The Kingdom of Infinite Space

A Fantastical Journey around Your Head

Raymond Tallis

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782395263
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

From the act of blushing and the amount of manganese in our tears (tears of pain contain more than tears of distress) to the curiousness of a kiss, The Kingdom of Infinite Space explores the astonishing range of activities that go on inside our heads, most of which are entirely beyond our control. After escorting his readers on a fantastic voyage through every chamber of the head and brain, Raymond Tallis demonstrates that not only does consciousness not reside between our ears, but that our heads are infinitely cleverer than we are.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

1Facing Up to the Head

2The Secreting Head

First Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Being My Head

3The Head Comes To

4Airhead: Breathing and Its Variations

5Communicating With Air

Second Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Enjoying and Suffering My Head

6Communicating Without Air

7Notes on the Red-Cheeked Animal: The Geology of a Blush

8The Watchtower

9The Sensory Room

Third Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Having and Using My Head

10Head Traffic: Eating, Vomiting and Smoking

11Head on Head: Notes on Kissing

12Headgear

Fourth Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Caretaking My Head

13In the Wars

14The Dwindles

Final Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Knowing (and Not Knowing) My Head

15Head and World

16The Thinking Head

Epilogue: Heading Off

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful for the support and enthusiasm of Toby Mundy at Atlantic without whom I would not have written this book: it is his idea. It has been wonderful to work again with Louisa Joyner, whose brilliant editorial skills have transformed this book, not the least by giving the author a better understanding of what he was trying to achieve through it. Latterly she was joined by Emma Grove who had a crucial role in bringing the manuscript to its final form. Finally, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the superb copy-editing by Jane Robertson. What luck to have been published again by Atlantic and again to work with such a team.

My greatest debt is, as always, to Terry, my wife.

Foreword

The Kingdom of Infinite Space owes its existence to Toby Mundy of Atlantic Books. He had suggested that I should write a book on the body, which would encompass biology and philosophy. The more I thought about it, the less manageable the topic seemed and the greater the danger that philosophy would be buried under biology. I was scratching my head as to how to deliver on his suggestion when it occurred to me that the answer lay under my fingernails. I would confine myself to the head.

Why the head?

Well, of all the items in the world, my head is the one that seems closest to me, in the rather difficult sense of being what I am, or (not quite the same thing) what I feel myself to be. And yet my relationship with my head is not at all straightforward. I am linked in different ways to different parts of it; and I have different links at different times to the same parts. Yes, I am my head (in a sense that proves extraordinarily difficult to characterize). But I also own it, speaking of it as I do now as if it were a possession. And I suffer it, enduring aches and pains that seem to have nothing and everything to do with me. I use it, manipulating it, sometimes quite crudely, as if it were a kind of tool. I present it. I judge it. I know it. I disown it. And so on.

All very baffling. ‘My head and I’ is a more problematic marriage than anything that August Strindberg or Edward Albee could have dreamed up. In this regard, however, my relationship to my head is no different from the muddled, even tortured, relationship I have to my body as a whole; indeed, it is the same relationship put in capitals. Which is I why I have chosen to write about the head: it is an entrée into the peculiar human condition of being a conscious and self-conscious, self-judging, agent in an organic body. I want to think into the muddle of embodiment. And I want to celebrate the mystery of the fact that we are embodied, rather than fall in with the venerable tradition of being rather sniffy about it.

Many writers, following the example of Plato, have seen the body as a kind of prison, a cognitive disaster, a humiliation, or some kind of moral disgrace. I, on the other hand, while I do not believe that we are immortal souls, unhappy lodgers accidentally trapped in 70 kilograms of protoplasm, equally reject the notion that we are entirely identified with our bodies. The standpoint of this book is neither religious nor scientistic, but humanistic.

Defending humankind against supernatural and naturalistic accounts of itself is a preoccupation informing The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head. This preoccupation will not, however, always be present or explicitly so. Because there is a lot that is wonderful and funny about my head, I see no reason to resist a lifelong habit of digression. (The poetry of existence, Kundera said, summarizing Laurence Sterne’s philosophy, lies in digressions.) If the overall impression is of an album of sketches, then I won’t be entirely unhappy. After all, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein described his posthumously published masterpiece Philosophical Investigations as ‘an album’ and as ‘sketches of landscapes made during the course of… long and involved journeyings’.¹

The Kingdom of Infinite Space, too, endeavours to do philosophy of a sort. Wittgenstein once described his philosophical method as being to ‘assemble a set of reminders for a purpose’. In his case, the purpose was to remind people of what was in front of their noses, so that they would not be bewitched by language into engaging with insoluble pseudo-problems. This did not deliver what he hoped. And a good thing, too. Some of the things he considered to be pseudo-problems, ripe to be ‘dissolved’ (rather than solved) by appropriate linguistic analysis, are handles by which we may take hold of, and interrogate, the too smooth surface of our lives and consciousness. So, although this book, too, is often an assembly of reminders, its purpose is to heighten, rather than allay, astonishment and the sense of mystery.

