The Fathom of Abstract Reality

This is one of my composite graphic arts and I called it - The Fathom of Abstract Reality.

A sense of abstract reality is a tool that enables us to make sense of the world in terms of ideas. The developing mind begins to construct an abstract world of general concepts that represent reality in a new way. It permits an understanding of the processes by which nature and society work and of our increasing control over these processes. It takes shape as part of the development of disembedded, rational, logically structured forms of thinking. Visiting our hilltop Italian town as a Philosophic thinker, one doesn’t seek the landmarks as one might with Romantic understanding, one refers to a map.

This new abstract theoretic world can come to appear more real and reliable than the everyday particular world from which it is abstracted. Our senses and our feelings can deceive us, as becomes evident when we look at the astonishingly divergent accounts witnesses commonly give of the same event. Our theoretic world can thus seem to be more “objective.” (We might feel that the castle is further north and not so far, but what we feel is irrelevant compared to where the reliable map says it is. The photograph’s evidence that you wore a blue dress is irrefutable by your memory of having worn a Spiderman outfit.) The transition to this new kind of thinking can be very exciting for students who access it quickly and thoroughly. They believe that they are at last able to understand how things really are and how the world works. The world thus becomes re-seen as made up of vast processes – historical, social, psychological, anthropological – governed by laws and rules which abstract theoretic thinking alone can discover.