The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press, 2021

A review by Robert M. Ellis

Overall Comments

The Matter with Things (2021) is Iain McGilchrist’s lengthy (1578 pages, 2 volumes) follow-up to The Master and his Emissary (2009), his brilliant multi-disciplinary historical survey of the effects of brain lateralization. Whilst The Master and his Emissary (previously reviewed here) had a huge and positive effect on my thinking, introducing a whole neurological dimension to my understanding of the Middle Way, The Matter with Things is unfortunately a huge disappointment overall. Although it contains further helpful material on brain lateralization and its effects, the majority of the book is dominated by its uncritically presented, impractical metaphysical philosophy. Having forced myself to read to the end to make quite sure I did it justice, I feel compelled to review it publicly out of concern about this book and its effects, which are likely to reinforce the left hemisphere dogmatism that McGilchrist is theoretically criticizing. I have already seen several reviewers and other readers seduced by its vast erudition into uncritical approaches. I’m also concerned about its likely role in the current political culture, where it may be an easy tool for exploitation by unscrupulous operators on the right.

The book is complex and often contradictory, and, if one is not sufficiently alert to its contradictions, it would be far too easy to accept it uncritically because of all the superficial reassurances McGilchrist includes in it, but then fails to follow through. Indeed, the failure to follow through makes this book hugely equivocatory. We are reassured of critical stances on all the traditional sacred cows of dogmatic belief, and then find the same old sacred cows have been somehow magicked back into life again, merely because the author has ignored the implications of their slaughter.

Before explaining further, let me fully disclose my personal position. After reading The Master and his Emissary around ten years ago, I wrote to McGilchrist, visited him, and maintained some correspondence with him for a few years. He read the first volume of my old Middle Way Philosophy series and kindly wrote a foreword to it, which he also gave permission for me to re-use in my new version of the same series. So, I am very grateful to McGilchrist, and also have much respect and affection for him as a person. It’s thus with considerable reluctance that I write this review. However, personal loyalty does not necessarily override every other value, particularly those involving intellectual integrity and wider moral concern. I am at least confident that he will understand my position at some level, as several times in The Matter with Things he refers to the relationship between Plato and Aristotle. It is possible to learn a great deal from someone and yet, in the end, deeply disagree with them.

Another introductory point that is needed here is to point out how high the stakes are with a book of this kind. It’s an apparently all-encompassing, all-explanatory multi-disciplinary book which has been given a great deal of opportunity to fully explain itself. I thus make no apology for holding it to higher standards – which it fails to meet – than I might apply to many shorter, less ambitious books by people with less genius and less privileged backgrounds. Although, for instance, I would normally try to avoid criticizing things books haven’t done that they have not explicitly set out to do, McGilchrist’s omissions are especially glaring, given the scope of what he sets out to do. I think McGilchrist could quite easily have written a very much better book than this – but he hasn’t, largely (it seems) due to a lack of some kinds of crucial critical awareness that it would not have been so difficult for him to develop.

The book takes the form of three sections. The first, ‘The hemispheres and the means to truth’ is largely an in-depth survey of the science of the hemispheres as it applies to the whole process of judgement and the conditions of judgement. The second, ‘The hemispheres and the paths to truth’ expands on McGilchrist’s view of truth in relation to science, reason, and intuition. The third, ‘The unforeseen nature of reality’, is non-stop metaphysics, including accounts of time, space, consciousness, value, and the sacred. I learned some interesting new things from the first section and found it very helpful, although it also sometimes foreshadows the other two, weaker, sections. It supplements and applies the materials in The Master and his Emissary, and could stand alone as a book with that function. The second section includes both helpful and problematic passages in approximately equal measure. The third, which is by far the longest, was for me a real slog: endlessly repetitive metaphysics that I read with gathering dismay and increasing alienation. Only my sense of loyalty to McGilchrist, requiring that I do him justice, stopped me giving up long before the end of the final section.

Although the first section could stand alone as a useful book, the book as a whole unfortunately stands or falls on its third section, to which the second is a warm-up. The first section displays McGilchrist’s scientific and scholarly rigour, adding to and updating the mass of evidence he has already mustered on the specializations of the hemispheres, the over-dominance of the left, and their effects. I was, however, already convinced of that case, as will most readers who might pick up this book after having read the earlier one. The second and third sections, however, increasingly show a lack of discipline in other crucial respects: practical, philosophical and structural.

There is practical indiscipline, because McGilchrist never tests his theories against any practical application. Tellingly, the very final subsection of his epilogue, entitled ‘So what should we do?’ does not offer any concrete suggestions for things to do whatsoever. He seems to have written the whole book under the delusion that it was somehow of practical value, but failed to check whether it actually was in any respect. Instead, the third section is an extended pursuit of the ontological obsession – the idea that for some reason we should describe how everything ultimately is, even when on his own account (in his clearer moments), based on his ground-breaking understanding of the hemispheres, we can’t. In one memorable sentence of The Master and his Emissary he described philosophy as like trying to fly using a submarine – and that precisely suggests the total impracticality of what he’s trying to do here.

There is philosophical indiscipline, because the whole third section (and much of the rest) puts forward endless metaphysical claims, without any critical enquiry or critical comparison as to whether or not this offers the best account of the implications of the hemispheres. He simply assumes that his account is correct, and dogmatically expounds it – with positive justifications, and tedious piles of proof texts from philosophers he agrees with, but no challenges from elsewhere showing awareness of other possible interpretations. This is not because he lacks a sense of a critical audience altogether, but his critical superego seems to be entirely directed towards an imagined scientific audience, not towards a philosophical or practical one. Despite his massive learning, he seems in many respects completely ignorant of philosophical and practical standpoints beyond the one he has adopted: the whole empirical tradition is not engaged with; the complex tradition of Buddhism is treated as though it was unanimous; pragmatism, embodied meaning and systems theory are all given highly tendentious interpretations without any debate at all.

There is also structural indiscipline, because the book simply goes on far too bloody long. It’s extremely repetitious, repeating the same or closely related claims in slightly different ways, and offering endless lengthy quotations to prove them, rather than examining those claims. The points it offers, especially in section 3, could have been made in about a quarter of the number of words employed.

To explain both the strengths and the weaknesses of the book in more detail, as well as where I am coming from in these summative comments, I will divide the remainder of this review into seven sections. Only the first, unfortunately, is positive, explaining the insights into brain lateralization and its effects that I think it offers. If all the rest is negative, this is, as I have already explained, because of my degree of concern about this book and its effects, requiring a detailed explanation of what is wrong with it – especially given that McGilchrist himself and many of his readers seem blind to what is wrong with it. The second section deals with the lack of practicality in McGilchrist’s whole approach. The third, with the crucial issue of why metaphysical claims, even (perhaps especially) when hedged with caveats that ought to contradict those claims, are a seriously bad idea, and undermine everything positive in McGilchrist’s brilliant work on the hemispheres. The fourth section deals with another crucial issue – the constant confusion of meaning and belief in the book. The fifth section deals with the absence of the Middle Way, which McGilchrist probably thinks he has included implicitly, even though he never mentions it. The sixth section is concerned with the way he completely ignores the tradition of empiricist thought, despite its obvious relevance to the hemispheres. The final section deals with the moral and political attitudes of the book – McGilchrist’s conservatism and the ease with which it could be abused.

Insights into lateralization and its effects

McGilchrist’s insights into brain lateralization and its massive implications were first developed convincingly in The Master and his Emissary, and McGilchrist begins his first section with a very useful summary of the key points of the earlier book (28-30). What the first section does to develop this is to break down different levels of our understanding and response to the world (attention, perception, judgement, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence, and creativity) and review the evidence on brain lateralization in relation to each of them. This is a different angle from which to approach that evidence from the one in The Master and his Emissary, which makes it often illuminating. It also updates that evidence more than ten years later. The very high standard of scientific referencing in McGilchrist’s work is maintained, as far as I can tell: at least, not only is there a great density of reference, but every time I have followed up a reference it has proved sound. I did not need convincing of the scientific case, which, as McGilchrist points out, is supported by a great weight of evidence as well as its explanatory value, but nevertheless the first section added to my understanding of that case.

McGilchrist likes to express his account of the hemispheres most basically as “two ways of paying attention”: the left hemisphere attending to a pre-existing set of beliefs into which any new information is accommodated,  the right attending to new experience and new meaning in a way that allows changes. Whilst this is correct, the two hemispheres’ ways of making judgements seem the most significant point of divergence to me, because it is this that makes the practical difference: the fact that McGilchrist does not place the emphasis there tells you something about his lack of practical focus, which I will return to.

