McGilchrist’s Relational, Creative-Process Idealism

Psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist's idealist metaphysics has consciousness as “irreducible, primordial and omnipresent.” But consciousness is “not a thing; it is a creative process,” he says. “All that exists, exists in consciousness … consciousness is the stuff of the cosmos.” Moreover, given “that consciousness is ‘the fundamental given natural fact’, it clearly follows that it cannot be reduced to something more fundamental” (McGilchrist, 2021b, 2021a, p. 1601).

Matter, to McGilchrist, is “a theoretical abstraction that no one has seen.” The term clearly has meaning, he clarifies; “it refers to the qualities of certain elements within consciousness which offer relative resistance and relative permanence as a necessary part of that creative process” (McGilchrist, 2021b). Matter is also critical for individuality to arise.

Put another way, McGilchrist has matter as “a special case, or a phase of consciousness.” Matter is not a separate thing, he says, any more than ice is separate from water; it's a phase of water; it's neither less nor more than water; it's not separate from water; it's a kind of water. And matter is a kind of consciousness—for a time—that has certain quite marked properties that are different from the way we normally think of consciousness, just as water is transparent and flows and all the rest, and ice is hard and opaque and can split your head open. So they're different but they're part of the same ontology.” McGilchrist stresses that “consciousness and matter must be distinguished”—but “there should be no need to set the one against the other.”

Consciousness, Matter, and Relational Being

McGilchrist's consciousness turns on its relational nature. He holds that “everything is relational, and that what we call things, the relata, are secondary to relationship.” Consciousness, he argues, is always “of” something, then he asks: “what is the nature then of that something that is both in part constitutive of, and in part constituted by, that relationship?”

A consequence, counterintuitive to most, is that while some scientists consider a “Reality Out There” to be independent of any consciousness whatsoever—naïve realism—McGilchrist says, “In reality, we participate in the knowing: there is no ‘view from nowhere’” (McGilchrist, 2021b).

Brain, Hemispheres, and Consciousness

Given that McGilchrist has consciousness as primordial and matter as a phase of consciousness, how does he have the relationship between the brain and consciousness? He says, “I do not suggest that the brain originates anything. I do not know that the brain ‘causes’ consciousness: it might or might not.” He goes on to note, rightly, “I know of no way of proving the point one way or the other, since the observable facts would look the same whether it [the brain] gave rise to, or simply mediated, consciousness.” In other words, the same findings are equally compatible with the brain emitting consciousness, transmitting consciousness, or permitting consciousness. (The latter two options are similar, except that permitting substitutes the idea of a constraint that is creative, fashioning what it allows to come into being, replacing the merely passive idea of transmitting.)” McGilchrist argues that “it is the last of these possibilities – permitting – that is the most convincing” (McGilchrist, 2021a, pp. 55, 1592).

Logically, McGilchrist's ontology would skew to the brain alone not causing consciousness and his medical training would skew to the brain not being a mere passive receiver of consciousness. His solution seems to be something like this: the brain structures, shapes and physically actualizes the consciousness we experience so that it can be expressed and felt by a body.

It's worth noting that McGilchrist's consciousness-matter ontology has a kind of relationship to his hemisphere hypothesis, which states that the brain's “two hemispheres have evolved so as to attend to the world, and therefore bring into being the only world we can know, in two largely opposing ways: the left hemisphere paying narrowly targeted attention to a detail that we need to manipulate; the right hemisphere paying broad, open, sustained, vigilant, uncommitted attention to the rest of the world while we focus on our desired detail” (McGilchrist, 2009, 2021a).

This means, he argues, that “each hemisphere brings into being a world that has different qualities … In the case of the left hemisphere, a world of things that are familiar, certain, fixed, isolated, explicit, abstracted from context, disembodied, general in nature, quantifiable, known by their parts, and inanimate. In the case of the right hemisphere, a world of Gestalten, forms and processes that are never reducible to the already known or certain, never accounted for by dissolution into parts, but always understood as wholes that both incorporate and are incorporated into other wholes, unique, always changing and flowing, interconnected, implicit, understood only in context, embodied and animate” (McGilchrist, 2009, 2021a).

Most importantly, the world of the right hemisphere is the world that presences to us, that of the left hemisphere a re-presentation: the left hemisphere a map, the right hemisphere the world of experience that is mapped.” To McGilchrist, loosely associating the right hemisphere with consciousness and the left hemisphere with matter may be more than metaphor.

Cosmos, Value, and Creative Process

Finally, McGilchrist sees “the cosmos as fundamentally relational, and the ground of Being as driven to come to know itself in and through creating an evolving cosmos. The ground of Being and the cosmos respond to each other. (So far this is in keeping with Whitehead.) What life does is to increase by untold orders of magnitude the responsiveness of that cosmos. I, like Nagel, see that ‘value is not just an accidental side-effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.’” What life brings, McGilchrist maintains, “is not consciousness, then—which, as I have argued, is present from the beginning—but the coming into being of the capacity for value: thus, a mountain cannot value, though it can have value for creatures, like ourselves, who value. And it is not just we, but all living creatures, that for the first time are able to recognize value. Life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness of, to and within the world.” Indeed, “life could be seen as the very process of the cosmic consciousness continually both discovering and furthering its beauty, truth, and goodness; both contemplating and (not separately but in the same indivisible act) further bringing them into being: a process” (McGilchrist, 2021a, pp. 1722, 1723).

Yet, the grounding of consciousness is not deterministic, McGilchrist says. It has none of the characteristics of being pre-programmed by “an omnipotent and omniscient engineering God constructing and winding up a mechanism. It is in the process of discovering itself through its creative potential (one thing we all know directly from our own experience is that consciousness is endlessly creative)” (McGilchrist, 2021a). The cosmos has purpose, McGilchrist says. “It has direction, but not direction of the hydraulic kind, being pushed blindly from behind, rather of the kind that is drawn from in front, by attractors that call it ever forward” (McGilchrist, personal communication).