One reading
of the history of western philosophy shows that, since 2500 years, humans are trying
to come to terms with the opposites and contradictions of their daily lives and the World
around them: the real and the imaginary, the good
and the bad, body and mind, life and death, …
Take
reality itself. For Plato (420ies BC – 340ies BC) reality resides in the world
of perfect forms or ideas, and what we experience with our senses are only
imperfect realizations (“shadows”) of those ideas. His pupil, Aristoteles (384
BC – 322 BC), already thought differently. For him reality was the stuff that
we have around us, from which, based on careful observation, we could derive
generalized abstract ideas about them. Western philosophy got stuck with these
two approaches towards reality up till today.
For Plato, the
clouds in the sky (Cat. Nr. 3) where stirred by the movements of perfect ideal forms
(Cat. Nr. 104, Cat. Nr. 105, Exhibit Nr. 18). While for Aristotle, the movement of clouds (Cat.
Nr. 106) would one day be explained by some abstract formulas.
