Jörg Noller: Digitalität. Zur Philosophie der digitalen Lebenswelt

Digitalität. Zur Philosophie der digitalen Lebenswelt Book Cover Digitalität. Zur Philosophie der digitalen Lebenswelt
Schwabe reflexe Bd. 75
Jörg Noller
Schwabe Verlag
2022
Paperback 23.00 CHF
123

Reviewed by: Gregor Bös (KU Leuven)

At a mere 100 pages, Jörg Noller’s little booklet traverses an impressive range of topics. Beginning with a philosophical conceptualization of virtual reality and its metaphysical status, it ends on digital ethics, aesthetics, and the digitization of education. This scope demands that some of these themes appear as philosophical appetizers, rather than main dishes. The order of that menu appears reversed, as the heaviest (and best) courses are served first. Here, Noller introduces his concept of virtual reality and demarcates it from the cognate notions of simulation, representation, illusion, and fiction. This part of the book should be digestible and useful to many readers. Some other features of the book might be matters of taste, especially the sometimes liberal use of technical vocabulary and the wide-ranging philosophical references and allusions. As a book aimed at a general audience, the metaphysical argument is informal and discussions of digital technology are set aside, although with philosophical reasoning for doing so. The goal is apparently to avoid a discussion of the details of transient technologies, and to focus on independent conceptual questions. This seems like a good idea, but it sometimes leads to a dearth of examples. At times, it can be surprisingly difficult to say whether Noller is talking about the present or a future state of technology. This is of course not helped by the rapid development in Large Language Models that led to new services like ChatGPT. Before my concluding comment, I now summarize the book in more detail.

Noller begins by introducing the concept of digitality (Digitalität): it is the layer of reality which only emerges on the basis of the cultural-technological process of digitization. Building on McLuhan, he argues that we have become not only blind to the medium of digital communication, but also this new layer of reality that this technology sustains (9). Here we encounter the first key metaphor: digitality emerges from the technological layers of digitalization like the phenomenon of life emerges from physico-chemical processes (22). Like the phenomenon of life cannot be described exhaustively as a physical phenomenon, objects of digitality have irreducible causal effects. This is an interesting line of thought, and metaphysically minded readers might be interested to see how it could address questions of causal exclusion. But given the intended audience of the book, it here remains as a conceptual proposal, without a technical in-depth treatment.

The other conceptual proposal concerns the process of virtualization. The metaphor here is the development of fiat currency: Whereas bank notes and coins are tied to a physical medium for exchange, the rise of digital banking systems has virtualized money. While it still serves as a universal medium of exchange, this economic role has become functionally independent of the material basis from money developed. Similarly, Noller argues, virtual reality can be considered independently of the technological basis that realizes it, since we are only interested in its functional roles. Surprisingly, there is no reference to debates on functionalism in the philosophy of mind, where parallel arguments (and debates) would be available.

Noller uses this causal independence of virtual reality to distinguish it from fiction, simulation, and illusion. Virtual reality is not a simulation because it does not only serve as a representation of an independent part of reality, and it has causal effects on reality that are not due to its use as a representation (32). The demarcation from fiction is more difficult. Noller refers only to the causal effects that virtual reality can have on analogue reality to draw it, but it would seem that fiction can similarly feed back into the non-fictional world. Committed fans set up conventions, or more drastically, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther inspired self-harming responses to unrequited love. It is not clear that a causal distinction offers all that is necessary here. But Noller’s discussion of computer games suggests how the distinction could be refined. While Noller considers computer games in single player to be fictions or simulations, they constitute a virtual reality when they become interactive and connect multiple players (42). In addition to the causal role of virtual realities, the relevant criterion seems to be also that virtual reality sustains the interaction of multiple agents.

Digitality is the domain of Noller’s investigation, and virtualization is how it achieves a level of independence from the technological infrastructure that realizes it. Noller proceeds to characterize digitality in terms of three categories. Objects of digitality are ubipresent because they can be accessed from anywhere and at any time. Agents in digitality constitute an interobjectivity, in contrast to an intersubjectivity, because artificial intelligences not only occur as tools for human agents, but as integrated into their actions and constitutive of their digital agency. Finally, digitality is transsubjective because it dissolves the distinction between creator and recipient of information.

