Forever Becoming: Donoghue

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Apollo / Dionysus

Apollo - Dionysus
Culture - Nature
Tighten - Loosen
Together - Apart
Modern - Postmodern
Construct - Deconstruct
Vertical - Horizontal
Narrow - Wide

Mono - Poly
Centre - Periphery
Reason - Intuition
Known - Unknown
High - Low
Inflate - Deflate
Spirit - Soul
Conscious - Unconscious
Light - Dark
Heaven - Earth

In The Birth of Tragedy Apollo and Dionysus, whatever character each of them possesses in other contexts and different bodies of lore, are defined as opposing forces.

Dionysus is a god of nature, associated with forces biological and violent, orgiastic mysteries, with everything that refuses to be civilised. Apollo is the god of civilisation: if he were linguistic, he would be the perfectly formed sentence, self-possessed in its transparency.

Dionysus wants not to possess himself but to lose himself in an ecstasy in which he and nature are one and the same: the methods of ecstasy are intoxication, sexuality, the Dionysiac music and dance, the dithyramb in which the barrier between man and nature are overwhelmed.

As he appears in the Bacchae, Dionysus is wild, god of maddened group, people who drive themselves out of civilisation by wine, drugs, dismemberment. Modern versions of the Dionysiac include the forces active in bullfights, cockfights, rock concerts, wrestling, charismatic revival meetings.

In Nietzsche, tragedy is the form in which Dionysus and Apollo are reconciled.

The Dionysiac music, by itself, would be unbearable, because it would defeat culture and shatter the necessary limits implied in character and individuality. The Apolline hero is a hero because he takes upon himself the Dionysiac experience and, not at all transcending it, incorporates it in himself, reconstituting his experience now as form and beauty.

[…] the Greeks allowed for an Apolline incorporation of Dionysus, and did not try to suppress him:

“The delight in drunkenness, delight in cunning, in revenge, in envy, in slander, in obscenity - in everything which was recognised by the Greeks as human and therefore built into the structure of society and custom: the wisdom of their institutions lies in the absence of any gulf between good and evil, black and white.

Nature, as it reveals itself, is not denied but only ordered, limited to specified days and religious cults. That is not the root of all spiritual freedom in the ancient world; the ancients sought a moderate release of natural forces, not their destruction and denial.”

We are not supposed to hanker after an aboriginal state of union with nature, as if culture had never happened. Drink and drugs are deemed to be harmful for many reasons but mainly because they remove the cultural distinction between a man and the nature from which he has been rescued. Apollo must win.

Each society recognises that there are Dionysiac forces at large, and it makes some provision for them. The carnival of Fasting in Germany is a few days of tumult and licence followed by Lenten rectitude. Public entertainments, sports, including blood sports, motor racing, and sporadic limited wars are provided, as far as possible under controlled conditions.

If we continue extending the definition of culture so that it covers virtually the whole of experience, leaving nothing to nature, we will make it impossible for ourselves to understand violence and obscenity except as failures of ‘the system’.

It would be wise to regard culture as a partial and improbable transformation of natural impulse rather than a comfortable norm. That way, manifestations of violence could be considered without the normal accompaniment of shock, horror, and insult.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 83-5

The Dionysian Mysteries were a ritual of ancient Greece and Rome which used intoxicants and other trance-inducing techniques (like dance and music) to remove inhibitions and social constraints, liberating the individual to return to a natural state.

It also provided some liberation for those marginalized by Greek society: women, slaves, homosexuals and foreigners.

'Dionysian Mysteries'

Dionysus was called Lysios, the loosener.

[...] Lysis means loosening, setting free, deliverance, dissolution, collapse, breaking bonds and laws, and the final unraveling as of a plot in tragedy.

[James Hillman]
Mythical Figures, p. 29

Different from Immanuel Kant's idea of the Sublime, the Dionysian is all-inclusive rather than alienating to the viewer as a sublimating experience. The sublime needs critical distance, while the Dionysian demands a closeness of experience.

According to Nietzsche, the critical distance, which separates man from his closest emotions, originates in Apollonian ideals, which in turn separate him from his essential connection with self.

The Dionysian embraces the chaotic nature of such experience as all-important; not just on its own, but as it is intimately connected with the Apollonian. The Dionysian magnifies man, but only so far as he realizes that he is one and the same with all ordered human experience. The godlike unity of the Dionysian experience is of utmost importance in viewing the Dionysian as it is related to the Apollonian, because it emphasizes the harmony that can be found within one's chaotic experience.

'Apollonian and Dionysian'
Wikipedia

The fragilista [...] defaults to thinking that what he doesn't see is not there, or what he doesn't understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.

So thanks to the fragilista, modern culture has been increasingly building blindness to the mysterious, the impenetrable, what Nietzsche called the Dionysian, in life.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 9-10

[Nietzsche] sees two forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. One is measured, balanced, rational, imbued with reason and self-restraint; the other is dark, visceral, wild, untamed, hard to understand, emerging from the inner layers of our selves.

Ancient Greek culture represented a balance of the two, until the influence of Socrates on Euripides gave a larger share to the Apollonian and disrupted the Dionysian, causing this excessive rise of rationalism. It is equivalent to disrupting the natural chemistry of your body by the injection of hormones. The Apollonian without the Dionysian is, as the Chinese would say, yang without yin.

[Nietzsche] called [Dionysus] “creatively destructive” and “destructively creative.” […] Nietzsche understood something that I did not find explicitly stated in his work: that growth in knowledge - or in anything - cannot proceed without the Dionysian.

It reveals matters that we can select at some point, given that we have optionality.

In other words, it can be the source of stochastic tinkering, and the Apollonian can be part of the rationality in the selection process.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 255-6

Where spirit lifts, aiming for detachment and transcendence, concern with soul immerses us in immanence: God in the soul or the soul in God, the soul in the body, the soul in the world, souls in each other or in the world-soul.

Owing to this immanence, dialogue is not a bridge constructed between isolated skin-encased subjects and objects, I's and Thou's, but is intrinsic, an internal relationship, a condition of the souls immanence. The I-Thou is a necessity, a given a priori with the gift of soul.

So soul becomes the operative factor in converting the it into a Thou, making soul of objects, personifying, anthropomorphizing through psychizing, turning into a partner the object with which it is engaged and in which it has implanted soul. Through our souls, as our dreams, projections, and emotions show, we are immanent in one another.

That souls are ontologically entailed means that we are existentially involved. Whether we like this or not, whether spirit pulls away and above, we are involved as a psychic necessity. Thus involvement becomes the first condition for admission to the psychic realm, to the field of psychology.

[James Hillman]

The Myth of Analysis, p. 27

She pops put into the pond’s clearing. The starry sky erupts above her, all the explanation a person needs for why humans have waged war on forests forever. Dennis has told her what the loggers say: Let’s go let a little light into that swamp. Forests panic people. Too much going on there. Humans need a sky.

[Richard Powers]

The Overstory, p. 275

Every return to nature is a regressive phenomenon, including any protest in the name of instinctual rights, the unconscious, the flesh, life uninhibited by the intellect, and so forth.

The man who becomes “natural” in this way has in reality become denatured.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p.123

We ought to understand the indication that the “Titans” existed (and reigned) before the gods, sub specie aeternitatis, either as a logical continuity, or as an indication of their place in the structure of the synchronic topology of the noetic cosmos.

The Titans always existed, just as the Black Logos of Cybele or the regime of the mystical nocturne. “Before” means either “higher” or “lower” depending on the viewpoint of the zone of the noetic Universe where we stand. For Mother Earth, with respect to the Titans, “before” means “better.” For the Olympians, the converse is true, since they think of themselves as the “new gods” who have won eternity in contrast to the endless cycles of the Titans’ self-closing duration. From the standpoint of the Logos of Apollo, the Titans are “ancient” because they did “not yet” know eternity, and they dwell below because they will never know it.

The discrepancy between the interpretation of the “before” and “after” is not simply the consequence of relative positioning, but an episode – and a fundamental one – of the Titanomachy, which is an expression of nothing more nor less than the choice of side in the never-ending battle of eternity against time.

The war of the gods and titans is a war for the position of the “observatory point”, a war to control it. Those who determine the paradigm, the grille de la lecture, will rule.

We thereby find ourselves in the very epicenter of the wars of the mind. The titans seek to overthrow the gods of Olympus in order to assert their Logos as the exemplary and normative one, while the gods insist on the triumph of the diurne. Therefore, the nature of any mythical figure or account depends on from what sector of the noetic cosmos we view such, and to which army we ourselves belong.

It would be highly naive to suppose that all people choose the camp of the gods, the Logos of Apollo and the solar regime of the heroic diurne. If this was the case, the Earth would be Heaven. Some tend towards the chthonic forces of the Earth, in solidarity with the worlds of the Great Mother. Some intuitively or consciously see themselves as warriors of the army of Dionysus.

As follows, we have the right to expect from such different treatments of myths, philosophical notions, and corresponding figures of Love between the three human types.

[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2

Stranger: There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence.

Theaetetus: How is that?

Stranger: Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body.

Theaetetus: I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are.

Stranger: And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion.

Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.

[Plato]
The Sophist

Male bonding and patriarchy were the recourse to which man was forced by his terrible sense of woman’s power, her imperviousness, her archetypal confederacy with chthonian nature.

Feminism has been simplistic in arguing that female archetypes were politically motivated falsehoods by men. The historical repugnance to woman has a rational basis: disgust is reason’s proper response to the grossness of procreative nature. Reason and logic are the anxiety-inspired domain of Apollo, premiere god of sky-cult. The Apollonian is harsh and phobic, coldly cutting itself off from nature by its superhuman purity.

[...] western personality and western achievement are, for better or worse, largely Apollonian. Apollo’s great opponent Dionysus is ruler of the chthonian whose law is procreative femaleness. As we shall see, the Dionysian is liquid nature, a miasmic swamp whose prototype is the still pond of the womb.

The tension and antagonism in western metaphysics developed human higher cortical powers to great heights. Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential. The Apollonian has taken us to the stars.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.12-13

Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature. The west and not the east has seen the frightful brutality of natural process, the insult to mind in the heavy blind rolling and milling of matter. In loss of self we would find not love or God but primeval squalor.

This revelation has historically fallen upon the western male, who is pulled by tidal rhythms back to the oceanic mother. It is to his resentment of this daemonic undertow that we owe the grand constructions of our culture. Apollonianism, cold and absolute, is the west’s sublime refusal. The Apollonian is a male line drawn against the dehumanizing magnitude of female nature.

From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.28

From the outset Dionysus is insistently presented as the affirmative and affirming god. He is not content with "resolving" pain in a higher and suprapersonal pleasure but rather he affirms it and turns it into someone's pleasure.

This is why Dionysus is himself transformed in multiple affirmations, rather than being dissolved in original being or reabsorbing multiplicity into primeval depths. He affirms the pains of growth rather than reproducing the sufferings of individuation.

He is the god who affirms life, for whom life must be affirmed, but not justified or redeemed.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.13

Inflation / Deflation

Centre / Periphery

Centre           -            Periphery
Consolidation           -            Exploration
Classicism - Romanticism
Order - Chaos
Communal - Individual
Narrow - Wide
Normative - Deviant
Monism - Pluralism
Known        -            Unknown
Explicit -            Implicit
Universal -            Relative

If we are to communicate with one another, and to live communally, then there must always be common ground - a centre around which we orbit.

The centre is a single point.

As we approach it, experience becomes narrowed. Possibilities are shut off in favour of an increasingly limited number of actualities.

At the centre there is a set way of doing things; rules, standards, and conventions.

As long as there's conservatism and invisible consensus, there will be avant garde work to outrage it and make it visible.

[Momus]
'Documenta's over, but it just keeps getting better'

The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas the public will accept.

Overton described a spectrum from "more free" to "less free" with regard to government intervention, oriented vertically on an axis. As the spectrum moves or expands, an idea at a given location may become more or less politically acceptable. His degrees of acceptanceof public ideas are roughly:

Unthinkable
Radical
Acceptable
Sensible
Popular
Policy

The Overton window is an approach to identifying which ideas define the domain of acceptability within a democracy's possible governmental policies. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public in order to move and/or expand the window. Proponents of current policies, or similar ones, within the window seek to convince people that policies outside it should be deemed unacceptable.

After Overton's death, others have examined the concept of adjusting the window by the deliberate promotion of ideas outside of it, or "outer fringe" ideas, with the intention of making less fringe ideas acceptable by comparison. The "door-in-the-face" technique of persuasion is similar.

'Overton window'

There are many ways that we can frame symbolic patterns, but the frame that I will use most prominently is the geometric symbolism of centre and periphery. I’m going to use that structure because its easy to understand - we encounter it in our bodies, our rituals, our societies; and more abstractly in our language and concepts.

[…] identity, refugees, walls, immigration, technology: all of these things can be understood quite well using the basic frame of centre and periphery.

In general the problem of chaos is the problem of the margin, and whether we see the margin as an exciting potential by which we can further ourselves out into the world, or whether we see it as a dangerous threat to the things we care about.

[Jonathan Pageau]
‘Symbolism in Guardians of the Galaxy v.2’

I always go to the rough edges, because that’s where you find things that are much more exciting than the structured aspect of the regular parts of a city.

[Tjalf Sparnaay]
‘Getting Closer’ (documentary)

[...] the world formed by art is recognised as a reality which is suppressed and distorted in the given reality.

[...] The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e. of those who established it) to define what is real [...]

Art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates individuals from their functional existence and performance in society - it is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity [...] But this achievement presupposes a degree of autonomy which withdraws art from the mystifying power of the given and frees it for the expression of its own truth.

[Herbert Marcuse]
The Aesthetic Dimension

[Marcuse] values art, as I do, for its power of contradiction, its protest against a narrow definition of reality and the prescription of its forms.

In our time, reality is administered mostly by politics: the function of the arts is the critical interrogation of politics, the questioning of its certitudes.

André Malraux's The Voices of Silence is based on his understanding that 'great artists are not transcribers of the scheme of things; they are its rivals [...] all art is a revolt against man's fate.'

The image of the doomed artist has retained its power because of the association of the artist with transgression, genius, the role of scapegoat, the sacrificial victim. We don’t know what to make of this image.

On the whole, we try to include the artist in the forms of our knowledge, but if he rejects our embrace we know that in some profound sense he is right, he knows he is not really one of us. Art does not confirm the reality we normally think we know and possess.

In fact art is permanently antagonistic to our sense of reality because it makes a space for those images which our sense of reality excludes.

There is in fact much to be said for bourgeois society even when we insist on degrading it by calling it bourgeois, but artists have rarely wanted to say any of it. One of the aims of modern art and literature has been to escape from the middle class and what Ezra Pound called its ‘accelerated grimace’.

So the arts have appealed to pleasure rather than duty, interrogation rather than conformity; they thrive upon suspicion rather than consensus, the creative speech of poetry rather than the stereotypes of daily life.

In avant-garde art, these gestures of dissociation have sometimes been maintained to the point at which many people can see nothing in them but spiritual terrorism, like the fractured face in a Picasso portrait.

In extreme cases, the gesture amounts to a rage for the absolute, as if nothing could satisfy so long as it remains finite.

The 19th-century artist kept his soul, as far as possible, by withholding assent to official purposes. As the price to be paid for that spiritual privilege, his art emphasised difference rather than continuity of experience; a certain purity of form, only to be achieved by transcending the ordinary world. There is always a risk of weightlessness in his images or in his voice, a suggestion of falsetto. He achieves form as a desperate choice, and we sense everything that has had to be kept out of the picture to make it become what it is.

The artistic vision is in some way ineffable, unspeakable; it deflects every attempt to pin it down by knowledge or to define it in speech. The stories say that art is not to be assimilated to the comfortable ways of a society.

The artist is an eagle, not a dove.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 13, 15-16, 21, 27, 69

Let us attempt to see.

[Robert Delaunay]
'Light'

Art is exploration: artists train people how to see.

The artists are the people who articulate the unknown. The role of art in a healthy culture is to bring to public awareness elements of being that have not yet entered the collective consciousness.

Here’s a way of thinking about artistic and creative people from a biological perspective: the world is basically an explored territory, inside an unexplored territory - every world is like that, everywhere you go is like that; there’s things you know, and things you don’t know.

The conservative people like to be in the middle of the things that are known. They can master that space, and are good at maintaining it.

The artists like to be right out on the edge, and that’s the edge between chaos and order. And they like to expand the domain of order out into the chaos. They do that first by transforming perception.

Artists have always been on the frontier of human understanding. The artist bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life.

The dream is the thing that mediates between order and chaos, it starts to make chaos into order. It’s half chaos, that’s why it’s not comprehensible. Artists play exactly the same role in society: they’re the visionaries that start to transform what we don’t understand into what we can [at least] start to see. They’ve always been at the vanguard, that’s their biological niche. They’re the civilising agents.

Imagine we’re all living on an island, and many of us are in the centre of the island - far enough away so that maybe we can’t see the shoreline, and the ocean. The artists are right on the edge, and they’re expanding the landscape, they’re moving the culture forward into the unknown.

They do that by translating what is as yet unimaginable, but sensed, into what is at least imaginable, and represent it in image, and drama, and literature. That’s the precursor to its full formulation in articulated philosophy and thought.

You can see them doing [it] in cities: it’s the open people, the artists, who go into parts of the cities that have degenerated to some degree back into chaos, and revitalise and recivilise them. [Then] the less artistic people, who are more conventional, move in, and that’s when you get gentrification. That usually chases the artists out, and they go somewhere else cheap and interesting and start the renewal process again.

That’s what artists do [...] They’re problem detectors and problem solvers [...] They’re transforming chaos into order, all of the time. That’s where they live, on that edge. It’s a very tough place to live, because you can fall into the chaos at any time.

[Jordan Peterson]
'July Patreon Q and A' and ‘Lectures: Exploring the Psychology of Creativity’

Structuralist readers are urged to adopt an ironic or sceptical attitude towards whatever they read; they are to know that it is poisoned.

Barthes, in his later work, showed how such readers might behave themselves. They should cultivate caprice and excess, going against the grain of the writing, distrusting its rhetorical figures, reading at their own speed.

