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Everything Flows, Heraclitus and Iain McGilchrist – Part 3

March 7, 2026March 7, 2026jennymacknessLeave a comment

This is the third and final post about the talk I gave to my local U3A (University of the Third Age) philosophy group on March 4^th, 2026. In it I focus on how Iain McGilchrist, philosopher and polymath, who lives on the Isle of Skye and in 2021 published The Matter With Things. Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, has been influenced by Heraclitus in his thinking about the nature of reality.

For the first two posts, and to understand the talk as a whole, see:

Everything Flows, Heraclitus and McGilchrist – Part 1

Everything Flows, Heraclitus and McGilchrist – Part 2

I have been following Iain McGilchrist’s work since he published his first major book, ‘The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World’ in 2009. I first heard him talk about Everything Flows in 2019. But even though I have heard McGilchrist say that Heraclitus is his all-time favourite philosopher, I didn’t know enough about Heraclitus to realise how much he has influenced McGilchrist’s thinking and writing. This influence can be clearly seen in his books, and particularly in Part 3 of Volume 2 of The Matter With Things. This is a 500 page in depth exploration of The Unforeseen Nature of Reality.

In my U3A talk, I referred to three of the chapters that McGilchrist wrote in Part 3 of Volume 2 of The Matter With Things, that seem to relate very closely to Heraclitus’ philosophy – The Coincidentia Oppositorum, The One and the Many and Flow and Movement.

I only had time to make brief reference to instances where it seemed to me that McGilchrist had clarified, emphasised or added to Heraclitus’ philosophy.

The Coincidentia Oppositorum (which relates to Heraclitus’ key idea of the Unity of Opposites)

McGilchrist has many similar ideas to Heraclitus, but he uses modern language and advances in science to explore these.

He tells us that opposites are not mutually exclusive. It is not the case that the further you go towards one end of the line, the further away you are from the opposite end. If you go far enough in any direction you reach not more of what you desire but its opposite. Opposites go full circle and eventually coincide. The example I have heard him give of this is that extreme religious fundamentalists and extreme atheists ultimately have the same world view. They are both uncritical of their beliefs which they think are infallible and they both cannot see alternative perspectives.

McGilchrist emphasises three points in relation to Heraclitus key idea of the Unity of Opposites. First, he tells us that the Unity of Opposites can be misunderstood as resolving a contradiction. But he says, opposites don’t just unite. Rather they coincide. They fall into one another to reveal a deeper truth. He asks us to imagine placing two images on top of one another. They do not merge to create a static whole but fall together in dynamic creative tension and reveal a new image.

Second McGilchrist emphasises this generative creative power of opposites saying opposing forces are necessary and interdependent. Heraclitus used the bow and lyre as metaphors to explain this. McGilchrist uses friction saying that constraint on movement is what makes movement possible. Just a certain amount is needed. Too much or too little friction and there is no movement. The opposing forces must be kept in balance.

The third point he emphasises is that a thing and its opposite can both be true at the same time. Opposite truths do coincide. We must therefore accept both and we should stay with the contradiction. He quotes A.N. Whitehead as saying: To have seen it from one side only is not to have seen it.

McGilchrist believes that happiness comes from integrating opposites and reconnecting with whole.

The One and the Many (which relates to Heraclitus’ key idea of Logos)

According to McGilchrist this key idea is often overlooked in relation to Heraclitus’ philosophy. The One and the Many addresses a key philosophical question: Is reality a single unified thing or a collection of distinct multiple things?

For Heraclitus and McGilchrist reality is both single and multiple. For Heraclitus the One (Logos) represents the single underlying essence of reality and the Many represents multiplicity, diversity, change and flux. The One (Logos) is a process that holds the Many (conflicting opposites) in tension.

In my last post I wrote that McGilchrist has said that Logos is an unword and that in our Western world the equivalent unword is God. I have also heard McGilchrist refer to God as a process.

Heraclitus wrote about the One and the Many as follows:

The One is made up all things, and all things issue from the One

Listening not to me but to the Word (Logos), it is wise to agree that all things are One

For McGilchrist all is one, but also all is many. Everything is interconnected. The One and the Many are not contradictory but mutually defining. The One and the Many are two sides of the same coin. The important point, according to McGilchrist, is that a healthy understanding of the world involves integrating these two perspectives. It involves ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’ thinking.

For McGilchrist we must move beyond black and white thinking. Societies need unity and diversity. Overemphasis on unity leads to rigid totalitarian societies. Overemphasis on diversity leads to fragmented societies.

‘Both/and’ thinking acknowledges that everything is in flux and subject to change. Not just being but also becoming.

Flow and Movement (which relates to Heraclitus’ key idea of Everything Flows)

For Iain McGilchrist flow is not primarily about change but equally about persistence and permanence. The river is ever changing but ever the same. Heraclitus wrote:

By changing it remains the same

McGilchrist also emphasises the relationship between flow and resistance. He believes that a balance between flow and resistance is essential for creativity and understanding. Nothing can come into being without a degree of resistance. Flow is the ultimate reality, but resistance is essential for creation.

McGilchrist asks us to imagine introducing resistance, such as a stick or stone, into a flow of water, a river, or stream. We have probably all seen that this creates difference and form. Behind the stick or stone, we see eddies and patterns in the water. McGilchrist uses the example of a whirlpool to talk and write about this. He says the whirlpool is not a thing in itself. It cannot exist without the water. It momentarily takes on a specific temporary dynamic form which can be photographed, measured and has the power to move things, but eventually dissipates back into the river.

McGilchrist suggests that the whirlpool is an analogy for existence, a metaphor for our lives. It serves as a metaphor for birth, life and death as one fluid motion.

McGilchrist says we are temporary manifestations within the flow. We are not separate from the underlying reality but momentary configurations of it. After a while the whirlpool resolves and merges back into the mainstream of the river, its energy changing form rather than ceasing to exist.

We, as individuals, ultimately integrate back into the great stream of things.

