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In recent times, Adam Phillips has had the dubious privilege of being called ‘the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness’. Pleasant as this envied or enviable label might initially sound, it brings with it the burden of our expectations, which, in a sense, is what Darwin's Worms is all about. After Freud and Darwin, what do we want and what can we expect from the lives we have? Where do we get our ideas about such things and what weight should we give to the conflicting messages we are given? What would make us want to live if our sole relief from the transience of existence is the fact of death? And, with all this in mind, is there too much suffering in the world - or just the right amount? (p. 3). It is with this last concern that Phillips begins what is probably his most accessible book to date, a book written with beguiling ease about ‘the big questions’ we inevitably face later, if not sooner. A book that suggests a life is more affirmed than diminished by the constraints of time and knowledge, that curiosity is best engendered by thwarted ideals and that a refusal to mourn is tantamount to a refusal to live.
To this end Phillips recounts the ways in which Freud's and Darwin's thought erosively shifted our sense of ourselves from the theistic worlds of permanence, transcendence and afterlife to the secular transience of (post) modern life. An era in which ‘the present never catches up with the past’ (p. 8), where ‘the past tells us nothing reliable about the future’ (p. 8), and where suffering is the inevitable consequence of the conflict of instincts and the scarcity of resources. However, he suggests we might be more relieved than (narcissistically) wounded to leave behind the old conceptual muddle that made us at once a part of and apart from ‘nature’. In what for me is the most inspiring part of Darwin's Worms, he describes the ways in which Darwin subtly and radically reconstructed morality to include our adaptability, retrieving our ‘fallen se