Rethinking Thinking

Creative Abstracting

By David Jiles, Ph.D.

Abstractions are so common in our society that we rarely pay attention to them. We have all seen abstract art. We read abstracts of books and articles. We often label ideas or theories as abstractions because they lack the full body of real things. Nevertheless, the process of abstracting remains largely mysterious, and many of its products go unrecognized.

Abstraction eliminates everything except one key element from observation and thinking. It reduces complex visual, physical, or emotional ideas to bare, stripped images, revealing, through simplicity, the power of purity.

Physicist Werner Heisenberg defined abstracting as “the possibility of considering an object or group of objects under one viewpoint while disregarding all other properties of the object. The essence of abstraction consists of singling out one feature, which, in contrast to other properties, is considered to be important.” (1, 2) His definition applies to any discipline, as Picasso made clear in describing the purpose of his abstract paintings: “I want to say the nude. I don’t want to do a nude. I want only to say breast, say foot, say hand or belly. To find the way to say it — that’s enough.” (3) His goal was to find the minimum visual stimulus that can be put on paper or canvas and still evoke recognition without spelling everything out. He searched for the essence of visual language, just as Heisenberg searched for the principles of nature.

The key to understanding abstraction is to realize that abstractions may not represent whole things but one or another of their less obvious properties. Picasso decided to focus his attention not on his model but on the space she inhabited.

Abstraction taunts us to see with our mind, not our eyes. In 1912, the Scottish physicist and Nobel prize-winner C. T. R. Wilson took the first photographs of subatomic particles. He had invented an instrument called a cloud chamber to study the formation of clouds. In essence, Wilson created a saturated atmosphere of water in a special box to re-create the conditions that best favored the formation of clouds, and soon realized that the presence of ions — charged particles — helped the process immensely. It then occurred to him that subatomic particles, such as electrons and protons, are charged and that they could cause the water vapor to condense in the cloud chamber, creating tracks of water droplets as they passed. If the entire cloud chamber was placed within a strong magnetic field, one could tell, by the direction in which the subatomic particles twisted in the field, whether they were positively or negatively charged. Thus his photograph shows only the particles themselves by the tracks left by charged fragments of atoms moving through a magnetic field. (4) One can make inference about the physical and dynamic properties — but only if one recognizes that the experiment has yielded not a portrait, but an abstraction.

Image from Wilson’s Cloud Chamber showing atomic particle tracks. Source: New Jersey Society for Amateur Scientists

Most of us would expect these particles to look like little bits of some larger mass. But seeing with the mind is the key to understanding Wilson’s photograph.

E. E. Cummings wrote poems not just as letters and words but also as an image. He plays with the structure of a poem on a page, calling his creations “poempictures.” (5) The words must be seen as well as heard, and their pattern on the page studied as carefully as the syntax. In this example the reader’s eye must jump back and forth across the page (such as a grasshopper).

Oddly, although all abstractions are simplifications, the best abstractions are like Picasso’s, Wilson’s, and Cummings’s in that they yield new and often multiple insights and meanings, using simplicity to reveal non-obvious properties and hidden connections.

Experience suggests that the simplest abstractions are often the hardest to perceive or devise and at the same time yield the most important insights. Take mathematics, for example, a field that is nothing but abstractions. The very concept of number is as abstract as one can get, for it can be applied to anything, anywhere, anytime. It can be manipulated without reference to reality — hence the universal power of computing. “Nothing” itself is an abstraction, zero representing that which does not exist and yet holding the place of everything that could. Mathematical physicist Paul Dirac has argued, “Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind. There is no limit to its power in this field.” (6) And mathematicians Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh go so far as to suggest that abstracting “is almost characteristic [of] or synonymous with intelligence itself.”

Language, too, is filled with abstractions. Many words, such as love, truth, honor, and duty, represent very complex concepts. The writer abstracts these and other words from a plethora of possible texts to make a singular statement. But the abstractions run deeper than this. As Samuel Johnson said, “The business of a poet… is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances… [To do so he] must neglect the minuter discriminations” (7) that do not characterize the group. A great deal of literary abstracting leaves important things unsaid as well. Novelist Willa Cather pointed out, “The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification.… That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole.” (8)

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© David Jiles, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

About the Author | More by David Jiles
David Jiles, Ph.D. latest book is Creativity and the Secret Language of the Mind (LuLu Press, 2007). In an effort to re-think thinking, he has examined the best creative thinkers e.g. Einstein, Hemingway, Picasso, Tesla, Beethoven and countless others to find common secrets towards creative thinking.

04/24/08