The subject-object divided understanding of AI is instrumentalist, because it considers AIs to constitute only objects for human subjects. By focusing on augmented intelligence, a cooperative achievement of humans and machines, rather than humans as the users of machines, we lose the distinction between human and machine intelligence. Furthermore, this is supposed to also eradicate the distinction between strong and weak artificial intelligence, but this seems to be based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of that distinction (55). Instead of understanding it in terms of the generalizability of capacities, Noller ties it to a distinction between simulating and realizing human intelligence and then argues that this distinction disappears for interobjectivity.

Noller emphasizes again that we should question the distinction between subjects and objects of actions in digitality. Theorists who rely on that distinction are prone to misunderstand artificial intelligence as a tool for subjects. But since interobjectivity erases the subject-object distinction, it also undermines this conception of artificial intelligence. However, Noller himself goes on to discuss whether artificial neural networks can be ascribed capacities for knowledge and judgement.  While they have ‘determinative judgement’, they always act heteronomously (58). But the very discussion of that question seems to require conceiving of artificial intelligences as subjects after all. Noller does not say whether the limitation to heteronomy is due to legal and ethical reasons, or whether it depends on the technological state of the art. While it seems to be proposed as a limitation in principle, its only support comes from a polemic citation of Dreyfus from 1988.

Digitality is transsubjective because it changes the relations between consumers and creators of information. While an encyclopaedia clearly separates the roles of author and reader, the internet blurs this distinction. This of course glosses over the fact that for many people, the internet is structured by giant corporations. These can lock data into proprietary formats or close their APIs on a whim (see Twitter). Even explicitly open projects like Wikipedia are run by a minority. Insofar as digitality is integrated into our lifeworld, does it really appear as an invitation to contribute? This seems to be more than a description of what is the case. But Noller understands his account of digitality as ‘weakly normative’. It does not only aim to describe the digital environment and how it appears, but also to formulate a vision towards which we should work. The subsequent chapter on ethics spells this out a little further.

Noller’s proposal for an ethics of digitality is based on understanding the internet as a virtual action space (Handlungsraum). This is not a space that consists of possible actions, but a space in which they take place: the Internet, YouTube, Twitter (67f.). The ethics of digitality are governed by the ‘virtual imperative’: act such that you enlarge the virtual action space (69). While this sounds like a libertarian principle, Noller seems to have something more restricted in mind. The establishment of a ‘parallel space’ like the dark web, for example, is considered to contradict the virtual imperative (69). The only hint towards a principle for such restrictions is that parallel spaces, such as fake news networks, do not allow for a ‘coherent connection’ to the global internet. But this does not tell the reader where the expansion of the digital action space runs up against principles that limit the freedom of speech, for example, and where mere contradiction of assertion turns into incoherence. Since the virtual imperative is not intended as a libertarian or techno-anarchist answer, it is at least incomplete.

The section on ethics is followed by a brief discussion of aesthetics of digitality. This touches NFTs, generative AI and computer games, but treats these mostly through rhetorical questions. For a section on digital education, Noller has specific expertise through a longstanding experience in running hybrid seminars, starting long before the pandemic. The lessons for digital education offered here, however, remain surprisingly generic. The ‘concrete use’ (92) that hypertextuality offers to philosophy education is that the ‘giving and taking of reasons’ becomes ‘ubiquitous and independent of specific places and times’ (94). But was the giving of reasons not already decoupled from time and place through written language, or at least other means of mass communication? It is not easy to see how this characterization would help philosophy educators to leverage digital technology. On the other hand, there is surprisingly no discussion of more obvious aspects of the digitization of teaching, such as the interplay between synchronous and asynchronous modes of instruction. And for the topic that looms large at the time of (unaided) writing of this review, namely the impact of large language models like GPT4 on essay-based education, Noller’s booklet is already too old.

It follows a brief comment on digital enlightenment, where Noller understands immaturity as the use of the internet as a static repository of information or a medium of consumption (97). As expected, mature users contribute actively to the enlargement of the digital action space. The concluding chapter on anthropology runs at less than 2.5 pages. It argues that instead of seeing new technology as a threat to our sense of reality, it should be seen as another means of expressing our human freedom, but the consequences of this idea are not articulated.

As already mentioned, the book is written in a slightly idiosyncratic style. While the format is aimed at a broad audience and the philosophical arguments are not treated in technical depth, the language contains a fair amount of philosophical jargon. Throughout, there are references to classical works, mostly to Kant, but also to Aristotle, McTaggart, Leibniz, Schiller, and Wittgenstein. But these references are mostly playful, and it is not always clear how seriously some philosophical formulae should be taken—for example, when Noller claims that the internet is the ‘condition of possibility of mediality’ (65). I imagine that one group of readers will be irritated by the language of such claims, and a very different group will be surprised by how little follows them. Kantian vocabulary and aphorisms like ‘data based intuitions without algorithmic concepts are blind, algorithmic concepts without data based intuition are empty’ (48) create anticipations of something important, but then remain aside remarks. The question is whether there is an audience in the middle, who is keen to have the philosophical references, but happy to stay at the general level of discussion.

The booklet bears the subtitle On the philosophy of the digital lifeworld, and sometimes speaks of the priority of a phenomenological description of digitality, in lieu of discussing its technological basis. But the philosophical approach is not placed in a phenomenological context. The concept of lifeworld is not further specified, and phenomenological and postphenomenological debates of the concept and role of technology play no role, which might disappoint some readers of this journal. Lastly, there are two minor irritations that could have been avoided editorially: a quotation from Engelbart lost all punctuation and thereby becomes unreadable (52), and the word ‘interaction’ has a recurring typo (90, 93), which can be mistaken for a neologism.

Noller’s booklet is strongest in the conceptual clarification of digitality and virtualization. Here he argues on the basis of two clear metaphors to establish digitality as a domain of philosophical, and not just technological research. Whether the two metaphors can sustain the philosophical roles that Noller assigns them is worth further investigation. The later parts of the book remain comparatively generic. As it is such a compact book, it might be most useful to whet one’s appetite for new questions and perhaps as an antidote for readers who are used to a very technical approach to its subject matter. The book also offers a good starting point to motivate a philosophical treatment that focuses more on the description of our everyday digital lives than on what sustains them technologically. But there remains room for phenomenologists to carry out such a description, and to do so not in large notes, but ‘in small change’.

Thomas Fuchs: In Defense of The Human-Being

In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology Book Cover In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology
Thomas Fuchs
Oxford University Press
2021
Hardback $45.00
272

Reviewed by: Elodie Boublil (University Paris Est Créteil; UPEC, France)

‘Persons are living beings, not programs’

Fuchs’ phenomenological theory of embodied anthropology

Thomas Fuchs is Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophical Foundations at the Psychiatry Clinic of the University of Heidelberg. He chairs the research section “Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy” at the Psychiatric University Hospital Heidelberg.

His latest book, In Defense of the Human Being, meticulously demonstrates how corporeality, vitality, and embodied freedom are intertwined and defeat any attempt to reify human beings, either through identifying them with machines or through digitalizing their existence thanks to algorithms and the digitalization of the lifeworld.

Indeed, the book argues that the standard humanistic paradigm displayed by Western societies, especially since the Renaissance, is superseded by a technological and transhumanist view that aims to develop an even more predictable and controllable version of the human being. Fuchs explains: “It is not my concern to defend humanity against an accusation but against a questioning. Because today, in question is what one could call—with unavoidable imprecision—the humanistic image of man. At the center of this image is the human person as a physical or embodied being, as a free, self-determining being, and ultimately as an essentially social being connected with others.”

Challenging and questioning our image of humanity entails another questioning that targets the philosophical and anthropological validity of our moral and ethical claims (dignity, personhood, responsibility, etc.). In other words, defending humanity responds to the urgent need for grounding our anthropological image of the human being based on the findings of contemporary science. Far from debunking the humanistic paradigm, Fuchs argues that recent findings concerning embodied freedom, relationality, the plasticity of the brain, etc., prove authentic our relational and embodied experience as human beings, and defeat the mechanical view of the body as well as the chimera of artificial intelligence and other transhumanist projects. In so doing, Fuchs admirably shows that endorsing the latter will alienate rather than emancipate human beings and may lead to new psychological conditions if technology is not used appropriately. As such, Fuchs’s book deserves to be known and read as it successfully defeats the diagnosis and predictions of Yuval Noah Harari’s book: Homo Deus (2017), according to which “Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm” (Harari, 2017, p. 381; Fuchs 2021: 3). To do so, Fuchs deconstructs three assumptions that lie behind this “scientistic view of humans”: reductionist naturalism, the elimination of the living, and functionalism according to which “phenomena of consciousness are attributed to processes of neuronal information processing. “The author puts forward a philosophical anthropology that insists on “embodiment and aliveness” to characterize the person:

