Amazon.com: The Body's Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (9780710204783): David Michael Levin: Books
This is a unique study, contuining the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and using the techniques of phenomenology against the prevailing nihilism of our culture. It expands our understanding of the human potential for spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our gestures and movements. The author argues that a psychological focus on our experience of well-being and pathology as embodied beings contributes significantly to a historically relevant critique of ideology. It also provides an essential touchstone in experience for a fruitful individual and collective response to the danger of nihilism. Dr Levin draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to clarify Heidegger's analytic of human beings through an interpretation that focuses on our experience of being embodied. He reconstructs in modern terms the wisdom implicit in western and semitic forms of religion and philosophy, considering the work of Freud, Jung, Focault and Neitzsche, as well as that of American educational philosophers, including Dewey. In particular, he draws on the psychology of Freud and Jung to clarify our historical experience of gesture and movement and to bring to light its potential in the fulfilment of Selfhood. Throughout the book, the pathologies of the ego and its journey into Selfhood are considered in relation to the conditons of technology and the powers of nihilism.
`David Levin is the contemporary spokesperson for the tradition going from Nietzsche to Husserl to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty' |IDon Hanlon Johnson
--This text refers to the
Kindle Edition
edition.
I am Dr. David Kleinberg-Levin (known, in earlier years as David Michael Levin) graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover and went on to study philosophy at Harvard University, graduated in 1961. I spent a year as Fulbright Exchange Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris and undertook research, mostly on Fichte and Schelling, at the university in Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1967, I received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, writing a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology under the guidance of Aron Gurwitsch of the New School for Social Research. He taught in the Humanities Department at MIT (1968-1972), and then joined the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, from which I retired in 2005. I presently enjoy living in New York City, partaking of its rich intellectual and cultural life, going the rounds of the art galleries and the art museums, and enjoying concerts, modern dance, and performances at the Metropolitan Opera. I love hiking in the mountains and wilderness, love feeling a part of nature; but I am equally drawn to the cultural life of the city. Since retirement in 2005, I have written two books that touch on matters dear to my heart, one published in 2008 (Before the Voice of Reason), one (Redeeming Words) just delivered to a publisher.The first of these two is a contribution to the ongoing critique of reason, retrieving the voices of nature and of other people, voices to which I am indebted, and which accordingly make a claim on my responsibility to care for them, by virtue of the fact that those voices helped me to acquire the voice I call "my own". The second book is a contribution to the philosophy of language, drawing on critical social theory (especially Benjamin & Adorno) as well as on the earlier nineteenth-century movements of German idealism and German romanticism, the transcendentalism of Emerson, and twentieth-century phenomenology (especially the thought of Heidegger, Rosenzweig and Levinas) to reflect on various works of literature. The book has chapters on Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Alfred Döblin, and Samuel Beckett. Since returning to New York City, the city where I was born, I have also written some brochures for gallery exhibitions--one on oil paintings and one on photography. Before I left New York to begin teaching at Northwestern, I was doing a good deal of writing on art gallery exhibits, dance and opera. I am now resuming such occasional writing, eager to do more.
10 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 starsLevin is a real one., January 31, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: The Body's Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (Paperback)
This is a book to have. I am not thru it yet because I take it a little at a time. I underline. Levin can make you "get" Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and their predecessors in a way they themselves simply could not. Who would know, from the title? It could be just another academic book. It was just luck that I bought it.
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