More Iain McGilchrist
at an CIIS conference
Yesterday Matthew David Segall published In Defense of Truth as Participation: A Process Philosophical Proposal. This title did not arouse my curiosity but the subtitle did: My presentation at "Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist," a conference at CIIS March 29-31. Together with my two co-creators Claudia Dommaschk and Jochen Weber, we are playing with the ideas of McGilchrist.
Below is from Segall’s conference opening comments, available here on YouTube, 7 minutes worth watching.
Something is the matter.
Our world is suffering. Nations are at war with more threatening to join the fray. Earth itself is convulsing. A mass extinction of species is well underway, the sixth great mass extinction in Earth's history. Human civilization is teetering on the edge. You might say on one side there are transhuman delusions and on the other side reactionary tribalisms, and so many more issues that we are facing. We're losing our way. We're threatened by other lies, nationalism, materialism, the list goes on.
But who are we? We, who are we?…We probably know no more about ourselves today than in Plotinus' time thousands of years ago. Why is that?
And why is this important?
Iain’s offering us a diagnosis. All civilizations rise and fall, but this time may be different. The wave of progress has grown higher and more massive, making our world more interconnected and more fragile than ever before. And we still have a chance. I know Iain well enough to know he's actually optimistic. The diagnosis that Iain has made suggests that the evil we face is not out there. It's not those other people. It's in ourselves. We must remember who we are.
I tried reading the transcript of Segall’s presentation “In Defense of Truth as Participation: A Process Philosophical Proposal” but I did not get very far, beyond my ability to comprehend.
However, we sense that the ideas of McGilchrist are also important and relevant to average and ordinary people. Many of us are motivated to do what we can while we still have a chance. And Claudia has an audacious idea that makes a lot of sense to me, that we add the feminine spirit to the story we are writing, our own version of The McGilchrist Manoeuvre described by Jonathan Rowson.
Writing essays and articles are a way I learn and a way to share my work which so far on McGilchrist and on feminism includes the following:
Three Wise Men
About Iain McGilchrist - Part 1
About Iain McGilchrist - Part 2
Final Wave Feminism
At Limicon 2024 we made the following announcement:
After Limicon 2024, Claudia Dommaschk, John Stokdijk and Jochen Weber will be playing with a potential implementation of "The McGilchrist Manoeuvre". We are inspired by the article by Jonathan Rowson which we recommend as a grounding reading. Join us as we oscillate from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere and back to the right again. If you would like to zoom out, zoom in and zoom out again, please let us know. Our email addresses are cdommaschk@gmail.com, john.stokdijk@gmail.com and cj.hammond.gm@gmail.com. We can also be reached on Substack. Claudia writes Immediacy Forum, John writes Metamodern Wannabes and Jochen writes Jochen’s Substack. Further details will be shared in coming weeks.
Please let me or Claudia or Jochen know if any of this lights you up.
This conference aligns with a paradigm shift as reflected by its vision. And also presenting at the conference were metamodern thinkers Zak Stein and John Vervaeke. And I also noted Richard Tarnas whose book The Passion of the Western Mind I read many years ago.
Friday, March 29th – Sunday, March 31st, 2024 | San Francisco, CA & Online
CONFERENCE VISION AND RATIONALE
Iain McGilchrist’s recent magnum opus The Matter With Things (2021) constitutes one of the most significant contributions to the contemporary process tradition as revealed through layers of neuroscientific data and decades of remarkable clinical research into brain lateralization and the hemisphere hypothesis. Drawing from multiple scientific disciplines, and from both ancient and modern philosophers including Heraclitus, Schelling, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and others, McGilchrist has established himself as a formidable process thinker committed to reintegrating the holistic modes of thought associated with the right hemisphere as a guide to cultural renewal. As part of this effort, he affirms the ontological irreducibility of relationality, time, value, purpose, experience, consciousness, and the sacred. This conference brings leading process thinkers across various disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and theology into critical dialogue with McGilchrist’s work in a collegial effort to assess, question, extend, and apply it.
Co-organized by California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) & Center for Process Studies (CPS)
I’d be open to attending your event on the McGilchrist manouevre
i attended the conference. it was a pleasant thought provoking experience, particularly connecting with other attendees. i’d say it ended on a less hopeful note, speaking to the West entering a period of death that provokes existential questioning, without many thoughts on how to escape it, but how to move through it.