Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Jamesian thinking and philosophy as story-telling
- 1 What Maisie Knew: the challenge of vision
- 2 The Ambassadors: observation and interpretation … passion and compassion
- 3 The Wings of the Dove: self and society
- 4 The Spoils of Poynton: experiments in subjectivity and truth
- 5 The Golden Bowl: the complex of shaping relations
- Conclusion: Henry James's version of the philosophical novel
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Jamesian thinking and philosophy as story-telling
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Jamesian thinking and philosophy as story-telling
- 1 What Maisie Knew: the challenge of vision
- 2 The Ambassadors: observation and interpretation … passion and compassion
- 3 The Wings of the Dove: self and society
- 4 The Spoils of Poynton: experiments in subjectivity and truth
- 5 The Golden Bowl: the complex of shaping relations
- Conclusion: Henry James's version of the philosophical novel
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau– Ponty gives a concise and persuasive account of what he believes to be the major strengths of the phenomenological approach to philosophical problems. He contends that it is legitimate for phenomenology to ‘be practised and identified as a manner or style of thinking’ since it, in fact, ‘existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy’. This sense of phenomenology, not as a narrow or doctrinaire theoretical school, but as a flexible and creative intellectual approach, is confirmed by Merleau–Ponty's concluding remarks, in which he argues that it
is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne – by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being. In this way it merges into the general effort of modern thought.
(p. xxi)While these loosely connected, general statements give a helpful picture of the projected method of phenomenological investigation, of the adaptability of the philosopher's conceptual tools and of his resistance to the rigid categorization of various kinds of exploratory scheme, it is important to identify the concrete content of characteristically phenomenological undertakings. Phenomenology marks a unique moment in recent philosophical effort, one in which an entire tradition of scholarly enquiry is first set aside, and then reinstated on modified – and, if the project is unsuccessful, more rigorous – terms.
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- Information
- Henry James and the Philosophical Novel , pp. 1 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993