In this way they retain some measure of freedom, and break the conspiracy between author, publisher and the economy of the market which has produced the book as a commodity for sale.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 40

The point has been made that at any given time the overwhelming majority of scientists are not trying to overthrow the prevailing orthodoxy at all but are working happily within it.

They are not innovating, and they seldom have to choose between competing theories: what they are doing is putting accepted theories to work. This is what has come to be known as 'normal science' [...]

It is true that Popper's writings are somewhat loftily exclusive in their references to the pathbreaking geniuses of science, whose activities his theories most obviously fit. And it is also true that most scientists take for granted, in order to solve problems at a lower level, theories which only a few of their colleagues are questioning.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 41

For Levinas, the course of Western philosophical tradition is determined from the outset by its ancient Greek heritage.

'Philosophy employs a series of terms and concepts - such as morphe (form), ousia (substance), nous (reason), logos (thought) or telos (goal), etc. - which constitute a specifically Greek lexicon of intelligibility.'

Like Derrida, he sees a systematic relationship or complicity between these terms, since they all point towards a moment of ultimate, self-present truth when reason would grasp the encompassing logic of its own nature and history.

What is intelligible to thinkers in this Greek tradition is whatever lends itself to the various 'totalizing' methods and strategies which thought has devised to maintain its grasp upon an otherwise recalcitrant world.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 231-2

Such thinking, as Derrida describes it, 'dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and ... live the necessity of interpretation as an exile' [...]

The other possibility is that of abandoning such nostalgic ways of thought and accepting that there can henceforth be no limit to the range of strong-willed interpretative options.

[...] To register the force of this critique would be to re-think the notion of 'structure', no longer seeking to limit the play of its differential elements by always referring them back, in the last instance, to some organizing 'centre' or thematic point of origin.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 139

The biggest problem of explicitness, however, is that it returns us to what we already know.

It reduces a unique experience, person or thing to a bunch of abstracted, therefore central, concepts that we could have found already anywhere else – and indeed had already. Knowing, in the sense of seeing clearly, is always seeing ‘as’ a something already known, and therefore not present but re-presented.

Fruitful ambiguity is forced into being one thing or another.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 180

What can we be said to owe to romanticism? A great deal.

We owe to romanticism the notion of the freedom of the artist, and the fact that neither he nor human beings in general can be explained by oversimplified views such as were prevalent in the eighteenth century and such as are still enunciated by over-rational and over-scientific analysts either of human beings or of groups.

We also owe to romanticism the notion that a unified answer in human affairs is likely to be ruinous, that if you really believe there is one single solution to all human ills, and that you must impose this solution at no matter what cost, you are likely to become a violent and despotic tyrant in the name of your solution, because you desire to remove all obstacles to it will end by destroying those creatures for whose benefit you offer the solution.

The notion that there are many values, and that they are incompatible; the whole notion of plurality, of inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims to be perfect and true, whether in art or in life, can in principle be perfect and true - all this we owe to the romantics.

[...] and yet, as a result of making clear the existence of a plurality of values, as a result of driving wedges into the notion of the classical ideal, of the single answer to all questions, of the rationalisability of everything, of the answerability of all questions, of the whole jigsaw-puzzle conception of life, they have given prominence to and laid emphasis upon the incompatibility of human ideals.

But if these ideals are incompatible, then human beings sooner or later realise that they must make do, the must make compromises, because if they seek to destroy others, others will seek to destroy them; and so, as a result of this passionate, fanatical, half-mad doctrine, we arrive at an appreciation of the necessity of tolerating others, the necessity of preserving an imperfect equilibrium in human affairs, the impossibility of driving human beings so far into the pen which we have created for them, or into the single solution which possesses us, that they will ultimately revolt against us, or at any rate be crushed by it.

The result of romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life [...]

[Isaiah Berlin]
The Roots of Romanticism, p. 146-7

The second condition of permanent political society has been the existence, in some form or other, of the feeling of allegiance, or loyalty.

This feeling may vary in its objects, and is not confined to any particular form of government; but whether in a democracy or in a monarchy, its essence is always the same, namely that there is in the constitution of the State something that is settled, something permanent, and not to be called in question; something that is generally agreed to have a right to be where it is and to be secure against disturbance, whatever else may change.

This feeling may attach itself—as among the Jews (and indeed in most of the commonwealths of antiquity)—to a common God or gods, the protectors and guardians of their State. Or it may attach itself to certain persons who are deemed to be the rightful guides and guardians of the rest, whether by divine appointment, by long prescription, or by the general recognition of their superior capacity and worthiness. Or it may attach itself to laws; to ancient liberties, or ordinances. Or finally (and this is the only form in which the feeling is likely to exist from now on) it may attach itself to the principles of individual freedom and political and social equality, as realised in institutions that don’t yet exist anywhere except perhaps in a rudimentary state.

But in every political society that has had a durable existence there has been some fixed point, something that men agreed in holding sacred.

[John Stuart Mill]
'Essays on Bentham and Coleridge'

The third essential condition of stability in political society is a strong and active force of cohesion among the members of the same community or state.

I need scarcely say that I do not mean ‘nationality’ in the vulgar sense of the term:

•a senseless antipathy to foreigners,

•an indifference to the general welfare of the human race, or an unjust preference for the supposed interests of our own country;

•a cherishing of bad peculiarities because they are national, or a refusal to adopt what has been found good by other countries.

I mean a force of sympathy, not of hostility; of union, not of separation. I mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government and are contained within the same natural or historical boundaries. I mean that one part of the community do not consider themselves as foreigners with regard to another part; that they set a value on their connection; feel that they are one people, that their lot is cast together, that evil to any of their fellow-countrymen is evil to themselves; and do not selfishly want to free themselves from their share of any common inconvenience by breaking the connection.

Everyone knows how strong this feeling was in the ancient commonwealths that attained any durable greatness.

[John Stuart Mill]
'Essays on Bentham and Coleridge'

[…] we cannot excel our way out of modern problems […] surviving our newfound god-like powers will require modes that lie well outside expertise, excellence, and mastery.

A single obviously stupid idea like 'self-regulating financial markets' now spreads frictionlessly among fungible experts inhabiting the now interoperable centers of excellence within newspapers, government, academe, think-tanks, broadcasting and professional associations. Before long, the highest levels of government are spouting nonsense about 'the great moderation' in front of financial disaster.

We have spent the last decades inhibiting […] socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop out of our research enterprise and into startups and hedge funds. As a result our universities are increasingly populated by the over-vetted specialist to become the dreaded centers of excellence that infantilize and uniformize the promising minds of greatest agency.

If there is hope to be found in this sorry state of affairs it is in the rise of an archipelago of alternative institutions alongside the assembly line of expertise. This island chain of mostly temporary gatherings has begun to tap into the need for heroism and genius.

In the wake of the Challenger disaster, Richard Feynman was mistakenly asked to become part of the Rogers commission investigating the accident. In a moment of candor Chairman Rogers turned to Neil Armstrong in a men's room and said "Feynman is becoming a real pain." Such is ever the verdict pronounced by steady hands over great spirits.

[Eric Weinstein]
'Excellence'

Exploration is movement from the knowable to the complex, selectively.

This movement is often mentioned in the literature on complexity as exploration versus exploitation.

Exploration is an opening up of possibilities by reducing or removing central control without a total disruption of connections.

There are some good reasons to move deliberately from order to chaos. There are times when it is necessary to break rigid structures in precipitation of a natural collapse (as one approaches the boundary), so that the transition can be managed more carefully; and there are times when a strong disruption is the only mechanism that will break up a strong but unhealthy stability.

The [...] chaotic space [can be used] for temporary disruption of all connections (possibly within a restricted context) as a stimulant to new growth.

Entrainment breaking is movement from the knowable to the chaotic to the complex, periodically. In entrainment breaking, we move from the knowable to chaos and thus stimulate the creation of new complex systems as the system rebounds into the complex domain.

This is a common approach to disrupt the entrained thinking of experts who, in our experience, tend to be the most conservative when it comes to radical new thinking.

The move to complex space is not radical enough to disrupt those patterns; we need to challenge at a more basic level the current assumptions of order. By using the complex space as a staging post, we create a more fertile space of interactions from which we can select stabilization points for the movement to the knowable.

Organizations tend to assume that they can design the nature of new systems. For example, an organization that needs new expertise in an area might commission a university to carry out a study, recruit specialist staff, or identify individuals within the organization and assign them new responsibilities. This is a successful and effective strategy when the conditions are suitable for ordered approaches.

However, if the situation is uncertain, it is more useful to shift the problem from the domain of the known to the complex. Organizations need to increase both internal and external levels of contact to the point where new patterns can emerge.

Immunization is movement from the known to the chaotic, temporarily. Immunization in chaos is a smaller “visit” to chaotic space that shakes up “the way things are” enough to cause reflection but not enough to destabilize the entire system.

Immunization serves two purposes. First, it inures people to the devastating force of chaos so that they will be better prepared to face those forces in the future. A perfect example: it is said that the great director Buster Keaton was able to craft his death-defying stunts (such as a house falling around him, a rescue from a drenching waterfall, amazing pratfalls, and so on) because as a toddler he was lifted out of bed by a tornado and set down unhurt in the street.

