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 is a work by Iain McGilchrist (2021).

Core claims

• McGilchrist’s 1,500-page opus is not fundamentally a neuroscience book but a work of philosophical theology that uses hemispheric lateralization as an empirical warrant for reviving the pre-Cartesian conviction that consciousness is ontologically prior to matter — making it the most ambitious challenge to reductionism since Whitehead’s Process and Reality.
• The “master and emissary” metaphor evolves here into a full diagnostic framework: the left hemisphere’s dominance is not merely a cognitive bias but a civilizational psychopathology structurally identical to the anosognosia (denial of deficit) observed in right-hemisphere stroke patients — a claim that reframes political and ecological crises as neurologically mediated delusions.
• McGilchrist’s concept of the “limit case” — that the literal is a degenerate form of the metaphorical, stasis a degenerate form of motion, isolation a degenerate form of relationship — provides the single most powerful conceptual tool in the book, inverting the entire hierarchy on which materialist science depends and aligning neuropsychology with the participatory ontologies of Hillman, Jung, and the Neoplatonists.

Related questions

• How does McGilchrist’s concept of the left hemisphere’s “sustained incoherence” map onto Hillman’s diagnosis in The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World that psychotherapy’s subjectivism has deprived the world of its own dream and complaint?
• In what ways does McGilchrist’s claim that “matter is an aspect of consciousness, not consciousness an emanation from matter” parallel or diverge from Jung’s position on the psychoid archetype as developed in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche?
• McGilchrist invokes Schelling’s vision of the sacred “All” as the antidote to fragmentation; how does this compare with Edinger’s account of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype, where the dissolution of participation mystique is both necessary developmental achievement and potential catastrophe?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/mcgilchrist-matter-with-things/

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