Although she lived in France for most of her writing life, she was most emphatically an American, and, as she wrote in her 1938 book on her friend Pablo Picasso, she felt completely in tune with "the century where nothing is in agreement, neither the round with the cube, neither the landscape with the houses, neither the large quantity with the small quantity." Again and again, stimulated by her undergraduate training in philosophy and psychology (notably with William James), she asked and investigated deceptively simple questions that reflected key issues of the century: questions to do with being, time, entity, identity, mind, language, and human nature--questions addressed by Alfred North Whitehead (a close friend of Stein's), Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. What is knowledge? What is mind? What is human nature? What is poetry? What is prose? What is literature? What is composition", she asked. What do these
do? She knew that, even in asking these questions, she was suggesting a new vocabulary of thought. Like Wittgenstein, she realized that she must invent a way of showing what could not be written
about. Writing
about things, explaining, was a nineteenth-century way of seeing: in the twentieth century there had to be ways of seeing what seeing itself was.
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