Dr. Iain McGilchrist argues Western culture’s 500-year shift toward left-hemisphere materialism—prioritizing fragmented, abstract logic over right-hemisphere depth—has eroded meaning in religion, art, and relationships, reducing them to dogmatic, decontextualized frameworks. His The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter of Things (1,200 pages) challenge dualism, framing consciousness as foundational, even in inanimate objects like rocks. Christianity’s panentheistic narrative, he insists, uniquely captures divine suffering and oneness, offering profound insights into happiness tied to spiritual belonging, social coherence, and harmony with nature. A "hopeful pessimist," McGilchrist believes the West’s crisis may spark a rediscovery of these deeper truths, essential for wisdom and authenticity. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Dr. Ian McGilchrist, one of the truly great philosophers living today.
As I've said on my podcast many times, I believe that the history of the last 500 years is essentially the history of the West losing its faith in God and the spiritual realm and becoming materialist.
And because I'm quite certain there is a spiritual realm, I think the result of our becoming blind to it is that we become increasingly expert in understanding the material world as we simultaneously descend into a kind of insanity, which accounts for our being able to invent airplanes and iPhones.
At the same time, we go around saying things like morality is relative and words are meaningless and gender doesn't exist, things that people believe without believing them.
We're all sort of living in the mad scene from Hamlet.
But there is a great drama that is going on, I think, behind the scenes and sometimes in front of the scenes, which is the drama of a spectacle, an epic spectacle of powerful minds rediscovering a sense of the sacred.
It's one thing for me, who's an artist, to rediscover a sense of the sacred because artists are allowed to take these great leaps without showing our work because we don't know why we know what we know.
So we just kind of put it forward.
But philosophers and scientists are embedded in their moment and they have to proceed by logical stages from the place where the history of philosophy and science has brought them.
Dr. Ian McGillchrist is a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a neuroscientist, and as far as I can tell, a literary scholar, an extraordinarily powerful mind.
And he wrote the best-selling 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, which I have not read, but I have read his magnum opus, which is called The Matter of Things, which is just an absolute terrific read at 2,000 pages.
And I don't say that.
I think it was the Count of Monte Cristo I said that about last.
Dr. McGill Christmas is so nice to meet you.
I'm delighted to meet you.
It's nice of you to come on.
Oh, thank you, Andrew.
It's lovely to be here.
Just to unfrighten your listeners a little, there's actually only 1,200 pages of text in that book.
Oh, is it okay?
Because I was reading on Kindle, so I didn't know.
He repaginated it.
So let's begin.
For those people who aren't familiar with your work, maybe you could start by explaining your theory about the brain hemispheres and what happened to them and what it means.
Yes.
I mean, a lot of people will say one of two things.
I've heard all about this, but I think nobody really believes it any longer.
And I'd like you just to put out of your minds anything you think you've heard about brain-hemisphere differences, because it's almost entirely wrong.
The second thing to say is, why should it matter?
I mean, okay, it may be interesting to a neuroscientist, but why should it matter to me doing my whatever it is job and carrying on with my daily life?
I'll try and address those rather briefly.
The brain is divided, which is an odd thing in itself.
Why should it be divided since its power consists in making connections?
Secondly, it's asymmetrical.
Why?
If it just needed more room, why didn't it expand symmetrically?
And there was a band of fibers at the base of the brain, which only came late in evolution at all and is already getting smaller in relation to the brain.
What is all this about?
And I think it's about the need that every creature has to do two impossible things at once.
One is to pay attention to a tiny detail that it knows it once, go and get it, quick and dirty, grab it, maybe wrong, but just need it now.
And the other, that it, by the way, is the left hemisphere.
It's not the sophisticated one that you were taught.
The right hemisphere is far more sophisticated and it sees the whole picture.
It's watching out for everything that's going on while you're doing the grabbing.
So looking out for predators, looking out for your kin and all the rest.
So in brief, they create two different kinds of a world, these hemispheres.
And we're in touch with them both all the time.
So we're not really aware of that.
But one of them is effectively the left hemisphere's version of the world is really like a map in relation to the world that is mapped.
The world that is mapped is infinitely complex.
And that's taken in by the right hemisphere, which understands complexity.
The left hemisphere sees only an outline, a skeletal thing that makes sense to help you orientate yourself.
And if you start believing that the map is the world, you're in big, big trouble.
And I believe that's where we are now.
We're believing that whatever it is the left hemisphere can construct, which is incredibly simplistic, designed simply to help us get and grab stuff quickly, is the whole story.
