Back in July, just after I’d finished reading Flow by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, I wrote this in my journal:
‘Read more fiction and ancient wisdom, and less critical theory. Theory emerges from post-scientific-revolution enlightenment rationalism, aiming to distill life to purely scientific concepts. Ancient wisdom writers and artists know that knowledge is best absorbed like nutrients from our food: through a balanced diet of lived experience, not the vitamin supplements of scientific theory. Books like Flow are helpful but ultimately dry out and calcify what was previously subconsciously understood through the lived experience of those who, in Aristotle’s phrase, consider life ‘worth living’ – by examining it not under the laboratory microscope but through plays and songs and stories.’
That said, I still have a number of books on my shelf to get through this year that are of a decidedly theoretical nature, but I also have J.R.R Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, and a couple of other novels. Perhaps I’ll keep supplementing my diet with these ‘vitamin supplements’ of the scientific disciplines – specifically, I’m interested in how we think and the things we think through (I have Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari and have recently finished The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul, which was excellent) – but I’m coming to appreciate more and more the limited benefit provided by such texts, compared with the soul-enriching nature of literature and art, so much of which pre-dates the scientific revolution that governs most of our thinking today.
Ben David Trigg 