`Death," Wittgenstein famously declared, "is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death." The statement, like so many others of its kind in the last, "mystical" pages of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sounds with the persuasive force of a mathematical theorem; however, although it is true, it is not the whole truth, as the philosopher himself came to acknowledge of the Tractatus in general. If we shall not experience the event of death itself, certainly the idea of it shapes our lives. Indeed, it might be said that death is the central event in human life, the "distinguished thing", in the dying Henry James's phrase, against which, consciously or otherwise, we measure our doings and our days. Speaking in his new book on the work of Darwin and of Freud, Adam Phillips observes that "it was the transience of things, the impermanence of natural phenomena, that fed them their best lines. Life was about what could be done with what was left, with what still happened to be there." Death, for all of us, is the prompter in the wings, the unseen inspiration that informs our best performances.
Adam Phillips is a psychologist, and former Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital. Over the past decade or so he has produced a series of frivolous-sounding but highly stimulating studies such as On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, On Flirtation, and The Beast in the Nursery - clearly, he has a way with titles. His latest book, Darwin's Worms, despite its brevity and its quietness of tone, is a profound meditation on the ways in which the pains and terrors of life might be ameliorated by a fundamental change in our attitudes to transience and loss. Darwin and Freud are central to Phillips's thinking on death. "It was not life after death that Darwin and Freud speculated about, but life with death: its personal and trans-generational history." In a beautiful passage in his Prologue - Phillips is one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson for our time - he declares:
"The brilliance of the earth is the brilliance of every paradise," Wallace Stevens wrote; and one can only write the poems of the earth, as Darwin and Freud did, if one is happily convinced that there is nowhere else to go. When transience is not merely an occasion for mourning, we will have inherited the earth.
Phillips begins with a consideration of what he calls "the enigma of loss", the mysterious fact that Man is the only animal that gives itself up so lavishly to sorrow and mourning. "After all, nothing else in nature seems quite so grief-stricken, or impressed by its own dismay." As Nietzsche had it, surely the other species on the earth regard man with bafflement "as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal". In the modern era, and especially in the 19th century, the question of our place in nature has become increasingly problematic. If we are only natural creatures, without an immortal soul, how is it that nature is not enough for us, is "insufficient to our needs", as Phillips puts it? For him, Darwin and Freud are the two essential thinkers who in their different but complementary ways showed us that "it was misleading to think of nature as being on our side. Not because nature was base or sinful, but because nature didn't take sides, only we did."
Many of Darwin's contemporaries, churchmen especially, saw him as a Mephistophelian nay-sayer, debasing man and counselling despair. In fact, of course, the opposite was the case. What Darwin wanted was for man to live to the fullest of his capacities, recognising not only the harshness of life but also its richness and blind exuberance, accepting the inevitability of extinction but also its promise of continuity, not of the individual but of the collective. The Darwinian vision is of nature as red in tooth and claw, but also as a vast, unending, ever-striving community of the living and the dead. Against the City of God he sets the world of creatures. No wonder the divines took such fright. Darwin was careful to avoid direct confrontation with his religious critics, observing mildly that "freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds".
Declaring himself wearied by the theological furore that his work provoked, at the end of his life he gave the appearance of taking Voltaire's advice and turning away to tend his garden - literally. His final work, Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits, is a triumph of the art of lateral assault. The surface of our world, he had discovered, is made by worms: the loamy deposit on which we stand, in which our food is grown, and in which ultimately we will be buried, is the product of the action of the digestive system of earthworms. This wonderful fact, which he had stumbled on in an early scientific investigation, delighted Darwin, one of whose most remarkable and endearing characteristics was his humility in the face of the natural world. Adam Phillips quotes an emblematic injunction, jotted by Darwin in the margins of a book: "Never say higher or lower."
In "The Death of Freud", Phillips's second essay in the book, he investigates Freud's lifelong distrust of biography and biographers. "Freud hated biography because it represented the dangerous and misleading claims one person might make about knowing another person." As Phillips astutely observes, "the subject of a biography always dies in the biographer's own way", thus in a manner depriving the subject of his particular, singular death. It was Freud's conviction, as it was Rilke's, as it was Heidegger's, that every human creature deserves his or her own death, and that no other creature has the right to interfere with that right. Only by dying into death, as it were, can a man be said truly to die - that is, to die in truth - and consequently to have lived in truth. Freud's late doctrine of the "death instinct" arises from this conviction. "From the point of view of the death instinct," Phillips writes, " . . . my life is a story about dying in my own fashion. From the point of view of the life instinct . . . more life is being sought and sustained." Hence a kind of balance - a tragic balance, perhaps - is maintained. This is, for Freud, the human predicament.
Darwin's Worms is a superb study of "the arts of transience". It calls on us to make a radical shift in our conception of death - our own deaths, and extinction in general - and in the process to re-evaluate ideas of our place in the world and our stance towards nature. Phillips's aim is the same as those of his two exemplars, who "press us to think of our lives as more miraculous than our deaths; our death is inevitable, but our conception is not . . . They want us, in short, not to be unduly dismayed by our mortality - to live with our own deaths." His programme is founded not in a grand metaphysics, but, as Darwin's was, in ordinary and often unconsidered things.
Darwin . . . leaves us with a bafflingly simple question the resonance of which he characteristically understates: What would our lives be like if we took earthworms seriously, took the ground under our feet rather than the skies high above our heads, as the place to look, as well, eventually, as the place to be? It is as though we have been pointed in the wrong direction.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times