James Joyce's Philosophical Formation: A Secularisation of Being

Abstract

This thesis draws on radical philology, which focuses on the analysis of textual sources, to examine the exogenesis of James Joyce's early aesthetics, which is to say its development as a result of inter-textual echoes and interpolations. The research dwells on the excerpts and annotations derived from Aristotelian poetics, psychology, ethics as well as from Thomas Aquinas' definitions of goodness and beauty as transcendentals, in the 'Early Commonplace Book', and examines their echoes and interpolations primarily, although not exclusively, in Stephen Dedalus' theory of beauty and artistic expression developed along the genesis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses. The reader will find all the relevant passages from Joyce's early manuscript transcribed and annotated in the appendix. Through several close readings of philosophical doctrines, of the textual sources used in Joyce?s excerpts and annotations, and of his echoes and interpolations, the main chapters of this thesis examine the relation between Aristotelian theory of poetry as mimesis and Stephen Dedalus' understanding of art as expression of one's own nature, between Aristotelian study of the soul as the principle of life and Stephen's use of the soul as the object of his ideal artform, and between medieval conceptions of beauty as a transcendental and Stephen's naturalistic use of them. This interplay of objectivism and subjectivism is read against the background of relevant developments of continental philosophy, such as French Eclecticism and the Neo-Scholastic revival. At its core, the research addresses the interaction between quest for being and pursuit of the autonomy of the self, primarily in Stephen Dedalus' artistic endeavour, aiming to remark that his individualism is interrelated with a secularisation of the divine, as it appears in his use of medieval identifications between beauty and truth, or goodness. The contribution offered by this thesis is in the first instance the result of its reliance on an exogenetic approach, which leads, for instance, to confirm the presence of Romantic idealist nuances in Joyce's understanding of mimesis. The importance of the research presented hereby, however, is also given by its capacity to interpret evidence under a new light, primarily by giving more importance to ontology and moral psychology in Joyce's early aesthetics.