There are two especially illuminating sections in part 1 which proved highly useful to me, and which I have subsequently made reference to in my own writing. The first of these is chapter 1 on ‘how we got here’, which offers an evolutionary account of how brain lateralization may have come to be such a big problem for humans particularly, even though it is found in most animals (beyond the point of jellyfish in the evolutionary tree). McGilchrist suggests that lateralization grows geometrically (not arithmetically) with complexity, so that as primate and human brains evolved in increasingly complex ways, the lateral differences were emphasised increasingly. This increasing lateralization created increasing duplication of functions between the hemispheres, which meant that we needed increasingly effective methods of repression of one hemisphere over another to prevent unhelpful interference between parallel functions. Since the left hemisphere is far more capable of repression than the right, its capacity to become over-dominant (through the medium of the corpus callosum) has been increasing with human brain development, and is far greater in the ‘newer’ parts of the brain. I have not come across any scientific objections to this so far – and it seems at the very least a highly credible and explanatory scientific account of our situation.

The second very useful point of information that I got from this book is what we might call right-hemisphere judgement. At a point of judgement we have to freeze our beliefs about a situation for practical purposes, and act as though things were a particular way, but until reading this book I had assumed that this was a left hemisphere function, and that the provisionality of our judgements depended on how far the left hemisphere remained integrated with the right when it made its judgement. McGilchrist makes it clear, however, that the right hemisphere has its own mode of judgement, and particularly that the right hemisphere can suppress emotional arousal from elsewhere for practical purposes. Think, for instance, of socially inappropriate sexual feelings: we don’t have to repress these because of puritanical dogma, but instead can suppress them in a way that allows us to maintain our emotional awareness and not act on an inappropriate emotional drive because of that awareness. Although McGilchrist does not bring out this implication, the phenomenon of right hemisphere suppression (223) allows suppression to be clearly distinguished from repression (lots of academics do not distinguish between them), and thus provisional judgements to be clearly differentiated from absolute ones.

Apart from these two specific points, the other insights I got from the first section were more in the nature of reinforcements of points that I had already previously understood from The Master and his Emissary, and already made extensive use of in my Middle Way Philosophy series. Nevertheless, the fuller and updated discussion of them was welcome. Many of these were about aspects of left hemisphere functioning:

• Further explanation of the left hemisphere’s lack of responsibility, confabulation, and conspiracizing (89,361)
• Explanation of the way delusions are due to right hemisphere underactivity or left hemisphere overactivity (with repression of the right)
• Explanation of the relationships between lateralization and very wide range of medical conditions
• Recognizing the ‘reason of the madman’: that is, the rigorous consistency of those with many mental illnesses (such as schizophrenia) based on narrowed premises (167)
• Hyper-rationalism and flipping between absolute positions as features of schizophrenia. (350,352)
• The reinforcing feedback loops in over-dominant left hemisphere thinking, including repetition and circularity (359)
• Ways that the left hemisphere lacks incrementality – it cannot understand properties as a matter of degree, but leaps discontinuously between total claims (586, 643)
• Ways that the left hemisphere substitutes abstract conceptualization for concrete (576)
• The limiting effects of over-specialization, which are dependent on left hemisphere over-dominance (502 ff)

There were also some points of a similar kind that are more positively about how we can get beyond over-dependence on the left hemisphere:

• A confirmation of the centrality of synthesis in creativity (242)
• An explanation of how awareness of context gives us a handle on dogma (540). This is a crucial practical point that is thereafter not developed practically.
• The contrast between the hemispheres as focused attention versus attention to a wider field (691). Again, this supports the crucial role of contextualization in addressing the over-dominance of the left hemisphere.

There is also a welcome analysis of the relationship between Daniel Kahneman’s work on bias and the hemispheres. Hemisphere use cuts across the ‘fast thinking’ of biases that Kahneman contrasts with the ‘slow thinking’ of reasoning. However, our slower reasoning can easily make new mistakes as it tries to rectify earlier fast thinking, and may even rationalize those previous mistakes (722). The crucial point is that left hemisphere based absolutization creates our deluded response to biases, being taken in by them (or, I would add, over-compensating for them) (740).

Unfortunately, though, the discussion of Kahneman’s work is about the only reasonably successful application of the science of the hemispheres in this book. In The Master and his Emissary, McGilchrist was far more successful in this regard, as he applied understanding of the hemispheres to explaining historical change. This was part of what made the earlier book so brilliant. In The Matter with Things, it’s downhill from here.

Lack of practicality

McGilchrist’s huge blind spot in this book is that he seems to think that he is offering something practically helpful, but he has completely failed to reflect on what his metaphysical theorizing is likely to do in practice. This is, indeed, perhaps an example of the kind of confabulation that he describes as typical of over-dominant left hemisphere operation: as instead of introducing, justifying or assessing any concrete proposals, he constantly substitutes further abstract waffle. The ironic apogee of this is, as already mentioned, at the end of his epilogue, where there is a section entitled ‘So what should we do?’ (1327 ff). ‘At last’, I thought, but then, on reading through it, realized that by the end of it McGilchrist had suggested nothing whatever that we might do!

McGilchrist makes use of pragmatist philosophy, but in a highly selective way. For example, he might have made use of Dewey’s dialectical approach to socio-political issues, and remarked on the ways that the right hemisphere is essential to learning from others through discourse – the heart of both democracy and education in Dewey’s account. But this would have been about what we do, how in practice we integrate the hemispheres. Instead, McGilchrist’s favourite pragmatist philosopher is William James. James wrote extensively about the supposed practical value of absolute religious beliefs that allow us to take a ‘moral holiday’, whilst totally ignoring all the negative effects of those absolute beliefs. Because James predates much (though not all) of the psychological and sociological evidence we have linking absolute metaphysical beliefs to repression and conflict, McGilchrist is able to extensively quote James, pretend to offer a ‘pragmatic’ perspective, and completely ignore most of the practical effects of what he is defending.

McGilchrist makes sympathetic reference to the value of mindfulness as a practice, and even collects further scientific evidence to support it in an appendix (7). However, I have substantial doubts as to whether McGilchrist has himself ever practised meditation in a consistent way. He recognizes the ways that meditation can open up our awareness of right hemisphere functions, but that it offers a practical way of working that can positively shape our philosophical and practical understanding of how to respond to the hemispheres does not occur to him. In meditation, we constantly fail through distraction, but then constantly re-contextualize. Instead, though, his constant driving after metaphysics entrenches a process of decontextualization in practice, as I will elaborate below.

There is a discussion of creativity (239 ff), which, as I have already mentioned, recognizes the role of synthesis. However, his whole approach to creativity is deeply impractical. He over-romantically asserts that creativity “can’t be made to happen” (246), rather than recognizing the balance of effortinvolved in creativity, where constant intentions need to be matched by provisionality (I return to this point below). I expect, in practice, he has discovered this in the process of writing books, but his idealized view (absolutizing a right hemisphere perspective) still gets in the way when he expresses it. His discussion of creativity (ch.8) is also characteristically elitist: he constantly emphasises the creativity of geniuses, and shows no interest at all in the creativity of ordinary people, for instance attending an art class in retirement and finding a gentle new meaning in their lives. I will return to this point.

The lack of practicality is also reflected in his attitude to science. He is concerned with ‘science’s claims to truth’ and deplores the emphasis on ‘mechanistic explanation’, but there is very little in this book about what scientists actually do that makes their activity scientific – that is, the application of scientific method. It is surely how well they apply this method that enables us to make some distinctions between more and less justifiable approaches to science. But McGilchrist, obsessed with ‘truth’, is not much interested in this, and largely ignores the extensive discussion in the work of great philosophers of science like Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn that attempt to clarify it.

McGilchrist gives an extensive defence of the value of intuition (ch.18), but focuses here almost entirely on the value of intuitive judgement for experts such as physicians. He makes quite a good case for that, but in the process completely avoids all discussion of the ways that intuition is far more commonly appealed to in common discussion – for instance, people claiming to have intuitive knowledge about the universe, or intuitive knowledge of others when they’ve only just encountered them on the internet. In all such cases, people are usually dogmatically committed to what they ‘feel’ is right regardless of the evidence. The total lack of balance and wider practical context in McGilchrist’s discussion of intuition makes it misleading in the very wide claims it makes.

But perhaps the biggest impracticality lies in McGilchrist’s approach to ‘knowing’. He fully appreciates all the major delusions in the left hemisphere’s unaided claims to ‘know’, but is nevertheless fixated, not on deconstructing the left hemisphere’s pretensions in practice (a difficult enough task), but instead, constructing an alternative account of ‘knowledge’ of ‘reality’ made by the right hemisphere.

