Temptation of the Abstract

I know I'm on a bit of an "abstraction" and "concrete" kick here, but hear me out. This is something I've gotten into before, but I think it bears repeating again. For all of its powers of inclusion, flexibility, universality, illumination, and so on, the process of abstraction is adding something to something that already exists. It is simplifying and organizing something so that that something can be more readily understood and anticipated, and possibly manipulated. In responsible hands, this can be a useful and powerful tool. It is a tool that can also greatly assist deception and exploitation, and much worse. Its power is all the more terrible the more compelling and comprehensive its narrative, which allows for lies to be carefully buried deep underneath its dazzling infrastructure. 

Expertly placed, concrete truths whose relations are defined through abstraction can lend ever more credibility to a false structure. But those same concrete truths can be used to test the validity of their proposed relation. 

Phenomenology of the Abstract versus the Concrete

There are good reasons for mastering the interplay between the abstract and the concrete. For all of its flexibility and universality, the abstract takes a lot of mental work to render into full clarity. When someone is making abstract arguments, you may find that it takes a strain to follow the arguments, in which you work to keep various symbols in the proper relation to each other, adding more connections and elements, grasping for the meaning of such a structure which relates to the real. 

What lends such arguments more power is then anchoring them into the concrete, utilizing various vehicles of metaphor and analogy for their powers of transmissibility, converting concrete particulars into universals, grafting them onto the abstract structure.  

Metaphorical concrete-anchored concepts like "hard" and "soft," or "hot" and "cold" take their power from a visceral evocation of direct experiences, which are immediately apprehended by the body in sense and muscle memories. One comes up against something "hard" in one's experience, and one can immediately feel limitation and resistance on the fingers and against one's muscles. One "knows" what it means in one's "bones," as it is often put. 

The "concrete" conceptual category is apt, as it allows for a firming up of one's inquiry, establishing a conceptual certainty that one can "stand" on and thrust against without becoming lost in constant draining mental contrasts. 

But where the concrete concept loses steam is in its very particularity: hot can cool to cold, and heat to hot again, and soft things can become hard, or hard things soften, and one becomes lost in the perpetual dramas of transformation and movement. The abstract, through its connective relationality, situates those many gradations into "structure," which can more readily be apprehended and understood and organized in the mind's eye, and in turn, anticipated. 

What to Work On?

This poor old blog has been seeing some neglect, I know. But maintaining different projects and observing the changing courses of those projects does yield some interesting insights, some of which I had not anticipated.  

A lot of the writing energy has shifted to my Substack project for several reasons. Part of it is the public nature of it. When you have a number of people you know regularly anticipating some results, it does spur you to get it done. It jogs the superego, to put it another way. Kind of like doing something strenuous with another person: if both of you commit to something together, you really want to stick to it even more, because you're not only letting yourself down but also the other person if you don't follow through. 

Synergizing with that, as you get more done and what attention starts coming your way tends to seed those little spurts of inspiration, and then it starts to pull you in a certain direction. This was something Dolly Parton noticed and attributed to her sudden vigorous output of songwriting material, which happened earlier on when her career was taking off, as explored in the wonderful and moving Dolly Parton's America podcast. Not that my projects could be meaningfully compared to the scale and power of Dolly's career, but I did instantly recognize that basic impulse and motivation, and it made for a good example to point to anyway.  

Nevertheless, I do find that I have to spend some more willpower to keep working here, but I think it is energy well worth spending. Much of the creative and intellectual resources I have at my disposal on the Substack project were forged here, through years and years of experimentation and contemplation, thinking and writing in silence, getting thoughts down on the metaphorical "page," and then having them represented back at me here. It was not just ideas and concepts that developed either, but a process and a craft. 

That continuous development is still very important to me, and I have a whole lot of ground to still cover here, so I keep coming back to do the work. It is kind of like sharpening an axe, or any kind of blade really. The sharpening part is a pain in the ass: it is repetitive and kind of boring. The sound of it is grating and harsh on the ears and it feels gritty and unpleasant to the touch.

But then you have this beautiful, shiny sharp edge at the end of it. It is much more fun to chop wood than to sharpen, but chopping with a dull blade is garbage and dangerous even. The added joy and effectiveness of a sharpening job well done makes the subsequent chopping all the more satisfying and enjoyable, and it is safer besides. Those observed results can really give you the "oomph" you need to muster up the willpower and do the damn sharpening. 

Abstraction as Inclusion

I try to imply in my language and the way that I structure my arguments - and perhaps I've explicitly stated it here and there - that I may have stumbled upon some things here in my limited experience that could be of some use, but I don't intend for these things to be prescriptions for everyone. Nevertheless, I thought it might be a good thing to write up a more formal post on it.

