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© Springtime Publishers 2006

Summary / Table of Contents

 

Summary

This book begins with a close consideration of a fundamental issue of world history, namely, the mustering of sufficient grounds or reasons for effectively dealing with the world. In the course of that beginning, it listens carefully to the attempts in this area by three prominent thinkers of the recent past, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Jacques Derrida.

From there it proceeds to work through factors of intentional consciousness misplayed by the three abovementioned stalwarts and ignored by a surprising percentage of the population. Along the way, it draws upon the efforts in this regard by novelist, Marcel Proust, physicists, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, John Gribbin and David Darling, choreographers, George Balanchine and David Parsons, graphic designer, A.M. Cassandre, composer, Olivier Messiaen, Bill Evans, jazz pianist and composer, and film directors, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Robert and Luc Dardenne, Agnes Varda and Billy Wilder.

The work comprises 327 pages and runs to about 170,000 words . It is organized as follows:

 

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction
Endnotes

Chapter One – The Phenomenal Constellation of Human Action

1. The Hold of Ground
2. The Many Faces of a Persona
3. Carnality and Paradox: A Correspondent Ground
4. A Composing Persona and the Primordial Scope of History
5. A Contending Persona and Variegated Persuasion

Endnotes

Chapter Two – Smashing against the Wall: Heidegger, Husserl & Derrida (The Good, the Ugly, the Bad)

1. Heidegger’s Unfortunate Discovery of What Works for Him (Lightning Reflexes, Overpowering Greed)
2. Husserl’s Loyalty to an Intellectual Life, and its Obtuse Consequences (Years of Practice, and He Still Can’t Dance)
3. Derrida’s Excellent Career (Tribe Trumps Truth)

Endnotes

Chapter Three – Proust’s Tribute to the Multifarious Ways of Desire

1. A Troubled Embrace of Embodied Thought
2. The Endless Corruption of Love
3. A Novel at War with Itself
4. Proust’s Novel Comes to Terms with Itself as a World-Historical Effort

Endnotes

Chapter Four – The Price of Historical Power

1. The Infrastructure of Historical Action
   a) Ground as Personal Saga
   b) Ground as Wealth-Yielding Saga
2. The Disconcerting Power of Historical Action
   a) Personal History
   b) Economic History
   c) Cultural-Political History
       1) Initial Public Crudity
       2) Iconic Coercion
       3) Religious Exertion as a Public Danger
       4) Humanism’s Cultivation of Organized Crime
       5) The Viral Proceedings of Historical Science

Endnotes

Chapter Five – Radical Science and a Crisis of Scientific Reasoning

1. Einstein and Hawking’s Measured Prescriptions
2. Gribbin and Darling’s Edifying Audacity

Endnotes

Chapter Six – Playing History

1. A Crucial Entailment of a Free Intentionality
2. The Infinite Permutations of a Finite Persona
3. The Fortuitous Complication of a Finite Persona
4. Endless War as the Cradle of Endless Composure
   a) An Intrinsically Violent World History
   b) Playing through the Violence of World History
5. Playing History

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index