Em relação à obra de Lodge, para além do interessante historial crítico que ele faz das concepções filosóficas, literárias e científicas sobre as questões mente/cérebro/consciência, aprecio o cepticismo dele quanto à redução pura e simples da personalidade e da experiência a modelos científicos.
Duas ideias, muito ricas e plenas de consequências, são a de que a literatura é uma pré-ciência da consciência e a de que o romance ou a novela constituem, provavelmente, a mais bem sucedida tentativa do homem para descrever a experiência individual dos seres humanos movendo-se no espaço e no tempo.
Pretendo discorrer mais sobre o assunto, mas por agora limito-me a transcrever duas passagens de Consciousness and the Novel , que considero muito esclarecedoras:
Damasio calls the self that is constantly modified the "core" self, and the self that seems to have a kind of continuous existence the "autobiographical" self, suggesting that it is like a literary production. Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained , says something very similar. As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories.
"Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are."
To Dennett, however, all these stories, and the selves they construct, are illusions, epiphenomena. Damasio's position is more conservative, and to a humanist more congenial. He places himself in the tradition of thinkers as diverse as Locke, Brentano, Kant, Freud, and William James, "all of whom believed that consciousness is 'an inner sense.'"
(...)
In a world where nothing is certain, in which transcendental belief has been undermined by scientific materialism, and even the objectivity of science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness.
David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel
Parece-me que o autor do Ene Coisas gostará de ler estas passagens, pois nelas encontrará afinidades ...
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