I am not saying that all I can know is a simulacrum, the relationship of which to a reality I can never know I also can never know. I am saying that what I know is real enough, but it is only what I am able to see from where I am: a tiny portion of the whole. (550)

This is the underlying thought that justifies the whole metaphysical edifice he then constructs, regardless of the practical effects of constructing it. There are, of course, no grounds at all for believing that we know even ‘a tiny portion of the whole’ to be ‘real’ (more on this below). More importantly, though, this argument – attempting to sidestep thousands of years of sceptical insight, and unaccompanied by practical alternatives, is a trigger for all the world’s dogmatists to utter a sigh of relief. This could be briefly summarized as follows “Oh, it’s all right then. We can know stuff. So we can just get on with business as usual.” McGilchrist fails to grasp that if you give the left hemisphere representation of ‘reality’ this kind of concession, in practice, it will just carry on rationalizing and confabulating its way back to all the things that might otherwise be called into question. In his account of schizophrenic ways of understanding the world, it is clear that McGilchrist does understand the depth of rationalization we can get into – but he fails to apply it to his own case. As a result, by the end of the book we are still left with business as usual, with no practical proposals for living otherwise whatsoever, and no consistent acknowledgement of the general uncertainty that might provide a stimulus for questioning current practices.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the central issue in this book. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, McGilchrist thinks he can get a general metaphysical explanation of the world out of a right-hemisphere situated stance. There is a complete and obvious contradiction in any such aspiration, because of all the ways that metaphysics is a distinctively deluded left hemisphere construction, yet McGilchrist fails to face up to this contradiction. As a result, a large part of this book is self-deluded and contradictory.

For a fuller account of why metaphysics is unavoidably absolute and deluded, the reader of this review will need to refer to my book Absolutization (especially section 4). Here, I will obviously focus on the shortcomings of McGilchrist’s attempts to use metaphysics in what he seems to think are non-absolute ways. To anyone to whom my criticisms remain baffling after that, the longer explanation in my book is likely to be necessary.

The place to begin in recognizing the impossibility of non-absolute metaphysics, I think, lies in embodiment and embodied meaning. Metaphysics attempts to create a representation of how the world ultimately is in general – not of how it appears, or of our provisional theorizations of how it is, but of how it ultimately is. If we were to explain how the world ultimately is, we would need to be able to represent its reality in language. However, all the indications as to how meaning actually interacts with our bodies and brains (including ones discussed by McGilchrist) suggest that language is not capable of such representation. It is our left hemisphere that thinks it is representing, but our right that experiences the more basic meaning that is drawn on implicitly by the left to construct its representational propositions. Metaphysical claims are thus a solely left hemisphere creation, completely out of touch both with the sources of meaning and with all justificatory information, because they think they have the whole story regardless of those sources.

The ways in which meaning mediated by the right hemisphere can operate without dependence on representation in the left has been thoroughly charted by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the pioneers of embodied meaning theory since the 1980’s. In brief, the meaning of our language (like that of all other symbols) is associative, dependent on the links made when we interact with objects or schemas in experience. We then develop this basic schematic language through metaphor so as to develop increasingly complex meaning-associations. McGilchrist makes reference to this work. As he writes, for instance:

…Complex phenomena at the highest level are already coherent wholes…. There the motor, affective and cognitive elements are inextricable linked in ways that have human meaning, and do not need to be ‘combined’ or assembled mechanically by any higher process. (985)

Yet it is precisely this mechanical assemblage at a higher level that he remains engaged in for most of the rest of the book – somehow convinced that representations of how things really are are the key to understanding the world in a new and helpful way. He quotes Lakoff and Johnson at one point on the ways that we don’t know whether or not we are separated from ‘reality’ (1090), whilst completely ignoring their explanations of how meaning and belief are generated, and thus gives the misleading impression that they would approve of his metaphysics that attempts to represent such reality.

McGilchrist’s metaphysics is, of course, complex and nuanced. But there is a point where nuancing a delusion serves only to rationalize it and hang onto it further (as I’m sure he is aware). Much of McGilchrist’s nuancing of metaphysics is equivocatory. For instance, he frequently claims that ‘reality’ can be incremental – we can have degrees of reality (e.g. 11, 390, 397). If that was the case, whenever we penetrated to a higher degree, we would presumably recognize that the previous degree of ‘reality’ was not reality at all. This is the kind of confusion that arises philosophically when people use absolute terms in incremental ways: in practice rationalizing their absolute belief by pretending to themselves that it is also at the same time an incremental belief. In most respects, the absolute belief then carries on doing what absolute beliefs normally do – that is, justifying dogma, repression, and conflict – having found a merely rhetorical way of fending off the challenge. It’s much better to stick with absolute meanings for absolute terms, rather than creating a smokescreen of this kind.

Similar problems attend McGilchrist’s exposition of ‘truth’: a term that frames the titles of his sections and volumes. He argues that truth should be seen as a relationship, process or attunement perceived by the right hemisphere (384). Again, though, if that was what ‘truth’ meant, it would not be a set of metaphysical propositions about ultimate reality of the kind he offers in this book. On his own account, then, his book cannot be true. Again, in practice, what he writes is equivocatory: he wants us to believe in the truth of his metaphysics at the same time as avoiding criticisms of absolute stances of the kind that are suggested by his account of the hemispheres. In another place, he claims that truth is ‘unconcealing’ (386). That might be a way of understanding how truth can be symbolically or archetypally associated with experiences of insight (something I have discussed in my book Archetypes in Religion and Beyond 6.c), but when attached to a business-as-usual metaphysics later in the same book, is just equivocatory. Yes, we have important experiences of recognition, of peeling away delusion – why do we have to associate these with abstract claims about ultimate reality? Such experiences are meaningful to us, but don’t need to be turned into absolute beliefs (see next section below).

McGilchrist’s confused approach to sceptical argument also underlies his use of metaphysics. Sceptical arguments point out uncertainty in any possible claim – crucially including those that may be justified by the right hemisphere as well as the left. McGilchrist uses some of these, for instance, in his critique of science’s claims to truth (414). Late on in the book, McGilchrist appears to accept the full and balanced implications of this uncertainty:

Being sceptical is not a mindless matter of rejecting as wholly false something that cannot be proved, but which might contain truth; any more than it is to accept something indiscriminately because it is theoretically correct without testing it on the business of living. (1269)

Again, a recognition that would suggest a much more practical approach than McGilchrist actually takes, and a recognition of the Middle Way that he does not sustain at all (see below). He does not apply this recognition of uncertainty at all to the supposed right-hemisphere metaphysics he subsequently creates, and in other places reverts to the standard conventional misunderstanding of scepticism.

In discussing schizophrenic hyper-rationalism and literalism, for instance, he discusses doubt as though it was an entirely hyper-rational phenomenon, discussing a schizophrenic who doubts his own hands (354). This kind of ‘doubt’ obviously decontextualizes and disembodies, but could just as easily be understood as obsessive negative belief (e.g. the belief that one’s hands are not one’s own). He then says that such schizophrenics can become ‘unsure of all meaning’, quoting one who had to carry a huge dictionary strapped to his back. There is equivocation, failure to define terms, and more confusion here. If a schizophrenic has a belief that he doesn’t know the meanings of words, that is an absolute belief and an instance of literalism, not an absence of meaning. One needs a meaning associated with a word already to be able to look it up in a dictionary, so one is looking up, not meaning, but conventionally accepted beliefs about the use of a word. All these unfair associations between doubt and meaninglessness are aspects of the widespread misinterpretation of the implications of sceptical argument – which tends to justify a desperate lunge for metaphysical foundations, however equivocatory, as the only possible alternative. But scepticism is not a threat to anybody or anything, except absolute belief – no desperate lunges are required.

McGilchrist tries to justify his metaphysics ‘from the inside only’ through ‘a hermeneutic circle’ which demands ‘a step of faith’ (1127). There is nothing new about this: it is a rewarming of very old rationalizations for metaphysics that in some way or another try to get us out of infinite regressions or circles of justification by claiming some sort of exception – a special justification for our metaphysics that for some reason doesn’t apply to all the other mistaken versions. Thus McGilchrist employs a whole set of other old moves from the metaphysician’s playbook. He assumes that the universe must be comprehensible and works down from there (1093). He frequently appeals to essentialism, as though metaphysical truths could be found in the ‘essential’ meanings of ideas – as in his arguments about the ‘limit case’ (7). He falls back on the old false dichotomy that if we don’t accept metaphysics we have no grounds for meaning or belief (933). He opposes belief in metaphysical truth to relativism or reductionism as the only alternatives in a false dichotomy (388). For some reason he completely fails to recognize that these moves simply repeat long-established narrow left hemisphere ways of framing the discussion, sending it round again and again in proliferating feedback loops.

