Book Review: Thought as a System

Readers of this Journal may have noticed my tendency to refer to the work of David Bohm, the late theoretical physicist and Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, as being of principal interest to phenomenological thought. I have been hoping that a text would be produced presenting his ideas in a manner that would be accessible to non-physicist readers who would be most interested in Bohm's philosophical and psychological speculations concerning such topics as thought, reality, the self, and so forth. When I received Thought as a System, I momentarily believed that just such a book had finally been produced. I am sad to report that it has not and, while the text is thoroughly accessible, informative, and often striking in its insights and challenges to assumptions, this reader felt somewhat let down by it.

I suspect that part of the difficulty is that the text, derived from a series of seminars given by Bohm in 1990 at Ojai, California, is exclusively in the form of a question and answer dialogue highly similar to what appears in many of the published works of Krishnamurti (who Bohm knew both as colleague and mentor). Now, whereas this form of written dialogue may work well with the presentation of fairly straighforward and metaphorically-inclined ideas of Krishnamurti, it becomes irritating (or, at least it did for me) when tackling the much more complex notions being discussed by Bohm which really do seem to require a sustained development of argument and clarification rather than appear in little 'bursts of wisdom' followed (or preceded) by another's comment or question.

However, I do not wish to put Journal readers off completely from this work. Perhaps, unlike me, many of you might find this type of argument development and presentation highly rewarding. And, in any case, if it serves to 'turn you on' to Bohm's ideas and theories, then all well and good. Let me just state that the entire focus of the seminars covers questions concerning the nature of objective reality, the relationship between mind and matter, the question of 'the self', and, most often, various problematic issues concerning thought and knowledge. All of these are considered from a standpoint that is not a million miles away from phenomenological enquiry—just as, in a similar fashion, the various tentative conclusions derived from such enquiry should strike readers as being deeply pertinent to existential-phenomenological enquiry.

Bohm was a greatly original (to some, even revolutionary) and influential physicist and thinker. To paraphrase an old advertising slogan from my youth: 'Try him; you'll like him.'

Ernesto Spinelli