1st August 2004.
Gary.C. Moore:
Precisely. The enemy in each and every endeavor is abstraction and the ease with which it is used.

Michael Pennamacoor:

... and "abstraction" in this and only case [!], in the way you use the term (abstractly, as some generality or commonplace, or essence, etc) is an other abstraction (according to your definitions), and so, if the "enemy" is "abstraction" and abstraction, then your very terms of reference deny your very claim since you utilise the very "enemy" you claim to be against: thus you do worse than contra-dict yourselves (you and Jud and nominalism, insofar as both are the same analytically), you render yourself silent in your own terms.

Gary.C. Moore: Yes, I agree this is a significant problem. However, that obscures the pragmatic problem I am trying to solve. Praxis is the forgotten fundamental of every abstraction, sometimes, as implicit in what you are saying, even when one is trying to use a more concrete abstraction. Yet we KNOW in the sense even of Heidegger's going back to the Greek sense of "Idea" as something literally seen, every abstraction must be based on sense perception.

Now, the actual problem is this. An 'ascending' abstraction cannot simply throw away its perceptual examples. An abstraction is made by literally selecting common qualities while ignoring the differences. One proceeds, then, to use the abstraction because it makes thinking so much easier because it discards all the numerous differences in actual experience. And in propaganda, politics, history, sociology, psychology, economics, and the other soft sciences one is rarely punished for the incongruities that crop up because it takes such detailed argumentation to make a point against the abstraction, and most people don't want to hear about it in the first place. A good and extreme example are ordinary Christians. Dan Brown's THE AD VINCE CODE is completely new territory to them and comes like a shock from nowhere as if someone's been hiding the truth from them. All this stuff is so new to them and presented in a easy systematic abstract form it makes a very bad writer and very bad thinker seem a literary and theological genius. And this is primarily because it is presented in the novelistic form that is entertaining -- at least his plots are fast paced -- AND deliberately presenting itself as 'informative' to people who have no background to judge by, having never even seriously thought about their own religion, and therefore can get away with incredibly sloppy pseudo-scholarship. I have been arguing something similar elsewhere in relation to Buddhism, that real Buddhism in real Buddhist countries is absolutely nothing like the elitist and refined form presented to appeal to Western tastes. In real Buddhist countries it is just as filled with superstition and hypocrisy to such an extent, except for the elite intellectuals -- the managerial level of monks and historical scholars in Asian universities, that its actual form is indiscernible from popular Christianity, popular Judaism, popular Islam, popular Hinduism, etc. The only thing that is changed is the names of things, BUT THE INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCED FACTS ARE THE SAME! To name two powerful, popular elements, there are demons and astrology.

However, in the hard sciences, these discarded differences relatively often built up real problems in experimentation that eventually must be accounted for. The problems of the Ptolemaic solar system were dealt with by Copernicus. The problems of the Kopernican solar system were dealt with by Kepler. The problems of Kepler's solar system were dealt with by the even larger context of Newton's universe. And the problems of Newton's universe were dealt with by Einstein. All these events happened because scientists had to go back and re-explain the raw data, the actual facts as 'really' experienced -- where the individual differences had been originally ignored. They had all 'work', but the newer ones were more efficient than the older, and we still have Newton around but in an Einsteinian context.

Marx brings up the example that the existence of the abstraction "commodity" discards the factual basis of its creation by the individual human mind imagining its form and the worker's hand that made it real. These considerations are supposedly wholly unnecessary in considering a commodity as exchange value. But even the concept exchange value cannot escape its factual, material group as use value. An economy of exchange value can proceed 'successfully' while being totally obvious to the individual worker producing the commodity and its use value until -- either the individual worker as worker disappears or the use value ceases to exist. For example, the farm economy in the US had completely collapsed by the BEGINNING of 1929 but Wall Street totally ignored this in the feverish climb of the stock market until October. And when the stock market collapsed, the whole economy doubled in every year under Hoover and did little better under Roosevelt. Why? Because the farm economy not only did not improve but even got worse. The farmer and farmed land were actually disappearing. Abstract exchange values collapsed when real use value and the workers who supported it collapsed.

And of course new technology outdating old technology is another example of the real difficulties of the factual object remaining a real difficulty though ignored by the temporary success of, for instance, vinyl records. When we had vinyl records, we ignored the real difficulties of using them because obviously they were better than nothing. There were tape machines that had some advantages over vinyl,  but had a great deal of awkwardness about them. Then cassette tapes came along and seriously competed for the large vinyl market making it diminish in the profits it too in. So research and development re-thought the status of vinyl records, the actual facts of its advantages that still made it popular to many people over cassette tapes, and worked out with individual minds and individual factual hands the compact disc. And now the abstract exchange value of vinyl records has completely disappeared and cassette tapes are well on their way out.

MICHAEL PENNAMACOOR:

Otherwise, tell us what you mean by "abstraction" that does not include the very employment of it ("abstraction") so very smugly. If you can not render such as not an example, then your very speech denies its self as an "enemy" (of self); if you can not speak without employing abstractions (in your own terms, not mine!) then you can not rule against the enmity of "abstraction" with out ruling against your own speech declaring the enmity of abstraction and thus rule your (textual, which is all we have got) own speech as out-side your own rule of speech thus ruling your own speech against abstraction as an abstraction its self thus condemning yourself as non-nominalistic, and thus your own speech as utterly nihilistic, and tantamount as silence (analytically).

Gary.C. Moore:

You are actually correct. Even when I claim to be dealing with specific entities precisely my own method of argumentation can go against me. BUT PRECISELY UPON MY DECLARED PREMISES! It is all too easy to assume a point has been made and totally nailed down when in fact there are ignored differences in the facts I have brought up myself. However even that is based on my premise you must always retain in the conscious background of one's mind the material fact upon which each and every abstraction is based because that fact is its only justification. However, if we truly ever knew all we needed to know once and for all about that fact then there could never be scientific revolutions. Therefore there is always something about the originally experienced fact we have not fully understood. With abstraction, we always proceed with partial knowledge and partial ignorance, and the most important of the two, and the most ignored, is the partial ignorance.

'Sincerely' Gary C. Moore