Time Is Our Home

So glad I have my multiple readings of Iain McGilchrist to salt my John Gray with. McGilchrist is my touchstone philosopher, nowadays. Whatever he may be wrong about – and I disagree with him at several points – his central insight, (which stands regardless of his neurological arguments: I’m not educated enough to evaluate those), is that our main problem is not what we’re thinking, it’s how we’re thinking. We are trying to stand outside of time, and everything that changes, or shifts its borders – like personhood, consciousness, goodness, beauty – we simply declare to be illusory, made-up, not real. Unfortunately, the category of things that change and shift their borders includes nearly everything that is important to us. So we’re left in a world where our reason can address only things that we don’t really care about. This is not, nor it cannot come to good.

 
Time is our home, says McGilchrist. If we try to live outside it we will only come to grief.