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The Recovery Of Archaic Truth In Literature: Light And Darkness In The Perception Of Space In The Human Imagination, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

While the appeal of both inner and outer space of world and consciousness presents an inexhaustible source for the artist and writer, primitive memories remain in the archaic makeup of human beings that continue to haunt as well as enchant the human mind. The archaic mind is evident not only in the once-upon-a-time of fairy tales, but in the acute awareness of existence itself—the closest we can get to the first order experience of the human creature to the wonder and terror of its birthing reality. This essay considers both ancient myth and reflective imagination in the work of modern …

A Question Of Endings, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

Death As Metaphor, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

Poetics Of Death: Intimations And Illusions, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

Language, Meaning, And Culture: Research In The Humanities, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

Human beings are story-telling animals. We play out our lives in complex and interactive narratives that constitute our individual and collective lives; taken altogether, such narratives constitute the self-understanding of a people and time. It should be acknowledged that this remains relative and a relational matter; that there exists no master-narrative in the sense that there is a final way that the world is. There is no one way that things or people must be; this is so of the physical world of objects no less than the life-world of human beings. Even so, as Physics aspires to a full …

Paradox And Metaphor: An Integrity Of The Arts, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

Art is movement, movement is life. Surprisingly, the spareness of paradox in art promotes a fullness of life. We must first speak as simply as possible about art as a fundamental human activity. Only then can we hope to say something of consequence about the so-called “fine arts” — which may be misleading as a description. In substance, the reference “fine art” simply means useless art: “fine” as being free from utility. Art is imaginatively productive, it makes something, whether painting, poem, or partita. But this making has no independent utility, and its character as a work of art is …

Notes On A Poetics Of Time, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

The idea of a poetics in contrast with an aesthetics of time is intended to focus on the creative possibilities of imagination in configurations of time. An aesthetics of time focusing on sensuous experience is a certainly a basic resource of creative imagination in literature. But the concept of a poetics of time, taken from the root meaning of poiesis in classical Greek thought—to make, or to bring forth—enables an inquiry into conceptions of human life and thought brought forth in various creative configurations of time in literature. This essay will analyze some of the ways in which poetic imagination …

Reconciliation And Harmony: The Philosophical Art Of Tragic Drama, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

In the performance of art one can begin at the beginning, but in a discussion of art one must begin somewhere in the middle. Here, it is with the conviction that art, in whatever form, though it may surprise the sense and quicken the spirit, disturb our thinking or revoke a thoughtless ease, still, its full expression restores a sense of presence and wholeness to our being. That is, every art form has a point of closure in a harmony of the spirit. Even tragic drama, which brings the darkness of human character into a glare of recognition and acceptance, …

The Mythic Journey Of A Changeling, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

There are many such tales in the archaic moorings of our collective memory, but one in particular that seems inclusive if indeterminate: Once upon a time there was a creature that came out of the darkness with a only a faint memory of water, and sand, and cold, and fear to discover that its very life depended on telling a story about its origins—of which it had no clear memory, and its destiny—of which it had no certain knowledge. What more fabulous to conceive than this creature which, having lost its tail, dreams of growing wings? It is a being …

Crossblood: Literature And The Drama Of Survival, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

Native Americans have witnessed the disappropriation of their lands and suffered the destruction of their way of life, yet have found strength to endure, to preserve their identities as a people through the communal character and power of their language and stories.

Culture And The Philosophy Of Moral Life: The True, The Good, The Beautiful, And The Sacred, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

Philosophy as a profession is blessed with leisure and exempt from an obligation to be socially useful or productive, and so has a special obligation to address fundamental questions about the meaning of the human project not otherwise on the contemporary agenda. This is not an undertaking that requires technical language or special skills. William James described the deceptively simple task of philosophy as saying something true about things that matter. That said, it is hardly the prerogative of philosophy to adjudicate which are matters of crucial importance to a given culture. Moreover, philosophical investigations are of a kind that …

Technology: The Future Of Our History, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

Reality And Illusion In The Work Of Art, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

Two basic intuitions that frame the relation of art and illusion in this essay—a conviction that illusion is essential to art, but also that art is an essential resource of truth—present an apparent conflict that invites or requires resolution. Indeed, conflict and disagreement seem endemic to discussions of art. In philosophy, the question of the relation art and reality invariably begins with Plato's well-known critique of art as mimesis, as imitation, that makes the process of art a second order activity of copying, and thus an essential distraction from the more serious first order business of life and truth. It …

Death, And The Elemental Passion Of The Soul: An Ancient Philosophical Thesis, With Poetic Counterpoint, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

In his famous “Letter”, Epicurus writes to his young friend Menoeceus that “Death is nothing” — either to fear or to hope for.1 This counsel further suggests that death is not something one can claim as his/her own, and that even its contemplation brings “a craving for immortality”, and so, loosens the fragile hold we have on the life of the soul.

