Monday, May 19, 2014

In the beginning

Before Phosphius was a man, it is said, he was a child. The child could not speak and only made sounds.
He had no means of communicating in the language understood by others; so he used symbols instead.

So, when he wanted to say 'bird', he would draw a bird. If he wanted water, he would make his sketch of a drop. For the sun he drew a circle, and so on.

Phosphius quickly learnt that there was a problem in the world around him. If he saw a bird, a black crow for example, he would draw a bird. If he saw a pigeon, he would draw the same symbol.

He had managed to express the word 'bird', but he had not managed to make a distinction between 'all birds' and 'that bird'. Were all birds representations of bird, the object? Or was the object merely an illusion that hinted that there were creatures that flew, had two wings, and looked somewhat the same, but were altogether different from a singular object of bird. Was there, somewhere, a perfect form of bird? A form that all birds were derived from?

The death of the bird was a way to better understand this; if a bird died, it was not the death of Bird, but the death of one bird. Each bird was different, but since he would never get to know them individually (birds not having the nature of man), they could be represented by one symbol, the Object. For birds, or water, devoid of speech as Phosphius was, there was a singular explanation of their character. They did not have individual traits and so he called this Objecta Genereca. There was a perfect form of bird, one that explained all birds. Even if he saw a bird he had never seen before, there were surely others like it (he learnt this from experience). Others had seen this bird die.

There was only one sun. Sun was therefore sun, suns and possessed the character of Object and Form. For a Object like the sun, of which he would only ever see one, Sun was both Object and its Form and represented all that was the nature of Sun.
Phosphius called this Objecta Singula.


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