In some places its approach may be best described as a rather informal phenomenology – ‘phunomenology’, even – reminding us of what is behind as well as in front of our noses. Phenomenology focuses first and foremost on the ‘phenomena’ – a word derived from the Greek, meaning ‘appearings’ or ‘appearances’ – and is motivated by the sense that our immediate experiences are the proper object of philosophical attention. Such experiences are ‘the given’; whereas factual knowledge, in particular scientific knowledge, is derivative, and consequently questionable, rather than the final authority. I am very attracted by the idea of phenomenology as a philosophical method and ambition, even though things have not worked out as the great phenomenologists – Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre – had hoped. They built huge castles of rather abstruse prose which seem somewhat remote from the immediate experiences they are about. What’s more they have proved unable either to account for, or to take account of, the mighty truths of science. What is the relationship between what I am feeling now and the scientific account of the world that has had such an impact on what I am feeling now?

You won’t find an answer in the many fascinating pages of the phenomenologists. Edmund Husserl admitted as much towards the end of his life. He could not find a way of linking the natural science that aims to give an objective account of what is out there with the subjective flow of individual consciousness. It wasn’t for the want of trying. Many long, densely written books and 45,000 pages of unpublished writing testified to this and to the tragedy of his cry, three years before he died a heartbroken technician and visionary:

Philosophy as science… the dream is over.²

This failure touches on something central to this book: the dissociation between facts and experiences. The Kingdom of Infinite Space is haunted, or at least bothered, by this: our experiences of our head are not fact-shaped. We cannot bridge the gap between what we feel ourselves to be, how we experience ourselves from moment to moment, and the innumerable facts, ordinary, extraordinary, and recherché, about us. Many, perhaps most, of the facts in this book go a long way beyond the immediate data of experience.

There is a lovely story about Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron, meeting in the Café de Flores. They were at the outset of their dazzling careers and they had not yet had their bitter falling out. Aron had just returned from Germany where he had sat at Husserl’s feet and he brought news of the phenomenological movement back to Paris. He pointed to a glass on the table and said to Sartre: ‘That is all you need in order to do philosophy.’ No equipment or technical know-how or esoteric knowledge was required; just an ability to reflect on the experiences one was having. One’s subjectivity is the appropriate point of departure for philosophy. Sartre is said to have gone pale with excitement. I continue to share that excitement, if not the pallor.

Looked at in a certain way, the head provides a wonderful entrée into many of the more traditional philosophical themes whose scope extends way beyond that marvellous structure. The reader may therefore look forward to what I hope will be user-friendly glances at topics such as the unique freedom of human beings, self-knowledge, the nature of personal identity, vagueness, and much more besides. We will head off along many paths.

One path I shall generally try to avoid is the one that ends in ‘neurophilosophy’ – the currently dominant theory that says that the mind or consciousness is identical with the neural activity of the brain. This book about the head says little about the brain. I imagine some readers will be glad to learn this and be more, rather than less, inclined to read on. There may, however, be one or two who feel that a book about the head that does not give the brain a starring role is Hamlet in which the Prince has only a walk-on part. After all, the brain is not only the biggest item in the head but also the most talked-about. It is to these readers that the following comments are addressed.

First, be assured the importance of the brain has not entirely escaped my attention. I know that if I mislaid mine, my IQ would fall quite disastrously. Indeed my living daylights, both intelligent and dim, would go out and their support services grind to a halt. The fact that head injury has a more profound effect on what I am than leg injury has something to do with the fact that my head contains my brain. There is, however, no shortage of books on the brain. Indeed, I would venture that there is a serious lack of such a shortage.

Try searching the net as I have done just now. The result is a Niagara of logorrhoea: ‘Brain and Consciousness’ 541,698 items; ‘Brain and Self’ 2,114,747 items; and ‘Brain and Mind’ 2,939,316. Amazon offered me 837 books dealing with brain, mind, self and consciousness and 60,970 items somehow implicated with the brain. If you key in ‘Brain’ alone you will find 11,351,398 items on the net, all eagerly awaiting your hit.

As the philosopher J.L. Austin once said, one has to be a special kind of fool to rush in where so many angels have trodden already. But a saturated market for books on the brain is not the only reason why most of the present volume will be resolutely extracerebral. To put it bluntly, the brain is absurdly overrated. The reason why there are so many books being published, and even read, and certainly being remaindered, on the Brain and Consciousness, the Brain and the Mind, the Brain and the Self, the Brain and You, is that there is a myth out there that the explanation of consciousness, the mind, the self, and you is to be found in the brain.

Some people imagine this is a new idea. It was old even when Hippocrates (500 BC) asserted that

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain on...