Consciousness, art, and the brain: lessons from Marcel Proust.

نویسنده

  • Russell Epstein
چکیده

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust's theory of conscious experience and show how it leads him directly to a theory of aesthetic perception. Proust's division of awareness into two components roughly corresponds to William James' division of the stream of thought into a "nucleus" and "fringe." Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought. I propose a possible neural basis for this Proustian/Jamesian phenomenology, and argue that the general principles of Proustian aesthetics can be applied to all forms of art. I conclude that a scientific theory of art should follow in a straightforward manner from a scientific theory of consciousness.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Consciousness, art and the brain: Lessons from

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust s theory of conscious experience and sh...

متن کامل

The Influence of Poincaré’s Thoughts on the Origins of Random and Chance in Works of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Chance is a broad concept which has become an important factor in linking science and art in the twentieth century. Simultaneously, concept emerged as a new scientific paradigm in Arts by Henry Poincaré and especially Marcel Duchamp, who has affected many artists such as John Cage, one of aleatoric music pioneers .This paper investigates the differences and similarities of the chance concept in...

متن کامل

Exploring the Educational Status of the Art of Film to achieve consciousness as a Requirement for Education

This study is to examine the educational status of the art of film as to describe the ways of achieving the concept of consciousness as the requirement for education. Findings show that through exploring a film, as to come up with consciousness, it is possible to have inductions and deductions from a film and its audience. With this presumption that a film is similar to a content of the textboo...

متن کامل

I-20: ART - Children How Are They Doing Lessons from Research

Worldwide there are over 4,000,000 ART conceived individuals. As fertility rates ‘fall’ in some countries use of ART is increasing with rates of 1.8% of live births in the UK, 4.4% in Denmark etc. Although still the single largest threat to future ART born children is being born twin, triplet or more, other research shows that there is good grounds for monitoring of the health of these children...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:
  • Consciousness and cognition

دوره 13 2  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2004