Students of the Chinese martial art tai chi learn a pose in which they extend both hands, cupping them into the shape of a sphere while each hand (each half of the sphere) remains separated from the other. They are then told to imagine that both their hands are pushing on a rubber beach ball which they will carry and present to someone else. They are to imagine, that is to say, a resistance between their two hands held some distance apart.
I just described the posture of the hands in two ways: to imagine a rubber beach ball between them and to imagine resistance between them. Which of those images is the more effective in representing what needs to be done? Which would help you hold your hands in the intended shape more easily? Most of us, I think, would say the image of a rubber beach ball. But why? The answer can help us write in a livelier way.
The study of writing has traditionally been associated not only with grammar, but with the discipline of logic as well. That study (and even just the word logic itself) has never enjoyed a particularly robust reputation, but since logic has to do with thinking and thinking has to do with writing, we are well served to understand some of the basics of this long-standing subject. Logic in its traditional rendition (also called classical or Aristotelian, in contrast to modern, logic) begins with what it calls the three acts of the intellect: simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning. The first is concerned with how we put words to the things we perceive in the world, the second with the statements we make with those words, and the third with the conclusions we come to in thinking about the connection, or implication, of statements when they are considered together.
It is the first of these acts, simple apprehension, that concerns us here. Grammar will talk about the difference between a concrete and an abstract noun, but behind that distinction is logic’s more complete understanding of the way we put words to our perceptions. Traditional logic maintains that the ideas we have in our minds, and about which we compose sentences to think and to communicate with others, come in the first place from the things we perceive with our senses. We do not arrive on the human scene, so to speak, with any preconceived notions; what we come to understand and to put into words first and foremost comes to us by our looking out on the world, sensing it, and then forming an image—an idea—of what we’ve gotten tangled up with in living our lives. The traditional understanding has it that we conceive an idea by observing an object.
Now when we observe an object by seeing or hearing or touching or tasting or smelling it, grammar calls the word we use to name that thing a concrete noun. But when we observe an object—say that beach ball—very closely, we can identify certain qualities, or characteristics, it possesses. The air inside a beach ball prevents my hands from touching each other as I try to push them together. Something resists my effort to unite them, and that fact which I feel working against my intent I call resistance, an abstract noun because I have drawn away (abstracted) with my mind some quality, some attribute or peculiar habit of the beach ball from the ball itself. And my mind is the only place where abstractions are possible. An abstraction, therefore, is an idea about an idea. We also know it as self-consciousness.
And that observation can make all the difference in how precise and how forceful are the sentences we compose. If it is true, as traditional logic has it, that every last idea there is has originated in objective things in the world, then the closer I can stay to the concrete nouns which name those real things, the stronger, the livelier, the more pungent will be the sentences with which I communicate my ideas to others. And that is why it will be easier for the tai chi student to assume that basic pose with his hands by conceiving of a concrete beach ball and not of an abstraction named resistance: the concrete noun stands closer to the object that generated the idea in the first place.
All of which is to say that we as writers are to prefer the concrete to the abstract, recognizing at the same time that this is ultimately a counsel of perfection, an unrealizable ideal in every instance, but a standard nonetheless at which we should always aim. Not I noticed his anxiety, but I saw his hand trembling. Not I saw an impression of anger in his eyes, but he glared at me. Events, as this second example shows, are concrete too. At our best we live close to the world of things. That is where our thinking arises, and to write well, we should try as best and as often as we can not to slip away too far from our simple apprehension of that creative and creating source.
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