## Metadata - Author: [[Iain McGilchrist]] - Full Title: The Matter With Things - Category: #books ## Highlights - The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature. ([Location 350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09KY5B3QL&location=350)) - One way of looking at paradox is as an indicator that we are dealing with two apparently valid world-pictures which yet do not concur. These two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival. We need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to deal with the necessities of life, and to build the foundations of a civilisation. But to live in it, we also need to belong to the world and to understand the complexity of what it is we are dealing with. This division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. However, it is a handicap – in fact, it is a catastrophe – when we use only one. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09KY5B3QL&location=789)) - Note we can begin with the description in terms of physics, but could never progress from that to the experiential tree; whereas we can begin with the experience and later incorporate within it the physics. The right hemisphere can incorporate the left’s take, but the left cannot incorporate that of the right. The mechanistic vision can come only from experience, even if it is an experience from which much has been excluded; the experience of the tree can never emerge from the mechanistic vision. ([Location 19774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09KY5B3QL&location=19774)) - Scientists involved in the Biosphere 2 project, which created the largest enclosed ecological system on earth, were puzzled by the fact that trees within the project repeatedly failed to achieve maturity before they fell over. Later, they realised that trees needed wind in order to grow strong. Exposure to winds causes the growth of ‘stress wood’, which is the core of the tree’s strength and integrity. Winds also cause the root system to strengthen. ([Location 19878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09KY5B3QL&location=19878)) - In political life, as every one knows, extreme anarchy and extreme despotism naturally lead to one another. The perception of dialectic in the province of individual ethics is seen in the well-known adages: ‘Pride comes before a fall’; ‘Too much wit outwits itself’. Even feeling, bodily as well as mental, has its dialectic. Everyone knows how the extremes of pain and pleasure pass into each other: the heart overflowing with joy seeks relief in tears, and the deepest melancholy will at times betray its presence by a smile. ([Location 19939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09KY5B3QL&location=19939)) - Note: Hegel - It is right it should be so; Man was made for Joy & Woe … Joy & Woe are woven fine, A Clothing for the Soul divine; Under every grief & pine, Runs a joy with silken twine. ([Location 19960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09KY5B3QL&location=19960)) - Note: Blake - The imagination thrives on the implicit, and is deadened by the explicit. The explicit is single: the implicit is a coming together of opposites, and requires the simultaneous presence and absence of whatever is being gestured towards. ([Location 19964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09KY5B3QL&location=19964)) - Somehow life does, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying opposites at once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our civilization presents … the way to certainty lies through radical doubt; virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its overcoming; by obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical and the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution. You hate your enemy?—well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals of fire on his head; to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save your soul, first lose it; in short, die to live. ([Location 19992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09KY5B3QL&location=19992)) - Note: William James