If McGilchrist had attempted to engage with the objections to metaphysics, perhaps he would have learned more from this about the massive holes in his contradictory project; but his reading of philosophy, although scholarly, seems to be very selective, and his engagement with it basically dogmatic. He is not interested in considering, for instance, what insights Buddhist, empiricist, positivist or postmodernist thinkers might have been working on when they have criticized metaphysics. Instead he simply ignores all such discussion and dogmatically expounds his own metaphysics. As a result, he repeats previous mistakes made by the broadly rationalist philosophers he tends to draw on. On other occasions, he quotes philosophers, like Merleau-Ponty, Dewey, or Lakoff and Johnson, that have serious criticisms of metaphysics, but takes them so out of context that he fails to mention this. In particular, the very possibility of a phenomenological approach, focusing on experience and discussing it provisionally rather than metaphysically, is not even mentioned.

It also needs to be remarked that metaphysics simply cannot give McGilchrist what he wants it to give him: a source of meaning and value. We find these things in experience, not in a metaphysical form, and we then develop them through practice. Trying to turn that experience into metaphysics just gives us more metaphysics, which (if correct) would only state ideals that we could easily remain alienated from. Only an engagement with the process of practice working with that experience can help us to stretch and integrate our values. The whole project of a supposedly experiential metaphysics is thus fundamentally misconceived.

The confusion of meaning with belief

McGilchrist’s account of the hemispheres, as I have already mentioned, is fully compatible with an embodied perspective on meaning, processed through the right hemisphere. However, McGilchrist has clearly not digested the implications of embodied meaning, and continues to follow representationalist ‘business as usual’ in the way he treats it. If meaning is associative rather than representational, it is clearly prior to belief: we can form associative meaning in relation to symbols without necessarily forming any beliefs about states of affairs or actions. The arts, with which McGilchrist has an inspired relationship, offer a huge pool of meaning without belief. He shows appreciation of the role of a view of the world fired up with meaning in his discussion of animism (102), and of how the left hemisphere in isolation unnecessarily turns meaningful stories into beliefs (211). Yet, even so, McGilchrist constantly continues to treat meaning in terms of belief (or worse still, as ‘knowledge’), because he has not followed through these threads consistently.

Magical thinking, which is meaning confused with belief, is treated positively, even though it is clearly deluded (158-162). He directly confuses conceptualization with the congelation of beliefs, even though concepts can be used freely in all sorts of ways that are not beliefs (577). He confuses undifferentiated meaning, in which we experience our sphere of awareness (uniting subject and objects) as a whole, with a ‘sense of self’, which obviously involves beliefs that have nothing necessarily to do with that meaning (333). He confuses schizophrenics jumping to conclusions (belief) with their perception of meaning (747). He claims that myth gives an understanding that is “foundational, non-negotiable” (636), which if correct could only imply a reduction of myth to belief.

Worse still than the confusion of meaning with belief, though, is the confusion of meaning with ‘knowledge’, ‘reality’, or ‘truth’. Here mere possibilities, experienced through our bodies and right hemispheres, are turned  by implication into left hemisphere absolutes. He quotes with approval Bergson’s claim that depth and duration (right hemisphere experiences that can integrate meaning or belief previously separated over time) show us “the external world as it really is” (901). He assumes that meaning can be “in the world” rather than in our experience, and that scientific approaches must be dogmatic if they question such assumptions about meaning (1123).

‘Knowledge’ is normally defined philosophically as justified true belief, which is obviously a form of belief, so by assuming that meaning is ‘knowledge’ one simultaneously both confuses it with belief and assumes that the belief concerned must be both absolutely true and absolutely justified. McGilchrist does make a point of the distinction between propositional knowledge (savoir) and knowledge by acquaintance (connaitre) (631), also saying that the former is subsidiary to the latter. However, as we have already seen above, he does not stick to this recognition. Since metaphysics consists in propositional knowledge claims of an ultimate kind, for one thing, he could not offer us metaphysics if he consistently believed that all knowledge was subsidiary to experienced meaning. The result, again, is large-scale equivocation: the right brain does not recognize what the left brain is doing.

Ignoring the very possibility of the Middle Way

McGilchrist’s lack of practicality, use of metaphysics, and confusion of meaning with belief all amount to an ignoring of the Middle Way. By the Middle Way, here, I mean a practical path followed whilst avoiding opposed metaphysical claims on both sides: an experiential, provisional and integrative path. There are, of course, different possible interpretations of the Middle Way. Despite its interpretation being my own life’s work, let me make it clear that my complaint here is not that McGilchrist does not precisely reproduce my own interpretation of the Middle Way. My complaint is much wider – that he completely ignores the Middle Way, either explicitly or implicitly. In the whole 1341 pages of the main text of the book, he does not mention the Middle Way once, despite its obvious relevance to everything he is discussing. He also does not implicitly use the Middle Way by seeking out an integrative path between the polarized opposites favoured by the left hemisphere.

His neglect of the Middle Way is not because he has never heard of it. McGilchrist had read at least one of my books about the Middle Way well before he wrote The Matter with Things, and corresponded with me about it. He also quotes me at one point (though on a different issue, without mentioning the key point of what I was discussing, which was the Middle Way). Ignorance thus cannot be his excuse.

Even if he didn’t wish to discuss my interpretation of the Middle Way, there is an earlier and much more widely-known Buddhist account, going back to the Buddha himself, from which he could have learnt much. McGilchrist does make several references to Buddhism, all of them sweeping and idealized. Buddhism is interpreted metaphysically, and no recognition at all is given for the complexity of Buddhist tradition, which is at least as varied as Christian tradition. The Middle Way is one important strand running through that tradition, closely associated with the practical orientation of Buddhism at its best. I have to conclude that the reason McGilchrist ignores the Middle way, either in Buddhism or anywhere else, is because it offers a major challenge to his metaphysical interpretation of the hemispheres, but he does not want to have to justify himself in the light of that challenge. His eye, as previously, is only on the professional scientific superego, not on all the challenges he might meet from other quarters.

The nearest that McGilchrist comes to an implicit recognition of the Middle Way comes at one point when he combines a recognition of uncertainty and balance:

The other prevalent fallacy also arises from the fear of uncertainty…. According to this fallacy, the fact that problems of definition make a phenomenon hard to deal with neatly and precisely demonstrates that therefore any intuitively likely conclusion, accepted in some cases for centuries, is mistaken. Of course it shows no such thing. (294-5)

Yes, indeed, the impossibility of proving the positive does not prove the negative opposite, nor vice-versa. This simple recognition, applied consistently and even-handedly, is the whole basis of the Middle Way. Unfortunately, though, McGilchrist does not apply it consistently and even-handedly. Throughout the book, he consistently only criticizes materialism or scientistic reductionism, whilst letting more traditional forms of metaphysics get away scot-free (even his phrasing above, “accepted in some cases for centuries” already shows his conservative bias). Without any discussion at all of any aspect of the Middle Way – such as the need for consistent rather than inconsistent use of sceptical argument, the application of agnosticism, or the ways that integrative practice supports the path – it’s perhaps not surprising that he doesn’t stick to that path. He didn’t set out to do so, and only his clearest, most insightful moments illustrate the possibility of it to any extent.

McGilchrist may think that he has dealt with the insights of the Middle Way in his discussion of ‘the coincidence of opposites’, on which there is a lengthy chapter. But much of this chapter is a load of near-incomprehensible waffle. Here is a sample of it:

There is nothing to which we can in any way liken nothing, but if there were anything, it would be, like Being, a process, (in this case, a process of negation, whereas Being is a process of affirmation). Hence the formation of a verb from what looks like a noun. Nothing is not just some thing that fails to presence – an absence – but a certain irreducible element in whatever exists, on a par with, and complementary to, Being itself; not passive and sterile, but having energy of its own that takes part in the coming into being of whatever is. (819)

To me that just looks like a severe case of reading too much Heidegger, though perhaps some of his readers with more patience for such language can make more of it than I can. My question about such stuff is “How is this going to help anybody?”. If it is, it needs to actually start with a practical intention and work back from that to support us in engaging with more abstract issues. But this is clearly not McGilchrist’s intention. His intention is to describe how things ultimately are, regardless of the total incompatibility of this project with his starting point in his account of the hemispheres. If in his more practical moments you might credit him with recognizing some of the practical points of the Middle Way, this mangled metaphysization of it is a comprehensive betrayal of that way. The Middle Way is not “a coincidence of opposites” in the universe at all, but a navigation between the opposites we encounter in experience. It is a practice – something it ceases to be the moment you try to turn it into an absolute description of the universe.

McGilchrist’s wilful ignoring of the Middle Way is also evident in the ways that he consistently inflates metaphysics, and refuses to even consider the possibility that there might be a non-metaphysical interpretation of the hemispheres. He swallows the now common philosophical dogma that metaphysics is necessary. “If we seriously doubted the existence of truth”, he claims, “None of us would get out of bed in the morning, because there would be no point in preferring any one course of action to any other” (390). This is a left hemisphere confabulation swallowed whole, only acceptable if one completely ignores the possibility of holding and acting on provisional beliefs that one can justify without knowing them to be true. If one can justify one’s beliefs without knowing them to be true, the “existence” of truth is completely irrelevant, like the “existence” (or non-existence) of any other metaphysical entity. We can also motivate our beliefs, and in practice always do motivate them, through bodily confidence, not through metaphysical guarantees. Yet McGilchrist seems to have unquestioningly absorbed this analytic philosopher’s dogma.

