Tagged: concept
The specificity of abstraction
Hegel begins the Phenomenology of Spirit by refuting an unexamined, commonsense view about the nature of sense perception. This view holds that our richest, most accurate, and most genuine knowledge of the world emerges from our immediate sensory experience. I see a rolling meadow, a tree upon a hilltop, flowers dotting red and white along the countryside – and then I read that very same description in a book, or in a blog post. Surely, the commonsense thought goes, I am better acquainted with the world in the former case, when I stand in that meadow and direct my attention to it, this, in the here and now. The petals of the flowers flit in the wind, a rabbit peeks her head out from above the tall grass. On what grounds could I possibly dispute this, the rich specificity of my immediate experience?
The first step comes in recognizing that, if I’m really to be relying on my immediate experience, then I can have no recourse to such descriptions as in the paragraph above. After all, these words are hollow ghosts which describe, but are not, the experience itself – they are the experience as it is mediated through language (among other things). So we do away with them. I stand in the meadow, silent, head empty, and concentrate on the scene before me. This. Here. Now.
I leave the meadow and head for the woods, set camp in a copse along the way. The trees loom above me like spectres, but I am warm in front of the fire. I survey the scene before me. This. Here. Now.
The point, in any case, is that no matter where I am, when I am, nor what I’m experiencing, the only thing I’ll ever be able to come up with when asked to share my supposedly rich knowledge of the world is: This. Here. Now. I look at the sky, the This is the moon, and it shines softly amidst the stars, here, now. Hours later I do the same, the sun beats upon my brow, that blazing this, here, now. At this level of conceptual determination, I am unable to distinguish between the one and the other – I am unable to grasp the particularity of the moon nor the sun.
All I grasp, it turns out, is an abstraction which, it seems, can be applied to whichever sensory context I please. There is no sensory context in which it would not be appropriate to describe what one sees as a this, right here, right now. For this reason, the concept which we thought captured the world in all of its rich particularity ends up being one which captures the world at its emptiest. I yelp. The world, the flowers, the rabbits, the trees – so close I can touch them, smell them – in the end leave me Tantalus, grasping at but never reaching their truth.
. . .
What’s one to do? Hegel goes on to demonstrate how one progresses from this emptiest of abstractions to ones progressively richer, which encapsulate conceptually not only the properties but the dynamic relations between specific things in the world (including ourselves!). The speculative history of our progression from immediate sensory experience as the grounds for knowledge to more refined forms is the history of our self-realization as rational members of a rational world. In the end we are left with a conceptual scheme as rich and varied as the world it purports to describe, though at the expense of the naive and alluring simplicity of immediacy.
In a way this mirrors the developmental progression from childhood to adulthood – meals are not longer just given, and one must actually set themselves to work. And yet, a sort of childlike wonder is genuinely lost in this process of development. For in the empty abstraction of the this, here, now there really is a genuine mystery – one experiences the scene before them without a clue as to what its constituent parts are, nor how they relate, nor even that one is a separate thing from the world around them. All there is, is immediate sense experience, swaying and swirling greens and reds and blues and the cool of the breeze and the warmth of the sun – though not even these, for there are no concepts nor words at this stage to specify our experience.
Only this, here, now.
Stripping down to philosophical kernels (part 2)
But what exactly offends so greatly when we engage in philosophical stripping? Isn’t it rather the case that, as Aristotle puts it in his Ethics, “our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts.” The insight here pertains to the contextuality of our inquiries: the method of our investigation and the precision of our measurement must respond to our subject.
Our imagined dispute between Adorno and Aristotle lies in their disagreement over the criterion for determining conceptual inadequacy. For Adorno, full adequacy could only (and inconceivably) arrive at the moment of total identity between thought and world, in which the object of our cognitive judgment is rendered bare to us in its entirety – in which thought becomes just as whole as the world which it reaches out to. Aristotle proceeds more modestly: full adequacy involves the proper sort of fit between thought and world, and what sort of fit that is involves an investigation of the object of thought and our own aims in thinking it. Particle physics admits of more precision in measurement than ecology, but this in no way means either field is more adequate to its phenomena. It is rather that to prove the existence of gravitational waves requires a two-and-a-half mile long apparatus sensitive to perturbations of “smaller than one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton (10-19 meter),” whereas to discover the detrimental effects of mercury on a particular ecosystem requires a different set of tools and standards.
