The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Two volumes. London: Perspectiva, 2021. Pp. 1578. $112.95
Iain McGilchrist’s Matter with Things is one of the most stimulating books I’ve ever read. Its learning is awesome, the writing beautiful, the insights multitudinous. It’s a huge two-volume work, but it took me extra-long to read because I stopped every page or two to luxuriate, ponder, check references.
McGilchrist has three main themes – one neuropsychological (“how our brains shape reality”), one epistemological (“how we can come to know anything at all”), and one metaphysical (“the nature of what we find in the cosmos”). On each topic, his aim is to “clear away the assumptions that cloud our vision,” particularly the “assumption of a materialist world composed of ‘things’” (xvii). He renounces the notion that the world is “‘nothing but’ a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility” (5).
Positively put: McGilchrist believes wholes are never identical to the sum of their parts. In fact, there aren’t any “parts”; to believe in isolated parts is “an artifact of a certain way of looking at the world.” Parts can be understood only by understanding wholes; parts are known only as parts of wholes, in relation to one another (5). McGIlchrist rebukes our instinct to think things must exist before they relate to one another. Things aren’t the primary reality; “relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related.” Relationships “don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things,’ which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with.” “Thing” is a “useful shorthand” to describe what’s “congealed in the flow of experience,” but “what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes” (4). Things look static, but “nothing we know is in reality ever entirely static; and relative stasis, not motion, is the unusual circumstance that requires explanation” (5-6). Toward the end of the second volume, he reiterates his commitment to
the primacy of motion over stasis, and the importance, in particular, of flow; the reality of time as an expression of that extended flow, not a series of linear moments; consciousness and matter as not simply irreconcileable, but in reality aspects of one another, in which consciousness is nevertheless primary; and the world having purposiveness without reductive, preordained purposes (1235).
McGilchrist is aware that talk like this is liable to be misconstrued as a variety of postmodern nihilism. He renounces that too, just as much as he renounces materialist extrinsicism. He rejects the ROT position – “there just exists a Reality Out There (ROT), the nature of which is independent of any consciousness of it.” With equal force, he rejects the notion “there is no such thing as reality,” a view he gleefully labels MUMBO, “Made Up Miraculously By Ourselves.” The true situation is: “there is something that is not just the contents of my mind” (9-10), yet the only world we know or can know is “what comes into being in the never-ending encounter between us and this whatever-it-is.” Both the knower and the whatever-it-is are “changed through the encounter: it is how we and it become more fully what we are.” Our relation to the world is “reciprocal and creative.” When we’re attentive, what we come to know is “the ‘real deal,’” a real presence, not merely a mental representation. At the same time, “we take part in its creation” (10-11). In sum, it’s nonsensical to think we can give an account of the world without including ourselves in the account.
McGilchrist offers this musical analogy to set the trajectory for his argument:
There is such a ‘thing’ as Mozart’s G minor quintet. It is in a way quite specific. It certainly is not a fantasy, and it cannot be made up by me any way I want it. However, it doesn’t exist in the closed score on my bookshelf (the potential alone is there). It doesn’t exist in Mozart’s mind, either, because he’s dead, and the moment when he died made no difference whatever to the existence or the nature of the quintet. And there isn’t a single ideal quintet that we are always imperfectly imitating in our encounters with it. It keeps coming into being, it keeps becoming, each time a mind, with all its history and preconceptions, encounters it, or when many minds do so together. Each time it will be real. And each time it will also be different, although it will be recognizably the ‘same’ piece of music. It is certainly not a matter of ‘anything goes.’ Nor every rendition will be equally good, or equally true to the spirit of quintet. . . . However, no-one would expect me to say precisely how I know that it is a ‘true’ performance of the work, let alone to prove to them that it is (11-12).