For both Heraclitus and McGilchrist flow is the ultimate reality.

For Heraclitus:

Logos is the underlying principle that structures reality.

Logos expresses as ever burning fire which symbolises constant change.

Constant change/flux is the result of dynamic tension between opposites.

Logos unifies opposites bringing them into harmonious but constantly shifting balance where everything is in a state of perpetual becoming.

McGilchrist takes this further emphasising:

The generative power of opposites that drives all creation.

The importance of the One and the Many, Unity and Diversity, ‘both/and’ thinking and alternative perspectives.

That flow is about change but also about permanence.

That resistance is essential for creativity and understanding.

So What?

At the end of my talk, I asked the group to consider the question ‘So What?’

What does it matter whether ultimate reality is static or a continuous flow?

For me there are many implications from Heraclitus’ philosophy that remain relevant to our lives today. Some of these relate to

Our view of reality as constantly changing or static

The meaning of stability in life

The role of conflict in our lives

The idea of the stable self and identity

The nature of truth

The nature of knowledge and education. How we can truly know anything if everything is constantly changing.

The implications of Heraclitus’ philosophy for an ethical life

References

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

Everything Flows, Heraclitus and Iain McGilchrist – Part 2

March 7, 2026March 7, 2026jennymacknessLeave a comment

This is my second post about a talk I gave to my local U3A (University of the Third Age) philosophy group on Everything Flows. Here is a link to the first post.

Everything Flows, Heraclitus and McGilchrist – Part 1

I started the talk with a little background on Heraclitus himself – what do we know about the man? What was he like? and then moved on to discuss Heraclitus’ philosophy and beliefs.

Heraclitus – the man

Heraclitus was an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher. We don’t have any exact dates for him, but we know he was active in the late 6th century and early 5th century BCE; more than 2500 years ago and 30 years before Socrates was born. He was born and died in Ephesus, which at the time was on the western coast of Asia Minor and is now in western Turkey. In the time of Heraclitus, Ephesus was a commercially prosperous, thriving community and cultural centre. It was also home to influential philosophers such as Thales and Anaximander.

This was a golden age for philosophy, when these pre-Socratic philosophers explored how the universe originated, how it functions and new ways of thinking about the nature of reality. It was a time when there was a monumental leap in human thought away from mythological explanations to rational abstract philosophical enquiries. An example of a mythological explanation is that a volcano erupts because Poseidon (God of sea, storms, earthquakes and horses) was angry. The pre-Socratics no longer found these mythological explanations satisfying and Heraclitus was at the centre of this shift in thinking.

Heraclitus was born into a wealthy family, but he shunned hereditary social conventions. He had a reclusive nature, living a solitary, simple, ascetic life, and he was subject to depression and melancholy, so much so that he earned himself the nickname ‘The Weeping Philosopher’. Some artists have painted Heraclitus as the weeping philosopher. In Raphael’s famous School of Athens painting, Heraclitus is the moody, solitary figure in the foreground.

Heraclitus is purported to have been an eccentric, arrogant man who didn’t suffer fools gladly and who didn’t think much of fellow citizens. He thought the opinion of the majority worthless, disliked mankind and avoided humanity.

He only wrote one work, but he was so critical of the city’s governance that he didn’t allow open access to this book, depositing it in Temple of Artemis, where the general public could not access it. And since it was written on papyrus, it didn’t survive.

So we only know Heraclitus’ ideas from 100 fragments written by later authors, including Plato and Aristotle. These fragments are full of contradictory ideas. They are written as series of cryptic, poetic aphorisms, in which Heraclitus used metaphor, simile and wordplay to express ideas. For example:

If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult.

Meaning: We must maintain an open and questioning mindset to understand the nature of reality.

Because Heraclitus’ fragments are paradoxical and difficult to interpret, he earned himself a second nickname – The Riddler.

Iain McGilchrist believes that Heraclitus’ style of writing was deliberately ambiguous in order to highlight the hidden, implicit, unbounded nature of reality, to invite multiple interpretations and to encourage us to reflect on the complexity of the world and the idea that truth can be approached from different perspectives.

Heraclitus wanted us to question and think more deeply about the nature of reality. In relation to the complexity of the world Heraclitus wrote, Nature loves to hide. Einstein wrote something similar: Nature hides her secrets, and Heidegger wrote The clearing in which Being stands is itself at the same time, concealment.

Heraclitus most famous fragment is arguably:

Into the same river you could not step twice, for other and still other waters are flowing

Plato, Aristotle as Plutarch interpreted this as meaning all things are in motion and nothing is at rest.

This view of reality was a significant challenge to philosophers of the time, such as Parmenides, who believed in a static view of reality.

Heraclitus’ beliefs and philosophy

‘Everything Flows’ forms the basis of Heraclitus’ philosophy. He is best known for this theme of flux or flow, but in fact his work is multilayered and he is less well known for his ideas on

The Unity of Opposites
Logos – the governing principle of the Universe
Fire – the underlying substance of the Universe

These 4 key ideas – Flow, the Unity of Opposites, Logos and Fire – are all essential to understanding what ‘Everything Flows’ means and (I would suggest) all remain relevant to our understanding of the nature of reality today.

Everything Flows

It is not certain that Heraclitus used these exact words, but we do know that he believed everything to be in constant state of flux, a constant state of becoming/transforming and that stability is an illusion. For Heraclitus change comprises the fundamental essence of universe. He emphasised process and dynamic interaction over static views of reality, which was really controversial at the time. Heraclitus’ thinking was process oriented. We can probably say that he was the very first process philosopher. For Heraclitus the world is always becoming, never being.

As I have already mentioned his most famous fragment is:

Into the same river you could not step twice, for other and still other waters are flowing.

Meaning: You cannot step into the same river twice because both you and the river are constantly changing. On stepping into the river the second time, the river has changed, and you have changed. The river bed and the cells in our bodies have changed. According to scientists the cells in our bodies change completely every 10 years or so; some change faster than this.

Heraclitus also wrote this famous fragment slightly differently:

Into the same river we both step and do not step. We both are and are not.

Meaning: The nature of reality is paradoxical. Things can be both the same and different simultaneously.

Heraclitus saw these paradoxical contradictions as essential to harmony, transformation and dynamic balance in life. This leads to his second key idea; the unity of opposites.

The Unity of Opposites

Heraclitus believed that contradictory or opposing forces are interconnected and interdependent, that opposites are not separate entities but different aspects of the same underlying reality, and that the balancing of opposites leads to unity in the universe.

Fragments which relate to this key idea are:

The way up and the way down is one and the same.

Sea water is at once very pure and very foul; it is drinkable and healthful for fishes, but undrinkable and deadly for me.

Meaning: foul and fresh, drinkable and undrinkable are one and the same.

This thinking is not unique to Heraclitus. Neils Bohr (father of modern physics) wrote: It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth. Carl Jung coined word ‘enantiodromia’ for a philosophical principle describing how an extreme one-sided tendency will eventually give way to its opposite to restore balance, and the Yin Yang symbol in Taoism represents opposing forces flowing into and becoming each other.

Logos

Logos is Heraclitus’ central pivotal concept. It refers to cosmic order or harmony of the world, the divine principle governing constant change and order in the cosmos.

For Iain McGilchrist Logos is an unword. McGilchrist tells us that every language of every people has an unword that holds the place for a power that underwrites the existence of everything. For the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu the unword was Tao. For Confucius it was Li. For Hindus it is Brahman. For Arabic peoples it is Allah and in our Western tradition it is God.

Heraclitus believed that Logos arises from the dynamic tension between opposing forces and gives rise to reality through continuous creation of balance.

The fragment that relates to this is:

The harmony of the world is a harmony of oppositions, as in the case of the bow and of the lyre.

The bow and lyre rely on opposing forces to function. An arrow cannot fly from a bow without the bow being pulled in one direction and the string in the other. The lyre can only produce a musical note because of the tension created by pulling a string in two opposite directions.

This explains Heraclitus’ fragment: War is the father of all things.

It is the creative tension between opposite forces that brings things into existence. Logos unites opposites and ensures the harmony of all things. Logos is the universal principle of change and order.

Fire

Fire is Heraclitus’ fourth key idea. For Heraclitus fire is the physical manifestation of Logos and represents universal flux, constant change and the unity of opposites.

Many pre-Socratic philosophers proposed basic elements, such as fire, as fundamental substances from which everything originates and as symbols of change. For Thales water was the basic element. For Anaximenes it was air. For Empedocles it was earth, air, fire and water and for Anaximander it was not a single substance, but ‘apeiron’ , the boundless, indefinite, ever moving source.

But for Heraclitus it was constantly changing fire, a symbol of change and process.

He wrote:

Everything is an exchange for fire, and fire for everything – as goods for gold and gold for goods.

For Heraclitus fire is the driving principle of change. While fire consumes life it also sustains life. It symbolises the unity of opposites, as it represents the destruction and creation that occur simultaneously.

These 4 key ideas from Heraclitus’ philosophy, Flow, the Unity of Opposites, Logos and Fire, set the stage for future philosophical thinking and continue to influence philosophers today. From my reading the most clear recent example of this influence is seen in the work of Iain McGilchrist which will be the subject of my next post.

Everything Flows, Heraclitus and Iain McGilchrist – Part 1

March 7, 2026March 7, 2026jennymackness6 Comments

Leonardo da Vinci – A Deluge – c. 1517-18
Black chalk on paper – Royal Collection, London

Movement is the cause of all life (Leonardo da Vinci)

I have written about the topic ‘Everything Flows’ before. Looking back over that post, written in 2019, I can see that I didn’t really understand it.

On March 4^ththis year I gave another talk to my local University of the Third Age (U3A) philosophy group – this time on Everything Flows. Previously I have talked on Philosophical Perspectives on Attention, and Hannah Arendt’s Perspective on Thinking.

For philosophers the expression ‘Everything Flows’ is usually associated with Heraclitus. I now think that had I known more about Heraclitus in 2019, I would have understood Iain McGilchrist’s lecture that I attended at that time better.

A common understanding of this expression is that everything changes all the time, so there is no point in trying to resist change! We are probably all familiar with expressions such as ……

Go with the flow
Play it by ear
Take things as they come
Ride the wave
This too shall pass

….. which we usually interpret as meaning, don’t try to control events, let them unfold naturally and adapt to them as they happen.

These expressions relate to the way in which we respond to life and its challenges.

The expression Everything Flows also relates to these interpretations but means much more than this.

Everything Flows refers to the nature of reality and in order to understand what Everything Flows means we need to know something about the philosopher Heraclitus and his doctrine πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei). Panta rhei is Greek for Everything Flows.

What did Heraclitus mean when he spoke of πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei)? This was a particularly counter intuitive idea in his era, and possibly even today.

My late husband, John Mackness, used to make notes in rhyming verse to capture key ideas of whatever he was thinking/reading about. These are his notes on Heraclitus and ‘Everything Flows’.

Heraclitus (c.540 – c.480 BCE)

His nickname was ‘The Riddler’
His writing enigmatic
Paradoxical aphorisms
Loved by this pre-Socratic

Although of royal descent
To govern was not his leaning
Instead he spent his life
Searching for truth and meaning

He despised his fellow man
To him they were uncouth
Who were blind to thinking
About ‘REALITY’ and ‘TRUTH’

LOGOS was the principle
Which was free to one and all
But most were too dim-witted
Their brains were just too small

LOGOS ordered all things
It’s magnificence divine
But shunned by ignorant masses
Who towed an unthinking line

His thinking was that LOGOS
Had three entwined ideas
Which could activate men’s minds
Open new frontiers

First: ‘Everything is in flux’
Life in constant flow
Nothing remains the same
Including what we know

Second: ‘the world is a living fire’
Symbolic of ceaseless change?
Or was fire the energy of LOGOS
The hot dry focused brain?

