to participate in your experience. Indeed, we find such an examination of, or participation in, our own experience to be alienating: we are unfamiliar with that which is most personal to us. That’s tragic.
Finally, it is not an accident that Erich Fromm has supplied us with this term. Fromm used the theories of Karl Marx to develop his approach to clinical psychology. Indeed, his construction of the term “abstractification” can be understood within the framework of a Marxist critique of capitalism. A brief foray into this will follow as a first example of abstractification—the abstractification of money. Before getting to that, I will allow Fromm (1990) to introduce the term as he has engineered it:
In order to understand the abstractification process in modern man, we must first consider the ambiguous function of abstraction in general. It is obvious that abstractions in themselves are not a modern phenomenon. In fact, an increasing ability to form abstractions is characteristic of the cultural development of the human race. If I speak of “a table,” I am using an abstraction; I am referring, not to a specific table in its full concreteness, but to the genus “table” which comprises all possible concrete tables. If I speak of “a man” I am not speaking of this or that person, in his concreteness and uniqueness, but of the genus “man,” which comprises all individual persons. (113–114)
To review what has been meant by “abstraction” and “concretion,” let me summarize: Fromm explains that the process of moving from the specific instance (concrete) to the general case (abstract) is an instance of abstraction.
Try this exercise: Draw a square on the margin of this page. Is it a square? Chances are that the concrete figure that you have drawn is actually no square at all. The side-lengths probably aren’t all equal, and the angles probably aren’t exactly 90-degrees. But we can fit it into the category nonetheless. “Square” is an abstraction of the concrete “whatever” you’ve just drawn (or imagined because there wasn’t a pen handy). The terms “abstraction” and “concretion” come from the categorizing procedures of logic. There will be more spoken on the system of logic in the chapters that follow. Now back to Fromm’s quote. He alludes to the biological classification system with examples of the terms genus and species. You are a person. Not many people know you very well, perhaps nobody does. To say that you are a human tells them a little bit, but it hardly captures you. How about your Facebook profile? Sure, this tells them a bit more, but does it really capture you or does it leave some important stuff out? This will be the topic of the first chapter.
Fromm also explains how abstractions alone are not inherently problematic. They are in fact very helpful. He explains that, without them, contemporary civilization would certainly return to a more primitive form. You might find yourself introduced to somebody else online, perhaps even mediated by a social network like Facebook. Rather than having nothing but a name to go off of, the information provided on a Facebook profile might be helpful in determining any potential similarities between yourself and this new contact. Abstractions are useful. But reading the information on somebody’s profile does not mean that you have met them. This is an abstractification. This is what would happen if the concrete social introduction were replaced by the abstract social introduction; this would be as if meeting somebody meant nothing more than exchanging names, occupations, alma mater, and favorite bands. Once again, the haunting familiarity of this kind of social introduction demonstrates the pervasiveness of abstractification. Fromm notes how this process has gotten out of hand in his introduction of the term “abstractify:”
Instead of forming abstract concepts where it is necessary and useful, everything, including ourselves, is being abstractified; the concrete reality of people and things to which we can relate with the reality of our own person, is replaced by abstractions. (114, emphasis added)
You see how fitting Fromm’s term is for the present work? Abstractification is the replacement of processes with things. This even includes ourselves. That is the overarching thesis of this book. The process of being human has been replaced by (that generic category) human being.
Overview
Part I. In order to accomplish the task of demonstrating the deficits of fact-mindedness, I will have to outline the metaphysical framework of how we look at our universe. This is how it became possible to speak about things in fact—that is, without greater skepticism or personal insight. This begins with epistemology, or what it means to “know” something. It wasn’t always possible to know something “in fact,” and before that, you only knew something if it was divinely inspired. Incidentally, both of these epistemologies (theories about knowledge) place the responsibility of understanding outside of the person. The next part will describe certain ontological assumptions—assumptions about whether or not something can or does exist (and what that might mean). To state something as fact requires not only a certain level of predictability in the universe, but also an unquestionable way of making observations.
Part II. Fact-mindedness has important consequences for education. I argue that it has created the scenario where people can begin to take the word of a fabricated newsstand’s regarding current events. Two important things happen between the early years of primary school and the later years of secondary school. 1) Students lose the creativity, curiosity, and unique insights that are their personal way of understanding and interacting with their world. 2) Students become less sensitive to, and eventually completely lose touch with, their intrinsic motivation. These two things amount to a student losing the skills for discernment and understanding, and then the sense of personal initiative in these processes (that is, they completely lose the desire to learn). That this occurs between pre-school and high school is not news and can be seen in the shift from “school is fun” to “school is boring” to finally “why am I even doing this?” Concluding Part II is an argument for why education has proceeded this way. Following the Marxist Louis Althusser, I argue that schooling does not simply result in the loss of motivation of students, but it is specifically engineered to accomplish just this! It requires that we take a long and hard look at who benefits from an education that encourages students to abdicate their own sense of understanding, and to take the word of others instead.
Part III. I will examine the fields in which these ideologies seem to dominate: physics, biology, and psychology. I’m going to do my best to keep these as simple as possible. I will try to demonstrate how, in each of these topics, it has become customary to take its subject matter to be a collection of things. Physics is concerned with particle things; biology with organic things; psychology with, well, more organic things; and so on. Moreover, the reduction of processes to things has been embraced and taught with an almost dogmatic fervor. I suspect that you know this approach (knowing things) quite well—you might even be good at it in some cases. I also suspect that you are intimately familiar with the second approach (understanding processes). This is because it is as close to you as your experience.
1For me, getting an afternoon cup of coffee is tantamount to self-actualization.
CHAPTER ONE
You are Becoming your Facebook Profile or, Abstractification by Facebook
You are becoming your Facebook profile. It started off as harmless, albeit peculiar, event where you were asked to fit your personality—who you are—into the template provided by Facebook. This fitting procedure required that you subtract large portions of yourself in order for there to be enough room. You have subsequently grown accustomed to this reduced-format “you.” As you have grown and changed in life, so too does your Facebook personality change because your experiences have been used to inform your profile. You have even found the ability to experience life, albeit narrowly, through the social
