Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

by Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips has been called “the psychotherapist of the floating world” and “the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness.” His style is epigrammatic; his intelligence, electric.His new book, Darwin's Worms , uses the biographical details of Darwin's and Freud's lives to examine endings—suffering, mortality, extinction, and death. Both Freud and Darwin were interested in how destruction conserves life. They took their inspiration from fossils or from half-remembered dreams. Each told a story that has altered our perception of our lives. For Darwin, Phillips explains, “the story to tell was how species can drift towards extinction; for Freud, the story was how the individual tended to, and tended towards his own death.” In each case, it is a death-story that uniquely illuminates the life story.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Science, Evolution, Essays

148 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1999

About the author

Adam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist.

Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He has been described by The Times as "the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his "brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling" work; and by John Banville as "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time."

Reviews

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, with its intelligent and profound meditation on mortality, really helped me to cast off the baggage or shackles of the unrealistic religious notions of justice and redemption which had become absolute burdens in the face of my own experience of life and of such historical facts like the Holocaust, to me the defining moral conundrum of our age, in which for the victims there was no redeemer waiting in the wings and afterwards so little justice meted out to the perpetrators.

By the time I left the monastery where I had lived and studied and loved for seven years I was an atheist, albeit a terribly reluctant one, yet I still harboured dreams (or tyrannical fantasies) within a type of secular religion, of the perfectibility of the individual, State or society with its secular beliefs of justice and redemption. But what I had experienced, and continued to do so in my new life, was imperfection and corruption, where of justice and redemption there was little sign, and where death made a final mockery of our brief lives and cherished beliefs. This little book saved my sanity. It opened my eyes to the stunning humility and honesty of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, and reconciled me to an imperfect world and has helped me deal with my fear of death.

Adam Phillips gently tries to lead us away from hoping for a better world outside of this one. Like Darwin and Freud, he argues that we need to accept the world as it is, and to cast off ways of thinking which seek to redeem us. And it is through accepting death that we can do this.

For both Darwin and Freud, the idea of death saves us from the idea that there is anything to be saved from." The "religious" obsession with our need for improvement limits us and binds us to the notion that we are somehow 'faulty', Augustine's old "original sin' myth.
We shall not achieve perfection so we should not seek it.And by letting go of this notion, this self-imposed burden, we are suddenly liberated to live each day to the full. And death, which is part of the package of existence, will come in its own time, becomes something far less frightening.

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book contains two essays, one on Darwin and another on Freud, couched within a prologue and an epilogue. There are many who have pointed out that the Freud that emerges out of Phillip’s writing is not the father of psychoanalysis but someone else, to what extent is this figure truthful to the real Freud is a pointless question. I don’t think that I keep returning to Phillip’s works for the real Freud but because of Phillip’s enigmatic image of Freud. At this point you could ask to what extent is the Darwin in this book real, and my answer would be I have no idea. Perhaps what you find here is not exactly an analysis of Darwin and Freud but rather an interpretation of them, where both Darwin and Freud are artists: two individuals who tried to find new ways to look at reality, at life. And just like a good interpretation that is in itself a work of art, Phillip moves us with his ideas, or intimations of them, but if it is for convictions that we search the pages of this book I think we will be disappointed. For Phillip’s both Darwin and Freud are occupied with the question of transience: the result of the death of eternity, a side effect of the death of God. But not just transience but what is destroyed is a cosmic order: a hierarchy in which ‘man’ occupied the second highest place. Both Darwin and Freud and Phillip with them are preoccupied with how are we going to find our peace with this new world, this new position that we find ourselves in, but Phillip doesn’t just want us to stop at coping with it but to find pleasures in these new sights that we encounter. And this book wants us, among many other things, to be experimenters attempting to find pleasure in this little life of ours.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Darwin's realization that much of the earth's surface is the product of earthworm excrement and Freud's antipathy to biography prompt Phillips' elegant, dense discussion on mortality and freedom. Discussions of such things as Freud's death instinct tend to lose me, and at times that was the case here. But Phillips' formulation of the two thinkers projects is probably as clearly stated as they can be and invigorating in their conclusions about nature and our place in it.

A quote: "For both Darwin and Freud the idea of death saves us from the idea that there is anything to be saved from. If we are not fallen creatures, but simply creatures, we cannot be redeemed. If we are not deluded by the wish for immortality, transience doesn't diminish us."

A good book to read alongside Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened Of.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engrossing meditation on mortality that is surprisingly life-affirming. I read it while at a particularly low ebb in the hope it would hasten my emotional demise but – who would have guessed it – it cheered me right up! More seriously, this is a well-written essay on what death does to the human body and spirit.

