The Transcendent Brain

The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science
Alan Lightman
Pantheon (March 14, 2023), 209 pages
Kindle edition, $13.99, Amazon hardcover $23.40

This is the second book I have read by Alan Lightman, the first being Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine. In both books he talks about his experience of spirituality, and in both books he insists that he is a materialist.

In The Transcendent Brain, Lightman writes in the introduction about watching the comings and goings of ospreys at his home in Maine. He describes how two young ospreys made their first flight after leaving their nest, and how they made eye contact with him. Lightman writes, “Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant.” Throughout the book he talks about spirituality, but he insists that “the universe is made of material stuff, and only material stuff.”

Lightman writes about a philosopher named Moses Mendelssohn who argued for the existence of the soul. He then discusses the Roman philosopher Lucretius, whose work I read in the original Latin when I was a classics major at Pitzer College in Claremont. In De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) Lucretius offers a sort of natural history, in which he states that the whole world is strictly physical in makeup and there are no gods to intervene with our fate. He wants to tell us that we need have no fear of their wrath. This was in contrast to Plato, who conceived of a soul separate from the body.

The author then discusses scientific research on the nature of consciousness and argues that all consciousness can be shown to come from strictly material sources. He writes about a debate in which he participated with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in which he described some of his transcendental experiences. Dawkins, Lightman reports, responded by saying that he would not let Lightman out transcend him. In the end it appeared to me that there was not really much disagreement between the two of them. It’s just that Lightman is tolerant of people who have religious beliefs and Dawkins is not.

Ultimately, methinks that Lightman doth protest too much. His insistence on the material seems forced and perhaps a tad desperate. I might wish that he accept his transcendent experiences at face value and leave them at that. For reading on the awe and wonder of nature, look elsewhere. Many of Loren Eiseley’s books are out in reprint editions, available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book. You will not be disappointed reading Eiseley.