Sunday, August 20, 2006
Not Difference, but Same
We have five appendages emanating from a central torso. The head is the crown, where the arms and legs are the motion-ers. The head is the Nobility, or the Patrician, where the arms and legs are the aristocracy, or the plebes.
Seeing that we are so basically alike, it is a wonder how we can disagree so much. I wonder what life would be like, if instead of the scholasticism that emphasized the aristotelian particulars, the platonic, or what is universal, had predominated western life during the middle ages.
I am of the mind particulars are to be appreciated and not discriminated against, yet this is the fate the particulars have suffered.
Thus I am not a fellow human being, but a redhead. You are not a sister, but a green-eyed blonde.
But the universal has survived. Otherwise, if there is no universal 'me', how can you recognize me as I change, seeing me years later, the last you saw me I was a child? Or I recognize you after you've dyed your hair or gone to a tanning bed?
Fortunately, one 'I' meets another, and what is universal survives.
We have five appendages emanating from a central torso. The head is the crown, where the arms and legs are the motion-ers. The head is the Nobility, or the Patrician, where the arms and legs are the aristocracy, or the plebes.
Seeing that we are so basically alike, it is a wonder how we can disagree so much. I wonder what life would be like, if instead of the scholasticism that emphasized the aristotelian particulars, the platonic, or what is universal, had predominated western life during the middle ages.
I am of the mind particulars are to be appreciated and not discriminated against, yet this is the fate the particulars have suffered.
Thus I am not a fellow human being, but a redhead. You are not a sister, but a green-eyed blonde.
But the universal has survived. Otherwise, if there is no universal 'me', how can you recognize me as I change, seeing me years later, the last you saw me I was a child? Or I recognize you after you've dyed your hair or gone to a tanning bed?
Fortunately, one 'I' meets another, and what is universal survives.