Second, immunization brings new perspectives, which cause radical disruptions in stable patterns of thought and lead to new complex patterns.

Examples of such events are scattered throughout literature, in the accident that changes a politician’s career, or the chance encounter that causes a lonely woman’s life to fill up with new meaning, or in many other kinds of radical departures that make everything on which one had relied seem meaningless and restricting.

Metaphors are particularly useful agents of immunization because they allow conversation about painful things, enable disruptive and lateral thinking, prevent entrainment of attitudes, and clear out the cobwebs of stagnant ways.

[Cynthia Kurtz & Dave Snowden]
'The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world'

Typical statistics textbooks teach standard (Gaussian) distribution – “the bell curve” – in which things like means and standard deviations most matter.

Some domains (like the sums of thrown die) naturally cluster around an average between strictly constrained extremes. If you know that the total height of two randomly selected people is 12-and-a-half feet, chances are the two people are each very close to 6 feet, 3 inches.

But if you know the total wealth of two randomly selected people is $125 million, the chance that wealth is close to evenly distributed is quite small; there is a very high chance that one of them has total wealth of close to $125m.

Unlike the size of an organism, the size of a bank account does not have a natural limit, and wealth isn’t evenly distributed around a mean.

It takes wisdom to know when we are in Extremistan rather than Mediocristan, so that we are not harmed by, and can even benefit from, a rare and unforeseen outlier.

This means that many of the analytic tools of social science—like correlation and linear regression—are much more limited than usually acknowledged, and often deceptive: one can always “fit” a line to random data and find spurious “correlations” in large enough data sets.

[Joshua P. Hochschild]
'Optionality and the Intellectual Life: In Gratitude for the Real World Risk Institute'

Postmodern theory is reinterpreted in order to argue that a postmodern perspective does not necessarily imply relativism, but that it could also be viewed as a manifestation of an inherent sensitivity to complexity.

As Cilliers explains, the characterization of complexity revolves around analyses of the process of self-organization and a rejection of traditional notions of representation. The model of language developed by Saussure - and expanded by Derrida - is used to develop the notion of distributed representation, which in turn is linked with distributed modelling techniques. Connectionism (implemented in neural networks) serves as an example of these techniques.

Cilliers points out that this approach to complexity leads to models of complex systems that avoid the oversimplification that results from rule-based models.

'Complexity and Postmodernism'

The taste of the higher type is for exceptions, for things that leave most people cold and seem to lack sweetness; the higher type has a singular value standard.

Moreover, it usually believes that the idiosyncrasy of its taste is not a singular value standard; rather, it posits its values and disvalues as generally valid and thus becomes incomprehensible and impractical.

Very rarely does a higher nature retain sufficient reason for understanding and treating everyday people as such; for the most part, this type assumes that its own passion is present but kept concealed in all men, and this belief even becomes an ardent and eloquent faith.

But when such exceptional people do not see themselves as the exception, how can they ever understand the common type and arrive at a fair evaluation of the rule?

Thus they, too, speak of the folly, inexpediency, and fantasies of humanity, stunned that the course of the world should be so insane, and puzzled that it won't own up to what "is needful.”—This is the eternal injustice of those who are noble.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

The Gay Science, 3

Not one of all these ponderous herd animals with their uneasy conscience (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as the cause of the general welfare – ) wants to know or scent that the 'general welfare' is not an ideal, or a goal, or a concept that can be grasped at all, but only an emetic

– that what is right for one cannot by any means therefore be right for another, that the demand for one morality for all is detrimental to precisely the higher men, in short that there exists an order of rank between man and man, consequently also between morality and morality.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 228

The spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises: we immoralists - we are the most extreme.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

The Will to Power, 749

Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments.

And man's greatest labor so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to submit to a law of agreement - regardless of whether these things are true or false.

This is the discipline of the mind that mankind has received; but the contrary impulses are still so powerful that at bottom we cannot speak of the future of mankind with much confidence. The image of things still shifts and shuffles continually, and perhaps even more so and faster from now on than ever before.

Continually, precisely the most select spirits bristle at this universal binding force, the explorers of truth above all. Continually this faith, as everybody's faith, arouses nausea and a new lust in subtler minds; and the slow tempo that is here demanded for all spiritual processes, this imitation of the tortoise, which is here recognized as the norm, would be quite enough to turn artists and thinkers into apostates: It is in these impatient spirits that a veritable delight in madness erupts because madness has such a cheerful tempo.

Thus the virtuous intellects are needed - oh, let me use the most unambiguous word—what is needed is virtuous stupidity, stolid metronomes for the slow spirit, to make sure that the faithful of the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance. It is a first-rate need that commands and demands this. We others are the exception and the danger - and we need eternally to be defended.

Well, there actually are things to be said in favor of the exception, provided that it never wants to become the rule.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

The Gay Science, 76

All subjects, no matter how specialised, are connected with a centre; they are like rays emanating from a sun.

The centre [...] is the place where [man] has to create for himself an orderly system of ideas about himself and the world, which can regulate the direction of his various strivings.

The centre is constituted by our most basic convictions, by those ideas which really have the power to move us. In other words, the centre consists of metaphysics and ethics, of ideas that - whether we like it or not - transcend the world of facts. Because they transcend the world of facts, they cannot be proved or disproved by ordinary scientific method.

But that does not mean that they are purely “subjective' or 'relative' or mere arbitrary conventions. They must be true to reality, although they transcend the world of facts - an apparent paradox to our positivistic thinkers. If they are not true to reality, the adherence to such a set of ideas must inevitably lead to disaster.

Education can help us only if it produces 'whole men'. The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the ‘whole man', in fact, may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories, he may treasure the Encyclopaedia Britannica because ‘she knows and he needn't, but he will be truly in touch with the centre.

He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity.

[E.F. Schumacher]

Small is Beautiful, p. 77

Criticality

Play
Life and Death (and everything in-between)
Concentrate / Decentrate
Levels of meaning
Wild Things

Explain Away

Life and Death (and everything in-between)

+                                 -
Life                    -                    Death
Con- Syn-    -                    De-
Together             -                   Apart
Addition -                    Division
Synergy                  -                   Entropy
Synthesis                -                    Analysis
Induction       -                    Deduction
Construct                  -                    Destroy
Concentrate        -                    Decentrate
Conserve               -                    Deplete
Confirm                   -                    Deny
Connote - Denote
Centripetal                -                    Centrifugal
Attach - Detach
Close                     -                    Distant
Tight -                    Loose
Conservative -                    Liberal

Will to life - Will to nothingness

Stay on the left too long and we seize up, become a statue.
Stay on the right too long and we fall apart, lose ourselves.

In all things there is a pull towards dissolution, and an opposite pull towards unification. This tug of war is everywhere, at all scales; from a society, to the bodies that make up that society, to the cells that make up those bodies.

It is the interchange between life and death.

Life is a combining of things; to preserve life, things must be kept together. Death, on the other hand, strives to pull those things apart.

When we look at a society we can see these processes. There are always those who pull towards the centre. These are the individuals who aim to preserve the status quo, who want to keep things as they are. We could call this a drive towards life, inasmuch as change would mean death to society in its current form, for it to be reborn in another. And of course, that new form would require its life force - those pulling inwards - in order to keep it healthy.

There are also those who pull in the opposite direction, towards the outside. They want to pull society apart. We could call them change agents, and they represent the drive towards death, death being synonymous with change.

Neither of these are any better than the other. Context defines their value. When something is not working, when it must be pulled apart, then those that seek to keep it together could be described as dysfunctional. When something is working, and must be kept together, then the situation is reversed.

Status-quo agents will always insist that it is working; or that, at the very least, it is ‘okay’; that death is too extreme; that change is not necessary.

Change agents will always insist that it is not working; that it is never okay; that change is always necessary.

Perhaps it remains, then, to those that lie in-between to decide what is necessary; life, or death?

None of us are ever all for life, or all for death. We all contain both poles within us. However, it may be true to say that we contain them in differing amounts. So there will be some that are inclined towards the status quo in any given situation; who feel an urge to conserve and protect. And there are others who are more inclined to pull at the seams; to question and critique. So whilst we all lie in between life and death, some lie nearer to one than the other. It is their combination that produces balance, and health. It is, therefore, imperative for the health of any collective, that all voices are given an airing.

It is context that defines which voice is heeded in any given situation. If you have something that works then you would be wise to amplify those voices that seek to keep it together and to diminish those voices that seek to pull it apart. If you have something that does not work then the opposite is true.

Barthes disapproves of any art that merely makes itself available to gratify its culture.

According to this view, Fisher-Dieskau is flattering petit-bourgeois society by offering it an image of its own perfection, of the sense of itself as perfect. He allows his talent to coincide with the particular kind of perfection a petit-bourgeois culture dreams of. Panzera’s art, apparently, set itself aslant its culture.

For the same reason, Barthes prefers Landowska to other harpsichordists, and Lipatti to other pianists: their playing is never flattened to perfection, they don’t add intention to the music or fuss over its every detail, contrary to petit-bourgeois art which, according to Barthes, is ‘always indiscreet.’

[…] Barthes argued that every aesthetic merit depends upon an interrogative and ultimately subversive relation between the art and its society. There should always be a certain recalcitrance.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 58

Those at the periphery are interested in deconstructing culture, rather than perfecting it. They seek alternatives to the status quo - new paths, new solutions, new forms. They adhere to the principle of destruction, and are moved by a centrifugal force.

