Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. He is a polymath, best described as a natural philosopher.[

The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (“TMHE”) is a masterpiece. In it, McGilchrist shows how there are two ways of attending to the world: one which seeks to take it apart and to manipulate it and the other which embraces it in its wholeness and connectedness. These two ways of attending to the world are typical of the left and right hemispheres respectively.

The left hemisphere looks at the world analytically, seeking to break it down into things that can be manipulated (TMWT Introduction p.21). The optimum way to use our brain’s potential to connect with reality is for the right hemisphere (the Master) to attend some part of the world, for the left hemisphere (the Emissary) to seek to apprehend that part, and for the results of the left hemisphere’s analysis to be re-integrated into the right hemisphere’s vision. After the parts have been examined, “There is … a need for effortful recomposition to make the whole comprehensible”.

McGilchrist’s argument is that healthy individuals, groups, and societies approach the world first via the right hemisphere, reacting to what is found there to form an impression of how everything links together; then the left hemisphere looks in detail at elements that can become objects of human action in isolation, and then the results of the left hemisphere’s inspection are returned to the right hemisphere where the individual elements are reintegrated into a more profound understanding of the whole.

Already in The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist was arguing that in modernism, the left hemisphere had triumphed resulting in “an excess of consciousness and an over-explicitness in relation to what needs to remain implicit; depersonalisation and alienation from the body and empathic feeling; disruption of context; fragmentation of experience; and the loss of ‘betweenness’.”

Ultimately there is nothing less than an emptying out of meaning.”

McGilchrist’s 1,578 page follow-up, The Matter with Things,is the most devastating demolition of reductive materialism since Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

McGilchrist’s claim is that in modernity the West has “systematically misunderstood the nature of reality”

THIS

as a result of succumbing to “the reductionist view that we are – nature is – the earth 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.”

Things have gone wrong because the left hemisphere believes that its comprehension of the part is total. “The awareness coming from the right hemisphere can embrace that of the left, but not the other way round.”

WOW

The left hemisphere makes at least two fatal mistakes: it regards its representation or analysis of the part as definitive in place of attending to the part itself and it treats the part in isolation from its relationship with other parts of the flow of reality. Instead of humbly submitting the results of its analysis to the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere becomes stuck in a feedback loop. The world as created by the left hemisphere becomes a totalising narrative, a metaverse, from which broader reality

“The left hemisphere adopts a theory, and then actually denies what doesn’t fit the theory.”

EXACTLY

“The left hemisphere adopts a theory, and then actually denies what doesn’t fit the theory.”

EXACTLY

In late modernity, we have mistaken the map, the theoretical schema created by the left hemisphere, for the reality of the lived world that our right hemisphere connects us with

YES

The “consequences … are far-reaching – indeed devastating.” (TMWT ch.9 p.305). Our lives are “lived” under the shadow of the “dead hand of mechanism, scientism,[7] and bureaucracy” (TMWT ch.9 p.329).[8][9] Analytical philosophy and the dominance of the machine metaphor in science have created “a tradition in which most academics now are so thoroughly schooled that they can’t see that there is a problem, let alone how to escape it.”

At one level, TMWT is the “unfolding and differentiation” of McGilchrist’s key claim that our left hemisphere-dominated worldview is having a multitude of nefarious ramifications.

An important claim McGilchrist makes is that “We cannot know anything without attending to it, and the nature of that attention alters what we find”

  Relationships are ontologically primary, foundational; and ‘things’ a secondary, emergent property of relationships.

Matter is an aspect of consciousness, not consciousness an emanation from matter.

Individuation is a natural process, whose aim is to enrich

Nothing is wholly determined, though there are constraints, and nothing is wholly random, though chance plays an important creative role.

The whole cosmos is creative; it drives towards the realisation of an infinite potential.

Nature is our specific home in the cosmos from which we come and to which in time we return.

