Logos and Life: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason

It is rare that we feel ourselves to be participating in history. Yet, as Bertrand Russell observed, philosophy develops in response to the challenges of socio-cultural problems and situations. The present-day philosophical endeavor is prompted not by one or two, but by a conundrum of problems and controversies in which the forces carrying life are set against each other. The struggles in which contemporary mankind is fiercely engaged are not confined, as in the past, to economic, territorial, or religious rivalries, nor to the quest for power, but extend to the primary conditions of human existence. They under mine man's primogenital confidence in life and shatter the intimacy of his home on earth. Philosophical reflection today cannot fail to feel the pressure of the current situation within which it unfolds. Since this situation now involves the ultimate conditions of human existence, its demands have at last given to philosophy the impetus and direction needed for conceiving that the first and last of its concerns should be life itself.

Autorentext
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of "The World Phenomenology Institute".

Klappentext

Employing her original concept of the ontopoiesis of life, the author uncovers the intrinsic law of the primogenital logos - that which operates in the working of the indivisible dyad of impetus and equipoise. This is the crucial, intrinsically motivated device of logoic constructivism. This key instrument is engaged - is at play - at every stage of the advance of life. In a feat unprecedented in the history of western philosophy, the emergence and unfolding of the entire orbit of the human universe is shown to bear out this insight. Furthermore, the intrinsic rhythms of impetus and equipoise are taken as a guide in uncovering the workings of the logos all at once, in contrast to the piecemeal exposition of a single line of argument. In a schema covering the entire career of beingness-in-becoming between the infinities of origin and destiny, an historically unprecedented harmonizing all sectors of rationality is accomplished in a span of reflection comparable to Spinoza's Ethics. The work draws on interdisciplinary investigations in both science and the arts. All of the history of Occidental philosophy finds summary in it, even as feelers, guidelines, leitmotifs are thrown out for its future development. A landmark of Occidental philosophy at the turn of the millennium.

Inhalt
Foreground.- I / The Creative Act as the Point of Phenomenological Access to the Human Condition.- II / The Structure of the Present Work.- III / Man-The-Creator and His Triple Telos.- The First Panel of the Triptych the Eros and Logos of Life within the Creative Inwardness.- The Outlines of an Inquiry.- I / The Emergence of the Problem of Creation: The Poet-Creator Versus the Philosopher.- II / Creative Reality.- III / The Factors in the New Alliance Between Man and the World.- The Theoretical Results of Our Analyses and the Perspectives they Open the Creative Context.- Concluding by Way of Transition to the Central Panel of the Triptych.- The Central Panel of the Triptych (Panel Two) the Origin of Sense The Creative Orchestration of the Modalities of Beingness within the Human Condition.- One the Creative Context as Circumscribed by the Creative Process its Roots Below and its Tentacles Above the Life-World: Uncovering the Primogenital Status of the Great Philosophical Issues.- I / Art and Nature: Creative Versus Constitutive Perception.- II / The Below and the Above of Creative Inwardness: The Human Life-World in its Essential New Perspective.- III / The Creative Process And The Copernican Revolution In Conceiving The Unity Of Beingness: The Creative Process As The Gathered Center and Operational Thread of Continuity among All Modalities of Being in the Constructive Unfolding of Man's Self-Interpretation-in-Existence.- Two the Trajectory of the Creative Ciphering of the Original Life Significance: The Resources and Architectonics of the Creative Process.- I / The Incipient Phase of the Creative Process.- II / The Creative Trajectory Between the Two Phases of the Life-World.- III / The Passage from the Creative Vision to the Idea of theCreative Work.- IV / Operational Architectonics of the Surging Creative Function in the Initial Creative Constructivism.- V / The Architectonic Logic in the Existential Passage from the Virtual to the Real The Will.- VI / The Intergenerative Existential Interplay in the Transition Phase of Creativity.- Coda / Conclusive Insights into the Question of Reality as the Outcome of Our Foregoing Investigations.- Three the Creative Orchestration of Human Functioning: Constructive Faculties and Driving Forces.- I / The Surging of the Creative Orchestration within Man's Self-Interpretation-In-Existence: Passivity Versus Activity; The Spontaneous Differentiation of Constructive Faculties and Forces.- II / Imaginatio Creatrix: The Creative versus the Constitutive Function of Man, and the Possible Worlds.- Four the Human Person as the All-Embracing Functional Complex and the Transmutation Center of the Logos of Life.- I / The Notion of the Human Person at the Crossroads of the Understanding of Man within the Life-World Process.- II / The Moral Sense of Life as Constitutive of the Human Person.- III / The Poetic Sense: The Aesthetic Enjoyment which Carries the Lived Fullness of Conscious Acts.- IV / The Intelligible Sense in the Architectonic Work of the Intellect.- Notes.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.- Table of Contents to Book 2 (The Third Panel of the Triptych).