Third: ‘War is the father of all’
Necessary for creation
Every living thing is made
By forces in altercation

Nietzsche liked this idea
Evil and good passions at war
The tension between them
Producing insights galore.

Nietzsche was not the only philosopher to be intrigued by Heraclitus. Heraclitus’ legacy from more than 2500 years ago has been considerable and enduring, but he was largely forgotten between the time of Plato (348 BCE) and the 18^th century. Philosopher and polymath Iain McGilchrist has suggested that this is because that period in history was dominated by abstract, analytical, philosophical thinking. He has written:

‘The static and the timeless has been privileged in the West ever since Plato followed the path of Parmenides, not Heraclitus.’ (McGilchrist, 2021, The Matter With Things, p.1205).

Plato and Aristotle thought Heraclitus’ ideas were a barrier to gaining true, stable knowledge.

However, there were two ancient philosophers that we know did value Heraclitus’ ideas: Epictetus (50-135 BCE) and Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD). Epictetus thought we should accept what is beyond our control. Marcus Aurelius referenced Heraclitus in his ‘Meditations’ and suggested that we should live in the moment and go with the flow.

In modern times, many more philosophers have been influenced by Heraclitus. For example:

Montaigne in the 16^th century

Spinoza and Leibniz in the 17^th century

Leibniz was interested in the relationship between flow and mathematics

Schelling and Hegel in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries

Heraclitus made a profound impression on Hegel, who wrote: ‘There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic’.

William James, Bergson, A.N. Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries

William James was interested in the stream of consciousnes

Bergson in the relationship between flow and time

Whitehead in reality as a process

Wittgenstein in language being an ever-changing process rather than a static, rigid system

Nietzsche emphasised the concept of becoming, writing: ‘The world for ever needs truth, hence the world for ever needs Heraclitus’.

Heidegger was influenced by Heraclitus in his exploration of Being and Time.

Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault in the 20^th century

Iain McGilchrist in the 21^st century

In my talk on March 4th, I did not have time to discuss the influence of Heraclitus on philosophers through history. Instead, I expanded on my husband John’s notes, with reference to Heraclitus’ writing (see Fragments below) to consider how the idea that ‘Everything Flows’ might challenge our view of reality in our present time. I also referenced Iain McGilchrist’s recent work on the nature of reality. Heraclitus’ ideas have had a significant influence on McGilchrist’s thinking. McGilchrist has written about the nature of reality as follows:

Philosophers in every known culture have debated the nature of reality, from time immemorial. While we cannot in the nature of things ever pin it down, we cannot give up the search: understanding, like reality itself, is an unending process; not a thing that is finished so as to be grasped. It is the process that offers to enlighten us, not the act of appropriation. ‘It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work’, goes one rabbinical saying, ‘but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.’ (McGilchrist, 2021, The Matter With Things, p.69)

Heraclitus’ Fragments

All that remains of Heraclitus’ work are fragments. A German classicist Hermann Alexander Diels collected these fragments and devised a system (later revised and expanded by Walther Kranz), for organising and numbering them, so that we now have the Diels–Kranz (DK) numbering system for identifying the fragments. This system is also used to identify fragments from other pre-Socratic philosophers. ‘22’ is the number that identifies the fragment as being the work of Heraclitus. ‘B’ indicates that it is a direct quote. (‘A’ would indicate a testimony from an ancient report and ‘C’ an imitation of the original work.) The final number, e.g. 18, indicates the order in which the quote appears in the Heraclitus chapter 22.

In my next two posts, I will report on what I said to our U3A group about Heraclitus’ and Iain McGilchrist’s thoughts on Everything Flows.

Below are the fragments that I referred to during my talk.

If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult. (Heraclitus – Fragment DK 22 B18)
Nature loves to hide (Fragment DK 22 B123)
Into the same river you could not step twice, for other and still other waters are flowing. (Fragment DK 22 B412)
Into the same river we both step and do not step. We both are and are not. (Fragment DK 22 B49a)
The way up and the way down is one and the same (Fragment DK 22 B60)
Sea water is at once very pure and very foul; it is drinkable and healthful for fishes, but undrinkable and deadly for men. (Fragment DK 22 B61)
The harmony of the world is a harmony of oppositions, as in the case of the bow and of the lyre. (Fragment DK 22 B56)
War is the father of all things. (Fragment DK 22 B53)
Everything is an exchange for fire, and fire for everything—as goods for gold, and gold for goods. (Fragment DK 22 B90)
The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one. (Fragment DK 22 B10)
Listening not to me but to the Word (Logos), it is wise to agree that all things are one. (Fragment DK 22 B50)
By changing, it remains the same. (Fragment DK 22 B84a)

References

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

Universities and the Future of Civilisation. A talk by Iain McGilchrist to Ralston College, Savannah, Georgia, USA.

January 1, 2026January 1, 2026jennymackness2 Comments

Last month I listened to a lecture on Higher Education given by Iain McGilchrist to Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Iain has recently been made Chancellor of Ralston College succeeding Jordan Peterson who was Chancellor for the preceding three years.

I have long been interested in the work of Ralston College which offers a unique and intensive MA in the Humanities, where the students spend their first semester in Greece, learning the language and studying ancient Greek philosophy. They then return to Savannah to complete their studies over the remaining three semesters.

Ralston College’s mission is to model ‘a humanities education worthy of that name, set within a scholarly community that aspires to truth, beauty, freedom, and fellowship’. It seeks a ‘revival and reinvention of the traditional university. A fellowship for anyone, anywhere who seeks the truth with courage’.

It was within this context that Iain McGilchrist was invited to speak to an audience at Ralston College (and online) about Universities and the Future of Civilisation. As yet a recording of this talk has not been posted on Ralston College’s website, so what follows are the brief notes I made as I listened to this talk. (Any errors within these notes are, therefore, of course, mine!).

