Objectives:
- Share what you think.
- Describe how Plato & Socrates are right or wrong to claim that universals are real.
- State if Hume is right to say that there is no such thing as red, but only things colored red.
Well,
my reading is lagging behind this week, but I definitely want to get
in on the conversation before the last minute, even if my thoughts
and understandings this time around are less informed than usual.
Both/And
seems to be something lacking in a lot of these perspectives we've
been studying, and thus far, it seems so here as well. Socrates seems
rather fixed on the concept of a universal being in a seeming many
forms, among many possible forms, leaving out the subjective for a
grand unitive objective being of sorts. I've not gathered from our
commentary and notes, lectures and readings so far that Hume is as
narrow-focused. That particulars exist, I am wont to agree: if not
for particulars, or such seeming limited forms of Socrates universal
existence, by what avenue might we manifest growth, and come to
awareness of being - of reality, by which we can discover his
universal? I'm still catching up, but cannot think now how that'd be
possible.
My
take, for what little it may be worth in light of such greatness, is
that of both particulars and categories being real, or of a real
universal existence that cannot and does not diminish the real,
finite particular. I extend this perspective into my religious belief,
concerning the vastness of God, and the irreducible uniqueness of
man. There need be no conflict - both can exist and be true.
As
to the issue of the color red, without contriving our fish-scale
lipstick and beetle-carapace pigments, a rainbow would certainly be
odd without red. In the spectrum of light, a quality exists
independent of our naming conventions of it that we relate to
similarity quality in other objects as red, that in this form is not
dependent on the object which seems to bear such a quality. Light
exists, so red exists. As for which naming convention best represents
that reality, that may vary without changing the thing at all.
In
other areas, we might ask if lumens exist, or only individual lights,
if notes on a scale exist, or degrees of heat, or even if the
measures we recognize for time reckoning exist. As concisely as possible, my take is that, if they did not exist on at least some
relateable level as object of thought, we could not even know them to
speak of them.
Where
we recognize connectedness in being, we cannot do so without seeing
uniqueness first, or there'd be no distinctions to relate. Where we
may accept particularity amongst unique beings, there must first and
always exist in them that common element of -being- on whatever
level, that by this they can be united and relate.
Back
to learning. Always.
