Living in the Age of Neuroreductionism
Here are two books we’re reading, both by Thomas Fuchs, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. If you want to understand current neuroscience and its many forms of reductionism, you must read Fuchs. The first was published in 2018 and another blockbuster in 2021, In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology. In the first book, Ecology of the Brain, Fuchs argues for the “crucial role of the Umwelt for understanding the human brain, namely as an organ of relation, interaction, and resonance: with the body itself, with the immediate environment of the organism, and with the social and cultural environment of the lifeworld. Of course, this essential relatedness applies to the embodied mind as well—an idea that is illustrated by the front cover of this book: being immersed in an enveloping milieu, which serves as a carrier for the diver and at the same time offers flexible resistance to his motion. However, an ecological approach to the brain requires, first of all, an autonomous concept of life. Up to now, the neurosciences have largely neglected that the brain is primarily an organ of the living being, not of the mind. The life sciences, too, are far away from grasping life as a phenomenon of its own, displaying a self-organization and inwardness that is irreducible to mere physical processes. In contrast, embodied and enactive approaches have considerably advanced our understanding of the living organism. Only on this condition does it become possible to overcome the direct “short circuit” of brain and mind that is still pervasive in the neurosciences.”
RECENT BOOKS BY THOMAS FUCHS
