I doubt I am original. That would be too strange even for me. I have heard bits and pieces of what I think from others, as when Marx calls Capital a relation. I would call it and every other thing a form of relationship. We only know a form is dead when people quit relating through it, sort of like the ptolemaic universe. Take any average form like math or politics, social forms like government or economy and people relate through them. All forms of relationship serve two purpose: Realization, and recognition. We have no objective means of proving we exist. The next best thing is to be reminded that we exist by others who seem to exist. A formality, a uniform, conforming, etc, reveal this aspect of being and recognition. But here realization means turning today into tomorrow. The future is uncertain and the end is always near. People relate to make their futures more certain because the best evidence that you were real today is being alive tomorrow. So people invest life into their forms, and get life back out of them. The surest sign of a failing form of relationship is that you get less life in exchange for the life you put in.
So; what is a form? It is an idea, a concept, a notion, and I would say a principals. All forms are conserved. All true forms of the physical world are conserved. A dog today will be a dog tomorrow, so it is no infinite, but rather is finite and can be defined. Definitions are reliable, they are identities and they are conserved. We know from physical theories like conservation of mass or momentum how essential these are to reasoning. We can only reason on the multitude of our physical objects if their definition, their identity is conserved. All definitions are tentative, and hypothetical. As the nominalist Dun Scotus might have said, we cannot know the world, but only reference the world. To borrow his words: Between thought and thing there lies an abyss of difference (heterogeneity), and yet there are areas of common ground (homogeneity) with the bridge between these two called analogy. Our concepts are but analogies of the world. As Schopenhauer said: The world is my idea. I am sure he was an idealist, but when we form a sense of what we see from what we know, what we know is the idea, and this judgment as Kant said is knowledge. So forms are concepts are ideas are notions and principals and judgments and all of these are knowledge. If you knew the definition of every word in the dictionary you would know everything because know edge exist as definitions, and back to Duns Scotus who believed that thought proceeds through language. It would be very rudimentary without language, and then language is a social form which people share and relate through and relate information through.
None of this presents much of a problem. If people cannot relate for example, through their native tongues, they can still relate through math as a universal language. Math is usually more exact if less colorful. The problem for people is in transcendent forms, what I would call moral forms because they usually carry a moral meaning. things like life, like love, like all the virtues, morality, and the emotions, God, gods, death, and all the vices are infinites, and no matter how many examples we may have, we cannot define them as physical forms. They are not objective qualities but subjective, with the exception of our own individual lives which hold a central place, as the most objective of all truths, and the meaning of all meaning.
The difference between moral forms and physical forms is that physical forms have being with meaning, and moral forms have meaning without being. So there is no point asking after the meaning of life. Life is all meaning, and no life means no meaning, and this is what Schopenhauer meant when he said: the world dies with me. But meaning is how we relate, and when we communicate we exchange meanings so if some day there is a last person left alive on this earth, all meaning will die before humanity because without the ability to share meaning, meaning is nothing.
Transcendent forms cannot be defined or conserved. Moral have their meaning because of their relation to life, and that is exactly why we fight and kill over them. If the object is the destruction of the person you first attack the meanings he associates with his life and welfare, like freedom, like justice, like right, or law, or honor. If two people disagree over justice, and they do not kill or die in the process of their disagreement, then in the end they will define justice for one as justice for the other. It is a coin each must share to have. If a dictionary or a society were to define justice in a fixed fashion, and people could not adapt it to their needs, then some one would have to die. Those people charged with defining this form undefinable must come to an agreement on a definition that will serve the moment rather than eternity.
Finally; the changing of forms is the story of all of human history. We build a form of dwelling out of a form in our minds, and if that serves us well we may never have to change it. And yet humanity has changed all the way from caves to sky scrapers. It is not that our human needs have changed so much, but because our needs have always remained roughly the same, for food, shelter, company, safety security adventure excitement, love children etc we had to adapt by changing our forms. Because humanity is universally conservative even in the face of need for change, change has always created great stress, and anxiety. None the less, when people need to change their forms they do so, and as Jefferson said of forms in the Declaration, we right ourselves with a change of forms.
Our moral forms are not real and have only the reality as meaning that we give to them. None the less, we build social forms out of our moral forms, just as the constitution of this country was created to achieve certain moral goods which I doubt it has ever touched. Still, because we so seldom see changes of social forms we do not get that from the perspective of humanity and human history this change of forms occurs all the time. People fear to change the form of their government even in the face of its obvious failure. So what. They did not accomplish the change from tent to dungeon without anxiety either -though the dungeon was more comfortable by far.
Just as in the Declaration of Independence, social change waits on formal consciousness. The reasons for the success of the United States in their rebellion were many, but high on the list is the fact that they did consciously do what they set out to do.
Our forms of government and economy and even religion do not serve our desire to survive, but impinge upon that need. We need our social forms to work, and only if we are willing to give our moral forms meaning will we change our social forms and survive.
Thanks...Sweeney
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