Adaptive Behavior Book Review Adaptive Behavior 2024, Vol. 0(0) 1–13 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/10597123231225511 journals.sagepub.com/home/adb Review of Thomas Fuchs—In Defense of the Human Being Review of Thomas Fuchs – In Defense of the Human Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, ISBN 9780192898197. Reviewed by: Mark M James  Handling Editor: Russell Meyer, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Machine with the strength of a hundred men Can’t feed and clothe my children; Can’t greet a sailor coming in Or know of desperation Lisa O’Neill 1. Introduction Amongst the books on my shelves, one in particular de- viates from the typical pattern. It is entitled The SAS Sur- vival Handbook and is, somewhat ironically, easily recognizable by the camouflaged pattern that is the primary motif of its cover and the shocking neon orange of the title text—quickly locatable in an existential pinch! Written by former British special forces member and now “survival consultant,” John “Lofty” Wiseman, it is, by all accounts, a classic. I purchased the book 15 years ago during a period when I was playing with the idea of living a more self- sufficient existence. Despite keeping it on my shelf all this time, I’ve never done more than skim its pages. Luckily, I’ve never had to. I simply trust the Amazon reviews that should the need ever present itself, I will be glad to have it. Reading Thomas Fuchs’ s (2021) In Defense of the Human Being (IDHB) puts me in mind of Wiseman and his classic text. Fuchs, as well being Karl Jaspers Professor for Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Heidelberg, is also a practicing psychiatrist and the medical director of the Blankenburg Day Clinic in Heidelberg. Like Wiseman, Fuchs knows his subject up close. But IDHB is also a survival manual of sorts. Indeed, one, oddly enough, with a lot more application in our current age than Wiseman’ s. I say this, for having lived with IDHB for a while now its value has been reaffirmed repeatedly and compounded with time. The number of times I have drawn on insights from it during an exchange, instructed my conversation partners that they must read it, or returned to it in the wake of a chat in which I couldn’t quite bring some vital insight to mind, far exceed any other text I have read in recent years, maybe even ever. Of course, like with any survival manual, one hopes that with a bit of time, and a bit of luck, it will become un- necessary and gather dust on a shelf somewhere, seeming quaint and out of touch. If I had to bet though, IDHB will remain in active service for some time to come. The nar- ratives it defends against are only growing in prevalence and power, and few books are likely to match IDHB in the power of the criticism it directs toward them. The narratives referred to have been organizing around a couple of dominant cultural, intellectual, and techno- scientific attractors for some time now. One concerns the ideas of biological determinism and the neuroreductionism that accompanies it, which tends to squeeze out any pos- sibilities for real subjectivity, that is, the kind that makes a difference. In short, it does so by reducing every event of a living experiencing being to the pre-determined unfoldings of a meaningless meat machine. The other narrative relates to the ideas of transhumanism and the neuroconstructionism that underpins much of it. Transhumanism is an emerging global culture that, at base, views the mind as independent from the body and seeks to transcend the human being and all its bodily inconveniences for an existence free not only from the limitations of the body itself, but of the rhythms and restrictions of life altogether. It is against these narra- tives and their consequences that Fuchs’ s sees his defense of Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Japan