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Abstracting: The Angel Is in the Essence
Why does simplifying produce greater insight?
Posted August 21, 2009
We've all heard that "the devil is in the details," yet mathematicians, scientists, writers, and painters all contend that the angel is in the essence. It's only by doing away with the details that one can find the essence of things. But here's the question: Why should simplification produce greater insight than having all the details to hand?
Consider devils and angels themselves and you'll understand. Draw an angel and devil, or describe each in detail. Then compare your two depictions or descriptions. If you do this rigorously, you'll find that angels and devils actually share many characteristics. Most of these shared characteristics are not, therefore, useful in differentiating one from the other. Most of these shared characteristics can be eliminated.
Go ahead and try to eliminate every line or shade in your drawing that doesn't need to be there. Excise every word (especially those adjectives!) that you can cross out. How spare can you make your depiction or description and still communicate your meaning?
This is a delicate proposition. Eliminating too much information creates confusion. Say you eventually characterize angels by the word ‘halo' or its image. Devil you characterize by the word ‘horn' and its image. That's fine, but halos can also be found around luminescent objects of all kinds and people who have had neck surgery wear a type of brace called a halo as well. The horn creates equivalent kinds of confusion: lots of animals and even some beetles have horns. So reducing the difference between angels and devils to halos or horns is an oversimplification.
We need to add back some of the characteristics we eliminated. But knowing which ones are both necessary and sufficient isn't so simple. We could try specifying that angels and devils are human in form but differ in having halos and horns. Depending on our choice of words or our composite image, however, this still might not take care of the problem. French horn players certainly have horns, and cuckolds are also said to have horns; saints and neck surgery patients share halos with angels. So we need more qualifiers.
How many more qualifiers? There's the rub! We need a description or depiction of an angel that is general enough to describe all angels and another that is general enough to describe all devils, yet these descriptions or depictions also need to be specific enough to differentiate their subjects from all other objects. What, then, is the essence of each?
Getting at this essence is the process of abstracting. Practitioners of every sort of discipline define abstracting in almost identical terms. Abstracting is the process of choosing the one set of characteristics that uniquely typify or describe a class of things, eliminating all others. As the example of devils and angels suggests, this process is not easy, simple, or without its challenges. Indeed, despite the often very simple products of this process (a dictionary definition, a two line poem, an abstract painting, an equation), practitioners of all disciplines often consider abstracting to be one of the most difficult and rigorous processes that anyone can learn.
The surprising power of abstracting emerges from the fact that by distilling the characteristics that uniquely typify a class of things, all the possible meanings associated with that class of things are also distilled. Very simple descriptors can convey huge amounts of information. A good example is the painting that we illustrate here, which we found in our hotel room in Toronto last week. (We were there for a meeting of the American Psychological Association, but that's another post.)
At first sight, this painting looks like a piece of non-representational art; perhaps a color field exercise that is meant to bring up calming emotions associated with greens and blues. But placed in different contexts, it takes on additional meanings. Our hotel was only a stone's throw from Lake Ontario, so the painting describes an aerial view of the shoreline and the lake - at least in our minds. Or turn the painting so the green is on the bottom and suddenly it looks like a green hill topped by blue sky, the summer landscape of Canada. When it comes to abstracting, contexts mean everything. And what makes this painting an effective abstraction is the distillation of contexts into one simple image.
In our next few posts, we'll continue to explore ways in which people in a variety of professions abstract and how, at heart, they are all doing the same thing in the same way even though their products differ markedly. So we'll be doing our best to abstract out the essence of abstracting.
But what about those angels and devils? Once you've arrived at an abstraction of either one or both that you think works, try them out on a series of friends and acquaintances. Without giving anything away, see if they perceive what you intended. Do they get the reference to angels; do they see that you mean ‘devil'? Interestingly enough, their ability to understand your abstractions may very well depend on the context in which you place your drawing or your words. In fact, by placing a halo and horns together, you might provide enough context for an unambiguous interpretation of each.
© Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein 2009
