Thursday, August 12, 2010

"To understand ourselves as works of fiction..."

"New psychologies have come and gone, but our self-awareness continues to haunt our science, a reality too real to be measured. 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.'"
-Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

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