Literary notes about abstraction (AI summary)
Writers employ "abstraction" in diverse manners that both evoke a state of inner detachment and serve as a tool for intellectual reduction. In some literary works, characters slip into an abstracted state—a moment of reflective withdrawal from the immediate world—as when a gaze fixed in thought distances a character from the surrounding reality [1], [2]. At the same time, abstraction is invoked philosophically to denote the process of distilling complex experiences or ideas down to their essential, sometimes idealized, forms [3], [4]. This dual usage enriches narrative and philosophical texts alike, simultaneously suggesting a meditative, often solitary state of mind and emphasizing a method of thought that seeks to remove the superfluous in favor of universal principles [5], [6].
- Presently, after moving, he leaned back and gazed with a curious abstraction at his antagonist.
— from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham - He looked at the two, less and less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought the ground and looked about him in the old way.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion.
— from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Our preoccupation with explaining the facts, then, leads us to treat what we know directly as so much material for abstraction.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - A copy of Spenser's Faery Queen , which had been given him by Charles Cowden Clark, was the prime cause of his abstraction.
— from English Literature by William J. Long - [ The Idea of Good is an abstraction, which, under that name at least, does not elsewhere occur in Plato’s writings.
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato
