Bringing allegory into the light from the neglect into which it fell means focusing on the wondrous heights of the human spirit in its significance for culture.
Contemporary philosophies and literary theories, which give pre-eminence to primary linguistics forms (symbol and metaphor), seem to favor just that which makes intelligible communication possible. But they fall short in accounting for the deepest subliminal founts that prompt the mind to exalt in beauty, virtue, transcending aspiration.
The present, rich collection shows how allegory, incorporating the soaring of the...

Above the dogmatic ideologies and utopias that have proved illusory, there is a resurgence of ideals of/for humanity in the human spirit's urgent quest after measure and harmony of the dispersed threads of existence. Devalued in the sectarism of postmodern thought, they affirm themselves in their original freedom as the irrepressible swing of the human spirit within the all-embracing new field of the Phenomenology of Life and of the Human Condition. Preceded by the exploration of allegory in aesthetics and the metaphysics of the ontopoiesis of life, the present collection opens with...

In her Introduction, Tymieniecka states the core theme of the present book sharply: Is culture an excess of nature's prodigious expansiveness - an excess which might turn out to be dangerous for nature itself if it goes too far - or is culture a 'natural', congenial prolongation of nature-life? If the latter, then culture is assimilated into nature and thus would lose its claim to autonomy: its criteria would be superseded by those of nature alone. Of course, nature and culture may both still be seen as being absorbed by the inner powers of specifically human inwardness, on which view, human...

Let us revive the true sense of fine arts: enchantment In the conceptualised, commercialised, artificial approach to fine arts, we forgot its authentic experiential sense. It lies at the imaginative heart of all arts there to be retrieved by the creative recipient as the very 'truth of it all'.

Regardless of the subject matter, our studies are always searching for a sense of the universal in the specific. Drawing, etchings and paintings are a way of communicating ideas and emotions. The key word here is to communicate. Whether the audience sees the work as laborious or poetic depends on the creative genius of the artist. Some painters use the play of light passing through a landscape or washing over a figure to create an evocative moment that will be both timeless and transitory. The essential role of art remains what is has always been, a way of human expression. This is the role...