Now, even that might not matter.
You might say, well, I don't care which of the hemispheres is doing this.
I mean, the outcome is an important thing.
But what about this?
Suppose I could just demonstrate very clearly that the left hemisphere is effectively delusional.
I'm not the only person who says this.
A number of neuroscientists have independently commented that the left hemisphere, left to itself, is deluded.
I mean, seriously so.
Will believe that an arm doesn't belong to it.
It will make up stuff just to fit a story it already has.
And so if I could show that one of these was really much more reliable than the other, and it is the right hemisphere that is more reliable to cut to the chase, that would mean something, but it would only mean something if we could identify when we're being led by the nose to the left hemisphere's point of view, or when we're able to see with the much richer, more sophisticated right hemisphere's point of view.
And importantly, we can.
So we can tell there are hallmarks of the left hemisphere's point of view.
It is atomistic, it is decontextualized, it's abstract, it's inanimate, it's unsubtle, it has no understanding of the implicit, only what is boldly explicit that is there.
Whereas the right hemisphere sees something that is never fixed, that is always in communion and union with other things, and those connections make up reality.
It sees a picture that is rich and vital, and in which the unspoken, the implicit is as important as what is explicit.
Now, given that pretty much everything that matters to us becomes degraded as soon as it's made explicit, that's quite important.
And one of them is religion.
Another is sex.
Another is friendship.
Another is art, poetry, music, architecture, ritual, narrative, myth.
All these things depend on not being turned into a kind of cheap, plastic exposition of what they are.
They go deep, deep, deep, and the left hemisphere doesn't do deep.
The right hemisphere does.
I hope that puts the picture so that people can see why I care about this so much.
It does.
And it does seem that you're describing becoming not just a materialist, if our left brain is taking over, not just a materialist, but kind of an autistic materialist, somebody who's not actually connecting to anything.
Precisely that.
Precisely that.
So you mentioned love and sex and religion, and you're talking about the spiritual realm.
And the one question I had as I was reading this part, which is the first part of the matter with things, is concentrating on the hemispheres of the brain.
Is that a left-brain thing to begin with?
In other words, are you kind of using, are you using this dilemma that we're in to expose the dilemma that we're in?
Well, I suppose there's two things about that.
One is I have to take people from where they are now.
It's no good sort of speaking to them through a loud hailer from a long way off.
I need to start with how they are likely to think of the world as science has supposedly explained.
It hasn't at all, but people believe science has said that there is no meaning, no purpose in the universe.
It hasn't.
Science starts from the premises that it's not going to look at those things.
That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
But the payoff is that at the end of the day, it can't say we didn't find them.
It wasn't looking for them.
It had ruled them out.
So I want to start with where they are.
And the other thing is that the thing about religion and all those other stories is that they do need to be approached rather carefully because they too can become left hemispheric.
So there are versions of religion that are all about, I'm right, it's written in this book and this is what you must believe.
Anybody else is wrong.
We see this going on on the world stage at the moment.
And so I don't want to enter into that.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with our bodies and our brains.
They are wonderful things.
Looking at the brain is an absolute joy because it's miraculous.
And you see, I believe that matter is not merely lumpen matter that has nothing to do with spiritual consciousness.
I believe it profoundly does.
And indeed, to cut a long story short, I believe that consciousness and matter are different phases of the same underlying reality.
I find this idea really fascinating because it does creep up on you after a while.
There's somehow no getting around this.
And yet, a duck and a rock do seem different.
Can you explain?
I mean, it does seem after a while, if you pay attention, that the world is shot through with consciousness.
But there is this difference between a duck and a rock.
And what is the difference?
Well, interestingly, in our culture, we think that when we found a difference or a distinction, we found a division.
And we haven't.
So I believe actually that there is a continuity, very different that life is from the inanimate.
There is a continuity between the inanimate realm and the animate realm.
That is not to deny they are very, very, very different, but they are continuous.
Now, nobody has been able to explain how consciousness could come out of matter if matter has nothing to do with consciousness.
People have been trying for hundreds of years.
Nobody has got even near a convincing answer to this.
So most philosophers in the modern West are now coming belatedly round to a view which was common in the East, which is that consciousness is foundational.
It is, as philosophers say, an ontological primitive.
That's to say you can't go behind it and extract it from anything else.
It's there.
And everything exists in that continuous field of consciousness and has something of consciousness about it.
Obviously, the consciousness of a duck and the consciousness of you, Andrew, are very different.
And equally, the duck and whatever it is the rock is able to experience.
