Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

accords very well with our modern understanding of substances. We need, for

instance, a particular arrangement of fundamental particles in order to get the atoms and molecules that make up the chemical elements and chemical compounds. Form, then, is critical in making things. And form, of course, is also a relationship.

But there is another understanding of the word form that gives us a very different perspective on things, as well as affording us a possible route into an understanding of essence and substrate. Form, in this second sense, means some kind of external pattern for the way things should be in the world. For Plato, ‘the forms’ are perfect – they are the ‘Realm of Being’, as opposed to our flawed world of imperfect substance – the ‘Realm of Becoming’ – the contingent world of everyday reality. More

generally, this mysterian understanding of the word form has form residing in Heaven, or bestowed on us by God. Form then, in this understanding, is a kind of magic ingredient that gives real existence to the world. In fact, this view of form could be a stand-in for substrate, if only science could cope with the magic! We can reach an initial understanding of essence by a kind of intermediate step. There was, for the ancient Greeks, the idea of a ‘quintessence’ – a fifth element – that sat along with air, fire, earth and water. The

quintessence was again a kind of magic ingredient that delivered to things their crucial grounding in the real world. But quintessence was not necessarily from a heavenly realm or an abstract world of perfect forms, or from God. Quintessence could be earth-bound. It was

form in its mundane sense that allowed air, fire,

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