“The Matter With Things Volume 2: What Then is True?” By Iain McGilchrist

The second volume of McGilchrist’s magnum opus focuses on philosophy more than neurobiology. He is still concerned with the left and right hemisphere split of the brain, but he goes into much greater detail discussing objective truth, morality, consciousness, the nature of the self, human values, and what makes life worth living. He begins by discussing reality, subjectivity, language and concepts, and the map and the territory, “The left hemisphere thinks reality is what it itself puts together, because that is all it knows – the theoretical construct in which it lives. For it, theory trumps life. If it therefore decrees that a state of affairs shall be a certain way, then reality will, it believes, bend to the decree. Since the left hemisphere uses language to label, this often involves a belief that changing the label will change the reality…. That there is no one fixed reality, and truth is not single or fully certain, does not mean that reality has been mysteriously abolished. That there is no one view that encompasses all truth about the world, does not mean that truth is made up, and can be whatever we want it to be.” He continues by discussing how the brain processes new experiences, “There is a reliable difference between the hemispheres in terms of their handling of fresh experience. They have shown that new experience of any kind – whether it be of real-life objects, sounds, skills or imaginary constructs – engages the right hemisphere. As soon as it starts to become familiar or routine, the right hemisphere is less engaged and eventually the ‘information’ becomes the concern of the left hemisphere only…. New experience tends to come from the periphery of the field of attention, and that is the province of the right hemisphere – which is, after all, on the lookout for whatever unexpected is happening, at the moment that it happens; whereas the left hemisphere is concentrating on what is already identified as of interest, known and familiar, and at the centre of the attentional field.” He also discusses uniqueness, “Uniqueness presents particular problems for the left hemisphere’s tool, language. Uniqueness brings everyday language to a standstill. Anything truly unique cannot be expressed in such language, which is why whatever is profound, personal, or sacred, if it is to be expressed in words, can be so expressed only in poetry…. Reductionist thinking, more typical of the left hemisphere, to which uniqueness is opaque, holds that all can be accounted for by breaking things down to further, and yet further, entities. Uniqueness, however, halts analysis: it is a standing rebuke to our ever-ready categories.”

One’s own conception of the nature of the self is an area where the hemispheric split plays a role, “The self as conceived by the left hemisphere, should be – and is – an entity that is relatively static, separate, fixed, yet fragmentary, a succession of moments, goal-oriented, with its needs at any moment perceived as essentially competitive (since others may similarly target the same resources), determinate, consciously wilful, circumscribed in the breadth and depth of what it sees, at ease with the familiar, certain and explicit, but less so with all that is fluid, ambiguous, and implicit, and unaware of the limitations of its own knowledge. The self as conceived by the right hemisphere should be – and is – more akin to a process than a thing, essentially fluid and less determinate, nonetheless forming a unique whole over time, aware that it is fundamentally inseparable from all else that exists, open to others and to experience, more concerned with co-operation than competition, less consciously wilful, more engaged in what one might call ‘active passivity’ (an open attendant disposition, in which one is ready to respond to what emerges), seeing the greater picture in space and time, and aware of the extent of its ignorance…. In other words, the self as intrinsically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others, the social and empathic self, and the continuous sense of self, with ‘depth’ of existence over time, is more dependent on the right hemisphere; whereas the objectified self, the external self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent on the left hemisphere.”

