They retreat into the Bronze Age myth-talk from whence they emerged, to drift with Amon-Re like mists above the deep.īy the 18th century Plato was finally on the run the Soul was a laughingstock. They go where the vehicles of metaphors go. As soon as one pays attention to how the words work, both pure Form and the Oneness of Form and Content disappear into an invisibility not of transcendence but of linguistic nonmeaning. But the opposite attempt-the monistic strategy of declaring the two (for example, form and content) to be the same-simply renders the terms meaningless and abandons them as tools. An attempt to split them apart and suppress one, as in Manichaean-type dualisms, can be a communal psychological tragedy-as in the Yawehist worship of Father without Mother, Sky without Earth, and so on. Such pairs of dependent terms, like left and right or yes and no, only have meaning in relation to one another and as different from one another.
He reasoned that form could only be known through its content, content only through its form. Aristotle, perplexed and annoyed, founded his own school and invented natural science. And the master’s answer is there, in the seventh book of the Republic, where Plato hesitates so long before pulling down the veil before the sanctum sanctorum: We see pure Form, he declares, with the Eye of the Soul! Aristotle, like Descartes later, wondered: Where is that Eye? (In the thymus gland, maybe?) Anyway, when Plato died, he didn’t make Aristotle the head of his school, but his cousin, who also had The Eye. But Aristotle wanted to know: How do you see pure Form? If it is really without content, then it must be transparent, which is to say, invisible. This much he tells us: All Plato talked about that day was triangles and squares: It was a geometry lesson! The Good was pure Form! Some of the students emerged in Pythagorean rapture. But cabbage-brained Aristotle again emerged perplexed. The crux came when, after years of waiting, he and the other advanced students were told that at last they would hear Plato’s legendary lecture on The Good. It was tax-exempt as a temple to the Muses, the Goddesses of Art, to whom, inside, pure Form was offered as an object of worship. Plato’s establishment was not, officially, a school. (Hadn’t Plato learned it, after all, from the priests at Heliopolis in Egypt?) It is said that Aristotle, in his own school later, would forego the quest for pure Form and have his students crawling around in the dirt of the garden, classifying types of cabbages. Aristotle, after twenty years in Plato’s school, still had a nagging suspicion that the doctrine of pure Form was a priestly trick of some kind. Plato thought that content didn’t matter at all: form, he said, really exists by itself, triumphant in its isolation, crystalline as a dawn light that will never be stained by the heat of a morning. TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED years ago the form-content relationship was a heated philosophical question. Join 550+ subscribers and sign-up for my writing and editing email newsletter for more tips like this.“The Plot against the Giant,” or, “The Good Man Has No Shape” Meanwhile, it would be fun to always refer to your house as your “manor”-no matter how grand it might be. Minding your manners when you’re at the family manor is probably important-minding how you spell these two words is equally significant. “Manor” means an estate or grand residence.“Manners” means social etiquette-for example, being quiet shows you know your manners in a library.“Manner” means a way or style of doing something-for example, hitting the books in a studious manner or hitting the books literally in a frustrated manner.“manor.”Ĭommunicating with your pinkie up in the air isn’t quite cutting it here. I’m talking about knowing the difference between “manner” vs. It’s time to mind our manners, everyone, and today, I’m not just talking about communicating with respect. Mind your “P”s and “Q”s and your spelling, please.
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