Literary notes about Arbitrary (AI summary)
In literary discourse, "arbitrary" often connotes actions or distinctions that appear to stem more from caprice than from reason. Authors use the term to underscore the randomness or the unfounded nature of human decisions and institutional impositions. For instance, a character’s values may be rendered as fancifully selected, much like the random hierarchy of playing cards [1], while political narrative critiques highlight decisions and executions that lack principled justification [2]. At times, “arbitrary” contrasts natural order or reasoned classification with conventions based on individual whim, emphasizing an inherent tension between order and capriciousness [3], [4]. This deliberate usage invites readers to question not only the motives behind such dismissals of rationality but also the broader implications of power exercised without restraint [5].
- People lost their humanity, and took values as arbitrary as those in a pack of playing-cards.
— from Howards End by E. M. Forster - If the cruel master had not infringed the laws of his nation, this arbitrary execution was not less unjust than it appears to have been imprudent.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James - These privileges, indeed, depended entirely on the arbitrary will of the emperor, who revoked or restored them according to his caprice.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - But are the rules that Conscience lays down merely known to us as the dictates of arbitrary authority, and not as in themselves reasonable?
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick
