Phillips: Darwin's Worms

Phillips, Adam: Darwin's Worms; Basic Books, New York, 2000

I really enjoyed this book.  As I read it, I kept thinking that what Phillips was saying seemed so true, that what he was concluding about Freud and Darwin's contributions to our knowledge of the world we live in and our lives themselves was so insightful and made so much sense.  His discussions of the importance of their work helped fill in some of the lacunae that kept tripping me up as I would read these texts - the sense that I'm missing so much and because I'm missing it, I can't see the big picture.  Phillips' take on the state of our knowledge about the world so far, for me was invigorating and, to use a trite expression, 'life-affirming'.

In his prologue, Phillips asks

How could it be possible that we were only natural creatures, but that nature was felt to be insufficient for our needs?  Either nature must be in some (old-fashioned) sense evil, or we have misconstrued our needs.  [pg 15]

He goes on to say that Darwin and Freud showed us that nature doesn't take sides and that "there was nothing now that could promise, or underwrite, or predict, a successful life."   "Nature seemed to have laws but not intentions, or a sense of responsibility."  This reminds me of a Stephen Crane poem I used to like to think about in my teens:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
  A sense of obligation."

Phillips writes that both Darwin and Freud were sceptical about the perfectibility of Man, a theory that despite having been brought up Catholic and despite an interest in Buddhism and Eastern religions, I've never really believed in, nor have I aspired to perfection.  That's not to say that I don't think that 'improvements' can't or shouldn't be attempted but that a goal of perfection is not even worthy of being aspired to.  Phillips writes that for both Darwin and Freud "we are the animals who seem to suffer, above all, from our ideals" [pg 17].  In Saturday's discussion about Frankenstein, Byron spoke about one of the versions of the Prometheus myth where Zeus kept making forms of humans but not embuing them with life because they weren't yet perfect.  Then Prometheus interfered and brought humans to life, gave us fire imperfect as we are - and by so doing, prevented us from being perfect, prevented Zeus from perfecting us.  Of course, had Zeus perfected humans, they wouldn't have been us; or we aren't them.  Phillips says that by our constant striving after knowledge, perfection, goodness etc, we are denying ourselves "the pleasure of reality" [pg 18]. I think Lawrence would have somewhat agreed with that - with his celebration of sex, nature, simplicity; and with his rejection of industrialization and class.

Phillips speaks about how

reality was a viable term for [Darwin and Freud]: that they used the word to do something.  Because, as a concept, it was a synonym for nature, it was rarely ironized by them. [pg 18]

That's a far cry from today where if you ask someone what the word 'reality' means to them, they are, sadly, most apt to talk about 'reality TV", an ironic if not oxymoronic term for 2013.  According to Phillips "If there are laws of human nature, some of them at least are of a peculiarly recondite logic." [pg 21]

The fact that we want to survive and reproduce, and the fiction that we desire in the way Freud describes, tells us remarkably little about how we should live.  Indeed, it tends to ironize prescription (when it doesn't render it cynical). And yet, of course, Darwin and Freud furtively prescribe in their writing through what they praise.  Their morality resides in their celebrations, as much  as in their dismay: where they find beauty is where they find happiness... [pg 22]

All along, some people have looked to animals, for their differences and for any commonality with humankind, to try and make sense of the world and of what it is to be human.  "...it is by comparing ourselves with other 'sentient beings' that we can find the proper place for our experience. [pg 22]

The word 'sublime' has been used alot in the texts we've been reading since Christmas, those from the 1600s on.  I didn't have a complete sense of what the authors meant when they used it - usually to describe Nature.  Phillips provides the best explanation I've read.

the experience of the sublime was essentially that which was beyond the making of sense: it was about what overawed us.  Whatever was in excess of a person's capacity for representation - whatever threatened our belief in our languages - was sublime... [pg 24]

 Phillips writes about Freud's 1916 paper 'On Transience' which Professor Zaslove sent us before his lecture on Freud.  I was fully in Freud's camp on this, that it is the transience of things that give them if not all their value, at least increased value.  In Saturday's discussion about Frankenstein, we were talking about his desire to solve life and death, to figure out how to prevent death - and I began to think about what life would be like if we were immortal.  I can't see how we would enjoy anything.  If we had eternity to do, try, experience anything and everything we could think of, what would be the point of any of it, what would be the joy or the excitement of any of it.  Freud intimated "there were two kinds of people: those who can enjoy desiring and those who need satisfaction."

I see this duality of perspective in my work.  We have to deal with death and loss of pets - and I've had to go through this personally with my own pets as well as with family members and their pets, and countless times with clients.  There are some people who in the midst of grief when they lose a pet say that they don't know if they will ever get another pet as it's too hard.  For myself, I can't think that way.  I'm very cognizant of the arc of having a pet and that they will get sick, and they will eventually die - I deal with this every single shift I work - but I can't let that overshadow all else.  I can't think about having a pet, enjoy taking them for a walk or curling up with a purring contented cat, and in the midst of that let myself be oppressed with thoughts that some day they will die and I will be sad.  That day will come and I will be sad - excruciatingly sad - but that is the reality.  I have no desire to avoid it by opting out.

