“The cosmopolitan motif” – Peter L. Berger (An Invitation to Sociology)

When discussing the motifs that make up a sociological consciousness, Peter L. Berger gives us four motifs; debunking, unrespectability, relativizing and a fourth “less far-reaching in its implications” (though the most far-reaching to our concerns): “the cosmopolitan motif”.

Wetenschap & kunst (Jonah Lehrer – Proust was a neuroscientist)

Sinds C.P. Snow in een bekende lezing de scheiding tussen de “two cultures” – kunst en wetenschap vaststelde, zijn de twee enkel nog meer uit elkaar gegroeid. Hij schreef: “Their attitudes are so different that they can’t find much common ground.” (gecit. 190). Snow stelde een “third culture” voor: “Our fictions and our facts would feed off each other. Furthermore, this third culture would rein in the extravangances of both cultures at their extremes.” (190).

In zijn boek Proust was a neuroscientist bewijst Jonah Leher dat artiesten ook een waarheid brengen: “What the artists in this book reveal is that there are many different ways of describing reality, each of which is capable of generating truth. Physics is useful for describing quarks and galaxies, neuroscience is useful for describing the brain, and art is useful for describing our actual experience.” (192). Deze derde cultuur zou “a celebration of pluralism“ (192) moeten zijn. Maar vele wetenschappers (Pinker, Dawkins, …) falen als het gaat als het gaat over het niet-wetenschappelijke; alles is voor hen een “symptom of our biology” (192). Oojk het absoluut relativisme van de postmodernisten is niet toereikend; “No truth is perfect, but that doesn’t mean all truths are equally imperfect.” (193); Lehrer stelt een fourth culture voor.

Virginia Woolf – The Emergent Self (Jonah Lehrer – Proust was a neuroscientist)

Volgens Jonah Lehrer stelt Virginia Woolf zich in haar boeken de volgende vraag over het menselijke bewustzijn en zijn identiteit:

“But if the mind is so evanescent, then how does the self arise? Why do we feel like more thatn just a collection of disconnected thoughts? Woolf’s revelation was that we emerge form our own fleeting interpretations of the world.” (169)

“The self is simply this subject: it is the story we tell ourselves about our experiences.” (169)

Proust was a Neuroscientist – Jonah Lehrer

In dit boek, gaat Jonah Lehrer na “how art and science might be reintegrated into an expansive critical sphere.” (197). Want

“[b]oth art and science can be useful, and both can be true. In our time, art is a necessary counterbalance to the glories and excesses of scientific reductionism, especially as they are applied to human experience. This is the artist’s purpose: to keep our reality, with all its frailties and question marks, on the agenda” (197).

Via acht case-studies (Whitman, Eliot, Escoffier, Proust, Cézanne, Stravinsky, Stein en Woolf) gaat hij na hoe fictie niet “the opposite of scientific fact” (ix) is, maar “[b]y exploring their own experiences, they expressed what no experiment could see” (xi): “what reality feels like” (x)

William Faulkner – Paris Review Interview (Issue 12, 1956)

I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes. (51)

Uit: The Paris Review Interviews. Vol. II. New York, Picador. 2007