His treatment of God is even more philosophically conventional. In time-honoured philosophical fashion, he appropriates agnosticism to his own side by defining it in those terms, giving it no opportunity to breathe in its own right at all.

The significant divide is…not based on the ‘what’ but the ‘how’: not between atheism and belief at all, but between those who approach the world literally and dogmatically, and those who approach the world with a richer understanding of metaphor and a capacity to tolerate uncertainty, be they agnostics or believers in a divine cosmos. (1271)

If that one slipped past you, have another look at the last five words. Yes, that’s right, “believers in a divine cosmos” are being bracketed with agnostics  as the goodies here, and simultaneously distanced from “belief” and dogmatism. “Everyone else’s left hemisphere metaphysics is wrong: but mine, of course, is different and right” is the over-familiar underlying message. The lack of even-handedness here becomes much more overt and even shocking, and it becomes unfortunately clear that the thickets of nuance in this book are largely a smokescreen for old-fashioned metaphysical conservatism.

McGilchrist, of course, disavows belief in the existence of God – except when he brings it in again by the back door, by the time-honoured method of assuming that it’s the only way we can have meaning and value in our lives. He doesn’t want to be dogmatic, and treads softly at all times – but he has no alternative to the old bankrupt metaphysical prescriptions, so that is effectively what he pushes.

It’s not only in relation to God and value issues that McGilchrist ignores the Middle Way to conservative effect. He has also absorbed the Chinese doctrine of wu wei:

There are rational goals that the rational person ought to pursue, which nonetheless can only be pursued by not pursuing them: along with sleep and happiness, these include things as diverse as wisdom, sexual performance, sympathy and being natural. (603)

Like unsophisticated expositions of wu wei, this is a very simplistic and one-sided version of an insight that is an aspect of the Middle Way: ‘do nothing’ is substituted for balanced effort. Yes, of course there are goals that it is unhelpful to pursue too wilfully or directly. Nevertheless, a consistent application of intention is needed even to get to sleep – for instance, to get off your computer, get to bed and close your eyes. Effective effort in such things is not non-existent at all: it is balanced, avoiding absolutized beliefs on both sides, and thus drawing on both hemispheres. The effect of such one-sided presentations, however, neglects the Middle Way both in its impracticality and its simplistic approach to Buddhism and other Eastern traditions. Its passivity in the face of things that we don’t try to change also suits a conservative political agenda, whether or not McGilchrist deliberately intended to suggest that here.

Ignoring empiricist tradition

Compounding the neglect of the Middle Way in The Matter with Things is a very one-sided approach to the traditions and arguments of Western philosophy. As a Philosophy Ph.D. who has done my best to engage with modern analytic philosophy, I agree with many of McGilchrist’s concerns about it, as trapped in a narrow left hemisphere echo chamber. However, prior to analytic philosophy’s development in the twentieth century is a long and rich tradition of empiricism, where many insights are to be found, particularly in the work of Hume, J.S. Mill, and Popper. These philosophers put a great deal of emphasis on our capacity to learn from the senses, and on avoiding the traps created by circular and self-fuelling rationalist thought. This is precisely, one would have thought, what is needed, at least prima facie, to avoid the traps of the left hemisphere and bring it into better relationship with the right. Whatever arguments McGilchrist may have with this whole tradition of philosophy, one would have thought that it was at least worth addressing – but instead, as with the Middle Way, McGilchrist pretty much completely ignores it, and in the process throws away the insights it has to offer. He only quotes Hume in one place (394-5), but in a way that is incidental to Hume’s main arguments (enough to show, once again, that ignorance is not his excuse). Instead he focuses relentlessly on figures like Heidegger, Scheler, Bergson and William James.

This neglect of empiricism has some important results. He shows no appreciation of incremental justification, apparently fails to credit the role of observation in scientific method, and, bizarrely, gets deduction and induction the wrong way round. These are pretty basic mistakes to make for someone with such massive learning and engagement with science, and they make a major contribution to catapulting his discussion of the implications of the hemispheres off into metaphysical la-la land.

The lack of any appreciation of incremental justification seems to be because he wrongly assumes that all quantitative judgement must be numerical. It’s either precise, scientific measurement, which he rightly recognizes cannot be applied to many important things, or we’re apparently straight into the realm of absolutes:

Within my experience of the world, very much can be changed by my response to whatever-it-is – in a sense everything can be changed. Though that may seem to be ‘just for me’, how big or small is that? We cannot weigh consciousness against the universe. (14)

Indeed, but we can weigh justifications against one another, assessing their relative strength, using processes I discuss elsewhere as ‘probabilizing’ and ‘weighing up’. We may well not have any numerical values to apply to the differing strengths of justification that we have for different possible beliefs, but even so, by going through a process of incrementalizing them we are forced to stop absolutizing them and consider them in relation to each other. It is the importance of this process, not just the calculative left hemisphere reductionism that McGilchrist endlessly complains about, that is one of the key insights of the empiricist tradition. It is found by implication in Hume’s ‘fork’ (in his ‘Enquiry into Human Understanding’), where he urges us to choose clearly between approaches that make use of information gained through experience – however approximate and imperfect – over the self-feeding abstract vacuity of metaphysics. It’s also found by implication in Popper’s falsificationism, in which he recognizes that we make gradual progress in science by ruling out alternatives that have been proved ‘false’ (or at least unfruitful, by Lakatos’s later refinements to this view) as opposed to judging what is ‘true’. Each positive result may add a little to our confidence, but does not ‘prove’ anything: which is exactly how a more right-hemisphere-orientated approach to justifying our beliefs about the world works. Without this incrementality, despite our best intentions, we end up in an assumed Platonic all-or-nothing discontinuity (“You can’t use the imperfect as a measure of anything” – Plato’s Republic 504c).   

McGilchrist discusses science extensively, but in a way that constantly emphasises the danger of dogmas in scientific theory fuelled by confirmation bias – not the huge advantages of scientific observation systematically used to avoid that bias and allow new information to modify our theories. He quotes with approval an account of the scientific world view by Flynn entirely in terms of “vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents” (235). Strangely, I always thought the scientific worldview was mainly about using observation to justify theoretical generalizations. Flynn’s account fits metaphysical philosophy a great deal better!

McGilchrist later talks about ‘the myth of the scientific method’, when what he is complaining about is ”an account of science operating in a deeply impersonal manner such that the scientist’s imagination almost entirely disappears from view” (421-2). This is not an account of the scientific method that I (or I suspect most scientists) would recognize at all: scientific method involves the use of observation, something that is obviously done by people, even though it can be systematized to try to reduce confirmation bias. Philosophers of science such as Popper also give full credit to the role of the imagination, stating that it doesn’t matter how a theory has arisen – what matters is how it is tested. Again, it is the empiricist tradition of basic justification of scientific method that supports this. It is this tradition that has done more than anything to maintain the use of right hemisphere information to modify left hemisphere assumptions, for instance forcing Western society to adopt a whole list of new models over old dogmas during the last three hundred years or so: Newtonian physics, Darwinian evolution, old earth geology, relativity etc. It is also this aspect of the method that enables pseudoscience, with its insufficient guards against confirmation bias, to be identified and avoided.

We have not yet reached the worst aspects of this, however. McGilchrist’s reversal of deduction and induction is perhaps the strangest thing in this whole book. As everyone except him (and possibly similarly confused Heideggerians) have recognized since the terms started to be used in the eighteenth century, deduction is the logical derivation of the necessary implications of one claim to another, telling us what has already been assumed in the fashion of the left hemisphere. Induction, on the other hand, is the incremental addition of justification to our beliefs from the evidence of the senses – one would have thought, a central function that integrates left and right hemispheres. However, McGilchrist does not see things this way at all:

Induction relies on the familiar remaining unchanged. This kind of reasoning is particularly associated with the left hemisphere, which makes sense if we realise that the left hemisphere needs to be able to predict, since its main concern is a plan of action. (168-9)

What he is describing here is not induction, but confirmation bias. Induction, far from relying on everything remaining unchanged, allows us to modify our views when things do change. He thus seems to see the process of science solely as a process of confirmation bias, reaffirming its dogmas through observation, and thus completely ignoring the major justification of science.

