The colloquial sense in which people use the words abstract and concrete is not incorrect, but it is regrettable in a certain sense in that it replaces another more precise usage of the terms which could shed light on one of the primary obstacles to clear thinking in our time. I understand that the statement may seem hyperbolic but I believe I can justify it, at least impressionistically, in a couple paragraphs below. A more thorough treatment is in the works1 but, for now, will have to wait. Colloquially, “abstract” is conceived as a synonym for immaterial or non-quantitative. Basically, it is related to anything that a person cannot sink his teeth into, or grasp with one or more of the five senses. “Concrete,” by contrast, is conceived as a synonym for material, measurable, and perceptible to the physical senses. One suspects that the soul of this word—which stems from the Latin con– (“with,” “together”) + crescere (“to grow”)—was drawn into the orbit of the cement aggregate, materially perceived, that has gone by that name ever since its invention and designation as such in the nineteenth century. In other words, it is likely that before this time, the word “concrete” was not so firmly cemented into its present connotations. In other words, it was likely with much greater facility that someone could use the word “concrete” without invoking the associations that are corollary to cement. Again, the popular definitions of “abstract” and “concrete” offered above are not in themselves incorrect. Similarly, it is not incorrect to employ “begs the question” as a synonym for “makes me wonder,” or to equate psychological extraversion with sociability and introversion with shyness, as is commonly done in colloquial usage. Nevertheless, these colloquial equations do not exhaust the significance of these words and, indeed, they threaten to dampen the resonances of their further semantic potentiation.
Allow us, then, to attempt to arrive at a more comprehensive grasp of these two terms. I will stipulate a general definition of each of them in turn, before proceeding with a brief commentary. Something is abstract insofar as it is considered apart from its context. Conversely, something considered concretely is that thing considered in its actual manifestation, which always already implies a (virtually infinite) but specific context. In this way, concrete thinking could be thought of as “realistic” or “ecological” thinking while abstract thinking could be thought of as “artificial,” “speculative,” or “hypothetical” thinking. Carl Sagan had a supremely evocative way of pointing out the essence of concreteness when he said that “in order to invent an apple pie from scratch, you would first have to invent the universe.” He is not speaking as a scientist per se when he says this because the scientific method consists precisely in the movement of abstraction. This passes under the rubric of “isolating variables.” A great deal can be discovered when objects and beings are considered in abstraction but a great deal will be overlooked insofar as we forget the fact that abstraction is an artificial condition and not a realistic one. Consider, for instance, the axiomatic belief among the majority of astrophysicists, cosmologists, and biologists alike that life and consciousness are supremely improbable and represent some sort of statistical accident within a universe that seems, at best, indifferent to these things and often downright hostile to them.2 Perhaps. But this postulate represents abstract thinking that has reached a pitch. Realistically conceived, the only universe we know of is this one, in which life and consciousness are part and parcel of it. In other words, a universe with neither life nor consciousness is an abstraction for which no reason to believe in it could be adduced other than a conception of it by physicists in a universe in which both of these things existed by necessity. The concrete idea of a lifeless and mindless universe is a sort of performative contradiction in that it entails the existence of life and mind. That ideas are often regarded only as abstractions—indeed one of the theses of this essay is that the two terms are often taken to be synonyms—serves to pull the wool over our eyes in respect to their essential coherence or sympnoia pantōn (σύμπνοια πάντων), as Hippocrates would say, which is “the breathing-together of all things.” Indeed, perhaps nowhere is the disinclination to conceive of ideas concretely which the conflation of terms indicated above has brought about so harmful as in the field of medicine, where professionals maintain that their first principle is to do none.3
As a final note, the rhetorical device known as “metonymy,” or more precisely, “synecdoche” presents perhaps the most accurate illustration of the process of abstraction. A synecdoche is characterized by a designation of something by a part or an aspect of that thing. Hence, when Mark Antony says in Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears” he is referring to the whole person—in body and soul and as the locus of attention and executive function—by a single anatomical feature. Similarly, day labourers are sometimes called “hired hands” and European royalty were sometimes designated by the colour of their blood, which was apparently tinged blue as the possible result of argyria, or excessive silver consumption as a result of repeated and prolonged exposure to silverware residue. In any case, abstraction also functions by identifying a single element of a phenomenon and treating it as a representative of the whole. The difference is that while synecdoche is generally intentional and generally enlists the part to complement and intensify rather than to attenuate, our experience of the whole to which it pertains, the cognitive process of abstraction often proceeds by riveting our attention to a fragment at the expense of the whole from which it was taken. In other words, the products of abstraction are frequently employed as placeholders and, all too often, these isolated fragments function as replacements. Scientific investigation, as suggested, often proceeds by abstracting a specific variable from its context and then further abstracting the quantifiable elements of the first abstraction from the phenomenon in question. Hence, the scientific method can be seen as abstraction² or “abstraction to the second power.” As noted, this is only deleterious insofar as it is not understood. Hence, it is to be hoped that this short essay may serve to promote the appropriate use of scientific reasoning so that it will not continue to present one of the primary obstacles to clear thinking in our time.
A friend and I are weighing the idea of a book-length treatment of this theme. Please find his work here: https://www.theawakeningspirit.org/
Cf. Physicist Steven Weinberg’s statement that “[we are] all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe…a chain of accidents…a more-or-less farcical outcome…reaching back to the first three minutes [after the Big Bang]?” The First Three Minutes (1988), 152.
In allusion, of course, to the Hippocratic Oath, the crux of which is the affirmation to “first, do no hard,” rendered in Latin as primum non nocere.