EXPERIENCE AND CREATIVITY: FOUR ESSAYS ON THE ROOTS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
Abstract
The motivating thesis of these four essays is that traditionally, philosophers have occluded the uniquely creative nature of human experience through the imposition of certain limited conceptual frameworks, the categories of which have then been employed to determine both the extent and content of experience. I show that a successful deconstruction not only discloses, but also releases, the creative power of experience--thus initiating that transformation of thought, which shows itself as the overcoming of inadequate conceptual frameworks through the formulation of new methodological principles and concepts, through which deconstruction fulfills its essential task. In the first essay I critically evaluate the tension, present in the philosophies of Kant and Husserl, between temporality as an origin and as a foundation of knowledge, and show how experience, when disclosed by the imagination in its original temporalized form, undermines the very foundations which support transcendentalism. In the second essay I argue that the loss of foundations is transformed, through Gadamer's notion of the fusion of horizons, into that advance into openness which an original experience is, and is thus the way in which knowledge is actually gained. Focusing in the third essay on the creative nature of this advance as a way of being actively and responsively receptive to the as-yet-unknown, I argue with Dewey that experience in its integrity is a creative venture which grounds, through transforming, our way of comprehending the world. Using Heidegger's insight into the relationship between this venture and the disclosure of truth, I restructure Dewey's aesthetics such that the creativity of experience can emerge as the disclosively world-founding event that it is. I turn in the final essay to an elucidation of Nietzsche's notion of the enhancement of power as a way of eliciting the crucial ontological implications of a philosophy for which the creative power of experience has displaced the authority of the legislative power of the knowing subject. Showing that enhanced power refers to a way of life which deliberately cultivates an appreciation of the truth of experience as world-founding venture, I explore the nature and depth of the challenge Nietzsche has posed to traditional interpretations of being and human being.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Philosophy
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