The world absolutely cannot be properly understood or appreciated without imagination and intuition, as well as reason and science: each plays a vitally important role.

The world is neither purposeless nor unintelligent, but simply beyond our full comprehension. The world is more a dance than an equation.

dismisses this reductionist ‘nothing buttery’ as inadequate to our experience of the world and inconsistent with the findings of quantum physics

“relationships must be primary, since entities become what they are only through their situation in the context of multiple relations.”

The primacy of relationships leads to McGilchrist’s eighth feature of reality: human beings are part of nature. Instead of thinking of human beings in opposition to their environment, we urgently need to rediscover that we are part of the world, and to re-form our attention to the world in ways that nourish and sustain it in its relationships with us and us in our relationships with it.

“A religious cast of mind sets the human being and human life in the widest context,

link us to the whole of existence. The world becomes ensouled. And we have a place in it once more.”

Our world is one in which there is a high degree of regularity but also an amazing amount of individuation. Every fingerprint and every snowflake is unique. Individuation and connectedness produce a creative tension.

Things are recognised for what they are not because they are identical with other things, but because of their resemblance to a pattern. “Everything is part of one whole, connected to every other part by a matter of degree. But everything is also absolutely unique”

“The claim that All is One is well-intentioned, but, it seems to me disastrous, because it is just half a truth. … the other equal truth is All is Many.”

that two superficially contradictory perspectives can be held in tension with one another, but ultimately reconciled by integrating one into the other.

McGilchrist advocates for balance, harmony, and complementarity, but not for symmetry. “Small imbalances, differences among sameness, at all levels in nature make it work, starting with the initial inequality of matter and antimatter.”

The tension between asymmetric opposites is creative, perfect symmetry is inert.

“[W]e need to resist choosing one truth only and ignoring the other; rather, we must see how the greater truth may hold both together.”

The right hemisphere worldview can embrace paradox, seeing how different perspectives can be integrated into a deeper vision. Our own experience of growing up and growing old is that we are the same person even as our life extends through time and the cells in our body are replaced.

What we ordinarily call a thing is itself a process, a ceaseless coming to be and passing away.”[14] This means that being is not a static quality but a continuous presencing. “If one espouses a view of the world as a flow, not as a collection of things; then all that exists is not just, inertly, being, but always ‘be-coming’; and time and movement is bound up in that very concept.”

“Flow, then, is not primarily about change, since it is equally about persistence”

“[C]hange is accentuated when one sees ‘things that flow’; persistence when one sees the flow itself.”

“Time, for the right hemisphere, is not something distinct from being, from reality flowing: it is always thus a becoming, never a something become.” (TMWT ch.22 p.902). “Time is the coherence-giving context in which we live.”

McGilchrist strongly affirms Wheeler’s famous pronouncement: “This is a participatory universe.”[15] (quoted in TMWT ch.25 p.1057). The world for us is the world as we experience it. This world cannot be manipulated howsoever we wish (as the left hemisphere is apt to think) but neither it is unresponsive to our attention.

“… this is how we bring all our world into being: all human reality is an act of co-creation.It’s not that we make the world up; we respond more or less adequately to something greater than we are. The world emerges from this dipole. We half perceive, half create.” (TMWT ch.19 p.765). “… we are social beings who co-create one another and the world.”

“The nature of the attention that we bring to bear on the world, and the values which we bring to the encounter, change what we find; and in some absolutely non-trivial sense, change what it is. At the same time, the encounter … changes who we are.” (TMWT Epilogue p.1330-31). This is something we share with all other creatures. “In organisms there is never just action without both interaction and mutual construction.” (TMWT ch.12 p.451).

"The nature of the attention & values that we bring to bear on the world, change what we find; and in some absolutely non-trivial sense, change what it is. Plus, the encounter … changes who we are." (TMWT Epilogue p1330-31). This is something we share with all other creatures. "In organisms there is never just action without both interaction and mutual construction." (TMWT ch12 p451).