I make use of a lot of these simpler material metaphors as building material that I've come across in the course of my life, which I have direct experience of and which have taught me certain things and revealed certain things to me. The purpose of the metaphors in this case is to abstract from those more concrete and grounded experiences in order to produce transferrable knowledge that could potentially be used in other contexts. 

This is the upside to the tools of abstraction, which although carry the danger of removing a thing from its context and changing its meaning and effects, can also confer a flexibility and universality to that thing as well. 

When talking about addressing some of the more pressing problems of our modern world, for example, there are many ways to simplify and detoxify one's life, and to re-organize one's energies and priorities. I write from my direct experiences living and working in the woods on a homestead, but not everyone can do that. Not everyone wants to do that besides. It would be an environmental disaster anyway; there are a lot of people in the world. 

To draw a direct contrast to the woods or any other rural environment, there are all sorts of possibilities for material, social, political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual revolution in the city, or somewhere in between, and indeed, much of what I've learned has consisted of moving back and forth between these worlds. And short of huge numbers of people suddenly dying off - a result our genocidal rulers might be fine with, regardless of its actual consequences - all of these people in existence have to live somewhere, and theoretically our dense and well-managed cities are the best way to do that. 

Besides, as I've expressed before, a given stage of development of the built environment finds its way into the wilderness eventually, transforming it, just as the state of the wilderness itself affects the built environment, and one is living in that totality. One consequence of this is that the act of homesteading changes in its nature throughout history, just as the act of city-living changes through time as well. Neither of these pure concepts can exist in isolation in the real.    

Part of the holistic thought here entails that the rest of the world is still out there, and doing its thing regardless of what one does, though one can certainly have good faith influence in small ways as well. For my part, I can only attempt to express the truths I apprehend in the particular sphere that I reside in and have a deeper experience of. 

But the way in which one expresses those truths does matter. Abstracting from the grounded and concrete to share those relations, in the hope that those abstracted relations are responsibly received and processed, and then eventually reconfigured and re-instantiated in others' concrete contexts and lives, positively informing them, is one way to go about this. 

I hope I've successfully expressed that I'm not all that interested in evangelizing some limited and particular lifestyle and ethic, to be forcefully adopted by the whole of creation. Such impulses can be quite arrogant at best, but they can also form the eventual building blocks of totalitarian thought and practice and well. 

But there is a balance to be struck here as well, because if I were just to put out my two cents, and then shrug and say, "hey everything is relative, to each their own," with no real interest in the arguments and their results, then what is the point? There is ultimately a way in which things work: how to successfully get by and live a decent life in the circumstances one finds oneself in. And there are good and bad ways to use less energy and avoid ecological trashing. At the same time though, one should also cultivate a good sense of when one is just pissing in the wind. 

Uncertainty in the Built Environment Pt. 7 - Practice and Conclusion

There is an important difference between confronting the idea of wilderness as bound to a certain place, and then confronting the idea upon its being disentangled from that place. 

You can go into into the wilderness as a place and have some really wild and incredible experiences. Things can get weirder and more interesting the less amenities you bring into it, or if you are experiencing some privation in your self, or perceptual alteration. 

The mountains and foothills, the deserts and badlands, the forests and scrublands...these places all entail different dynamics and experiences, and require different preparations to go into them. But all in all, going into a wilderness area comes with a certain established set of practices that you can become acquainted with and understand. There is a whole industry of outdoor sporting goods that stands at the ready to outfit you and make that outdoor experience as enjoyable and successful as possible. Further, the more you go into it, the more you become acquainted with how it works, and the more comfortable you become regularly going in. 

A conceptual wilderness is a little different, whether that wilderness is found in a wild area, a built environment, or within one's own self. We are talking less here about going to a certain place, accompanied by certain things, and more about an unstable and unintelligible relation of elements to one's everyday understanding of daily reality. This means entering a certain state of consciousness, and even a certain ontological state, which entails certain experiences and practices. 

What we are talking about is fundamental uncertainty. Not just whether we're unsure whether to go with the chicken or beef for dinner, or even willpower fatigue or decision paralysis - which can be serious problems in themselves - but a fundamental uncertainty about how to understand and relate to a given state of affairs, and at the extreme end, whether a certain course of action will ensure the immediate or future continuity of one's own self. At a long enough sustain, this state can encourage doubts about the very nature of one's reality. 

How to enter into - or even cope with - such a state of affairs? How to manage and practice in a state of uncertainty or unpredictability? It seems as though to manage something or practice something, you have to have something to anticipate, or be able to predict something, however obscure that something is, so as to have some kind of handle to manage, or direction to practice towards.