[Peter Bruno]

Really beautiful meditation on the human condition.

[Richard Ascough · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's always fun to read (and re-read) Adam Phillips and while this is not his best work, it still conveys his erudition both in his comfort zone (Freud) and outside (Darwin). Phillips relentlessly draws the reader to thoughts of death by reviewing Darwin's fascination with the simple earthworm churning detrius into topsoil before delving into Freud's resistance to biography as a refection of the death-instinct. There is lots to digest in this short book, with many quotable quotes along the way (e.g., "what is narrative about if it is not about objects of desire and the detours and obstacles and dangers entailed in their acquisition," p. 83).

[sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

love some freud biotheory but unfortunately this read like an undergraduate term paper :(

[Gaetano Venezia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evolution of a Life Worth Living: The Lowly Lives at the Center of Disillusionment
Phillips has a gift for making world-historical connections seem so obvious while revealing our daily tediums as endlessly complex and unresolvable. As in all his work, Phillips here incites us to re-engage with the world and its history in order to better deconstruct and then reconstruct our own contingent lives.

That said, this book is a bit more straightforward that Phillips' other work: appended by an introduction and epilogue, there are just two main essays: one on Darwin's evolutionary and secular fascination with earthworms, and one on Freud's complexes around biography and autobiography, especially his own.

For Darwin the story to tell was how species can drift towards extinction; for Freud, as we shall see, the story was of how the individual tended to, and tended towards, his own happiness and his own death. In each case it is a death story that uniquely illuminates the life story; indeed, that makes it intelligible. What makes creatures die is deemed to be a key to how they live (as if you can only start telling the story when you know what is driving it to its conclusion). (p. 13)

I had no idea that Darwin was so taken by earthworms replenishing the earth with loam, that he struggled to find secular visions to replace spiritual ones, that he suffered for decades to make sense of his findings, that he was so clear-sighted about the ability for persuasive, enticing redescriptions of the world to replace the old visions, instead of direct argumentation. Nor did I know that Freud—while building an idiosyncratic psychoanalytic method for quasi-biography—was so excoriating of the biographical task of recounting a public life.

Even further, I could have never guessed that Freud and Darwin's disparate obsessions actually might concern the same central tension that exists with us to this day: the attempt to find realistic, redemptive (but not religious) reasons for going on living, loving, suffering, and reproducing ourselves and our kind.

Both writers describe our bodily lives – and for both a life is synonymous with a body – as astonishingly adaptive and resilient, but also excessively vulnerable, prone to many deaths, and shadowed by the reality of death. Notably obsessed by what Frank Kermode called ‘a sense of an ending’, they are preoccupied by remains, by evidence of and from the past. Masters of retrospect, they distrust prophecy; they insist that the present never catches up with the past, and that the past tells us nothing reliable about the future. (p. 8)

As always Phillips leaves me feeling realistically hopeful for a quieter, more satisfied life. One full of drama and world-historic conflict as much as it suits us, but without the need to enlist in spiritual, ideological warfare. We're acting out our own lives. We're replenishing the earth. We'll just never know exactly how, why, or what for.

Favorite Quotes
[I]n a secular world who can we blame but ourselves, or nature? Religious despair has turned, that is to say, into political despair, God can no longer redeem us, and political process cannot sufficiently protect, or even represent, the people and things we most value; global capitalism can make democracy seem amateur, while the only potent religions are fundamentalist in intent. (p. 4).

‘Nature,’ Raymond Williams wrote, ‘is perhaps the most complex word in the language.’ It is used to justify both politics of diverse persuasions and the apolitical. It becomes the repository at once for everything deemed to be essential about ourselves and for everything considered to be most troubling; our foundation that is also our antagonist. In this conceptual muddle – that is me legacy of a theological world view – nature can seem to be at once the problem and the solution. If in the old world the drama was between God and nature, with ‘Man’ (as we were then called) as the middle-man, completing or failing to complete the triangle, then we can see Darwin and Freud as among the people involved in taking God out of the picture, leaving us with nothing between us and nature. If there is nothing outside nature, it becomes nonsensical to talk of nature, and especially human nature, as being divided against itself. Nature is, as it were, always on its own side. (p. 5)

Because of the Oedipus complex, Freud’s mythic account of human origins and development, desire is what ensures our survival, while at the same time being fundamentally forbidden (we depend on our parents, but they are experienced as ‘belonging’ to each other, and therefore as also taboo). (p. 7)