The openness of the universe to our participation is the concomitant of McGilchrist’s sixth feature of reality. The insights of quantum physics reveal that in nature, nothing is wholly determined, though there are constraints, and nothing is wholly random, though chance plays an important creative role.

McGilchrist’s participatory view of the universe reinforces his claim that relationships are primary. “The idea that God is love, or even the ‘word’ (logos), suggests that ultimately what is primary is relationship: a word exists only in the betweenness of utterance and audition, which has the same structure as love. Love is an experience always in process, never a thing or anything like a thing.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1237).

Instead, McGilchrist argues: “things are better thought of as being attracted towards certain goals, rather than pushed blindly forwards by a mechanism from behind.”

“Nature’s purposiveness includes and is predicated on the freedom of her creatures” (TMWT ch.27 p.1186). Once we have accepted that human beings are not the only things with intrinsic purpose, then we realise that we are part of nature, that we belong in and with nature

Because of the left hemisphere’s blindspots, “the right hemisphere is a more reliable guide to reality than the left hemisphere. … it has a greater range of attention; greater acuity of perception; makes more reliable judgments; and contributes more to both emotional and cognitive intelligence than the left.”

“Some things can only be experienced or understood when they are not put to analysis. This is not because analysis defeats them, but because they defeat analysis.”

Therefore, the left hemisphere fails to take proper account of them: “by focussing too much on reason we miss all the things that can’t be reasoned about, or precisely expressed – only alluded to.”

Because of the interconnectedness, the richness, and the multi-layered nature of the world and our experience of the world, “metaphor … is fundamental to how we understand the world.” (

McGilchrist approves of Aristotle’s observation in De arte poetica that “a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars”.[20] “All understanding whatsoever is, at bottom, metaphorical.” (TMWT ch.15 p.632). Elsewhere he says: “It’s metaphors all the way down”.

McGilchrist approves of Aristotle's observation in De arte poetica that "a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars". "All understanding whatsoever is, at bottom, metaphorical." (TMWT ch15 p632). Elsewhere he says: "It's metaphors all the way down".

Our dependence on metaphors reveals our need for myths and for metaphysics.

“Just as there is no option to think without metaphor, there is no such thing as not having a myth” (TMWT Epilogue p.1330).

“[U]ltimate meaning will always lie beyond what reason can conceive or everyday language express.”

“The beauty and power of art and of myth is that they enable us … to contact aspects of reality that we recognise well, but cannot capture in words.”

Therefore, in order to find our home in the world, we need to approach the world as something to be embraced rather than manipulated. We need to assume the connexion with the world that we are going to find. McGilchrist insists that “belief is dispositional, not propositional” (TMWT ch.28 p.1262) and that “a true understanding requires a certain disposition of the mind towards its object. … True understanding … already presupposes a connexion, rather than being the prerequisite of such a connexion.” (TMWT ch.26 p.1127).

The reason that we cannot pin down the “meaning” of the world, is not because it has no meaning, but because there is “a plenitude of meaning, beyond simple articulation” (TMWT ch.10 p.390). There are things, (like love, sunsets, and even the joy of being in a good bookshop) which we cannot reduce to writing not because they have no meaning but because they are overflowing with meaning.

who writes that Eckhart saw “God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness.”

Our fundamental calling is to experience, to enjoy, rather than to analyse, to rejoice in rather than to exhaust.

We are to go with the flow, to connect with our partners, to follow the harmonies.

McGilchrist’s emphasis on experience leads to his affirmation that consciousness is prior to matter. The left hemisphere worldview thinks that material things are simple and can be understood in their totality, but that consciousness is a mystery which must be explained away as either an illusion, an epiphenomenon or as somehow magically emerging from matter.

A major theme in TMWT is that no things can be fully understood apart from their relationships to everything else in the universe, with the consequence that our understanding of matter is necessarily partial and incomplete.

