Galen A. Johnson

This paper initiates a phenomenological study of the aesthetics of forest and wood in three main phases. First, we consider the modalities of wood’s sensuousness and argue against the formalist tradition that restricts aesthetic appreciation to visual forms. Second, we examine the structural, eidetic features of hand-made wooden objects in the “second life” of trees. Third, we engage in reflections on the communities gathered by the first and second lives of trees. These themes outline an aesthetics of the beautiful, the given, and the gathering. We take philosophical inspiration from Merleau-Ponty throughout, and in the end, also Thoreau.

Beginning from Klee’s statement on truth in self-portraiture that his faces are truer than real ones and Cézanne’s promise to tell us the truth in painting, we consider the origins of truth in art for the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. We discover that truth in perception, in life, and incarnate existence, as in art, originates from bodily movement. Similar to Heidegger’s argument in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” a truth happens between the work and painter, between the work and viewer, and is not limited to the domain of language, but words and symbols mix together with colors and forms, as in the paintings of Klee. Similar to Husserl’s argument in “The Origin of Geometry,” the originary sense of art, like geometry, is an interweaving of world, intersubjectivity, speech, and writing that achieves a more “militant” truth than mere logical propositions. Truth is marked by its endurance, mobility, agility, subtlety, and depth. These interweavings mean there is no single origin of truth in art and life but a plurality of origins in movement, pleasures, and desires for the becoming of creation

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 Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne 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.

This article explores the question of the cognitivity of the arts. It begins from Kundera’s argument that the novel, originating from Cervantes, offers a response toGalileo and solution to Husserl’s diagnosis of a “crisis of European sciences.” Expanding to the full range of literary arts, we next undertake a re-reading of Aristotle’s Poetics to assess Aristotle’s views of the origins of tragedy and press for a cognitive interpretation of the meaning of catharsis and emotions. Finally, turning to the abstract expressionism of Barnett Newman, we develop a cognitive interpretation of visual arts and the non-figurative aesthetic of the sublime.

These inquiries do not diminish or overshadow the power and importance of the gift that isThe Embers and the Stars. It must be counted among the richest, most eloquent, original, and challenging new works of philosophy to appear in recent years, standing alongisde the best of the authors Kohák admires most, like Marcel and Ricoeur. It must be read. Moreover, we must press Kohák for both the philosophical theology and philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of artifacts toward which this work points. Once there was a man, once there was a raccoon, once there was a work. That is the miracle, that is the point

This book is a philosophical inquiry into historical meaning and narrative understanding. Interpreting selected writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and stories of Kafka, Rilke, Sartre, and Camus, the author defends the narrative coherence of life and the irreducibility of narrative understanding and truth. The island imagery uncovered in these authors provides the parameters for a contemporary philosophy of history properly mingling earth and sky as natality and mortality, remembering and forgetting, wandering and homecoming, waking and dreaming, wealth and poverty. Johnson has pushed the life-world theme of Husserl's phenomenology out toward the wild-flowering world where it seems to have been headed.