Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

Philosophy, Literature, And Laughter: Notes On An Ontology Of The Moment, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

There is an initial difficulty which merits acknowledgment at the outset of this inquiry. In philosophy, all categories are weighted toward reflection and away from spontaneity. It is hard to envision a philosophy of laughter, notwithstanding Bergson's familiar efforts to categorize the comic, or Nietzsche's provocations lauding caprice. Philosophical discourse has been solidly and traditionally anchored in eternal concerns far from the madding eruption of laughter--the sound of frolic signifying nothing. The characteristic philosophical disdain for, and obsession with escape from: the momentary, the pleasurable, the distraction of the body and temptations of the senses, the seduction of, and abandonment …

Human Kind In Literature: The Ideals Of Fiction - The Fiction Of Ideals, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

No abstract provided.

And Unto Dust Return: The Remembered Earth, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

The earth is a primal resource of human imagination; its conceptual and creative tie to literature is pervasive, in part, because of the profound ambiguity of our relationship to it. Home and prison, earth holds in bondage the life it sustains. The paradox of life as freedom and life as bondage gives rise to the conflicting task of holding to the good earth, yet becoming free of it. This paradox and conflicting effort forms a basic pattern in western thought. A deep ambivalence and generative tension frames metaphors in literature from the earliest mythic and creation stories to the most …