In a book of cheerful wisdom by math popularizer Lillian Lieber, I underlined these words:
A person who can be loyal to such abstract concepts as truth, justice, freedom, reason, rather than to an individual or a place, has the loyalty of a human being rather than that of a dog.
What exactly is Lieber saying? Loyalty to a cousin, a neighbor, a favorite teacher, a hometown… that’s somehow bad?
Not necessarily. She goes on:
Please do not think that we are using the word ‘dog’ in a disparaging sense, for they are very dear animals… But still they are animals and not human beings.
To rise above doglike instinct you must forget the specific sights, sounds, and smells your senses gather from the world. You must instead consecrate your life to Platonic abstractions. Let your mind govern your will.
Don’t arrange your life based on the familiarity of certain odors.
But then, in a book of bittersweet wisdom by poet Bill Holm, I underlined these words:
Sacredness is unveiled through your own experience, and lives in you to the degree that you accept that experience… even, or perhaps particularly, if it comes into conflict with the abstract received wisdom that power always tries to convince you to live by.
Holm grew up on the Minnesota prairie, left for the glory and glamor of coastal universities, and then returned as a literary defender of the prairie life. As such, he is an anti-Lieber. Proudly doglike.
To Holm, what matters is your own experience, especially when it stands against the dicta and slippery platitudes of the powerful:
One of power’s unconscious functions is to rob you of your own experience by saying: we know better, whatever you may have seen or heard… we are principle, and if experience contradicts us, why then you must be guilty of something.
“Truth, justice, freedom, reason”—for Lieber, these are the highest ideals, but for Holm, they are words at once totally empty and impossibly heavy, words chanted by the powerful to drown out the quiet inner voice that tells you who you are.
So which is it? Are abstractions the essence of intellectual life, or the enemy of spiritual life?
I teach math. So I am, inescapably, a peddler of abstraction. I teach how to boil our irreducibly complex world down to simple numbers (i.e., abstractions). Then I teach how to perform calculations on these numbers (i.e., to wring new abstractions from old ones). Then I teach a language for comparing, combining, and undoing calculations, regardless of what numbers are actually being calculated upon—a language called algebra, which is an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction.
My work is in high demand. Consensus holds that every young person must learn this craft, must learn to perform certain mental operations with perfect indifference to the sights that flash and the sounds that buzz and the smells that waft around them. What I teach is something dogs can never learn.
Lieber would applaud my work. Holm, I am not so sure.
In the end, Lieber and Holm point to the same basic truth: Civilization depends on our power for abstraction. They differ in only one minor detail: how they feel about civilization.
Is it something the mind must embrace? Something the soul must resist? Or, terribly, both?
Thank you for this reflection piece. I struggle with teaching math with stories, curiosity, and encouragement while perfecting students’ skills, mastery, and efficiency. I value reasoning and conversation, but assessment results on paper dictates their “performance.”
Always a noble struggle! We’re up against a pretty powerful form of socialization. I think C. Thi Nguyen’s recent paper “Value Capture” is a nice discussion of some of the forces at play.
C. Thi Nguyen’s paper “Value Capture” offers valuable insights into how socialization influences our values and decisions, highlighting the challenges we face in maintaining our autonomy amidst powerful societal pressures.
Both, to answer the question. This philosophic debate predates Abelard vs Anselm, even Plato vs Aristotle. Holm’s late-modern nominalism — everything is a power-trip has become so banal. The quest of the soul is as much finding out what you are as who you are.
Thanks for commenting. Holm’s burst of nominalism here stood out to me partly because it was a tonal break. Mostly I read it (perhaps more softly than Holm intended it) as a call never to lose your curiosity about your own experiences or your conviction about their importance, and never to subordinate them to received wisdom — and where the two contradict, to seek some kind of synthesis or reconciliation that still honors the data of your own senses and relationships.
But I must admit that’s not exactly what Holm says in this passage! And I’m sure you’re right that, as stated, it’s a bit too sharp and absolute to be philosophically defensible.
I must disagree with Holms and anti-abstraction sentiment. What is our identity but an abstraction, a mash-up of traits, memories, and ideas? What is our world but an abstraction, governed by the laws of physics and ideas that permeate every layer of reality? First of all, it should be impossible to experience anything that the abstract logic of our universe forbids, and, second of all, if one does, it is not necessary to reject abstraction as a medium for understanding our world, merely a realization that it is necessary to update our societal understanding of the laws that govern the universe.
For Holm are TWOness and THREEness abstractions? Are one person’s TWOs the same as another’s? Seems the philosophical outcomes depend upon how these are decided.
Both — my “two” is blue and soft, yours could be colorless but loud. What they share is the abstraction that we need in order to communicate even remotely effectively 🙂
Yes, I think you’re both right that Holm is lost if he denies *all* abstraction!
I read him as cautioning against precisely the sorts of abstractions that Lieber praises, abstract social concepts like “truth, justice, freedom, reason.” My own feeling is that there *is* important content in those abstractions, but that (as Holm warns) they are rather easily weaponized.
Then again, I wonder if the greatest social and political danger comes not from those who reject abstractions altogether (does anyone?) nor those who fully embrace Lieber’s abstractionism, but those who take a vivid personal experience or intuition, and then leap straight to a vast and only weakly related abstraction. It’s the worst of both worlds: doglike narrowness coupled with power’s sweeping indifference.
Dogs are in some places as beloved as humans, they are considered intelligent animals and never betray their owners.
Nice post 99 nights in the forest