Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dale W. Jorgenson, professor of Economics, who teaches two graduate level Economics courses this semester, consults for the federal government. He likens the consulting activity of an economics professor to the clinical practice of a dentist. "It's exposure at a less abstract level," he said. "My research is largely empirical, and in a consulting role you're dealing with something specific and down to earth...
...sign language and push-button computers, apes have shown they can use symbols to generalize, pose questions and express moods. These experiments contest the claims made by thinkers from Descartes to Noam Chomsky that man's uniqueness can be found in his unusual ability to think and talk in abstract terms. What is it, then, Leakey asks the reader, that makes man different? What special quality does the human brain possess...
...with that you reach a paralysis in government." In the extreme, there could be worse things than paralyzed government. There could come a breaking of that basic spirit of accommodation and mutual respect that, in the final analysis, is the very heart of American democracy - but not an abstract matter of "goodness." Everybody's self-interest is ultimately undermined when the capacity for give-and-take and conciliation erodes...
...real sense the abstract expressionists in their early years were like religious artists without a context, practicing a deeply felt but homeless (and culturally impossible) totemism. Some, like Pollock, drew direct inspiration from Southwest Indian art, transforming it-as in The Key, 1946-into the congested, baroque rhetoric of shape which would later be refined as the allover skeins and webs of his drip paintings. Still and Rothko regarded their art as mediumistic: it was, Still declared, a way of "being with in a revelation," and this kind of priestly bombast was a regular feature of abstract expressionist utterances. Painting...
...religious principle, so the New York painters declared their separation from American materialism by means of an impassioned sense of the numinous. They found it in nature as well as culture: Arshile Gorky's paintings, full of flower stems and tendons and odd rhythmic copulations of not-quite-abstract form, are among the most exquisite animistic landscapes in the history of romantic painting...