Surrealism in its early period offered specific methods to bring images closer to concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusive passive and receptive role of the 'surrealist subject', are bankrupt and are giving way to new surrealist methods for the systematic exploration of the irrational... The new delirious images of concrete irrationality suggest their physical, real 'possibility'; they go beyond the domain of psycho-analysable fantasies and 'virtual' representations... Against the dream memory and impossible, virtual images of purely receptive states that one can only recount, the physical facts of 'objective' irrationality with which one can already hurt oneself.
Salvador DalíRelated topics
beyond closer concrete dream early exploration giving hurt impossible irrational irrationality memory objective possibility real recount specific virtual way surrealism surrealist facts representations StatesRelated quotes
We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? ... Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.
Nikolai Berdyaev
This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or.. inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life - which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him.
Teste was conceived - in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years - at a period when I was drunk on my own will and subject to strange excesses of consciousness of my self.
I was suffering from the acute ailment called precision. I tended toward the extreme of the reckless desire to understand, and I searched in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.
Paul Valéry
Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him-as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness-just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.
Theodor Adorno
If craftsmen and blacksmiths were feared for transforming material substance, if traders were feared for transforming such intangible qualities as value, how much more will the banker be feared for the transformations he effects with the most abstract and immaterial of all economic institutions? Thus we reach the climax of the progressive replacement of the perceivable and concrete by abstract concepts shaping rules guiding activity: money and its institutions seem to be beyond the boundary of laudable and understandable physical efforts of creation, in a realm where the comprehension of the concrete ceases and incomprehensible abstractions rule.
Friedrich Hayek
You well know ... for which reason I began searching for a number of demonstrations proving a statement due to the ancient Greeks ... and which passion I felt for the subject ... so that you reproached me my preoccupation with these chapters of geometry, not knowing the true essence of these subjects, which consists precisely in going in each matter beyond what is necessary. ... Whatever way he [the geometer] may go, through exercise will he be lifted from the physical to the divine teachings, which are little accessible because of the difficulty to understand their meaning ... and because the circumstance that not everybody is able to have a conception of them, especially not the one who turns away from the art of demonstration.
Al-Biruni