Literatura i filozofia w poszukiwaniu sztuki życia : Nietzsche, Wilde, Shusterma

Abstract

The book aims to analyze the concept of aesthetic existence, of living located within the framework of (broadly conceived) art, as it might be approached and practiced by modern philosophical subjectivity that is aware of her textual and extratextual involvements and thus embarks on the task of perfecting and fashioning of her self and those of the others with the (rhetorical and literary) means that have bearing on the contents of the philosophical message. While defining the principle of self-creative subjectivity, the work draws upon the modernist dialectic of the rational and aesthetic (or reason and artistic decadence) in order to transcend its limitations (for instance, by deconstructing the conventional image of nineteenth-century aestheticism); it poses a question of what constitutes aestheticization as the principle of both individual existence and social organization in the age of self-reflective modernity; it also points to aesthetic self-creation as a way of emulating and practicing the ancient art of good living — care of the self and community — in contemporary philosophical writing (by such thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, and Richard Shusterman).