Cosmo-Transcendental Positioning of the Living Being in the Universe in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s New Enlightenment

Abstract

The latest focus of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka on the phenomenological investigation of transcendentalism is placed in the context of modern science, taking into account the fact that the compartmentalization of science, so beloved by positivist thinkers of the nineteenth century, has not yielded the expected answers to the questions of the nature of human consciousness, and that neither has the Husserlian transcendental reduction since it does not resolve the problem of the dichotomy of matter and mind. Tymieniecka’s inclusion of cosmos is the most important component of her search for rationality as tied to the evolutionary progress of nature and the emergence of human creativity as the stimulus to the development of human culture with its aesthetic, moral, and intellective senses. These intellective senses and their corresponding passions have been the subject of numerous volumes of the Analecta Husserlianaseries. According to Tymieniecka’s philosophy, Imaginatio Creatrix liberates the human spirit from one-sided dependence on nature and opens it to the acts of interpretation of organic processes. The creative act is an act of self-individualization. Moreover, the evolution of the universe is to be seen as fundamentally connected to the process of self-individualization.