McGilchrist discusses how the nature of time is essential to the human conception of reality, “Conceptualising time immediately puts one on the outside of the experience, rather than being within it, the standpoint alone from which it can be understood…. Time is no thing…. Time is adverbial, if it is anything that grammar recognises; an aspect of being (itself a verbal noun, or gerund) or of Dasein (also a gerund). Time is not separate from events or experience…. It is itself an aspect of experience…. Reality is what we experience – ever moving, changing, and continuous. Things, however, are secondary, static, products of perception which supervene on ‘from above’, not support ‘from beneath’, that field of flow.” The nature of reality is embodied and the human body is a creature always in motion, “Motion is at the core of every aspect of our experience, and of our ability to make sense of it, in a way of which we are normally unaware, because our analytic intellect cannot deal with it…. Mind and body are inseparably connected.” Conversely, “Analytic thought and language tend to immobilise the world…. The idea that perception is altered by, and may even be secondary to, activity is familiar from the Gestalt theory of perception, according to which we are co-operatively constructing the aspects of the world that we see…. Perception is an active, not a passive process – or better, it is a profoundly interactive process…. Movement is as foundational as space and time. Each requires the other. Space is the potential for something to move within it; time is the potential for something to change within it. Both become actualised in flow…. Analysis, the forte of the left hemisphere, ultimately yields stasis…. Analysis wants measurement, and measurement begins the process of immobilisation and fragmentation. Yet it is never quite equal to what it measures…. Motion can, of course, never be reached by aggregation of static elements.”

Relatedly, McGilchrist takes on the concepts of space, matter, form, and time and how each relate to lived reality. “Space and time are not containers in which we live, but aspects of being…. Time speaks profoundly to the human condition in a way that space, however fundamental it might be, simply does not. Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland…. Despite this, space has the means to be generative: it is the potential for motion, and gives rise to form, which is what we see, precipitated out of potential, in space…. While time shows us that aspect of reality which is always incomplete, space shows us that aspect of reality which has been achieved…. Forms are usually evidenced in matter, and matter in forms: no-one has seen matter without form…. I can see imaginary or abstract forms, with the mind’s eye, or in certain states of mind with the bodily eye. But matter is inconceivable without form…. The forms that are found in Nature are the result of motion, and embodied movement, not stasis; similarly, movements found in Nature enact forms, not structures.” He continues, “40 years of efforts to simulate the Standard Model on a computer have so far failed. To perform such a simulation, one must first take equations expressed in terms of continuous quantities and find a discrete formulation that is compatible with the bits of information in which computers trade…. If reality is such that our knowledge is intrinsically, not accidentally, incomplete; if it is intrinsically, not accidentally, uncertain; if it is intrinsically inexpressible in everyday language, requiring exceptional, non-denotative, highly metaphoric, ‘poetic’ use of language to get beyond the limits of language; if we must deal not with facts but with connexions; if entities are never wholly separable from other entities; if the process of a knower coming to know is interactive or reverberative, each changing the other – not distanced, inert and owing nothing to the presence, and possibly the nature, of the one who comes to know; and if any attempt to model it reduces what is continuous and moving, to what is static and discrete – if all of this is true, it is clear which hemisphere will be better suited to discerning it.”

