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Eidos: ancient
Greek, FORM is
used by Plato to
refer to the
perfect and
unchanging
Ideals or Forms,
of which the
things in the
world are but
copies.
Mack and the boys, too, spinning in their orbits. They are the Virtues, the
Graces, the Beauties of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and the
cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the
fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy
everything lovable about them. Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the
Virtues , the Graces. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by
strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dined
delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs
to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the
whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown
prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the
poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and
trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends,
blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who
has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the
English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and
overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack
and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art
in nature.
Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the
cause would not be able to act as a cause. It is what the majority appear to do,
like people groping in the dark; they call it a cause, thus giving it a name that
does not belong to it. That is why one man surrounds the earth with a vortex to
make the heavens keep in place, another makes the air support it like a wide lid.
As for their capacity of being in the best place they could possibly be put, this
they do not look for, nor do they believe it to have any divine force, but they
believe that they will some time discover a stronger and more immortal Atlas to
hold everything together more, and they do not believe that the truly good and
binding binds and holds them together.
from Platos Phaedo
If we try to attempt to explain Nature in terms of nature alone we are forced to
deny the ultimate binding Good in the universe. A thing may strive for
perfection of its form for its own sake, or for the sake of the larger purpose of
the Good.
Absolute Truth exists in the idealized world of the forms for the classic greek
teleologists. For Ed Ricketts and Steinbeck by extension teleology leads to
trouble they see men(society) interpreting the ultimate purpose for things in
a destructive and non-sustainable manner leading to war, the destruction of
our environment, etc. Ricketts wrote about a non-teleological view of the
world a world that avoided the cognitive hubris that saturated the 20 th C.
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
Classic
Linnaean
Taxonomy
Hierarchical
Teleological
Non Hierarchical
Non Teleological