Iain McGilchrist on Logic

The following quotes are from Iain McGilchrist’s books The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter with Things. McGilchrist points out the limits of sequential analytic logic, the building up of knowledge from parts, and the prioritising of detail over the bigger picture.

An uncritical following of intuition can lead us astray, but so can an uncritical following of logic.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

Even the rules by which logic operates…have to be taken on the recommendation of intuition – and such intuition may be only partially reliable.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

…every logical system leads to conclusions that cannot be accommodated within it.

–Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

The process of re-presenting a thing not only distances us from it, and substitutes an abstraction, a token, for the thing itself; it also objectifies, and reifies it, so as to bring it under control.

–Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

I believe…that many, if not all, logical paradoxes can be seen as arising from the…attempt to analyse something that is better grasped as a whole…

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

Externality and instrumentality are inescapable logical requirements in whatever it is that one claims drives the machine model.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

It is not that language and rational thought…are not valuable: they are. But they are there to be struggled with, and finally, having been found wanting, let go.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

I want to suggest that there is a kind of madness associated with…imagining that life follows a sort of mechanical logic. I am not, of course, in favour of abandoning logic, or attention to facts…

—Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

Narrow logic, once given foundations, can carry on operating as long as you like. But it cannot ground itself. It cannot provide either its own first assumptions in any argument, nor, in more general terms, its own worth as a tool in reaching the truth.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

…according to a narrow logic a thing and its opposite cannot both be true: in the machine sense it ‘does not compute’.

–Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

…people are…seduced by the rhetoric of reason. And incidentally, some recent…work in evolutionary theory suggests that this may be the whole purpose of logic – not to understand, but to persuade, to seduce, others and win a competitive argument.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

Pursuing logic will not in itself achieve understanding, which comes from living a thoughtful life.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

The left hemisphere doesn’t realise its own limitations. Neither does logic if unassisted. It doesn’t know what it is that it doesn’t know.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

…unless you have the courage to stand by one of your own [visions], you are not a philosopher – just a logic-chopper. And a vision never results from following procedures.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

…we have difficulty seeing beyond a vision of the world that looks logical, but at a deep level isn’t really logical at all.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

…reality is infinitely ramified and interconnected,…and…recede from the approach of logical analysis, language is a constantly limiting, potentially misdirecting and distorting medium.

–Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

…the tools of language and logical analysis take one away from context, back to the set of familiar concepts…

–Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

…the real world isn’t the way we think it is because logic says so.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

What is fascinating is the rationalistic…conclusion: not that…logic has its limits in understanding the world, but that the experiential world somehow doesn’t measure up to logic.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

Update 2023-05-06: Introduction added. Quotes added from The Master and His Emissary. References added (when missing). Typos corrected.