Phenom Cogn Sci (2009) 8:151–158
DOI 10.1007/s11097-008-9114-2
BOOK REVIEW
Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology,
and the Sciences of Mind
Cambridge, Mass. & London, Harvard University Press, 543 pp,
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02511-0, ISBN 10: 0-674-02511-3
Keith Ansell-Pearson
Published online: 11 November 2008
# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008
This is a large book, and large books have to justify themselves more than short
ones. Although there are times when I think Evan Thompson could be more
succinct, the length of the book is justified owing to the need for the ambitious
project the book undertakes to be properly and convincingly realized. Overall, the
book is a tremendous success and amounts to a superior contribution to recent and
current debates in the philosophy of mind. Thompson displays a deeply impressive
grasp of the relevant literature across a range of disciplines, including biology,
phenomenology, psychology and neuroscience. Not only has he read widely, he has
an admirable intellectual independence, and is confident of the arguments he wants
to demonstrate and the direction he wants the sciences of the mind to take. The book
provides a highly instructive series of insights into how we have got to where we are
in our conceptions of the mind, how these continue to replicate the errors of modern
thought (these errors are largely Cartesian), and how the philosophy and biology of
life, as well as the sciences of the mind, require the insights of phenomenology if we
are to do justice to our understanding of consciousness. None of this would come
across as powerfully and persuasively as it does without the tremendous intellectual
gifts Thompson has in his possession and that he brings to bear on some of the most
important topics confronting both philosophy and scientific inquiry today. These
gifts reveal themselves in his impressive mastery of the literature; in his judicious
and sober treatment of the different sides that have constructed the core debates for
us today, such as advocates of genocentrism and complexity theorists; in the
thorough manner in which he exposes real or genuine deficiencies in the arguments
and positions of his opponents; and in the comprehensive manner in which he states
the case for a phenomenologically-driven science of life and mind. There can be
little doubt that owing to his tremendous intellectual skills, he is a reliable guide
whom the reader can trust. In fact, he displays at their best and most open the two
intellectual virtues that Nietzsche held should inform the most demanding tasks of
K. Ansell-Pearson (*)
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, England
e-mail: keith.ansellpearson@btinternet.com
152
K.A. Pearson
modern intellectual inquiry: honesty or probity and modesty. Thompson has a
genuine intellectual conscience and his refusal to settle for simple-minded positions
is both admirable and inspiring. One cannot sing one’s praises of this book enough,
and it deserves all the plaudits it will surely receive. It makes a truly invaluable
contribution to the philosophy and science of the mind.
Thompson has set himself the task of providing an informed and adequate
conception of ‘mind in life’, that is, of bridging the explanatory gap between mind
and life, or between the subjective and the objective, the phenomenological and the
physical (ultimately, our attachment to these oppositions is shown to be part of our
problem and requires much greater finesse than is commonly done). For Thompson,
there is a deep continuity of life and mind: where we encounter life we will find
mind in its most articulated or sophisticated forms, and mind belongs to life. This is
to pose a challenge both to science and transcendental phenomenology simply
because for science life is taken to refer to a strictly external, objective, structural
and functional property of physical systems; whilst for phenomenology questions of
life can be bracketed out and left to physicalism with the phenomenologist, as the
widespread supposition has it, simply devoting him or herself to the study of the
intentional positioning of consciousness, which is taken to be an internal, subjective,
qualitative, and intrinsic property of mental states It is not only the sciences of the
mind, then, that Thompson is challenging in this book.
Evan Thompson is best known to date for his pioneering work with Francisco
Varela and the development of autopoiesis as a distinct and unique approach to the
study of self-organizing systems, including the organism. It has its roots in Kant’s
treatment of the organism in his Critique of Teleological Judgment (1790), and
Thompson provides a rich and precise account of Kant’s contribution in this book.
On these issues of self-organization and the nature of the organism, Kant is shown to
be far from the dead dog he is often assumed to be. Thompson simply refuses to rest
content with the widespread view that there is no distinct ‘hard problem’ of life—the
problem Kant was wrestling with and could not resolve—simply because, the claim
goes, there is no deep continuity of life and consciousness but only a radical break
between them (one proponent of this view is David Chalmers). The widely held
view is that whilst we can account for living processes by providing physical
accounts of structure and function, when it comes to consciousness, it is necessary to
resist functional analysis. The problem with this is that it treats consciousness and
the ‘feeling of life’ in mysterious terms, throwing up poorly conceived thought
experiments such as the brain in a vat and the zombie problems. The physicalist
account of life goes wrong in supposing that a living system can be explained in
terms of ‘sheer exteriority’ (partes extra partes), and is a system devoid of
‘immanent purposiveness’ (p. 225). But can we solve the problem of the relation of
mind and body so long as we continue to conceptualize it in such a way that they
intrinsically exclude one another? As Thompson points out, ‘this chasm is a
philosophical construction built on sedimented and problematic ways of thinking
going back to Descartes’ (ibid.).
Thompson’s magisterial study makes an important contribution on a number of
fronts. First, it wants to explain selfhood or subjectivity from the ground up by
accounting for the autonomy it is legitimate to identify with living and cognitive
creatures. Second, it wishes to contribute to the work of those are seeking to
Mind in life: biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind
153
‘naturalize’ phenomenology. Thompson holds that phenomenology cannot rest
content with providing descriptions of lived experience but must understand and
interpret its inquiries in relation to those of the life sciences such as biology and the
sciences of the mind. Clearly, there are all sorts of dangers in this effort to naturalize
phenomenology, and, more generally, in the ambitious synthesis Thompson is after.
On the one hand, science can end up being treated ineptly; on the other hand,
phenomenology can lose is integrity as a distinct and novel intellectual practice. It is
to Thompson’s credit that he avoids both of these pitfalls. His challenge is to show
that not only must phenomenology engage with science, but also that naturalism
needs to climb up to the vantage point of phenomenology. It must do this if it is to be
a serious ‘science’ of life. We can longer be satisfied with a purely physicalist
approach to embodied consciousness. Husserl attempted to show that the synthesis
of consciousness is something quite different from the external combinations of
natural or physical elements that suppose ‘mutual externality, spatial intermingling
and interpenetration’; by contrast conscious life involves ‘intentional intertwining,
mutual implication of meaning’ (Husserl cited in Thompson, p. 356). Husserl
expresses this decisive insight in a series of lectures on phenomenological
psychology given in 1925, but it is one Bergson made central to his analysis of
the difference between the physical and the mental in his 1889 study of ‘the
immediate data of consciousness’ (translated into English as Time and Free Will).
Bergson’s analysis centres on making clear the difference between two kinds of
multiplicity: spatial and discrete, on the one hand, and temporal and continuous, on
the other hand.
Thompson acknowledges that his argument that phenomenology can stand in an
explanatory relation to biology will sound odd to many of his readers: ‘What could
phenomenology possibly explain in this domain?’ (p. 358). His key argument is that
the physicalist conception of nature as an objective base for the phenomenal can no
longer hold sway and instead nature needs to be re-examined from the perspective of
phenomenology (p. 359). The most progressive move forward to make, then, is not,
as some commentators have supposed (Brian Leiter for example), to limit the
imperial claims of substantive naturalism (everything real is physical) by curtailing it
to a methodological naturalism that allows for an appreciation of qualia. Rather, it
consists in contesting the primacy of the physical and of the physicalist conception
of nature: the mental goes all the way down. This is, in fact, a philosophy of nature
that early philosophers of life of the modern period such as Nietzsche and Bergson
were seeking to promote, and that did not have its properly effective moment in
twentieth century thought and inquiry. This is not to discredit the immense
contribution and richness of phenomenology, but simply to indicate that the project
Thompson is committed to has earlier sources and resources. Phenomenology makes
a unique contribution in insisting upon the irreducibility of consciousness, and
Thompson provides a superb demonstration of just what this amounts to in chapter
eight of his book (pp. 221–43). In short, it means consciousness, conceived as an
epistemic base, cannot be rendered equivalent to perceptual appearances. It is not
simply the case that empirical objects are given to consciousness but rather that
consciousness, conceived now as the activity that discloses objects as complex
structured manifolds, is a condition of possibility for there being any appearances at
all. So consciousness needs to be understood not simply empirically but
154
K.A. Pearson
transcendentally. Husserlian phenomenology continues the work effected by Kant’s
transcendental turn, but the kind of project Thompson undertakes ensures it does not
remain caught in the trap of transcendental idealism.
The book is divided into three principal parts. In the first part Thompson outlines
the contribution the ‘enactive’ approach can make to the task of showing the
continuity between life and mind. In the opening chapters, he provides an instructive
introduction to the key concepts of phenomenology—for example, intentionality,
active and passive geneses and syntheses, the move Husserl makes in his later work
in the direction of generative phenomenology (treating not only intersubjectivity or
the self-other relation, but also the events of birth and death and the interconnectedness of generations), as well as treating core notions such as autonomy and
emergence. In part two he switches the focus to ‘life’ and engages with autopoiesis,
the philosophy of the organism, and evolutionary theory. Thompson is especially
good in this part of the book in showing precisely why it is inadequate for scientists
to deny that the question of how ‘life’ in its minimal sense is to be defined—and
centred on the issue of explaining how protocellulaer life arises from nonlife—is a
valid one. As he puts it, the ‘question how and when life originated is inseparable
from the question of what a living system is’ (p. 95). Moreover, he is persuasive in
arguing that a characterization of life that can account for genuine individuality has
logical priority over one that does not. It simply means that the philosophy of the
organism has to be taken very seriously, and on this point I found myself largely in
total agreement with him. What will not do in seeking to distinguish life from
nonlife is simply coming up with a shopping list of those things we deem to
characterize living systems, such as the genetic material of DNA and RNA,
metabolism and self-maintenance, evolution by natural selection, and so on. To say
that life is cellular because without the cell there is no life is fundamentally
tautological. The question to be posed is rather: what is it about a cell that makes it
something living? In the third and final part, the author focuses his attention on
consciousness in life with a rich set of treatments of sensorimotor subjectivity,
mental imagery, time and temporality, emotion and valence, and empathy and
enculturation. There are two appendices on, respectively, Husserl and cognitive
science, and emergence and the problem of downward causation.
It is with this third main part that the book truly comes to life (excuse the pun).
Thompson has been inspired by the work of Hans Jonas (1903–93), a phenomenologist who made a series of original, if neglected, contributions to our thinking of
life in all its most salient aspects, including the ethical one. In this part of the book
Thompson provides valuable insight into the patterns of advanced or complex forms
and systems of life, including immanent purposiveness, sense-making, and identity
over time. Moreover, he shows that these notions are essentially normative ones.
They refer to what Merleau-Ponty called ‘vital structures’ and only such structures,
as opposed to entirely physical ones, can be comprehended in relation to norms (we
comprehend physical structures according to laws). On the one hand, these structures
enable us to develop an understanding of vitally important biological phenomena
such as stress, illness fatigue, and health, as well as more generally plasticity and
adaptation. On the other hand, such concepts enable us to develop an appreciation of
how questions of illness and health become more complex for us as a living system
grows in historical complexity (cultural and spiritual). This latter half of the
Mind in life: biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind
155
investigation is not really explored by Thompson, and I am not sure of the reasons
for this (Nietzsche erected an entire philosophy on its basis). It could be because
Thompson is wedded chiefly to phenomenology and, if this great tradition of
thought has one weakness, it is that it assumes things such as autonomy and
individuality, and does not pay enough attention to their historical and cultural bases
which are best analysed in the genealogical and critical terms undertaken by
Nietzsche. It is perhaps in this respect that phenomenology can often come across to
some philosophers, such as myself, as a bourgeois science.
The most important argument cashed out in the book is that the self-organizing
features of mind can be understood as an enriched version of the self-organizing
features of life, in which the self-organization of biological life implies cognition and
the incipient mind finds sentient expression in the self-organizing dynamics of
action, perception, and emotion. If biology has allowed itself to become trapped in a
genocentrism, which complexity theory has sought to expose and break out of, then
the science of the mind has allowed itself to become unnecessarily and unwisely
trapped in a reification of the brain as the progenitor of our representations of the
world. For Thompson, mental life is bodily life and situated in the world, which
means that the roots of mental life cannot simply reside in the brain but ramify
through the body and its environment. It is simply an error—of atomism, of
mechanism, of our spatial habits—to reduce mental life to brain processes going on
in our heads. Thompson is wonderfully innovative and provocative when he
suggests there is, in fact, not a mind-body problem, but only a body-body problem.
