Date: 2021
Author: Martim Brion
Abstractions – to abstract something means taking it completely out of the physical realm but not into the mystical – one takes it into a more scientific realm of dissection, of constituent parts, zooming into one’s surroundings, ideas, and visions. However, it can also involve zooming out, the formation of patterns of a wider view from a myriad of seemingly disconnected components. Ultimately, chaos has a pattern, even though zooming out is a harder feat to implement and less relatable as it depersonalises; as humans, we are terrible at being able to look at things not through ourselves, worse even than our ability to look at things through ourselves.
To abstract is thus an exercise, a powerful, important, and ultimately beautiful one. Not that it is superior to non-abstraction; it is just another option, and with options one can then make, see, and think great things – it’s our option. Nonetheless, as with everything, the exercise can be taken to the extreme, which again is in itself interesting and nourishing, but it needs to be said and advertised that it is so, an extreme case unrelated to reality as we know it here in the middle of the focus lens. That’s when the abstraction of a concept or idea can cause extreme distress in our reality; the Nazis and their half-baked racial theories and the communists and their new world order are two glaring examples of abstractions and theoretical concepts being applied literally into reality with total disregard for real life. Religions are also full of these examples; the direct interpretation of sacred texts is probably one of the greatest killers that has ever existed. In art, things are not so dramatic as usual; they are more contemplative, but nonetheless, problems arise. The recent overuse and misinterpretation of Heidegger, Deleuze, or Derrida are clear examples. And here there is another step which happens, which is the extreme abstraction; the exercise in abstraction becomes the focus, the link to reality is not important anymore and is lost with time, and what is left and discussed is just the process, this finality. This process, which, according to the exercise, is final, also gives the person interpreting a sense of sureness. Things are easier to accept and to live with when they are black and white; it requires effort to be constantly thinking that they are all in flux, that much of it we do not know about. Ultimately, we are here without any purpose whatsoever if we decide to follow Cioran’s path of decay. Looked at in a positive way, there is no purpose, so we are free to find one. One digresses.
This sense of sureness gives the studying person a sense of confidence, a sense that knowledge is something correct, with logic, without gaps, immutable and constant – again, the need for comfort and certainty. This is then propagated onwards down the next generation and so on. We finally have a cohort of studies that study nothing but the certainty of a thought, which is in itself an exercise in abstraction, a decoupling from the philosophical reality into the ether, a zooming in or out of the plain in which the space not viewed through the lens is discarded. As an exercise, it was important and interesting, fruitful even; as a truth, it is utter garbage and not only garbage but also dangerous, as it ossifies discourse and prevents alternative views from being heard, and gives a false sense of knowledge. Ultimately, it is just ignorance.
Martim Brion 