Quotes about Abstractivism

Myth is not what we most readily-most facilely, and typically abstractly-take it to be: "exotic stories" from cultures unlike ours. Myth is a mode of culture itself, which precipitated those stories and gave them their power and form over the mode of mentality or personality to which it is a historical-psychological correlate. Myth is a way of being, a mode or dimension of subjectivity, an organic system of concretely grasped value-principles concentrating the meaning of human life into a pre-philosophical metaphor, a nuclear parable or potent allegory: we recognize it in primitive or premodern peoples, we see it-briefly-in the sparkling imagination and spiritual life of children, before our distinctive modern culture crushes their morale and introduces them to the prison of compulsively literalizing ways of seeing things, the prevailing prosaic, banal, fact-ridden existence to which literalized and abstractivized mentalities can of course see no alternative. Moderns know myth, as they know anything, only as what they have dissected it into, what they have "scienced" or intellectualized.

Gnosis is cultured and critical evidentialism, it is "phenomenology" i.e. Aristotelian concern and respect for the actual and self-governing shape of the phenomena; it is a self-critical recognition that mind should not be arrogantly and unilaterally dictating its own preferred and self-flattering "laws" (logicism, rationalism, a-priorism, theologism, ideologism) to actuality. It is the true aristeia or wisdom or moderation (in Greek the same word, sophrosyne) over against the intellectual hyperactivism of Platonic abstractivism and its high-handed philosophical mandarinism: it is all too easy for facile or self-uncritical "mind" to spin out a self-coherent "noetocosm" that routinely and methodically purges all the polemics and trauma from its controlled noosphere. But this projected and constructed order is not something truly known or understood as true or actual, it is merely something logicistically obligatory to take for granted and to think in terms of.

Left-brained phasis or noesis is capable of being "critical" of the naive sympathies and subjectivisms of right-brained gnosis (immersed in its own undifferentiated immediacy), but of course it is NOT capable of being critical of its OWN peculiarly alienated (detached or dissociated or abstracted) ways of positing and relating to its intellectual constructs. We have a pre-self-alienated mode of immediacy that feels and (mis)takes this feeling for thinking, seeing and reasoning; and we have a self-alienated mode (psychological self-disengagement, "abstraction" or formalizing / bourgeois dissociation) that reduces its own feeling-components to something neutralized and manipulable, and this more sophisticated / noetic / abstractive mode mistakes its self-distancing or emotively chilled attitude for "truth" and "objectivity" when in actuality it is only a sort of psychic anesthetic.  Abstractivism is in actuality a form of LOCAL anesthetic that only works on its own feeling or intuitive consciousness, like those disinfectants or "deodorants" that do not counteract odors per se but rather cripple or benumb your sensory receptivity to them.  Thus, instead of actually understanding and mastering one's feeling-life, abstractivism is a normalized or conventionalized modus vivendi that merely withdraws from its own more primitive strata of being.