He then goes on to define deduction as “seeing that something is implied by what one knows, and is latent or implicit in it” (169). He lays all the emphasis on this ‘latency’, extending it to apparently cover synthetic processes that combine ideas, and thus claiming, bizarrely, that “the right hemisphere plays a bigger part in deduction than induction”. Again, if he had paid attention to Hume, he would at least take account of Hume’s insight that deductive processes offer us no new information, but just recycle the old information according to what is assumed within a particular model. Deduction is not normally understood as covering synthesis in which new combinations of ideas are made (except by Kant, whose arguments are highly questionable), so although its results may be ‘latent’ in some ways, they are rarely very interestingly or insightfully latent. For example, in a mathematical calculation, the result may seem ‘latent’ in the sense that we did not predict the answer in advance, but the calculation only uses familiar numbers and familiar procedures for processing those numbers.

McGilchrist compounds the confusions of his perverse account of induction by attributing deductive processes to induction: “It is the left hemisphere that tends to reach hasty conclusions on the basis of what seems likely”, but reaching such hasty conclusions is deduction, not induction. It begins with the left hemisphere’s model of the likely scenario (which is probably based on previously considered evidence), and then works out what is implied by that model. In this way, induction and deduction are often combined in complex ways in any given process of reasoning, but McGilchrist apparently takes no account of this.

It is this kind of confusion that seems to be at the core of the rationalist bias in this book. He makes a distinction between ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’ in which ‘rationality’ is said to be a linear process aiming for certainty, and ‘reason’ a more flexible process ‘in the round’ (548). In the light of McGilchrist’s confusion about how reasoning works, I can only see this distinction as an appropriative move on the part of his underlying rationalist philosophy. He wants us to give his purely rational processing of logical relationships the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his metaphysical assertions, even though they are completely at odds with his account of the hemispheres, by pretending that deduction involves the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist’s underlying rationalism comes out more fully and explicitly in his chapter on value:

Why for that matter believe in reason as a guide to truth, let alone the only guide to truth? I believe it helps us approach truth because I believe the cosmos has meaning, I believe reason is an aspect of its coherence, which both grounds it and it in turn grounds, and I believe we are an expression of that cosmos. (1124)

This is full of very worn old theistic moves. When the road of justification from experience starts running out, firstly one substitutes “I believe”, and secondly one confuses meaning (which is an embodied experience) with metaphysical beliefs about the universe. Finally, one may also bring in a fake humility (that we are just an “expression” of the cosmos) to disguise the arrogant “belief” that we know what the cosmos as a whole is about on the basis of a biased interpretation of an infinitesimal portion of it. The basis in ‘reason’ (including the use of inductive evidence channelled through the right hemisphere) for this kind of Platonic nonsense was long ago deconstructed by Hume in his Dialogues on Natural Religion, but it is still in circulation.

Another development of the wider empiricist tradition, especially in relation to religion, is found in Jung. Hume did not address the potentially inspirational role of sublime or integrative experiences that we might associate with concepts or symbols of the infinite, but Jung’s account of archetypes (again, not discussed in McGilchrist’s book) provides a basis for doing this without having to believe in cosmic metaphysics (see my book Archetypes in Religion and Beyond). Though much critical winnowing through Jung’s assumptions is needed, he did draw on experience both of his own inner process and that of his patients, to offer us the starting point for an account of how religious ideas function for us, providing an alternative to treating them as metaphysical absolutes whilst respecting their role in meaning.

The neglect of empiricism is also what seems to allow him to keep interpreting science in very narrow, stereotyped ways. For instance, he has some good points to make about a mechanistic tendency in mainstream biology, but completely fails to mention that there is a whole systemic approach to biology pioneered by Maturana and Varela which is far from subject to this criticism. Again, ignorance is probably not the explanation, as he quotes Varela in one place – on an oblique matter (551). He also has a very unconvincing chapter on intelligence, full of ad hoc argument, where he asserts both that general intelligence is right hemisphere led, but at the same time that a fall in IQ must be left hemisphere led and due to ‘scientific spectacles’ that are characterized entirely in terms of the rationalizing processes of science. He really can’t have it both ways, that science is both the hero with reliable IQ tests on the one hand, and the villain with unreliable ones on the other, but again he seems unaware of the big inconsistencies in his case in this chapter.

By pretty much completely ignoring empiricism and the advances it has helped us to make on a wide variety of philosophical and scientific fronts, then, and by also ignoring the Middle Way as an option, McGilchrist ends up, despite what may have been his best intentions, with rationalism. The narrowness of this rationalism lies in McGilchrist’s assumption that there are only two options, and the refusal to explore any third options. Whilst there are plenty of questionable assumptions in empiricist tradition, McGilchrist does not make any attempt to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. This, again, does not mean that I expect him to draw exactly the same conclusions as I have from a critical process of engagement with these sources – but it seems entirely reasonable to expect him  to engage in some sort of critical process of some kind.

Conservatism

McGilchrist is, I believe, something like a theoretical Burkean conservative – a position that, in theory, I have much sympathy for, because it prioritises a recognition of complexity in socio-political relationships, and discourages quick and simplistic solutions to problems. However, one of the major problems in current political discourse is the appropriation of such conservative ideas by corrupt political Conservatives – who have very little understanding of complex systems, and are mainly interested in defending the interests of a privileged class through any manipulative means that are available. This point is very relevant to The Matter with Things, because although on the face of it this is not a political book, there are many claims in it that have political implications or could easily be used politically. Since corrupt Conservatism has shown itself entirely capable of appropriating any aspect of sophisticated Burkean conservatism for its own ends, this book is no exception, regardless of the intentions of its author. These dangers are particularly great given the bulk and complexity of this book, which means very few people will actually read it, but many more will be seduced by its reputation, on the basis of secondary summaries that are likely to be even more one-sided than the book itself is. I think it very likely that McGilchrist will be appropriated by the corrupt right, in a similar way that the subtleties of Nietzsche were appropriated by Nazism.

There are many features of the book that lay itself open to such treatment, including its one-sided attack on modernity (which it identifies with soulless instrumentalism), its idealization of traditional metaphysical beliefs, its elitism, and its lack of interest in democracy (I will say more about each of these below). Even when McGilchrist provides a relatively balanced and nuanced context for these tendencies, one needs to constantly remind oneself that in practice, only these headline overall tendencies will get communicated very far, along with the powerful message that these political approaches are justified by brain lateralization.

McGilchrist could have avoided all of this by writing a genuinely balanced book in which a balanced politics is foregrounded as the outcome. This might even need to make the clear point that the heirs to Burkean conservatism in modern UK politics (parallel to many other countries) are much more the Green Party, which prioritize the conservation of the complex relationships both between humans and the environment and within human society, rather than the asset-stripping ‘Conservative’ Party. Without making this explicit, the immensely destructive corrupt right will simply appropriate books like this for their own rhetorical purposes. Instead, he has offered an overall message in favour of traditional metaphysics, whilst avoiding much political discussion, and thus left the drawing of political conclusions to others. Metaphysics can be political dynamite, as a whole set of absolutizing ideologies have proved – from Marxism to Islamic State.

The one-sided attack on modernity is the most central element that makes this book so politically vulnerable. Normally, McGilchrist carefully references every statement he makes of possible contention, but when it comes to making sweeping statements about modernity, all this goes out of the window. He seems to consider it so blindlingly obvious that modernity is purely dominated by narrow left hemisphere approaches that he does not need to consider or address any possible counter-evidence. Yes, modernity has given us (among other things) mind-numbing managerialism, rises in recorded mental illnesses, brutalist architecture, some narrowly conceptual art, and totalitarian ideology. However, it has also given us democratic freedoms to follow individual paths, actually a huge range of creative art and thought, completely unprecedented levels of education and health, awareness of a wide range of problems (such as mental illnesses) that have greatly raised our base line, and the liberal ethos that has allowed writers like McGilchrist to pursue his work without interference. Everything good about modernity is pretty much ignored in this book, presumably because McGilchrist takes it all for granted, and does not appreciate that it is now very much under threat from a predictable process of climate change, stress, ideological shortcuts and authoritarian rule. Gratitude is an emotion apparently completely absent from this book.

Here is an example of McGilchrist’s sweeping one-sidedness:

Modern culture reflects many of the characteristics of left hemisphere domination: loss of focus, of history and continuity, disrupted attention, excess of detail, fragmentation, reification, loss of the embodied self, and so on…..And not just in art, but in life. With increasing mobility ensuring that the continuity of local histories is disrupted, and identity politics masterminding the complete rewriting of a people’s history in a manner hitherto confined to totalitarian regimes, we are becoming a society without a history, in a novel without a narrative. And breakdown of narrative risks loss of meaning, coherence, and purpose, in a people as much as a person. (942-3)

This quoted section is completely without references. Yes, there is only one sentence of more or less explicit anti-wokery that could have come straight out of the Daily Mail, but one sentence is quite enough for political purposes. We have the massive unsupported (and also undefined) claims about “identity politics”, the potential ethnic exclusivism of “a people’s history”, and the rhetorical invocation of totalitarian regimes to immediately create guilt by association. That the “identity politics” of formerly (or in some cases, still) oppressed groups might itself be mainly a helpful and integrative narrative to rebuild their confidence does not seem to occur to him. Nor does it seem to occur to him that anti-wokery is itself highly illustrative of the narrow left-hemisphere motives he complains about. If he wanted to give evidence of some of the excesses of “identity politics” on US campuses, this is available, in a far better contextualized form, in Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s book The Coddling of the American Mind – but there is no sign of any such specific evidence, which would then have to be weighed up in context.

Supporting this implicitly political one-sidedness is the constant demonization of materialism, whilst older Platonic metaphysics is let off the hook. This is not a problem because materialism is innocent – McGilchrist is right to point out its narrow and reductive nature. The problem is that exactly the same reductionism applies to Platonism, which reduces meaning to represented conceptualized ‘essentials’, claims that justification depends only on a top-down absolute understanding of the rational structure of the cosmos, and that values should come from metaphysical foundations. All of these features of Platonic metaphysics are reinforced in this book when McGilchrist effectively returns to them, as supposedly the only alternatives left to ‘reductionist’ modernity. Yet these beliefs are every bit as reductionist, judged in relation to embodied complexity, as materialism is. Embodied meaning, as I have already said, is associative, yet this book is peppered with appeals to ‘essential’ ways of understanding things. An embodied being has no way of grasping the cosmos as a whole, but relies on an interpreted relationship to an infinitesimal part of it: so to interpret intuition of wholes as cosmic metaphysics is merely conceptual reduction that is every bit as bad as reducing it to atomic parts. We similarly have no way of knowing whether or not value is “intrinsic to the universe” (1121) as McGilchrist claims, not because of any contrast between known ‘facts’ and unknown ‘values’ (the scientistic shibboleth that McGilchrist targets), but because we have no way of knowing either of them – only provisional beliefs justified by experience. To elevate ‘values’ above ‘facts’ in this metaphysical fashion is actually another way of reinforcing the bankrupt fact-value distinction.

McGilchrist’s demonization of modernity and materialism is accompanied  by an idealization of tradition. In one of the very few explicit mentions of politics in the book, he claims:

In politics, coming up with a list of clearly defined ends and then looking for the technical means of realizing them most efficiently ignores the complexity,… the non-absolute nature,…of all experience. The best of what we glean from experience is not technical in nature; and the kinds of knowledge it affords… are the first kinds to be ignored in articulation. They are acquired, honoured and transmitted only through our participation in a community extending over time in which we are immersed… – what is called a tradition. (605)

All this is good Burkean stuff, but what he fails to also mention is the way that tradition also entrenches and passes on shortcut dogmas that become virtually impossible to remove because of their powerful association with acceptance by the group. We could talk of ‘tradition’ as the finely adapted complexity of internal socio-economic relationships that have organically evolved in a Middle Eastern souk (as Nassim Nicholas Taleb does), or we could talk about how a minor Protestant sect that has split off from another minor Protestant sect in Scotland holds on grimly to its absolute Calvinist beliefs. Tradition does need critical differentiation, even when we broadly accept its subtle adaptive value. McGilchrist reminds us that ‘lived’ tradition can be flexible and adaptive (712-3), but makes no mention of the non-adaptive dogmatic use of tradition as dogma. Nor does he consider the complexity of defining what a ‘tradition’ consists in, and how many different (potentially competing) traditions we may all be involved in.

McGilchrist also idealizes the past. He discusses his request for the use of the words of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer at the funeral of his parents, which the officiant clergy did not feel able to grant.

The ancient words no longer sit well in their kindly modern mouths, and are better not said [in the view of the clergy, I assume he means]: they come from an age when people still really lived, and really died, seeing life and death sub specie aeternitatis. (1296)

“Really?” I wrote in the margin here, “Was 1662 that great?”. The suggestion seems to be that people no longer “really live” or “really die”, and that some sort of Platonic metaphysical view of the situation is needed to appreciate and contextualize the full meaning of death. This is strange not because he appreciates the value of something that comes from the past, or because he feels the value of a particular contextualizing ancient verse in the context of a funeral, but because he idealizes it to an absolute extent, in assumed contrast to a caricatured present.

McGilchrist’s account of ethics is rather unclear, except in his exaggerated rejection of utilitarianism as a scion of modernity. At times his ethics seems deontological, as he writes

The coherence of a civilization depends on accepting the reality and value of principles which we do not, and perhaps never can, fully understand. In all societies hitherto this has been achieved by the influence of knowledge embodied in traditions…. (567)

This is a classic conservative defence of deontological ethics, though one that can very quickly switch from a recognition of complexity and mystery to one of asserting power through the appeal to tradition. If we were to take such arguments seriously in the context of Western thought, for instance, we would still be condemning as evil completely harmless homosexual practices. In another place, though, he briefly acknowledges that deontology as well as utilitarianism runs “the risk of encouraging an attitude that is too rigid and rule-based towards morality”. This very brief moment of even-handedness, though, is enormously overshadowed by the fact that he spends a much greater amount of time unfairly attacking utilitarianism, without any consideration of the equal likelihood of the same problems in deontology.

Indeed, his unfair treatment of utilitarianism rests on some basic philosophical confusions. There are various forms of utilitarianism, but what they all have in common is the idea that we should act so as to bring about consequences that produce the greater good for the greater number. They all avoid any stipulations about motives or states of mind, but urge us to focus only on the consequences of our actions to everyone who might be affected by them. It is thus completely inaccurate to confuse utilitarianism with instrumentalism in general, which is what McGilchrist does (1132). If a more balanced use of the hemispheres in fact leads to better consequences, there is no reason why a utilitarian cannot support it. There are, of course, issues with the utilitarian’s capacity to judge these consequences appropriately given the limitations of his or her understanding (which is why I am not a utilitarian – let me make that clear), but this does not at all mean that all utilitarianism is narrowly instrumental. One well-known utilitarianism, Peter Singer, is particularly well-known for challenging our narrow instrumentalism in relation to animals, on utilitarian grounds.

A little later McGilchrist also claims that life is “essentially collaborative” (a further instance of his essentialism) and protests that “we have been taught to think of nature as merely a blood-drenched battle (1142)” (by whom?). In his simplistic identification of modernity with both utilitarianism and narrow individualism, he seems to miss here that utilitarianism is intensely (indeed unrealistically) demanding of our moral response to others. It requires that we prioritize “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” in Jeremy Bentham’s foundational words. There being far more of others that of oneself, utilitarianism is thus practically synonymous with ridiculously unrealistic altruism. How, then, can McGilchrist bracket these two totally opposed moral tendencies – utilitarianism and individualism – as though they were the same thing?

McGilchrist then positively praises virtue ethics, in contrast to both utilitarianism and deontology, as emphasising “dispositions, processes, and relationships viewed from the inside”. However, if one starts looking into virtue ethics more critically (which McGilchrist does not) there are just as many problems with it as with the other forms of ethics. How does it help us to make judgements? Which competing virtues should we prioritize cultivation of? What unifies these different virtues when they are in conflict with each other? How do we universalize virtues, given that they are all cultivated in differing, often conflicting, social groups? The answers to such questions, at least unshaped by a practical guiding principle such as the Middle Way, generally end up being vague and metaphysical at best.

Overall, then McGilchrist’s approach to ethical judgement, like his approaches to politics, lends itself to unscrupulous political appropriation. By misrepresenting utilitarianism, he allows the corrupt right to confound institutional moral thinking with caricatures of alienated ‘wokeness’, even when it is actually careful and contextualized. Nearly all medical judgements are done on a utilitarian basis, for instance, as this is the most helpful basis on which to make them in a public health system in which patients have varying values. Those who want to disrupt and appropriate the public health system for their own narrow purposes (whether those of profit or political advantage) will use all the rhetorical ammunition they can to try to demolish it, including attacking the values on which it depends and contrasting them with the private (often religious) values that their gullible audience may identify with, in order to gain their support. Not only does McGilchrist give no practicable alternative to utilitarianism for institutional decision-making, but he does not even respect the professional users of that system sufficiently to employ an accurate definition of it.

