← Philosophy For Our Times
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- [00:00]
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- [00:36]
Iain McGilchrist
You were quoting Augustine. And of course there are others like Pascal, who learned a lot from Augustine, who said that first you must love something if you are to understand it. But of course people would say, but you can only love it when you understand it. And there's some truth in what I'm getting at. There is a circular process or a recurrent reverberative process. So you, you commit yourself partially to something and you see what happens. And what happens guides your response and its response. And you won't find this by sitting calmly reading a book. You have to be immersed in the living process. It's like trying to learn to swim by sitting on the bank of a river with a book and saying, yes, I think I know now how to swim. You actually have to get into the water.
- [01:20]
Daniel (Podcast Host)
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Daniel here, and today's episode is a wonderful conversation between Ian McGilchrist and Rowan Williams, coming from very interesting and in places contrasting intellectual backgrounds. With Rowan, of course, formerly the Archbishop of Canterbury after spending years as an academic at both Oxford and Cambridge, and Ian, with an equally impressive academic background, along with decades of experience as a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, the pair tackle the age old question of whether we are capable of truly knowing anything. But from the perspective of knowledge as a relationship bound in time and as we'll see, requiring love. They'll touch on questions as varied as why some languages have several words for the concept of knowing to what the romantic poet Coleridge teaches us about imagination as a key form of knowledge, all the way to what the coronavirus pandemic revealed about our expectations of science. That's enough from me. So without further ado, let's let Iain McGilchrist and Rowan Williams take it away.
- [02:35]
Iain McGilchrist
But I think I'm going to be the one that kicks off, so to speak. First of all, it's a great honor and pleasure to be able to have this conversation. Rowan, we've talked in public before and in private, but it's always an honor. And I think, to a large extent, we have fairly similar visions of the cosmos, I believe, Although we do maybe have points of difference. But what I wanted to say, because I think one of the issues we're asking about is the nature of reality. And so we've got less than half an hour to get there. But one of the important points about it is that it has always seemed to me, since childhood and certainly since my teens, that the world was rather different from the one that is often explained in the modern idiom, which is of a world which is largely sort of passively there and not responsive to us. That opposites get as far away from one another as possible, whereas I believe they tend to coincide. That context makes a huge difference, and that things are connected one with another. And the process of the intellect is to divide them up. That dividing up is very important, of course, but it's only a preparatory phase to reconnecting something that is now more complex. And that, I think, is the bit that we've lost sight of. So, in the realms of epistemology, as I've laid out in the second part of my latest book, the Matter with Things, I think there are different ways in which we can get at reality, and they do involve science and they do involve reason. I'm passionate about both of them, but neither of those will take us all away by any means. We also need the capacity for intuition and imagination, which teaches other things that may be very true, but difficult to articulate in the terms or reach in terms of science and reason. I mean, a good example is music, something that has made my life as happy as it is and as fulfilled as it is. And yet it is not either encompassable by reason or by science. Neither can really explain why Mozart's G Minor Quintet is such a profound experience. And starting from there, just going on to the whole business of consciousness. You know, what is consciousness? The idea that everything can be reduced to mere matter. That is, if you believe matter is mere at all, which I don't, then you know you're missing an enormous amount in life. And I think the sense of something beyond that is connected to us, in which we all cohere, which has. An existence that suggests something rich and complex and that we have intuitions of and are drawn towards, but can never fully grasp. I think that is where I would situate my beliefs about the place of the sacred. At any rate in the idea of the cosmos as a whole. Do you have any reflections on that, Rowan?
