Escape Philosophy

Every living person is constantly holding the body together: the breath in our lungs, the blood in our veins, the food we digest, the thoughts and attention we keep in focus. Only at death does all of this give way, seeping into the soil and rising into the air. People have long pictured the body as a cage, something to be broken out of by whatever means are available. Those means include machines, mechanization, drugs, sensory isolation, alien abduction, religious rapture, and even death or the end of the species. Escape Philosophy traces how humans have pursued that exit and tried to go beyond the body's limits, drawing on examples as varied as the horror films of David Cronenberg, UFO encounters, the metal band Godflesh, ketamine experiments, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics.

The book is written against a backdrop of a world that seems to be breaking down faster all the time. Climate collapse and a global pandemic have produced a particular 21st-century unease, a sense of dread and of being reduced to something less than human. Against that background, the author asks what leaving the body might actually look like, and whether such an escape is possible at all.