Literary notes about Concrete (AI summary)
In literature, “concrete” functions on multiple levels, serving both as a marker of tangible, sensory reality and as a counterpoint to abstract ideas. Authors employ the term to evoke vivid materiality—for instance, when describing the harshness of physical structures like a bunker or a step [1], [2]—and to emphasize particulars that ground theoretical or ethical deliberation [3], [4]. It is frequently used to draw sharp contrasts, highlighting how definitive, specific details of human experience or societal conditions carry more weight than general or abstract notions [5], [6]. This layered deployment helps to bridge the gap between lived experience and intellectual discourse [7].
- A burst of white light, a blast, carefully aimed from inside a deep concrete bunker.
— from Second Variety by Philip K. Dick - The dinner was baking beautifully on a concrete step.
— from Bliss, and other stories by Katherine Mansfield - Taking thought to keep a personal engagement is obviously of the concrete kind.
— from How We Think by John Dewey - No abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver.
— from The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James - Reason deals with universals, with general principles, with laws, which lie above the welter of concrete details.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey - Happiness is not an abstract idea, but a concrete whole; and these are some of its parts.
— from Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill - This expedient for an Ethnographer consists in collecting concrete data of evidence, and drawing the general inferences for himself.
— from Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski
