Concreteness Quotes
More Concreteness Quotes
It is the sphere farthest removed from the concreteness of society which may show most clearly the extent of the conquest of thought by society.
herbert marcuse— p. 104 (One-Dimensional Man (1964))
He confronts a basic tool of the measurers the statistical technique called factor analysis, developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearman and demonstrates persuasively how factor analysis led to the cardinal error in reasoning of confusing correlation with cause, or, to put it another way, of attributing false concreteness to the abstract. It is this sort of performance that makes the book's eventual refutation of Arthur Jensen seem incidental, for it is far more absorbing to have our powers of reason challenged than it is to have our social consciences shaken.
stephen jay gould— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Books Of The Times" The New York Times, 1997-11-09, p. C29
Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.
herbert marcuse— p. 141 (One-Dimensional Man (1964))
I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.
mark rothko— letter to Clyfford Still, undated; as quoted in Mark Rothko : A Biography (1993) by James E. B. Breslin / and Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 170