McGilchrist’s elitism is evident for instance in his discussion of intuition (ch.18) – which is all about the intuition of professional experts, not of ordinary people. Likewise in his discussion of the research on creativity, he is concerned with the creativity of those at the highest level of that quality, and dismisses the creativity of ordinary people as unimportant:

‘Averagely creative’ individuals tended to tended to engage primarily the left hemisphere in a creative task, where as highly creative individuals tended to engage the right…. They [Dietrich and Kanso] took this to be a ‘null’ result, but it is the opposite. (302)

By ‘elitism’ here I do not mean preferential or deliberate judgement, which does involve a hierarchy of values: to judge in practice, we have to choose one possible value over another. However, a hierarchy in judgement at one point does not imply a hierarchy of persons in society in which the development of some is considered intrinsically more important than that of others. Defining a quality like creativity or intuitive judgement only in terms of the skills of one class has the clear implication of excluding those outside that class from an understanding of the integrative path, and thus also probably from support or resources to help them on that path. Thus Dietrich and Kanso were evidently correct – if your evidence about creativity only fits an elite, that doesn’t justify you in only defining it in terms of that elite: instead you need a wider and more adequate understanding of creativity. The Middle Way starts from wherever we begin and goes on from there – but McGilchrist’s values seem to be overwhelmingly those of reinforcing the power of those already further on to the exclusion of the rest.

This impression is also reinforced by McGilchrist’s attitude to democracy. “In modern life” he writes, “there is no hierarchy of importance, but a democracy of the importunate” (330). This involves unhelpful assumptions about what democracy is: it is not a synonym for ‘undiscriminating equivalence’ in judgement, nor does it necessarily imply strict equality in other respects. Democracy is primarily a decision-making mechanism that tries to ensure that we cannot simply repress those we disagree with, but rather have to take them into account (it is also, possibly, an archetypal symbol, as I have discussed elsewhere). The ‘democracy of the importunate’ comment appears in the context of McGilchrist’s discussion of a schizophrenic who experiences everything as ‘flat’ and meaningless. In that context, the reference to democracy seems to me to ooze Nietzschean contempt for ordinary people who may need help, and who are being compared to meaningless details. Nowhere in the book is there any positive mention of the ways that democracy requires us to listen to each other and thus draw on the right hemisphere, presumably because this would undermine his caricature of modernity.

This attitude is followed up with an attack of social identity:

In the modern world the individual may experience him or herself as no longer having a role and a place in a close-knit community on a human scale, and therefore as engulfed in the mass – of the populace, of the city, of bureaucratic organizations and global corporations – relatively powerless. No wonder people emphasise (with tragic and damaging results) something called ‘identity’, in which, ironically, their true identity is swallowed up. (334)

The appeal to ‘true identity’ here again shows the Platonic essentialism underlying the Nietzschean contempt for ‘the mass’. Not that he does not identify a genuine problem with people’s feelings of loneliness and alienation in the modern world: but there is no recognition of the rigidity of ‘close-knit communities’ before this problem, and the conflicts they constantly created both within and between individuals. Again, there is no possibility offered of any third option between idealized ‘true identity’ and the possible drawbacks of the ‘identity politics’ that McGilchrist is again hinting at. We are offered no possibility that these are both stages in a progression, like the Buddha’s temporary residences in the Palace and the Forest. Instead, we are just invited to join the rigidity of political conflict between absolutized factions.

Finally, even McGilchrist’s aesthetics underline this metaphysical conservatism. His view of beauty, he writes, is that it is

… a constitutive element in the cosmos to which the right hemisphere is particularly attuned, an aspect of reality which it discloses. If that were the case….we would expect that beauty had qualities that could neither be reduced to utility, nor were conformable to the assumptions of the left hemisphere’s model of reality. I have already alluded to some of these qualities: beauty’s relational nature; its affinity for the ambiguous and unexpected; its implicit and embodied nature; its dependence on appreciation of the unique; its Gestalt nature; its capacity to please without concepts, its close links with the imagination, and its intrinsic ineffability. (1159)

It goes without saying that beauty is indeed all about right hemisphere experience, and McGilchrist’s list also identifies many of the right hemisphere features that make it distinctive and valuable. The claim that beauty is ‘a constitutive element of the cosmos’ and ‘an aspect of reality’, however, is completely unnecessary to that recognition. Once we start thinking in those terms, it becomes clear that those who perceive this ‘reality’ must have a discontinuous superiority over those who do not. The appreciation of beauty then becomes an intrinsically superior pursuit that must be protected from the interference of the philistine hoi polloi. It really doesn’t have to be like this, because anyone can experience beauty, and anyone can refine their experience of beauty.

There are alternative possible ways of framing our understanding of beauty that do not have this implication, using the integration model that McGilchrist completely ignores and neglects (again, not because he’s never heard of it). The right hemisphere qualities of beauty are exactly what makes it an integrative experience, at least temporarily unifying our desires, attention and sense of meaning. Integrative experiences, however, are not necessarily elitist, unlike metaphysical beliefs about experiences of ‘reality’. Rather they are incremental – we can become more integrated through the experience of beauty, from wherever we start, as part of a practice for which we take responsibility.

The recognition of different kinds of beauty could also help McGilchrist overcome his general prejudices about the whole of modern art. Different kinds of beauty are not relativizations of beauty, because greater integration is still better – it is not a matter of beauty lying solely ‘in the eye of the beholder’. Nevertheless, there are different ways in which sensual experiences can integrate: by directly affecting our mental state (aesthetic beauty), by providing us with more and deeper resources of meaning (symbolic beauty), by inspiring us through association with more integrated states (archetypal beauty), and through concepts (conceptual beauty). Abstraction in art probably means a lack of symbolic, archetypal or conceptual beauty, but it can still be aesthetically beautiful and deeply integrative – as in the work of Mark Rothko. Conceptuality in art also does not necessarily mean a lack of beauty: the recognition of a pattern of conceptual complexity in modernist literary works like The Waste Land or Ulysses can trigger a kind of awe that is also integrative.

I am in danger of diverting too much into my own theories here, but I do so only to try to show that there is an alternative. There is likewise a Middle Way alternative in epistemology, in meaning, in ethics, and in politics as well as in aesthetics. At the heart of McGilchrist’s metaphysical conservatism is the depressing dualistic assumption that there can be no alternative – it’s either Platonic metaphysics or bust. This, from someone who once seemed to have an original grasp of the Middle Way, is deeply disappointing, to put it mildly.

Conclusion

As I indicated in my introduction, I write this critical review, not with relish at wielding the axe, but with a sense of painful duty. The duty involved is to warn other people of just how bad and dangerous this book is.

It is, ironically, all the more bad and dangerous because of some of its strengths. If it did not show so many initial indications of the Middle Way, it would not seem so bad when these are comprehensively betrayed. In betraying it, though, he is reducing something very important to just another left hemisphere tool in contradiction to his own professed values. If McGilchrist was not so clever and hugely informed, his apparently wilful ignoring of Middle Way alternatives would not seem so bad. If he had not previously written so powerfully and usefully about the hemispheres, he would not have gained such intellectual stature, and this book would also not be so dangerous. If he was not also writing at this time of deeply polarized and increasingly corrupt politics across the West, this book would also not be so dangerous. If we were not on the cusp of a likely rapid deterioration of our civilization due to runaway climate change, adding to the temptations of easy and absolute solutions, it would not be so dangerous. If the book was not so long and detailed, more people would actually read it, and it would not be so dangerous.

If you are thinking of reading McGilchrist’s work, my advice is to engage with everything that is good and helpful in it, but to make every effort to differentiate this from what is not. Read The Master and his Emissary (which has a few issues, but nothing remotely on the scale of this book). If you want more scientific detail, read the first section of The Matter with Things. Only read the rest if you are prepared to spend a lot of time engaging with it critically as you go. Scribble in the margins whenever you have a critical thought, so you do not lose your critical perspective in the wake of this tide of dogmatic exposition. Whether or not you agree with my account of the alternative, bear in mind constantly that there is an alternative. McGilchrist’s wonderful, pioneering work on the hemispheres really, really does not have to be interpreted in this way.

I will close with a brief positive summary of that alternative, just to reinforce my central assertion that it is there, despite the efforts of this book to repress it. The Middle Way is an option because not all our general claims, even the most basic ones, have to be absolute. A two-phase, even-handed critical process is needed to avoid left hemisphere dogma of both a positive and a negative kind. Our embodied situation requires full scepticism – but even-handed scepticism that does not have any ‘negative’ or ‘nihilistic’ implications. Rather that scepticism allows us to be provisional rather than metaphysical. We need to clearly separate meaning as prior to belief, and follow through the implications of meaning being embodied and associative, so that we do not confuse the bodily state of confidence, a sense of meaningfulness, or the inspiration we need in our lives, with absolute beliefs. We do not need, ever, for any reason, to make claims about ‘reality’. Instead the integration model can help to explain how we make progress in overcoming left hemisphere delusion, which is the source of dogma, repression, and conflict, uniting perspectives that were previously opposed rather than appealing directly to an absolutely united position. Integration works through a process of successively greater contextualization, so that conflicts at one level can be resolved at another where we see a bigger picture of what formed them. Values are developed in the experience of stretching from our starting point as we follow the path – they do not require metaphysical claims about the cosmos. It is not metaphysics, but practice that provides us with the standpoint we need to increasingly use the right hemisphere to integrate the time-divided absolutizing perspectives of the left.