Retrospective 2024-38

This is a retrospective of week 38, 2024 (2024-09-16–2024-09-22).

This week I’ve read Rupert Read’s review of The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist. Rupert Read writes (italics in the original):

For me, the great value of McGilchrist’s work consists in (i) critiquing the existing picture; especially, by way simply of showing that it is a picture; thus freeing us up from its unconscious ideological grip, and (ii) providing a kind of corrective to it. There is a correction of perspective – a movement to a less unhappy place – going on; not (necessarily) a new statement of absolute metaphysics.¹

I think it is possible to see McGilchrist’s philosophy as a corrective to the metaphysic and epistemology by which we are possessed, more than as a metaphysic of its own which runs the risk then of setting up a new dogma.²

What’s missing in Rupert Read’s review is the risk he sees if we allow ourselves to separate and split off the hemispheres from each other. The following is from a conversation between Iain McGilchrist and Rupert Read on June 13, 2024 (my emphasis in italics).³

McGilchrist: I can see the hallmark of the left hemisphere at work and I can see the hallmark of the right hemispheres broader vision, and if we have to make decisions about which way we’re going to to lean, I think it’s wise to lean towards the one that tends to be more veridical, and I mean that in a very literal sense…

Read: Yes, although that only follows if we allow ourselves to separate and split off the hemispheres from each other.

McGilchrist: My argument is the left hemisphere is a good servant, but not a good master. In our society it’s become the master.

Read: Yeah, but shouldn’t we always seek to remain clear on the point that the hemispheres are parts of a whole. If we don’t remain clear on that, then we always risk a sort of fallacy of decomposition.

The hemispheres are parts of a whole brain, which is part of a whole person, which is part of a whole society. What’s true of some parts of the whole is not necessarily true of the whole.

Notes:
1. Rupert Read, Critical Notice: Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, p. 7.
2. Ibid., p. 11.
3. Perspectiva, “Iain McGilchrist & Rupert Read in Conversation: Are We in a War Against Life?”, 20230613, YouTube Video, 1:44:30, https://youtu.be/WvZ9-Y8MR0o?t=1186