The Tyrannies of Abstractions
The seductive perils of seeing human beings as instances of categories
You, reader, are not actually you - not first and foremost, anyway. You might think of yourself as an individual, with a name and a body and a life story and so on, but your true existence is something else entirely. Before you or anyone else can exist, *categories* exist, categories like ‘human being’ or ‘life form’. These categories existed before and will exist long after you. You, reader, are first and foremost an instance of these categories, a concrete example of abstract concepts.
This vision of existence is the one brought into the world by Plato, one of the earliest and certainly the most influential of philosophers in the Western tradition. This vision is fascinating and profound and at least gestures towards the extraordinary capacity for abstraction that we find in human beings.
This vision is also one that can bring untold atrocities into the world, one which can justify violence and cruelty against any individual.
In this post, I’ll explore this issue - the relationship between individuals and abstract categories - as it’s played out in the thought of four major philosophers: Plato (obviously), Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger.
To lay my cards on the table, one of my deepest moral instincts is that lynching is bad. I acknowledge that this is extremely bold and original and that I’m very brave for making such a mind-blowing claim.
Now that your eyebrows have finally lowered, I want to take a look at some of the philosophical presuppositions why people destroy individuals in the name of destroying categories, and then ask if there’s a way to think about these things that respects the utility of abstractions without letting them overshadow the flesh-and-blood people who carry them.
Let’s start, as a lot of things do, with Plato.
Plato
Plato’s heroic, tragic mission was to contemplate his way out of the human world of time and chance. He wants a way out of the chaotic flux we all live in, the ever-changing world of our senses. He wanted access to a deeper reality of eternal permanence, a reality hat he called the realm of the Forms. In his dialogues (most famously in the Republic, the Symposium, and the Phaedo), he argues that the things we see around us—every-thing from flowers to humans to acts of justice—are like shadows or reflections of perfect, eternal “Forms” such as Flowerness, Humanness, or Justice itself.
Individual flowers come and go, but the category “Flower” remains, timeless and unchanging. The same goes for bigger and juicier concepts like Justice, Beauty, or Goodness. The true essence of these concepts belongs to the realm of the Forms, which is *more real than the physical world*.
This might sound inspiring: there is a perfect Form of Justice or Beauty that transcends our flawed, everyday experience, and we can commune with it through contemplation. Yet this vision can also be treacherous, terribly-so. Plato’s thought paved the way for future philosophers and political leaders to claim that the universal category to which someone belongs is more important than any particular individual human being. The world becomes cast as a ‘category spoils system’, with benefits and privileges being explicitly dispensed to people based on the category they supposedly exemplify.
This becomes especially problematic when some categories are identified as bad, as being oppressive or parasitic. If someone is an exemplar of a ‘bad’ category then their life must be diminished or even destroyed in the name of destroying said bad category, irrespective of their vices or virtues as an individuated human being.
Aristotle
Aristotle, Plato’s onetime student, took a much different approach. In works like the Metaphysics and the Categories, he posited that the individual being—what he called the “primary substance”—is fundamentally real. Universal concepts, to him, do indeed exist, but only within the particular beings themselves. Forms, such as they are, are immanent to the world, patterns that emerge from the bottom up rather than floating down from a transcendent realm.
Put more bluntly, if you’re looking at a horse, the “horseness” is right there in the horse itself, not in some mystical and transcendental world of Ideas. This “earthy” orientation of Aristotle might initially seem to solve Plato’s problem of prioritizing the universal over the individual, at least as far as category-based cruelty is concerned. After all, if concrete individuals are the truest reality, how can we justify harming them in the name of some abstract notion?
Aristotle, for me, is a step in a more just direction, but found its limits all the same Aristotle’s works on politics and biology, for instance, justified certain social hierarchies (e.g., “natural” slavery, or the “natural” subordination of women) based on what he observed in individuals—thus reifying categories even within his ostensibly individual-focused viewpoint.
Hegel
Jumping to the 19th century, we encounter G.W.F. Hegel, a philosopher who tried to synthesize the individual and the universal through his concept of the dialectic. In works like the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel portrays human history as a grand process wherein Spirit (or Geist) moves toward greater rationality and freedom by confronting the contradictions intrinsic to various stages of rationality, working them out and transcending the apparent oppositions. Reason, for him, does not point us to some timeless realm of Forms, but is instead a historical process, inextricably bound up in change and time. Individuals, philosophies, societies, and even entire civilizations are stages in this unfolding drama, one inevitably carrying all of humanity towards absolute freedom and self-conscious knowledge. Individuals and the “categories” they instantiate are thus neither separate nor static—they are dynamic nodes within the unfolding totality of history and thought. In this way, Hegel avoids assigning outright ontic priority to either side: individuals matter insofar as they embody universal notions, while those notions only become real through their concrete existence in particular beings.
Hegel’s story can be inspiring. It places each of us within a larger cosmic-historical movement. It promises that our personal struggles, no matter how mundane, contribute to humanity’s broader self-realization. But there’s a catch: once you buy into the idea that history is marching inevitably toward some higher goal, it becomes easy to see individuals who dissent from that “inevitable direction” as obstacles. In the wrong hands, Hegelian philosophy can (and indeed has) been twisted to justify quashing those obstacles “for the greater good.” God, i.e. History, is on the side of those who kill in the name of justice.
