Is ordinary consciousness just an illusion? Marilynne Robinson takes aim at reductionist Òparascience.Ó

By DAVID B HART
Friday, July 9, 2010

An interesting book review on an interesting new site called Big Questions Online discusses the book called "Absence of Mind" by Marilynne Robinson based on her 2009 Lecture series.

The full article is here. An excerpt:

"The chief purpose of Absence of Mind Ñ the published version of Marilynne RobinsonÕs splendid Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 2009 Ñ is to raise a protest against all those modern, reductively materialist accounts of human consciousness that systematically exclude the testimony of subjectivity, of inner experience, from their understanding of the sources and impulses of the mind. Its targets are all the major schools of reductionism (Freudianism, Marxism, Darwinism), but also all the currently popular champions of the reductionist cause (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and so on). It is, in simple terms, a robust defense of the dignity and irreducible mystery of human conscience, personal identity, and self-awareness; and, as such, it is a stirring success.
If, though, I had to come up with some complaint to make against the book, I suppose I could fret for a few moments that its rhetorical power might possibly distract many readers from the cogency of its arguments. Ours is the age of ÒbulletÓ headings, after all, and expository prose is expected to come in bland, easily digestible fragments, composed entirely of short, often repetitious declamatory sentences. There is some danger, consequently, that RobinsonÕs literary grace Ñ the expressive force of her language, the dense economy of her sentences, the fluidity with which she moves from point to point Ñ will be mistaken by some as willful obscurity, or resented as a cruel tax upon their patience.

It would, however, be a dark day for civilization if writers of RobinsonÕs gifts could be swayed by complaints of that sort. In point of fact, much of the joy of reading Robinson comes from her ability to translate complex ideas into words suited to their subtleties. Beginning with her remarkable debut novel Housekeeping (1980), all of her work, fiction and essays alike, has been marked by a luminous intelligence and a rather attractive intellectual severity, communicated in a language that wastes no words and that demands attentiveness. Absence of Mind is a short book, but also an intensely reflective and penetrating one, and it offers considerable rewards for anyone willing to read it carefully, and to think along with it. For all its brevity, it makes its case with surprising comprehensiveness."

A.