Conversation about McGilchrist

Me:

I'm still reading "The Master and his Emissary" by Ian McGilchrist and was curious about a section in (I think) chapter 4 in which he attacks those who claim there is no such thing as truth.

Are there really such people? I mean actual academic authors. I know some in the right like to claim post-modernists deny truth but surely it's just a debating point - no serious thinker, say Baudrillard - actually makes such a claim. Even headlines like "the gulf war does not exist" is about the spectacle of late capitalism, following the ideas of people like Guy Debord?

Reply:

Great question, John — and you're absolutely right to want to dig beneath the surface of what often gets simplified or caricatured in debates about postmodernism and truth. McGilchrist does indeed criticise the idea that truth is somehow illusory or relative to the point of nonexistence — and he associates this view with certain currents of modern and postmodern thought. But let's unpack what’s really going on.

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🧠 McGilchrist’s Concern

In The Master and His Emissary, especially in Chapter 4, McGilchrist laments a cultural shift where the left hemisphere’s detached, abstract reasoning comes to dominate. He sees this reflected in the epistemological relativism of some postmodern theories — a view that treats truth as entirely constructed, provisional, or even meaningless outside of a given language game or social structure.

His complaint is not just that people deny objective facts, but that they deny the very possibility of truth as something that can guide us or orient us beyond language, culture, or power. He sees this as a kind of nihilism — a failure of the intuitive, embodied, and empathic insights he associates with the right hemisphere.

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🤔 But do postmodernists really deny truth?

This is where it gets more nuanced.

You're spot-on that people often misunderstand figures like Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Let’s look at a few of them:

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🧩 Baudrillard – “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”

This is perhaps one of the most spectacularly misunderstood postmodern titles. As you said, Baudrillard isn’t denying that bombs fell or people died — but that what we consumed in the West was not a war in the traditional sense but a media spectacle, a simulation. He draws on Debord’s "Society of the Spectacle", where reality becomes a series of images, and the image replaces the thing itself.

So, Baudrillard doesn’t deny that there is truth — rather, he’s trying to expose how the media landscape masks or replaces it, such that people no longer encounter the real but only its representations.

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📚 Derrida – “There is nothing outside the text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte)

This is another line that gets weaponised in critiques of postmodernism. Critics claim it means "everything is just words." But Derrida meant something subtler: that meaning is always mediated, never simply present, and that interpretation is inevitable. He’s not denying reality, but he’s pointing out that our access to it is never neutral or immediate.

Derrida did believe in truth — but he was suspicious of claims to absolute, context-free truths, especially when such claims underpinned political or metaphysical authority.

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🧠 Foucault – Truth and Power

Foucault likewise never claimed that truth doesn't exist — but he problematized how truth is produced. His famous idea that "truth is a thing of this world" is about how discourses, institutions, and power structures shape what is accepted as true.

He didn’t say “truth is fake” — but rather, that we need to be alert to how certain 'truths' get legitimised, while others are excluded or suppressed. In that sense, he’s pushing for more awareness, not less.

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🛡️ So is McGilchrist attacking a straw man?

Not exactly. While Baudrillard, Derrida, and Foucault are more careful than their critics admit, McGilchrist is tapping into something real. Certain trends in postmodernism can slide into a performative contradiction — for example, asserting that “truth doesn’t exist” as if that itself were a true statement. Some later theorists, particularly in literary studies and cultural criticism, did push these ideas in ways that undermine shared meaning or common ground.

So while the most rigorous thinkers like Derrida are not denying truth, some of their followers may indeed have implied or behaved as if truth is either entirely subjective or irrelevant.

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🧭 Where McGilchrist may differ

McGilchrist is trying to retrieve a sense of truth as something real, ineffable, and often implicit — something known through resonance, pattern, embodied understanding. For him, truth is not just propositional, but something lived and intuited — a process of attunement rather than logical deduction.

That makes him more aligned with phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) and poetic or religious understandings of truth, where what matters is not just facticity but presence, depth, and significance.

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🧩 Conclusion

So to your original question: no, most serious thinkers, including Baudrillard, do not claim there’s no such thing as truth. They question how truth is constructed, mediated, and wielded. The more radical-sounding claims often turn out to be provocations — challenging us to think harder about what we take for granted.

McGilchrist is right to call for a revaluation of truth — but the postmodernists are also right to remind us that truth claims always come with a context, a history, and a cost. The danger lies in absolutising either pole.

Me:

That's interesting because Jordan Peterson seems to be making a similar claim to McGilchrist in this regard anyway, they both don't seem to like the way Derrida, Foucault and Baudrillard show how truth is affected by power, in all its forms - through race, patriarchy, sexual orientation and class in particular - but there are all types of power structures at work, child/adult, neuro-divergent, ablist, agist and so on.

