"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
Part One
The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes
In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective "European" meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in history, apprehended the world (the world as a whole) as a question to be answered. It interrogated the world not in order to satisfy this or that practical need but because "the passion to know had seized mankind."
The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mechanical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon.
The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl's pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, "the forgetting of being."
Once elevated by Descartes to "master and proprietor of, nature," man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man's concrete being, his "world of life" (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0571148190
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Prompt service guaranteed. Seller Inventory # Clean0571148190
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Brand New!. Seller Inventory # VIB0571148190
Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover0571148190
Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # newMercantile_0571148190
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0571148190
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0571148190
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Buy for Great customer experience. Seller Inventory # GoldenDragon0571148190
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks183050
Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. 0.75. Seller Inventory # 0571148190-2-1