In a similar way, “the flow of the universe is always creative, though it has order, and is not random or chaotic; the world is always a matter of responsiveness, though it is equally not a free-for-all. It is a process of creative collaboration, of co-creation” (13). Music isn’t unique, but “a very clear case of how what we take to be a thing emerges from a complex of relationships, both those between notes and those between individual consciousness.” This is the character of all experience: It’s “a complex flow, a constantly unfolding, responsive dance of reciprocal gestures.” That’s just what reality is. Our participation in the process doesn’t make the world a “solipsistic fantasy”; it proves the opposite, since “we interact with one another and the world at large in a myriad of ways without being able to have more than limited control of the outcome” (13-14).
As McGilchrist doesn’t say, reality is so very like the Trinity. Not only does he not say it, but when he does briefly talk about the Trinity, it’s in the context of left-brained religious “dogmatism” - which, you might guess, isn’t a good thing. More on this below.
Why don’t we see the world this way? Why are we obsessed with things, with moments of time, machine-like regularities? McGilchrist blames our brains – one half of our brains, to be specific. History, at least modern history, has been a struggle between the Left and Right Hemispheres of the brain. The Left Hemisphere (LH) is a control freak, OCD, hysterical, calculating and linear. The LH is evident in mechanistic theories of science, totalitarian polities, buildings that function as “machines for living.” The Right Hemisphere (RH) is wholistic, intuitive, attuned to reality, poetic, fluid. When brains operate properly, RH is Master, LH its obedient emissary. But at some point, the Emissary mounted a coup and locked the Master in the dungeon. Modern culture is in thrall to the left brain.
How did this happen? McGilchrist gives an account of the rise of LH dominance in his earlier The Master and the Emissary. He acknowledges multiple forces act on minds and bodies, both individually and corporately, “over expanses of time.” Brains aren’t the sole driver of cultural change; rather, external culture interacts with the brain, and the brain in turn shapes cultural reality. Cultural shifts exploit the possibilities of the two hemispheres; the hemispheres constrain the options.
A critical cultural shift took place early in Western history. When human beings began to write, “the two hemispheres became more independent of one another’s operations.” Writing shifts human thought away from direct experience to symbolic re-presentations. That sets Emissary free from the constraints of the Master, so that each enhances or exaggerates “its intrinsic mode of operation.” The LH becomes more consistently LH, the RH more thoroughly RH.
A shift happened not only at the cultural level but within the brain itself. Natural selection plays a role, but, McGilchrist thinks, a small one. The shift is too rapid for natural selection. Genetic factors may be relevant, as Goths, Huns, and Franks invaded the Roman Empire and destroyed “whole ways of thinking and being” for a thousand years. (Yes, he speaks of the “Dark Ages”!)
More important is our capacity for imitation. McGilchrist endorses Richard Dawkins’s concept of “memes,” suggesting they spread through constant interaction between mind and meme. “Imitation is extremely infectious: thinking about something, or even just hearing words connected with it, alters the way we behave and how we perform on tasks.” When we imitate, we take something from another, “not in an inert, lifeless, mechanical sense” but as a Hegelian “sublation” that receives the model into ourselves and transforms it. We “identify projectively with people with whom we share a common purpose,” and incorporate into ourselves the habits of those we admire. Imitation may, he suggests “explain the otherwise incomprehensibly rapid expansion of the brain in early hominids.” Given the power of imitation, “we had better elect good models to imitate, because as a species, not only as individuals, we become what we imitate.” The LH took over our minds and culture because our models were bad. Especially in recent history, “skills have been downgraded and subverted into algorithms: we are busy imitating machines.”
The story seems to be this: certain LH-dominant persons became cultural exemplars. Newton and Descartes became objects of imitation, the Principia and the Meditations models of scientific and philosophical purity. School curricula were shaped around these models, and over the course of centuries little brains molded into LH calculators. Meanwhile, poets and musicians lost their cultural dominance, as fewer and fewer persons imitated their wholistic vision of reality. Over the centuries, in short, we’ve all become brain-damaged, suffering something not unlike schizophrenia.
