This broad interdisciplinary and comparative study of the ways in
which we discursively "make" the world and its things aims to go
beyond the "poetic thinking" of Heidegger toward a more pragmatic
way of interpreting concrete social, cultural, and political
experience.
The book outlines three constitutive functions of world-making.
"Endowing" signifies the direct provision of the "wherewithal" that
must come into being if anything else is to come into being.
"Enabling" develops or facilitates what is endowed; it is a kind of
education in being-in-the-world. "Entitling" embraces the realm of
justice and decision; it concerns what is right for human beings to
have and do and be.
Placing these functions in contemporary contexts, the book offers
as an alternative some perspectives of American pragmatism (Dewey,
Peirce, James, Mead, Buchler) and Continental philosophy (Arendt,
Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, Barthes, Gramsci). The book
closely examines the thinking of Hobbes, Descartes, Vico, Calderon,
and Jefferson and several literary figures and thinkers (Yeats,
Emerson, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Pascal, Rilke, Frost, Brecht).
Throughout, the book investigates and questions the tradition of
possessive individualism interpreted by modern scholars, notably
Pocock.
The book is in five parts. Part I argues a need to move beyond
deconstructing toward reconstructing. Part II considers the
interactions of endowing, enabling, and entitling. In Part III, the
author explores the ways in which discourse works in the Cartesian
discourse of reason, and the phenomenon of Manifest Destiny as
rendered by Frost. The focus of Part IV is incorporating, which
builds on Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh, or the process by which
the body acts and becomes fully worldly. Part V addresses the
phenomena of experience in a variety of modes, including the role
of story and natality, experimental theater, the epistolary novel,
and representations of the heroic Lucretia.
A postscript, exploring the "conclusion" with which scholarly books
typically end, offers a perspectivist reading of the final text,
Emerson's "Experience."
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