Six memos for the next millennium by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino
Format: mobi
Tags: Criticism, Style, Literature, History and criticism, Literature - History and criticism, Philosophy, Literature History and criticism, Literary, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, General, Literary History And Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, Literature - Classics, Literature Philosophy, European - General, Literature - Philosophy, European
ISBN: 9780674810402
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1988-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

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the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time. Leopardi therefore starts with the rigorous abstraction of a mathematical notion of space and time, and compares this to the vague, undefined flux of sensations.

So, too, exactitude and lack of définition are the poles between which the philosophical and ironic thoughts of the character Ulrich oscillate in the endless (and indeed unfinished) novel by Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities):

Ist nun das beobachtete Element die Exaktheit selbst, hebt man es heraus und làsst es sich entwickeln, betrachtet man es als Denkgewohnheit und Lebenshaltung und làsst es seine beispielgebende Kraft auf ailes auswirken, was mit ihm in Beriihrung kommt, so wird man zu einem Menschen gefiihrt, in dem eine paradoxe Verbindung von Genauigkeit und Unbestimmtheit stattfindet. Er besitzt jene unbestechliche gewollte Kaltblutigkeit, die das Temperament der Exaktheit darstellt; uber diese Eigenschaft hinaus ist aber allés andere unbestimmt. (I, part 2, chap. 61; Ro-wolt edition, 1978,1.246-247)

If now the element under observation is exactitude itself, if one isolates it and allows it to develop, if one regards it as an intellectual habit and a way of living and lets it exert its exemplary influence on everything that comes into contact with it, the logical conclusion is a human being with the paradoxical combination of precision and indefin-iteness. He possesses an incorruptible, deliberate cold-

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