And it may sound very odd, but we do believe that it is possible to talk about the experience of un as we would say, non-animate matter.
These things, they are very different, but they are part of a continuity.
And go on.
Well, when you talk about there's nothing behind consciousness, I mean, that does bring you to this kind of genesis idea that something is there.
There can't be matter without consciousness, that something is there in matter that speaks to us about a consciousness, which does, even though you're obviously absolutely right about religion becoming a left-brain intolerant thing, it also becomes, it can be this incredibly revelatory communication with the world.
That's what I believe.
So I heard you, you know, there's this joke on the internet called the bell curve meme.
I don't know if you've ever seen it.
It's a bell curve and on one end is an idiot and the idiot is saying, I know there's a God and he loves me.
And at the top of the bell curve is a philosopher spouting off this very incomprehensible paragraph of nonsense.
And on the other side is a wise man saying, I know there's a God and he loves me.
And I heard you on an unheard podcast talking to another philosopher whose name has escaped me.
Philip Goff.
That's it.
That was it.
And you started to say to him, you both started to say to each other, it's kind of dangerous in a career sense to start talking about God because people stop taking you seriously.
And I wonder, is that an issue for you?
Is that something that you have to consider as you're discussing this before you get to the word God?
Because it does take you a while in the matter of things to get to that word.
I mean, you approach it almost like a sort of wild animal that you're afraid of taking on.
And you do get to it, but is that a problem?
I don't know if in America you have the expression, I don't mind what they do as long as they don't frighten the horses.
And I didn't want to frighten the horses.
So I wanted to take people on a journey and say, look, you accept this, don't you?
Yes, yes, so far.
And what about this and this and this?
The different ways in which we can approach reality.
Yes, yes, I think I agree with that.
And then what kind of a world does this conjure up?
It has these qualities and these qualities.
Yes, I suppose I can't disagree with that.
And to bring them to the door of chapter 28, which is called The Sense of the Sacred.
It's a very long chapter.
It's about 110 pages.
It's a short book in itself.
And I wanted people to be prepared not to dismiss it.
And I think that if they read the book up to that point, they won't dismiss it.
And I've had people write to me saying, I've all my life been an atheist.
And you have changed my mind.
You've shown me something I never understood what people were talking about.
And of course, it is a very difficult thing to talk about.
That is the main problem.
That the really, really deep things are ineffable.
Literally, they can't be F.
Well, they can't be spoken.
And this is the problem.
So I had to find a way of using language to circumvent language, of using philosophy to show the limits of philosophy, but not turning my back on language or philosophy and not disrespecting them.
And so that was the purpose of that long chapter.
And I think that before I wrote this book, some well-meaning friends said, don't do the chapter on spirituality.
Using Language to Circumvent Language00:03:46
Interesting.
Because they won't take you seriously.
And you've got loads of philosophical things that are very interesting to say.
But I thought, no, actually, because it's so important.
It was like building an arch without a keystone.
It's the key element, if you like, in this picture.
And, you know, I don't think that we'll get ourselves out of the mess that we're in unless we reattune our hearts and minds to the cosmos, a spiritual cosmos.
And so I wanted to begin in a way that would help people.
You know, the Tao De Ching, the great text of the Taoists, begins, the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao.
And Augustine, St. Augustine, said, if you know, it's not God that you know.
So in other words, there is always uncertainty and difficulty about grasping it in language.
And my worry is the fellow travelers who want to vaunt that religion is dogmatic and clear-cut and so on, it absolutely isn't.
And you get closer to it when you don't have a certainty that you are right.
Instead, you feel something powerful calling to you.
It's all in a relationship.
We're not pushed from behind.
We're called to from in front, from ideals such as goodness, beauty, truth, and the sacred, by love, in fact.
All these things are encounters.
They're all relational.
And the trouble with our world picture is that it's made up of things.
We think the relations come later.
But I argue that the relations are foundational.
People might say, but how can there be relations until there are things to relate?
But don't forget that everything that we think we know emerges from the web of relationships.
It is what it is because of the context, because of the other things to which it is connected.
So you have to begin.
There is no shortcut to this.
You have to begin by experiencing a resonance with something and allowing that to grow.
Not, as it were, trusting blindly, but not also failing to trust where there's something to trust.
I sometimes say, I'm not recommending blind faith.
I'm recommending that when you have to forward a stream and somebody is holding out a hand to you, you take that hand and you cross the stream.
It's not blind, but it's not certain.
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Wondering About Wisdom00:12:09
Huh.
How do you spell that?
