Werner Jaeger – Paideia

Jaeger is perhaps best known for his multivolume work “Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture”, an extensive consideration of both the earliest practices and later philosophical reflections on the cultural nature of education in Ancient Greece, which he hoped would restore a decadent early 20th century Europe to the values of its Hellenic origins. Jaeger coined the term Paideia, a shorthand for Greek education and culture, which is now used like Polis, Hellenism or Renaissance ranging in its use from the journal Paideia to the Paideia Proposal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Jaeger

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)

Titlepage.tv – Episode 1: All over the map

Een nieuw internet-boekenprogramma over globalisatie-literatuur.

Titlepage’s first episode: All Over The Map.
On this episode we “travel” across the world with some of the country’s best novelists. This episode features fiction that takes us to the Lower East Side of New York, a midwestern college campus, the bustling stock exchange of Shanghai, and the neon streets of Las Vegas. Our guests are: Richard Price, Colin Harrison, Susan Choi and Charles Bock.

“One of the best ways to see and understand the world is through first-class fiction” (Daniel Menaker)

Te bekijken op: http://www.viddler.com/explore/titlepage/videos/7/ 

Saul Bellow – Paris Review Interview (Issue 36, 1966)

INTERVIEWER

Your context is essentially that of the modern city, isn’t it? Is there a reason for this beyond the fact that you come out of an urban experience?

SAUL BELLOW

Well, I don’t know how I could possible separate my knowledge of life, such as it is, from the city. I could no more tell you how deeply it’s gotten into my bones than the lady who paints radium dails in the clock factory could tell you. (p. 102)

Citaten van Jorge Louis Borges

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”

Uit het essay “A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”