Az elveszett Paradicsom. Kerekasztal beszélgetés egy Bosch kép előtt

Abstract

Participants of this imaginary conference were invited to share their thoughts on Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Haywain from the perspective of their own discipline. The opening presentation shows the middle part of the Triptichon as a social system that while dissipating the gifts of Paradise is running toward the inferno. The lecturer of "The Beauty and the Beast" takes an anatomical approach to Bosch's absurd creatures. These strange monsters indicate that, once natural correlations are eliminated, there are emerging self-sustaining networks in the very short term, but they will be replaced by self-destructive networks in the long run. The approach of landscape ecology reveals the contradiction between the beauty of the cultivated landscape and the selfishness of its cultivators. The "Limits to Growth" is an economic-ecological approach, interpreting hay as a symbol of finite resources. It contrasts Malthus' pessimistic forecast with Georgescu-Roegen's economic physics. The "Selfish genes and the helping whole" relates the looting in the foreground of Bosch's imaging to Dawkinsian atomized genetics and the harmonious order of the background to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Each of these analyses interprets Bosch’s painting as a warning to rethink our views about the world, our scientific vision and our way of life too.