The mind-body problem only arises at the point we commit ourselves to the basic
Cartesian error of conceiving the mental as somehow mysteriously separate from
bodily life (an error that Nietzsche sought to overcome in the emphasis he placed on
the study of the body over the reified mind). Although Thompson relies on the
obvious phenomenological references to demonstrate his thesis—notably the rich
contributions made by figures such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty—I trace this effort
to overcome our reification of the brain and mind to philosophers of life such as
Nietzsche and Bergson. These figures do not appear in Thompson’s rich text, and
their absence is a sign that there is a neglected and forgotten tradition that can enable
us to get out of the impasses that mar our making real progress in the philosophy and
sciences of the mind.
Bergson’s great and remarkable text of 1896, Matter and Memory, is an especially
fertile text in this regard. Neglect of it leads Thompson to at times exaggerating the
newness of what is being proposed in this book, as when on p. 244, for example, he
writes: ‘In recent years, a new dynamic sensorimotor approach to understanding
perceptual consciousness has arisen in cognitive science and the philosophy of
mind’. But such an approach was already being advocated by Bergson at the end of
the nineteenth century! Bergson attempted to draw our attention to the faulty
assumptions on which much of our thinking about mind and world is founded. For
example, he sought to show how realism ends up in the trap of idealism. To state this
in brief terms of two notation systems: for the idealist the world is the product of our
ideas and cannot exist independently of them. For the realist or materialist the mental
is reduced to the cerebral and in this way the brain is made into the progenitor of our
representations of the world. Bergson takes both to task for reducing the relation of
the body to the world into one of speculative knowledge as opposed to vital activity.
156
K.A. Pearson
Realism becomes idealism when it locates perception and consciousness in a centre or
some detached isolated object that has been abstractly divorced from its conditions of
action in the world. Both err in making the presentation of the part—the mind or the
brain—equivalent to the presentation of the whole (say the structural coupling of
organism and the environment). A great deal of neuroscience, and what passes today
for the philosophy of mind (identity theory, for example), inadvertently produces an
idealism of the cerebral substance by severing motor activity from the processes of
perception, localizing perception in the sensory nervous elements. But this is in error
in thinking, since the perception is no more in the sensory centers than in the motor
centers; rather, it measures the complexity of their relations, and, is, in fact, where it
appears to be. The view that Bergson sought to combat most is one which would, in
treating sensations merely as signals, in which the office of each sense is to translate
homogeneous and mechanical movements into its language, posit, on the one hand,
homogeneous movements in space and, on the other, extended sensations in
consciousness (a quantitative outside and a qualitative inside). In contrast with this
view, Bergson argued that the identity resides not between the cerebral and the mental,
but rather between the real action of sensory elements and the virtual action of
perception (including the motor diagrams). Thus, perception is a part of things (it is
not an interior, subjective vision), just as an affective sensation (such as the capacity to
experience pain or pleasure) does not spring from the depths of inner consciousness by
extending itself into an outer realm (affection is not a simple movement from an inner
intensive state to an outer extensity), simply because it is intimately bound up with the
modifications that inform the movement of one body with other bodies. Our
appreciation of the movement of bodies becomes more complex when this is thought
in terms of duration and the addition of memory. Although this movement has its
material conditions in a nervous system—‘The greater the power of action of a body,
symbolized by a higher degree of complexity in the nervous system, the wider is the
field that perception embraces’ (Bergson)—it cannot be reduced to its simple physical
embodiment simply because the brain is part of the world and not simply in one’s
head. The error in treating the brain in reified terms as the material center of
consciousness is that it withdraws the objects which encase it, so also withdrawing in
the process the very thing we designate as a cerebral state, simply because the brain is
dependent on the objects in the world for its properties and states. Realism or
materialism surreptitiously passes over into idealism where it posits as isolable by right
what is isolated only in idea. Bergson is not, of course, denying that there exists a
close connection between a state of consciousness and the brain. His argument is
directed against any reified treatment of the brain in separation from the world it is a
part of and from ‘life’ treated as a sphere of praxis or activity. He thus argues against
the idea that if we could penetrate into the inside of the brain and see at work the
dance of the atoms which make up the cortex we would then know every detail of
what is taking place in consciousness. The body is a center of action and not a house
of representation. Thompson is close to Bergson when he argues that the brain is an
organ and not an organism. This means that each of us is precisely not a brain in a vat
but a bodily subject (p. 242). There is nothing genuinely astonishing in the hypothesis
that what one is, is nothing but a pack of neurons (you are your synapses), except
perhaps for the simple-minded character in which some scientists tell us the so-called
‘truth’.
