Deboarah Solomon, the Simon Cowell of newspaper magazine journalism, went for the jugular again during an interview with author Peter Watson in last week’s New York Times Magazine:
WATSON: I do not believe in the inner world. I think that the inner world comes from the exploration of the outer world – reading, traveling, talking. I do not believe that meditation or cogitation leads to wisdom or peace or the truth.
SOLOMON: Then I don’t understand why you would want to write a history of ideas, since inner reflection and dreaminess surely count at least as much as scientific experiment in the formation of new ideas.
WATSON: To paraphrase the English philosopher John Gray, it is more sensible to look out on the world from a zoo than from a monastery. Science, or looking out, is better than contemplation, or looking in.
SOLOMON: If that were true, how would you explain a novelist like Virginia Woolf, whose achievement was based on the rejection of the panoramic outward view in favor of inner sensibility?
WATSON: The rise of the novel generally is a great turning in. But I don’t think it has given a lot of satisfaction to people. It has not achieved anything collective. It’s a lot of little personal turnings that lots of people love to connect with. But these are fugitive, evanescent truths. They don’t stay with you very long or help you do much.
SOLOMON: You strike me as deeply unanalyzed. Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?
Brutal stuff.