- [05:57]
Rowan Williams
First of all, to say that I'm very impressed you've managed to reduce those two enormous volumes for the last five minutes. But that's not an excuse for not reading the two large volumes. I hasten to add a couple of things which have always struck me about your work and which struck me in the way you presented it now, which I think are key in pushing back at some of the myths that hold us captive in our contemporary culture. First is what you said about mere matter. We think there's a nice simple opposition between materialism and something else which is softer and woozier. And that means we buy into a particular mythology about what matter is. We think matter is little lumps of hard stuff. It exists in small associations and big associations, but basically it's little lumps of hard stuff. What if we reset our imagination where matter is concerned and think about matter in terms of communication frequency, energy in different concentrations, which is what any self respecting physicist will tell you. What if you start there? It all looks a bit different then. And that leads on to the second thing. We've bought into a picture of knowledge, which is essentially about something in here, looking out there, labeling, categorizing and so forth, sitting still while we take a rather slow exposure photograph of it as if we're saying to the world around, look, don't do anything, just hang on while I fix you again. What if the process of knowledge is a matter of attuning to energy communication that is coming to us? What if the form we intuit is active, not just passive?
- [07:48]
Iain McGilchrist
Exactly.
- [07:50]
Rowan Williams
And then I suppose that really leads on to the third crucial element in what you're sharing here, which is that our characteristic position in the universe as human subjects is neither that of a sort of mindless instrument of impersonal forces, nor the position of a godlike other who is somehow parachuted into this world of little lumps of stuff. Our position is that of someone who trying to catch the continuities, trying to go with the flow, quite literally to make something of the patterns of energy that are communicating to us. And part of that, and this is a key to the sort of granular work that you set out, especially in volume one of the two books. Part of this is the recognition that our brains are so constituted that it's not a matter of hard and soft bits of knowledge, but granular and integrative kinds of knowledge. If you're capable of recognizing eyes, noses and mouths, but have no idea what a face is, then there's something a bit wrong in how you're relating. And I'd love to hear you say more about the actual experimental evidence from the neurological world that helps fix that. Those are the things which I really taking us the take home messages from the books.
- [09:22]
Iain McGilchrist
Yes, thank you. And I probably won't because of time go into the detail of the neurology, but thank you for that recognition that there is something there that I think is important about two entirely different ways of attending to the world. The prime difference between the hemispheres is the kind of attention they pay. And I'm not going to take up a lot of time on the hemisphere hypothesis. But what is important is that the left hemisphere and sees these fixed things that the camera was photographing, as you referred to. So granular, atomistic, isolated, decontextualized, abstracted, fixed. Whereas the right hemisphere sees that in reality everything is connected ultimately to everything else. That it's never completely fixed or known or certain is knowable. And we can have greater degrees of certainty and truth about it. But it is not a final thing that exists out there. It is comes from a relationship. And this is the really key thing. I argue in the matter of things that relationships are what the universe is made of. And that the relata, the things that are related, emerge secondary from the web of relationships. I know that sounds paradoxical, but we haven't time to go into that. Perhaps too much, but the point there is that things only become what they are. Those things we think we see because of where they're situated in relation to everything else and the full context in which they inhere. And so that perception changes the way we think of knowledge. It's not that the stuff out there that we can more faithfully or other otherwise record simply passively. It's something about if we really want to know it, we have to enter into a relationship with it. And that means that something of us goes into the experience of whatever it is we experience no surprises in. But it does not emphatically insist, does not lead anywhere near a sort of postmodern belief that we all just make it up. I resist that with every fiber of my being. I think instead we have a task, a duty, which is to follow truthfully our intuitions where they seem to be testable and true in experience of life and that there is a truth. But it is something that we approach in a spirit of approximation and trust. In a relationship you trust the other. And trust and truth have the same origin. So I believe that whatever it is that we know and experience ultimately comes out of relationships. And of course in the Christian religion But also in other religions the ground of being, whatever word one uses to describe that, is love. And love is nothing except a relation.