I have heard Iain McGilchrist talk about education in general before, but never about universities specifically.

For McGilchrist universities are the cornerstones of civilisation; they are of medieval origin. Interestingly I recently had a conversation with my son who told me that our local vicar had preached a sermon about how universities in medieval times were set up by the church and how this connection with the church is now broken. I am sure McGilchrist would concur with this.

These days, McGilchrist told us, tradition has a bad reputation, because it is being ossified, but he said, tradition is inherently dynamic, a living phenomenon. Universities must introduce a grounding of tradition because nothing creative can be done without tradition. Music, art, literature and poetry all build on tradition and take it further. There is nothing stultifying about tradition. It is not static. It is constantly in flow, evolving powerfully. Universities today are neglecting tradition. We need to understand the context in which new inventions arise.

McGilchrist believes that universities have lowered expectations of students, increased specialisation and narrowed discussion, but that free discussion must be of the essence. A university should offer a universe of subjects, including the humanities, so that students can see things in the broader perspective of the whole. Losing the humanities means that we lose learning about what it means to be human. Education has become skewed by economic considerations. Lowering of standards leads to passive learning.

Education is not about putting something in (to the minds of students) but clearing away obstacles and allowing something to come out. As Plutarch said, the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lit. We need imagination and intuition as well as techniques. Students must be held to high standards to do and learn more. Teachers can show the way because education is relational. Machines fail at the first hurdle, but teachers can communicate a spark to students. Teachers must talk about what excites them and help students select the best way of being in the world. McGilchrist believes that Ralston College makes education as hard as possible to take students to a higher order purpose and encourage them to go as far as they can.

He said we take it for granted that there is linear progress, that what comes next is better than what comes before, but this is not necessarily the case. The current philosophical position is not only depressing but also false. The 1970s saw deconstructionist and post-modernist attacks on truth, but McGilchrist believes that if there is no truth, universities are a waste of time. Popular culture has led to life with no purpose, no meaning, no values, and a fragmented world. But there needs to be truth and some things are truer than others.

Moving on requires not just acquisition of knowledge and information, but also wisdom and understanding. These represent the two kinds of knowing that McGilchrist has often talked about and I have written about before. The one is narrow and analytical and the other is holistic. In some languages, e.g. French, there are different words for these two kinds of knowing (savoir and connaitre), but in English we just have the one word. McGilchrist believes that our education systems are skewed towards narrow, analytical ways of knowing, and that we have sold out to this way of thinking. Universities need to change hearts and minds. Intelligent communities need to re-vision what is important, by shifting away from mechanistic ways of thinking and seeing. We should ask ourselves the question, ‘What does my way of thinking stop me from seeing?

Wisdom and creativity don’t come from what you do, but from what you don’t do. Creativity will find you. You don’t find it. Truth, goodness, beauty and the sacred all come to us in this way, but for this we need to have an open disposition towards the world.

These days everything must have an instrumental value. Everyone questions the use of value – useful for what? This focus on utility is narrow minded and short sighted. The important point of education is about the genesis of fulfilled human beings.

Universities have an influence on the way culture is evolving. There are high intellectual goods, such as beauty, goodness and truth, which can pull you forward, but you need to have ideals, and be drawn from the front.

McGilchrist believes that we need to be led out of the prison we are in (Plato’s Cave) and that a good College will cause the student to grow towards the light. At the heart of regeneration of culture is how human beings relate to the whole. For McGilchrist, universities and their students need

Openness to truth wherever it might lead
To think and talk about everything in a civilised way
New beliefs
To get back a sense of the spiritual
To acknowledge that there is something more than we know
To go where intuitions lead us, informed by lives guided by goals of reflecting back to the universe goodness, beauty and truth.

McGilchrist believes that Ralston College, by encouraging students to work hard and think deeply and freely, is doing this. In his response to the invitation to become Chancellor of the College he wrote:

“I am truly honoured by the invitation to take on the role of Chancellor at Ralston College, that new bright star in the firmament of academe. Universities are a cornerstone of our civilization, and I believe that their future in the West lies in the balance: nothing less than our integrity as a society depends on getting them back on course.

“The stakes, then, are high; and I know of no better institution than Ralston College to champion, tirelessly and courageously, freedom of thought, true scholarship, a love of excellence and deep engagement with the richness of the humanities.

“May God bless its every endeavour and help me to do what I can to encourage Ralston on its path to the greatness of which it is assured.”

Image Attribution

By Pieter Brueghel the Elder – Levels adjusted from File: Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg, originally from Google Art Project., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22179117

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) Introductory Notes

September 19, 2025jennymackness7 Comments

Earlier this month a member of my local U3A philosophy group gave us a talk on Ayn Rand. I had heard of her before, but didn’t really know anything about her.

Source of image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

On entering the room, the first slide of the speaker’s PowerPoint presentation was already on display. It read:

Atheism is good
Capitalism is good
Selfishness is good
Altruism is evil

The speaker had warned us that Ayn Rand was/is a controversial figure, but on reflection, I wonder whether this opening slide set us up to think negatively about her. In the feedback session at the end of the talk, Rand was variously described as dangerous, deluded, and a narcissistic psychopath deserving of more than a slap. This is an indication of the emotions that were stirred up during the session. But perhaps a more balanced, informed and nuanced view is required.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Russia, but moved to America, where she stayed for the rest of her life in 1926. Ayn Rand was her pen name.

She is known for her philosophy which she named Objectivism and for four novels:

We the Living (1936) – Rand’s first statement against communism
Anthem (1938) – about a dystopian future world in which totalitarian collectivism triumphs to the exclusion of ‘I’
The Fountainhead (1943) – about an unconventional architect who struggles against a conformist society
Atlas Shrugged (1957) in which Rand develops her philosophy of Objectivism

Objectivism offers several life lessons, primarily emphasising reason, self-interest, and individual rights. Rand described the essence of Objectivism as ‘the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute’. She believed that reality is perceived by our senses; reason makes sense of that reality; the pursuit of happiness, through a focus on self-interest is the moral purpose of life; capitalism is the best (only) way for individuals to be free. ‘Objectivism encourages individuals to be honest with themselves and other, to avoid playing the victim, and to develop self-esteem’ (quoted from session notes).