McGilchrist next takes a deep dive into the nature of consciousness, “When I use the word ‘consciousness’, I refer very broadly to all that we might call ‘the experiential’. This covers all the activities that go on, for each of us, as we say, unconsciously and preconsciously, as well as consciously; but could not go on without what is conventionally referred to as subjectivity, or inwardness…. I discriminate, reason, make judgments, find things beautiful, solve problems, imagine possibilities, weigh possible outcomes, take decisions, exercise acquired skills, fall in love, and struggle to balance competing desires and moral values all the time without being reflexively aware of it. Note that these are not just calculations, but rely on my whole embodied being, my experience, my history, my memory, my feelings, my thoughts, my personality, even – dare I say it? – my soul: ‘psyche’ in the broadest sense…. Even Descartes derived the ego from experience, not experience from an ego. What can more conservatively be claimed is that something about me – in the ‘field of me’ – permits these particular activities: and that something is what, in the broad definition, I am calling my consciousness…. I would say that matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise. All individual beings, including ourselves, bring forms into being and cause them to persist: each of us is not, ultimately, any one conformation in matter, but, Ship of Theseus-like, the conformation itself, the morphogenetic field, which requires matter in order to be brought into being, but, once existent, persists while matter comes and goes within it…. The conclusion we should draw is – not that all that we can encounter are representations of something we cannot know – but the precise opposite: that we do actually deal with reality and know it, just with an aspect of it that we partly call forth ourselves by our approach. The fact that we play a part in its being what it is does not make it unreal…. Things, it seems, emerge from our descriptions of experience: they do not constitute it. Whether a thing enters our world or not depends on the scale at which it is seen, or sought…. It may be objected that, whether we see something or not, it still exists. But what that tells us is that a ‘thing’ is a category within our thought…. If Nietzsche was right in saying that ‘A thing = its qualities’, and qualities change unrecognisably with scale, so do things come and go from experience depending on how they are observed. As the perspective shifts so do the Gestalten.” McGilchrist concludes, “If matter is a product of primal consciousness, and is the creative element of resistance within it which causes ‘things’ – becomings and processes – to be precipitated out as differentiated entities in space and time, this requires no further purpose than itself. It is the never-ending coming into being of the cosmos, in which the primal consciousness comes to understand itself…. I believe that what exists is a locally differentiated, but ultimately single, field of potentiality, which is constantly actualising itself. Thus all is one, and all is many. Each differentiation is, however, also a Gestalt that is complete in itself – a new whole, not a fragment…. There is no reason to dub our full experience of the world an illusion, while ascribing to the very partial mathematical description of the world the reality. I also believe internalism is a mistake, and that consciousness is located not inside us, but in a non-spatial ‘betweenness’ created by our attention and the object of our attention. It is, therefore, always a partial revelation – and partly, also, a creation of the act of experiencing – but our part in it does not negate its reality: that is reality…. I do not claim to know what experience is any more than anyone else, except that it is the condition on which I know anything at all. And yet we all understand it directly. It is what we know (kennen) better than anything at all, and yet know (wissen) least of all about. It is therefore difficult to discuss, since neither language nor reason are well adapted to it. Language is already at a remove from direct experience.”

McGilchrist stumps for moral realism, “The main claim is that value, whether it is truth, goodness or beauty, is not, as our culture has come to regard it, an ‘add-on’, a human invention, some sort of extra that is not intrinsic to the nature of the cosmos, but is, rather, itself constitutive of the cosmos and is discovered by, and disclosed in, the encounter of life…. I think truth matters more than utility, because I see truth as an ultimate value, irreducible to anything else: that is part of my view of the cosmos as pregnant with meaning, soliciting our allegiance, rather than a place where it is good enough to get by with comfortable lies. For me, values are part of its very fabric, not optional adornments…. Truth is a moral value, like beauty, and goodness…. Values are not just validated by the outcomes they achieve: they are inseparable from our deepest emotional experience.” He next tackles human purpose, “Whatever creative energy underwrites the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is continually active and involved in that universe; that the future is tended towards, but not closely determined; rather it is open, evolving, self-fulfilling. This means that it seems ‘purposeless’ to some; richly ‘purposeful’ to others. To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological…. Though purpose may be more or less apparent at different levels, the process of life cannot, in reality, be broken down in this way…. Living beings equally shape and are shaped by a world that is coming into being alongside them in a reciprocal, and reciprocally paced, process, not negotiating a path across its already pre-formed surface…. Interdependence means not just interaction, but mutual constitution.” Finally, he takes a stab at the nature of the sacred, “God, truth, and infinity are all processes, not things; comings into being, not entities that are already fixed. All three seem to me, however, like rivers, to combine stability with flux. ‘All things flow’; but ‘by changing, a thing remains the same’. Ultimately, Being and Becoming are aspects of the same thing…. Becoming is even more fundamental than Being.”

Finally, McGilchrist describes what is ailing modernity, “We are now in the grip of an obsession with human power and the subjugation of nature, at bottom of which lies our infatuation with technology: the power to manipulate. We have subordinated ends to means. We emphasise self at the expense of others, our rights rather than our duties, what we have rather than who we are, the material rather than the spiritual, and vaunt the reach of the unaided human intellect. In such a world God is a nuisance…. When our society generally held with religion, we might indeed have committed many of the same wrongs; but power-seeking, selfishness, self-promotion, narcissism and entitlement, neglect of duty, dishonesty, ruthlessness, greed, and lust were never condoned or actively and openly encouraged – even admired – in the way they sometimes are now. In other words, we have lost all shame.” He concludes, “The deep truths about reality are likely to appear initially paradoxical. What look like things – with inevitable suggestions of stasis, certainty and fixity – are processes; and all such thing-like processes are interdependent with others, bringing one another into being. Everything is changed by context…. There is absolutely no reason to believe matter to be ontologically prior to consciousness.”