Our instincts, at once the source of our suffering and of our satisfaction, ensure the survival of the species and the death of the individual.(p. 10)

When transience is not merely an occasion for mourning, we will have inherited the earth. (p. 12)

the one pleasure we have denied ourselves is the pleasure of reality (what Freud called the ‘reality principle’ wasn’t merely – or solely – the enemy of pleasure, but its guarantor). (p. 18)

The death of God is the death of someone knowing who we are. (p. 24)

For Freud we interfere with our joy by wishing it was otherwise, ‘The beauty of the human form and face vanish for ever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm.’ It is life as provisional, and therefore pleasurable, that Freud celebrates. Love at its strongest, Freud implies, is an acknowledgement of transience, not a wilful denial of it. Deaths make life lovable; it is the passing of things that is the source of our happiness. For [those who disagree with Freud], because there is death, because there is transience, there is only tantalization. As though, Freud intimates, there were two kinds of people: those who can enjoy desiring and those who need satisfaction. (p. 26)

It was to be part of Darwin’s undogmatic shuffling of the hierarchies to see earthworms – traditionally associated with death and corruption and lowliness – as maintaining the earth, sustaining its fertility. The poor, he would imply, had already inherited the earth. (pp. 41-42)

[Worms] preserve the past, and create the conditions for future growth. No deity is required for these reassuring continuities. It is worms that keep the earth abundant; and, indeed, hospitable to people’s needs.
. . .
Worms worked incessantly; but from their point of view, so to speak, they were merely digesting their food in order to survive and reproduce. And this happened to be contingently beneficial, to archaeologists and to seedlings. They were inadvertently generous; not designed for altruism. Not intentionally collaborative; but the way they struggled for survival had spin-offs for other parts of nature. (p. 56)

...the thought of death is a good dancing partner. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (66)

Our lives are, as it were, the way we fill in the details of our own personal ambivalence as it unfolds over time. (p. 91)

as Freud could not help insisting, psychoanalysis offers us nothing by way of predicting our lives; it simply shows us – like Darwin’s writing – the power of the contingencies we inhabit: our desire, our childhood and our chances. (pp. 94-95)

Biography, in all its fixity and formulations – with all its indelibly written evidence – was like a picture for Freud of what psychoanalysis at its worst might become: the patient ‘cured’ by psychoanalysis believing he was both the author and the subject of his own biography. Biographical truth sponsored the illusion that there could be such truth about a life. (pp. 106-107)

Freud wants us to be self-defining creatures, but self-defining at one remove; not merely the inventions of our conscious will. So he calls the self-defining self ‘unconscious desire’, partly to show us the ironic sense in which we are the unnameable authors of our own lives (authors who keep losing the plot, authors who experience themselves as being fed their lines from some odd place). (pp. 107-108)

[Darwin and Freud's work is trying] to make unredeemed mortality itself more than merely bearable; to render aging, accident, illness and death not alien but integral to our sense of ourselves; to find out whether loss is still the right word. That we might consider ourselves diminished by acknowledging, or even enjoying, such things – such things as time and bodily life – is a mark of just how distracted we have been. Believing there is a better world elsewhere now looks like a way of not seeing the sufficiencies of this one. (p. 118)

sometimes we suffer most from being unwilling to suffer enough. (p. 124)

It is as though, they suggest, we have added to the ordinary suffering of biological life the extraordinary suffering of our immortal longings, of our will to permanence. (p. 127)

Belief in what was once called the perfectibility of man – and might now be called cure or normality or success – their writing suggests, destroys our hopes for (and in) this world. Our ideals baffle and conceal our possibilities; the very falsity of our hopes inevitably defeats us. (p. 128)

In Darwin’s and Freud’s view it was our relentless, unforgiving attachment to the available varieties of perfectionism – to idealizing our ideals – that consistently humiliated us. There was a will to pessimism in our choosing spurious, impossible ideals for ourselves; as though we had somehow become addicted to looking disappointing in our own eyes. We had diminished ourselves from our own too closely guarded point of view. We could only idealize our ideals because we were caught up in two false beliefs, the belief in redemption (and its secular equivalents perfect happiness, total knowledge, cure), and the belief that we could stop time (find some way of exempting ourselves, of excusing ourselves from change). It was the art of being realistic optimists –but neither depressed, nor cynical, nor unduly narcissistic – that Darwin and Freud wanted to interest us in: the worm and not the biographer. (p. 129)

They perform in their writings an intrigued resilience, neither bumptiously optimistic nor complacently gloomy. (p. 133)
———
Kindle Edition.

