Lamentations over the disarray and disorientation in the philosophical quest may be heard from all sides today. The horizon of the All no longer beacons, for our hope of attaining it seems ever to recede. Yet, challenging the mistrust of reason that pursuit is precisely engaged in what is undertaken here. Our forty–year elaboration of the ontopoiesis/phenomenology of life as first philosophy/phenomenology in its unravelling of the metamorphic deployment of the logos of life has laid the foundations for the retrieval of the metaphysical vision. Here the classic concerns of philosophy are not negligently dismissed but are ciphered afresh in the light of innumerable perspectives and insights brought to philosophical attention in a New Enlightenment by advances in the sciences of life and of human apprehension. Strikingly enough pursuit of the greatest enigma of all, namely, that of the All enhancing Divine, is revived in the revelation that the logos informing life is the Fullness of God. In the Fullness being revealed in the infinite intricacies of the operations of the Logos of Life, we find the plenitude of God’s experiencing man. In times when the prevailing critique of reason casts aspersions on the quest for God through reason, the full revelation of the logos brings to the entire human experience the infinities of God.

This highly personal account of a lifetime’s spiritual and philosophical enquiry charts the author’s journey of faith through contemporary culture. Distinguishing between what she posits as the ‘universal’ and the ‘rhapsodic’ logos, Tymieniecka interrogates concepts as varied as creativity and the media, joy and suffering, and truth and ambiguity. She contemplates the possibilities and limits of communication between human beings, and outlines what she calls the ‘transnatural destiny’ of the human soul. The book asserts that unlike theory, which unfolds a logical continuity, and unlike dialogue, which is directed sequentially upward toward intellectual conclusions, the mode of reflection of the ‘rhapsodic logos’ imposes no limits or caps upon its understanding. Instead, the ‘logoic’ flow interlaces the rhapsodic cadences of our reflections on reality, in all their innumerable fluctuations, and sifts them to mold the intimate mind/soul inwardness that we experience as faith. The radiative meditations of this ‘rhapsodic logos’ weave their way through the entanglements of the mystery of incarnation, the constitutive archetypes, the inwardly sacred, the transnatural destiny of the soul, and finally ascend the rhapsodic scales toward culminating faith in the Christo-Logos.

Rationality in its various expressions and innumerable applications sustains understanding and our sense of reality. It is traditionally differentiated according to its sources in the soul: in consciousness, in reason, in experience, and in elevation. Such a functional approach, however, leaves us searching for the common foundation harmonizing these rationalities. The perennial quest to resolve the aporias of rationality is finding in contemporary science’s focus on origins, on the generative roots of reality, tantalizing hints as to how this may be accomplished. This project is enhanced by the wave of recent phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life, which reveals the workings of the logos at the root of beingness and all rationality, whereby we gaze upon the prospect of a New Enlightenment. In the rays of this vision the revival of the intuitions of classical Islamic metaphysics, particularly intuition of the continuity of beingness in the gradations of life, receive fresh confirmation.

This volume presents discussions on a wide range of topics focused on eco-phenomenology and the interdisciplinary investigation of contemporary environmental thought. Starting out with a Tymieniecka Memorial chapter, the book continues with papers on the foundations, theories, readings and philosophical sources of eco-phenomenology. In addition, it examines issues of phenomenological anthropology, ecological perspectives of the human relationship to nature, and phenomenology of the living body and the virtual body. Furthermore, the volume engages in a dialogue with contemporary behavioral sciences on topics such as eco-alienation, sustainability, and the human relationship to the earth in the context of the cosmos.

This book celebrates the investigative power of phenomenology to explore the phenomenological sense of space and time in conjunction with the phenomenology of intentionality, the invisible, the sacred, and the mystical. It examines the course of life through its ontopoietic genesis, opening the cosmic sphere to logos. The work also explores, on the one hand, the intellectual drive to locate our cosmic position in the universe and, on the other, the pull toward the infinite. It intertwines science and its grounding principles with imagination in order to make sense of the infinite. This work is the first of a two-part work that contains papers presented at the 62nd International Congress of Phenomenology, The Forces of the Cosmos and the Ontopoietic Genesis of Life, held in Paris, France, August 2012. It features the work of scholars in such diverse disciplines as biology, anthropology, pedagogy, and psychology who philosophically investigate the cosmic origins of beingness. Coverage in this first part includes: Toward a New Enlightenment: Metaphysics as Philosophy of Life, Transformation in Phenomenology: Husserl and Tymieniecka, Biologically Organized Quantum Vacuum and the Cosmic Origin of Cellular Life, Plotinus "Enneads" and Self-Creation, The Creative Potential of Humor, Transcendental Morphology – A Phenomenological Interpretation of Human and Non-Human Cosmos, and Cognition and Emotion: From Dichotomy to Ambiguity. ​

The essays in this book respond to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s recent call to explore the relationship between the evolution of the universe and the process of self-individuation in the ontopoietic unfolding of life. The essays approach the sensory manifold in a number of ways. They show that theories of modern science become a strategy for the phenomenological study of works of art, and vice versa. Works of phenomenology and of the arts examine how individual spontaneity connects with the design(s) of the logos – of the whole and of the particulars – while the design(s) rest not on some human concept, but on life itself. Life’s pliable matrices allow us to consider the expansiveness of contemporary science, and to help create a contemporary phenomenological sense of cosmos.