The Vision of the Soul

by James Matthew Wilson
Catholic University of America Press, 2017
eISBN: 978-0-8132-2929-4, Paper: 978-0-8132-2928-7

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead—an age that claims mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents. The western— or Christian Platonist—tradition, he argues, tells us that man is an intellectual animal, born to pursue the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in beauty. Wilson begins by reconceiving the intellectual conservatism born of Edmund Burke’s jeremiad against the French Revolution as an eff­ort to preserve the West’s vision of man and the cosmos as ordered by and to beauty. After defining the achievement of that vision and its tradition, Wilson off­ers an extended study of the nature of beauty and the role of the fine arts in shaping a culture but above all in opening the human intellect to the perception of the form of reality. Through close studies of Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Maritain, he recovers the classical vision of beauty as a revelation of truth and being. Finally, he revisits the ancient distinction between reason and story-telling, between mythos and logos, in order to rejoin the two.

Story-telling is foundational to the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form—a story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson’s book invites its readers to a renewal of the West’s intellectual tradition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Preface
Introduction. The Drama of Cultural Conservatism
Part I. The Real, the West, and the Good
One. The Hunger for Reality
Two. What Is the Western Tradition?
Part II. Art, Being, and Beauty
Three. We Must Retranslate Kalon
Four. Style and Truth: Conservatism as Literary Movement
Five. What Dante Means to Us
Six. “Only What Does Not Fit into This World Is True”
Seven. Re-Reading the Book of Nature
Eight. Art as Intellectual Virtue
Nine. Beauty as a Transcendental
Ten. The Need for Proportion
Part III. Reason, Narrative, and Truth
Eleven. Reasoning about Stories
Twelve. Mnemosyne: Mother of the Arts
Thirteen. Novel, Myth, Reality: An Anatomy of Make-Believe
Fourteen. Retelling the Story of Reason
Fifteen. The Consequences of Our Forgetting
Sixteen. Still Interested in the Truth
Bibliography
Index

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