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If the latter, then culture is assimilated into nature and thus would lose its claim to autonomy: its criteria would be superseded by those of nature alone.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.

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".

Inhalt
Inaugural Study.- Differentiation and Unity: The Self-Individualizing Life Process.- I Singularization - Clustering - Intervals - Spacings.- Plants and the Problem of the Individual.- Disinterested Praise of Matter: Ideas for Phenomenological Hyletics.- Hyle, Body, Life: Phenomenological Archaeology of the Sacred.- Épochè et Force.- II The Translacing Continuum of Life.- Enculturation of the Life-World.- The Human Animal: Prolegomenon to a Phenomenology of Monstrousness.- La Crypto-fugie animale.- III Life in Human Experience.- José Ortega y Gasset's Categorial Analysis of Human Life.- L'Apparaître à soi-même ou l'emergence phénoménologique de la Vie s'éprouvant elle-même comme continuité résistante.- Human Condition and Recreation of Life in Literature: The Example of Paul Gadenne.- IV Passage Without Reductionism.- Science, Literature and Life: A Celebration of NonLocality.- The Work of Art and Its Interpretation.- A Phenomenology of Education: The Foreshortenings of the Problem.- V Excess and Harmony in Literary Creation and Re-Creation of Life.- Night Calls for Dawn: J. M. G. Le Clézio and Michel Rio.- Rio and Le Clézio: A Quantitative Study.- Trois Proses du Désert: P. Loti, A. Memmi, J. M. G. Le Clézio.- Existence, Conflict and Harmony: From M. Rio's Les Jungles pensives to P. Ricoeur's Philosophical Reflection.- VI Meandering of the Spirit.- The Pessimism of Le Clézio.- Materialism, Exoticism and Mysticism: From Onitsha to Guruwari.- À la recherche du sens perdu: Le théme du passage dans la fiction de J. M. G. Le Clézio.- 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).- The Experience of Oneness: Silence andNight as Components of the Void in J. M. G. Le Clézio and Michel Rio, with Correspondences in Music and Film (Part II).- The Novels of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.- L'lnconnu sur la terre: Harmony and the Sacred.- Index Of Names.