One of the most effective sections of McGilchrist’s book contrasts LH science with its RH-dominant, or normal, alternative. He makes the case that LH science itself has stumbled back into reality in spite of itself. Ironically, the life sciences, biology and psychology, embraced a mechanistic view of their subject matter just at the moment when physics was abandoning the “machine fiction” (432). The irony on top of that irony is that biologists never fully embraced Descartes or fully abandoned Aristotle in the first place. Their treatises on the “mechanics” of living things are full of Freudian slips, talk of parts that regulate, control, guide, impose, adapt; organisms that adapt, integrate, and organize; meaningless machines that, impossibly, give and receive information, recognize and interpret signals, distinguish relevant from irrelevant information; molecules that target, recruit fellow molecules, set goals and achieve tasks; cells that pursue self-realization (434-5).
These aren’t mere anthropopathisms but accurate descriptions forced on scientists by their observations of living things: “Organisms are said to perceive or know things because they do; they are said to respond appropriately to changing circumstances, because that is exactly what happens” (436). Scratch a mechanistic materialist, and he’ll bleed vitalist. Ghost in the machine indeed!
Genetics – apparently, the most deterministic branch of biology – proves to be anything but. Contra Richard Dawkins’s famous “selfish gene,” genes don’t program development in the way coding programs computers. DNA works only when it’s embedded in a cell, and much of what happens in the cell is achieved by something other than DNA. Cells aren’t products of DNA, but act on DNA. “The genome is not a sketch or design of the finished body,” writes Werner Müller (quoted 437). Genes change in response to the life experience of the organism – epigenetic change (439). Biologists have difficulty defining what a gene is, and some even doubt the existence of discrete genes (439). We should have known this as soon as someone discovered that humans share 98-99% of our genes with chimps and about 50% with bananas. Instead of reducing ourselves to monkeys or tropical fruit, it demonstrates “that the determining role of genes as such is more limited than we thought” (438).
Deterministic programming doesn’t explain development but “black boxes” it: “Embryogenesis is much too complex and much too reliable in its outcome to be specified by a program” (Daniel Nicholson, quoted 440). As John Dupré points out, genetic programming wouldn’t work anyway. A programmed organism would fail much more often than nature does: “if I ask someone to go to the shop and buy me a loaf of bread, and they agree, I am fairly confident that the outcome will be as I intend. If I provide a deterministic programme – take 12 paces north-west, raise hand, turn knob, push, etc., there are too many unanticipated interventions that can derail the process for me to have much hope of success. Teleology is much better than deterministic causation at getting things done, and development is much too reliable to be seen as anything but teleological” (quoted, 440). Natural processes aren’t random but too reliable to be the product of genetic programming. Teleology trumps programming; Aristotle 1, Descartes 0.
Biological organisms aren’t machines. Machines, after all, have an off switch. Organisms don’t: An organism is “one unceasing flow of matter and energy” (443). The only off switch is death. A machine has to be built before being set in motion; organisms exist only insofar as they are in motion. Living beings are really “living ‘becomings’” (444). Machines are static; they need outside energy to move and change (insofar as they do). Even the stable structures of organisms are “dynamic eddies of matter.” The stabilities of living things are stabilizing processes, and organisms themselves aren’t things so much as “moulded rivers” (444, 446).
Machines are linear. Causes yield effects. With organisms, the two-stage cause-effect model is more false than true. Development isn’t a step-by-step process but “everything going on at the same time” (quoting Sydney Brenner, 448). Or, in McGilChrist’s words, “‘everything does everything to everything’: interlocking, reciprocal and interpenetrating processes” (449). Living things are a “single, indivisible movement, a flow,” not a chain of events (449). The model of cause and effect itself depends on a “left hemisphere” view that the world is a collection of discrete things, rather than an infinite complex of interacting processes. Symbiosis is the rule rather than the exception in biology (470).
Even “interaction” is too static a term. Kirti Sharma says that an organism doesn’t react to its environment, but with it, such that both are transformed in the process. Not really transformed either; rather, organism and environment are constituted by their interdependence: “organism and environment are transformed simultaneously, and at each moment . . . they arise new in each instant . . . this ‘arising anew’ occurs dependently – that is, phenomena bring each other newly into being in each instant” (quoted 453). Not for the first or last time, I jotted “Trinity!” in the margin at this point. I wrote “Trinity!” next to this too, McGilchrist’s explanation of his idea of “betweenness”: “an electrical current resides not in the negative pole or the positive pole, nor the space between the poles, but in the sum of all of these, plus, crucially, the wholly new element that comes about from ‘adding them together’” (459). What would Augustine have made of that? Or William Desmond, philosopher of the between?