The notes provided at the session included the following key lessons:

“Use reason:

Rand stressed that reason is humanity’s primary tool for survival and progress. She believed individuals should rely on logic and evidence to understand the world and make decisions.

Pursue self-interest:

Rand argued that acting in one’s own self-interest is not only rational but also morally right. This doesn’t mean harming others, but rather, focusing on one’s own well-being and happiness as the primary moral goal.

Respect individual rights:

Rand believed that every individual has the right to their own life, liberty, and property. This includes the right to act on their own judgment and to keep the fruits of their own labour, as long as they don’t infringe the rights of others.

Embrace self-esteem:

A core principle of Objectivism is the importance of self-esteem, which Rand defined as the conviction that one is worthy of happiness. She believed that self-esteem is earned through productive work and ethical behaviour.

Value production and achievement:

Rand emphasised the importance of productive work and achievement as the foundation of human value. She believed that individuals should strive to create value in the world, whether through their work or other contributions.

Be honest:

Honesty is a fundamental virtue in Rand’s philosophy. She believed that individuals should be honest with themselves and others, and that dishonesty is ultimately self-destructive.

Don’t be a victim:

Rand’s philosophy rejects the idea of ‘victimhood’ and encourages individuals to take responsibility for their own lives and happiness. She believed that people should not passively accept suffering or misfortune, but rather, actively work to overcome challenges.”

Some of these key ideas seem reasonable and positive, e.g. Be honest and Don’t be a victim. I think it was the ethics of individualism that disturbed our U3A group members. Rand rejected collectivism and thought working for the good of others is wrong, that selfishness is a virtue and there is no such thing as altruism. She believed that all forced taxation is theft, and that people should not be forced to pay for benefits they may never receive. Ultimately, she was accused of hypocrisy, because when it came to the crunch and having publicly advocated against welfare programmes, she did collect Social Security and Medicare benefits under her husband’s name. Was this a double standard or was it an instance of radical selfishness where she used the system to serve her own self-interest?

In my group’s post talk discussion at the U3A meeting, the view was expressed that Rand’s whole philosophy, whilst containing elements of truth, is a house built on sand; human beings cannot function as individuals, we are all in relationships, we are built to be social. The groups felt that Objectivism is not a philosophy, more a modus operandi which is attractive to people who are already in dominant positions.

Many politicians have been and still are influenced by Ayn Rand’s ideas. Margaret Thatcher famously said: “There’s no such thing as society” but she was not thought to be an objectivist or a follower of Rand’s philosophy. Some UK conservative MPs (e.g. Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid) are all thought to be fans of Ayn Rand, and a lot of influential American politicians cite Rand as a major influence, e.g. Reagan and Nixon. According to an article written in The Guardian by Jonathan Freedland in 2017, Rand’s novel The Fountainhead is one of the few works of fiction that Donald Trump likes. Freedland ends this article with the following paragraph.

“So Rand, dead 35 years, lives again, her hand guiding the rulers of our age in both Washington and San Francisco. Hers is an ideology that denounces altruism, elevates individualism into a faith and gives a spurious moral licence to raw selfishness. That it is having a moment now is no shock. Such an ideology will find a ready audience for as long as there are human beings who feel the rush of greed and the lure of unchecked power, longing to succumb to both without guilt. Which is to say: for ever.”

Since the cult of individualism seems to be growing across the world, I wonder how Ayn Rand would respond were she alive today. Would she feel validated in her thinking or begin to doubt her philosophy of Objectivism?

Beyond this introductory post, The Ayn Rand Institute’s website https://aynrand.org/ provides further information about her life and work, and the YouTube video in which Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand, originally broadcast in 1959, gives you a sense of her as a person.

Fine Words Butter No Parsnips

August 18, 2025jennymackness2 Comments

Last week I spent most of the week on a literature course (part of the North West Region U3A’s summer school) at Manchester Metropolitan Museum in Manchester.

The title of the course, which was led by the wonderful Meg Shaw, was ‘I have something to say’. In her introduction Meg wrote ‘We shall listen to three voices, three novelists over three centuries, who spun their yarns around Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell (‘Mary Barton’), Howard Spring (‘Fame is the Spur’) and Jeanette Winterson (‘Oranges are not the Only Fruit’). Obviously, we discussed the three books, but we also had broader discussions on topics such as the campaigning novel, changes in the novel and ‘The North’ as a literary symbol. There were 17 people in the group, all women, and most (but not including me) seemed to be very well-read English graduates, so the level of discussion was challenging and stimulating. Meg herself, was impressively well read across both literature and philosophy.

There is so much that I could share from this course, but in this post, I am going to focus on our very first session, when I knew that I was in for a good week, and which set the tone for the following few days. The title of this session was ‘Literature Butters No Parsnips’. To the surprise of my discussion group members, I had never come across this expression before. The original expression was ‘Fine Words Butter No Parsnips’ (the title of this post). Evidently this is an old English proverb dating back to the 17^th century. Parsnips were a staple in the English diet before potatoes became common and the addition of butter made them more palatable. The expression means that empty talk, or promises are not enough to achieve anything tangible or real – so if we change this, as Meg did, to Literature Butters No Parsnips, we can question whether literature is simply empty talk and promises or can achieve anything tangible or real.

How does fiction work in the human brain? Is there a scientific explanation?

Neuroscientists have been working on how fiction influences the mind. There are chemical changes in the brain as we read. Repeated scanning eye movements help to clean the brain. This may mean that reading on a Kindle or iPhone is not as good for the brain. This is an emerging area, but current thinking is that literature sustains us, quells negativity, helps us build relationships and bolsters well-being.

