The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World Hardcover – November 9, 2021

The Matter with Things is more than a book. It is an intellectual foundation for a world that can value truth, beauty, and goodness. Using neuroscience, physics, metaphysics, evolution, an understanding of consciousness, intuition, imagination, reason, science, philosophy and the sacred, the work is wonderful and wise but also long and complex. It asks the questions – How do we know what is true? What account of reality emerges? And who are we as individual beings and as a species? It does this in part by examining Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (the book’s subtitle). The book comes in 3 parts, with an introduction, 28 chapters, an epilogue, 8 appendices, and a 200-page bibliography. It may be helpful to take notes and perhaps to view the chapter videos on the McGilchrist website. These one hour videos are records of conversations between Iain McGilchrist and Alex Gomez-Marin on topics in the book’s chapters. I found them helpful in developing my own understanding of the material when reviewing my notes though they would probably only be marginally helpful without reading the chapters first.My aim in the rest of this review is to make them about us, about our common humanity, and the gift that is The Matter with Things. We can be manipulative and attentive, selfish and generous, fearful and courageous, callous and compassionate. We more easily see these things in others. My hope is that these three meditations will perhaps provide an opportunity to see them in ourselves as well as to see them in the whole human enterprise. The first two meditations have taken their themes from The Matter with Things. The Left and Right in their titles refer both to our asymmetric brain hemispheres, that is to our neuroanatomy, as well as what’s left to us plus what we get right.Two notes may be helpful before you read the poems. The simile “like fools with a map” is in the first poem. The point here is that the fools have the map but miss the experience and reality that the map, whether graphics, words, ideas, just represents. In the third line of the final meditation, “My humanity is caught up in yours,” is Desmond Tutu’s translation of the Zulu word Ubuntu.We Are What Is LeftLions and tigers and bears, oh myLanguage and logic and liesFictions seem to last longer than the truthwhich is always derivative in this worldof either/or and the land of certainty,built on shifting sand. It is the home of egosand some of survival’s necessities.Like a vision with blinders,we just name things – this is…You are…They will…Nouns name; that’s all.These little thoughts are in fast company.Easy are these directions without depth.Though many voices speak,one voice says – this way –mistaking representation for reality.We might get comfortable living herein this place where our home is not,where all seems locally linear.The time measured here eats his children,and this servant can control the master.Love can sometimes find a space,and perhaps fear always does.Do we believe stardust can always start over?We Are What Is RightMoving and fishing and flow, oh myIntegration is both more difficult for usthan deriving and is a softer presencein this, our home of both/and.It is at first liminal, then shared,and then renewed, for a time whole and healed.Presence and the integral are related to thatand that to the flow. Waiting at the gatesof heaven, may we find dancing and laughter and joy.The beginning of wisdom is awe at God’s presence.(or as it is written, the fear of the Lord)We can take time and take our place tooas well as taking only what we needwhile queing up to be integrated.Space is connected and will be made whole.May we find the fullness to growin word and grow in silence,in the light and in the dark,in waves of rainbows, music, and time.Waters of LifeWill a time of compassion begin?Stand or sit or kneel and be forgiven.My humanity is caught up in yours.Let us find Shalom.May you live in the grace,whose path is looking informed by love.though love is not a thing but a verb.May you find your peace with uncertaintyand also with the feeling of fullnessthat is prayer.Be free to stumble and rise again.Find yourself at home.Let all judgments take into accountthe many others in these experimentswith seeing and thought,with language and intuition and imagination.Our long journeys toward wholeness are similarMay they be safe placesfor souls to show up.

Dr. McGilchrist was thoroughly educated in humanities before he went to medical school, then into neurology and psychiatry. His expressive brilliance is evident throughout this work, which as many others have said, is a collection of books with a unifying theme, that we must relinquish left brain control over our thoughts and values. The mechanistic reductive thinking of the left hemisphere, epitomized in Descartes’ writings, will not help us achieve self worth. But, if we take that analytic power and refer it back to the right hemisphere’s wholistic awareness, we can grow in wisdom as well as knowledge. Here is another Copernicus revolution in thinking, more encompassing than Kant’s. For those who want an introduction to his ideas, there are myriad videos on YouTube to watch or just listen to. This will give you a hint of the richness of his thought.

