doi:10.1093/brain/awp019
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BRAIN
A JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY
BOOK REVIEW
The muddle of embodiment
For biology, and science generally, this is both ‘the best of times
and the worst of times’. The best of times because its prestige has
never been greater, the scale of its research institutions never
more impressive and its financial support never more lavish. Yet,
this is also the worst of times for when it is possible to say ‘this is
how it happened’—this is how the universe and our solar system
came into being, this is how the landscape of our earth was
formed, this is the universal code of life and so on—then ‘the
future’, what comes after, is likely to be something of an anticlimax. And there is too the perception that science for all its great
intellectual achievements no longer has anything interesting to say
about the human experience. Why should it be as the writer Bryan
Appleyard observed that ‘in the maps provided by contemporary
science, we find everything except ourselves’.
This is all the more perplexing because it seems only yesterday
that the twin bastions of molecular biology and neuroscience
were on the brink of resolving the fundamental questions of
‘being human’. ‘The search for the ‘Holy Grail’ of who we
are has now reached its culminating phase,’ observed Harvard
University’s Walter Gilbert at the launch of the Human Genome
Project in 1991. ‘The ultimate goal is the acquisition of all the
details of our genome . . . that will transform our capacity to
predict what we will become.’ And, similarly, neuroscience was
revolutionized in the 1980s by the ability of PET imaging to
observe the brain in action looking out on the world and thinking
its deep thoughts. ‘The question is not whether the neural machinery [of the brain] will be understood,’ insisted professor of neurology Antonio Damasio in the journal Scientific American the
following year, ‘but when’.
Nearly 20 years on both disciplines continue to generate new
research findings on a staggering scale, where a year’s volumes of
a single journal now fill an entire library shelf. But the relevance of
this new knowledge, the promise of that ‘Holy Grail of who we
are’ remains as elusive as ever. And it will continue to be so without some glimmer of an insight into how the monotonous genes
strung out along the double helix might instruct for the near
infinite richness of form and attributes of the living world or
how the monotonous neural firing of the brain might translate
into the richness of the human mind. Thus, while there is no
denying the technical achievement in being able to spell out
James Watson’s personal genome in its entirety, yet ransacked
The Kingdom of Infinite
Space. A Fantastical
Journey Around Your Head
By Raymond Tallis 2008.
London: Atlantic Books
Price: £19.99
ISBN: 978 1 84354 669 6
from top to bottom it sheds not a ray of light on the character
and brilliance with which he has dominated biology in the
post-war years.
There is the strong impression that science has been looking
in the wrong place for explanations that somehow lie outside its
domain, while threatening to crush the true spirit of intellectual
inquiry under an avalanche of undigested and indigestible facts.
The difficulty, as is well recognized, is that science is in thrall to
the sort of radical reductionism epitomized by the genome projects and modern neuroscience and for whom the objective and
impersonal facts generated by the scientific method constitute the
only form of reliable knowledge. But it cannot be that science has
nothing to say about the human condition whose materiality,
clothed in flesh, animated by blood is inseparable from our experience. Further, its fundamental premise that the phenomena of
life can be accounted for in exclusively materialist terms, without
recourse to the metaphysical, remains unchallenged as the dominant intellectual mind-set of the western world.
Raymond Tallis, Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine, philosopher, poet and all round polymath in his formidable philosophical trilogy (reviewed by John Cornwell in Brain 2005, 128,
443–46) has sought to resolve that impasse by restoring to the
scientific domain the subjective first person perspective and the
knowledge that flows from it. The twin pillars of Tallis’s philosophy
draw heavily on the continental tradition of phenomenology as
elaborated by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. They are,
first, the investigation of the ‘obvious, non-obvious’ where the
most seemingly trivial of human achievements mediated through
ß The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved.
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Book Review
Tallis’s wit, erudition and imagination prove to be (literally) extraordinary. This is seen to best effect in the first volume of his
trilogy ‘The Hand: a philosophical enquiry into human being’
that enriches beyond measure the standard scientific account of
this most useful of appendages.
