James S. Hans – författare

Challenging prevailing trends toward aesthetic neutrality, James S. Hans argues that there is such a thing as good and bad taste, that taste is something one is born with, and that it is firmly rooted in the mechanics of biology.   Taste is everything, Hans says, for it produces the primary values that guide our lives. Taste is the fundamental organizing mechanism of human bodies, a lifelong effort to fit one''s own rhythms to the rhythms and patterns of the natural world and the larger human community. It is an aesthetic sorting process by which one determines what belongs in--a conversation, a curriculum, a committee, a piece of art, a meal, a logical argument--and what should be left out. On the one hand, taste is the source of beauty, justice, and a sense of the good. On the other hand, as an arbiter of the laws of fair and free play, taste enters into more ominous and destructive patterns--but patterns nonetheless--of resentment and violence.   Hans develops his conception of taste through astute readings of five literary landmarks: Milan Kundera''s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sophocles'' Oedipus the King, William Faulkner''s Light in August, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. These texts explore the art of soulmaking and the quest for personal expression: the costs as well as the fruits that come from acceding to the imperatives of one''s being. They also reveal how the collision of personal and collective rhythms, whether in the Greek citadel or the Mississippi countryside, leads to violence and ritualized sacrifice.   Elegant, principled, and provocative, The Sovereignty of Taste is an essential book that restores taste to its rightful place of influence, shoring up the ground beneath civilization''s feet and offering hope for the future of integrity, value, and aesthetic truth.  

Discusses the ethical aspects of literature.This book addresses the ethical aspects of literature by discussing three major American poets: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and A. R. Ammons. It develops a philosophical framework by which an ethics of literature can be construed, and differentiates this view from a purely political criticism on the one hand and a purely "disinterested" criticism on the other. Beginning with Nietzsche's assumption that the world itself is an aesthetic place, Hans shows how an ethic is always inevitably implicit in the aesthetic through which a writer constructs his work. At the same time, he argues that this ethic never tells us how to live our lives; it only presents us with a series of constructs through which we can begin to understand the nature of valuing in the everyday world. The book also examines some of the reasons why academics have resisted the ethical aspects of literature, confronting the two major forces in literary criticism today: political writing (chiefly feminist) and post-structuralist (chiefly deconstructionist) writing.The Value(s) of Literature goes beyond Nietzsche and Derrida's critique of Nietzsche, which does not seriously approach the need for positive evaluation of the world. It is precisely this positive attempt to weigh the value of things anew to which this book is devoted.

The Mysteries of Attention explores the principles of selection through which the nature of human attention is established and delineates the modes, forms, measures, and motifs of attention. It is a literary/philosophical discussion of the ways in which our sense of the world is determined by the mechanisms of attention that always remain beyond our comprehension.

This book addresses the question of human uniqueness at a time when academic discourse has all but abandoned its long-held commitment to the value of individuality. Through an appraisal of the works of Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault, the author establishes the ways in which the current critique of the self has grossly distorted the nature of the debate by reducing it to a simple choice between essential or constructed selves. Hans argues that the tradition that emerges from Emerson's work is based on a relational sense of the individual as much as it is devoted to the premise that we all have a specific form of integrity. Likewise, even though Nietzsche's critique of the fictional nature of the subject is the origin of contemporary visions of the fabricated self, Nietzsche is equally insistent that each of us is a productive uniqueness: we are all principles of selection whose links to the world embrace more than the social circumstances around us. Nietzsche's vision of our productive uniqueness is carried on in larger and smaller ways by Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault, each of whom entertains a far more complex vision of the individual than those which currently dominate our ways of talking about what it means to be human.

Based on Nietzsche's critique of religion and culture, and engaging the contemporary offshoots of that critique, this book assesses the myths of origins that have been used to articulate the fundamental attitude toward the relationship between shame and beauty. In reconsidering some of the myths upon which the West is based, from Hesiod and Greek mythology to Plato and the Bible, Hans pursues the ways in which we have habitually separated shame and beauty in order to create the grounds that would provide us with the authority for our lives we think we need. By juxtaposing Socrates' repression of violence in The Republic and Nietzsche's conception of the overman, the author revises the network of relations that are associated with the religious, the aesthetic, and the political, asserting that the religious derives from the aesthetic rather than the other way around, and establishing a necessary connection between the political and the aesthetic.Hans aims to raise yet again the questions embodied in Nietzsche's attempt to prompt humans to face the true status of their actions in the world: are we finally able to address our shame without immediately projecting it onto another or repressing it? If so, what changes might we see in the psychological, social, and political worlds we would create out of such an acknowledgment? What value is to be found in accepting the uneasy relationship between shame and beauty upon which our lives rest? While The Origins of the Gods provides no definitive answers to such questions simply because none are possible, it makes use of such queries in order to reassert the great importance of Nietzsche's affirmation of the value of the world as it is. It argues that this affirmation has something crucial to offer if we are willing to forgo an authorized existence and confront the beauty and shame from which our lives are inevitably constituted.

This book explores the relationship between authority and context and attempts to establish the ways in which authority is a function of a particular agent or set of agents, and the degree to which it is a product of a context rather than an agent. The work is not a sociological or psychological study but rather a literary/philosophical speculation into the roots of our conceptions of authority. It declares all authority to be aesthetic in nature and is based on an analysis of several key texts from various different cultural backgrounds: Foucault, Weber, Nietzsche, Confucius, and Homer.