CATEGORICAL,
ABSTRACTING THINKING
Years
ago, someone I admired very much once said to me: "Oh, you love Humanity
alright. It's people you can't stand."
OUCH!
Extroverted and flamboyant as he was, he did have a flair for the histrionic
and hyperbolic, but his criticism, overstated somewhat though it may have been
(after all I did love him quite particularly), was not without basis and
substance.
While he never missed a meeting of the various organizations he belonged to, I
preferred to sit on my computer and philosophize about Humanity. While people
irritated and disappointed him often, he never stopped meeting with them in
meat space. I preferred then, as now, not to hobnob.
His
criticism started me on the way to realizing the errors, and dangers, inherent
in the categorical thinking that leads to dissociating abstractions. When
particular individuals are subsumed under the category Humanity, we have
misused our ability to think abstractly.
There
is a place, and a need, for abstract thinking. I considered the possibility of
trying to do away with it entirely, but that idea quickly degenerates into
impracticality.
However,
thinking abstractly when we should be thinking particularly spaces us out,
removes us from our hearts, and can lead the way to insensitive stereotyping,
racism and even to tyranny. All of the nationalistic buzz words that snap
people into a trance are abstractions: Nation. Values. Democracy. Family.
Liberty. Peace. These abstractions are meant to arouse feelings of
insignificance in us in comparison to them and they hypnotize us into
obedience. We sacrifice our actual, particular, selves for those abstract
concepts.
While
particularity can lead to the kind of individualism that is little more than
being anal-retentive (and all of the high falutin' sounding philosophy touting
individualism doesn't ennoble its mean and petty base), and we need to guard
against that; so thinking abstractly, to the detriment of being concerned with
the particular, is the thought pattern of Fascism.
Abstract
thinking creates a buffer zone between our hearts and another's integrity. That
zone provides the illusion that we can hide all culpability in it. Immediacy
disappears. So, culpability is put off indefinitely. Everything in that zone is
indefinite and nothing immediate. In that zone, our feelings of protection of
others born of identification with them are neutralized. Abstract thinking
makes compassion and identification into abstractions, not actual feelings for
another actual Person or being. In that buffer zone of Abstraction the perfect
storm for brutality forms. It is only when we recognize another being's
actuality that harming that one, unique, actual being becomes unthinkable.
Neither
can abstracts be used as measures of perfection that no actual Person or being
can ever live up to. The Platonic World of Ideas does not exist. It is cruel to
measure real People and and non-productive to measure real things against
unreality.
It
is helpful to remember and internalize the words of Rumi when we consider
ourSelves and others: "You are not a drop in the ocean, but the ocean in a
drop." The particular is not subsumed and rendered insignificant in
comparison to any abstraction. In a "fractal" reality, each particular
contains the entire pattern. Moreover, each actual Person and being is an
actual, really real embodiment and to be embodied is infinitely greater than to
be disembodied idea.
The
goal is to stop thinking of God as an abstraction, and to see God as every
particular. When we can do this, we see that every Person's and every sentient
being's integrity is sacred, and therefore, inviolable. Toward the inanimate,
we feel genuine gratitude and use the things presented to us gently and wisely.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com
