The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality

Merleau-Ponty's categories of the visible and the invisible are investigated afresh and with originality in this penetrating collection of literary and philosophical inquiries. Going beyond the traditional and current references to the mental and the sensory, mind and body, perceptual content and the abstract ideas conveyed in language, etc., these studies range from the `hidden spheres of reality', to the play of the visible and the invisible left as traces in works of human genius, the origins of intellect and language, the real and the imaginary in literature, and the `hidden realities' in the philosophy of the everyday world. These literary and philosophical probings collectively reveal the role of this disjoined/conjoined pairing in the ontopoietic establishment of reality, that is, in the manifestation of the logos of life. In tandem they bring to light the hidden play of the visible and the invisible in the emergence of our vital, societal, intimate, intellectual, and creative involvements.

The Thematic Study: The Visible and the Invisible in the Dynamic Manifestation of Life.- Section I Grasping The Hidden Sphere Of Reality.- Symbol and Metaphor: The Search for the "Hidden Side" of Reality in ContemporaryPhilosophy.- Beyond Intelligibility: Ciphers, Beauty, and the Glow of Being.- Metaphoric and Metonymie Symbolism: A Development from Paul Ricoeur's Concepts.- Where Does Meaning Come From.- Privileged Access and Merleau-Ponty.- Section II The Hidden Realities In The Everyday Life-World.- The Hidden Realities of the Everyday Life-World in Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Genet's The Balcony.- Phenomenology and Revolutionary Romanticism.- The Milieu: A Chart of our Margin of Play.- Section III From Inspiration To Expression.- Inspiration and its Expression: The Dialectic of Sentiment in the Writings of Benjamin Constant.- The Invisible and the Unpresentable: Barnett Newman's Abstract Expressionism and the Aesthetics of Merleau-Ponty.- The Visible and the Invisible: T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding and Edmund Husserl's Expression and Meaning.- Gadamer's Leveling of the Visual and the Verbal, and the "Experience of Art".- The Miracle of Literature: An Ethical-Aesthetical Theory of Mythopoiesis.- Section IV The Invisible In Trace And Memory.- Recognizing Invisibility, Revising Memory.- Poiesis and the Withdrawal: The Garden-Motive in Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and David Mamet.- Las Bibliotecas Invisibles.- Section V The Play: Visible, Invisible.- Resemblance: Play between the Visible and the Invisible.- "Seeing Clearly in Darkness": Blindness as Insight in Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Gide's Pastoral Symphony.- The Phenomenology of Music: A Vital Source of Tagore's Creativity.- INDEX OF NAMES.