Advertising In Arcadia, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

There is not a long history of censorship in philosophy, but where it does occur it receives memorable note, as in the case of Plato‟s Republic. And there, as elsewhere, I often find I am in sympathy, if not agreement, concerning the problem, but utterly opposed to the offered solution. In the paper I wish to review, Paine takes the very strong position that “child advertising” is in its very conception an offense—and that its continuance is both economically exploitative and morally corruptive of children. Although she is careful to separate her concerns as moral rather than legal or political, …

"Everything Flows": The Poetics Of Transformation, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

Plato famously dismissed art as thrice removed from reality, holding that mimesis is a copy of a copy, a distraction from the more serious affairs of truth. Two millennia have done little to remove this stigma of dissembling deceit leveled at art. Metamorphosis provides an alternative view of reality, and of the access of art to that reality, that I will consider in the remarks that follow. On the opposite view of things from Plato, Heralclitus, addressing the question of reality — of what and how things are — declared “IIαvτα Pηεl ”, Everything Flows: the idea that reality …

Telling Stories, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

In what follows I will be using Native American culture and literature as the primary focus for a discussion of storytelling. For this culture, the life of speech and the presencing of meaning through the sharing of stories are vital to the very existence and identity of a people. Momaday's remarks about the nature of the relationship between language and experience surely are not limited to the lives of Native Americans. His accompanying claim that we cannot exist apart from the moral dimension of language is no less applicable to our own culture, but showing the importance of an awareness …

Boundaries: The Primal Force And Human Face Of Evil, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

Philosophy can be, rarely perhaps, a call to a sane place, a resolve to take time to consider the Other, to understand and overcome the space between. In quite ordinary and extraordinary ways, this begins over again the elemental process of healing, of becoming whole. This is not the only or even the primary task of philosophy; but in a secular age, one in which everything is negotiable and most things for sale, the convergence of the philosophical and poetic is a still point of access to such elemental passions of the soul.

Evil is a primal word, a sound …

The Aesthetics Of Enchantment, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

There are two preliminary things to be stated at the outset of any philosophical consideration of enchantment. First, traditional philosophy has been antagonistic toward the idea of enchantment: as a foundational discipline of reason, philosophy has defined itself in opposition to the non-rational. The main traditions of philosophy have regarded any form of discourse other than that centered in reason as alien, the other, as something which obscures or undermines those procedures which alone can determine knowledge and value. I presume here that enchantment would be considered “non-rational”, and also that such a designation is problematic in a number of …

Sense And Sensibility, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

The Poetics Of Place, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

Paul Ricoeur, at a Hannah Arendt retrospective some 15 years ago, spoke of the controlling metaphor of Arendt's work as that of Place, and said that he offered in his own work, instead, an enabling metaphor of Time. To bring together the work of these two exceptional thinkers, to bridge the divide and to map out the complementarity of engaging metaphors would be a worthy task of scholarship, however I will not try to do so even in outline here. Still, the contrast and convergence of the two metaphors of time and place is one I want to at least …

Eros / Kalon / Agathos: Love, The Beautiful And The Good, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

A Sense Of Life In Language Love And Literature, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

The fundamental human activity of telling stories, extended into the cultural tradition of literature, leads to the creation of alternative worlds in which we find resonance with the whole range of human thought and emotion from different and often conflicting perspectives. Fiction has no obligation to the ordinary strictures that bind our public lives, so the mind is free, engaging in literature, to become for the moment whatever imagination can conceive. So we become, in fictive reality, madman and poet, sinner and saint, embrace and embody sorrow and joy, hope and despair and all the rag tag feelings that flesh …

The Sounds Of Music: First Movement, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

In his essay "Understanding Music," Roger Scruton has argued for a nonreductionist approach to aesthetics, emphasizing the contextually rich language and grammar that structure discourse about various forms of art. This accords with Wittgenstein's series of "reminders" about the importance of finding philosophical footholds in ordinary language. However refined artistic taste and aesthetic judgment may become, their fundamental source is in ordinary discourse about what surprises, pleases, and moves us. In what follows I will try to amplify these remarks and map the outlines of a conceptual investigation of the grammar of musical understanding. I will be less interested in …

Journeys Home: The Pathos Of Place, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

The pathos of place is elemental in grounding the risk of life, the source of confidence requisite to the human quest whether it is conceived as arche or telos, whether it is where one begins, or the end toward which one’s journey is directed. The project of living is such that one’s journey is always toward a homeland, however it be conceived: dreams of homecoming the recovery of innocence, the joyful receiving of the retrieved prodigal, the triumphal march of the heroic legions, the quiet return of the native — all hopeful to appear once again in the light of …

Literature And The Passion Of Virtue, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

Paideia: The Learning Of Values And The Teaching Of Virtue In Public Education, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

Poetry, Life, Literature, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

The question and theme of the poetry of life reaches deep into the essential questions of human existence. In the sense that poetry is the central core of literature, it is essential to the meaning of our lives. This question does not necessarily place human life, nor indeed biological life at the center of inquiry. We will examine the sense in which life itself is poetry, and great literature--in this essay we will refer only to that--is recognized by its capacity to capture and express that poetry. When it does this it penetrates to the heart of human accord and …

Literature, Mystery, And Truth, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

In this essay I will make use of a procedure, and concept of truth that emerged from the work of Brentano and Husserl, that runs against the currents and idols of our age. Its most recent articulation is found in the work of Heidegger. The idea of truth as aletheia is an attempt to see the truth of Being as it discloses itself to understanding. In this way, truth is an activity of disclosure that has two moments; coming to light and bringing to light. Its notion is that of allowing things, as it were, to come to presence, to …

Notes On The Art Of Memory, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

A few years ago I was asked to write a piece for a memorial Festschrift for a friend and colleague who had just died. It occurred to me then that remembrance was a very special faculty of mind; this essay takes up the threads of that remembrance. The task of understanding memory is daunting: it is ubiquitous in every aspect of life and thought. I will try to distinguish important features of memory as it functions in our individual and collective lives, but my primary concern is with a particular aspect of remembrance that is a creative resource vital to …