Page 10 - GALIET FORMS AND UNFORMS: Aristotle´s Refutation to Plato IV

extreme dwellers between the lure of Plato’s light and Aristotle’s categories and logic until post-structuralists, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida, with their deconstructive constructions and negation of the one and many, tore the grand narratives from the pages of the cannon. Yet, for the purpose of this essay, what could this poetic fragment be but a murmur, a whisper of that incognoscible one? This is Plato: the poet- philosopher, he-maker, he-muse, he who, as Diogenes Laertius once stated, “heals the human soul,”4 a Whitmanesque reincarnation, he who sees the divine light that knows of one grand truth. He who tried to express that which is by shifting our perception of reality because he must have seen a light and therefore remembered that majuscule essence of essences, the Forms, the source of everything that is, utterly inconceivable and inexpressible: logos beyond logos. Did he derive his Theory of Forms from his despair after witnessing Athens’ moral disintegration post the Peloponnesian War by reckoning that “what is completely is completely knowable and what is in no way is in every way unknowable?” (Rep V, 477a) or did he imagine it? For, surely, we can all imagine, but only those makers, those poets 3⁄4 poietes 3⁄4 can truly know as Plato’s song is the poem of poetry, of matter and form. For, according to Socrates, poetry is that Heraclean magnet5 that forever links us to divine inspiration and transports us where muse and mused,
4 Barnstone, Willis. Greek Lyric Poetry. New York, USA: Shocken Books. 1972. 178
5 Benjamin Jowett, trans. The Dialogues of Plato. “Ion”. Great Books of the Western World. Volume 7. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 1952. 142–148
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