McGilchrist’s claim that matter is the creation of consciousness, rather than vice versa, has similarities with the idealist philosophy of George Berkeley

McGilchrist insists that the metaphysical questions are the most important questions of all, and that they cannot be answered from within a left hemisphere framework (hence the inability of scientism to make sense of the questions).

“For me, and for many philosophers historically, the deepest question in all philosophy … is why there should be something rather than nothing. And close on its heels comes the question why that ‘something’ turns out to be complex and orderly, beautiful and creative, capable of life, feeling and consciousness, rather than merely chaotic, sterile, and dead.”

McGilchrist’s answer to the second question is that the best explanation for the qualities of the matter of the universe is that it is the product of a cosmic scale mind.

The soul is both in and transcends the body, as a poem is in and yet transcends mere language

If consciousness is prior to matter, then the universe is a product of Mind. McGilchrist does not endorse pantheism, the idea that, as Roger Scruton puts it when commenting on Spinoza, ‘the distinction between the creator and the created is not a distinction between two entities, but a distinction between two ways of conceiving a single reality’

Instead, he prefers panentheism (the view that “all things are in God, and God in all things” (TMWT ch.28 p.1231)), because it “permits something further: the possibility that God has a relationship not just with the divine self, but with something Other; and this, it seems to me, is the drive behind there being a creation at all.”

McGilchrist is clear that God is both wholly transcendent and wholly immanent

God simply is – in a use of the verb that requires that we understand God both to have Being and to be the ground of Being at one and the same time.”

Therefore, “God is certainly greater than but includes the universe” (McGilchrist, quoting Keith Ward,[27]TMWT ch.28 p.1232). “God … can say ‘yes’. And to say ‘yes’ to everything includes saying ‘yes’ to ‘no’ – limitation – which may explain the existence of sin.”

Ultimately Being and Becoming are aspects of the same thing.

However, as usual, there is an asymmetry: they are not equal. In the philosophy of Whitehead, the divine is Becoming, and Becoming is even more fundamental than Being.”

McGilchrist’s panentheism draws on a number of thinkers, including the Christian theologian Jürgen Moltmann: “In the panentheistic view, God, having created the world, also dwells in it, and conversely, the world which he has created exists in him”

McGilchrist’s panentheismrejects any notion of creation as a machine or God as a clockmaker who simply winds up the clock and then lets it tick away by itself.

“that whatever creative energy underwrites the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is continually active and involved in that universe; that the future is tended towards, but not closely determined; rather it is open, evolving, self-fulfilling.”

Not just for our own sakes, because we bear some responsibility, however small, for the part we play in creation …”

“While invoking God does not … answer our questions, it is part of a picture – a Gestalt – that makes more sense to me as a whole than a Gestalt that avoids the divine.”

[I]f the nature of reality is not already fixed, but rather, evolving, participatory, reverbative, it is both rational and important to open your mind and heart to God, in order to bring whatever it is evermore into existence.”

McGilchrist’s God is “that which underwrites, timelessly and eternally, whatever is: in other words, the ground of Being.”

God is “a co-ordinating principle in the universe which is evidenced in order, harmony and fittingness; a principle that is not only true, but the ultimate source of truth.”

I believe the concept of God to be fraught with difficulties. … I am merely indicating that … there is almost certainly more here than we have words for, or can expect ever to understand using reason alone.”

Thus, “What the term ‘God’ requires of us is not a set of propositions about what cannot be known but a disposition towards what must be recognised as beyond human comprehension.”

Consistent with his apophaticism, McGilchrist does not want to be dogmatic in his assertion of panentheism. “We should resist the temptation to take it as gospel – which is why I talked about a ‘speculative’ theology of panentheism. There are no certainties here.”

McGilchrist offers a philosophical vision with many strengths. It is relational, it is anti-reductionist, and it integrates perspectives from a variety of disciplines into a more than plausible whole.