Those at the centre adhere to the principle of creation, or consolidation, and are moved by a centripetal force. They are interested in the perfection of certain prescribed forms.

Barthes was, perhaps, someone who dwelled at the outskirts, and as such wasn’t interested in confirmatory, petit-bourgeois art. Barthes valued art as exploration, as a means to find alternatives to the conventional forms of the centre.

Donoghue paints him as a partisan, as someone who was committed to the ideals of the periphery to the exclusion of the centre. Accordingly, he doesn’t value art as confirmation: he insists that art always ought to be interrogative, subversive, and recalcitrant in its relation to society; that it ought never to be entirely enamoured. As a partisan, he cannot (or will not) see the value of his opposition; he cannot enjoy confirmatory art, it repels his sensibility (and his politics).

In Barthes’s view, society can never be entirely good, or good-enough; it must always be questioned.

It seems to me that society should be both questioned, and accepted. In other words, there must be those elements within it that confirm it, and those that deny it. Society itself exists as a tug of war between these factions. As with most partisans, Barthes, seemingly, can't admit to the value of his opponent; perhaps because to do so would be to weaken his hand. He is embattled; and in a battle any gesture of reconciliation may be turned against you.

The most fundamental observation that one can make about the observable universe [...] is that there are at all levels forces that tend to coherence and unification, and forces that tend to incoherence and separation.

The tension between them seems to be an inalienable condition of existence, regardless of the level at which one contemplates it.

The hemispheres of the human brain, I believe, are an expression of this necessary tension. And the two hemispheres also adopt different stances about their differences: the right hemisphere towards cohesion of their two dispositions, the left hemisphere towards competition between them.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 128-9

The forces of the past tend to cause clockwise drift in the Cynefin space: people living together and sharing mutual needs lead to the emergence of ideas; convenience leads to stabilization and ordering of the ideas; tradition solidifies the ideas into ritual; and sometimes, either lack of maintenance or the buildup of biases leads to breakdown.

The forces of the future push dynamics to the counter-clockwise: the death of people and obsolescence of roles cause what is known to be forgotten and require seeking; new generations filled with curiosity begin new explorations that question the validity of established patterns; the energy of youth breaks the rules and brings radical shifts in power and perspective; and sometimes imposition of order is the result.

In a sense, these two forces are always pulling society in both directions at once, and this is reflected in organizations as well.

[Cynthia Kurtz & Dave Snowden]
'The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world'

The weak and quasi feminine type of the dissatisfied has a sensitivity for making life more beautiful and profound; the strong or masculine type, to stick to this metaphor, has a sensitivity for making life better and safer.

The former type manifests its weaknesses and femininity by gladly being deceived occasionally and settling for a little intoxication and effusive enthusiasm, although it can never be satisfied altogether and suffers from the incurability of its dissatisfaction. Moreover, this type promotes all those who know how to provide opiates and narcotic consolations, and it resents all who esteem physicians above priests: thus it assures the continuation of real misery.

If this type had not been superabundant in Europe since the Middle Ages, the celebrated European capacity for constant change might never have come into existence, for the requirements of the strong among the dissatisfied are too crude and at bottom so undemanding that eventually they can surely be brought to rest.

China, for example, is a country in which large-scale dissatisfaction and the capacity for change have become extinct centuries ago; and the socialists and state idolaters of Europe with their measures for making life better and safer might easily establish in Europe, too, Chinese conditions and a Chinese "happiness," if only they could first extirpate the sicklier, tenderer, more feminine dissatisfaction and romanticism that at present are still superabundant here.

Europe is sick but owes the utmost gratitude to her incurability and to the eternal changes in her affliction: these constantly new conditions and these no less constantly new dangers, pains, and media of information have finally generated an intellectual irritability that almost amounts to genius and is in any case the mother of all genius.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

The Gay Science, 24

[…] those who live according to time, the changing and destroying element, fix and conserve themselves; those who live according to space, the fixed and permanent element, disperse themselves and change unceasingly.

This must be so in order that the existence of each may remain possible, for in this way at least a relative equilibrium is established between the terms representing the two contrary tendencies; if only one or the other of the compressive and expansive tendencies were in action the end would come soon, either by ‘crystallization' or by 'volatilization’ […]

This is why nomadism, in its ‘malefic' and deviated aspect, easily comes to exercise a ‘dissolving’ action on everything with which it comes into contact; sedentarism on its side, and under the same aspect, must inevitably lead only toward the grossest form of an aimless materialism.

[René Guénon]

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p.149

[…] the business of poets and other prophets is not only to celebrate things, and it is certainly not to go on always celebrating the same things.

Just as often, they need to denounce things, to shake us from our dogmatic slumbers, to warn us, to point to what is going wrong. Sometimes, that is, they have to act as unacknowledged legislators of the world.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.65

[…] John Stuart Mill called it “commonplace” for political systems to have “‘a party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform’...

The antagonism between two primal mindsets certainly pervades human history: Sparta and Athens; optimates and populares; Roundheads and Cavaliers; Inquisition and Enlightenment; Protagonus and Plato; Pope Urban VIII and Galileo; Barry Goldwater and George McGovern; Sarah Palin and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

[Jonathan Haidt]
‘Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle’, p.8

In the normal or healthy state the role of reactive forces is always to limit action. They divide, delay or hinder it by means of another action whose effects we feel.

But, conversely, active forces produce a burst of creativity: they set it off at a chosen instant, at a favourable moment, in a given direction, in order to carry out a quick and precise piece of adjustment.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.111

Abstract / Concrete

Short              -           Long
Concrete          -                      Abstract
Pragmatic       -                      Ideal
Narrow           -              Wide
Small          -                      Large
Separate          -                      Unified
Many              -                      One
Close    -                      Distant
Specific          -                      General
Fixed -                     Loose
Matter - Patterns
Part                 -                      Whole
Individual       -                     Collective
Analogue           -           Digital
Deduction       -                     Induction
Differentiation        -                     Integration
Analysis    -                     Synthesis
Destruction    -                     Creation
Chaos    -                     Order
Low         -                     High
Hot    -                     Cold
Body    -                     Mind

At the top of the pyramid things appear to be still, an illusion. At the bottom we can see that they are moving, changing.

Top: no change
Bottom: all change

Thus, we find god at both extremes: above, and below.

Abstraction is the process by which we focus on the underlying constructs of data. As Boisot (1998) admirably demonstrates, the process of abstraction is focused on concepts, not percepts.

Percepts, “...achieve their economies by maintaining a certain clarity and distinction between categories, concepts do so by revealing which categories are likely to be relevant to the data- processing task” or information creation.

“Abstraction, in effect, is a form of reductionism; it works by letting the few stand for the many”.

[Dave Snowden]
'Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place: an Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in Formal and Informal Communities'

[...] the mind of limited capacity can survey the few and simple relations that lie within the range of its narrow sphere of action, and can handle the levers of these with much greater ease than the eminent mind could. Such a mind takes in an incomparably greater and richer sphere and works with long levers.

Thus the insect sees everything on its little stem and leaf with the most minute accuracy and better than we can; but it is not aware of a man who stands three yards from it.

On this rests the slyness of the dull and stupid, and this paradox: "There is a mystery in the minds of those who have none."

For practical life genius is about as useful as an astronomer's telescope is in a theatre.

[...] For the intellect is a differentiating, and consequently separating, principle. Its different gradations, much more even than those of mere culture, give everyone different concepts, in consequence of which everyone lives to a certain extent in a different world, in which he meets directly only his equals in rank, but can attempt to call to the rest and make himself intelligible to them only from a distance.

Great differences in the degree, and thus the development, of the understanding open a wide gulf between one man and another, which can be crossed only by kindness of heart. This, on the other hand, is the unifying principle that identifies everyone else with one's own self.

The connexion, however, remains a moral one; it cannot become intellectual.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.145-6

Mice live all their lives next to the ground, building their nests and gathering their food among the roots of the tall grass and bushes of the prairie. Because of this, Mice never see things at a distance.

Everything they can see is right in front of them, where they can sniff at it with their noses and Touch it with their whiskers. Their lives are spent in Touching things in this way, and in gathering seeds and berries to eat.

A Mouse Person would be one who saw everything close up, and whose vision would be limited to the immediate world around him.

He would be a gatherer of things. He might gather facts, information, material objects, or even ideas. But because he could not see far enough to connect to his world with that of the great prairie of the world around him, he would never be able to use or understand all that he saw or gathered.

[Hyemeyohsts Storm]
Seven Arrows, p. 7-8

It is difficult for an adversary to see further than the dichotomy between winning and losing in the adversarial combat. Like a chess player, he is always tempted to make a tricky move, to get a quick victory.

The discipline, always to look for the best move on the board, is hard to attain and hard to maintain.

The player must have his eye always on a longer view, a larger gestalt.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 239

Whether something is monolithic, binary, dialectical, or meaninglessly plural is a function of your distance from it.

When you're very close to something, all you can see is oneness, pure dominance by the thing of all others. For a baby, Mother's breast is the entire universe. For a fundamentalist, it's God.

