- Image via Wikipedia
For those of you who may be thinking why is Professor Guerrero reinventing the wheel in rehashing Plato’s theory of forms, I’ll simply beg your patience and let me prove my claim that Plato’s aesthetics left out two important dimensions.
Plato’s theory of forms –an early aesthetic theory of mimesis (imitation)—allows three different categories with which we apprehend the world. Socrates identified the archetypes (universal, unchangeable forms, as the first category. Since these forms exist outside time and space, they are timeless and unchanging.
The second category includes the actual three-dimensional objects that we can apprehend with our senses. These objects have shape, dimension, bulk, and exist in nature; an example of which is the carpenter’s bed (Socrates’ example, by the way).
Socrates argues that objects of the second category take their shape from the archetypes of the first category—they partake of the universal bed: bedness.
In the third category, Socrates includes shadows, images that we see in water, mirrors, and in the arts (a painting, or sculpture), where the things we apprehend are two-dimensional (length and width). These are copies twice removed from the archetypes.
For many years I’ve felt that Plato’s catalog is incomplete.
I would like to add a fourth category: the metaphoric aspect of language. Take the following statement, for example:
“You made your bed, you lie in it.”
I could give many other examples (riverbed, Bedford, bedtime, bed of roses, etc), but I think I’ve made my point. This is a uni-dimensional category.
What I like about Roland Barthes “Writing Degree Zero” theory, is that he inadvertently hit on a fifth category of apprehension where language could be stripped of its metaphorical and conventional attachments.
It’s time to hit the sack!
NOTE: The only textbook I consult to write my articles is Mary Duffy’s Sentence Openers.
