"Science and psychoanalysis apart, the most profound development in thought since Nietzsche, as far as we are concerned, is the phenomenological approach to the world. Mallarmé sought "words without wrinkles," Baudelaire cherished his minutes heureuses and Valéry his "small worlds of order," as we have seen: Checkhov concentrated on the "concrete individual" and preferred "small scale and practical answers," Gide though the "systematizing is denaturing, distorting and impoverishing." For Oliver Wendell Holmes, "all the pleasure of life is in general ideas, but all the use of life is in specific solutions." Wallace Stevens considered that we are "better satisfied in particulars." Thomas Nagel put it in this way: "Particulars things can have a noncompetitive completeness which is transparent to all aspects of the self. This also helps to explain what the experience of great beauty tends to unify the self: the object engages us immediately and totally in a way that makes distinctions among points of view irrelevant." Or, as Robert Nozick, who counseled us to make ourselves "vehicles" for beauty, said: "this is what poets and artists bring us―the immense and unsuspected reality of a small thing. Everything has its own patient entityhood." George Levine call for "a profound attention to the details of this world."
- Thomas Mann, translated by James Wood
- Albert Einstein
- Zen Master Dogen
- Benedict De Spinoza
- Mies Van Der Rohe
- Mike Garofalo
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Maezumi Roshi
- W.H. Auden
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