- [12:20]
Rowan Williams
And the way you put it there reminds me of the way in which somebody like St. Augustine talks about knowledge itself. We don't know unless we love. And he doesn't by that mean we know what we feel warmly about. He means simply that we have an investment in our knowing. This is about me and how I'm going to be and how I'm going to receive give. And when I'm in that kind of relationship, truth actually impresses upon me. I am in an adequate or appropriate relationship with what is coming to me. And that's truthfulness. But precisely because it's relational, it's also time based. You can't freeze it, you can't say well that's it and that's all that there ever will be to say. And the other dimension which I think comes through very powerfully in your book in the Matter with Things is the role of time and the way in which certain kinds of dysfunction of the brain manifest themselves as an inability to cope with time sequences and an inability to see oneself as a time bound subject. Now that to me is both coming at it from a philosophical point of view and coming at it from a religious and theological point of view makes absolute sense. We are of our very nature, time taking beings. Growth is part of what we are. And if your ideal of knowledge is a set of again frozen photographs which will be the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, to use a theological phrase, then there's something again you've really missed there. But I want to come back, if I may, into the word intuition.
- [14:03]
Iain McGilchrist
Yes.
- [14:03]
Rowan Williams
Which you used. I would hazard a guess that for a lot of people in an audience like this the word intuition has a very slightly loose feeling.
- [14:12]
Iain McGilchrist
Yes.
- [14:13]
Rowan Williams
Oh, I've got an intuition that that's the case.
- [14:15]
Iain McGilchrist
Yes.
- [14:16]
Rowan Williams
But I think you're saying something rather stronger than that, aren't you?
- [14:18]
Iain McGilchrist
That there's.
- [14:18]
Rowan Williams
Yes, there's a cohesive connection making capacity that is just inbuilt in our mental process, which name it intuition or whatever. But it's stronger than just a vague feeling, isn't it?
- [14:32]
Iain McGilchrist
Yes. Intuitions can deceive us, there's no question about that. And that's a point of view that's put about and makes a lot of money for bands of psychologists who go into organizations all around the world and say never trust your intuitions. However, this is very foolish advice and what we need to do is not always trust but Certainly not never to trust, but to pay adequate respect to our intuitions. The same is true of reason and science. They can lead us to mistaken places. Even reason can believe me, and so I'm a great believer in science and reason. But they are not able to tell the full story, and intuition can tell us enormous amounts. And when you have to collapse an intuition, which is often implicit into an expression in language, it becomes single, explicit, and defined by language. Whereas when it remains at an intuitive level, as many as 12 or 15 different strands of knowledge and experience are being brought together and weighed together as a result of that. A jurist, in other words, an academic specialist in the law in Germany, the head of one of the Max Planck Institutes, says that in every organization, people should be encouraged as much as possible to understand their intuitions, use their intuitions, and, of course, examine their intuitions.
- [16:02]
Rowan Williams
I was thinking there of something I've quoted more than once in recent months, and that is Phil Whitaker writing in the New Statesman a couple of years ago about online diagnostic tools in medicine and the strength and the weakness, because the weakness is that there will always be in a physician's diagnosis elements that do not yield readily to precise formulation, but without which you will get things disastrously wrong in your perception of what's there. Because the online tools can only give you information in response to certain questions, and those will be the questions you are aware of. But if you're a good physician, you will know in the diagnostic process that there are things you are picking up which you don't know you're picking up, but those will be feeding in somewhere to your overall response. And I think it's that holistic sense and the sense of what you're not actually bringing to the forefront of your mind that is important. It's not flabby, it's not loose and impressionistic, but it's very hard to nail down.
- [17:09]
Iain McGilchrist
Yes. I mean, online tools can be trained obviously, on masses and masses of expert knowledge. And then we think that they're doing what an expert does. And sometimes they can be very helpful because they can work faster than the human mind often works, but they can be disastrously wrong because everything, this is a simple point, but a very important one. Everything depends on its context. And the context of symptoms is a whole person, a life, and all sorts of circumstances that are going on before and after the consultation and around it. So you're always dealing, again in a relationship. And what an AI tool doesn't give us the option of is a relationship. It may simulate dangerously, one and lead to a great deal of untruth and suffering. But it is that relationship that matters. And you know, you were quoting Augustine, and of course there are others like Pascal, who learned a lot from Augustine, who said that first you must love something if you are to understand it. But of course people would say, but you can only love it when you understand it. And there's some truth in what I'm getting at. There is a circular process or a recurrent reverberative process. So you, you commit yourself firstly to something and you see what happens. And what happens guides your response and its response. And you won't find this by sitting calmly reading a book. You have to be immersed in the living process. It's like trying to learn to swim by sitting on the bank of a river with a book and saying, yes, I think I know now how to swim. You actually have to get into the water.