When you're a bit further away, a tidy binary replaces oneness. There are men and there are women. There's East and there's West. This is the distance journalists live at. The world of journalism is always seeing small fluctuations in the relative positions of big, established binaries like these.

[Momus]
'Binary hopping'

[...] it is clear what is the function to which Schiller attributes the highest value, divinity: it is the constancy of the idea of the ego.

The ego that abstracts itself from affectivity is for him the most important thing, consequently this is the idea he has differentiated most, as is the case with every introvert. His god, his highest value, is the abstraction and conservation of the ego.

For the extravert, on the contrary, the god is the experience of the object, complete immersion in reality; hence a god who became man is more sympathetic to him than an eternal, immutable lawgiver.

From the abstracting attitude of consciousness, which in pursuit of its ideal makes an experience of every occurrence and from the sum of experience a law, a certain limitation and impoverishment result which are characteristic of the introvert.

[...] For the more the relation to the object is restricted by abstraction (because too many "experiences" and "laws" are made), the more insistently does a craving for the object develop in the unconscious, and this finally expresses itself in consciousness as a compulsive sensuous tie to the object.

[C. J. Jung]
Psychological Types, p. 91-3

[...] it should not be forgotten that, in the same measure as the conscious attitude may pride itself on a certain godlikeness by reason of its lofty and absolute standpoint, an unconscious attitude develops with a godlikeness oriented downwards to an archaic god whose nature is sensual and brutal.

[C. J. Jung]
Psychological Types, p.96

Human beings are capable of meta-abstraction: there’s the phenomena in and of itself - that complicated and multi-layered thing; and then there’s your representation of it - which is what you perceive, [and] is already abstracted, and limited, to a tremendous degree; and then there’s abstractions of that.

It seems to me that language is a thumbnail of images, that are a thumbnail of the reality of things. So if I say ‘cat’ to you, what the word does is produce the image of a generic cat - which is already a kind of abstraction - and then that’s attached to your understanding, so that you can generate the understanding that would go along, at least in part, with perceiving or interacting with a real cat.

So in some sense what I’m doing is compressing the information down to a tremendously low-resolution thumbnail, and then throwing that at you, and you decompress it into a low-resolution image, and then you decompress that into something that’s roughly equivalent to reality. That’s what you’re doing when you’re reading a book, for example. When you read the book you can conjure up images of the places that the author is talking about, and […] of the characters.

Intelligence in general seems to be whatever underlies the ability to generate those low-resolution representations, and to utilise them - to manipulate them in your mind [and] communicate them to others.

Your ability to abstract, and then your ability to manipulate those abstractions, seems to be at the core of whatever ‘intelligence’ is, and that’s what IQ purports to measure.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'2015 Personality Lecture 18: Openness - Creativity & Intelligence'

Temple Grandin’s claim was that she cannot see ‘house,’ she can only see a house. So if you say to her something like ‘house’ then what comes to mind is a particular house that she’s actually experienced - she can’t take the next level of abstraction past that. [It] seems to be something like a deficit in generating a hieroglyphic image.

[Children] draw people with sticks and circles, [and it’s] unbelievably sophisticated - because those aren’t pictures, they’re hieroglyphics. The child automatically produces them, and that’s a proto-linguistic development. Some autistic kids can draw like Leonardo DaVinci, with no training whatsoever, and that’s partly because they don’t use hieroglyphics - they don’t really conceptualise the thing they’re looking at as an abstraction. They see nothing but detail.

If you’re training yourself to be a visual artist, you have to stop looking at the abstraction, and start looking at the thing. That’s very unsettling.

If you take your hand, for example, and you look at it, and you snap it out of ‘hand’ representation, it all of a sudden looks like some kind of octopus claw. And as soon as you see it that way, you can draw it. But as long as you’re seeing it like a ‘hand,’ you’re going to put a balloon, with four balloons on it, and that’s going to be the ‘hand.’

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'2015 Personality Lecture 18: Openness - Creativity & Intelligence'

In Barthes [...] criticism became what it has only rarely been, subjective and epicurean. Barthes wanted, especially in his last books, a sensuous relation to phenomena rather than an ethical discrimination of their qualities or consequences.

We can interpret pleasure as a more-or-less continuous satisfaction or, as in Barthes's writing, a momentary bliss: in his case it depends upon a savour, a glance, a phrase. In such epicurean forms it goes with the cult of the fragment, not the large-scale work but the sentence. Style appears as a flicker of eloquence; it accompanies the refusal to be great.

Judgement and discrimination are disavowed because they imply an aspiration to completeness which is distasteful to patricians. In judgement and discrimination the detail is chosen only for its representative force and never for the extractable pleasure it provides.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 125

People can identify a given action in many ways. Of particular interest is that act identifications vary in level of abstraction.

High-level identifications are abstract (e.g. becoming more cultured), lower-level identifications become more and more concrete (e.g. attending a ballet; listening to sounds and watching people move around while you sit quiet and still). Low-level identifications tend to convey a sense of "how" an activity is done; high-level ones tend to convey a sense of "why."

Although people drift upward and downward as circumstances change, there's also evidence that people differ in the levels they tend to maintain as they think about what they're doing. Some people report typically thinking of their actions in low-level terms; others typically think of their actions in high-level terms.

These differences are reflected in a variety of ways. For example, compared with high-level identifiers, low-level identifiers tend to be more impulsive and less planful or stable in their behaviour, consistent with the idea that they're especially vulnerable to cues implying different identifications.

[...] Emmons (1992) found evidence that people differ in levels of abstraction they characteristically use when reporting their personal strivings. Some people report strivings that are broad, abstract, and expansive. Others report strivings that are narrower, more concrete, and even superficial.

These tendencies are also reflected in moment-to-moment contruals of behaviours they're engaged in. When randomly paged and asked to report what they were doing, high-level strivers reported they were engaged in relatively high-level activities; low-level strivers reported they were engaged in relatively concrete actions.

[C.S. Carver & M.F. Scheier]
On the Self-Regulation of Behavior, p. 74-5, 79

A high-level identifier is akin to a frame, or a grand-narrative.

In the absence of high-level story, behaviour becomes more diverse. The story imposes sense on those things nested within it; it orders them, providing direction, or 'rules'; it erects boundaries and classes certain things as off-limits.

In its absence, anything goes.

God is the ultimate high-level identifier. For believers, everything takes place under the omniscient eye of a higher-power: no action goes unseen.

Another similarity between the Miller et al. (1960) statement and the Powers (1973a) model concerns the distinction between digital and analog processes and the idea that the two can work in concert within a system.

The Powers model is mostly analog in nature (i.e. both feedback and discrepancies are represented continuously and quantitatively). It deviates from that quality only at the program level, where behaviour is a digital process (i.e. a linear string of decisions).

In the same way, Miller et al. argued that "planning at the higher levels [equivalent to Powers's programs] looks like the sort of information-processing we see in digital computers, whereas the execution of the Plan at the lowest levels looks like the sort of process we see in analogue computers."

They went on to suggest that development of a skill is comparable to providing a digital-to-analog converter for the output of a digital machine. Thus, Miller et al. saw the two kinds of systems as compatible.

[C.S. Carver & M.F. Scheier]
On the Self-Regulation of Behavior, p. 76-7

The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from our selves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively. This distance, this ability to rise above the world in which we live, has been made possible by the evolution of the frontal lobes.

To understand the landscape we need both to go out into the felt, lived world of experience as far as possible, along what one might think of as the horizontal axis, but also to rise above it, on the vertical axis.

To live headlong, at ground level, without being able to pause (stand outside the immediate push of time) and rise (in space) is to be like an animal; yet to float off up into the air is not to live at all - just to be a detached observing eye.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 21-2

Archaic -                     Being
Magic -                     Acting
Mythic -                     Images
Mental -                     Words

Under the assumption that we may so generalize, we suggest that many aboriginal cultures around the world represent (or approximate representing) the Other as a Firstness; in the Spenglerian tradition, and on analogy with such descriptives as Faustian and Apollinian, we choose to characterize such cultures as manifestations of the “Shamanic” soul, and to note that, for such cultures, the highest and most conspicuous art form is invariably dance, since it is the fleeting ecstasy of dance that most fully allows the artisan to approximate and to represent a state of Firstness.

[Steven Bonta]

'A Peircean typology of cultural prime symbols: Culture as category'

Aboriginals lived close to the unconscious realm, the realm of Dreaming, constantly dipping into it. Thanks to this proximity every (waking) thing was infused with unconsciousness, or 'dream consciousness.' The border between dream life and real life was permeable, ill-defined.

The sorites paradox (from Greek soros, a heap). Thought to have originated with Eubulides of Miletus (c. 350 BC).

If one grain of sand is not a heap, and at no stage adding one more grain of sand is going to make the difference between not being a heap and being a heap, how can it ever be that (by, for example, the time 100,000 grains are reached) a heap has come into being?

This results from believing that the whole is the sum of the parts, and can be reached by a sequential process of incrementation.

It tries to relate two things: a grain of sand and a heap, as though their relationship was transparent. It also presupposes that there must either be a heap or not be a heap at any one time: ‘either/or’ are your only alternatives. That is the left-hemisphere view, and sure enough it leads to paradox.

