Contextualizing Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Concept of Fabulation

Abstract

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Book three of Logos and Life is devoted to the exploration of the life-significance of literature and the fabulating creativity of the human being. Her work is to be viewed in contrast to the postmodern treatment of narrative as an ever-present factor in private or social discourse and ultimately without any essential or epistemological foundations and values.

The fabulating creativity of literature as a particular form of aesthetic involvement in the arts is specifically human: it enagages the individual human being in a given historical time and culture. However, Tymieniecka eschews the underlying possibility of relativism, so strongly implied in postmodern thinking, on the grounds that the richness of life’s variables is not “random.” Instead, these variables constitute the very primeval laws of life. It is the vocation of literature to embrace these variables and, thus, to engage in philosophical investigation as well.