• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

McGilchrist and the Re-Enchantment of the Brain

Between Neuroscience and Metaphysics

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction

Iain McGilchrist is a unique figure straddling neuroscience, philosophy, cultural criticism, and spiritual inquiry. Best known for The Master and His Emissary and its expansive sequel The Matter With Things, he presents a provocative thesis: that the brain's hemispheres are not merely biological structures but represent competing ways of engaging with reality. For McGilchrist, the dominance of the left hemisphere's abstract, mechanical worldview has led to a civilizational crisis—one only resolvable through a rebalancing in favor of the right hemisphere's relational and holistic perspective.

This essay explores the speculative dimensions of McGilchrist's work, situating him between mainstream neuroscience and more metaphysical thinkers like Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ken Wilber. How scientific is McGilchrist's project? Where does it border on spiritual or mystical idealism? And can his call for re-enchantment be squared with naturalism?

From Neuropsychology to Civilizational Critique

McGilchrist began his career as a psychiatrist and academic, trained in the empirical tradition. However, his writings rapidly evolve beyond clinical neuroscience into broader cultural and philosophical territory. His central argument is deceptively simple: the two hemispheres of the brain have distinct, even conflicting, modes of understanding the world. The left favors abstraction, manipulation, and certainty; the right values context, embodiment, and ambiguity.

But McGilchrist's move is not merely descriptive. He argues that the modern world—particularly post-Enlightenment Western culture—has become dominated by the left-hemisphere's narrow mode of attention. As a result, we increasingly inhabit a reified, fragmented, and ultimately dehumanized world. The brain's internal struggle becomes an allegory for the condition of modernity itself.

While this diagnosis is rhetorically powerful, it makes a major speculative leap. There is little hard evidence that the structure of brain hemispheres causally determines the evolution of cultures or civilizations. McGilchrist relies on an interpretive narrative that blends psychology with metaphysics—a method more reminiscent of Goethe or Spengler than modern neuroscience.

Consciousness as Primary

A major turning point comes in The Matter With Things, where McGilchrist openly challenges materialist metaphysics. He argues that consciousness is not a byproduct of matter but its ground. This view places him in proximity to philosophical idealism, panpsychism, or even process theology.

Unlike neuroscientists who seek correlates of consciousness in brain function, McGilchrist asks whether the very idea of consciousness as an emergent property is a category error. Consciousness, he suggests, is ontologically prior—something we know directly through lived experience, not infer through neural imaging.

This aligns him more with thinkers like Bernardo Kastrup, who asserts that the universe exists within universal consciousness, and Ken Wilber, who sees Spirit as both the source and goal of all development. But McGilchrist avoids systematizing. His approach is phenomenological, literary, and cautiously reverent. He speaks of the sacred and the ineffable, but refrains from naming a God.

A Participatory Cosmos

McGilchrist's metaphysical commitments include a radical revaluation of how we engage with reality. He argues for a “reverent” stance: one that experiences the world as alive, interconnected, and meaningful. The cosmos, in his view, is not a dead machine but a dynamic, responsive whole. Value, beauty, and love are not projections but intrinsic features of existence.

In this, McGilchrist echoes Rupert Sheldrake, who argues that modern science has stripped the world of vitality. Sheldrake's notion of “morphic fields”—patterns of memory and form not reducible to genetics or physics—is a direct challenge to mechanistic biology. While McGilchrist does not endorse Sheldrake's field theories, he shares the intuition that reality resists flattening into left-brain analysis.

Both thinkers insist on restoring the sense of the sacred—not through dogmatic religion, but through a deeper attunement to lived, relational experience.

Comparison with Wilber's Integral Model

Ken Wilber's Integral Theory offers a systematic attempt to include science, spirituality, psychology, and culture in a unified framework. Like McGilchrist, Wilber diagnoses modernity as suffering from “flatland”—a reduction of the richness of being to quantifiable surfaces. Both critique the dominance of rational-analytical modes of thought and advocate a recovery of depth.

However, Wilber operates within a teleological developmental model: reality evolves from matter to life to mind to spirit, with each level transcending and including the previous. McGilchrist is more circumspect about progress narratives. While he implies that Western civilization has lost its way, he avoids any clear stage model or promise of spiritual ascent.

Indeed, one could argue that Wilber's model is left-brain friendly in its structural elegance, whereas McGilchrist champions the messier, open-ended, and aesthetic register of the right hemisphere.

Scientific Standing and Criticisms

From a mainstream scientific perspective, McGilchrist is a maverick. He is not engaged in empirical research, does not publish in peer-reviewed neuroscience journals, and his models of hemispheric difference are often seen as overly metaphorical or rooted in outdated dichotomies.

Critics argue that:

• Brain hemispheres are highly integrated and rarely act in opposition.
• Cultural changes cannot be causally attributed to neural architecture.
• McGilchrist's grand narratives lack falsifiability and empirical testability.

In this sense, McGilchrist's work is scientific in style but philosophical in substance. He uses neuroscience as a springboard to discuss themes that border on metaphysics, theology, and existential reflection. Whether this disqualifies his work depends on one's epistemological commitments.

Re-Enchantment Without Dogma

What makes McGilchrist compelling—despite the lack of empirical rigor—is his ability to re-enchant the reader's perception of mind, nature, and culture. He speaks to a growing audience disillusioned with materialist reductionism but wary of religious literalism.

He offers a third way: neither mechanistic science nor supernatural belief, but a renewed attention to lived experience, relational knowing, and the poetic resonance of being. His call is less for belief than for perception—a shift in how we attend to the world.

In this, McGilchrist stands alongside other post-materialist thinkers. But unlike Kastrup's monistic metaphysics or Sheldrake's field hypotheses, he remains rooted in humanistic, phenomenological observation. His speculative leap is not into alternative science, but into the value-laden structure of reality as it discloses itself.

Conclusion: A Brain Worth Listening To

Iain McGilchrist is not a typical scientist. His work will not change neuroscience labs or produce new data on brain function. But he is a rigorous and passionate interpreter of science, one who dares to ask what brain research means for how we live, think, and love.

His writing invites a metaphysical conversation that neuroscience has often refused to have. Whether or not one agrees with his idealism or cultural critique, he offers something rare: a deeply literate, spiritually sensitive, and intellectually honest voice asking what kind of world the brain reveals—and whether we are capable of hearing it.