Anyone with an interest in what it is to be human will enjoy reading this book. In the early chapters, Raymond Tallis - British professor of medicine, poet, novelist, philosopher - establishes himself as the Shakespeare of the skull. Though I found myself awash in the flood of anatomical detail that Tallis presented, I went with the flow of his charming prose, amazed that anatomy could be so ... well, so engrossing. For example, The Secreting Head, the subject and title of Chapter 2, would seem (on the face of it) to provide but small grounds for amusement. What charm could there be in saliva, sweat, tears, ear wax, mucus, pus etc.?
The Kingdom of Infinte Space: A Portrait of Your Head
, by Raymond Tallis, Yale University Press, 324 pages, $30.95
And yet, Tallis charms and amuses, and in many ways. One is his continuous and cute word play: Tears are "ocular ejaculation" or "ocular incontinence," for example. Another is the acuteness of his observation: tears "empower the powerless"; the harrumph is "a suppressed bark ... an acoustic blob, a protolinguistic Ur-phoneme"; "All faces are to some degree poker," and so on.
Yet another source of amusement is his unending string of curiosities: We generate 30,000 litres of saliva in our lifetime; human migrations can be tracked by racial differences in ear wax; we "yawn about 250,000 times during our journey from the cradle to the grave." And then there are his uncounted evocations of philosophers, scientists and poets with whom he is, it seems, personally acquainted.
But the real charm of this book is the fact that the human head is not its topic, title notwithstanding. Bit by bit, we are shown that the subject of this book - its heart, so to speak - is not the head, but the essence of being human. Finally, on the 217th page, Tallis states explicitly what is by then implicitly plain: This book is "a head-driven exploration of the human condition."
For those of us with a burning interest in the mystery of how consciousness emerges from the metabolism of the brain, this book neither promises nor provides any insight. Tallis recognizes this mystery, and indeed draws many a portrait of it as truly and deeply mystifying - but only to turn away from it to, instead, "think into the muddle of embodiment." Think or sink, for those of us who believe that neuroscience provides a philosophical basis for understanding the mystery of consciousness, his dismissal of our neurophilosophical project as "neuromythology" or (more accusingly) as "neurotheology" may seem both unwarranted and unkind.
Tallis provides brilliant illumination of many dark corners of human existence, such as religion and our attitudes toward death
Still, the onus is on us neurophilosophers to sell the explanatory power of brain science to those whom we would like to enlighten. If Tallis and those like him insist that they are boggled by the fact that our brains' dark and tiny cells produce our minds' bright and infinite space, then it is pointless for neurophilosophers to insist that such mysterians (as we call them) are mistaken.
So Tallis's philosophy is of the continental sort rather than the Anglo-American sort, despite its provenance from west of the English Channel. Like any trip to the continent east of the channel, I found this book fascinating, sometimes delicious, sometimes disgusting, sometimes (and somehow) both at once. At one moment, under Tallis's anatomical gaze, the human head disintegrates into a evolutionarily contingent collection of bits and pieces. The eyes cease to be windows to the person within the body, transformed instead into gelatinous orbs sampling the light outside for bits of information.
And then, in the next moment, as Tallis playfully discusses laughter, the mood abruptly lightens. It is funny that we laugh at sex; it is funny that "the plunging of an erect penis into a self-lubricated vagina has to pass itself off as the supreme and appropriate expression of ... being valued for one's self."