“The Matter With Things Volume 1: The Ways to Truth” By Iain McGilchrist

Much of this first volume is a rehash and update of the thesis of McGilchrist’s first book, “The Master and His Emissary” about the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the human brain. “The left hemisphere is, compared with the right hemisphere, unreliable in just about every way that matters. In terms of attention to the world, and its role in thereby constructing, and understanding, experience; in its inability to comprehend time, space and motion; in its lack of skill in conveying and interpreting emotion; in its (lack of a) sense of the body as a living inseparable part of the self; in the comparative weakness of its faculties for direct perception, for the evaluation of beliefs and for making judgments; and indeed in terms of its lesser intelligence (which means understanding): in all of these it is more vulnerable to falsehood, more likely to deceive us, than the right…. There is a tendency in the left hemisphere to turn from the business of dealing with experience towards the process of abstraction and representation…. The right hemisphere seems to be aware of its limitations, as well as of shades of meaning and degrees of truth; and it is more in touch with reality, while the left hemisphere prefers its theory about reality.” McGilchrist, throughout this volume, does always caution that both sides of the brain are important and necessary to processing the lived world most effectively, but it is clear which hemisphere he would prefer if forced to choose.

McGilchrist spends much of the rest of his time relaying how the human brain processes the truths of the world. “It would be irrational to suppose we are directly aware of more than a little of what exists. Why assume that our cognition is capable of more than a few limited forays into the vastness of reality?” For him, subjectivity and objectivity are not bright lines, but ones that may blur. “We can only know the world as our brains construe it; and in every brain there are at least two internally coherent versions of the world that conflict. Science must take this into account when it talks of objectivity.” He quotes Einstein, “Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use.”

Much of this book is also a rebuke of scientific systems that attempt to mechanize the concepts of lived reality. For McGilchrist, a machine is a poor metaphor for the brain or for any living entity. “The left hemisphere's serial, analytic approach is better equipped to deal with a system that is closed, static, linear and predictable – like a machine; not one that is open, constantly flowing, becoming and changing, and ultimately complex and indeterminate – like life. In the left hemisphere's vision, things take priority over processes. It is good at understanding linear cause and effect, not so much reciprocal interaction, let alone a process of co-creation. It understands a whole as simply the assemblage of parts, and causation as from bottom up only, not from many directions at once within the whole. It is at home when it can follow procedures; less so when it comes to recognising new forms, or fields, at work. It prefers what is clearly defined, to what has imprecise boundaries. It doesn't see Gestalten, of which life provides the pre-eminent examples…. This allegiance to the left hemisphere is, then, another reason why, however efficacious biology may have become in terms of manipulating the world, its claims to truth should be treated with care.”

The preeminence of reason in modernity is another bugbear for McGilchrist. “It could be said that the trouble with Western philosophy began with Plato's foregrounding of logos. In the Greek world, as in most pre-modern cultures, there had always existed more than one way of acquiring an understanding of the world. The Greeks, let it not be forgotten, also gave birth to many of the most enduring myths by which we understand our relationship to the world, such as those of Oedipus, of Prometheus, of the gods of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. There was, and is, no conflict here. Indeed they distinguished two types of truth, mythos and logos; each was considered essential in its own proper field.” He quotes Karen Armstrong, “Logos (‘reason’) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. People have always needed logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logos was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment…. Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos…. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our thought and behaviour…. A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.” McGilchrist expands, “Myths were archetypal, not incidental, truths, reflecting eternal patterns that we could recognise, but which could not, without diminishment, be translated into the everyday terms of logos…. Logic was invented in order to win arguments, not to take us closer to the truth. Mythoi by contrast were the ideals of men of action, weighty, performative, supportive of the truth…. This distinction between logos, the literal and the essentially decontextualised, on the one hand, and mythos, the metaphorical and essentially contextual, on the other, is not only grounded in, but maintained by, the difference between the two hemispheres…. Myths 'think themselves' in us all, without our being aware of it…. Something like Jung's collective unconscious may be acting by means of epigenetics, or by means we may as yet be able only to surmise…. One of the most important aspects of many experiences – such as the experience of love, of art of every kind, of the magnificence and beauty of the natural world, of ancient myths and narratives, of the solemnity of a religious ritual or of an ancient tradition—is that they require us to relinquish control. They speak of something much bigger than us, that cannot entirely be articulated; something ancient and enduring, which speaks, if it can be said to speak at all, through us, not just out of us.”

Metaphor is the means through which the brain processes reality, according to McGilchrist. “What we are talking about here is a type of essentially metaphorical understanding, of which myth, poetry, drama and ritual are all manifestations. In true metaphor the intention must remain implicit; spelling it out causes its richness and emotional impact to collapse, much as explaining a joke makes it fall flat, or paraphrasing a poem reduces it to a series of banalities…. We do not use metaphor to decorate, and therefore obscure, something best conveyed literally (although that would be how the left hemisphere sees it), but to bring to life a deeper and broader set of meanings than could be conveyed by literal language…. All understanding whatsoever is, at bottom, metaphorical…. Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and, as I say, those something elses in language eventually come back to bodily experience. There is nothing more fundamental in relation to which we can understand that…. Metaphor embodies thought and places it, where it belongs, in a living context. In this, it bridges the gap between language and the world, a gap entailed on us by the very nature of language.” He quotes Bryan Magee, “People who live most of their outer or inner lives in terms that are expressible in language – for example, people who live at the level of concepts, or in a world of ideas – are living a life in which everything is simplified and reduced, emptied of what makes it lived, purged of what makes it unique and theirs.” And Ortega y Gasset, “The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.”

McGilchrist speaks of how ancient man first saw his world through pictures, and then through insights and intuitions, before explicit reasoning through language. “Pre-modern cultures think in pictures, as well as using direct perception and sensory memory, patterns of smell, light and sound intuitively, in ways that we have lost…. When it comes to problem-solving, visual thinking is far more important than verbal: but, for this very reason, during problem-solving visual perception can get in the way of visual imagery. This may be one of the reasons that we close our eyes when working on a problem: closing the eyes to sight really does increase insight…. Having to verbalise impedes visual memory; it does so not only for faces, and visual image processing, but including things as basic as colour, as well as remembering and identifying tastes and pieces of music, which are obviously not primarily visual at all. Thinking out loud while solving a problem markedly impairs the ability to find solutions to problems using insight, though it has no effect on analytical problems.”

Finally, for McGilchrist, imagination is not just pure fantasy, but a way of seeing reality’s many possibilities. “Imagination is far from certain, of course; but the biggest mistake we could make would be never to trust it – never to believe in it – for fear of being mistaken. For truth requires imagination. It alone can put us in touch with aspects of reality to which our habits of thought have rendered us blind. It leads not to an escape from reality, but a sudden seeing into its depths, so that reality is for the first time truly present…. Our current perceptions are governed by past perceptions and preconceptions; yet these too are always influenced reciprocally, if more weakly, by the new perception, the new experience…. There is no such thing as perception without such ramifications, because we are not just creating a Cartesian representation of the world, but are involved in the process of the experiential world coming into being.”

“The Master and His Emissary- The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World” by Iain McGilchrist

McGilchrist is a former psychiatrist, neuroimaging researcher, and professor of English at Oxford. He believes that the left and the right sides of the human brain, while exhibiting signs of plasticity, do have unique capabilities. The thesis of his book is that “for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognizably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.” This thesis is at once simple and revolutionary. McGilchrist begins by pointing out some hard biology. “The corpus callosum contains an estimated 300-800 million fibres connecting topologically similar areas in each hemisphere. Yet only 2 per cent of cortical neurons are connected by this tract.” That is, most of our brain’s neurons are not connected by the only pathway that links our right and left hemispheres. Furthermore, when comparing various animals, the bigger the brain size, the less interconnected the hemispheres are.

