The Heavens Declare the Glory of God

The Real Problem with Abstractions

Abstraction consists of isolating a particular thing (subject) or quality (predicate) from the relational/communal network that constitutes the identity of that which is isolated. Prior to the “understanding,” which is the philosophical term for the faculty of discerning between distinct things in time, we are all met with the immediate fact of a world we are both a part of yet distinct from. The unity-in-distinction of our most basic experience testifies to the truth of communion. We ourselves are part of the communal whole that constitutes creation, and our immediate experience is the proof. Abstraction consists of breaking apart this communal whole into separate identities and events. In fact, our own self-identity consists of an original “abstraction” of ourselves from the world. When we attain self-consciousness, we become the “I,” and everything else becomes the non-I or other. This abstraction occurs after the original encounter with the world that manifests itself as a unified and immediate experience. S.L. Frank makes this point succinctly:

“The real starting points of knowledge are not the separate contents A, B, C, … with the connections among them being only ‘added on’ as it were. Rather, the real starting points are the integral complexes or unities abc, which are analyzed by us into the concepts A, B, C, … which are interconnected. Both conceptual contents and the connections among them are products of the analysis of an integral picture of being, in which everything is given or thought at once, i.e., in which there are as yet neither separate definite contents nor separate connections among these contents, but only an undivided, integral unity.”¹