Oh, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
One of the things that startled me in the book was your, you seem to feel that the West, this journey that the West was on, starts with Plato.
I mean, it really starts with the beginning of the West.
You seem to feel that the path to materialism is built into Western philosophy.
And correct me if I'm wrong, that was what I saw, because you mentioned, you don't go after Plato, but you mention him sort of in a derogatory way.
And I thought you were going to go all Schopenhauer on me and fall in love with Eastern philosophy, which is beautiful.
But you don't.
So I'm wondering how, do you think that?
Do you think that Western philosophy was destined to go in this direction?
Well, a good one.
I mean, first of all, I do think that there is profound wisdom in Eastern philosophy, and I have all my life read it and always will.
In the West, I think probably more a misunderstanding of Plato than Plato himself has caused a kind of derailing of our thinking.
And it was cemented in place by Aristotle.
Now, it might surprise you that I have enormous respect for both of these great, great figures.
It would be ludicrous to dismiss them.
But they did set up a belief that all truths could be found by reasoning towards them.
And I don't think Socrates actually believed that at all.
But Plato and Aristotle in their philosophy suggest this.
And they also suggest fatally that a thing and its opposite cannot be true.
But my God, if you want one piece of advice from me, do not dismiss the idea that a thing and its opposite can be true at the same time.
And that indeed one of the problems of our world is we neglect the shadow side of things we think are just good, and that more and more and more of them will be better and better and better.
And we ignore the shadow side, a fatal mistake, both for an individual.
I've helped many people come to terms with their shadow self and be much happier and much nicer and kinder people to know.
But also in a culture where we believe some things are good and some things are bad and that's just the way it is.
You said in this podcast, which actually startled me, you said that Christianity is the richest mythos that we have.
And I agree with I'm a Christian and I agree with that.
But I'm wondering why you didn't really explain why do you think that?
Well, I mean, I suppose I should say I'm a Christian too.
And I wasn't brought up in a faith of any kind.
But in my teens, I encountered the extraordinarily awe-inspiring, evocative story of compassion, of spiritual richness.
And it opened my eyes to there being so much more than I was taught in my classes.
And so I've never lost that.
And what I mean by that is that there is nothing that can be more profound than the story of a God that is both transcendent beyond what we have here and yet imminent in what there is.
I believe that all things exist in God and God is in all things.
That is a philosophy called panentheism.
It's not the same as pantheism, which just lumps everything together and says, that's God for you.
But no, God is more than the sum of everything.
But everything exists in God and God is in, interpenetrates with everything that exists.
And this story of a God that loved creation so much that he was willing to suffer in it and not to forego the most humiliating and painful death in order to share something with his creation is, to me, speaks so much that it's impossible to turn one's heart and one's eyes and one's mind away from it.
Well, I couldn't agree more.
I'm reading a book that you recommend that I had never heard of, that you recommend in your book called Madness and Modernism.
I'm almost done.
I'm a few pages from the end of it.
Oh, well, I hope you're enjoying it.
Oh, I think it's tremendous.
I mean, but he sort of says, he points out, I mean, I just wrote a passage about this in a book before I even read the Louis Sasse book, that modern art essentially expresses the same things that schizophrenia expresses.
But he sort of looks at schizophrenia as a form almost of wisdom blown out of proportion, I guess would be the hyper wisdom that is wisdom beyond wisdom in some way.
Whereas I just feel that modern art may be an expression of madness.
But I'm wondering, you're a psychiatrist.
Are you practicing?
Do you have a practice or have a practice?
Well, I'm now far too old.
I'm retired.
Thank God.
But you have to.
And I had to make a decision at one stage to either carry on practicing or write and talk.
And I decided to do the second of these.
Although I very much love my job and love my patients.
But in any case, I don't think Louis Sasse would say that at all.
I know Louis quite well.
He would never say that there is wisdom in schizophrenia.
But there's a kind of hyper self-awareness, a hyper-self-consciousness, if you like, a kind of intelligence that is completely gone off the rails.
And I believe that we have inherited this too in the 20th century because we have turned our backs on the advice, as it were, the knowledge, the insight, the true wisdom that would come from seeing what the right hemisphere tells us.
Because we are so set on the success we've made by grasping and acquiring and getting power and riches.
And the left hemisphere is a very basic tool.
It just helps you get stuff quickly.
That's what we're in love with.
But what we haven't accounted for is that this will destroy meaning in our lives, purpose, values.
All these things go out of the window.
And then we're like, what are we doing?
Who are we?