“No abstract inwardness, disembodied consciousness or pure spirit are the guiding ideas of a humanistic view of the person, but the person’s concrete physical existence. Only when it can be shown that the person is present in her body itself, that the person feels, perceives, expresses, and acts with her whole body, do we escape confinement in a hidden inner space of consciousness, an inaccessible citadel from which only signals penetrate to the outside world, signals which can no longer be distinguished from the those of artificial intelligence. Furthermore, only when persons have an embodied freedom, i.e., determine themselves as organisms in decisions and actions, does subjectivity become more than an epiphenomenon, i.e., really effective in the world”.

The book is divided into three parts: 1/ Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and Virtuality; 2/Brain, Person, and Reality; 3/Psychiatry and Society. The first two parts delve into the anthropological and existential implications of the brain paradigm already explored in the Ecology of the Brain (2017) to show their impact on the way individuals relate to themselves and each other. Fuchs demonstrates the philosophical inconsistencies of the assimilation of the brain to machines and algorithms, the self-reification at stake, and its psychological consequences for the subject. Part three illustrates the necessity to provide society with an adequate anthropological foundation to address pressing issues such as aging, dementia, or psychological conditions.

***

The first chapter clarifies the distinction between human and artificial intelligence. Debunking the dream of replacing humans with robots thanks to algorithms, Fuchs explains the epistemological and ethical implications of dematerialization and the disincarnating process at stake. His critical analysis of “information” plays a key role as Fuchs rightly explains that “information only exists where someone understands something—that is, news as news signs as signs. Information exists only for conscious living beings or for persons.” In other words, a computer does not “understand” messages; it “computes” them. This clarification brings to light how human beings project their abilities, states of mind, and emotions into machines. In other words, we should be aware that “we are only dealing here with metaphors.” Subsequently, this chapter retraces the history of the digital revolution to underline the categorical differences between human intelligence and AI. Fuchs claims that “there can be no real intelligence without life and consciousness” and that, therefore, the idea of “artificial intelligence” or “artificial life” is self-contradictory. Opposing Harari’s claim that “organisms are algorithms,” Fuchs claims that “programs” are not persons and persons are not programs. Technological artifacts rely on simulation, yet they lack qualitative and differentiated experience. It also applies to the brain’s functioning: “The brain is not a control center, but an organ of resonance and relations (Fuchs, 2018). Only living beings are conscious, feel, sense, or think—not brains and not computers. Persons are living beings, not programs.” Consequently, this chapter appraises the challenge addressed to medicine and scientific research by artificial intelligence as it unconsciously challenges the image we have of human beings, their finitude, and their capabilities. Ultimately, artificial intelligence addresses not only epistemological and ontological questions but ethical dilemmas as it pretends to become a new compass to consider our existence against its performance.

Chapter two expands on this idea by assessing the worldview and ideology developed by transhumanism. Transhumanism seems to do away with what is the most salient feature of humanity: namely, embodiment. Indeed, by considering human beings either as purely “biological machines” or “pure minds” to be programmed, transhumanism denies the very “foundation of our existence” and the irremissible power of “cultural shaping” in the way we conceive of our physical nature. In other words, instead of fully acknowledging life’s dynamism and the realization of freedom through the “embodied enactment of life,” transhumanism reveals a process of self-reification that relies on a “false concept of consciousness.” Moreover, the utopia of the “new man” liberated from finitude and mortality eradicates the very idea of freedom and accomplishment, as limitations and resistance precisely confer its value to any endeavors: “transhumanist utopias thus counteract the very efforts that have so far supported the idea of improving the human world – the efforts to achieve social, cultural, and moral progress based on individual and collective efforts, progress that cannot be achieved by technical reconstruction of the human being but only by self-education, self-development, and the common shaping of the lifeworld.” The chapter ends with a consistent criticism of neuro-reductionism and the fantasy of “mind uploading” that relies on an epistemological and philosophical fallacy. The epistemological mistake consists in identifying the brain and the person; the philosophical dead-end annihilates freedom at the very moment it seeks to expand it: indeed, contrary to what transhumanism argues, “this embodied and thus, of course, mortal individuation is the price we have to pay in order to experience the freedom and wonder of earthly existence.” Transhumanism is ultimately a form of neo-Gnosticism that carries significant ethical consequences.

Chapter three focuses on the impact of neuro-constructivist paradigms on our intersubjective relations through the example of virtuality. Does the virtual world help us develop and improve empathy, or does it compromise its flourishing? “What consequences may ensue for intersubjectivity and relationships in our society because of increasing virtualization of perception and communication? How is empathy transformed when it is increasingly directed to a virtual other?” According to Fuchs, empathy relies first and foremost on our corporeality and the embodied dynamics of inter-affectivity. Recalling Scheler’s conception of empathy, Fuchs explains that “we experience the other person primarily as a psycho-physical unity of expression.” What we generally understand as perspective-taking or imaginative transposition (putting oneself in the other’s shoes) reflected a different level of empathy that the author describes as “explicit empathy”: “it seems necessary to differentiate between a primary, implicit, or bodily empathy and an expanded, explicit, or imaginative empathy. The latter already involves an element of “as-if” and thus of virtuality.” The question thus arises whether we could disconnect primary bodily empathy and imaginative empathy, as it happens in “virtual empathy.” According to Fuchs, “the culture of growing virtuality and simulation is connected with disembodiment, a retreat from bodily and intercorporeal experience. Simultaneously, empathy tends to separate itself from these experiences and to shift into virtuality – into a space where we are confronted by hybrid forms of the other as a mixture of appearance, simulation, and illusion, and where the medium and the mediated reality intercorporeal pole toward the virtual and projective pole of the spectrum.” Consequently, the “media-based idealism” that inspires our digital age may well give us the impression that we are all easily interconnected, yet it considerably undermines the reality of the qualitative experience we undergo while facing – for real – the presence of the other. Indeed, virtual communication lacks non-verbal synaesthetic interaction. It modifies and structure our attention and often reinforces individual projections and ego-centeredness rather than achieving genuine empathy. Fuchs then concludes with an epistemological and ethical claim: “only when others become real for us in this manner can we become real for ourselves. Today, our relationships come increasingly to be mediated, even produced, by images. But no one encounters us through a smartphone. The virtual presence of the other cannot replace inter-corporeality. “

The second part of the volume provides a critique of cerebrocentrism and the way the brain paradigm shapes our conception of reality and self-identity.

Chapter four analyzes the abusive identification between person and brain and the way such an approach to personal identity lays further the ground for a simplistic approach of reality and subjectivity: “for neurobiology, the brain becomes the new subject, the thinker of our thoughts and doer of our actions; subjectivity itself is only a useful illusion.” This neurobiological conception disqualifies our ordinary conception of freedom and decision-making. It entails a deterministic conception of the human world as if thoughts and actions were governed by predictable movements and neuronal connections. According to this worldview: “persons are cerebral subjects, and images of the brain are the modern icons of the person.” On the contrary, Fuchs aims to show that “the brain is only an organ of the person, not the seat of the person. In other words: personhood means embodied subjectivity.” This chapter thus reinvests the previous critique of neuro-constructivism to show that the latter reinforces the Cartesian paradigm of exteriority that does not match the reality of our embodied interactions with ourselves and the world. Drawing on the analysis developed in The Ecology of the Brain, Fuchs shows that the person is not reducible to her brain, even if this organ – as a mediating organ – is key to her understanding of the world. Persons are “embodied subjects” and “living beings.” Neurosciences are thus wrong to undermine the role played by the body – as a lived body – in our understanding of the world as the brain cannot be dissociated from the living organism it draws upon: “this ‘cerebrocentrism’ neglects the interrelationships and circuits in which the brain is situated – as if one were to examine the heart without the circulation or examine the lungs without the respiratory cycle. The reason for this is that the neurosciences have no concept of a living organism. They are still trapped in the computer metaphor of the mind.” To Fuchs instead: “Conscious experience therefore only arises in the overarching system of organism and environment, through the interplay of many components to which the brain and the entire body with its organs, senses, and limbs belong, just as much as the appropriate objects of the environment. The brain is the organ that mediates these interactions; in short: an organ of mediation and relation. But, in the brain itself there is no experiencing, no consciousness, no thoughts. (…) the brain is therefore a crucial condition of the possibility of personal existence in the world. However, the person is not a part of the body, but the body-mind unity, the living human being. Persons have brains, they are not their brains.”