At first glance Aristotle’s sensibly conservative view may seem to have the upper hand above Adorno’s impossibly demanding method. But, it turns out, we may not yet be off the hook. Two concerns give reason to push us from Aristotle to Adorno: the circularity of assessing conceptual adequacy by way of “proper fit,” and the reasonable notion that philosophy as a knowledge-domain ought not only give us insight about parts of the world, as particle physics or ecology might, but should rather present us with an account of the whole of the world in terms of what is most fundamental about it. The first concern, we’ll see, makes way for the second.
So let’s say we agree with Aristotle – our concepts are adequate insofar as they properly fit the subject matter they seek to describe. Well, what’s a proper fit? It seems we’ve just punted the question of adequacy down the field. Our goal was to discover the criterion for ascribing adequacy to concepts; our discovered criterion ends up being that a concept is adequate when it properly – or, should I say, adequately – fits the object we are conceptualizing. But this sort of adequacy was precisely what was at stake in our deliberation, and our criterion seems to come up empty.
What would it possibly mean for a conceptualization to be adequate to its subject matter? Suppose we have a model like this: when thinking about some subject matter S, our conceptualization of it C is adequate just in case it meets our criterion of adequacy R. For example, when we think about the existence of gravitational waves, our conceptualization of that existence involves (among other things) a sensitivity to instrumental perturbations of 10-19 meters, and so meets our criterion of adequacy involving standards of precision and accuracy (among other things). But, for any conceptualization, how do we determine the criterion of adequacy R? How do we know, for example, that our concept of gravitational waves must be sensitive to one standard of measurement, but our concept of an omelette does not? None of us, I hope, measures out the egg content of their omelette to the attometer. It seems, in other words, that we must have some criterion for choosing the correct criterion of adequacy R. But to choose such a criterion we’ll need another, and to choose that one we’ll need another, and to choose… well, it’s a long and unproductive tumble from there.
Stripping down to philosophical kernels (part 1)
To cut through the confusions of theorizing our world, messy as it is, philosophers strip – they remove features of the object of inquiry until they reach some essential kernel. These kernels offer enough meat for substantial conclusions and generalizations, without the mess of irrelevant contingency to hamper philosophical progress. Indeed, on some conceptions this just is what philosophy amounts to: stripping down and generalizing based on what’s left. For example, in discussions on ethics, one might treat human beings as moral agents insofar as they possess the capacity for rationality. All of those other features about human beings – their bodies, preferences, emotions, and what have you – are set aside by the ethical theorist for the purposes of their analysis.
Typical objections to the stripping method rely on the notion that something is lost when a thing is considered in terms of its particular essential kernel. When we take human moral agency to consist in the capacity for rationality, our account is defective insofar as we have left other things out of the picture. Stripping, in other words, is inherently reductive. Perhaps the most dedicated critique along these lines is Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, which argues that thought always fails to do justice to its object. Whenever we conceive of a particular object (or set of particular objects) under a concept, our conception necessarily fails to encompass the whole of that object (or set of objects).
For example, suppose I conceive of my feline companion, Bashir, as a cat. I will (quite accurately) capture the fact that Bashir is a four-legged, furry felis catus whose ancestors were quite revered in Egypt. But, I’ll fail to capture his propensity to beg for food by standing on his hind legs, as well as his particular sort of mercurial disposition toward baths. And, even the brief description I’ve just provided of those particularities invariably comes short of describing exactly who Bashir is.
For Adorno, the failure of our concepts to make good on their promises of rendering the whole of the world intelligible gives us a duty to engage in ongoing self-critique. Our failed conceptualizations produce suffering: first, of the sort that comes intrinsically from the inability of our conceptualization to make good on its implicit promise to adequately think the object of thought; second, of the sort that arises from the consequences of acting on such a failed theorization of the world. Though Adorno rejects the notion that we’ll ever reach a state of identity between thought and world (in which, as Hegel says, the real is the rational, and the rational the real), he does take it that we can move toward progressively less inadequate understandings. Indeed, such is the progress of philosophy.
lacun(a)head 