In short, purposiveness, adaptiveness, and creativity exist at all levels of living organisms, in the parts as well as in the whole: creaturely creativity all the way down. At a couple of points, McGilchrist teases the idea that “parts” don’t really exist, except in our attempts to understand organisms. Slightly less radically, he suggests that “life requires cognition at all levels” – from the cell to the entire living becoming. “Everywhere we can observe [a] proclivity for ingenuity,” writes B.J. Ford. Along a surgical cut, cells identify “the nature of the surgical trauma and [initiate] manoeuvres to restore it. Capillaries re-form so that the microcirculation is restored, innervation is reinstated, and the many epidermal layers are properly reconstituted. None of this we understand.” And none of it is guided by the brain or regulated by hormones. Instead, “the cells are the decision-makers.” More generally, “Single cells can take decisions; single cells can plan responses; single cells contain memory” (464-5). What would a computer have to be to be like organisms? Just this: the code for the computer would have to be written as the machine comes into existence by the machine’s self-formation as a machine (471). Not gonna happen.
The Matter With Things is a beauty, an education between two covers. But the more I’ve read, the more I worried I was being carried along by McGilchrist’s limpid prose and rhetorical skill. He repeats his Hurrah! words a lot – flow, movement, dynamism, fluidity; he prefers vortices, ripples, and raindrops over rationalized geometrical representations of smooth, voluptuous natural shapes. I respond favorably, because these are my Hurrah! words too. Gradually, though, I grow suspicious and wonder if I’m responding to the poetry, without being persuaded by the substance of what he’s saying.
And that leads to a further frustration: The absence of argument in the book. McGilchrist assembles massive amounts of material from diverse sources and seasons his book with myriads of myriads of quotations. But not all the quoted statements are consistent with one another, nor are McGilchrist’s own positions always compatible with the quotations. Yet he rarely makes those divergences explicit. He piles up quotations that more or less point in the same direction and then, presto!, draws a conclusion. The probative force arises from analogies among very different theories. Heidegger is not Merleau-Ponty is not Whitehead is not Cusa; one can see family resemblances, but it’s not clear how mashing them together leads one to truth.
McGilchrist has a ready response, which is my final source of frustration: were I to object to his face, I expect he would invite me to dial down my left brain and switch on my right brain. Brain polarity is essential to his project; he is, after all, a neuroscientist whose previous best-selling book was subtitled “The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” His life’s work is to cure the West of its LH schizophrenia, because the left-brained can’t handle the truth. Well, I tilt right, yet I still want him to persuade me, not just pile up quotations within beautifully constructed paragraphs crowned with witty aphoristic conclusions. And I resent the sense that he’s protected himself from critique by pre-classifying the critic as someone suffering from a brain imbalance.
My dissatisfaction has something to do with McGilchrist’s views on language. My eyebrows rise whenever writers of enormous tomes complain of the inadequacies of language. His story of LH dominance is partly a Fall story – a Fall into written language, which untied the tethers holding the restive LH in check. Experience is, more generally, preconceptual and prelinguistic; raw experience is accessed by the friendly RH, while the LH treats reality as something constituted by language (656). Contrary to the LH, we don’t need language to think, and at times “language can act as an impediment” (760), because it “substitutes a crabbed expression for a living reality” (1196). For many, perhaps most of us, memory and thoughts are pictorial rather than verbal. Whatever the truth of that claim, it assumes that “thought” is what happens inside the individual head (or body), as opposed to the wisdom that emerges from the interaction of person with person, and of persons with reality. The individualistic bias of McGilchrist’s views on language is at odds with his entire project. If thought and consciousness are essentially social and shared, is language indeed essential to thought? Besides, if language can become “crabbed,” can it not also do the opposite – open insight into new sorts of relations? Can we talk about language’s limits when confronted with George Herbert’s description of prayer as “Reverse thunder”?
