Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy From Thoreau to Cavell

Description

Offers a critique of rationalism in contemporary American thought by recovering a lost tradition of intimacy in the writings of Thoreau, Bugbee, James, Arendt, Dickinson, Fuller, Wilshire and Cavell. This title focuses on a number of American philosophers whose work overlaps the religious and the literary.

Edward F. Mooney is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Syracuse University, USA. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Kierkegaard's Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Editor and Introduction, 2009), On Soren Kierkegaard (2007), Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Engagement (2008), Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard's Moral-Religious Psychology from Either/Or to Sickness Unto Death (1996), and Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1991).

"Edward Mooney's Lost Intimacy in American Thought proceeds in a lyrical mode, as though to exemplify, as well as to assert, that we can be redeemed from the quiet desperation that underlies modernity, and much of contemporary philosophy. He joins Stanley Cavell in attempting to undo the repression of voice and of particularity in our intellectual consideration of philosophy and literature. Mooney, in every chapter, resists the de-humanization of the humanities. He investigates, elaborates, elucidates, and aligns himself with a group of thinkers and writers who can help provide us a basis for such resistance - including, besides Cavell, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, J. Glenn Gray and Hannah Arendt. Most especially, he finds inspiration in the neglected American philosopher Henry Bugbee, and reintroduces him into our contemporary conversation about the humanities. Mooney's discussions of literary texts, for example by Dostoevsky and Henry James, exemplify the complementarity of literature and philosophy, and in his argument for the necessity of an autobiographical basis in philosophy, he generously shares his own such basis. He continues Kierkegaard's project of reminding us what it is to be a human being. This is a book to be savored." -- Stanley Bates, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Middlebury College, VT, USA. "Much of Edward Mooney's writing during his long and distinguished career has been influenced by the themes and style of Henry G. Bugbee. Indeed, for some four decades Mooney has been Bugbee's paramount disciple, having done more than anyone else to keep Bugbee a living presence on the American cultural scene. In Lost Intimacy in American Thought, Mooney offers fresh perspectives on his lifelong teacher, the original source of his theme of intimacy. But this excellent book is hardly limited to Bugbee. It also contains fascinating meditations on Henry Thoreau, Stanley Cavell, Henry James, and J. Glenn Gray, among others. Lost Intimacy in American Thought is a wide-ranging saunter at the side of an open-minded and eloquent companion. It's a book that speaks to the heart, not just the head, acutely aware that the quality of our understanding depends on the depth of our personal engagement." -- Steven E. Webb, author of Presence, Memory, and Faith: Excerpts from a Notebook on The Inward Morning. "This book is a work of love, in which a group of extraordinary thinkers are defended as exemplars of authentic philosophy and united as part of an alternative canon. True to the spirit of his epigraph from Ortega, Edward Mooney devotes careful attention to these American philosophers and their ideas, unveiling and thus demonstrating their significance. Lost Intimacy In American Thought subverts the myth of impersonal reflection, the assumption that philosophers should write books without being writers, and 'the apathetic fallacy,' as Mooney aptly terms it, which arises from the belief that reality is factual but not valuable. In fact, as Mooney shows, the world is a place that overflows with meaning in ways that our best philosophers have sought to understand and account for - and to develop a significant philosophical vision of reality, as Mooney convincingly argues, is nothing less than a sacred task. Apart from Alphonso Lingis, no one other than Mooney has done so much to bring a lyric voice to contemporary philosophy. Readers who are just discovering Mooney's work will be in for a delightful surprise, and those who have admired his writings on the existential tradition will enjoy a new and distinctive addition to his corpus. This is truly an essential text." -- Rick Anthony Furtak, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Colorado College, USA "'Lost Intimacy' resurrects a strain in American thought dedicated to celebrating life and its endless potential. It seeks a philosophy of celebration and appreciation and praise, to counterbalance our reining philosophies of analysis and means/ends rationality. Mooney's explorations of Thoreau and Cavell are sharp and always illuminating. In particular, I came away with a deeper understanding of Cavell's ethical perfectionism. A fresh and necessary rethinking of philosophy's basic task: here seen as illuminating and perpetuating life's possiblities. Philosophers will find themselves refreshed by this book, and re-focused on the life-enhancing possibilities of rigorous thought. 