Jim Mich... talks about the uniqueness of stories and their opposite
abstract laws:
>So, in order to attack this question, I said to myself: 'What is the
>opposite of a story?' Maybe the reason that the concept of 'story' seems
>to promise us so much, seems so full of meaning, is that we've been living
>for too long with its opposite -- whatever that might be.
>
>A pretty good candidate for this is 'law'. Good old Newtonian Scientific
>LAW.
>
>Consider:
>A story is a sequence of unique events. A law, abstractly, knows nothing
>of unique events.
I'd like to posit this point: We often create a dichotomy between the
abstract and the concrete. I think this dichotomy is an illusion. Here's
what I mean. If you _understand_ an abstraction, you can relate it to
concrete reality. If you can't do that, you don't understand it. Or I
sometimes like to say if I understand something it is, by definition,
concrete. Thus, our abstractions are just ways we categorize and
generalize our concrete experiences (stories, if you will) in ways that
help us adapt to and create our world. Abstractions are kind of
human-created shorthand for universal stories that can manifest themselves
in myriad specific ways amongst us individual human beings and all the
stuff of the world with which we are involved. In fact, all those stories
wouldn't mean much to us without our abstractions and vice versa.
-- John Woods jwoods@execpc.com