Henri Bergson – Note to Self

Added Bergson’s Creative Evolution to my reading list after finding so many references in McGilchrist’s latest. And had also noticed lots of cross-links between Bergson and Whitehead / James through an active “fan” of Bergson on my timeline in the last couple of years (Emily Herring).

Keep coming across references to him having been the most famous philosopher, most famous and decorated public intellectual in fact, in his early 20th C time – Brooklyn’s first traffic jam, etc. This, despite also being evidently influential on so many other important thinkers, leaving you wondering why he had dropped out of the headlines in the same way that (say) Einstein is constantly recalled to public consciousness.

However, as I added Bergson to my list I had that feeling I had acquired Creative Evolution before, a title that so obviously fitted my agenda. Sure enough I mentioned starting (trying) to read it back here in 2007 (9/11 2007 as it happens) having bought it in Barnes & Noble when we were living in the US. So I scanned my library, thoroughly randomised by a recent down-sizing house-move, and found it. (A 2005 edition of the 1907 Harvard translation by Arthur Mitchell, assisted by Wm James. And I only acquired it because an MoQ-Discuss / Pirsig reference noted.)

A short but familiar reading list in there too, several of which also in the bibliography of McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things. Small world. Add The Creative Mind and Time and Free Will to the reading list.

And that pic reminds me – Mark Solms Hidden Spring sits there unfinished too. A victim of priorities over the course of this year. And I never did finish Zeman’s latest either.

Heritability of Psychological Traits

Always contentious that atypical variations around the neurotypical “human condition” are (a) real in any objective sense and (b) heritable as much as they are plastic in mental development. Always PC to avoid medicalising conditions away from such norms, and variety has its own value anyway, but the woke extreme of PC often denies the basic facts.

Kevin Mitchell re-tweeted this from an older thread


Earlier in the thread (that I hadn’t actually been following at the time) he had said:

“All species accumulate genetic variation that leads to heritable differences between individuals in all kinds of traits (that have a genetically specified species ‘norm’) Human psychology is no exception. It is the product of an incredibly complex program in the canonical human genome that specifies a canonical human brain. Except no individual has the ‘canonical’ human genome or brain – we all have inevitable variations in our genomes and *consequent variations* in our brains and our psychological traits.”

NOT part of the thread, but an aside that hit me relating this to the McGilchrist work, is taking the same logic to the idea that there are canonical male and female human brains, even if no individual can be that canonical exemplar and the individual variation is enormous.

Like so much of any field that his been tainted by pop-psychology it is normal (ie PC, woke) to deny very real biologically heritable, brain/mind and psychological sex/gender differences.

“[That] genetic differences affect our individual natures – is completely expected. It couldn’t be otherwise.”

In McGilchrist terms the sex/gender differences are an aside to his main agenda, but no less real. Something I picked-up on in his original Master and Emissary and supported by even more evidence in his latest. In fact it is a reminder of the scientific thoroughness needed in recording all case sample features in order not to be fooled by randomness – a false randomness imposed by prior political conditioning.

(To be clear women being different to men is something to value for them and for humanity and says nothing against anyone’s human rights or opportunities. In fact it’s positively a reminder that despite any and all heritable differences we share common human rights. Vive la difference! as I may have mentioned once or twice before.)

And I am not alone in warning about being fooled by the statistical randomness of aggregation across the sexes. Here Kathleen Stock picked-up on Jonathan Haidt’s latest:

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[Post note, coincidentally several threads generated by opinions about Haidt here. The recurring woke / PC problem of denying the deniers rather than attempting to understand subtle realities between extreme positions:


Includes even the gendered brain differences taboo – McGilchrist’s work is surely going to allow some common sense to pervade these spaces?]

Meta Communication of Things

[Latest updates re The Matter With Things:

I’m in a bit of a quandary. I have now, actually since the middle of last week, finished Part2 of McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things – paused intending to write another partial review – with copious notes – but have now started on Part3. That third part is already “Wow!”-level thought-provoking in terms of depth and breadth and it’s not that Part2 was any less so. The problem is, and looks like it will continue to be, what on earth to write?

