Word: everymanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Clarity & Point. The secret of Sylvia Porter's success is that she writes of complex financial matters in terms that Everyman can understand, shuns the jargon of the financial specialist (which many a businessman-though loath to admit it-does not understand too well himself). She constantly redefines technical terms, turns complex concepts into housewifely images. "I write for a faceless image of myself," says she. "I figure if I'm interested in a subject, other people will...
PIETER BRUEGEL was a lowbrow in art. In an age when the Italian Renaissance was sweeping all before it, Bruegel kept his Dutch feet firmly on lowland ground, stuck close to everyman's taste. His zestful love of practical jokes, wise saws, old proverbs and the daily life in field and village earned him the nickname of "Peasant" Bruegel. But history has proved that Bruegel was dealing with an eternal response of man that lies deeper than the shift and change of artistic fashion. Collected by princes and merchants alike, he has remained one of the most popular artists...
...intellectual life of modernity, which "has largely lost the way to ripen the fruit of its own genius." When Descartes announced his famous Cogito, ergo sum as the basis for a philosophy, neither he nor his successors realized that he actually was assuming that "his private certitude was everyman's certitude in kind." Modern men, taking him at face value, not only plunged "into his subjective depths"; they also tended to accept his belief that the physical universe is merely a mathematical process devoid of purpose and quality or any rapport with man. "With this abandonment...
...every object and experience can be shared by others, and so I-think implies the notion of Thou-art. Science itself reveals this sense of ''inter-subjective reality" every time "the lonely experimenter, wherever he is, knows he has discovered truth as unquestionably a truth for everyman . . . Modernity has thus held to its own type of certitude, its science, its humanistic confidence in human thinking-in brief to its 'I-think'-until on its own empirical ground it sees its incomplete truth. What religion may say, and truly say, is that this inter-subjective reality...
Communist Everyman. Politically, Kolakowski cannot speak with an authority comparable to Yugoslavian Dissenter Milovan Djilas. But intellectually, he strikes more deeply at the Communist mystique. In his Nowa Kultura series, Kolakowski casts himself in the role of a Communist Everyman. First, he asks why so many party intellectuals have withdrawn from activity and buried themselves in non-political work and a general effort to avoid responsibility. The answer, he says, is that the party is driving its supporters into passivity by denying them the right of dissent...