Book Review

Man is more than his neurology

The Kingdom of Infinite Space: a fantastical journey around your head

A large number of popular books have been published recently, more scientistic in spirit than scientific, suggesting that a combination of Darwinian theory and neuroscience is on the verge - give or take a detail or two - of completing Man's self-understanding. After two millennia and a half of philosophical effort and reflection, we are now trembling on the edge of a complete explanation of ourselves. With just a little more technological sophistication, which as everyone knows is increasing exponentially, we shall soon have unravelled the mystery of our own inner space.

Raymond Tallis will have none of this hubristic nonsense. He is far from being an obscurantist who denies all the claims of science: he is an eminent geriatrician, now retired, with a long list of scientific publications to his credit. But a certain human modesty is in order; the wise man acknowledges just how much he does not know, and what remains deeply mysterious.

In this book of reflections on the human head, from which, thank goodness, the idea of the brain as a computer is completely absent except in the dismissal, Professor Tallis takes us on a philosophical tour of aspects of this rather important appendage. He takes phenomena such as blushing, yawning and vomiting as the occasion of philosophical meditation. If he believed in God, he would read almost like a modern equivalent of the divines of the seventeenth century, who likewise took familiar things and made them the occasion of philosophical (and, of course, theological) meditation.

As well as being an eminent geriatrician, Professor Tallis is a philosopher - not of the armchair or saloon-bar variety but of the kind taken seriously by professional philosophers. He is also the foremost British critic of literary theory - that horrible indiscipline that has all but destroyed literary studies in our universities, a Dutch elm disease of genuine scholarship. From this brief description, it will come as no surprise that his range of cultural reference is enormous, and that he seems to have read (and remembered) everything, or at least everything worth reading and remembering.

Although his book, a tour d'horizon of the head, is a little idiosyncratic - one minute we are learning about the physiological and cultural meanings of mucus, the next about laughter and blushing - Professor Tallis keeps certain important targets in view. He is anxious to lay to rest the idea that man is an animal not so very different after all from the rest of zoological creation. He also wants to demonstrate that there is more to man's consciousness than neurology, or for that matter neurochemistry.

Over and over again, he reminds us that mankind lives in a universe of meaning, and not just of brute events. Attempts to demonstrate that man is a jumped-up chimpanzee, and that anything a man can do, a chimpanzee can do, except a little less well, are fundamentally wrong-headed. Language is the decisive difference between man and the rest of creation: it permits an essential distinction between the world in which we live and propositions about the world in which we live. Professor Tallis expresses it thus: animals live their lives, humans lead theirs. Only humans, he says, have an explicit concept or idea of the past, the present and the future: which is both a tremendous advantage and a terrible burden. Only man knows that he will die, and death is actually the ground of all our being, even if, as La Rochefoucauld says, we cannot stare at it long, just as we cannot stare long at the sun. It is the limitation imposed by time that gives meaning to all our projects, and therefore to our lives. If the literary editor of this journal had said to me, please read and review Professor Tallis' book some time within the next 17,000 years, do you suppose that you would be reading my review now, this week? But 17,000 years is a trifle to set against eternity. Eternal life, at least eternal sublunary life, would mean eternal procrastination. (On the other hand, Professor Tallis would never have written this book, so the question of reviewing it would not have arisen.)

Man's consciousness is more than neurochemistry, more than brainwaves, more even than pink and blue patches on fabulously sophisticated brain scans, for two reasons: first because the consciousness of man, who is embedded in a world that is partly given, partly of his own creation, is dependent on things outside the brain, and therefore cannot be wholly described by brain events; and second because (in any case) the means by which neurophysiological events are translated into subjective experience is radically mysterious and likely to remain so for purely metaphysical reasons. In other words, man not only cannot now explain himself to himself any better than Shakespeare did 400 years ago, but it is very unlikely (for which read impossible) that he ever will be able to do so. This is good news for literary types such as myself, who want subjective experience always to remain an important part of human knowledge, and also for those who fear that infinite knowledge means infinite power, and therefore abuse of power.

Professor Tallis is pessimistic about our capacity for complete self-understanding, but does not therefore conclude that man is nothing but a beast driven to behave badly by biological imperatives. He is not at all religious - in fact, I suspect that he is hostile to religion - but, oddly enough, the religious will find much in his book to reassure and console them.

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