The human hand, Tallis points out, is not only just a unique
organ of manipulation combining the contradictory properties of
both great power and remarkable precision, but also an organ of
knowledge and of communication. ‘The hand acts, it knows and
speaks.’ From this starting point, he takes the reader on a breathtaking tour (de force) of the specific talents of the digits one by
one, and then their further attributes combined as two, three, five
and ten. And then there is the talking hand, the playful hand, the
numerate hand and still its possibilities are not exhausted. The
human hand, he suggests, has crossed a rubicon to leave that
of our primate cousins far behind on its distant bank—the rubicon
of being able to ‘make infinite use of finite resources’.
The second pillar of Tallis’s philosophy, intrinsic to the phenomenological perspective, is the assertion of the authentic reality of
the human mind in perceiving, thinking and doing—not to be
explained away (as the objective materialist’s view would have
it) as an illusion or epiphenomenon of the neuronal activity of
the brain.
We shall not find . . . our everyday lives in the behaviour of
excitable [brain] tissue even though the latter is a necessary
condition of the former,’’ he comments in a recent review of
Professor Chris Frith’s ‘Making up the Mind’ (Brain, 2007,
130, 3050-3054). ‘‘The illusion that we can do so arises from
neuroscientists’ anthropomorphising bits of the brain. When
they find that those bits don’t deserve the human epithets
conferred upon them, they tend to question whether human
attributes such as free will, access to reality, self knowledge or
progress towards objective truth really exist. If you fail to find
something when you look in the wrong place, or in the wrong
way, it is tempting to conclude that it doesn’t exist.
Now in his most ambitious project so far Prof. Tallis combines
these two themes of his philosophical enquiry in ‘A Fantastical
Journey Around Your Head’ in pursuit of that most substantial
of questions ‘Who am I?’ or rather ‘What is involved in being
me?’ The journey around the object that is closest to what we
feel ourselves to be, namely the head, is, he suggests, an entré
into ‘the muddle of embodiment – the peculiar condition of being
a self-conscious, self-judging agent in an organic body’.
That muddle is (relatively) easily put: we suppose ourselves to
be our physical bodies and particularly our heads, yet the moment
we start to reflect on any specific feature, it ceases to be intrinsic
to ourselves, but rather some objective property belonging to us.
The harder I attend to my mouth, the more firmly it is placed at
the end of my attention as its object. There is this gap where
every bit of my body I attend to becomes something I attend
to, not something that I am.
The traditional way round this seeming paradox is to distance
oneself from the body altogether, where the ‘true me is a
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non-body, something that lodges in my body and does not
share its fate’. But this distancing of some non-material self
from the body, as he points out, raises all sorts of unanswerable
questions—about how it comes to be there and how ‘I’ experience
the world through it.
Tallis’s ambitious project then is to stick with the physicality of
the head and demonstrate how its numerous attributes when
reflected on deeply enough from a phenomenological perspective
help to resolve the question of ‘what is involved in being me?’
This promises to be a most productive line of inquiry, so it is more
than surprising to learn early on that his journey is going to bypass
the capital city of the head—the brain. This has the undoubted
virtue of simplifying matters but might seem as perverse as
Shakespeare writing Hamlet while only giving the Prince of
Denmark a walk on part. Tallis justifies this omission, less than
convincingly, on the grounds that this master organ is ‘overrated’
and so much has recently been written about it—but at the cost
of drastically narrowing the interest and coherence of his thesis.
The Kingdom opens with a classic Tallis paradox of the ‘obvious
non-obvious’ which typically of his writing induces a state of
heightened awareness comparable to that of taking a mind
expanding drug. He invites the reader to look into a mirror as
happens every morning, but this time to see the multifariousness
of the face staring back—‘the site of endless trafficking’, absorbing
the inputs of the senses of sight, sound and smell, of air inhaled
through the nostrils and food and drink through the mouth, and
generating its outputs of tears and saliva, and those ceaseless
transmissions, both verbal and non-verbal with which we communicate our signals of intent to others. And yet, as he points
out, there is nothing in all this activity that hints at the ‘silent
cacophony of thought’ within the head that commands the
centre of its conscious attention. The sudden rush of realization
of the queerness of this contrast between the voluminous busyness of our dealings with the outer world and the silent busyness
of the inner exemplifies the power and richness of the phenomenological perspective, bringing to our attention the almost
unfathomable profundity of all those aspects of ourselves we
take so readily for granted.