[Murf Reeves · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a good time reading these stories. It took me a little while to get the hang of Phillip's writing style, and I needed to read several things a few times to really understand the idea. Darwin and Freud shattered our way of thinking with their works, and Phillips focuses on Darwin's love of earthworms, their abilities, and power. Darwin believed earthworms were the ultimate representation of nature because the worms' lives are all about digestion without question. No concern with culture and to do the work until the next chapter of life or transition. The digestion is also the way of plowing the land and covering the past and letting the past go, instead of using the past to try and shape the future. According to Phillip's interpretation, this is what nature really is, very tough with a certain amount of suffering and certain death that is only concerned with living and not how living is viewed by those living. The idea that nature is something to be controlled and if for our bidding is ludicrous. Phillip tackles Freud the same way but using Freud's hatred of biographers/biographies to illustrates Freud's point that life is really just a way to die as one wishes. A biography of someone's life is missing the point of life. We can't describe our lives because we are living them and for another to write of our lives would only be an exercise in studying the biographer because it is the biographer choosing which portion of our lives is important or "good."

[ILoveARainyNight · Rating 4 out of 5]

“For both Darwin and Freud the idea of death saves us from the idea that there is anything to be saved from”. I really enjoyed this book and especially the authors style. The chapters on Darwin I surprisingly found more interesting than the ones on Freud. I think this was because of the constant reiteration of the concept of biography in relation to Freud felt strained, but I understood the connection needed to be made. Overall this book was great at conceptualizing mortality in a way that felt like a I was reading a meditation. Definitely want to read more Adam phillips.

“It has been the tendencies of western belief systems to value what is immortal - god, truth, the sole - Darwin and Freud encourage us to describe what thus craving for continuities might be a solution to. And they press us to think of lives as more miraculous than our deaths; our death is inevitable, but our conception is not.”

“The unconscious is the true physical reality…in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world”

“Like his favored worms, organisms might happen to collaborate with each other and even with other species (even if this could not be described as their intention); but their survival in order to reproduce would always set ineluctable limits to the very real communality that could be observed to exist in nature”

“The only world that is possible must be the best of all possibly worlds”

[Aaron Ambrose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Darwin and Freud didn’t kill God. Rather, they gave us new ways to consider our role in the world that no longer required a god. The ongoing health of God in our culture just shows that there are lots of ways to understand one’s role in the world. Phillips’ project here is to highlight a specific observation shared by Darwin and Freud - life is ever changing, attachments are ever dying, and without deaths there can be no room for the future to appear. Mourning is an act to embrace, reacting to the changing environment (i.e., evolution) is crucial to survival, and death is married to life. Relish all life - because death is inevitable, but your birth was not.

[Mauro Locarnini · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the book and very much liked the conclusion. However the writing style is overly complex and makes the reading unnecessarily hard. I enjoyed the philosophical journey to interpret both Darwin (which I haven't read) and Freud (which I have). It was super interesting but too hard.

[John Fredrickson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not enjoy this book. The section on Darwin was OK, as it managed to convey a little bit of who Darwin was, and how his focus on worms provided some relief and insight into the life and death process. The section on Freud I found to be rambling, and lacking in any focus that I could discern.

[Shaun · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like Phillips but there’s not much in here and I ordered it in print because digital was not available so a bit disappointing.

I also think the topic of death is handled with gloves.

I enjoyed reading about Darwin though.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic and dry

[Anna Novikova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has some thought provoking moments but it’s also written in both a vague/obscure and repetitive manner. Still interesting, and the epilogue was prob my fave part.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phillips as usual where he brings the width and depth of his reading into my home. Always so much to learn, different ways of looking at things.

[Nicola Parise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Phillips explores the lives and works of Darwin and Freud to bring fresh perspectives on mortality and death to light. His writing is clear and to the point, making intelligent and well considered arguments. This book is most valuable for the way it shakes up worn out discourses surrounding death and challenges readers to reconsider conventional notions of mourning.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

A challenging, dense, slow read, which unfortunately didn't pay off all the work. I felt the author, like so many before him, way overstepped in his analysis of Darwin in his effort to support his thesis.

[Gail McConnell]

'How should we live if we take unredeemable transience seriously?' (46)

[Mymortalremains · Rating 5 out of 5]

On death and meaning of life: an evolutionary and psychodynamic approach to existential issues.

[Susan Bernstein]

Worthwhile--about the "art of transience" and loss, death, change, ambivalence. Compares Darwin and Freud on death, ephemera, impermanence.

[Clementine Morrigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really want to like this book. There is a lot of really interesting stuff here, but I don't agree with the conclusions the author draws from it.