When the Dog Speaks, the Philosopher Listens

My old friend Nigel McGilchrist – brother of Iain – has written an exquisitely crafted and beautifully illustrated masterpiece on Pythagoras while at the same time articulating his own mature philosophy of life. The book was written at his home on the Greek island of Kythera and is deeply informed by Nigel’s extensive expertise in art, architecture, landscape and the history of the islands of the Aegean Sea. All this contributes to the vivid sense of time and place evoked in the course of the narrative. Carefully chosen photographs and classic works of art make a vital contribution to the whole by adding an illuminating dimension of understanding. The title comes from a well-known story about Pythagoras recognising the soul of an acquaintance in a dog, and indeed Nigel’s first acknowledgement is to his own dog Livia – more on this episode below.

The book begins by situating the reader immediately within the geography of the Greek archipelago, but more widely in its cultural interaction and mercantile exchange with North Africa and Asia. It draws attention to the significance of the extraordinary Phoenician voyage around Africa that took place as far back as 600 BC that constitutes an illustration of expansion of perspective through exploration. Nigel identifies a number of qualities of Greekness, then the central chapter is entitled ‘Pythagoras Distilled’, before he moves on to problems with Pythagoras and the transmission of his insights, then his significance for today. Pythagoras received a great deal of inspiration from the East, but was able to translate and transpose it into wholly new forms. The overall argument recalls Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s Eastern Religions and Western Thought.

Nigel describes Pythagoras as a horizon: ‘he was the first mind we know of in the West to think in a truly integral manner about our world, our place within it, and its place within the cosmos. He was the first person to talk about all this without resorting to myth, anthropomorphic deities or allegorical narrative. And he was the first person to show how it was beauty that gave meaning to this whole – the beauty of underlying harmony and of a universal mathematical order.’ (p. 232) He is surely right in arguing that the genius of Pythagoras lay in bringing the outer and inner worlds together and of understanding their relationship: ‘both the world as understood by the mind and the world as lived by the soul, outer nature and inner life; science and spirit.’ (p. 233) Here is one of a number of places where Nigel’s exposition runs in parallel with Iain’s work on left and right hemisphere intelligences, though this is never explicitly stated.

The Three Words referred to in the title of this review are kosmos, armonia (harmony) and philo-sophia, each of which were given new meaning by Pythagoras and reflect the architecture of the Greek mind in terms of structure, clarity and balance. Nigel observes that ‘architecture is the visible and material expression of a way of thinking: yet at the same time it actively shapes our thinking. It is in a constant and living dialogue with the mind.’ (p. 62) Greek architecture highlights structure and corresponds to the value given by Pythagoras to proportion, number and geometry. Pythagoras enjoined us ‘to see and understand’, and it is here that the first of the three words comes in. Kosmos is both order and beauty (‘to see order and to feel beauty is to be human and alive’ as Nigel puts it) and is at the root of the word cosmetic: ‘our cosmos is defined both by order and by its beauty’- and we now live in an impoverished imaginative world that has remembered the first and forgotten the second. Fascinatingly, the word armonia originated as a woodworker’s close-fitting joint, translated by Pythagoras into proportion and music. Sophia was likewise a term originally derived from craftsmanship denoting know-how but developing into wisdom. Crucial to Nigel’s argument is philosophy defined as ‘receptivity to knowledge and insight’, ‘a deep attentiveness to experience and awareness of the phenomena that surround us.’ (p. 105) Hence the importance for Pythagoras of both sound and silence. Musically harmonious relationships arising from exact proportions are experienced as beauty – also by Einstein as physicist and violinist. Silence enables us to attend and listen to intuitive promptings.

Nigel has an original take on transmigration of souls arising from his consideration of Pythagoras recognising the soul of his friend in a dog, as reported by Xenophanes. He sees this process ‘as an expansion of our being into a greater dimension… [and] as a metaphor of our growing consciousness’ as well as an inescapable communality of being that should elicit compassion: ‘It pushes us to see how our lives are related in a way similar to the individual leaves on a tree yet at the same time indissolubly interlinked through their participation within the greater organism.’ (p. 128) The soul, for Nigel, ‘is in the business of learning. It is as if our consciousness travels; and as it journeys, it grows.’ More subtly, he argues that it is the unfulfilled parts of us that return for further purification, winnowing or filtering out as ‘we create what we are’ and return to the life-bearing tree after each season of life. (p. 130) Later, in a chapter on the soul as work of art, he observes that ‘both life and death are processes of tuning, tempering and purification.’ (p. 236)

Even at the remove of over 2,500 years, the essential philosophy of Pythagoras can guide us in a way of life exhibiting ‘both intellectual and spiritual integrity’ and summarised by Nigel as follows

• Do no deliberate harm to any living beings – human, animal or plant – the principle of kinship

• Foster and hold to harmony as the greatest aspiration of our earthly life and seek to understand its meaning – this brings together the moral and the aesthetic

• Look for beauty in all aspects of life: create it and cultivate it with care – beauty also gives meaning to life

• Respect silence and remain always receptive to intuition

• Train and free the mind to think and reflect – for spiritual growth and fulfilment

• Be open always to other ways of seeing and thinking

In his epilogue and appendices, Nigel reflects on truth and beauty, coming to agree with the famous lines from Keats which T.S. Eliot apparently found incomprehensible:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

He also draws some fascinating parallels between Pythagoras and Lao Tse. They both sought ways of bringing humanity into fruitful harmony with the principle of heavenly order, and in this respect they both emphasise being and the need for spiritual listening to bring oneself into the flow. There are many other richly developed themes that space does not allow me to elaborate here. To read this extraordinary work is an odyssey in itself, an initiation into the way Pythagoras saw and understood the world, pivotally transforming the outlook of his time in ways that reverberate into our own, while also reminding us of the wholeness and balance we now need to recover at a different turn of the spiral: it is up to us to see and understand anew.