- [18:48]
Rowan Williams
That's an absolutely key point, I think, because it takes us back to precisely this vastly ambitious subject we're supposed to be talking about, the nature of reality. Is reality being conceived, imagined as a mechanical process which can in principle be described from nowhere in particular? And can we occupy that nowhere in particular position, which is the assumption that's frequently made? Or is it something which is very much more like learning to swim, adjusting, receiving messages physically and mentally and imaginatively calibrating where we are, how we are shifting our balance without quite knowing why, as when we're walking up a steep incline, we. Yes, all of this is knowledge, and all of this is our share in reality as such.
- [19:39]
Iain McGilchrist
Yes.
- [19:39]
Rowan Williams
But just to put that in a different kind of cultural context, it occurred to me during the pandemic period that one of the tensions we were experiencing, among many others, was on the one hand, the solemn adjuration about following the science, and then sometimes a very deep skepticism about the science, because, you know, the science didn't give us the answer straight away. And it made me think that perhaps we're just expecting too much of science or expecting the wrong things. We're expecting the wrong kind of precision. Scientific studies can give us a fantastic level of precision in a number of respects unimaginable a generation ago. And that's wonderful. And neither you nor I want to be Luddite about that in any way at all.
- [20:31]
Iain McGilchrist
Absolutely not.
- [20:32]
Rowan Williams
But if you over egg the expectations of what science can deliver, if you say follow the science and your course of action will be clear, and the science isn't clear and you're not clear about course of action, the danger is the Pendulum swinging into an irrationalism anti scientific and ultimately anti truth mindset, which we've seen plenty of in the wilder corners of the online world is.
- [20:58]
Iain McGilchrist
And I think the. What you're illuminating is our tendency to want to be black and white about things when in reality there are shades and contexts that change the weight one should give to something. I'm slightly sympathetic to, you know, people who are lambasted for saying follow the science because at the time they didn't know what they were dealing with and they thought that it really could be an absolutely devastating plague. And so it's okay to use the retrospectroscope, but really one needs to be compassionate to people situation and the judgments that they make at those times. What I worry about though is, as we probably all in this room do, about the tendencies towards total control, monitoring, rule following and so forth that has come up in the wake of COVID and doesn't seem to be being repealed fast enough for me. But can I just come back to what you were saying about intuition? Because I wanted to bring in the important concept of imagination. And you of course, Rona, are a poet. And imagination was something that Coleridge wrote about probably more interestingly than anybody in English. And of course he was a poet, but he was also a very distinguished philosopher. And he put in the foremost place where our understanding of the world, imagination. Nowadays we tend to think that imagination is something that takes us away from reality. But what he meant was our only chance of actually entering into reality fully. And in fact he made a distinction that I remember when I was an undergraduate I found a little bit tiresome, but seems to me now deeply important between what he called primary imagination and secondary imagination. And by primary imagination he meant something that we all indulge in all the time, which is our ability to feel our way towards and bring into being something that is only a potential for us initially. And that. That is rather like what a poet does. There's a sense to the little that I've written poems, I have this feeling that there's some shape there and some phrases. And it's not like something that's built up sequentially, but it's more like a picture that's out of focus that very gradually comes into focus. So again, it's not a linear process, a holistic process. And the distinction he made between primary and secondary imagination was that secondary imagination is what poets and musicians and other people do. But primary imagination is the origin of that which is the thing we do all the time. So we are creating the world. We have a duty, we have a purpose, we have a role. You can shrug it off, you can deny it, but I would caution against doing that hastily because it may be part of our role here to discover the nature of reality. And often when people talk from the standpoint of someone like myself or Rowan, who is arguing for a complex world, that of course does not deny science or reason, but goes beyond them. One of the