Tymieniecka’s Vindication of the Life Significance of Literature

Abstract

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Logos and Life, Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason ¹ is a feast for all the senses and the mind, for all the vital synergies that stream together, when “initial spontaneity … springs forth from the Human Condition.” (175) Once again she confirms that art is the sublime mission of man, since it is the exertion of the mind, trying to understand the world and the human condition, and to make the world and the human condition understood. She proposes that “the creative act of man is the Archimedean point from which to gain understanding of the life functioning, and that it is the only access to the exploration of the Human Condition.” (3–16) In the creative orchestration of human existence and of everything-there-is-alive, is Tymieniecka’s path and vision: she takes the path in order to become the path herself for us who will follow her vision in a new appreciation of Scapin, the leading character of commedia dell’arte, as he emerges in Callot’s engravings, in the writings of Molière and Claudel, and as enacted on stage in the plays of Molière and J.-L. Barrault. Tymieniecka’s treatise on the life-significance of literature has liberated it from the cultural and theoretical prisons to which it had been sentenced for many years. Her treatise finally retrieves the poetic sense, the smile of the mind, in the interplay of several modes of experience. The voices of drama, art, dance, music, poetry, sculpture, and opera are harmonized in Tymieniecka’s Logos and Life, Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason.