(March 15, 2015 at 2:36 am)Nestor Wrote: I think there is a context in which it is sensible to talk about Platonic ideals, just not one wholly applicable to the world of sense perception---a point Plato stresses. For him there were unchanging forms from which perceptions derived their order. If we think of something like abstract truths being static (2+2=4, for example) then I think his forms are to that extent valid. Another important function of them is to help us extricate what element it is in two distinct objects that allows us to classify them under a single term, say, such as the idea "bed." One must have an idea of a bed before he seeks to craft one into being, and the resulting product may be quite unlike any other bed-like object yet conceived, but it is called a "bed" due to the likeness of some ideal conception of bed that it shares, i.e. the form common to all beds. On a conceptual level his forms have a lot of application. The problem is when people take the "little agitations in the brain called 'thought'" too far and start inventing realities rather than defining the one presented before us for purposes of clarity.
Yeah, they have a use, but they're so often fetishized that I think they can in that manner be pretty stifling.
I see self as a process, anyway -- it's a sum of your experiences, sure, but it's also the way you address the world and the little tricks it has up its sleeve. I read just enough Carl Rogers in college psych to get into the idea of life as a flow. I'm not a very spiritual person, but I find my most ineffable moments are those when I'm so inside the flow of things that self-awareness falls away; and I think that that is a damned good goal to have: to be so part of a process that you own it even as it owns you.
