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)
Deze vaststelling bewijst Lehrer’s premisse, dat kunstenaars het vaak bij het rechte eind hadden: “As the modernists anticipated, the permanent-seeming self is actually an endless procession of disjointed moments.” (177) We houden ons zelf tesamen door een “act of attention” (181) die de wereld interpreteert: “We bind together our sensory parts by experiencing them from a particular point of view.” (181). Het zelf is dus een illusie, een fictie.
“our feeling of unity was a “mental confabulation”; we invented the self in order to ingore our innate contradictions.” (180)
“the self is simply our work of art, a fiction created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole “theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen.” If it didn’t exist, then nothing would exist. We would be a brain full of characters, hopelessly searching for an author.” (182)
“As Woolf understood, the self is a fiction that cannot be treated like a fact. Besides, to understand ourselves as works of fiction is to understand ourselves as fully as we can. “The final belief,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, “is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.” (188)
Hieruit blijkt dus het gebrek van wetenschap, hoe accuraat ook: “Any explanation of our experience solely in terms of our neurons will never explain our experience, because we don’t experience our neurons.” (187)
“This is where art comes in. As Noam Chomsky said, “It is quite possible – overwhelmingly probable, one might quess – that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels that form scientific psychology”. If science breaks us aparts, art puts back together.” (188) / “The artist describes what the scientist can’t.” (188)
Uit: Lehrer, Jonah. Proust was a Neuroscientist. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston New York. 2007
Categorie: belang van fictie, belang van literatuur, fictie, Jonah Lehrer, Literatuur, Verhalen, Virginia Woolf
