What a surprise! I knew that Marilynne Robinson was a brilliant author of fiction, with an ability to penetrate the depths of the human condition. (Gilead or Home, anyone?) I was unaware of her non-fiction chops—until now. Absence of Mind is a compilation of four lectures she gave as part of the Terry Lecture Series at Yale.

In Absence of Mind, Robinson points a finger at scientism and exposes its conceits. Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Sigmund Freud alike receive her critique. The scientific method is, of course, a valuable and legitimate mode of inquiry. Robinson is concerned with pseudo-scientific thinking—science overstepping its bounds and becoming the meta-narrative of the modern age.

The mind is a particular concern for Robinson. Is mind reducible to that lump of meat between our ears or is there something qualitatively different?

Might not the human brain, that most complex object known to exist in the universe, have undergone a qualitative change as well? If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimized ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us, a change gradualism could not predict—if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are. (135)

Robinson’s prose is as poetic in this non-fiction as it is in her award-winning fiction. Her style takes some time to adjust to, but it befits the subject. The human mind is too glorious a creation to describe exclusively with the self-assured language of empiricism.

Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Terry Lecture Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.