McGilchrist’s reservations about words reveal reservations, or just plain ignorance, of the Word, the eternal Logos of Christian faith. McGilchrist has read everything, except Christian theology. He quotes from a narrow selection of mystical theologians, but he has no sense of the Christian tradition as a whole or even how his favorites fit into that tradition. When he turns to religion in the final chapter, the thinness of his grasp of Christianity becomes glaring. He loves the Cusan “coincidence of opposites,” as do I, but he abandons Cusa’s paradox at the critical moment, emphasizing the priority of flow to stasis, of consciousness to matter, the primacy of the many to the one – even though he’s just cited Heraclitus: “by changing, it stays the same.” Abandoning paradox leaves him at a loss to grasp Christian theology. “If God has initiated a process that generates what is genuinely new, genuinely free” – which, according to Christian theology, He has - “why would God destroy it by omniscience and omnipotence?” (1253). An odd locution, that, as if God created and then, at some logically or temporally subsequent point, imposed His knowledge and power. Apart from its formulation, McGilchrist’s statement is false in substance, as is evident when he draws the conclusion that God isn’t an agent “performing acts of will” (1253). He doesn’t seem to be aware that the puzzles he identifies have been fodder for two millennia of Christian theology. Quoting Jordan Peterson, he concludes that resistance and negation is “necessary to creation” – war being the father of all, after all (1260). At least since Augustine, Christianity has rejected this ontology of violence, but McGilchrist gives no attention to Christian belief in peaceable creation. His treatment of the Trinity is appalling. He uses it to illustrate how the LH infiltrates even the RH realm of religion, perverting it into dogmatism, although, as I’ve indicated above, much of what he says about the world fits perfectly in a Trinitarian ontology.
The source of my disquiet with McGilchrist’s book came clear late in the second volume, when he endorses Stephen Gould's notion that science and religion occupy "non-overlapping magisteria" (1281). Science is the realm of evidence, analysis, proof; religion of intuition, ritual, symbol. Each has validity “on its own terms” and “each should take account of the other” (1281). When religion makes truth-claims or presents evidence (say, eye-witnesses to a resurrection), it veers from its proper lane. McGilchrist's brain science naturalizes this dualism, as if it’s woven into the fabric of reality: science exercises the LH, religion the FH. The right is master, the left emissary. That's a nice inversion of the modern prejudice, but the dualism remains, explicitly so.
Besides, actual believers, not just Fundamentalists, appeal to authoritative texts, make truth claims, and argue for them. Is McGilchrist willing to say the world's two largest religions (Christianity and Islam) don't know what religion is supposed to be? The science/religion dualism behind Gould’s formula is a contingent cultural framework; for proof, see everything Peter Harrison has ever written. For all the beauty and brilliance of his work, then, there's an issue of coherence. McGilchrist sorta recognizes the massive role of intuition, ritual, and symbol in science; he acknowledges that religions do assert and argue (though he doesn’t seem happy about it). He wants both-and. Much of his evidence should lead him to conclude there's no dualism at all. Not: "we need the metaphoricity of religion and also the logical rigor of science." But: "Logic and metaphor coinhere, each requiring the other. " That’s not where he ends up. Through a kind of intellectual electrolysis, his RH/LH framework regularly turns paradoxes and coinherences into dualisms. He could escape, but to do so he’d have to take a massive theological turn.
If his book traced the oscillation of rationalism and romanticism, if it were a work of cultural or intellectual history, this path would be open to overcome the organizing dichotomy. Given the primacy McGilchrist gives to left-right dualism, it's not. Most of his arguments persuade without any appeal to hemispheres. If Eckhart – as innocent of neuroscience as they come – could approximate McGilchrist’s distinction, why do we need brain science? Throughout his book, brain science serves as an anchor, with the result that his argument is determined by a scientific paradigm. Which makes McGilchrist very much a practitioner of the very left-brained scientism his entire book so powerfully, so beautifully, and so successfully demolishes.
PETER J. LEITHART
President | Theopolis Institute