Tallis’s journey proper begins with the head’s multi-talented
secretions of mucus and sebum, tears and saliva each interpreted
and expanded on so as to convey how the sense of self and the
human experience are formed out of ‘biological events’. Thus,
saliva might seem from a strictly scientific objective perspective
as no more than a trivial fact, but he elaborates on its capacity
to make ‘infinite use of finite resources’ facilitating those 4-fold
diverse functions of lubricating food, assisting speaking, initiating
the digestion of starch and protecting against infection. And that
is just the beginning for Tallis remorselessly elucidates saliva’s
central role in human relationships both of the most intimate
kind, as in kissing, but also the most hostile.
Spitting on someone is the ultimate insult compared with
which name-calling, however inflammatory and degrading,
seems merely metaphorical. Spittle originates from the cavity
where words are factored, so that spitting partakes of
linguistic sign . . . It is, however, without grammar. It has the
brutal immediacy of a fist on the face. It is half way between
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a curse and a blow. It has a particularly sinister aspect. It is a
forced intimacy, a little rape: the spat-upon is directly exposed
to materials drawn from the intimate recesses of another’s
body.
And, scarcely breaking step, Tallis draws attention to the centrality of saliva to the event at the heart of the culture and belief
systems of western civilization—Christ’s passion.
The image of the Son of God with sputum trickling down his
sweat-glistening, bloodstained cheek is a shocking confrontation with the . . . notion of the Author of the Universe taking
on the human condition. In this powerful . . . myth of Christ’s
passion, the mysterious process whereby human beings transform natural events (in this case the upwelling of saliva in their
own mouths) into symbols . . . reaches an extraordinary climax.
The next step on the journey is breathing, commonly perceived
as the province of the lungs, but shamelessly appropriated by the
head and suborned to its many purposes when laughing, coughing, yawning, sneezing—and most importantly of all when speaking. Here, the poet Tallis’s prose is so dense with meaning it must
be read closely to catch its many nuances.
Speech is fashioned out of exhaled air, exquisitely sculpted by
the lips, the tongue, the palate, the throat, working together in
marvellous synergy . . . these sounds are linked into utterances of
bottomless complexity, in which we at once discern meaning and
intent. Their rising and falling tones declare that what is being
uttered is an assertion or a question, or a wish or a sigh, or a
curse; that it is gentle or aggressive, flattering or mocking, informative, misleading . . .
Tallis concludes these reflections on the possibilities (and diversity of forms) of breath-generated speech with the brilliant
thought-provoking paradox where ‘the breath that is life articulates the consciousness that life sustains’. That consciousness,
or self-awareness, Tallis reminds the reader, is the defining feature
of our species where we alone know what we are doing—and
why—permitting us not just to live our lives, but to lead them.
‘The propensity to transform expired air into sounds that are
used to refer to other things, to possibilities that may or may
not be realised, presupposes an explicit sense of ourselves, of
the material world and of other humans.’
Still, language for all that it frames and shapes our lives, falls
far short of what might be said, in failing to capture those depths
of the human experience that lie beyond words. This brings us
to the next step in the journey, the extraordinary expressive
capacity of the facial muscles to convey our innermost emotions
of sadness, anger, surprise, fear and contempt. ‘They tell us about
the current account of your soul’, Tallis writes, ‘what is happening
between you and me, what kind of person you are, what kind of
person I am’. And the grammar of non-verbal communication
goes very deep indeed as Tallis, in another brilliant apercu,
points out that the amused smile is inextricably linked to the
further uniquely human ability to appreciate the significance
of time.
