Retrospective 2024-37

This is a retrospective of week 37, 2024 (2024-09-09–2024-09-15).

This week I’ve viewed recordings and read transcripts from the Metaphysics and the Matter with Things: Thinking with Iain McGilchrist conference put on by the Center for Process Studies (CPS) and the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in March of 2024.

I’ve read McGilchrist’s books The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. I have also listened to many interviews with him. This was the first time I saw McGilchrist in a conference setting.

I’ve quoted McGilchrist extensively in my blog because much of what he says resonates with me, but I must also say there are things which don’t resonate. I will come back to that below and in some future posts.

What I find unsettling is that the interest in McGilchrist starts to feel like a cult. Truth drowns where cults thrive. McGilchrist rightfully received much praise for his work during the conference, but it becomes one-sided when people don’t make their critical voices heard. Personally, I would never, ever, allow a conference to be setup in my honor.

Jonathan Rowson, co-founder and Chief Executive of Perspectiva, once described McGilchrist as coy.¹ It’s one thing to receive praise with modesty, another to receive criticism. I found McGilchrist surprisingly defensive. What’s important is not to think with McGilchrist, but to think together (with or without McGilchrist).

If I ever would be invited to a McGilchrist conference (it won’t happen!) I would talk about what resonates with me, and what doesn’t. I would start with saying that I have no need to convince anyone of anything, only a need to clarify my own thinking, and that I would welcome feedback afterwards. I would end the talk (looking especially at the guys!) suggesting that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. I’ve outlined some tentative thoughts below about what doesn’t resonate:

1. McGilchrist (and others) talk about values as the good, the beautiful, and the true. But what is value and what is good? (Ref. Robert S. Hartman, The Structure of Value.) What is beautiful? (Ref. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order.) What is true? (Ref. McGilchrist, The Matter with Things.)
2. So, I’m not convinced that values are why there is life at all.
3. I’m not convinced either of the primacy of relations over relata. You can’t have one without the other? They come into existence simultaneously? It might not even be meaningful to talk about one before the other? (Ref. Ruth Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.)
4. I’ve started to question the hemisphere hypothesis and all talk about left and right. It’s meaningless, since for some people, left is right. And for others, there’s such an individual variation that it’s very hard to discuss. (Ref. McGilchrist, The Metaphysics and The Matter with Things Conference, Session 0.) Is this, metaphorically speaking, the “lump under the rug”?
5. I’d suggest it might be more meaningful to talk about the brain and the heart. Yes, we can think with the heart too! (Ref. indigenous wisdom.) And more strange things are going in the connection between brain and heart. (Ref. the senior heart transplant surgeon at Papworth Hospital, UK, who became unnerved by personality changes in the recepients and ceased to operate. See McGilchrist, The Matter with Things.)

Opinions, elegantly expressed, are still opinions.

Updated 2024-09-19:
Truth drowns where cults thrive added.
Related posts added.

Notes
1. Reference will be added. Rowson has had many opportunities to interact with McGilchrist since Perspectiva Press is the publisher of The Matter with Things.

Related posts:
John Vervaeke on Ecologies of Practice
Iain McGilchrist on Sledgehammering at Western Civilization
Zak Stein on Values