‘The Matter with Things’: A Magisterial Study of Reality
A review of ‘The Matter with Things’, by Iain McGilchrist; Perspective Press, 2021.
‘2B or not 2B?’ was the amusing response to one observation made about Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things: that it was so interesting that you went through several pencils reading it. Even those who do not meet George Steiner’s definition of an intellectual — ‘one who reads with a pencil’ — will likely find something they badly wish to underscore in this vast, 700,000-word volume, whose references alone run to 300 pages. And believe me when I say that the author really strives to charge his sentences with meaning. This has none of the ‘fluff’ that marked those essays you did not prepare for properly when you were 16.
I will not be gushing about The Matter with Things. This, after all, is a book that has already been called ‘one of the most important ever published’ by Professor Charles Foster of Oxford University. (‘And I do mean ever,’ he added.) So let us just get into it. For the sake of brevity, we could say that The Matter of Things sets out a cosmology — a theory or account of how the world is. It involves neuropsychology — how our minds shape our experience; epistemology — how we come to know anything at all; and metaphysics — the nature of what we find in the cosmos. So it is a fairly big undertaking, the product of decades of scholarship, and one that explores first the means to truth, then the paths to truth, and, finally, the nature of reality itself.
It has already been called ‘one of the most important books ever published’ by Professor Charles Foster of Oxford University.
At this point, it would probably help for you to know a bit about who, exactly, Iain McGilchrist is. His curriculum vitae is very impressive; in short he is a polymath who swapped literary criticism for psychiatry and then philosophy, excelling in all three fields. He is best known for his ‘hemisphere hypothesis’, and if you do not know what that is then you can either read my review of his previous book, or accept the following précis. In brief, you will know that our brains are asymmetrical; this is true, in fact, of every creature in the animal kingdom. The question is: Why? And what Iain proposes, very convincingly in my view, is that each side of the brain perceives the world differently. The right hemisphere (RH) encounters the external world; the left (LH) processes and analyses the product of that encounter. The RH deals with understanding the world as it is; the LH with manipulating it. But I will more specific. I will quote myself here (forgive me):
The right hemisphere’s distinctive ‘take’ on the world is that all is flowing and changing, provisional, interconnected, embodied, living. It perceives a gestalt — a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. Its left-sided counterpart, in contrast, understands the world as static, isolated, mechanical, disembodied, abstracted, detached.
In the book in which he introduces this idea, The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist argues that the right hemisphere is the more important of the two (the ‘Master’ of the book’s title) and, if you like, passes raw experience over to its more analytical counterpart, the ‘Emissary’. The problem is that the left hemisphere, whose modus operandi is to narrow down to certainties, does not ‘know’ it needs the right, let alone that the right is the ‘Master’ in their relationship; and thus it begins to confuse its necessarily impoverished worldview for reality. Iain explores the implications of this hypothesis, and the implications of the two ‘takes’ of the hemispheres on the world, in the context of the development of Western culture from Ancient Athens to today. In The Matter with Things, he goes even further: using the hemisphere hypothesis as a lens through which to study reality itself.
In the Master and His Emissary, he argues that the right hemisphere is the more important of the two.
In doing so, he explores the nature of creativity, the shortcomings of institutional science, the essence of paradox, the necessity of beauty, and much more besides. We get the impression that he has read just about everything, drawing freely on the work of thinkers and writers as diverse as Max Scheler, Nils Bohr, John Dewey, A.N. Whitehead, Cusanus, Heraclitus, Mary Midgley, Samuel Coleridge, Roger Scruton, and hundreds of others. A vivid picture gradually comes into view like an impressionist painting; and it is of a living world fundamentally characterised by flow—the world, in other words, of the right hemisphere. The ruling view, at least outside of physics, is of a mechanistic world, made up of ‘things’. But we find that this view, though useful in many respects, is not true to the way things are. And to live in opposition to reality, rather than in harmony with it, is unavoidably to create a few problems for ourselves and those around us.
A central theme of The Matter with Things is the importance of balance. We are in the habit of thinking in ‘either/or’ terms when it would be wiser, says McGilchrist, to indulge the possibility—indeed, the reality—of ‘both/and’ explanations. This, McGilchrist says, is far more common in Eastern traditions than Western ones. Equally, science, reason, intuition and imagination must all be called upon if we are to understand anything truly. And theory must be tested in the laboratory of our own experience. There is a place, too, for both propositional and dispositional knowledge: if I wanted you to understand the beauty of a landscape, I could only take you there: there would be no use just telling you about it. And we neither create the world wholly in our own imaginations, nor passively respond to a ‘completed’ world that lies ‘out there’: we exist in a responsive relationship to it. We are in dialogue with our world.
Science, reason, intuition and imagination must all be called upon if we are to understand anything truly.
Weighty stuff. But on the page, Iain is never high-minded. Rather, he comes across as easy to like as well as enormously erudite: he is at times amusing, generous in his appraisals and very stylish. He is also quick to credit those whose ideas have inspired him and helped him to form his own. He is happy to say that he is ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, to quote Newton. Incidentally, he comes across in much the same way in person—I had the good fortune of seeing him give a talk at St. James’s Church a few years ago—and in the interviews he gives, many of which are in YouTube. And though some will be put off by the size of this book, I would only stress that it is really very readable, and having reached the end of it your first instinct may well be to go straight back to the start.
You may have worked out by now that I think this is a very good book, by a very wise and clever man, and the only reason I will not repeat Professor Foster’s comment is because he has probably read a hell of a lot more than I have and is therefore more qualified than I to use that unassuming little word ‘ever’. But certainly my hunch is that this is a book that will be held in enormous esteem for a very long time. I hope so. Because (and I am sorry to sound so earnest) I think what it has to say is rather important.