This is the core danger of teleological thinking (the belief that history is moving inexorably toward an end point): if you believe you know where history is headed, you might also believe you have the right—or even the duty—to remove anyone who stands in the way. Individuals become pawns in a grand game, cogs in the wheel of progress, and we risk forgetting that each of these “cogs” is a person with hopes, fears, and irreducible and infinitely precious moral dignity of their own.
Heidegger
Martin Heidegger famously declared that all of Western philosophy, starting with Plato and Aristotle, has forgotten to ask the most fundamental question: What does it mean “to be”? This had plagued Western thinking ever since. Descartes’ famous assertion, maybe the most famous sentence in all of philosophy, “I think therefore I am”, feel victim to this problem too. When you say “I think therefore I am”, what does “I am” mean? How can we say anything like “I am” at all?
In Being and Time, Heidegger takes this question by the throat. He uses the term Dasein to refer to the uniquely human way of existing—we are beings for whom Being is an issue, existing things which wonder what it means to exist. For Heidegger, the centuries-long argument between “Are universals real?” or “Are individuals real?” might be missing the point. He believed we have to get beneath those debates and face the mystery of our own existence head-on.
Heidegger thought that by focusing on categories—be they Platonic Forms or Aristotelian substances—philosophy lost sight of the deeper reality of Being. In everyday life, we rely on “ready-made” concepts (what Heidegger calls “idle talk” or “the They”) that flatten out the uniqueness of individuals. We slip into viewing people as members of a group, roles in a social system, or data points in a political program, thus overlooking their authentic presence in the world. For Heidegger, we fall into this world of comforting abstractions to flee in vain from the inescapable individuality of our own existence. Why would we do this? Because to be human is to be mortal, to live with the inevitability of death, to live with the inevitability of our own particular life ending. No matter how much we contemplate the timeless Forms or whatever, nobody can die on your behalf. No matter how much you observe the death of other people you will never gain any true foreknowledge of what awaits you after your existence as a human being comes to an end.
Heidegger himself is a controversial figure, not least because of his affiliation with the Nazi party. One could argue that despite his radical call to think about Being, he too fell prey to the seduction of large-scale categories—namely a nationalist vision that allowed him to see people as “belonging” to certain world-historical destinies. This tension in Heidegger’s own life serves as a cautionary tale: even if you champion the question of Being, you can still end up aligning with destructive ideologies if you forget the individual Dasein in front of you and start buying into group-based or category-based illusions.
From Categories to Lynchings
So how do these abstract ideas about universals and individuals lead to something as horrific as lynchings? Think of it this way: lynchings typically arise from a mob or an assassin’s conviction that a certain “type” of person—identified by race, class, ideology, or another marker—is a bad type, an oppressor or parasite. The victim is reduced to a mere token of this hated group, effectively stripped of their name, their life story, and their humanity. Once that reduction happens, the mob feels justified in eliminating the “type,” as if hurting a flesh-and-blood individual can somehow eliminate the abstract concept.
It’s both morally repugnant and philosophically sloppy. Universals don’t die when their instances die. As soon as you start treating actual people as disposable carriers of a category—“criminal,” “traitor,” “undesirable”—you open the door to atrocity.
A More Humane Ontology: Seeing the Person First
A shared lesson from Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger is that when we lose sight of the individual, terrible evil can follow. Plato’s emphasis on universals and Hegel’s grand vision of a rational future can (if applied a certain way) discard the distinct uniqueness and moral worth of concrete individuals. Aristotle and Heidegger both did fine work in refocusing on concrete individuals in their own way, but neither carried their projects of enshrining the individual far enough.
So what now?
A few core ideas:
See Philosophy As Self-Criticism: The overarching goal of rational thought is to question our own assumptions. Evil things can certainly feel good, but they can seem right as well. Self-control is far easier to implement over our pleasurable desires than it is to implement over our drive to see ourselves as morally pure.
Respect Individual Existence: Every person is a singular event in the world, never repeatable, here today and gone tomorrow. If we see them only as an instance of a category, we miss this precious uniqueness and risk sliding into good-or-bad thinking that justifies their destruction.
Practice Compassionate Encounters: Whenever we’re tempted to reduce someone to a mere carrier of a “bad” category, let’s remember that each person is more fundamentally real than the label we’ve pinned on them.
Whether your sympathies lie with Plato’s sublime realm of Forms, Aristotle’s focus on concrete particulars, Hegel’s sweeping historical dialectic, or Heidegger’s quest to reawaken our sense of Being, the bottom line is this: we should never reduce a human being to a mere example of something else. Each of us is more complex than any abstract classification. Each of us has to face death entirely alone. Cultivating this awareness is the first step toward dismantling the dangerous us-versus-them logic that has fueled lynchings, genocides, and countless other atrocities throughout history.
Embrace the categories if you must—but do so with the knowledge that they are only tools, not gods. The person in front of you, the friend or stranger, is a universe that cannot be subsumed under any category. Respecting that mystery is the beginning of a truly humane way of being in the world.