Customer Reviews

Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

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As usual, Phillips' disarmingly easy prose reveals a great deal of thought about the stories behind the stories: the messages that can only be found by asking the right questions. This erudite author can point the way toward new ways of thinking about psychoanalytical themes because he calls on a wealth of knowledge and synthetical ability. Be warned, however, that the reader has to take his own psychoanalytical knowledge to the encounter and be willing to track down some of Phillips' references from time to time. The clearness of his writing hides a number of concepts that the author presumes his audience knows. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not is irrelevant, the experience is worth the effort and can make a reader clarify his own thinking.

This book consists of four somewhat related essays on what Darwin and Freud have to say about how to live a life in the face of the transient nature of existence. Disappointingly, the essays fail to address this interesting question effectively. Instead, Darwin's Worms is a collection of brief, descriptive essays on a few elements of Darwin and Freud's thinking.

The first essay sets out the question. Darwin and Freud are two thinkers who are probably most central to the "existential" worldview, the view that there is no greater "being" responsible for or looking over our actions. As a result, each of these writers was keenly aware of the relevance of "transience" as an element of living a life. Darwin saw that transience was a natural element of his theory of evolution, and Freud saw mourning and loss as a critical component in the dynamic of the psyche. So the interesting question arises: what did each of these thinkers have to say about how to live a life in this new world into which they thrust us. This question is particularly intriguing since both viewed themselves as scientists for whom direct speculation on these issues would be inappropriate. The answer to the question needs to be carefully teased from their writings. Unfortunately, the author does not carry through this exercise.

The second essay focuses on Darwin and what can be learned from his interest in the productivity of worms. The writer provides a light pastel portrait of Darwin and considers the broader implications of Darwin's interest in worms. But for me the review was too cursory and I had no sense from this of Darwin's answer as to how to live an "existential" life. At best, this was a teaser to read the more detailed work done by Darwin's biographers.

The third essay, on Freud, is surprisingly confused, given that Phillips is a psychoanalyst. It appears that what happened is that Phillips had previously written an essay on Freud's feeling toward his own biographers. Phillips then tried to fit that essay into this book and somehow make it address the larger questions this book was to address. The result is an essay that moves unconvincingly from Freud's feeling about his own biographers to his thoughts about the death instinct.

The final chapter tries to summarize what we've learned, but again the rigor is lacking. If you are looking for a cursory treatment of Freud, Darwin and the question of how to deal with the "transience" implied by their work, this book is fine. For this reader, I found the lack of disciplined reasoning frustrating, and made the book not worth the purchase price.

Even though Adams is a brilliant thinker his writing lacks lucidity. His book promises too much, and delivers too little. I know he has an argument, but his writing style lacks deduction and his ideas need further development. It is almost easier to read Hegel's mind than to decipher the connection between Adam's premises. If you are not totally familiar with the works of Darwin and Freud be ware; Adams should not be your starting point.

A provocatively insightful, beautiful elegy on the transience of life. Phillips turns to these two thinkers not to provide a study of their theory as much as to discover in them the workings of his own imagination (and also to illuminate the not-so-conscious underpinnings of their own thought).
He is his most elegant in the Prologue and Epilogue--for these two sections alone the book is well worth the price.

This is not a book for the casual reader. Oh no, he who picks up this book had better have his thinking cap firmly in place. The book is split into four sections, each distinctly different from the others yet related in their relevance to the studies of two men: Darwin and Freud.

Expecting to find a biological study on Darwin's fascination with worms, I foolishly picked this book up. I was dismayed to discover that about ten pages of the first chapter is actually dedicated to the study of worms and their importance. Even this one section deals with worms more from a psychological standpoint than in a biological sense. This book, although interesting as it delves into complex theories, was slightly misleading to me with its cover and title.

how brilliantof adam phillips to have written a book with which i totally agree.

he has laid open the catch-22 of one's own very personal dance with death and it is indeed a grand achievement. to other superstitious jewish atheists like myself, here is a reason to don nobly the banner of Good Loser and to smile.

As Adam Phillips shows in his brief and intense book, neither Darwin nor Freud saw the forest for the trees. He notes the epistemic capture of his twins, without properly crediting Heraclitus for it. He writes: "[For them] there was no longer any such a thing as a ... person with a recognizable identity." ( p. 21.) Which is only to say that, in their opinion, Socrates' I was transient.

True we cannot step into the same river twice, it being transient, but a lot of dazzling Greek philosophizing happened after that of the Presocratics, Socrates' for one.

Is everything in the world of common experience transient?

"No," says Socrates, confident of the survival-after-death of his never-changing I.

What rendered Darwin and Freud blind both to the reality of their unchanging I-dentity and to its immunity to change and to death? In my judgment their minds, already befuddled by their daillance with atheism, were further obtunded by their jejune diet of Heraclitean junk food, having by-passed the solid nourishment afforded by Plato and Aristotle.

What had atheism to do with it? Simply this: the condign punishment for denying the existence of God (the Supreme I) is to evolve into one of Time's fools. This is perhaps the most ironic evolutionary event of all. Of this syndrome, Nicolas Berdyaev, the celebrated 20th century Russian philosopher wrote illuminatingly as follows: "That is the essence of the tragedy as it affects the philosopher [the thinker]. On the one hand, he is incapable of supporting, indeed, refuses to suffer the authority of religion; on the other, he tends to lose all notion of Being, and the strength it imparts, as soon as he becomes detached from religious [transcendent] experience."

One cannot but sympathize with D&F for trying to salvage whatever the transient world might offer.

Of this, however, I am sure: Socrates would not have settled for the ephemeral beauty of a Brazilian rain forest, or for the raptures of psychoanalytical procedures.

More highly evolved than Mr. Phillips' two "masterminds," Socrates naturally selected for the real gold of I-existence over the fool's gold of the transient ego.

--John Cantwell Kiley, M.D., Ph.D. (philosophy)