What are we doing in this world?
Nothing seems to have any meaning anymore.
Now, this is what happens to schizophrenics.
They are actually not, you know, G.K. Chesterton made the point that a madman is not someone who's lost his reason.
He's a man who's lost everything but his reason.
All he can do is rationalize.
And he doesn't see what's wrong with it.
I mean, for example, somebody who is hearing voices, and the voices are coming out of their own head.
But they think, I look around the room, there's nobody there.
So how is this voice coming to me?
I know it must be that electric socket there.
That's the only way in which it could come into the room.
And so they develop a whole scheme, which is totally mad, but it's consistent with something they believe, that they couldn't be responsible for these voices, which is a typical left hemisphere position.
Now, in the modern world, there's something like this going on.
Oh, we couldn't possibly be responsible for this kind of vision or that kind of vision.
It must come from somebody else, someone else.
So we demonize others.
And we say that they are untouchable people because they have a different point of view from us.
Some of us say this, not you and me, but you know what I'm talking about.
So I get, but the question I want to ask, I'm almost, I've got five minutes left, and the question that I would like to ask is, as a psychiatrist, is there something psychiatry started out as an almost completely atheistic proposition?
I mean, even Jung sort of saw, he saw that there was a spirituality, but he got himself into this kind of cul-de-sac where you could never really accept that spirituality as wholly real.
I'm wondering, is there a psychiatry that's required that understands the things you understand?
I mean, in my youth, psychiatry saved my life.
But the only thing I ever said to my psychiatrist that shocked him was when I came in and said, I've become a Christian.
I believe in God.
He thought I'd gone mad again.
He thought I'd gone back to being mad.
Well, yeah, no, it may surprise you to know that there are a number of special interest groups, as they're called, in the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which is the professional body for psychiatrists in Britain.
And the largest of these is the spirituality, the special interest group.
It has more adherents than any other, and it's increasingly emphasized that, I mean, after all, what psychiatry really means is the healing of souls.
And that people are not machines.
People have souls, however you care to think of that.
But at any rate, to pay attention to spiritual beliefs, because they are profoundly important for happiness.
One of the things I didn't know until I'd almost finished writing that very long book, The Matter with Things, was how important having some connection with the divine cosmos is for sanity, mental health, physical health, and spiritual health.
So, in fact, the payoff for having this relationship with the divine is so great that it outweighs the effects of giving up smoking, losing weight, going to the gym several times a week, if that's what interests you.
But if you embrace it only for that reason, then you won't embrace it properly because that's not what it's for.
But it's just the point that it actually is one of the most important determinants of health and happiness in human beings.
The other two being belonging to a coherent social group, which is a surprisingly difficult thing to do in the modern West, with whom you can share values and trust people and share your life, and a oneness with nature out of which we come and to which we return and is not just something around us like an environment.
That is something we're also being cut off from.
I guess my last question is, when you look at this situation, are you hopeful?
Yes, I am hopeful, but I'm also a pessimist.
I call myself a hopeful pessimist.
And what I mean by that is that the way things are going is not good.
I think we'd all agree about that.
But on the other hand, I am very hopeful because, first of all, only a fool predicts the future.
If one had predicted the future in the past.
One but oftentimes have said, you know, the whole thing is over, it's got to gotta collapse, but it didn't.
and i also think human beings are amazingly resilient and creative and actually the worse it gets the better it will get in the sense that we've been protected so much from the impact of any kind of real you know real life experience that we need to get back the importance why it is not just a luxury why it is not just for pleasure that we should espouse a deeper view of ourselves
and of the world and of the cosmos, but because it has wisdom in it, it brings love with it, and it is truer than anything else that we are likely to believe.
Dr. Ian McGilchrist's Wisdom00:01:01
Dr. Ian McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain in the Making of the Western World and The Matter with Things.
The Matter with Things, just a great read.
I just loved every page.
And talking to you is just a refreshing breath of common sense in the world.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I hope you'll come back.
I hope we get to talk again.
I'd love that, Andrew.
Thank you very much indeed.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you.
Dr. Ian McGilchrist, just as good in person as he is on the page, I cannot tell you what a joy it is to read him and to talk to him and to hear what seems to me to be the right answers and the common sense of sensible answers.
Just a delight.
And again, if you can get through the matter with things, apparently it's shorter than I thought it was because I was reading it in Kindle, so it's 1,200 pages of text and the master and his emissary, which I will also read but have not yet.
Also, once you are enlightened enough, you should then come to the Andrew Clavin show on Friday.