Craig said About Jonah Lehrer's "Proust Was A Neuroscientist,":
"This book about the relation of art & the mind is compatible with MOQ."
Ant McWatt asked Craig on March 20th (GMT):
Quite a juxtaposition in that intriguing title, Craig! (Does that mean Oscar
Wilde was an astrophysicist? Platt a charity worker in Africa?) Anyway, any
particular wisdom in this book that actually throws light on the MOQ?
DMB helpfully stepped in later that day:
Jonah Lehrer was a journalist, a science journalist, until his fall from grace.
He was fired - and effectively bounced out of the profession in a plagiarism
scandal. Even before his cheating was discovered, his books were harshly
criticized by actual scientists.
There's an old review (11th November 2007) of Jonah Lehrer's "Proust Was A
Neuroscientist" in Slate for example. The reviewer discredits the book's main
premise. Here's the premise in Jonah Lehrer's own words: "We now know that
Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual
cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of
consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions."
The reviewer undermines this premise by pointing out that these artists weren't
scientists and did not discover things either. They were getting their ideas
from elsewhere. (If memory serves, Proust was William James's brother-in-law.)
"Many of the breakthroughs attributed to the artists profiled in the book seem
to have been prefigured—or even stated outright—by contemporary theorists like
William James. Indeed, the architect of American psychology lurks in almost
every chapter: In a discussion of Cezanne's discovery that the mind fabricates
an image of the world from our sensory impressions, Lehrer quotes from James'
Pragmatism, saying substantially the same thing; when he explains how Woolf
discovered our splintered consciousness, it's James again, on the "mutations of
the self"; a chapter on Gertrude Stein's discovery of the language instinct
begins with her work in William James' laboratory at Harvard; and so on. (For a
discussion of James' considerable influence on Proust, you'll have to look
elsewhere.) Midway through the book, I started to wonder if a better title
would have been James Was a Psychologist."
I don't if the book would illuminate the MOQ or not but this connection with
James does, at least, make the idea seem plausible.
Ant McWatt comments:
Dave,
Oh no, I thought the title of Lehrer's book was purely allegorical. Otherwise,
yes, it sounds like he was stretching credibility with attributing all these
artists with intuitively knowing various scientific discoveries. Maybe that IS
true in some cases but it would need going back to first hand sources to check
or, at the very least, referring to a writer that you can trust - like William
James. That Proust was William James' brother-in-law is a telling connection
in this regard. As is your suggested re-titling of the book!
I wonder what Craig will make of all this?
Anyway, it has reminded me that I really need to re-read my James. ("Bill, you
know it's been over a decade since our last stroll..."),
In the meantime, many thanks for the pointers!
Ant
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