I struggle between these two. The highlands and the lowlands as described in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Abstraction is a useful tool for generalizing and finding structure and analogy that can be used in multiple places. However, I struggle with it once it gets too general and lofty. It feels disconnected from the real world and it’s wrinkles, and goes to a place where people with flowery enough words can say things that don’t mean much.
Mountains and Valleys
In the past, I’ve accused my brother as having his head in the clouds, disconnected from reality, and he’s reacted to this with some annoyance and incredulity. He’s always talking about lofty ideals and the deeper meaning of certain things. I’m generally more grounded and in tune with what’s actually going on around me - “reality” if you want to call it that. This generally aligns with our professions, too - he’s a software engineer, while I work on hardware, with an interest in software insofar as it’s useful to the hardware (this is also changing).
A few weeks ago, he got into a debate with my uncle, where my uncle accused him of the same thing that I always do. This prompted a discussion I had with him, where I revisited this idea, and we tried to uncover why he was always so confused when I accused him of being more abstract. For example, on the topic of religion, while I would generally be more concerned with the interpretations most people actually had in practice and how that affected their lives, he would deep dive into the deeper, more symbolic or esoteric meaning that many rituals or stories have. We would talk past each other - he couldn’t see that most people didn’t really understand those aspects of their religion, taking them at face value - and though I could see the elegance of the concepts he explained, I failed to see how to apply them to my life.
Eventually, it got to the point that I asked him whether he felt disconnected from reality, dealing with such abstract ideas and ascending these monumental towers of thought. He replied that his view was one of descending into the depths, to more general and fundamental things about reality - he was peeling back the layers of illusions that exist in what we perceive to be reality. From my perspective I look up at him and think that he has his head in the clouds, and from his perspective he looks up at me and wonders why I’m still bound by illusions.
This difference feels fundamental to our natures, and though both of us may ascend/descend as is useful to us, we will find it most comfortable in our current stations along the axis of abstraction. I view lived reality and the actions we take as fundamentally real - through the averaging of all of our worlds, while he is more Advaitan, believing in uncovering deeper truths and realizing the unity of all things.
I think this can also be mapped to Aristotelian vs Platonic perspectives, as well as viewing science / math as something that is discovered or something that is created.