The individual person, like the species of which she is a member, is going nowhere discernible (or predictable), and nowhere in particular. But this is not so much a cause of grief as an invitation to go on inventing the future.  As Darwin and Freud discover more and more about the powers of the past - about how the present is continually being rushed by the past - they also realize one simple fact: that the past influences everything and dictates nothing. [pg 29]

This last phrase, to me, is all you ever would need to know to be a counsellor or psychoanalyst. Yes - you will be affected by what has happened to you in your past BUT you are not bound by it, it does not define you, it dictates NOTHING.

For Darwin it was a simple matter of biological imperatives - survive and reproduce.  For Freud there was the complicating factor of man's desire for happiness - and "their unhappiness shows that they are divided against themselves." [pg 30]

Once happiness matters - and happiness entails the pleasures of justice as inextricable from the pleasures of sexual satisfaction; the possibilities of kindness made sufficiently compatible with a sense of aliveness - so-called biological functions become moral questions. [pg 31]

In my work for Veterinarians Without Borders (not to say that I don't think about this at home in Canada as well) I end up thinking alot about humans, animals and the environment, the "One World" concept we are [finally?] starting to accept.  Darwin wrote "I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life..." 4th Chapter.  Phillips goes on to write: "Beauty and complexity are self-evidently good, and they can be found now in the co-adaptation of the ecological system." [pg 38]  "Nature is astonishingly prolific, but it is a prodigal process going nowhere special, sponsored by destruction and suffering." [pg 40]

Phillips looks to a particular aspects of each man's work to say something about life.  For Darwin, it was his work on the lowly earthworm.  For Freud, it is the reasoning behind his hatred about biographers.  They were men grappling with the state of knowledge in the 19th century.

In their writings we see religious traditions and sensibilities struggling to transform themselves into secular, scientifically informed ways of life. pg 116

He asks some tough questions in his epilogue. "Since a natural world is a world of continuous change and therefore continuous loss, how and why does loss matter?"  pg 117  He writes about their discoveries leading them to a secularized world, a world that no longer needs, that no longer can use, a god to give it meaning; and states "The risk was that life could be seen as an enormous waste; the pain of existence would not only be without justification, it could be without compensation. "  pg 117

There was so much I liked about this book and this author.  Who could resist an author who would write, I assume non-ironically, "given the conventional iconography of worms"? [pg 41]  One analogy I didn't agree with however was when Phillips compared Darwin's "side attack" on the status quo, through his observations about the role and importance of the common earthworm, with "middle-class fears of unionizing".  Philips suggests Darwin was intimating [pg 59] that "there may be parallels and analogies in the social hierarchy; that those at the bottom can do perfectly well what those at the top claim for themselves." While this may have held some truth 100 years ago, in 2013, the middle-class assuredly includes unionized workers, or said another way, you won't find many unionized workers in the ranks of the poor.  Said yet another way, the middle-class are not at the top, and the unionized worker is by no means at the bottom of any societal hierarchy.  If anything this hierarchy, in the 21st century, remains more gender-based, not worker's class-based.

In the section on Freud, with his odd fear of biographers, Phillips writes

It is not merely that we might be endangered by people's assumed knowledge about us, or our assumed knowledge about them - as in racist or sexist fantasy - but that it is misleading to assume it is knowledge that we want or that we have of people, any more than it is knowledge that we get from listening to music.  pg 74

 Phillips expounds a bit upon Freud's theory of a death wish, something I've never read up on.  He says that our life story:

this cosmic death story is in two acts. First, at no definable moment, and by no describable agent or process, 'The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception.' [...] And then for equally mysterious reasons ... the next thing happened...  'For a long time, perhaps,' he writes, 'living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death.' pg 79

Freud believed that we intellectually wish to live but that we instinctively wish to die, but to die our own way.  Phillips asks "Indeed, what is narrative about if it is not about objects of desire and the detours and obstacles and dangers entailed in their acquisition?" pg 83

...it is as if there are two kinds of life stories going on inside us.  From the point of view of the death instinct - that Freud is inclined to regard as the omniscient narrator - my life is a story about dying in my own fashion.  From the point of view of the life instinct, of Eros, more life is being sought and sustained.  pg 84

 "To be or not to be, that is the question"  Shakespeare, yet again, blazed a path we are still following.

'Instincts and their transformations are at the limit of what is discernible by psychoanalysis.' [pg 91]

Phillips writes that for Freud biographies were 'spurious and misleading' accounts of a life whereas psychoanalysis shows that a person's account of their own life is what should be relied on.  I don't know that I would agree at all, given the vagaries and unreliability of memory not to mention the impact of perspective.  I don't think there is any true or complete summary of a life - even if, as in these times of recording every moment and posting it online, an entire life were recorded and played back.

Lives dominated by impossible ideals - complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love - are lives experienced as continuous failure. pg 115

Phillips says that Darwin and Freud "press us to think of our lives as more miraculous than our deaths; our death is inevitable, but our conception is not."  pg 128

Habit, like bad science (or prejudice) creates an illusion of predictability; it keeps things the same by turning a blind eye to difference.  Darwin, Notebook 1839

This really resonates with me as I've always been someone very comfortable in habit and often made uneasy by the prospect of change.  Freud added to Darwin's insights about the constant state of change and adaptation (and co-adaptation) by bringing humankind's internal life into the mix, along with the external world, saying we also have to adapt to the internal world of desires, memory, repressions etc. Thinking of change as the normal state of affairs, not just something that occurs but as the main truth of life, as the most important factor in our lives and as the one we need to accept if not embrace, is an exciting way to think about things.