things they say is that we're making things up, really. There is no contact with reality. We're like Homunculus is sitting in an intracerebral sphere that has no windows on it, and all we're watching is a film projected interiorly. I deeply disagree with that. Our knowledge is, of course, partial, but not in the sense that it only goes part way towards reality. It's partial in the sense that any one person can only perhaps see what they can see, but nonetheless, what they see is actually real. And therefore, when people say, you know, purpose and value, which are so important to human flourishing, are things we invent to cheer ourselves up, you see, they're not inventions, they are discoveries. We are uncovering things that are there. And I hold that purpose and values like goodness, beauty and truth are primordial. They are ontologically primitive. They are part of the nature of consciousness. Whatever we mean by consciousness, it's always directed towards something. And that something is guided by values and purpose, which are intrinsic. And scientists are now beginning to recognize purpose, at any rate, and beginning to talk about it more freely. But, you know, the trouble was that in the past, science started from very reasonable premises that it was not going to consider value or purpose. It was going to see where it could go without those. But at the end of the day, it then reports back that having thoroughly examined anything, it can't find any values or purpose. Which brings us back to the idea of needing to be given partly to it to find it at all.
- [25:50]
Rowan Williams
That's right.
- [25:51]
Iain McGilchrist
I think it's.
- [25:52]
Rowan Williams
In a way, it's coming to see that knowledge is itself just one aspect of a much wider human project, if you want to put it like that, which is the project of being at home with the real.
- [26:05]
Iain McGilchrist
Absolutely.
- [26:06]
Rowan Williams
And you talk about goodness or beauty or truthful, as all of those are slightly, you know, glowing traditional words for being at home with reality one way or another. And the essence, therefore, of the ugly, the irrational, the sinful, whatever, is a jarring with what is real, which is deeply costly to what is real, including ourselves. So I think that's. That's absolutely axiomatic in, in looking at this, in. In the wider perspective. And I think Coleridge on primary imagination is a really, really helpful corrective to the assumption that somehow making connections between things is an optional extra for us in our intellectual activity. We do it, we cannot not do it, because.
- [26:55]
Iain McGilchrist
But what he would say is that it's not that we make those connections,
- [26:59]
Rowan Williams
it is already discovered, as you say,
- [27:01]
Iain McGilchrist
it's indissolubly a whole. Yes, and. But he says in certain casts of mind, the universe just seems to me a heap of fragments. But that's when he's thinking, as it were, with the left hemisphere away. And so I think the reality is continuity. And even David Tong, the professor of physics at Cambridge, thinks that physical reality is at ground continuous. And it's that togetherness and wholeness that we are uncovering. And so I like that very much.
- [27:28]
Rowan Williams
And it seems to me that we need to talk quite a lot more in our educational philosophy and educational practice about the two most remarkable and important aspects of our mental activity, mistakes and surprises. If we were simply sitting in the hermetically sealed cell of our cerebral activity making stuff up, there would be no mistakes and no surprises. No mistakes because our thinking would never run into anything difficult. No surprises because there wouldn't be something that we hadn't seen coming down the road. But our human activity, from nuclear physics through to poetry, is all about mistakes and surprises.
- [28:10]
Iain McGilchrist
I think that's a very, very good point. And I do absolutely agree that one of the reasons one can take it that one is encountering something other than one's own thinking is that often one finds that something doesn't work or is wrong. And one has to say once it got a surprise. Do you think, like me, that one of the problems for the English speaking world is that we only have one word for no. But in most other cultures there's more than one word. One means knowing facts in the sense from the outside, the left hemisphere, knowing that Paris is the capital of France, but also another kind of knowing which only comes through experience of actually having spent a year or two in Paris. And you know, they're Cannon and Vista and Le Cornette from the Savoy. But I gather from other people speaking many other languages that this is pretty much the case. But I think a lot of the wrongness with Anglo American analytic philosophy comes from misunderstanding what means by what we mean by no. Is that it? Yes. Thank you.