After 10+ years McGilchrist published a sequel to The Master and His Emissary. The new book is even bigger: about 1.500 pages. In the Kindle edition it is 3000 pages of which 2000 as the main text and the rest is appendices, bibliography and endnotes. So it is not a hill, but a mountain to climb.You can read it on different levels. One is that of the psychopathology of the brain halves. Part I is almost entirely dedicated to show what the different hemispheres, left (LH) and right (RH) do, what and how their respective take is on reality, where things can go wrong, and what then happens, and how dominance of the LH in an uncanny way corresponds with texts and utterances of several famous philosophers and physicists, which is not a good sign.Another level is as a Kulturkritik, by which I mean that the book shows how the different takes of the hemispheres and the dominance of LH have shaped our current world and why this is very worrying. This level is dispersed all over the content of the book. It shows exceptionally clear how the two-hemisphere hypothesis interweaves with several of the societal and worldwide crises that we face.A third level is that of a philosophic search for the ways of gaining true knowledge. This level expands into metaphysics, later on into mysticism and in the last chapter into a search after the ground of being. This level that in itself is many layered, is mainly part II and III.For some people, like me, all levels are very interesting. But when you are a climate activist, or a politician for that mater, the second level might be the most interesting. But although McGilchrist extensively shows the dangers of the current dominance of the LH, no action plan is to be seen. If you are an activist of some sort, imagination/fancy might lead you easily into any planning to go to the barricades, and this is, I feel, just the pitfall that will lead to further dominance of LH. McGilchrist explains the urgency of a rebalancing the LH and RH, but gives no explicite answer, although the answers are, I think, implicite in the text.He takes quite another turn to metaphysical epistemology (if this is not a contradictio in terminis) that is not for everyone. But he writes beautiful pages on many topics, especially the ones on values. From it I sense a deep Metaphysical Heimweh, which could explain the outcome (i.e. God/god/g’d, although not the Christian one, it is more the general idea of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of Rudolf Otto, which he mentions only in passing) that, I guess, is only for (the) very few. Such, while as I feel it, insight in the pushes and pulls of the RH and LH, and their take of reality is the real key to a fast-learning track of self-awareness, which is: ‘Know Thyself!’, the adage of the Delphi Oracle. I ask myself if here McGilchrist did not try to stack up up to much hay, so to speak, in one book. Here I sense that the different takes that the reader can take to the book do not always sit well together. You might love one part of the approach, and disagree deeply with another part of it.I agree with any conclusion that rebalancing LH and RH is in the end an individual matter, but culture as a whole shapes us as well as we shape culture, so there is an equally important collective problem here.This said, reading the book is delight because of the erudition, even if you do not agree on every single point. McGilchrist seems to me one of those very precious homines universales, as from a bygone era. It might be his Magmum Opus.McGilchrist quotes, agreeing, Sir Arthur Eddington: ‘We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown … we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. An Lo! Its our own’. (p 1691 Kindle) But he leaves it at that.So, for me in the end it is us! At the end of the quest I do not find god/God/g’d, but I find us and me, humanity in all its greatness and shortcomings. It is from us that the move has to come to honour the master (RH) and show the emissary (LH) its rightful place. This should not be a battle with a winner and a looser, or a wobbly truce that has to be closely guarded. In the end it is us that need to acknowledge that we belong to Nature in every sense you can think of, that Nature isn’t ours, but we are Nature’s. If we do not understand this no God or mysterium can help us. It is up to us alone!But then how difficult is this? The imbalance between LH and RH has happened before. I feel that RH, to stay in the metaphor, has been lured by LH to a dark place, but RH afterall is the Master, who will take his rightful place. It might be a wild ride for some time to come, and we might be too late, but if not, I am not afraid about the outcome. It only asks for a change of paradigm that many are willing to make, but collectivily is a much harder turnaround. But this is personalJan Willem van EeThe Netherlands

We can all benefit from McGilchrist’s thorough, clear and far-reaching thinking. A wonderful follow-up to The Master and His Emissary, but even wider ranging.

Iain McGilchrist has a ton of information on the brain hemispheres. This giant 2 volume set is beautiful. I have yet to finish reading both volumes....so much to read!