The Matter with Things

At roughly 1,500 pages across two volumes, Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things” is less a book than a civilization-level argument. It’s the massive follow-up to his influential “The Master and His Emissary,” and its ambition is staggering: to demonstrate, through neuroscience, philosophy, physics, and the arts, that consciousness is ontologically fundamental and that the modern world’s crisis is, at root, a crisis of perception, a catastrophic over-reliance on the left hemisphere’s narrow, fragmentary, and controlling mode of attention.

The praise has been extraordinary. Rowan Williams, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, called it “a genuinely groundbreaking and exceptionally important challenge.” Beshara Magazine described McGilchrist as “a renaissance man.” On Goodreads, the book holds a remarkable 4.77 out of 5, with 84% five-star ratings. These numbers reflect a genuine resonance. McGilchrist’s argument that the left hemisphere of the brain has, in effect, constructed a self-reinforcing model of reality that excludes everything it cannot quantify or control speaks directly to the felt sense many people have that something essential is being lost in modern life.

For readers on a contemplative path, the book’s core insight is deeply familiar. The left hemisphere’s tendency to grasp, categorize, and reduce is remarkably similar to what contemplative traditions call the activity of the conceptual mind, the veil of thought that obscures direct experience. McGilchrist’s right hemisphere, by contrast, is the seat of openness, presence, and relational awareness. When he argues that the right hemisphere’s mode of attention is primary and that the left hemisphere’s abstractions are derivative, he’s making a neuroscientific case for something contemplatives have long practiced: dropping out of conceptual thinking into direct, present awareness.

But a book this ambitious inevitably overreaches. Raymond Tallis, writing in Literary Review, praised the clarity while criticizing the “relentless personification of the hemispheres,” noting that it becomes “a rather reductionist critique of reductionism.” This is a sharp observation. McGilchrist sometimes writes as if the hemispheres are two little people inside your head, each with its own personality and agenda, which is a metaphor that risks obscuring the very nuance he’s trying to preserve. Andrew Louth, also in LARB, noted that philosophers and poets were used as quotations rather than engaged with in genuine depth. And Rowan Williams, despite his high praise, found the final metaphysics sections “least satisfying.”

Robert Ellis, writing for the Middle Way Society, was far more critical, calling the book “a huge disappointment overall” with “a complete and obvious contradiction.” This seems too harsh, but it points to a real tension: McGilchrist wants to critique reductive thinking while also making a comprehensive argument about the nature of reality, and those two projects pull in different directions.

The book rewards patience. It’s not something you read straight through; it’s something you live with, returning to sections as your own understanding deepens. The sheer range of evidence McGilchrist marshals, from neuroscience to Renaissance painting to quantum physics, creates a cumulative effect that is genuinely transformative, even when individual arguments wobble.