The Matter With Things

An interim response to Iain McGilchrist's magisterial work

Iain McGilchrist’s Matter With Things is one of the most stimulating books I’ve ever read. Its learning is awesome, the writing beautiful, the insights multitudinous. It’s a huge two-volume work, but it took me extra-long to read because I wanted to stop every page or so to luxuriate, ponder, check his references.

McGilchrist has three main themes – one neuropsychological (“how our brains shape reality”), one epistemological (“how we can come to know anything at all”), and one metaphysical (“the nature of what we find in the cosmos”). On each topic, he’s trying to “clear away the assumptions that cloud our vision,” particularly the “assumption of a materialist world composed of ‘things’” (xvii). He renounces the notion that the world is “‘nothing but’ a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility” (5).

Positively put: McGilchrist believes wholes are never identical to the sum of their parts. In fact, there aren’t any “parts”; to believe in isolated parts is “an artifact of a certain way of looking at the world.” Parts can be understood only by understanding wholes; parts are known only as, well, parts of wholes, in relation to one another (5). Our instinct is to think things must exist before they relate to one another. Gilchrist disagrees. Things aren’t the primary reality; “relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related.” Relationships “don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things,’ which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with.” “Thing” is a “useful shorthand” to describe what’s “congealed in the flow of experience,” but “what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes” (4). Things look static, but “nothing we know is in reality ever entirely static; and relative stasis, not motion, is the unusual circumstance that requires explanation” (5-6).

McGilchrist is aware talk like this is liable to be misconstrued as a variety of postmodern nihilism. He renounces that too, just as much as he renounces materialist extrinsicism. He rejects the ROT position – “there just exists a Reality Out There (ROT), the nature of which is independent of any consciousness of it.” With equal force, he rejects the notion “there is no such thing as reality,” a view he gleefully labels MUMBO, “Made Up Miraculously By Ourselves.” The true situation is: “there is something that is not just the contents of my mind” (9-10), yet the only world we know is “what comes into being in the never-ending encounter between us and this whatever-it-is.” Both the knower and the whatever-it-is are “changed through the encounter: it is how we and it become more fully what we are.” Our relation to the world is “reciprocal and creative.” When we’re attentive, what we know is “the ‘real deal,’” a real presence, not merely a mental representation. At the same time, “we take part in its creation” (10-11).

McGilchrist offers this musical analogy to set the trajectory for his argument:

There is such a ‘thing’ as Mozart’s G minor quintet. It is in a way quite specific. It certainly is not a fantasy, and it cannot be made up by me any way I want it. However, it doesn’t exist in the closed score on my bookshelf (the potential alone is there). It doesn’t exist in Mozart’s mind, either, because he’s dead, and the moment when he died made no difference whatever to the existence or the nature of the quintet. And there isn’t a single ideal quintet that we are always imperfectly imitating in our encounters with it. It keeps coming into being, it keeps becoming, each time a mind, with all its history and preconceptions, encounters it, or when many minds do so together. Each time it will be real. And each time it will also be different, although it will be recognizably the ‘same’ piece of music. It is certainly not a matter of ‘anything goes.’ Nor every rendition will be equally good, or equally true to the spirit of quintet. . . . However, no-one would expect me to say precisely how I know that it is a ‘true’ performance of the world, let alone to prove to them that it is (11-12).

In a similar way, “the flow of the universe is always creative, though it has order, and is not random or chaotic; the world is always a matter of responsiveness, though it is equally not a free-for-all. It is a process of creative collaboration, of co-creation” (13). Music isn’t unique, but “a very clear case of how what we take to be a thing emerges from a complex of relationships, both those between notes and those between individual consciousness.” This is the character of all experience: It’s “a complex flow, a constantly unfolding, responsive dance of reciprocal gestures.” That’s just what reality is. Our participation in the process doesn’t make the world a “solipsistic fantasy”; it proves the opposite, since “we interact with one another and the world at large in a myriad of ways without being able to have more than limited control of the outcome” (13-14).

As McGilchrist doesn’t say, reality is so very like Trinity. (Not only does he not say it, but when he does briefly talk about the Trinity, it’s in the context of left-brained religious “dogmatism” - which, you might guess, isn’t a good thing.)

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Let me illustrate the energy and scope of the argument with a few threads of his chapter on biology and its implications for life.