The Thought at the Back of the Mind
Five Explorations of the Human in the Age of the Natural Sciences
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
The Thought at the Back of the Mind is a plea for the centrality of the humanities as a vehicle of knowledge about ourselves and about the reality around us. It illustrates the interpretative arts through Aronowicz's close reading of Charles Peguy, Don DeLillo, Bernard d'Espagnat, Wysława Szymborska, and Marilynne Robinson. Each author exhibits a complex relationship to the narratives emanating from the sciences--wonder, terror, appreciation, resistance. All, in different ways, point to a dimension of the human that cannot be captured through "the scientific method." For the most part, they make their points not through abstract argument but through an exploration of daily life. Each writer gives pride of place to metaphor, humor, and/or intuition as indispensable conduits to the reality within and without us. The Thought at the Back of the Mind explores the religious dimension embedded in the narratives emanating from the natural sciences as well as in the quest to formulate what eludes them. These two contrary dimensions of our relation to the sciences, in their various configurations, reveal us to ourselves in our historical moment.
Endorsements (3)
“This is the most engaging, indeed inspiring, justificatory defense of the humanities I have yet encountered. Rather than being content to marshal the usual theoretical arguments, Annette Aronowicz shows us in practice how a subtle interpretive reading of richly suggestive texts buttresses our capacity to remain fully human in an age dominated by the techno-scientific paradigm. Hers is humanities scholarship of the highest order, helping us to think seriously about our human destiny.”
“The Thought at the Back of the Mind is incisive and elegantly written. . . . Aronowicz turns to novelists, essayists, a poet, and—not least—a physicist to explore how to express the distinctively human within and beyond what is generated by an at once reductive and expansive account of science, giving a generous hearing to the humanities and to the irreducible multiplicity of human life. It is an important book, and strongly recommended.”
“This is a delightful book, at once absorbing and insistent, meditative and a call to action. An expert guide through the difficult writings of five elegant modern writers, Aronowicz invites her readers to take up the good fight, reading carefully and thinking boldly, not only for their own sakes, but because everything is at stake—the possibility of our being human today beyond what she calls the religion of science. Intuition, metaphor, the ability to imagine the whole, subjectivity, glimpses of the Real, the ethical, interiority, poetry, and more; it is these things that make us human and that remain a bulwark against the technologization of our lives.”
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