Perceiving-Thinking-Writing : Merleau-Ponty and Literature

By: Wesling, Donald

Donald Wesling proposes a hyphenated philosophy: three-in-one and three-in-each-other. His leading argument is a cross-over theory of the humanities, with philosophy and literature in a relation of constructive interference. What is common to both disciplines is the attempt to understand the necessary but often forgotten act of perceiving within the embodied mind. Wesling asks and answers the question: How does perceptual content enter thinking and writing? Topics include a re-definition of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as a big-hearted rationality; quantum interference as a metaphor for thinking and also for the relation of self to the outer surround of things and persons; nine key terms from Merleau-Ponty as applied to the practical reading of poems as stories; the sentence as an energy that structures thinking and writing; and ordinary creativity and co-creativity. Overall, Wesling reveals the meaning for the humanities, now, of Merleau-Ponty's belief that future work will be a search for "a secondary, laborious, rediscovered na?vet?," and that in this pursuit "our relation to what is true must pass through others."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 8367405579
• ISBN13: 9788367405577
• Release Date: November 2023
• Publisher: de Gruyter GmbH, Walter
• Grade Range: Postsecondary