Miscellaneous:AbstractionandReality
2024-03-07 12:02阅读：
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.
