Si vous ne vous êtes jamais trompé, n'ouvrez pas ce livre !
Vous seriez déçu d'apprendre que vous avez manqué l'expérience la plus fondamentale de votre vie.
"Si je me trompe, c'est bien parce que je suis persuadé d'avoir raison" :
Kathryn Schulz part de ce paradoxe pour traquer avec humour l'erreur dans toutes les circonstances de la vie - illusions, croyances, théories, passions... Elle démontre que la propension à se tromper est une condition de la pensée, indispensable à l'avancée des connaissances. Contre toute attente, l'erreur est même indissociable de nos qualités les plus précieuses: l'empathie, l'optimisme, l'imagination, la confiance, le courage.
En bref, l'erreur nous rend meilleur.
Mais comment se fait-il que nous ayons tant de mal à admettre nos erreurs ? Jusqu'où pouvons-nous considérer nos certitudes comme fiables ? Quel bénéfice y a-t-il à reconnaître que nous avons eu tort ? Pourquoi est-il inévitable et profitable de se tromper ? Kathryn Schulz nous entraîne dans une enquête au long cours, où les relations humaines et les faits divers ont autant leur place que les événements historiques.
On y rencontre aussi Platon, saint Augustin, Descartes, Shakespeare, Freud, Wittgenstein, ou encore Molière, Proust, Coetzee, Philip Roth... Une analyse décapante de la nature de nos erreurs et de toutes leurs implications. Au mieux, avoir tort vous irritait; au pire, c'était un cauchemar. Désormais, vous saurez qu'il est bon d'être faillible, que c'est même votre génie !
The author explains what it means to be right or wrong and why it matters so much to people, arguing that humans' tendency to make mistakes is an essential part of our intelligence. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
''An extraordinary gift of a book, a tender, searching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be human. I wept at it, laughed with it, was entirely fascinated by it. I emerged feeling a little as if the world around me had been made anew.'' - Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk and Vesper Flights Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Kathryn met Casey, the woman who would become her wife. Lost & Found weaves together their love story with the story of losing Kathryn''s father in a brilliant exploration of the way families are lost and found and the way life dispenses wretchedness and suffering, beauty and grandeur all at once. So much has been written about loss - and Schulz writes with painful clarity about the vicissitudes of grieving her father - but here she writes about the vital phenomenon of finding. The book is organized into three parts: ''Lost'', which will explore the sometimes comic, sometimes frustrating, sometimes heartbreaking experience of losing things, grounded in Kathryn''s account of her father''s death; ''Found'', which examines the experience of discovery, from new ideas to new planets, grounded in her story of falling in love; and finally, ''And'', which contends with the way these events happen in conjunction and imply the inevitable: life keeps going on, not only around us but beyond us and after us. Kathryn Schulz has the ability to measure the depth and breadth of human experience with unusual exactness and then to articulate the things all of us have felt but have been unable to put into language. Lost & Found is a work of philosophical interrogation as well as a story about life, death and the discovery of one great love just as she is losing another.