Without a little “why?”, of the two extremes, a simple “everyone must read” recommendation is patently inadequate for a costly two-volume work. If you’ve not already acquired and read his previous Master and Emissary, on which this book builds, you could I guess, skip the time and expense of that first step. Although the content is additive in terms of specific sources and detail, the hemispheric arguments are rehearsed, recapped and summarised many times as well as being monumentally extended in this magnum opus.

You could argue with the editorial decision – beautifully executed by Perspectiva, taking over from McGilchrist’s less adventurous existing publisher- to publish the minimally edited 1577 pages into a single two-volume work. This as opposed to, say,  a more ruthless marketing edit or maybe recast as three separate new instalments in a trilogy of four? In fact, reading on, you see why theirs has been the enlightened decision.

On the other hand if I was to summarise all the highlights I considered novel or important, I would be re-writing a good deal of my past 20 years of blogging, of which the last decade has already been getting highly repetitive as it is. This is not to say that it is one of those books I might wishfully think “I could have written that”. There’s a whole ‘nother level of detail beyond all the original resources I’ve already plundered into a level I’ve barely even acknowledged second-hand or even been aware. Apart from name-dropping, how can that be summarised without further repetition? (eg Why stop at neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, when rabbi Jonathan Sacks can also support your case? We’ve all been there.) Maybe a huge classified matrix of who has said what would be my engineering presentation of preference.

A lot of quotes and references, from all over the academic map and timescales, can give any book a “learned” air, and it’s something I’ve already mentioned in previous reviews of Part 1 and of Master & Emissary before it. I’m sure some less scrupulous authors and publishers have used that as a tactic before. But it’s the strategic synthesis that is so important and largely original. As well as the references and quotes themselves, large parts of McGilchrist’s own text is paraphrasing and linking his sources. It’s a lot of the same or words just not necessarily in the same order. In fact the common etymologies of similar but divergent words and languages is another important thread. (As an aside, it demands the imagining of what McGilchrist might create with a purely artistic literary brief. Next time maybe?)

That may not sound like a hard sell or a strong recommendation for the current work, but it is the point. So much of this is ancient wisdom discarded by the received wisdom of the modern rational collective mind and painstaking stitched back together – made evident – by the polymath author. The important thing is that as well as the ancient sources, the major part of the evidence really is there in a mass of modern scientific output. A modern critical-thinking mind will undoubtedly analyse details of arguments they could pick to death, with the repeated application of but how? and why? There’s no shortage of target material if so motivated by their own rational standards, until we “starve upon the residue”. But again, this is the point. We’ve allowed our minds individually and collectively to adopt a narrow and ultimately destructive outlook on our world. Not for the first time I say that’s the Catch-22 lesson of this work.

So writing another review simply adds more similar words unlikely to provide any more effective impact on the world at large. But this is a very important book; one that everyone should not simply read or read about, but enact and embody. Best use of resources, mine or anyone else’s, is to surely to get the content into active groups of people interacting in as many walks of life as possible. Judged against the dry orthodoxy of the scientific community this approach might look a lot like a religious, even cultish, lifestyle movement. Of course the point is that dry “left-brain” orthodoxy is the cult humanity should be afraid of. He’s not the first to say it of course, but few if any have said it so thoroughly.

Meaningless Broad Definitions

I had this list in a recent post, reacting to Steven Pinker’s definition of rationality being so broad it was indistinguishable from any number of “good things”

He says:
“Rationality is using knowledge to attain [human] goals.”

I said:
Using knowledge to attain (human) goals is Rationality?
Using knowledge to attain (human) goals is Politics
Using knowledge to attain (human) goals is Cybernetics
Using knowledge to attain (human) goals is Game Theory
Etc, etc.

And now I add from this morning’s Reith Lecture by Stuart Russell on AI

Using information to attain goals is Artificial Intelligence?
Using information to attain (human) goals is Intelligence

One land-grab after another. Unashamed political interest.
Definitions so broad they are meaningless and useless.