August 18, 2007

• Happy Birthday, Robert Redford

  A Concrete Universal

  
  "What
  on earth is
  a 'concrete universal'?"

  -- Said to be an annotation

  (undated) by Robert M. Pirsig
  of A History of Philosophy,

  by Frederick Copleston,
  Society of Jesus.
  
  "No matter how it's done,
  you won't like it."

  
  -- Robert Redford to     
    Robert M. Pirsig in Lila    
  

  
  "In chapters 19 and 20 of LILA there is a discussion about
  the possibility of making Zen and the Art into a movie. It
  opens with a scene where Robert Redford, who 'really
  would like to have the film rights,' comes to meet and
  negotiate with Phaedrus in his New York City hotel room. Phaedrus
  tells the famous actor that he can have the rights to the
  book, but maybe that's just because he's star-struck and doesn't
  like to haggle. Under his excitement, Phaedrus has a bad feeling
  about it. He tells us that he's been warned by several different
  people not to allow such a film to be made. Even Redford warned
  him not to do it. So what's the problem? As it's put at the
  end of that discussion, 'Films are social media; his
  book was largely intellectual. That was the center of the
  problem.'"

  -- David Buchanan at robertpirsig.org

  "The insight is constituted precisely by 'seeing' the idea in the
  image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the
  particular, the abstract in the concrete."

  -- Fr. Brian Cronin's Foundations of Philosophy, Ch. 2, "Identifying Direct Insights," quoted in Ideas and Art

  See also Smiles of a Summer Evening, the current issue of TIME, the time of this
  entry (7:20:11 PM ET), and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

  • 7:20 pm
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