Phenomenology of Living Consciousness in Stanislaw Lem’s Novel Solaris
摘要
The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the attempt to inscribe living consciousness in the context of scientific picture of the world. Unlike classic literary works, which explore living consciousness in terms of psychology, science fiction collides structures of living consciousness with science-generated objects, such as EEG, quantum particles, protein structures of the brain, gravitational fields, and others. Such a ‘collision of realities’ makes the reader especially acutely aware that the physical world contains irremovable traces of human living consciousness. Stanislaw Lem’s story Solaris is a science-fiction ‘mirror’ in which the living consciousness of man is reflected in the world of physical reality. Using a fantastical image of the ‘living ocean’, Lem with artistic mastery describes many new features of human living consciousness and boldly penetrates with his imagination into the ‘holy of holes’ of living consciousness—the subconscious.