- [29:10]
Rowan Williams
I've learned something at nabod, having importantly the connotations of recognizing.
- [29:16]
Iain McGilchrist
Recognizing. Exactly. Not cognizing, but recognizing something that is there.
- [29:23]
Rowan Williams
It's again a reminder that we look back at our intellectual history and we iron out the difficulties, the diversities. And one thing that has always and rumbled alongside the mainstream Anglo American philosophy is that tradition going back at east of the 17th century in English language philosophy of what's sometimes called probabilism, the idea that our knowledge is based on accumulating a whole wide range of acquaintanceship with things out of which eventually comes an integrative solution that suggests itself rather than imposes itself. And from, I don't know, from some of the Cambridge Platonists through to Bishop Berkeley in the 18th century, to Coleridge and Newman in the 19th century, and that I suppose you could say in some ways to writers like Iris Murdoch in the 20th century as well as surprisingly, really surprisingly Wittgenstein. All of these have notions of certainty and knowledge and conclusion, conclusive knowledge that are very non mechanistic, that always assume that there are things going on in my processes of learning that I will not be conscious of, but will nonetheless be determinative for where I get to and where to use an image I quite like it. Where I decide to put my weight. Is this a load bearing way of
- [30:54]
Iain McGilchrist
moving through the world? And I suppose what that brings to my mind is people ask me sometimes, could there be an AI version of what the right hemisphere does? And I think the answer to that has to be no, because its knowledge is non computable. It simply is as it's something that can't be done using algorithms or procedures and involves being an embodied being with the awareness of one's mortality and all the things that one feels because of the relationships that make us who we are. Because however much we may pretend that we are individuals, we are the products of and we owe everything to the society to which we belong, the people. When I say society, I mean the group of people with whom we in. With whom we belong. And actually you mentioned this business of being at home. I do love this because, you know, what we've lost is the sense of the earth or the cosmos as a home. And I think it's a mistake because we've discovered there's a vast extent to space and the sheer scale of it makes one think so. But this has actually nothing to do with home in it. And that feeling of being at home is very important to recover. And I think it depends on re establishing our sense of oneness with other people, oneness with nature and oneness with the higher Power, with God, with the spiritual realm, whatever it is and I can demonstrate scientifically and doing my work the extraordinary benefits that occur or result from adopting these positions. But that's not the reason for doing them. It's because they are intrinsically good, not for some utility we will acquire. And they bring us understanding. And I think understanding needs to be glossed as well, because there's knowledge and there's even information that comes before knowledge. There's data and then there's knowledge, which comes from being able to make some sort of sense. And then there's understanding, which is the business of something deeper in which you actually see the nature of what it is you are encountering. And it has full reality.
- [33:08]
Rowan Williams
I think we're being told.
- [33:22]
Daniel (Podcast Host)
Thank you for listening to philosophy for our times. What do you think? Do you agree that we should see knowledge more as an equal or symbiotic relationship with whatever we're striving to understand? Or is such an attitude just a distraction from the fact that we will never truly get close to any kind of certainty or understanding? Normally I'd have a bit of a conversation here with my co host, but since I'm on my own this week, I thought I'd open it up to all of you at home. So here's a question for you all. If you speak a language aside from English, does your language have multiple ways of viewing knowledge, as we saw in the talk in French, German and Welsh, for example? And what do you think that reveals about what it can mean to know something? If you pop me a message in the comments section on whatever platform you're using, or send me an email using the address in the show notes, I promise I'll give them a read. And if you'd like to hear more, please like and subscribe and head over to our website, IAI TV for plenty more debates, talks and interviews from the world's leading thinkers. Bye.