Literature as sustaining

Literature gives us peace of mind and offers control. The narrator’s voice encourages us to find our own voice. The story gives us hope. Good luck is always a possibility. Literature allows us to be free in a world not of our making. It promotes imagination and frees the mind. It gives us tools to express what is in our heads. Through literature we can say something that we can’t say in any other way.

Literature quells negativity

Literature provides a tool to heal grief. We can go through the process of grief safely. It is a tool for encouraging self-acceptance. It helps us to manage despair and human limitations. It helps us to bounce back from our failure to understand the world.

Literature helps us build relationships

Through self-disclosure literature produces wonder and triggers love. When we see this in a novel, we realise that we can do this too. It is a tool to lessen loneliness and connect with other minds. We share the company of others. Literature allows us to enter someone else’s thoughts. We can identify with the author and the novel’s characters.

Literature bolsters well being

It empowers us and teaches us to self-trust. We can see the value of our own opinions and combine these with others. In the novel we can do this in safety. Literature lays before us choices that we would not see ourselves. We can consider alternative opinions in safety.

Reading is a tool for general well-being. It is good for us. It provides:

Distraction – passing the time without too much effort
Comfort – it is soothing, reassuring, temporary
Consolation – it helps us to come to terms with endemic problems, such as death
Enlightenment – it helps us to see the world in a different way
Inspiration – it gives us the means to go forward.

The question for the first discussion of the course was: Why do we read novels? Is it for any of the reasons mentioned above, or do you have an alternative explanation? I have read a lot of novels this year – not necessarily literature, but that’s another discussion! My reason has been escapism. Reading has kept me going through sleepless nights, so I enjoyed this first session of the course, despite not being an English graduate. There was so much I could relate to.

And far from being the bleak, grey, wet, dirty, impoverished city depicted in the novels we read and discussed, Manchester shone and gleamed through the bright sunny hot week. All in all, a very enjoyable experience.

Hannah Arendt’s Thinking

July 10, 2025jennymackness1 Comment

Photographer: Barbara Niggl Radloff – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

This is my fifth and final post about Hannah Arendt’s perspective on the importance of thinking.

Here are links to the previous posts.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt on the Importance of Thinking

Hannah Arendt as a Teacher of Thinking

Hannah Arendt on Thinking, The Nature of Evil and Totalitarianism

In these I share the notes I made for a talk to my local U3A (University of the Third Age) philosophy group. These notes provide a very brief introduction to some of Hannah Arendt’s ideas on thinking. I did not have time to include reference to content in her book The Life of the Mind. This book was planned to be in three parts, Thinking, Willing and Judging, but Hannah Arendt had only written parts 1 and 2, before she died of a heart attack in 1975. Ultimately her friend Mary McCarthy edited and published the first two volumes in 1977 and 1978. For a more in depth exploration of Arendt’s ideas on Thinking it would be important to read The Life of the Mind.

Roger Berkowitz of Bard College is currently leading a reading group on The Life of the Mind.

In this final post, I think it is important to acknowledge that Hannah Arendt did not always get it right. Sometimes her thinking failed her.

Her lifelong project was to try and understand how the holocaust could have happened, how totalitarian regimes arise, the nature of evil, what it means to be a stateless refugee, what it means to be human and much more, but most importantly what it means to think. She refused to blindly accept prevailing opinion and had a lifelong political and intellectual commitment to think from another’s point of view.

But she was sometimes arrogant and sometimes, by expressing her opinions in the strongest possible language, she touched raw nerves and provoked sharp criticism. She was often insightful but sometimes insensitive to the complexities of reality.

Some of the prominent criticisms that have been levelled at Hannah Arendt are that:

She was racist. This was because she described Africa as the dark continent whose inhabitants were savages and barbarians. She later acknowledged this criticism saying that she had not understood the depth and political consequences of vicious discrimination against Blacks in America. (For further discussion about this criticism, see Deumert, A. (2020). On racism and how to read Hannah Arendt. Diggit Magazine)

She was flippant and malicious. This criticism arose from her use of irony in her writing. She defended herself against this criticism saying that her ironic writing style was deliberate. She used irony to protect herself from painful and difficult ideas, and to keep enough critical distance to try and understand.

She was too sympathetic to Eichmann. She had been taken in by him. The banality of evil concept trivialised the extermination of millions of Jews.

She was harsh in her judgment of Jewish leadership and the role of the Jewish Council during World War II.

I think it is important to be aware of these criticisms. They show that even for the best of thinkers, justified critical thinking can be hard to achieve. I only had time to briefly mention them in my U3A talk, but, I think, any knowledge and understanding of Hannah Arendt’s work should include knowledge and understanding of the criticisms levelled against her.

What Hannah Arendt’s supporters say is that she must have loved her people and the world very much to go to such lengths to try and understand what happened, why it happened, how could it have happened.

Hannah Arendt did not provide us with a framework for thinking. She did not tell us what to think. Rather, through her writing, she showed us how to think. She provided us with a model for engaging in serious self-reflective critical thinking.

She wrote:

“If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ’demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.” (The Life of the Mind)

Hannah Arendt believed that thinking does not belong to some rarefied world of professional thought. She believed that

To stop and think what we are doing is an ethical imperative

And that

We all have a human duty to think.

References

Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Arendt, H. (1961). Between Past and Future, London, Faber & Faber

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London, Faber & Faber

Arendt, H. (1964). Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship. In Kohn, J. (ed.) (2003). Responsibility and Judgment. Schocken Books, New York

Arendt, H. (1978). The Life of the Mind, 2 vols., London, Secker & Warburg

Bernstein, R. J. (2018). Why Read Hannah Arendt Now. Polity Press

Buxton, R. (2020). Hannah Arendt, in Buxton, R. and Whiting, L. (2020). The Philosopher Queens. Unbound

Stonebridge, L. (2024). We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Jonathan Cape

Tubali, S. (2018). Hannah Arendt and the Human Duty to Think. Philosophy Now

Secondary Sources

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College https://www.bard.edu

Reflections by Samantha Rose Hill Substack https://substack.com/@samantharosehill

Hannah Arendt on Thinking, The Nature of Evil and Totalitarianism

July 9, 2025jennymackness5 Comments

Hannah Arendt was a prolific writer. I have barely skimmed the surface of all she has written. Recently I heard Roger Berkowitz of Bard College, New York, say that even after 10 years of reading Arendt for his job as the Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights, he is still discovering things he hasn’t read or thought about before.

I am writing these posts to share the notes I made for a talk I recently gave to my local U3A philosophy group (University of the Third Age) in which I focussed on Hannah Arendt’s ideas on Thinking. The talk was only 30 minutes long, so was just an introduction to some of Hannah Arendt’s ideas.

This is my fourth post. Here are links to the previous three:

Thinking and the Nature of Evil

Hannah Arendt is perhaps best known for her phrase ‘the banality of evil’. She was a controversial figure who was often criticised for her work and thinking, not least for her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which was where the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ first appeared.

Adolf Eichmann was the official in the Nazi Party who organised the transportation of six million Jews to the concentration camps or ‘corpse factories’ as Hannah Arendt called them. She also called them ‘holes of oblivion’. At the end of the war Eichmann fled Germany for Argentina where he lived under an assumed name until he was captured by the Israelis in 1960 and smuggled out of the country and back to Jerusalem to stand trial.

When Arendt heard this news, she immediately contacted the New Yorker and offered to report on the trial. She said she would never forgive herself if she didn’t go to Jerusalem and look at this human disaster face to face. The trial lasted four months resulting in the publication in 1963 of five articles which were later collated into her book, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil’. The book upset a great many people, particularly the Jews, and still negatively affects her reputation to this day.

How did this phrase – the banality of evil – that upset so many people, come about?

When Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 as a reporter to collate the facts, she expected to be faced by evil in the form of Adolf Eichmann, but she found her thinking challenged and began to question her presuppositions. She had followed the Nuremberg trials in Berlin in the 1940s and at that time thought of evil as ‘radical’. In the Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, she wrote of radical evil, which she explained as demonic evil inherent in human beings. But in Jerusalem she came to realise that this thinking needed to be revised. She thought that the deeds of the Nazis could not be simply explained away by portraying them as monsters and demons. She came to think that evil is banal. By this, she did not mean that evil does not exist. Rather that the banality of evil is the nature of the human capacity to do wrong when you stop thinking, or simply the reluctance to ever imagine what the other person is experiencing.

What Hannah Arendt found in Jerusalem was not a figure of radical, awful evil, but a small, pompous man, who was self-important and talked in cliches and was radically unable to think about where he was and who he was talking about. She did not think he was a sociopath or driven by extreme ideology but rather an extremely average person who had no internal moral conversations about his actions.

Arendt viewed thinking as an active internal dialogue where we have conversations with ourselves. She thought that Eichmann didn’t do this. He was a thoughtless bureaucrat. His actions were not banal. His thinking was banal.

“The sad truth is”, she wrote, “that evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” (The Life of the Mind)

Evil comes from a failure to think. Eichmann failed to use self-reflection as a basis for judgment.

In writing Eichmann in Jerusalem and about the banality of evil, Arendt was writing about a very particular form of thinking. By saying that Eichmann lacked the capacity to think, she meant that he lacked the ability to imagine the world from the perspective of another. The banality of evil equates to a lack of empathetic imagination. Obviously, Eichmann could think, but his thinking was banal.

Hannah Arendt believed that everybody is capable of self-reflective critical thinking. In her essay on ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, she wrote:

“The difference between those who decided to go along with the Nazis and those who decided to resist, was that those who decided to resist chose to think for themselves.”

She believed that when moral norms and laws within society can no longer be counted on, we have the right to disobey. If we think, we can choose to resist.

Thinking and Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt thought that all thought process moves from personal experience. This can be seen in all her writing. By the time she was 35, her personal experience was that she was a stateless Jew in exile at the time of the holocaust, who had lost many of her friends and family members to the death camps. She had also lost her home, her language, her living and her entire way of life. Her first book, ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, published in 1951, ten years after arriving in New York, is a response to all this experience. It is her longest and most meticulously researched book.

In it she traces the rise of totalitarianism through antisemitism (which I have written about on this blog) and imperialism, and she tries to understand, What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?

Arendt believed that we must think critically and constructively about our history, and we must avoid the temptation of simply looking down on those who got it wrong.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt tries to alert us to the key features of totalitarianism. Some of these are:

Toying with the truth
Deliberate confusion of fiction and reality
Incessant use of mass media to manipulate the way people experience the world
Use of propaganda and conspiracy to change the perceived structure of reality

She believed that totalitarian regimes actively undermine the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and that it is the failure to engage critically with our own ideas that draws us into this.

She wrote: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

Arendt believed that this happens because totalitarianism takes over people’s minds and by extension the whole of society. Totalitarian regimes dominate thinking through propaganda and fear. They make individuals more vulnerable to manipulation and control.

She also thought that the ultimate aim of totalitarianism is to make human beings, as human beings, superfluous, by

treating them as objects or obstacles to the state’s goals
deeming them of having no value within a particular social, political or economic system
stripping them of citizenship and individuality
making them stateless
deeming them expendable; marginalising and eliminating them

“What totalitarian ideologies aim at”, she wrote, “is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionising transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself”. (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

And she predicted in 1951 that totalitarian regimes can persist even after the regime has fallen.

“Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social and economic misery in a manner worthy of man.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

So, for Hannah Arendt, a key feature of totalitarian regimes is that they undermine the ability to think for oneself. She believed that thoughtlessness is a part of a totalitarian regime, just as it is a cause of evil.

Bibliography