'It is a mistake,' Ed Mooney insists, 'to think that philosophy must maintain an impassable divide between professionalized discourse and intimate appraisal.' Lost Intimacy in American Thought shows how right he is, and the many benefits we realize when we cross the divide. Ed Mooney engages writers who show 'generosity of spirit and love of the world,' who 'instill courage and hope and any number of other essential virtues and sensibilities,' and who "know that personal revelation has a role in showing what philosophy and a better life might be.' The payoff for that engagement in 'Lost Intimacy' is great, for Mooney and his readers." -- Philip Cafaro, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Colorado State University, USA "Few, said Thoreau, truly know how to walk, how to acknowledge the ordinary world as a sacred place. Edward F. Mooney answers Thoreau by taking us on a series of walking meditations through the broken and beautiful landscapes of our time: the terror of Kamikaze pilots and 9/11, the nobility of a broken statue, the wonder of birds angling in the sky with the sun on their wings. In the company of writers from Thoreau and Henry James to Stanley Cavell, Henry Bugbee, and Hannah Arendt, Mooney shows how philosophy becomes poetry, argument becomes prayer, skepticism becomes love, even-especially-in the face of doubt, pain, and suffering. This lyrical, searching, and intimate book will ask you to change your life. If reality is reborn in our acts of attention, reading it will do just that." -- Laura Dassow Walls, John H. Bennett, Jr., Chair of Southern Letters, Department of English, University of South Carolina, USA "Throughout this sparkling collection of occasional meditations, Edward Mooney displays an uncanny knack for charting the loss of intimacy that serves as both motivation and theme for the distinctly American thinkers to whom he pledges his allegiance. American philosophy is never so vital as when it attends, as it does at Mooney's behest, to the (mostly) taboo themes of loss, bereavement, ruin, and death. These essays are courageous, haunting, insightful, and rich in personal gratitude. A fitting bookend to Henry Bugbee's underground classic, The Inward Morning." -- Daniel Conway, Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, USA 'Lost Intimacy is a transformative book. Ed Mooney weaves together, reconfigures and leaps beyond the genres and disciplines-poetry, theology, Continental and analytic philosophy, literary criticism-that make possible even as they limit our visions and affirmations. He thus finds new ways into the visions and affirmations of Thoreau, Cavell, Bugbee, James and others, leading us into encounters "along the very contours" of these writers' expression with a singular, evocative voice that transfigures these writings and makes new claims on us.' -- Tyler T. Roberts, Professor of Religious Studies, Grinnell College, USA "Edward Mooney's eloquent and challenging Lost Intimacy in American Thought is perhaps even more encompassing than its subtitle suggests. While Thoreau and Cavell do indeed anchor the structure of this book and the places it explores, there are a host of figures that occupy significant positions in this struggle to regain something lost in our thought. Most especially, he examines closely the work of Henry Bugbee, an elusive figure among American philosophers, belonging both to a certain moment at Harvard and to a longer period of his life in the American West. (Bugbee's writing seems to traverse the various boundaries between nature and culture, including the more antagonistic aspects of each.) It is hard to imagine a more generous and more detailed accounting of Bugbee's interests and themes, along with an appreciation of his passionate and lucid prose. The pages on Bugbee are the most numerous and often the most rewarding in the book. For this account alone, the book would deserve a thought reading...But no one even partially drawn to such [Romantic] projects will want to ignore the power and the detail of this book." -Tim Gould, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, August 2010 "I have read this extraordinary book carefully and find it ground-breaking. It manages to link imaginatively and sensitively a series of figures from Thoreau through Henry James and Bruce Wilshire, to Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, and J. Glenn Gray. It assembles these diverse thinkers in an intense dialogue that touches base deeply with phenomenological and existential themes. At the same time, it offers an original model of 'personal philosophy' that is as timely as it is unusual at this historical moment. Throughout, there is the splendid expression of a mind that is at once sophisticated and concrete-that speaks to us in the present." -- Edward Casey, Distinguished Professor, Philosophy Department, State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 2009-10, and founding member of the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy