Abstract
The situation of a human being in the contemporary world is here to be considered within the metaphysics of life maintained by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Being deeply rooted in the American democratic tradition devised in the political philosophy of the U.S.A’s founders, Tymieniecka’s mode of thinking is strikingly different from the Marxist-Leninist philosophy propagated in the former Soviet Union. But looking ahead, Tymieniecka’s metaphysics with its regard for the human condition in unity with “everything-there-is-alive” opens new avenues for thought in the twentieth century. It is this century that is supposed to be an epoch where there is non-violence shown to nature as well as to humanity, and in the light of the new existential situation of human beingness, ecological issues should become the decisive factor in the fate of humankind and the Earth in general.
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Notes
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Empiricists (New York: Dolphin Books, 1961), pp. 309–311.
Maija KIle, “Filzofija kâ atklâjums” [Philosophy as Revelation], in Atklâjums No. 1 (Riga, 1991), p. 7.
Jadwiga S. Smith, “A Moment in History,” Phenomenological Inquiry Vol. 17 (Belmont: The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 1993), p. 6.
See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “The Human Condition within the Unity-of-EverythingThere-Is-Alive, a Challenge to Philosophical Anthropologies,” in Analecta Huserliana, Vol. XXXV (Dordrecht: Kluwer 1991), p. 295.
Ibid., pp. 299–302.
Here I would like to remind the reader that the organization of Soviet power and the establishment of the Soviet regime was from the very start connected with violence. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a weapon for the building and forming of socialism as much as it was a weapon for crushing the bourgeois class. In reality that meant that not only big factory owners or prosperoud farmers were exterminated, but also other civilians who had had some kind of property were put into prison and sent to concentration camps afterwards. When Latvia as well as the other Baltic states were incorporated into the former Soviet Union in 1940 and a socialist form of governmental framework was established instead of the existing democracies, more than thirty thousand civilians (34,250 precisely) were deported from Latvia to Siberia in Russia. Actually 1,355 civilians out of this number were shot or tortured to death that year in prison dungeons, among them 18 children and 105 women (see O. Freivalds, “Baigais gads” [The Terrible Year], in Mana Mâja (Riga: 1942), also in Gadagramata Majai un Gimenei (Riga: 1994), p. 97). Likewise in Russia during the years of the establishment of Soviet power not only were representatives of the bourgeois class exterminated, but also quite decent and innocent people. According to the accounts by the Soviet demographer B. Urlanis, before the proletariat revolution in Russia only four million people belonged to the so-called higher officialdom (inclusive of the members of their families). Two million people of this number emigrated from Russia. According to the accounts of other Soviet demographers, during the years from 1918 to 1922, i.e., the first years of the Soviet regime, the total number of inhabitants diminished from 147.6 million to 132.5 million people. The difference is 15.1 million civilians who were exterminated. See [The Last Hosts of the Kremlin] Ta6avxxxos F., IIocneAHxe xowiesa KpeMna (Xapbxos: EAxHopor, 1995), p. 323.
Mary Rose Barral, “Creativity and the Critique of Reason,” Phenomenological Inquiry Vol. 12 (Belmont: The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 1988), p. 137.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “Nature and Culture in the Unity-of-Everything-There-IsAlive” in Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo (ed.), Physica, Cosmologia, Naturphilosophie (Rome: Herder, Università Lateranense, 1993), p. 287.
Ibid., p. 292.
Ibid., p. 291.
See Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “The Human Condition within the Unity-ofEverything-There-Is-Alive,” Analecta Husserliana Vol. XXXV (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). p. 302.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Logos and Life Book 3: The Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the Ontopoiesis of Culture (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), p. 36.
Vaira Vilçis-Freibergs, “The Negative Parallel or Negative Simile in Latvian Folk Poetry,” Journal of Baltic Studies No. I (USA: Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, 1995), p. 10.
Ibid., p. 16.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 3, op. cit., p. 41.
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Ikere, Z. (1998). Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Philosophy of Life and the Fostering of Ecological Thinking. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Analecta Husserliana, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2604-7_30
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