McGilchrist points out that “lateralisation brings evolutionary advantages, particularly in carrying out dual-attention tasks…. The right hemisphere appears to be deeply involved in social functioning…. Where there is divided attention, and both hemispheres appear to be involved, it seems probable that the right hemisphere plays the primary role…. More specifically there is evidence of left-hemisphere dominance for local, narrowly focussed attention and right-hemisphere dominance for broad, global, and flexible attention…. What is new must first be present in the right hemisphere, before it can come into focus for the left…. Only the right hemisphere can direct attention to what comes to us from the edges of awareness…. The right hemisphere understands from indirect contextual clues, not only from explicit statement…. The right hemisphere takes whatever is said within its entire context. It is specialised in pragmatics, the art of contextual understanding of meaning, and in using metaphor. It is the right hemisphere which processes the non-literal aspects of language…. The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction, which, as the world itself tells us, is the process of wresting things from their context. This, and its related capacity to categorise things once they have been abstracted, are the foundations of its intellectual power…. The left hemisphere operates an abstract visual-form system, storing information that remains relatively invariant across specific instances, producing abstracted types or classes of things; whereas the right hemisphere is aware of and remembers what it is that distinguishes specific instances of a type, one from another…. The right temporal lobe deals preferentially with memory of a personal or emotionally charged nature, what is called episodic memory, where the left temporal lobe is more concerned with memory for facts that are ‘in the public domain’…. Not only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical. The left hemisphere’s principal concern is utility. It is interested in what it has made, and in the world as a resource to be used. It is therefore natural that it has a particular affinity for words and concepts for tools, man-made things, mechanisms and whatever is not alive…. Self-awareness, empathy, identification with others, and more generally inter-subjective processes, are largely dependent upon…. right hemisphere resources…. The right hemisphere plays an important role in what is known as ‘theory of mind’, a capacity to put oneself in another’s position and see what is going on in that person’s mind…. It is a capacity that children do not acquire fully until the age of four…. The right hemisphere is the locus of interpretation, not only of facial expression, but of prosody (vocal intonation) and gesture…. The left hemisphere reads emotions by interpreting the lower part of the face…. The right hemisphere alone seems to be capable of understanding the more subtle information that comes from the eyes…. It is the right hemisphere that understands the emotional or the humorous aspect of narrative…. It is the right hemisphere that mediates spontaneous facial expressions in reaction to humour or other emotions, including smiling and laughter. It is also the right hemisphere that is responsible for the peculiarly human ability to express sadness through tears…. The left hemisphere has a much more extensive vocabulary than the right, and more subtle and complex syntax. It extends vastly our power to map the world and to explore the complexities of the causal relationships between things…. The superiority of language stems from its nature as the hemisphere of representation, in which signs are substituted for experience…. The right hemisphere plays a vital part in language, too. It uses language not in order to manipulate ideas or things, but to understand what others mean…. It is therefore particularly important whenever non-literal meaning needs to be understood - practically everywhere, therefore, in human discourse, and particularly where irony, humour, indirection or sarcasm are involved…. The right hemisphere represents objects as having volume and depth in space, as they are experienced; the left hemisphere tends to represent the visual world schematically, abstractly, geometrically, with a lack of realistic detail, and even in one plane…. The left hemisphere exhibits a strong tendency to confabulate: it thinks it knows something, recognises something, which it doesn’t, a tendency that may be linked to its lack of ability to discriminate unique cases from the generalised categories into which it places them…. The left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome. The right prefrontal cortex is essential for dealing with incomplete information and has a critical role to play in reasoning about incompletely specified situations…. The self as intrinsically, empathically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others, and the continuous sense of self, are more dependent on the right hemisphere, whereas the objectified self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent on the left hemisphere…. The unconscious, while not identical with, is certainly more strongly associated with, the right hemisphere.” The right and left side might work in conjunction with each other, but there is a clear tension between the two hemispheres in each human brain.

