The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47.
Leviathan (1651)
Context: Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is that the object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure forever the way of his future desire. And therefore the voluntary actions and inclinations of all men tend not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life, and differ only in the way, which ariseth partly from the diversity of passions in diverse men, and partly from the difference of the knowledge or opinion each one has of the causes which produce the effect desired.
“Phenomenology is one name for the path back from the object to the thing, the counterbalance to the objectification or 'progress'. Poetry is another.”
'Paradoxides' 2012
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Don McKay 10
Canadian poet 1942Related quotes
Source: Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 6
Source: Books on Phenomenology and Life, Material Phenomenology (1990)
“Change is one thing, progress is another.”
1950s, Unpopular Essays (1950)
As quoted in The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962) by Katharine Kuh, p. 118
1960s
Book II, Chapter 5, p. 274
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
Source: Science and Sanity (1933), p. 20.
Context: The only link between the verbal and objective world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all "knowledge" is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex of relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order. From this point of view, all language can be considered as names for unspeakable entities on the objective level, be it things or feelings, or as names of relations. In fact... we find that an object represents an abstraction of a low order produced by our nervous system as the result of a sub-microscopic events acting as stimuli upon the nervous system.
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 109
Context: There are ways in which poetry reaches the people who, for one reason or another, are walled off from it. Arriving in diluted forms, serving to point up an episode, to give to a climax an intensity that will carry it without adding heaviness, to travel toward the meaning of a work of graphic art, nevertheless poetry does arrive. And in the socially accepted forms, we may see the response and the fear, expressed without reserve, since they are expressed during enjoyment which has all the sanctions of society.
Close to song, poetry reaches us in the music we admit: the radio songs that flood our homes, the juke-boxes, places where we drink and eat, the songs of work for certain occupations, the stage-songs we hear as ticketed audience.