Oakness | Impose stability Flux of reality Dialectical dialogue |
L
ooking out my front door, here nicely rendered in backlight is the quintessential Pen Oak. This image raises the ancient metaphysical “problem of universals,” a conundrum involving thought, knowledge, and reality. Because energy and matter are in continuous motion in space over time, nothing ever remains constant from moment to moment. Thus any acquired knowledge we harbor based on observation is obsolete before obtained. But our intellect can contemplate concepts, ideas as forms, which can remain stable. These concepts can represent abstract universal characteristics, properties, behaviors or relations that can be predictive of the individual or particular. Further we can establish classifications of individuals or particulars regarded as sharing or participating in certain universals. Plato postulated a sharp distinction between the realm of the senses and the realm of the intellect: one can only have opinions about perceptions, but one can have knowledge about universals. Therefore the intelligible world is the real world while the sensible world is only provisionally real, like shadows on the lawn. Reality is what you think it is.
“To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.” - Wallace Stevens
