Introducing The McGilchrist Manoeuvre

Improving our Perceptual and Conceptual grasp of Reality

Tonight I’ll be talking with Perspectiva’s best-known author, Iain McGilchrist, whom I have known for 12 years, since chairing an event at the RSA about his classic text The Master and his Emissary (you can see a younger me from 29 mins). Later I arranged a dialogue and seminar about Iain’s main ideas published as Divided Brain, Divided World: Why the best part of us struggles to be heard and a few years subsequently I was featured in the documentary about Iain’s work by Vanessa Dylyn called Divided Brain. If you’ve never heard of Iain or his ideas, you could do worse than watch the RSAnimate, and Iain now has an excellent website maintained by Mary Atwood, which includes a short description of the overall thesis and why it matters as well as summaries of his books. It’s a huge honour for Perspectiva to publish The Matter with Things, described by many as one of the most important books ever written(!) and I was glad to give voice to the credibility of this kind of assessment at the book launch in November 2021.

Three months ago, as part of the One year anniversary of the publication of The Matter with Things, I spoke with Iain about the cumulative argument in the second volume of the book. Tonight, I’ll be introducing Perspectiva’s seminar series called Attention as a Moral Act and asking Iain about several things, including what I have begun to describe as ‘The McGilchrist Manoeuvre’ (I mean manoeuvre in the simple rather than strategic sense, as a movement or series of moves requiring skill and care).

The McGilchrist manoeuvre refers to a pattern of disclosure and a morphology of analysis in Iain McGilchrist’s scholarship. In its most fundamental manifestation, it refers to the hemispheric hypothesis developed in The Master and his Emissary (2011) expressed as the ‘right, left, right’ functioning of our brains as we move (sequentially but imperceptibly) from the presencing of a particular lived context (right hemisphere) to the re-presentation of that context into elements for analysis (left hemisphere) and then back into a perception of context that is changed by the hemispheric interaction (the right hemisphere’s initial perception of context is enriched and enhanced by the left hemisphere’s analysis and includes but transcends it). However, the hemispheric hypothesis is often misapprehended and misrepresented, which is why a deeper appraisal of the McGilchrist manoeuvre is important.

Iain tells me that audiences who encounter his work often seem to want two things, neither of which they can have. The first common desire is to know that when there are two things, one is right and the other is wrong, or in this case that the right hemisphere is good and the left hemisphere is bad. That is not true because they both matter hugely, just asymmetrically, for instance, the right hemisphere understands the value of the left but the left does not understand the value of the right. The second common desire is that when there are two things that matter they should be equally important, and that is not true either, for very often two things both matter, but disproportionately, in this case, the right hemisphere and left hemisphere both provide an invaluable perspective on reality, but the right hemisphere’s take has been consistently and decisively proven to be more fully accurate than the left hemisphere’s take.

Iain uses this point - of the partial validity of both hemispheres but the relative trustworthiness of the RH perspective as a premise to make progress in philosophy, both in epistemology (the study of how we know) and metaphysics (the study of the nature of reality). Very often philosophical debates are stuck on two apparently contradictory framings of conundrums that correspond to the respective ways of attending of left and right hemispheres (McTaggart’s argument for the Unreality of Time would be an example, or the impression that we cannot have free will in spite of feeling that we do). In these cases and others, both perspectives have partial validity, but there is good reason (for the whole person in the fullest possible context) to trust the right hemisphere’s perspective as a relatively reliable guide to how reality is. (We plan for one of the events in the seminar series to assess the claim that this represents progress in philosophy).

The second most fundamental expression of the McGilchrist Manoeuvre is informed by the neurological premise of the hemispheric hypothesis as well as the epistemological strategy of most of the first volume of TMWT, which is to consider ways to truth (attention, perception, judgments, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence, creativity) and paths to truth (science, reason, intuition and imagination) in light of the hemispheric hypothesis. When we encounter what is real and what is true as viewed by both hemispheres, it very rarely takes a binary either/or form, but nor is it simply both/and. The second expression of the McGilchrist manoeuvre is therefore the perspectival shift from the contention that something has to be either/or (LH) or both/and (RH) to the recognition that reality is invariably either/or and both/and. Iain is not the first or only thinker to disclose this pattern, but it falls out his insights very elegantly. To be clearer on the ‘and’ here, the claim is that when we are considering reality in its fullness it invariably has the quality of both/and (RH) to either/or (LH) and back to both/and(now including either/or) (RH).

The McGilchrist manoeuvre is expressed in different parts of The Matter with Things, but the idea is most profoundly expressed in chapter 20 on The Coincidentia Oppositorum and to a slightly lesser extent in chapter 21 on The One and the Many (which is the general case of the prior chapter examined more specifically). Throughout the book, I noticed the manoeuvre in all of the following forms and more:

“We need both the vision that reveals separation and the vision that reveals union.”

“the equal necessity but unequal status of spiritual opposites”

“the non-duality of duality and non-duality”

“the unity of multiplicity and unity”

“the union of union and division”

“opposites coincide while remaining opposites”.

“the more intimately they are united, the more, not the less, they are differentiated”

“Thus the general is found in the individual, the eternal in the temporal, the spiritual in the embodied. This tension is creative, generative.”

This idea is most fully expressed through different language forms, including the idea of hormesis, the phenomenon whereby a substance that is harmful in large amounts may be positive in small amounts, the Heraclitean notion of ‘graspings’ or ‘syllapsis’ which, Iain says, is indicative of a subtle and fulsome notion of how reality is apprehended.

Iain quotes one saying of Heraclitus that may be particularly puzzling to the modern reader: ‘Graspings (syllapses): wholes and not wholes, convergent, divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.’  In response he writes: ‘It is hard to overestimate the richness of this fragment. It says many things at once: that a deep understanding of the nature of reality comes in glimpses, or graspings – moments of insight; that, in that insight, all is neither simply single, nor simply manifold, neither simply whole, nor simply not whole, neither simply like nor simply unlike, each working with, and by the same token working against, the others; that the One and the Many bring one another forth into being, together generating the reality that has this structure at its core; and that despite (or, in light of all this, perhaps because of?) the nature of this multiplicity, all is held together in a syllapsis: the only word here not to be paired with an antithesis.’

There is plenty more to say about all this, including the Jungian notion of enantiodromia, but I’ll keep some powder dry for tonight.

For now, to try again at a shorter definition, I might venture:

The McGilchrist manoeuvre entails the combined perceptual and conceptual capacity that transcends contradictions, disclosing the coincidence of opposites as generative of reality, thereby re-enchanting aspects of life long considered problematic, including tension and paradox.

I’m sure I can do better, but it’s a start!

@Jonathan_Rowson