Book Review
We are animals for whom time is not merely lived through the
vicissitudes of our bodies, but is experienced through an explicit
past and a future . . . we have a feeling, on the basis of a recalled
past, of how things are going to be in an anticipated future.
And so we are aware of the difference between how things turn
out and how they should have turned out. We are consequently
susceptible to surprises: by punch lines that confound our
expectations; by things that come together when they should
be kept apart . . .
The most potent of the attributes of the head in defining the
sense of self is in its role as a watchtower—looking out on the
world ‘out there’. The distinctive feature of vision as opposed to
the other senses such as smell and hearing, is that it permits us
to see the world around us at a visible distance from where
the self is located (or so it appears to be) just above the eyes in
the middle of the forehead. ‘The seer’, as Tallis puts it, ‘is not
immersed in what he sees. Vision lifts us up above the sea of
things . . . I see the world around me as being around me. This
makes my visual field into something that has me as the
explicit centre.’
This should be the cue for a roll of drums heralding the
approach to the capital of the head—those 3 pounds of protoplasmic stuff locked within the skull that contain the unique
personality of each one of us: ‘The self’ that forged by experience changes over time but yet remains remorselessly the same.
Certainly, neuroscience may have failed to solve the riddle of
how the electrochemical activity of the synapse translates into
the richness of the human self, but it has generated more than
enough fascinating insights into the physical basis of perception,
memory and free will to contradict the prevailing materialist view
of the self as an illusion generated by the brain to convey the
impression of there being ‘someone in charge’. Yet, Prof. Tallis,
for all his searching insights in his philosophical trilogy into the
inconsistencies and false logic of the ‘identity theory’, does not
want to go there. He is, one suspects, over fearful of finding
himself compelled by the logic of his own argument and the
recent findings of neuroscience to embrace the dualist notion of
brain and mind as being two distinct essences—without their
being any conception of how the one might influence the other.
Thus half way through the journey, his investigation of the interdependence of the head and self fizzles out and the further
stages are a grievous disappointment with chapters devoted to
hair, vomiting, smoking and the ageing head that have little
relevance to his central argument.
It is possible to glimpse the scale of this missed opportunity in
the final chapter where Tallis returns to form in an extended
reflection on thinking. There is perhaps no better instance of the
narrow horizons of contemporary science than its failure to have
anything of interest to say about this one activity that fills our
heads from morning till night—other than the supposition that it
must be the consequence of some sophisticated neurochemistry.
The phenomenology of thinking in contrast prompts a whole
series of novel insights that massively deepen our understanding
of this defining feature of our species.
Thoughts, by definition, are silent and known only to their possessor, so that we only know what they are by hearing them
Book Review
within our heads. This raises the uncomfortable question of who
is doing the ‘speaking’ and who the ‘listening’. ‘Do I have to tell
myself my thoughts in order to think them?’ Tallis asks, ‘in which
case how do I know what to tell myself?’ But, on further reflection, it may not be ‘I’ doing the thinking at all; rather ‘our
thoughts are often given to us rather than generated by us.
We suffer our thoughts as much as we enact them.’ Who
then, or what, is giving us our thoughts, or indeed the reverse,
what is the status of those thoughts we know are there—but
resolutely refuse to come? Then, one might reasonably wonder,
what is it that distinguishes banal from profound thoughts—
and how to tell the difference between them? There is nothing difficult about these thoughts about thinking. They emerge
quite readily in all their deeply enigmatic colours as soon as one
starts ‘thinking’ about thoughts, prompting the sort of intrigued
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response ‘that’s really interesting’ that is the main impetus of intellectual enquiry.
The Kingdom, disappointingly, may be rather less than its parts,
but Tallis’s is still an unforgettable journey in drawing to our attention the richness and resonance of the most seemingly trivial facts
of biology. ‘The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new
lands’ observed Marcel Proust ‘but in seeing with new eyes’—and
the facts of the head seen through his new eyes prove endlessly
fascinating.
James le Fanu
General Practitioner and columnist for the Telegraph
E-mail: [email protected]
Advance Access publication March 2, 2009