Iain McGilchrist - The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

The Matter With Things:

Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

Copyright 2021 Iain McGilchrist

First published in 2021 by Perspectiva Press

PO Box 75779, London, SW15 9HW

www.systems-souls-society.com

All individual copyright information for material incorporated in this book can be found in the credits for the colour plates in volumes 1 & 2, and in the Acknowledgments.

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Iain McGilchrist asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the copyright owner and the publisher, other than as permitted by UK copyright legislation.

ISBN (hardback) 978-1-914568-06-0

ISBN (ebook) 978-1-914568-05-3

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is what would conventionally be called a single argument. That is why I have chosen not to publish it as three separate books: one on neuropsychology how our brains shape reality; one on epistemology how we can come to know anything at all; and one on metaphysics the nature of what we find in the cosmos. It is intended as a single whole, each part illuminating, and in turn illumined by, the others.

And yet it is also not an argument, in the conventional sense, at all. If we want others to understand the beauty of a landscape with which they may be unfamiliar, an argument is pointless: instead we must take them there and explore it with them, walking on the hills and mountains, pausing as new vantage points continually open around us, allowing our companions to experience it for themselves.

Such, at any rate, is my intention in this book. The journey matters because it is the arrival. This means that while, for some, every succeeding view will disclose some new aspect of an always changing landscape with which at every turn they become better acquainted, for others the landscape will appear to be, unrewardingly, always the same landscape.

Importantly, this also means that the reader must not feel that the whole book has either to be read in its entirety or not at all. Continuing the analogy of a journey, it can be taken in (I hope) enjoyable stages; and can be put down and picked up, or explored according to whim. My hope is that my reader will end by reading much of it anyway, but do so in a spirit of an intellectual friendship, not as another challenge to fit in to a busy life.

At one point I was going to call this book There Are No Things. I changed my mind when I saw that it might align me with a nihilistic trend in post-modernism that I deplore. It also gave the impression that I was arguing for truth-as-correctness rather than truth-as-unconcealing. My aim is to clear away the assumptions that cloud our vision: and the assumption of a materialist world composed of things is the greatest impediment we face. In an obvious sense, there are things: my hope is that the reader will not abandon them, but reconceive them in a richer way. In summary, my trust is in my readers, that for them something deeper will be unconcealed, and that they will literally dis-cover a new vision of the world for themselves.