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Originally Posted by Angela  No -- I didn't say or mean that. (maybe Dan did  ) Rather: it does exist, and it's existence is the understanding people have of its "reality." |
Hm, I've deleted my response to this four times now. Let me backtrack, since I've erased the logical history of how I got from the quoted to my response.
A concept, a philosophy, an idea: whatever generic name you are pleased to assign to things like polarity or feminism or religion: has a lifespan. They are born when they are imagined and understood, yes. They are amorphous and unbounded as contributors work out the details and consequences of the idea, yes. But at this point, it crystallizes. It becomes a Thing, of Platonic existence, that has a nucleus of certainty with an electron cloud of questions. Then it fragments. Perhaps the original group dies, or is usurped. But the Thing is then derived into new Things, following the same process. When people assign it the same name, then it's extremely confusing, but that's what adjectives are for. Then it stops being thought of and considered. At some point, it is forgotten, and dies.
Socrates would wring my neck.
He would have agreed with you, I think; Plato is the one who decided that things should be written down after all.
The crystallization is what I'm talking about. It's a maturing of an idea to a point where it can be thought of reductively. What you're talking about is something that never crystallizes. It's
always liquid, morphing and changing, instable and uncertain. It never grows up; it's never its own person.
Now, to be honest, this personification is making me nervous, and I do need to think about this. A lot of what you're arguing
is valid, and you can see the same process when literature people talk about Early Shakespeare versus Late Shakespeare, or when people compare authors and poets embittered by the world wars. What made them profoundly distinct arguably never crystallized.
But what Moses and Joshua did for Judaism, or Constantine and Augustine for Christianity, Hammurabi for law, Popper for science, Cervantes for the novel form, Jung for personality psychology, Knuth for algorithms, Campbell and Tolkien for mythology: these were such major crystallizations. And this wasn't a bad thing. It made ideas accessible, because it was possible to have a solid grasp on them, and people were thus able to dissect those thoughts and form new ones. Would we have Shakespeare, if not for Plato? Who knows.
I'm off the beaten track now. I'll head back to it.
Without the crystallization, you may have something amorphous. You can say something is Goethe, but what are you actually saying with that? That it reminds you of Goethe? Why? How? In what respect? Which details, and why those? What broad respect? There's a shape there that you can compare and contrast with another shape, pointing out the differences, the similarities. That shape
is the thing, the echo of their personality through their creations.
With the crystallization, you can definitely say that yes, the concept of inertia is defined as a zero acceleration, and with acceleration, you have a force: the first two Newtonian laws of motion; if someone says Newtonian force happens without acceleration, then they're simply wrong. That yes, a broadly tripartite story of exploration, heroism, and triumphal return is a Campbellian monomyth, but no, Romeo and Juliet is not an example of it because Romeo does not attain Master of Two Worlds, but runs away, chooses death and is lost to his community, never redeeming or raising it up with an elixir of life or magical knowledge.
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Originally Posted by Angela I love it when you do that. |
Heh. No one has dared say that since high school. Incidentally, I've been working on a system of morality.
It's actually quite elegant at the moment, which probably means it's completely wrong. Currently composed of 11 words and 8 arrows. ^_^