Retrieval of the Beautiful
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€33.99
A01=Northwestern University Press
Author_Northwestern University Press
Beauvoir
Category=QDHR5
Category=QDTN
continental
embodiment
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
existential
existentialism
Heidegger
Henry
Husserl
Levinas
Merleau Ponty
ontology
phenomenological
phenomenology
philosophy
Sartre
Scheler
transcendental
Product details
- ISBN 9780810125667
- Weight: 428g
- Dimensions: 149 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 30 Dec 2009
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this elegant new study, Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful. In Johnson's formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world's element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being. Merleau-Ponty's ""Eye and Mind"" is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cezanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke's commentary on Cezanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson's book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty's aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin's Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.
Galen A. Johnson is an honors professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island, director of the University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities, and general secretary of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle.