Mind in life: biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind
157
To be fair to his study, Thompson does make reference to some neglected sources
and figures of modern thought, such as Maine be Biran (1766–1824), who attempted
to take seriously ‘the feeling of existence’ in his work on habit and spontaneity and
who located the source of the personal ‘I’ in the bodily experience of the exercising
effort in movement (I would also mention the work on habit of his successor, Felix
Ravaisson). In addition, I would acknowledge that phenomenologists such as
Merleau-Ponty, a figure greatly inspired by Bergson of course, enrich what Bergson
gives us in terms of a philosophy of the lived body and the syntheses of time
consciousness. Bergson’s revolution consists in thinking in terms of duration and not
space, but he often restricts the activity of the body to the present and grants the
future to memory, so reinstating dualism if of an unorthodox, non-Cartesian, kind.
I share Thompson’s view that too much contemporary theorizing about life and
mind remains in the grip of atomistic and mechanistic habits—habits which need their
own genetic explanation. As he points out, genocentrism and computationalism—the
two dominant models in our thinking on evolution and mind—run on the same
conceptual fuel and both perpetuate, rather than break free from, the dualisms of
hardware versus software, mater versus information, body versus mind, as well as
get wrong the role that particular subsystems play in the dynamic and complex
phenomena of the whole organism embedded in its environment. These errors are
not merely intellectual errors but also fundamentally ‘ethical’ ones in the deepest and
richest sense of this term. Thompson is right to take to task the metaphors these
modes and models of thinking rely upon, including the metaphor of information, and
to draw attention to the fact that the very disavowal of metaphor—for example, by
Richard Dawkins when he claims that life is just bytes and bytes of information and
that this is not metaphor but ‘the plain truth’—is intellectually dishonest and
irresponsible. The core claim that DNA is an information store is a serious
oversimplification that has little predictive or explanatory power, if any. Instead, it
serves to obscure a genuine understanding of the complex dynamics of autopoiesis,
reproduction, heredity, and development. Reigning in science is an inflated
conception of natural selection that fails to appreciate the extent to which its
emergence is the outcome of more basic dynamic and thermodynamic processes.
Thompson takes up these arguments, familiar from the work of Depew and Weber,
and endeavours to show that dynamic stabilization in the form of the emergence of
stable self-producing processes in a bounded biochemical system is the prerequisite
of natural selection.
Thompson is right, I believe, when he states that we are in the grip of
informational idolatry and superstition, not science. In the 1880s Nietzsche drew on
new work in embryology in an effort to counter what he saw as the ‘mechanistic
senselessness’ of Darwinism—the choice of phrasing here is revealing—and to
appreciate complexity and synthesis at the most primitive level of life (what he called
‘the preform of life’ and characterized as ‘will to power’). Thompson’s study shows
that much twentieth century philosophy and science ignored this appeal to
complexity—Nietzsche summarised it in his critique of Herbert Spencer with the
phrase the ‘music of life’, by which meant that life is sense (Sinn) and sense is
‘complex’—and instead stubbornly wedded itself to atomistic and mechanistic habits
with their attendant reductionisms and spatializations. So long as we remain wedded
to these habits we are unable to adequately think ‘life’. As I have said already, this is
158
K.A. Pearson
not simply an intellectual problem but an ethical one. As Nietzsche pointed out, we
knowers remain unknown to ourselves.
Perhaps the most important contribution Mind in Life seeks to make is to our
understanding and appreciation of sentience: what is the feeling of life and how do
we best explain this feeling? As Thompson duly notes, accounting for the emergence
and presence of sentience in the natural world is perhaps the truly outstanding
problem of the philosophy and science of the mind today. He calls it at one point in
the book, ‘the sensorimotor way of being in the world’ (p. 221). In its full nature or
extent it comprises locomotion and perception, emotion and feeling, as well as the
sense of agency and self along with the aspiration or drive towards autonomy (which
is in fact what Nietzsche was seeking to capture in his formula of the will to power).
I am convinced that Thompson is right about this and has made one of the richest
contributions to the study of ‘mind in life’ in recent years. It deserves to become a
major work of reference and inspiration for research in the immediate future and,
indeed, for many years to come. It provides a genuine and far-reaching clarification
of core issues in the philosophy and science of the mind, and is to be greatly
welcomed. My hope is that Thompson will now turn more of his attention to the
critical and clinical study of the health and pathology of consciousness, in short, to
the normative dimension of consciousness studies.