The Much-at-Once
Music, Science, Ecstasy, the Body
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In this capstone work, the late Bruce Wilshire seeks to rediscover the fullness of life in the world by way of a more complete activation of the body’s potentials. Appealing to our powers of hearing and feeling, with a special emphasis on music, he engages a rich array of composers, writers, and thinkers ranging from Beethoven and Mahler to Emerson and William James.
Wilshire builds on James’s concept of the much-at-once to name the superabundance of the world that surrounds, nourishes, holds, and stimulates us; that pummels and provokes us; that responds to our deepest need—to feel ecstatically real.
“The Much-at-Once is an extraordinary edifice, a cathedral of concepts, a summa of Bruce Wilshire's distinguished and diverse writings. It is unprecedented in our time.”
“For decades, the late Bruce Wilshire has showered us with incandescent prose, teaching us to reflect and see beyond the banal, the habitual, the perpetual vises that often render our experiencing inert. In this last bequest from Wilshire, he teaches us how to listen, how to hear.”
Bruce W. Wilshire (Author)
Bruce W. Wilshire was Senior Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His many books include Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy and The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought.
Edward S. Casey (Foreword By)
Edward S. Casey is Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. His published books include Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Indiana University Press, 2000), Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Indiana University Press, 2000), Getting Back into Place
(Indiana University Press, 1993), The Fate of Place (University of California Press, 1997), and The World at a Glance (2007).