1513
Abstraction changed how we see the world by shifting our focus from a collection of fixed, isolated "things" to a dynamic system of interrelated processes and structures. Historically, humans relied on "thing-seeing," which categorized the world into discrete entities like trees or animals framed by axes of reference like size and position. Abstraction, particularly in science and art, allows us to "peel away" this "phenomenal skin" of secondary qualities to reveal the underlying structures that define reality.
This shift toward abstraction has several profound implications for human perception and cognition:
1. The "Beholder's Share" and Top-Down Processing
Abstraction in art—such as the work of Turner or Mondrian—radically changes visual processing by reducing images to form, line, color, or light. Because these works dismantle the building blocks of "bottom-up" visual processing (like perspective and holistic depiction), the brain is forced to rely on top-down processing. This means that the beholder must recruit their own emotions, memories, and imagination to interpret the work, making the experience of seeing a creative act of the brain rather than a simple window on the world.
2. The "Essential Poverty" of Mental Abstraction
In the realm of imagination, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that abstraction is characterized by an "essential poverty". While a real, perceived object possesses an infinite multiplicity of determinations and relationships that we can never fully exhaust, an abstracted mental image only contains what we intentionally put there. This allows for "quasi-observation," where we "see" the object but cannot learn anything new from it because the "knowledge" of the object is what constituted the image in the first place.
3. Music and the Acousmatic Experience
Music provides a paradigm for pure abstraction through the acousmatic experience, which is the severance of sound from its physical cause. When we listen to music, we pass from the "world of sound" into a "world of tones," where sounds are detached from the material world and organized through an irreducible metaphor of movement in an imaginary space. This allows us to perceive "pure events" in which no individual substances participate, offering a "God's-ear view" of a soundscape that vision cannot replicate.
4. Modernity, Identity, and Fragmentation
In the modern era, abstraction has led to the segmentation of society, requiring humans to play multiple, often incompatible roles. This has prompted an "inward turn" where value is drained from public action and transferred to subjective emotion. Furthermore, technology and the digital age have abstracted time and narrative; the "digital vision" promises to liberate us from linear, temporal confines, delivering us into a universe where knowledge is an immediate, full presence rather than a chain of authored thought with a beginning, middle, and end.
5. From "Thing-Conscious" to "Process-Conscious"
Finally, abstraction has enabled us to see "action patterns" where we once saw static objects. We now recognize that a pattern in nature is a temporary boundary connecting the past and future of the processes that trace it. This shift makes us "process-conscious," causing us to attach importance to the emergence of unity and harmony in perception rather than just the quality of a single feeling. In this way, abstraction "cleans the window of perception," reconciling us to the world by translating it into pure appearance.