Chapter 5 concludes this critique of cerebrocentrism and argues for a libertarian conception of embodied freedom. Even if freedom may be philosophically challenged by determinism, we all have decisions to make in the experience of our day-to-day lives. Thus, our lived experience of freedom is irreducible and must be accounted for. Consequently, Fuchs develops a concept of embodied freedom that reflects the person’s life and does not limit its course to unfolding brain activities or the weight of individual determinations and constraints. According to the author: “If one wants to find the cause of a person’s actions, one must not look for them in an “I” or in the brain but only in the person with all their mental and physical states, or in other words, in the person as an embodied subjectivity.” The person as an embodied subjectivity is thus the source of all decisions. This conception defeats linear causality and psycho-physical determinism to claim back our human sense of responsibility and freedom. To Fuchs, the critical element lies in the person’s self-relation. Drawing on the notion of “circular causality” analyzed in depth in his previous book, The Ecology of the Brain, the author does not oppose the mind and the organism but instead merges the two poles into an “overarching structure” that interrelates the level of life and the level of existence. This view is not only philosophical. Fuchs demonstrates that it corresponds to a true scientific conception of the human being as a person that is more realistic than the scientist accounts based on cerebrocentrism. He further argues that “we do not find any empirical findings in the scientific world that are insurmountably opposed to our experience of freedom of choice” and that it is the human being’s responsibility not to get trapped in a worldview that might lock herself “in the cage of determinism.”

Chapter 6 questions the worldview elaborated by neuro-constructivism and how it has disrupted our sense of the lifeworld to replace it with the “brain world.” According to this worldview, reality is a construction and simulation of the brain, and our world of senses is “a world of illusion.” Fuchs shows that such a conception is not new and relies on a hidden Cartesian dualism that divides the world into artificial “inner” and “outer” dimensions. “Representationalism” objectifies human reality and amounts to a process of “de-anthropomorphizing” that divests the human being from its same characteristics as an embodied living being. Contrary to this perspective, Fuchs recalls his account of perception based on sensorimotor interaction. According to the enactive conception, “embodiment, lifeworld, and reality mutually ground each other.” Mutual perception and recognition frame our perception of reality and prevent us from reducing our first-personal lived experience to brain mechanisms.

Chapter 7, titled “Perception and Reality: Sketch of an interactive realism,” goes a step further by elaborating on the enactive approach to perception and embodiment to promote a “lifeworld realism.” It argues that “the fundamental reality is not the world of measurable quantities and particles abstracted by the special sciences, in particular physics, but the common reality of the lifeworld constituted by implicit intersubjectivity.” In other words, the brain should be conceived as a “mediating or relational organ, not as an internal producer of perception.” Neuroconstructivist approaches seem to reproduce the type of disconnected sense of reality one founds in schizophrenia. According to Fuchs, “The “ego tunnel” in which one lives according to the neuroconstructivist conception, the movie-in-the-head that is supposedly presented to us by our brain, is only a pathological state that patients experience in psychosis (Fuchs, 2020). In everyday experience, on the other hand, we find ourselves in the shared world, constituted by the implicit intersubjectivity of perception”.

The third and last part of the book focuses more directly on the role and status of psychiatry in contemporary society and the scientific landscape.

