Poetics Of The Elements In The Human Condition Part 2 The Airy Elements In Poetic Imagination

Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: Part 2 The Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination

Ingardeniana II

This Ingardenia volume is the second in the Analecta Husserliana series that is entirely devoted to the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden. The first was volume IV (1976). Twenty years after Ingarden's death, this volume demonstrates that the Polish phenomenologist's contribution to philosophy and literary scholarship has received world-wide attention. His ideas have proven especially fruitful for the definition of the structure of the literary work of art and the subsequent recognition of its characteristic features. Of all the early phenomenologists who were students of Husserl, it is Ingarden whose work has faithfully pursued the original tenet that language "holds" the essence of the life-world "in readiness" (bereit halten). To investigate this premise with the rigor of a science, as Husserl had envisioned for phenomenology, was Ingarden's life work. That Ingarden did not quite reach his ambitious goal does not diminish his unquestionable achievement. The understanding of the nature of the literary work of art has increased enormously because of his analyses and aesthetics. The Polish phenomenologist investigated above all the work of art as a structure of necessary components which define and determine its nature. That the artistic ingredient was shortchanged under those conditions should not be surprising, particu larly since Ingarden usually kept a purist's philosophical distance from the concrete detail of the material under consideration. He was not concerned with individual works of art but with the principle that was shared by all of them as the defining feature of their being.

Reason, Life, Culture

Rationality in its various expressions and innumerable applications sustains understanding and our sense of reality. It is traditionally differentiated according to its sources in the soul: in consciousness, in reason, in experience, and in elevation. Such a functional approach, however, leaves us searching for the common foundation harmonizing these rationalities. The perennial quest to resolve the aporias of rationality is finding in contemporary science’s focus on origins, on the generative roots of reality, tantalizing hints as to how this may be accomplished. This project is enhanced by the wave of recent phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life, which reveals/expresses the workings of the logos at the root of beingness and all rationality, whereby we gaze upon the prospect of a New Enlightenment. In the rays of this vision the revival of the intuitions of classical Islamic metaphysics, particularly intuition of the continuity of beingness in the gradations of life, receive fresh confirmation.