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A multifaceted and novel examination of core problematic contexts and pathways of life and how we locate and orient ourselves in them.
What does it mean to actively or reflectively locate oneself in the life contexts in which one finds oneself? Locating One's Life explores from various angles striking exemplifications of how locating one’s life can be understood as a form of reflection and as a concrete action of existential placement. It is something we do by our actions and decisions as well as by our recognition or understanding of the multiple problematic situations and their consequences that we find ourselves faced with or suffering from in our lives. These situations range from deathbed or late-life recollections of one’s life course to finding ways to situate oneself in the mysterious totality of the clashing cosmic powers and overwhelming beauty of the universe into which we ultimately disappear. Such themes are linked in a sequence of accessible chapters that challenge and enable each of us to locate our own lives in light of the existential lessons they take up: accepting approaching death or old age by bringing one’s life to mind in memory, practicing, Stoic fashion, how to face the present with its unavoidable or even fatal demands, the enriching dislocating nature of travel, being or staying healthy as a soulful form of existential balance, the distinctively human forms of hunger and eating, and other contexts of life, including our religious practices of self-placement in the universe as the ultimate context of all contexts.
"This is a major synthetic contribution by Bob Innis to the fields of philosophy, psychology, and cultural history. Locating One's Life is the title that precisely summarizes the essence of the whole contribution—the active person is constantly involved in locating one's self within the coordinates of past-present-future, living and dying, health and non-health, and youth and non-youth, as well as many other parameters. Innis is the pathfinder between cultural psychology, philosophy, and history, and this book develops further his seminal work on Susanne Langer and John Dewey." — Jaan Valsiner, Aalborg University, Denmark
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Locating One's Life: Forms of Memory, Mood, and Self-Reflection
2. Existential Goods of Living in the Instant: Life Lessons from the Ancients
3. America as Assemblage of Placeways: Toward a Meshwork of Life-Lines
4. Traveling Toward Distance: Italian Lessons
5. The Enigmatic Soul of Health: From Balance to Inscape
6. Framing Hunger: Eating and the Categories of Self-Development
7. Locating Oneself in the Universe
Notes
References
Index