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

By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place j

Much as the right hemisphere understands the need for the left, but the left does not understand the need for the right, generalists appreciate the need for specialists, while the specialist is less able to see the need for the generalist.

Employing analysis, which works from the outside of its object, without listening to intuition, which inhabits the matter at hand from the inside, is like looking for the power of a poem in the translation, where it cannot be found, and then when one cannot find it, denying it was there in the original.

It might be pointed out, however, that two thousand years of insistence, in the West, on the idea of truth as single, timeless and correct has demonstrated only how multiple, contingent and fallible it seems to be, since it has notably failed to coerce the wisdom of philosophers to any one point of view.

Reductionism envisages a universe of things – and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which

The ‘building blocks’ of the supposedly mechanical universe behave like patterned flows of energy, or force fields: they are constantly moving and changing, have no precise boundaries, overlap and mingle with other equally elusive entities, cannot be precisely predicted or specified, change their nature and behaviour depending on circumstances and

And Toynbee continues, later, specialisation has become an indispensable intellectual tool. But being indispensable is not the same thing as being all-sufficient … the farther that specialization is carried, the more of the meaning of the phenomena is left unplumbed in the unexplored gaps between the specialists’ deep but narrowly constricted borin

In one way, the hemisphere hypothesis is deceptively simple: the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways. It is the implications of this that are manifold. Immediately it gives rise to a number of further hypotheses: that this is a requirement of survival; that th

Clarity is a wonderful, indeed beautiful, thing, where it can be achieved without loss of truth. We cannot let ourselves off the hook of striving for it. But we need also to know the proper place to stop. Its application is limited, and on a larger scale its virtue becomes a vice; then it is no longer the agent of truth, but – somewhat paradoxicall