Quotes About Tropism

Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.

He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile.

Knowledge is not constructed abstractly on the basis of sensation but problematically on the basis of an initial tropistic and taxic unity, which is the coupling of tropism and sensation, an orientation of the living being in a polarized world.