Chapter 8, “Psychiatry: between psyche and the brain,” investigates psychiatry’s relation to the spirit and analyzes its various discourses’ epistemological and historical roots. Fuchs recalls the specific status of psychiatry and its historical relation to natural and human sciences. Contemporary reductionism makes psychiatry contingent upon a kind of neurobiological monism: “Mental disorders are brain disorders” is the guiding principle of biological psychiatry today,”  Fuchs explains. Following his previous critique of neuro-constructivism, the author offers an alternative account of psychiatry as “a comprehensive relational medicine” – a practice that reconnects with the interpersonal aspect of reality’s experience. According to this view, the impact of environmental and social factors on the individual is as much significant as the genetic and biological factors involved in mental illnesses. Following the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry (Binswanger, Straus), Fuchs defends a global approach of the person in this chapter. Indeed, psychiatry’s “primary object is not the brain, but the person living in relationships.”

Chapter 9 explores the relationship between embodiment and personal identity and how it may be disrupted in dementia. Personal identity is a “basal self-experience” coextensive to embodied experience. It refers to a non-predicative sense of self that yet unifies our stream of consciousness. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s description in The Phenomenology of Perception, this phenomenological account of personal identity does not require narrative skills or reflective processes to characterize one’s sense of self. Instead, it argues that the ecological and enactive approach of the subject includes the constitution of personal history at the level of the habitual body.

From this perspective, Fuchs analyzes contemporary approaches to dementia, primarily based on externalist or discursive accounts that miss the crucial role of embodiment in preserving the subject’s first-person perspective. According to Fuchs: “the concept of embodied personhood and history is able to change our image of dementia. In place of a brain and cognition-centered perspective, we may adopt the view of the patients in their own individual embodiment, which, for its part, is embedded in social and environmental contexts. (…) A concept of person grounded solely in rationality and reflection inevitably stigmatizes people with severe cognitive deficits. By contrast, bringing in a concept of person orientated towards embodiment and inter-corporeality, the response and relational capabilities of patients become a significant foundation of their personhood—such as the ability to give expression to joy, gratefulness, sorrow, or fear that is still preserved”.

Finally, the last chapter – chapter 10 – compares and contrasts the cyclical time of the body with the linear time of modernity. Expanding on the concept of physical memory, Fuchs analyzes the alterations of the experience of time in various mental illnesses and how they conflict with the demands of modernity. Modernity and, in particular, Western economies rely on a linear time that is always prone to be accelerated. The cyclical time of the organic body also matches the cyclical time of the unconscious brought to light by Freud in “repetition compulsion” – a sense of time that is also profoundly disrupted in other mental illnesses. Fuchs gives the example of the manic patient and the one suffering from depression. Both conditions reveal a specific way to relate to the modern lifeworld or to be cut off from it. As the author explains: “precisely as a fundamental disorder of temporality, depression, like no other mental illness, reflects the conflict between the primary, cyclical structure of life processes and the rule of linear time, which has been established in Western culture since modern times. Desynchronization, falling out of linear world time, becomes a latent threat in our competitive and accelerated society, which has to be fought against continuously. In depression, these efforts fail, the individual lags hopelessly behind, and decoupling from the common time becomes a reality.” Implementing back a rhythmization of one’s life, based on the cyclical time of the body, could help restore a connection to oneself and others.

**

In line with his previous book (The Ecology of the Brain), Thomas Fuchs continues his critical, epistemological and phenomenological work by offering us a book resolutely turned towards pressing contemporary issues: the virtual world, aging, the status of care for the most vulnerable in our Western societies. Far from the gnostic fantasies of transhumanism, Fuchs offers us a phenomenology of the life of the mind that is both resolutely human and existentially fruitful.

The legacy of Jaspers and existential psychiatry (Binswanger, Straus, Minkowski) is evident here. Any scientific project is the consequence of a specific anthropological vision of the human being. What we could call the de-anthropologization of the world in favor of a technocentric approach must also be considered a contemporary worldview. We are then facing the following alternative as a limit situation: either the headlong rush into the ideological consolidation of this worldview and the deadly reification of the human and the living as a whole or an existential leap that allows us to reconcile a scientific approach to the world and a critical phenomenology of our relationship to it. By offering us a salutary deconstruction of contemporary scientism, which claims to master and go beyond the limits of the body and consciousness through technology, Fuchs offers an approach as accurate as adjusted to science, denouncing the myths of its metaphors (information, dematerialization, etc.). The author admirably demonstrates that this worldview is based on a normative conception of normality and dictated by a representation of the human being designed to match our contemporary pleonexia.

The book is vibrant, and we would like to highlight three aspects of it: 1/ the phenomenological deconstruction of contemporary psychiatry and the highlighting of an expanded concept of consciousness that reintegrates its ethical dimension and its embodied anchorage; 2/ the defense of a humanism that is less the classical humanism of the spirit than a humanism of the living, embodied spirit. In other words, the philosophical critique of Cartesian ontology calls for its overcoming in a renewed humanism anchored in phenomenological realism. 3/ The crucial role of the concept of the lifeworld and the relational and interpersonal dimension of any properly human existence.

Fuchs would undoubtedly acknowledge the words of Erwin Straus, who already stated in his writings that: “The object of psychiatric action is not primarily the brain, the body, or the organism; it should be the integral man in the uniqueness of his individual existence as this discloses itself – independently of the distinction between healthy and sick – in existential communication” (Philosophy and Psychiatry); or the words of Binswanger for whom psychiatry is a “science of man, of human existence.” It is not a question of denying some illnesses’ biological and organic dimensions. Instead, it is necessary to articulate this level of analysis and understanding with the existential and relational possibilities that give it meaning and inscribe the latter in the biography of a person. The richness of Fuchs’ analysis shows that this is not a theoretical bias. Recent scientific findings make the phenomenology of embodied cognition and enaction more credible and inescapable. In other words, contrary to the contemporary ideology developed by novelists like Harari, freedom is not the founding myth of our humanity but its real and embodied fulfillment. Fuchs insists on this crucial point: “Humanism in the ethical sense, therefore, means resistance to the rule and constraints of technocratic systems as well as to the self-reification and mechanization of humans” “The defense of man is, in this respect, not only a theoretical task but also an ethical duty. ” (Fuchs).

The high prevalence of mental illnesses in our contemporary times is explicitly correlated with a weakening of the social bond and atomization of the existence of individuals that can only increase in the schizoid world of the “technological mind.” Conversely, the examples of care, and in particular the care of older people with dementia, show the importance of interpersonal relationships and real socialization to guarantee the well-being and dignity, and self-esteem of one’s person. The ecology of the embodied self, therefore, requires us to question our modern systems based on the performance of individuals and self-sufficiency in order to consider the resources of our vulnerability and finitude, especially at the ethical and relational levels: ” As the other becomes real for us in his body, we also become real for ourselves, as bodily beings appearing in their bodies. Embodiment, lifeworld, and reality mutually ground each other” (Fuchs, 155). Isolating someone is undoubtedly the best attempt to destroy her humanity. The valorization of the disembodied spirit in our contemporary societies through digitalization – an ideological perversion of Cartesian ontology – alienates us at the very moment it thinks it can liberate us.

Fuchs’ phenomenological realism insists on embodied cognition and its constitution in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). It is constitutive of our free relationship with others and the world in that our choices and environments determine each other. Interactive realism goes beyond materialist monism and Cartesian dualism in favor of a relational ontology whose primary constituent is interdependency:  “Because perception, according to my first thesis, is neither an activity of the brain nor a process in an inner mental world, but rather an active engagement of living beings with their environment, or in short: perception means sensorimotor interaction. (Fuchs, 158).

The aesthesiological and cosmological dimension of perception promoted by interactive realism allows us to overcome the explanatory gap. Indeed, “only humans can grasp objects and situations as such, i.e., independently of a purely subjective perspective” (Ibid.) From this perception arises a form of responsibility towards other human and non-human forms of life. In other words, any epistemological perspective on the human being also implies an ethical perspective on freedom, truth, and reality. Such a perspective opens new philosophical ways to existential psychiatry, in the tradition of Straus, as we have said, but also of Minkowski.

We can only rejoice at this demonstration which brilliantly defeats the worldview of neuro-constructivism and the fallacy of the technological mind who pretends “to encounter us through a smartphone.” Fuchs’ book keeps all its promises and offers an essential analysis that holds the human being and the world together. This phenomenological approach departs us from the paradigm of power and mastery that foments some posthuman conceptions in favor of a paradigm that resynchronizes life and embodiment to make us responsible for our ways of being and living together within the common world, here and now. As such, by defending the human being, Fuchs defends all forms of life against the reductionisms or relativisms alienating them.