After sketching the basic functions, McGilchrist continues by exploring how each hemisphere interacts with language, music, and truth. He suggests that music has ancient origins, even predating language. In prehistoric society, music played an integral role in religion, ritual, celebration, and in uniting the community. It was not passively experienced, but as shared-performance, binded the people in a single experience. Poetry also evolved before prose. “Most forms of imagination, for example, or of innovation, intuitive problem solving, spiritual thinking or artistic creativity require us to transcend language.” Words influence our perceptions, but thinking evolved prior to language. “What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them…. Language may not, after all, have originated in a drive to communicate - that came later - but as a means of mapping the world…. It is a means of manipulating the world…. Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings, and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, but with a disembodied representation of the world, abstracted, central, not particularised in time and place, generally applicable, clear and fixed. Isolating things artificially from their context brings the advantage of enabling us to focus intently on a particular aspect of reality and how it can be modeled, so that it can be grasped and controlled.” The right hemisphere plays with metaphor. “Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body…. Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context…. Language originates as an embodied expression of emotion.”

McGilchrist begins to show how the functions of each hemisphere have consequences for how humans interact with the outside world. “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.” He posits that philosophy in the Western tradition is a left hemisphere process. “It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualised, disembodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear approach to truth…. [After all,] manipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division…. According to the left hemisphere, understanding is built up from the parts; one starts from one certainty, places another next to it, and advances…. It conceives that there is objective evidence of truth for a part outside the context of the whole it goes to constitute. According to the right hemisphere, understanding is derived from the whole, since it is only in light of the whole that one can truly understand the nature of the parts…. The left hemisphere is always engaged in a purpose: it always has an end in view, and downgrades whatever has no instrumental purpose in sight. The right hemisphere, by contrast, has no designs on anything. It is vigilant for whatever is, without preconceptions, without predefined purpose…. The right hemisphere is the primary mediator of experience, from which the conceptualised, re-presented world of the left hemisphere derives, and on which it depends…. The left hemisphere does not itself have life…. The means of argument - the three Ls, language, logic and linearity - are all ultimately under left-hemisphere control…. Its point of view is always easily defensible, because analytic…. The left hemisphere builds systems, where the right does not. It therefore allows elaboration of its own working over time into systemic thought which gives it permanence and solidity…. The existence of a system of thought dependent on language automatically devalues whatever cannot be expressed in language…. The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility. If the defect might reflect on the self, it does not accept it. But if something or someone else can be made to take responsibility - if it is a ‘victim’ of someone else’s wrongdoing, in other words - it is prepared to do so.” Imitation is the function of the right hemisphere. Only humans imitate means as well as ends when trying to achieve a goal. Imitation is at root escaping one’s own experience to enter the mind of another. “More empathic people mimic the facial expressions of those they are with more than others…. The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere, whereas copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, and is left-hemisphere-based.”

Through the rest of his book McGilchrist posits that, in the Western world, there has been a historical battle between the two hemispheres that has ebbed and flowed through the ages. At first, the right hemisphere was ascendent. “In the Homeric era, the sense of self is intimately bound up with ‘interpersonal and communal dialogue’ in a shared ethical life…. The hiddenness or necessarily implicit quality of Nature requires a particularly alert flexibility on the part of those who go to approach her. ‘Hidden structure is superior to manifest structure’; and openness is required by the seeker of wisdom.” Heraclitus’ philosophy did not turn inward, but sought to carefully study the phenomenal world. “Opposites define one another and bring one another into existence.” However, soon after, the left hemisphere would gain sway. Plato’s “legacy includes the (left-hemisphere-congruent) beliefs that truth is in principle knowable, that it is knowable through reason alone, and that all truths are consistent with one another…. Plato’s belief that knowledge must be unfailing and general led to the position that we cannot know things that are changing or particular.” The ideal forms were all that were worth knowing and striving towards. Ideas about things were prized over the things themselves. Plato particularly disdained poetry, putting in Socrates’ mouth, “all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of reality but merely give us superficial representation.” Hans Peter L’Orange writes that this trend away from nuance continued in the traditions of the Roman Empire where “there is a movement away from the complex towards the simple, from the mobile towards the static, from the dialectic and relative towards the dogmatic and the authoritarian, from the empirical towards theology and theosophy.” McGilchrist posits this trend furthered with the early Christians, whose “passion is for control, for fixity, for certainty; and that comes not with religion alone, but with a certain cast of mind, the cast of the left hemisphere.”

