Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to fin...d out how we can get hold of the truth at all."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or ch...ange occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point wher...e those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art p...urifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For although memories, of a season, for example, Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure... That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting; It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal, Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt, Harsh strokes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not f...or the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Pilate was in advance of his time. For 'truth' itself is a...n abstract noun, a camel, that is, of a logical construction, which cannot get past the eye even of a grammarian. We approach it cap and categories in hand: we ask ourselves whether Truth is a substance ... or a quality ... or a relation.... But philosophers should take something more nearly their own size to strain at. What needs discussing rather is the use, or certain uses, of the word 'true.' In vino, possibly, 'veritas,' but in a sober symposium 'verum.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an action,' as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expre...ssion--it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for any ... noun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the adjective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »