Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness

(Paperback, Main)

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'A wonderful, wild, dazzling book. You will feel more human for having read it' - Literary Review

'Foster's daringly imaginative exploration of alternative models of selfhood is an original and beneficial way of grappling with history ... precisely what we need to remind us that there are many alternatives to the "I, me, mine" mindset' - TLS

What kind of creature is a human If we don't know what we are, how can we know how to act Charles Foster sets out to understand what a human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history.

Foster begins his quest with his son in a Derbyshire wood, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, and when modern consciousness was first ignited. From there he travels to the Neolithic, a way of being defined by fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine and we were soulless cogs within it.

Reviews

'Dazzling and, yes, eccentric ... Foster is a beautiful writer and an engaging companion throughout this ... wonderfully fun if entirely bonkers read' - Alex Preston

'Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness is not the book its subtitle would have us believe. It's a better one. It's a lesson in what to watch for in nature. It's a discourse on the sentience we may have had as early humans and that, over millennia, we've somehow roasted into a crisp. It's funny. It's moving. It's mind-expanding. It's a collection of thoughts to read again and again ... Foster is a writer of extraordinary ability' - Rebecca Coffey

'Foster's daringly imaginative exploration of alternative models of selfhood is an original and beneficial way of grappling with history ... There is an increasing awareness today of the limitations of individualist models of selfhood, which many consider the root cause of some of our most urgent crises. The kinds of new and old imaginaries that Foster explores here, empirically and otherwise, are precisely what we need to remind us that there are many alternatives to the "I, me, mine" mindset' - Anna Katharina Schaffner

'Foster is an amiable narrator. He is self-deprecating, feminist, in awe of what the natural world has to teach him. His observations - that it is hard to say where humans stop and aurochs begin; that the great disaster of the Enlightenment was its reduction of the universe to a machine - align firmly with those of Donna Haraway and Amitav Ghosh in recalling us to the epic mysticism of existence. He is, I think, also an optimist, still hopeful for humanity, even if we are never again going to run around Derbyshire in a deerskin loincloth' - Rachel Andrews

'Controversial, yet oddly compelling' - Nature

Author Bio

Charles Foster is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Being a Beast, which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Wainwright Prize, won the 30 million d'amis Prize in France, and is the subject of a forthcoming feature film. In 2016, he won the IgNobel Prize for Biology.