Epstein Russell
Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, 3815 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104-6196, USA.
Conscious Cogn. 2004 Jun;13(2):213-40. doi: 10.1016/S1053-8100(03)00006-0.
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.
在马塞尔·普鲁斯特的小说《追忆似水年华》中，他认为对意识现象学的传统描述是不完整的，因为这些描述过于关注主导每个意识瞬间的高度显著的感官信息，而忽略了处于背景中的联想网络。在本文中，我阐述了普鲁斯特的意识体验理论，并展示了该理论如何直接引导他形成一种审美感知理论。普鲁斯特将意识分为两个部分，这大致对应于威廉·詹姆斯将思想流分为“核心”和“边缘”的划分。普鲁斯特认为，艺术的功能是通过使用精心挑选的感官表象来控制思想流，从而在观察者的脑海中间接唤起潜在的联想网络。我提出了这种普鲁斯特式/詹姆斯式现象学的一种可能神经基础，并认为普鲁斯特式美学的一般原则可以应用于所有艺术形式。我得出结论，艺术的科学理论应该直接源于意识的科学理论。