McGilchrist suggests that in the Renaissance priority begins to shift back to the right hemisphere. Giotto, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, is the first painter to employ perspective. “Perspective mediates a view of the world from an individual standpoint.” The Renaissance ushered in an age of more cultural tolerance and plurality. Melancholy was co-mingled with wit and intelligence. Sadness and pleasure were intertwined. This growth in nuance was, to a large degree, countered by Luther’s Protestant Reformation. “The outer world was in itself empty, and therefore the only authenticity lay in the inner world alone…. The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times.” The literal Word replaced metaphors in the quest for human understanding. This need for certainty continued with the Enlightenment, which replaced Luther’s religion with a secular science of positivism. Rationality imposes an either/or mentality on life. “Whereas reason respects the implicit, the ambiguous, the unresolved, rationality demands the explicit, the clear and the complete.” This trend was in opposition with artistic creation and this tension grew into the Romantic movement. “Art is by its nature implicit and ambiguous. It is also embodied: it produces embodied creations which speak to us through the senses, even if their medium is language, and which have effects on us physically as embodied beings in the lived world.” Max Scheler stated, “For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie], fulfill a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognizable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of this kind. For by creating new forms of expression, the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see, for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by doing so they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind…. That indeed is the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul.” The Romantic movement was a move back towards the incompatible. Goethe emphasized, “we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.” McGilchrist suggests the Romantics returned to the theme of childhood again and again as “childhood represents innocence, not in some moral sense, but in the sense of offering what the phenomenologists thought of as the pre-conceptual immediacy of experience (the world before the left-hemisphere has deadened it to familiarity). It was this authentic ‘presencing’ of the world that Romantic poetry aimed to recapture.” Goethe stressed the impermanence of reality when he stated, “the phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete, but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.” Shelley suggested, “poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar…. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.” The familiar is the realm of the left hemisphere, whereas the unique and particular of the right.

Industrialization, modernity, and post-modernity were each turns back towards the primacy of the left hemisphere. “The world is either robbed of its substantiality, its ‘otherness’, its ontological status as an entity having an independence from the perceiving subject; or alternatively seen as alien, devoid of human resonance or significance…. The more we rely on the left hemisphere alone, the more self-conscious we become; the intuitive, unconscious unspoken elements of experience are relatively discounted, and the interpreter begins to interpret - itself. The world it puts into words for us is the world that words themselves (the left hemisphere’s building blocks) have created…. [We become] modern man as homo consumens: concerned with things more than people, property more than life, capital more than work…. Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.” Modern man becomes passive to the world. “An admiration for what is powerful rather than beautiful, a sense of alienated objectivity rather than engagement or empathy, and an almost dogmatic trampling on all taboos, lies at the heart of the modernist enterprise.” There is novelty and shock, as opposed to newness- seeing afresh what one once thought of as familiar. The explicit reigns over implicit meanings. “Originality as an artist (as opposed to as a celebrity or a showman) can only exist within a tradition, not for the facile reason that it must have something by ‘contrast’ with which to be original, but because the roots of any work of art have to be intuitive, implicit, still coming out of the body and the imagination, not starting in (though they may perhaps later avail themselves of) individualistic cerebral striving…. Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know - only release something in us that is already there.” In modern society, knowledge has become professionalized. “Expertise, which is what actually makes an expert (Latin expertus, ‘one who is experienced’) would be replaced by ‘expert’ knowledge that would have in fact to be based on theory, and in general one would expect a tendency increasingly to replace the concrete with the theoretical or abstract.” Measurability and quantification become the standards of knowledge. Context could be neglected for general rules. Uniformity and equality become the overriding goals. In art, “metaphor and myth have been replaced by the symbolic, or worse, by a concept.” The world is seen as a collection of objects. However, “certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or of science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris.”