Virtues and passions in literature : excellence, courage, engagements, wisdom, fulfilment PDF
Preview Virtues and passions in literature : excellence, courage, engagements, wisdom, fulfilment
VIRTUES AND PASSIONS IN LITERATURE ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME XCVI Founder and Editor-in-Chief: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka TheWorldInstituteforAdvancedPhenomenologicalResearchandLearning Hanover,NewHampshire Forsequelvolumesseetheendofthisvolume. VIRTUES AND PASSIONS IN LITERATURE Excellence, Courage, Engagements, Wisdom, Fulfilment Edited by ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA TheWorldPhenomenologyInstitute,Hanover,NH,U.S.A. Publishedundertheauspicesof TheWorldInstituteforAdvancedPhenomenologicalResearchandLearning A-T.Tymieniecka,President LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationDataisavailable ISBN978-1-4020-6421-0(HB) ISBN978-1-4020-6422-7(e-book) PublishedbySpringer, P.O.Box17,3300AADordrecht,TheNetherlands. www.springer.com Printedonacid-freepaper AllRightsReserved ©2008Springer Nopartofthisworkmaybereproduced,storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted inanyformorbyanymeans,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,microfilming, recordingorotherwise,withoutwrittenpermissionfromthePublisher,withthe exceptionofanymaterialsuppliedspecificallyforthepurposeofbeingentered andexecutedonacomputersystem,forexclusiveusebythepurchaserofthework. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii THEMATIC STUDY LAWRENCE KIMMEL / Literature and the Passion of Virtue xi SECTION I TSUNG-I DOW / Historical and Contemporary Virtues As Reflected in Chinese Literature 3 BERNARD MICALLEF / Revisiting the Traditional Virtues of the Hero: A Phenomenological Study of Wilfred Owen’s Disabled Soldier 15 VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / Beauty, Taste, and Enlightenment in Hume’s Aesthetic Thought 49 SECTION II EVGENIA V. CHERKASOVA / Virtues of the Heart: Feodor Dostoevsky and the Ethic of Love 69 BRUCE ROSS / The Willing Subject and the Non-Willing Subject in the Tao Te Ching and Nietzsche’s Hyperborean: Taoist and Deconstructive Challenges to the Idea of Virtue 83 REBECCA M. PAINTER / Virtue in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead 93 SECTION III ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ / Inherent and Intentional Inquiries on Virtues 115 RAYMOND J. WILSON III / Striving and Accepting Limits As Competing Meta-Virtues: Goethe’s Faust and Ibsen’s The Wild Duck 123 v vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PETER WEIGEL / Happiness, Division, and Illusions of the Self in Plato’s Symposium 135 ANNIKA LJUNG-BARUTH / The Virtue of Responsibility: Femininity, Temporality, and Space in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours 159 SECTION IV VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / Enlightenment, Humanization, and Beauty in the Light of Schiller’s “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” 171 LAWRENCE F. RHU / Beyond Adaptation: Stoicism, Transcendence, and Moviegoing in Walker Percy and Stanley Cavell 199 JOHN BALDACCINO / Between the Ironic and the Irenic: Happiness, Contingency, and the Poetics of Recurrence 211 RAJIV KAUSHIK / Phenomenological Temporality and Proustian Nostalgia 225 SECTION V JAIMIE JANDOVITZ / Art and Awareness 245 ENRICO ESCHER / The Image in the History of Thought 253 MARTIN HOLT / The Narrative Model 265 WILLIAM ROBERTS / Political Symbolism in the Saint Antoine Gate 291 MÜNIR BEKEN / Music Theory and Phenomenology of Musical Performance. A Case Study: Five Notes in Joël-François Durand’s un feu distinct 305 NAME INDEX 311 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thestudiespublishedinthisvolumestemmainlyfromthe30thInternational Conference of the International Society of Phenomenology and Literature. It was held May 24 and 25, 2006, at Harvard University Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The topic was “Historical and Contemporary Virtues As Reflected in Literature,” but a more innovative title has been judged to be more appropriate for this volume. My sincere thanks to all of the authors and speakers for their ingenious contributions going reflectively throughthecontemporarytransformationsinapproachestolifeandexcavating the ancient sedimentations of cultural molding while they maintain a focus onselfhoodandpersonhood.ThanksgotoJeffHurlburtforhiseditorialhelp and to Springer for the copyediting and proofreading of the volume. A-T. T vii THEMATIC STUDY LAWRENCE KIMMEL LITERATURE AND THE PASSION OF VIRTUE Letotherscomplaintheageiswicked;mycomplaintisthatitiswretched,foritlackspassion. Kierkegaard INTRODUCTION There has always been a reasonable concern that passion constitutes a challenge to the ordeal of civility—that passion and pathology are close cousinsifnottwinsiblings.Butinatimeandplacewherepoliticalcorrectness seems to be replacing moral sensibility and political biases are hawked as the morality of family values, it is reasonable to redirect attention to a world of literature in which morality has never been reduced to norms of social currencyandwherevirtuestillembodiesapassionofcommitmentthataspires to excellence. AsacodiciltoNietzsche’sargumentforthemoralimperativeofrevaluing all values, our own time begs recourse to a world of literature in which actionsarenotsimplyrecastintheidolsandideologiesoftheage—adiverse and contradictory world that holds some promise of rediscovering a moral touchstoneforcriticalunderstanding.Moralinsight,notsocialrespectability, has always been the appeal of literature, and we would do well to redis- cover its sustaining spring. The world’s great literature is a resource for stretching imagination to test the limits of moral intelligibility. Setting aside the commanding and comfortable authority of prescriptive righteousness in favor of a broader and deeper understanding of the complex virtues of moral life is a risk of literature well worth taking. It demands only that we search for a moral compass informed by literature and life no less than politics and polls. In this light I will proceed to analyze the idea of virtue in its original meaning of “human excellence,” which requires passion in its expression. Althoughmyprimarypointofdepartureisthearchaicliteratureandnotthe classicalphilosophyofGreekculture,agooddealoftheearlierliteratureisin concert with Aristotle’s “virtue ethics,” which contends among other things that virtue is not a function of action but an activity of the person. It is the xi A-T.Tymieniecka(ed.),AnalectaHusserlianaXCVI,xi–xxv. ©2008Springer.
The list of books you might like
