The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World is a 2021 book of neuroscience, epistemology and metaphysics written by psychiatrist, thinker and former literary scholar Iain McGilchrist. Following on from McGilchrist's 2009 work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, The Matter with Things explores the radically different ways in which the two hemispheres of the brain apprehend reality, and the many cognitive and worldly implications of this. The book "is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years [i.e. since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment] – some would say as long as two thousand years."
Overview The work is 1,500 pages long and divided into two volumes – "The Ways to Truth" and "What Then is True?" – with many scientific, philosophical and literary quotations, citations and footnotes, and several appendices. The bibliography alone is 180 pages long.
Basic premise: The divided brain
McGilchrist distances himself from the discourse about the left brain–right brain divide in pop psychology, emphasising that "just about everything that is said about the hemispheres in pop psychology is wrong because it rests on beliefs about what the hemispheres do, not about how they approach it." One of the fundamental differences between the hemispheres of the human brain (and that of other species, such as birds), according to McGilchrist, is that the left hemisphere has evolved to sharply focus its attention on detail; it breaks things apart and tends to deal in abstractions, the explicit, and "either/or" (differentiation). The right hemisphere, on the other hand, has a broad and flexible attention that is open to whatever possibilities come along, and it sees things in their wider context, appreciates the implicit, and favours "both/and" (integration, holism). The right hemisphere has a better appreciation of itself and the left, than the left has of the right. Both approaches are necessary and complementary, but the left hemisphere's operation should not dominate the right. It makes "a good servant, but a very poor master." McGilchrist writes:
"[Y]ou could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain's left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is." He believes that "nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to 're-present' what first 'presences' to the right hemisphere." McGilchrist argues that the Western world has "oscillated" between predominantly left-brain and predominantly right-brain function through history, with some periods of relative balance. During certain periods such as the Renaissance, there was a movement toward the right, whereas since the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment – with exceptions such as the Romantic movement – it has become increasingly left-brain dominant, and in light of this, McGilchrist is concerned about the many cultural and global crises that we now face.
Volume 1: "The Ways to Truth" In Part I of "The Ways to Truth", McGilchrist looks at the neuroscience and different worldviews of the two hemispheres of the brain, and the means to truth: attention, perception, judgement, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence, and creativity. He also explores the mental disorders schizophrenia and autism. In Part II, the author looks at the brain hemispheres and the paths to truth, which he sees as being science, reason, intuition, and imagination. He shows the advantages and limitations of each approach, the desirability of using these in combination, and argues that in each of these approaches, the right hemisphere of the brain plays a more important and more veridical role than the left.
Volume 2: "What Then is True?" In Part III, "What Then is True?", McGilchrist asks and attempts to answer the question "what is truth?", before turning to a wide-ranging exploration of the nature of reality: the coincidence of opposites (the idea that at a deeper, higher or transcendent level, apparent opposites may be reconciled or find union); the one and the many; time; flow and movement; space and matter; matter and consciousness; value; purpose, life and the nature of the cosmos; and the sense of the sacred. McGilchrist further argues that consciousness, rather than matter, is ontologically fundamental.
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