According to the right-hemisphere view, it is a matter of a shift in context, and the coming into being of a Gestalt, an entity which has imprecisely defined bounds, and is recognised whole: the heap comes into being gradually, and is a process, an evolving, changing ‘thing’ (this problem is related to the Growing Argument).

Failure to take into account context, inability to understand Gestalt forms, an inappropriate demand for precision where none can be found, an ignorance of process, which becomes a never-ending series of static moments: these are signs of left-hemisphere predominance.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 137-9

The essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel no concern about such chimeras as the latter end of the world.

Well, I can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human nature. Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of the word insanity. The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.

[William James]
'Some Metaphysical Problems', Pragmatism and Other Writings, p. 50-1

Elevated power increases the psychological distance one feels from others, and this distance, according to construal level theory (Y. Trope & N. Liberman, 2003), should lead to more abstract information processing.

Thus, high power should be associated with more abstract thinking—focusing on primary aspects of stimuli and detecting patterns and structure to extract the gist, as well as categorizing stimuli at a higher level—relative to low power.

In 6 experiments involving both conceptual and perceptual tasks, priming high power led to more abstract processing than did priming low power, even when this led to worse performance. Experiment 7 revealed that in line with past neuropsychological research on abstract thinking, priming high power also led to greater relative right-hemispheric activation.

[Pamela Smith & Yaacov Trope]
'You focus on the forest when you’re in charge of the trees: Power priming and abstract information processing'

[...] learning to recognize and appreciate the domain of un-order is liberating, because we can stop applying methods designed for order and instead focus on legitimate methods that work well in un-ordered situations.

Tom Stewart references the case of a group of marines taken to the New York Mercantile Exchange in 1995 to be taught and to play with simulators of the trading environment. Naturally the traders won each time. But when the traders visited the Marine Corp’s base in Quantico and played war games against the marines, they won yet again.

What they realized is that the traders were skilled at spotting patterns and intervening to structure those patterns in their favor. The Marines, on the other hand, like most business school graduates, had been trained to collect and analyze data and then make rational decisions. In a dynamic and constantly changing environment, it is possible to pattern un-order but not to assume order.

In another case, a group of West Point graduates were asked to manage the playtime of a kindergarten as a final year assignment. The cruel thing is that they were given time to prepare. They planned; they rationally identified objectives; they determined backup and response plans. They then tried to “order” children’s play based on rational design principles, and, in consequence, achieved chaos.

They then observed what teachers do. Experienced teachers allow a degree of freedom at the start of the session, then intervene to stabilize desirable patterns and destabilize undesirable ones; and, when they are very clever, they seed the space so that the patterns they want are more likely to emerge.

In the ordered domain we focus on efficiency because the nature of systems is such that they are amenable to reductionist approaches to problem solving; the whole is the sum of the parts, and we achieve optimization of the system by optimization of the parts.

In the domain of un-order, the whole is never the sum of the parts; every intervention is also a diagnostic, and every diagnostic an intervention; any act changes the nature of the system. As a result, we have to allow a degree of sub-optimal behavior of each of the components if the whole is to be optimized.

[Cynthia Kurtz & Dave Snowden]
'The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world'

Music and art come before language in human evolution, so human language evolves from abstractions.

The evolutionary argument for this is it allows rapid exaptive thinking. The ability to rapidly repurpose things actually comes from abstraction. [You also] get higher empathy in abstraction than you do in the material.

Things like parable form stories for example provide better moral guidance than values or principles, partly because they define the negative not the positive. So an ability to understand or appreciate beauty is actually going to make you a much more effective decision-maker as a human than if you just confine yourself to material.

[Dave Snowden]
'EP11 Dave Snowden and Systems Thinking', Jim Rutt Show

Imagine reality as a series of stacked abstractions.

Let’s use an example: there is a factory floor level view of an assembly line with real parts and real workers, then there can be a process monitoring software abstraction of the same reality running on an operator’s computer screen, and then there can be a higher abstraction yet in the COO’s office where measurements from the real time process control software are aggregated.

Because the COO is looking from a higher plane of abstraction, he or she is likely to focus on weak signals that would only look like noise for the floor factory worker.

Now I used a process control software analogy, but the same can be said about the mind. Some minds are sensitive to higher degrees of abstraction, and the more complex the environment, the higher the abstraction mental plane required.

Let me make one more point on abstraction and weak signals: the higher the abstraction, the weaker the signal! That is because higher abstractions operate at lower energy levels. In the factory floor example, it takes a lot less energy to run the software abstraction of the assembly line than the assembly line itself, and so, the higher abstraction means less brute force, more subtlety and thus less obvious signals.

This view of reality as a vertical series of stacked abstractions fits beautifully with the complexity which our brains and the world they function in share.

Emergence, the key ingredient of complexity, is precisely the mechanism that enables upward abstraction.

['lnedelescu']
'Effective strategy in complex environments, or why a complex world requires abstract thinking'

In terms of psychotherapy, Grof found that the deepest source of psychological symptoms and distress reached back far past childhood traumas and biographical events to the experience of birth itself, intimately interwoven with the encounter with death.

When successfully resolved, this experience tended to result in a dramatic disappearance of long-standing psychopathological problems, including conditions and symptoms that had proved entirely recalcitrant to previous therapeutic programs.

I should emphasize here that this "perinatal" (surrounding birth) sequence of experiences typically took place on several levels at once, but it virtually always had an intense somatic component.

The physical catharsis involved in reliving the birth trauma was extremely powerful, and clearly suggested the reason for the relative ineffectiveness of most psychoanalytic forms of therapy, which have been based largely on verbal interaction and by comparison seem scarcely to scratch the surface. The perinatal experiences that emerged in Grof's work were preverbal, cellular, elemental. They took place only when the ego's usual capacity for control had been overcome, either through the use of a catalytic psychoactive substance or therapeutic technique, or through the spontaneous force of the unconscious material.

Yet these experiences were also profoundly archetypal in character. Indeed, the encounter with this perinatal sequence constantly brought home to subjects a sense that nature itself, including the human body, was the repository and vessel of the archetypal, that nature's processes were archetypal processes an insight that both Freud and Jung had approached, but from opposite directions.

[Richard Tarnas]

The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 427-8

Kohlberg's dilemmas, in the hypothetical abstraction of their presentation, divest the moral actors from the history and psychology of their individual lives and separate the moral problem from the social contingencies of its possible occurrence.

In doing so, the dilemmas are useful for the distillation and refinement of the "objective principles of justice" toward which Kohlberg's stages strive.

However, the reconstruction of the dilemma in its contextual particularity allows the understanding of cause and consequence which engages the compassion and tolerance considered by previous theorists to qualify the feminine sense of justice.

Only when substance is given to the skeletal lives of hypothetical people is it possible to consider the social injustices which their moral problems may reflect and to imagine the individual suffering their occurrence may signify or their resolution engender.

[Carol Gilligan]

‘In a Different Voice’, Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 47, No. 4, p. 511-12

Requiring that all phenomena must be ultimately subsumable under a covering law betrays an ontological bias in favor of a deterministic, or at the very least, linear universe devoid of novelty and creativity.

Modern philosophy and science allowed no discontinuities or surprises because a deterministic universe excludes all forms of randomness and nonlinearity. Also, because philosophy's understanding of causal relations and explanation required that the explanandum be identified with the generalizable and repeatable, the object or phenomenon in situ to be explained first had to be lifted from its concretely individuated particularity so as to be so always and everywhere.

Both of these requirements, in turn, presupposed a static or, at the very least, nonevolving (only developing) explanandum that a covering law could capture in all its essential features, always. Indeed, only this assumption makes predictability, the whole point of the covering-law approach, possible at all. As Hempel (1965) once noted, explanation was thought to be related to proof.

Given that what is surveyed is eternal and essentially unchanging, the survey's result should yield answers that are always and everywhere the same. Since no point of view or time is privileged, contextual features were dismissed as secondary and beyond the scope of scientific explanation. In a theme repeated since the time of Parmenides, the contextual and temporal were considered inexplicable because not fully real.

By excluding contingencies and idiosyncracies, science left out the unique and the individual as well.

The aim of modern science, therefore, was

“to so objectify experience that it no longer contains any historical element. The scientific experiment does this by its methodological procedure[s]. ... (which guarantee), through the objectivity of (their) approach, that these basic experiences can be repeated by anyone.... Hence no place can be left in science or philosophy for the individuating effect of experience. Modern science and philosophy thus (continue) in their methodology what they have always striven after.

Experience is valid only if it is confirmed; hence its dignity depends on its fundamental repeatability. But this means that experience, by its very nature, abolishes its history.” (Gadamer 1985, 311)

Covering-law explanations were even supposed to apply to reasoning about morals, as Kantian ethics illustrates. Perhaps reflexes such as the patella jerk or reactions like blinks approximate this kind of phenomenon, but the individual trajectories of hurricanes and Bénard cells emphatically do not. Nor does most of biology.

Science and philosophy have had no room for individuals in all their novelty and particularity, and no room, as a result, for understanding or explaining individual human act-tokens as unique trajectories.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.218-9

There would be no need for hermeneutical explanation in a closed, linear, deterministic universe. But in an open, complex, world, a more expansive form of reasoning than the narrow, straightjacket rules and formulas of episteme allows us to understand why [people behave the way they do].

