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Literary notes about involution (AI summary)

The term "involution" in literature has been used with a variety of nuanced meanings. In James Joyce's Ulysses, it denotes a sense of diminishing or contracting vastness in contemplation [1]. Immanuel Kant employs the term to reframe theories of individual preformations, suggesting that involution can capture the essence of inherent limits within developmental processes [2]. George Santayana further advances the idea by positioning involution as a precursor to evolution—a necessary contraction before the manifestation of an innate ideal—while also using it to illustrate mutual and reciprocal internal processes within nature and life [3, 4, 5].
  1. Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?
    — from Ulysses by James Joyce
  2. In correspondence with this the opposite theory of individual preformations would be better entitled the theory of involution .
    — from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant
  3. Evolution suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent manifestation of an innate ideal.
    — from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana
  4. Their mutual involution.
    — from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana
  5. No connection could be closer than this reciprocal involution, as nature and life reveal it; but the connection is natural, not dialectical.
    — from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

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