Flaubert, Taleb, Bergson

I want to write an essay on Flaubert, Taleb, and Bergson.

Flaubert, for me, represents the problem of self-deception. In Madame Bovary I experienced many characters that were so wrapped up in a rigid narrative that they were incapable of dealing with reality. Charles is so wrapped up in using science and medicine as a way to ignore the difficulties of reality. Madame Bovary, on the other hand, is so wrapped up in Romantic language and literature that she can't perceive clearly past it anymore.

Taleb, I think, offers a language in which we can precisely render this problem of self-deception. Viewing the world as Charles and Emma do, he would say, is a procrustean problem: it comes from the desire to fit the messiness of reality to the cleanliness our ideas, rather than to tailor our ideas to the nuance of reality.

Bergson, however, offers a view of knowledge in which we do not have to cut the edges off of reality for the sake of our ideas. Bergson's concept of intuition allows us to appreciate reality in all of its ineffability, hopefully avoiding modern procrustean tendencies.

I think it would be a wonderfully exciting piece of writing for me to do.

It addresses many things that I'm currently interested in. Obviously, three things. Self-deception, the relationship between ideas and reality, and the distinction between knowing from the inside versus the outside (the former obviously belonging to empathy/simulation, the latter obviously belonging to science/analysis).