In her Introduction, Tymieniecka states the core theme of the present book sharply: Is culture an excess of nature's prodigious expansiveness - an excess which might turn out to be dangerous for nature itself if it goes too far - or is culture a 'natural', congenial prolongation of nature-life? If the latter, then culture is assimilated into nature and thus would lose its claim to autonomy: its criteria would be superseded by those of nature alone. Of course, nature and culture may both still be seen as being absorbed by the inner powers of specifically human inwardness, on which view, human being, caught in its own transcendence, becomes separated radically in kind from the rest of existence and may not touch even the shadow of reality except through its own prism. Excess, therefore, or prolongation? And on what terms? The relationship between culture and nature in its technical phase demands a new elucidation. Here this is pursued by excavating the root significance of the 'multiple rationalities' of life. In contrast to Husserl, who differentiated living types according to their degree of participation in the world, the phenomenology of life disentangles living types from within the ontopoietic web of life itself. The human creative act reveals itself as the Great Divide of the Logos of Life - a divide that does not separate but harmonizes, thus dispelling both naturalistic and spiritualistic reductionism.

Inhalt

The Theme: The Differentiation of Living Beings: The Multiple Rationalities' Bridging the Nature-Culture Gap. Inaugural Study: Differentiation and Unity: The Self-Individualizing life Process; A-T. Tymieniecka. Part I: Singularization - Clustering - Intervals - Spacings. Plants and the Problem of the Individual; R. Canullo. Disinterested Praise of Matter: Ideas for Phenomenological Hyletics; D.A. Conci. Hyle, Body, Life: Phenomenological Archaeology of the Sacred; A. Ales Bello. Épochè' et force; Y. Merrouch. Part II: The Translacing Continuum of Life. Enculturation of the Life-World; J. Sivak. The Human Animal': Prolegomenon to a Phenomenology of Monstrousness; Y. Raynova. La Crypto-fugie' animale; V. Houillon. Part III: Life in Human Experience. José Ortega y Gasset's Categorial Analysis of Human Life; J. García-Gómez. L'apparaître à soi-même ou l'émergence phénoménologique de la Vie s'éprouvant elle-même comme continuité résistante; R. Decriem-Franksen. Human Condition and Recreation of Life in Literature: The Example of Paul Gadenne; D. Fabiani. Part IV: Passage Without Reductionism. Science, Literature and Life: A Celebration of Non-Locality; W.S. Haney II. The Work of Art and its Interpretation; O. Rossi. A Phenomenology of Education: The Foreshortenings of the Problem; E. Plekhanov, E. Rogacheva, R. Telcharova-Kurenkova. Part V: Excess and Harmony in Literary Creation and Re-Creation of Life. Night Calls for Dawn: J.M.G. le Clézio and Michel Rio; M. Kronegger. Rio and le Clézio: A Quantitative Study; N. Campi de Castro. Trois proses du désert: P. Loti, A. Memmi,J.M.G. le Clézio; S. Meitinger. Existence, Conflict and Harmony: From M. Rio's Les jungles pensives to P. Ricoeur's Philosophical Reflection; M.A. Cecilia. Part VI: Meandering of the Spririt. The Pessimism of le Clézio; J. Onimus. Materialism, Exoticism and Mysticism: From Onitsha to Guruwari; P. Brady. À la recherche du sens perdu: le thème du passage dans la fictions de J.M.G. le Clézio; M. Spiridon. Part VII: Oneness, Harmony, the Sacred. The Experience of Oneness: The Components of the Void in J.M.G. le Clézio with Correspondences in ARchitecture (Part I); J.L. Mornes. The Experience of Oneness: Silence and Night as Components of the Void in J.M.G. le Clézio and Michel Rio, with Correspondences in Music and Film (Part II); J.T. Strommer, J.E. Strommer. The Novels of Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio; I. Gillet. L'inconnu sur la terre: Harmony and the Sacred; C. Osowiec Ruoff. Index of Names.