When we are asked to explain human action there is often no universal or lawful regularity from which to strictly deduce its parts and predict an agent's future course of behaviour. Because the dynamics are complex, induction won't do either; that logical technique searches for commonalities across individuals to formulate a lawful regularity from which future individual cases can then be inferred.

But because complex systems, whether hurricanes or people, are embedded in time and space, unique circumstances and individual experience play a crucial role in their identity, their behavior, and in the way in which they must be explained.

In the case of complex systems, as we saw, the devil is in the way differences and variations, not commonalities, hang together in a particular context, given a particular background. As information theory has always insisted, the differences make a difference.

[…] I suspect that the current revival of interest in myth, the tales of Genesis, and storytelling in general is not unrelated to the perceived inadequacies of the received logic of explanation that modern philosophy and science have offered the public at large.

But it is not, as some have suspected, that we find in myths and conversations a mechanism for coping [...] I have claimed that by relying on concrete, contextual and temporally grounded narratives and reenactments, myths and tales explain because they recreate the open, nonlinear dynamics of the real processes they purport to explain.

By reconstructing a storyline that hangs together despite and because of many twists and turns, myths and stories respect time and origins; by emphasizing concrete, particular details they respect connectivity and correlations, that is, contextual embeddedness. They respect, in other words, the human being's sense of place, the importance of a particular temporal and spatial point of view in human life and behaviour.

In contrast to the approach taken by science, human beings and their actions do not adopt “the view from nowhere.”

The idea that all reasoning must be prooflike is a fairly recent one, as we have seen: only a few hundred years old. […] We have therefore come full circle, it seems, to a much earlier understanding of what counts as explanation: to explanation as genealogical, story-like, and richly contextual.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, 241-2

Henceforth the complex and changing world of daily life would be judged unreal: the details of experience and change were just “stories," and stories were untrue illusions, poets the "mothers of lies."

Philosophers and scientists thus usurped the bard's divine authority by substituting for the concretely and messily real the absolutely and abstractly Real.

Despite his respect for the individual and the embodied, even Aristotle gave pride of place to the eternal and universal. Through philosophical and scientific reflection, thinkers were expected to dismiss the here and now, discard all indexical references, and tap into Universal Truth, which exists only in eternity. Parmenides had won.

Definition […] with its eternal unchanging definiens, aligned itself with the universal and general, with the eternal and absolutely true "one," which can only be so in abstraction from the profuse variation of contingent detail exhibited by the “many." Symbolic logic and mathematics advanced this trend away from time and context as their abstract notations put more and more distance between formal systems and the messy here and now. Newtonian science and covering-law theories of explanation followed in this tradition. And so for 2,000 years, the search continued for a perfect, that is, a universal, language (Eco).

But neither the universal nor the abstract explains the particular as such when that particular is an open, dynamical system far from equilibrium.

Discarding the unique characteristics that time and context impress on natural phenomena in favor of universal and eternal essences, therefore, had an additional consequence: the very contingent details exhibited by the "many" - those idiosyncratic characteristics and vicissitudes that make each individual unlike any other - disappeared from ontology and epistemology as well.

When time and context are banished, in other words, individuality is banished as well [...] Rehabilitating a narrative logic of explanation [...] will be necessary if we are ever going to pay more than lip service to the individual.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p. 243

The alchemist or philosopher of the Arabian Culture, too, assumes a necessity within his world-cavern that is utterly and completely different from the necessity of dynamics. There is no causal nexus of law-form but only one cause, God, immediately underlying every effect.

To believe in Nature-laws would, from this standpoint, be to doubt the almightiness of God.

If a rule seems to emerge, it is because it pleases God so; but to suppose that this rule was necessity would be to yield to a temptation of the Devil. This was the attitude also of Carneades, Plotinus and the Neo-Pythagoreans. This necessity underlies the Gospels as it does the Talmud and the Avesta, and upon it rests the technique of alchemy.

The conception of number as function is related to the dynamic principle of cause-and-effect. Both are creations of the same intellect, expression-forms of the same spirituality, formative principles of the same objectivized and “become" Nature. In fact the physics of Democritus differs from the physics of Newton in that the chosen starting-point of the one is the optically-given while that of the other is abstract relations that have been deduced from it.

The "facts" of Apollinian Nature-knowledge are things, and they lie on the surface of the known, but the facts of Faustian science are relations, which in general are invisible to lay eyes, which have to be mastered intellectually, which require for their communication a code-language that only the expert researcher can fully understand.

The Classical, static, necessity is immediately evident in the changing phenomena, while the dynamic causation-principle prevails beyond things and its tendency is to weaken, or to abolish even, their sensible actuality.

[Oswald Spengler]

The Decline of the West, p. 393

A Hellenic river-god is definitely understood as being the river and not as, so to say, dwelling in the river […] On the contrary, not a trace of this localised materiality clings to the elves, dwarfs, witches, Valkyries and their kindred the armies of departed souls that sweep round o’nights. Whereas Naiads are sources, nixies and hags, and tree-spirits and brownies are souls that are only bound to sources, trees and houses, from which they long to be released into the freedom of roaming.

It is as though the Faustian universe abhorred anything material and impenetrable.

In things we suspect other worlds. Their hardness and thickness is merely appearance, and — a trait that would be impossible in Classical myth, because fatal to it - some favoured mortals are accorded the power to see through cliffs and crags into the depths.

But is not just this the secret intent of our physical theories, of each new hypothesis? No other Culture knows so many fables of treasures lying in mountains and pools, of secret subterranean realms, palaces, gardens wherein other beings dwell.

The whole substantiality of the visible world is denied by the Faustian Nature-feeling, for which in the end nothing is of earth and the only actual is Space. The fairy-tale dissolves the matter of Nature as the Gothic style dissolves the stone-mass of our cathedrals, into a ghostly wealth of forms and lines that have shed all weight and acknowledge no bounds.

[Oswald Spengler]

The Decline of the West, p. 404

Physics defines itself as the science devoted to discovering, developing and refining those aspects of reality that are susceptible to mathematical analysis.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with physics as such, but it is an inappropriate model for all consensible and potentially consensual knowledge.

[John Ziman]
Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science, p. 28

‘In a sense, all science aspires to be like physics, and physics aspires to be like mathematics.’

In short, abstraction is itself a prime aim. This would mean that all studies must try to get rid of their particular subject-matter so as to reach the condition of mathematics, which is universal because it has no subject-matter.

They should try to stop talking about anything but universal forms.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.194

Liberals could not see that parochial attachments called forth an intensity of conviction unmatched by an abstract attachment to humanity as a whole.

If liberalism lacked “fervour” and “fanaticism” […] it was largely because it condemned all forms of tribalism as backward and unprogressive, demanding that they give way to more and more inclusive (and necessarily attenuated) allegiances.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.384

While number cannot be held in the hand, they are abstractions that can be grasped in the mind; they are the objects of thought that can be manipulated and moved around in a mental universe.

To the mathematician and scientist these mental objects exist through their interrelationships of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Otherwise they are without quality, and when we speak of them as "having value" we mean this only in the quantitative sense and not as referring to any intrinsic spiritual or moral value.

Within Indigenous science, number is a being - a living entity immersed in flux. To enter the world of numbers and sacred mathematics is not an act of abstraction but a sacred process. To understand the transformations of number, for example, is to seek a relationship with the dynamic processes of energies and spirits.

[...]

When we open the drawer we are not surprised to see sets of fish and steak knives, a bread knife, a carving knife, a paring knife, a chopping knife, and a knife for cutting cheese. To us, knives are knives, things used for cutting. We may use adjectives to distinguish between fish and steak knives, but we would never go as far as to ask our language to differentiate between the individual steak knives in a particular set.

But in a hunter's world all knives are individual. Each knife was made by a particular person. Not only will it differ from other knives in the way it looks, works, and handles, but it will share the spirit of the person who made it.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.163, 228

In the process of solving a complex problem by using a network, it is not necessary to have an explicit theory about the structure of the problem.

In conventional computational problem-solving such a theory is explicitly required in order to construct an algorithm that can be programmed. The construction of a theory therefore precedes all other activities.

When dealing with complex systems, however, it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to construct such a theory since a large number of factors can interact in complex, non-linear ways. Theory construction under such circumstances involves large-scale reduction of complexity with a high risk of ending up with an abstraction that provides an inadequate model of the system.

Since a neural network implicitly encodes the relationships between large amounts of factors in a non-linear, distributed way, the need for a complete and explicit theory falls away.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.69

[…] the stage of financial capitalism did not place emphasis on the exchange of goods or the production of goods as the earlier stages of commercial capitalism and industrial capitalism had done.

In fact, financial capitalism had little interest in goods at all, but was concerned entirely with claims on wealth - stocks, bonds, mortgages, insurance, deposits, proxies, interest rates, and such.

It invested capital not because it desired to increase the output of goods or services but because it desired to float issues (frequently excess issues) of securities on this productive basis. It built railroads in order to sell securities, not in order to transport goods; it constructed great steel corporations to sell securities, not in order to make steel, and so on.

But, incidentally, it greatly increased the transport of goods, the output of steel, and the production of other goods.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, p.212

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