Miscellaneous: Abstraction and Reality

Text/Flowers of the Sea

Date: Monday, March 4, 2024

       It has been said that abstraction is the fundamental characteristic of philosophy. So what exactly is abstraction?

       There was an old man who felt that he was dying, so he put on his clothes, tied a tie that had not been used for a long time, and walked into a portrait gallery. He asked the owner of the portrait gallery to paint him a bust. so that his children and grandchildren would know what their grandfather was like. He sat in a chair and asked his boss to paint a portrait of him. After more than half an hour, the boss said: It's okay, you can go home, and tomorrow you come here to get your portrait. Because the portrait needs to be colored, it also needs to be finely processed. The old man was very happy when he got home, but he slept in bed at night and never got up, so he died.

       The next day, the painter waited all day but did not wait for the old man, and the painter found the old man's home, and the family said that he had died. The painter was amazed and saddened. So he said to his family, "The portrait of the old man is still in my portrait gallery, so bring it back."

       When the family saw the portrait of the old man, it was a little different no matter how they looked at it. But from a distance, it was their father. So I took the portrait of the old man home, chose a wall, and hung the portrait of the old man on the wall.

       Since the painter only drew an outline at that time, and did not draw it carefully, some details could not be remembered. There seems to be a mole on his face somewhere? Is the eyebrow on the left or right, half of the eyebrow is on the eyebrow, how many white eyebrows are there, and the front teeth are missing half, as if the buttons on the clothes are gray?......。 Although the portrait is not unrecognizable, it is still a portrait of an old man.

       If the old man is not dead, and the portrait is restored to this old man, the old man in the painting is not the same person as the actual old man. Because there are a lot of things in the portrait, there are many differences from the old man in reality. Because some of the superfluous places were imagined by the painter himself, there were no such superfluous things on the old man's face. Therefore, abstraction is a kind of thinking that is imagined according to reality.

       No matter how abstract the vocabulary or how abstract the thinking, there must be such references or referential events in reality. If there are no abstract references or referential events in reality, such abstract theories cannot return to reality.

       Abstract theories have the role of guiding reality to achieve a certain goal in a certain sense, but how much can be achieved depends on the results of efforts. Although some abstract theories cannot be fully realized, only a part of them or a very small part of them are realized, which shows that this abstract theory has played a certain role.

       Some abstract theories may not be implemented in reality and will not guide reality towards this goal, but it will work in the opposite direction.

       The basic source of abstraction is the things or ideas that exist in society. If you come up with an abstract word and you can't return to reality, this abstract word is meaningless, and it can also make reality go to the opposite and cause chaos in society.

       The basic trajectory of abstraction is: reality --- abstract --- reality. It's like painting a portrait of an old man, you can't make your own decisions and paint this on the old man's face, paint that on the old man's face, and then open the portrait and the old man's face doesn't have these things at all.

       When we move from an idealist to a realist, we must overcome and remove the hypocrisy of nothingness in ourselves. Not only can these things become stumbling blocks in our path, but they can also harm others and society.

THE END.