These forces affecting how truth appears within culture and society seem to reflect exactly the complexity McGilchrist claims for the right hemisphere and which McGilchrist and Peterson claim for poetry and spirituality - but they seem to use poetry and spirituality to oppose power/knowledge relations yet surely it isn't either/or, why can't they complement each other?

Reply:

That’s a sharp and really important observation, John — and I think you're touching on something that often gets missed in the noise of culture wars: namely, that the critique of power and the appreciation of poetry, spirituality, and embodied meaning don’t need to be opposed. In fact, they can — and often do — belong together.

Let’s break it down a little:

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🧠 McGilchrist & Peterson: Truth as More than Fact

Both McGilchrist and Jordan Peterson are deeply concerned about truth being reduced to narrow, technical, left-hemisphere-style rationality or cynical relativism. For them:

Truth is not just data or fact-checking — it’s something lived, intuited, and transformative.

They see myth, story, symbol, and the sacred as essential ways of grasping the richness of human life that can't be captured in metrics or strict logic.

So far, so good. And they’re not wrong to worry that a hyper-rational or purely constructivist view of truth can lead to alienation, flattening, or even nihilism.

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⚡ Where They Clash with Postmodernism

What they seem to reject — or perhaps misunderstand — is how postmodern thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard aren’t denying meaning, but problematizing how meaning and “truth” emerge in cultural contexts saturated with power.

Peterson, in particular, paints Derrida and Foucault as architects of cultural decay — “neo-Marxist postmodernists” who deny reality in favour of cynical identity politics. But this is hugely reductive.

Foucault isn’t saying truth is meaningless — he’s saying truth is shaped by power: who gets to speak, whose voice counts, which knowledge is legitimised.

Derrida isn’t denying meaning — he’s saying meaning is always deferred, always open-ended, and we must attend carefully to nuance and difference.

These are not inherently enemies of spirituality or the poetic. They’re just alert to how even spirituality and poetry can be co-opted by systems of dominance — a priesthood, a national myth, a colonial aesthetic.

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🌿 Right Hemisphere Complexity vs. Social Power Complexity

Here’s where your point is especially insightful: McGilchrist describes the right hemisphere as attuned to ambiguity, context, relationship, and the ineffable. But power relations in society — particularly those involving race, gender, class, and so on — are also ambiguous, contextual, relational, and often hidden or implicit. That is right-hemisphere territory!

So why not integrate these insights?

Power is not always overt. It can be inscribed in habits, institutions, language, norms — exactly the subtle, "field-like" structures McGilchrist says the left hemisphere overlooks.

Poetry and myth, far from being divorced from power, are often the very mediums through which power speaks or is challenged. Think of the Psalms, Blake, the Gospels, Dante, or modern writers like Audre Lorde and Seamus Heaney.

In other words, power/knowledge and poetic/spiritual insight can be allies, not enemies.

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🧩 The False Either/Or

You’re absolutely right to reject the idea that we have to choose between:

Spiritual-poetic truth that transcends the world, or

Constructed social truth that exposes power and injustice.

In fact, we often need both:

The prophetic tradition in religion (Isaiah, Amos, Jesus) combines spiritual insight with a critique of injustice.

Liberation theology, Black theology, feminist theology, and queer theology do precisely what you’re describing — merging deep spiritual vision with awareness of structural power.

Even in philosophy, Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and later Judith Butler bring together embodiment, language, and the social world in ways that don’t deny truth but deepen it.

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🧘 So What Might a Complementary View Look Like?

Here’s a synthesis that honours both:

1. Truth is real — not just constructed — but it is encountered through a web of relationships, histories, biases, and embodiments.

2. Poetry, myth, and spirituality reveal layers of reality that logic alone can’t reach.

3. Power always shapes what is visible, sayable, or thinkable — even in art or religion — so we must be alert to it.

4. Critique and reverence, deconstruction and wonder, can exist together.

This is, arguably, the view someone like Tillich or even Simone Weil might have embraced: that truth is sacred, but must be wrestled from the distortions of the world, not assumed.

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✨ Final Thought

It’s deeply ironic that McGilchrist and Peterson both champion wholeness, myth, and depth, yet can be dismissive of thinkers who are also trying to unmask the flattening effects of domination and reductionism.

Rather than an either/or between poetic spirituality and critical awareness of power, we might aim for what Ricoeur called a "second naïveté" — a return to meaning that has passed through critique, not bypassed it.

Let me know if you'd like a few short examples from postmodern or theological writers who hold this integrated view.