Customer Reviews

The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions

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It is unfortunate that Sartwell's book has received so little attention since he really did an excellent job of demonstrating what modernism has done to aesthetics and life in general. And really, what doesn't come down to aesthetics for meaning?

Sartwell develops the concept of art in many contexts including Zen, Taoism, Hinduism, Native American, African and African-American traditions. He then moves into reintegrating aesthetics into its true position in life - the core - as opposed to the scrap heap where modernism would like to have it stay.

Sartwell's chapter, "The Art of Knowing", is, I believe, the pinnacle of the book. He carefully demonstrates what has been done to "knowing" and how modernism (and scientific realism) have attempted to slide a number of incoherent positions into our general framework and proclaim them to be some sort of truth.
Highly recommended along with Bogdan's "Minding Minds", Faber's "Human Objectivity and Perception" and Flemons' "Completing Distinctions".

I'm surprised it has never been reviewed before now...