I think one thing we can say, is that so long as you are living and breathing, that by definition, there is always some sort of predictable, practicable foothold to move towards, however chaotic and uncertain a given environment is. If something is too chaotic and uncertain, in which everything solid is evaporating and flying asunder, say in the heart of some explosion, then that is the end anyway. 

The footholds can appear as anything from food, water, raw resources, and shelter in the wild, money and credit, traded goods, utilities, and shelter, and social relations in the built environment, clarity of mind, spirit and heart, confidence, and reasoning efficacy in the self, and so on. 

So, the idea is to predict unpredictability, while angling towards some sort of practical predictability in the process. This might still seem obscure, so perhaps we move closer to the concrete now? Of the various practices, there are a few different elements we can put together here. 

One principle is this: localized control. Anything you can do yourself, or which can be done by immediate family, friends, colleagues, etc., anyone with whom you have a strong enough bond to be trusted under strain, is more dependable through external failures or foreclosures of action or resource. Having at least one dependable point of strength somewhere which can be leveraged - such as security and shelter - can serve as a foothold to consolidate other sources of strength.

Lower, denser centers of gravity, in a metaphorical sense, can help. Not necessarily literal lower ground, as higher ground and its various advantages can be of benefit, but simplicity of action and robustness of resource and tool. Something you can source or make yourself, or get from somewhere local and dependable.

Complex Rube Goldberg machines such as industrial supply chains spanning continents can make for the rapid provision of powerful and useful resources, and should be taken advantage of, but they can't be counted on into perpetuity either. 

Here is another principle: it is good to have redundancy. In an uncertain and unpredictable environment, things fail, and that can mean the failure of any one of your footholds. Back up options and plans are great, or alternative pathways that can potentially be pursued. Having some very basic and universally useful provisions always on hand for example, which are not used up but which are saved for emergencies, can fill in some important gaps when unexpected things happen. Obvious resources like water, dried and/or non-perishable foods, lights and tools, and etc. 

And yet here is another principle: a diverse toolkit of dependable practices and protocols that can be turned to in a pinch, which can be maintained with regular repetition. It may feel completely natural to flick on the gas or electric stove to boil some water, but what if one doesn't have access to gas or electricity? Making a fire is not always easy, and requires preparations of its own, which are useful to practice. Using older and simpler technologies is not always simple, and requires a holistic movement into their art and technique. 

By that same token, community trust is built up and earned through skills of communication, emoting, and mutual aid, a trust that can yield great power and benefit, and the same is the case with maintaining one's personal spirituality, which has implications not only for how one as an individual moves in the world, but with how one moves with others. There are multiple layers of discipline, resource, and repetition to hold into account. 

Diversity is key, as each given tool fits into the other and reinforces the whole. One cannot properly and skillfully pursue alternatives or safely pursue physical emergencies if one's mind is in disarray for example. Physical practice, mental practice, spiritual practice: all of these things work together. 

So, with our practice. are we to accomplish the re-establishment of the home under duress, and then move on to systematically drive back every last trace of the wilderness then, so that it never troubles us again? Oh ho ho, I'd really be leading us astray if I were to suggest such a thing. 

I think one of the more serious weaknesses of modern industrial society is its relentless pursuit of convenience and comfort, both of which are such obviously good and desirable things that it becomes difficult to see when one can have too much of them. Such a society is terminally self-absorbed and enamored with itself, sealing itself into its own warm and safe environs, which doubles as a symbolic and experiential hall of mirrors in which the original signal successively decays and winks out. 

You need a wilderness, and sources of uncertainty, to perpetually improve things and oneself, to stay abreast of a world that is itself undergoing constant change. There are many other benefits to wilderness that I've hinted at before, and which I'll gloss over now, such as source of resources in the form of natural processes or social processes that need to be trusted and left alone to regenerate, spiritual benefits such as wonder and awe and gratitude, and so on.  

But by that same coin, is complete immersion in wilderness a panacea then? Does one make oneself perpetually stronger by living in as difficult and austere and alienating conditions as possible? No, emphatically not that either. 

Constant uncertainty and chaos only exhaust people over the long run, leading to strife and increasing desperation, until spectacular acts of cruelty lead to severe counterreactions in which you have warlord-types building out fortresses of confidence, shutting out the outside world and freezing the dynamism of reality so that nothing like that ever happens again.    

One needs a home, a stable place of comfort, and a community to love and care for, and the constellation of pleasures and contentments that come with those things, which makes life enjoyable and worth living, to do the really difficult stuff to secure those things in turn. 

Ah but now it appears that the post grows long. It seems as though we've just started to get into the juicy stuff as this post and series are coming to an end. This is a process that can last a lifetime and then some, and as usual, we'll explore these themes in other ways in the future.