Theōria and the Disappearance of Form

What happens to the contemplative intellect when the reality of its objects is denied?

I. Faculty and Object

What follows is a reflection on theōria (contemplation) and the reality of form. In more general terms, I want to think through the relation between a perceptual faculty and its proper objects, and what happens when a culture comes to deny the reality of those objects. I offer these reflections as a speculation about how perception and philosophical formation may be more deeply entangled than we often assume, especially today.

My starting premise is that training certain faculties of the mind, and the capacity for theōria in particular, requires and assumes the presence of those objects that the faculties are directed toward, and that their cultivation presupposes. Classical thought recognized a plurality of perceptual modes—aisthēsis (sensation), phantasia (imagination), dianoia (discursive reason), phronēsis (practical reason), mnēmē (memory), and theōria (contemplation) among them—each oriented toward phenomena which that mode apprehends and through which it is trained and developed.

For example, the senses are trained through repeated exposure to sensible qualities: color, sound, motion, texture, and so on. Imagination is cultivated through engagement with images and representations. Memory develops through the recollection of past events, structured by habit and repetition. Discursive reason grows through contact with arguments, logical sequences, and inference. Practical reason is honed by attention to human action in context, discerning right ends and appropriate means. The contemplative intellect is shaped in part by attending to form or essence. Put simply, each mode of perception developed the way it has because its objects of concern present themselves to awareness in the way they do.

To reiterate a claim I return to often: perception is a skill that must be trained. However, as we can see here, perception is not one thing. It is an integrated and variegated continuum of faculties, each with its own objects of concern and, in turn, its own training regimen that affords skilled perception at each level. In other words, at every level of apprehension, faculty and object stand in interdependence, mediated by practice. I understand this interdependence as a kind of participation (methexis), in the technical sense deployed in the Platonic tradition.

Participation, as I am using the term, rejects two alternative positions. First, it rejects that in perceiving, a person stands over and against the object of perception as a detached observer of brute fact. Second, it rejects that the person constructs the object of perception from within his or her own representations. Both positions treat faculty and object as separable, related only after the fact. On the view I am proposing, by contrast, perceiving draws a person into a relational disclosure that gives faculty and object together, indexed at every point to the stances and skills he or she has cultivated.

The development of a faculty thus presupposes the givenness of the kind of object it is meant to apprehend. Where those objects are taken seriously and emphasized, the faculty has room to grow and engage; where they are denied or rendered invisible, the faculty may begin to atrophy.

Thus, if theōria is the faculty that perceives form or essence, and if both have been denied real existence in the reigning philosophy of the day, or at the very least, are depicted as ontologically suspect or epistemically illegitimate within a culture’s habit of thought (as is often the case today), then theōria is left with no proper objects to attend to as publicly credible realities. Lacking its proper objects, the faculty comes to seem no longer worth cultivating. Over time, it may fail to develop at all, since its objects are assumed a priori to be nothing more than projections or illusions, artifacts of a premodern and discredited ontology, the vestige of confused minds.

If the above diagnosis is right, we should ask what philosophical commitments make the denial of form seem self-evident in the first place, and here a particular picture of the relation between appearance and reality comes into view. This picture holds that appearance itself, and the appearance of form, especially, is something to be overcome, positioned as it often is as something like a veil or an obstacle that sits between the mind and what is truly out there in the world. On this view, genuine reality is thought to be what lies behind how things show themselves, accessible only once the subjective conditions of sensible appearances have been stripped away.

What lends this picture its weight is the often-unspoken identification of appearance with illusion, as though the conditions under which a thing shows itself were always conditions of distortion rather than presence. Plato’s interpreters sometimes read him in just these terms, and there are passages, taken in a certain light, where Plato himself seems to speak in this way. However, as Eric Perl argues in his reading of Plato, the Greek εἶδος, the term traditionally rendered as “form” more basically means “look” or “appearance.” What is at issue here is not an occult reality standing behind sensible things (in another world to be reached only when appearance has been left behind) but the very intelligibility of what appears to us here in this one.

What Perl draws from this tradition, and what the participatory account I have referenced inherits, is that the look of a thing and the seeing that receives it belong indissolubly to one another, so that the skills of attention and perception are themselves part of how form comes to presence. The deeper latent claim here, which Perl traces to Parmenides’ famous dictum that “the same is for thinking and for being,” is that thought and being are themselves co-given in a single act rather than two ready-made terms to be coordinated afterward. Adapted into the skill-based register I have been developing, this means that thinking should not be read exclusively as a supplementary reflection on what perception delivers but is ingredient in perception itself. In other words, thought is internal to the discriminations by which the skilled perceiver picks out what is there to receive amid the complex and textured flux of a changing world.

In this sense, appearance is not the same as illusion.

Of course appearances can deceive us, and illusions are real phenomena that have to be sorted out from what is genuinely the case in a given moment. But, I would point out, these corrections happen within the field of appearing itself, by means of further appearing, not by stepping outside the field altogether. What would that even mean? That something shows itself only under certain conditions of awareness does not make it unreal, or indeed “only” an appearance, and it inverts the more simplistic reading that says first-person experience is something to be overcome always and everywhere. It implies, rather, that perception must be trained and cultivated rather than escaped or abandoned. Reality, in this view, is not what lies behind appearance but is what comes to presence by means of it, whether that be through scientific, aesthetic, contemplative, or philosophic modes of understanding.

Importantly for my purposes, to mistake the appearance for the illusion is to undercut the very grounds on which intelligibility rests, a point I want to explore further. Theōria, as the Platonists on Perl’s reading understood it, does not circumvent the sensible world in order to reach form but rather moves into the perceptual presence in which form appears, so that sense and form, appearance and reality, are disclosed as one integral whole rather than as two stages the mind passes between, discarding the former in favor of the latter. To defend form, on this view, is also to defend appearance, and to defend appearance is to defend the horizon in which form can show itself at all.

Stated another way, what appears, in appearing, is form. Form and appearance are in this sense internally related. Form is not behind what appears, waiting to be reached once appearance has been overcome; it just is the intelligibility of what appears, given to a mind capable of receiving it. If this is right, then the attempt to strip away appearance in search of a reality behind it, one bereft of sensible qualities like color, shape, sound, and scent, is a fundamentally mistaken philosophical move. For what remains after this stripping away is complete is not the real laid bare, but an object abstracted from perception and then mistaken for a ground, what Alfred North Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: the error of taking an abstraction drawn from concrete experience for concrete reality itself.

II. The Disappearance of Form

Now, one might object that form was discredited not by a prior prejudice about the nature of appearance and form but by explanatory displacement, that is, by modern mechanistic and probabilistic accounts that outcompeted modes of form-talk that did not deliver the same level of predictive accuracy when put to work on certain causal systems. Indeed, one might even respond that what I am calling the decline of theōria is not a loss at all but a transformation in the direction of a clearer truth, one less saddled by the confused and superstitious nature of the premodern mind, one thus more able to manipulate and force the real into the shape of humanity’s will, now untethered.

In other words, what was lost in the stripping down of appearances and the evacuation of form reappears as a gain in terms of new powers of prediction and control. In this sense, the modern intellect, one could argue, is not bereft of contemplative capacity at all but orients that capacity differently (and more correctly) toward the abstract structures of modern physics or the logic of computation when read under these assumptions. On this view, if theōria has changed, then it may be because our understanding of intelligibility itself has been sharpened and clarified, not because it has been lost or diminished. These arguments should be taken seriously, and my point is not that modern ways of thinking about the world are simply mistaken. They are obviously not. But they are partial, and that’s the issue I’m raising. There is a large, and in my mind unwarranted, leap from a view that says modern science offers more precise descriptions of specific modes of causality to one that extends that localized success into a totalizing and complete ontology.

The result of this operation is a view of reality, of Being, that is controllable in new ways but is also drained of the intelligible–sensible structure that gives Being its fullness and richness in the first place. Perhaps counterintuitively, since, as we have seen, theōria is sometimes pictured as the mind’s ascent, or even escape, from the world of unreliable sensation into a separate intelligible realm, the stripping of appearance collapses the older epistemological continuum in which theōria stood as a legitimate mode of contact and apprehension. Because theōria‘s work is to receive form as it is given in appearance, to evacuate the field of appearing is to leave theōria without its proper field of operation. What is dissolved through this maneuver in thought is the integral appearing through which form is ever given, and with it the mode of apprehension whose whole work is to attend to that appearing. The unusual consequence of this line of thinking is that saving form requires saving appearance, as we have just seen.

To be sure, new modes of understanding have been achieved in these more recent approaches, and in these areas they often disclose causal structures of extraordinary explanatory power. What is often missing from these modes of inquiry, however, is what the older tradition would call intrinsic intelligibility and final causality (the claim that beings are intelligible in themselves rather than only for us, and that the ends toward which they are ordered disclose something real about what they are).

In contrast, much of modern theorizing operates within a more deflationary ontology, where Being is treated as reducible to mechanistic explanation. What can be modeled or measured is tacitly assumed to exhaust what is ultimately true of reality, and what resists such treatment is classed as subjective overlay or useful fiction. Here, again, an abstraction is taken for the ground, now as a habit of thought (and so a habit of perception) that renders the world present in a particular way, and in taking this ground as settled once and for all, this habit forecloses the possibility of construing the world, in realist terms, otherwise.

In another direction, the Kantian critical turn marks a different kind of redirection, one that does not degrade contemplation into instrumental cognition but instead relocates the source of intelligibility itself. Here intelligibility becomes a condition of possible experience on the side of the subject rather than a structure the intellect encounters in beings themselves. Much subsequent philosophy, we might say, continues to operate within this basic settlement, treating intelligibility as something the subject contributes to experience rather than something it receives from beings themselves, even when the transcendental architecture has been replaced by other accounts of its constitution, often linguistic or historicizing in nature, that locate the conditions of intelligibility in structures other than the transcendental subject while preserving the basic move.

Again, theōria is not straightforwardly abolished under these conditions but it is redirected, its receptive orientation reshaped into something that manipulates the representations and abstractions it has confused for ground reality. Whether what remains here is still theōria bent out of its proper operation, or something that has ceased to be theōria altogether, is itself a question the redirection has made hard to settle, since what has been lost includes the very field in which the distinction could clearly be drawn. The availability of the noumena remains out of reach.

One could argue further against this view of substantial form by claiming that faculties do not require the real existence of their objects to function or flourish, either as the realist forms of Plato or as the regulative forms of Kant. Indeed, from a constructivist or pragmatist point of view, what matters is not whether an object like “essence” or “form” exists independently, or even transcendentally, but whether our concepts and practices involving them prove socially useful. On this view, theōria may again be seen to evolve, as its focus shifts toward new modes of intelligibility without any need to posit form in either the classical or critical sense. Pragmatism sees itself as an advance on both.

To be sure, this approach may challenge certain kinds of naive realism, but, I would argue, it overlooks the phenomenological depth of how human faculties are shaped in relation to Being, not merely in relation to usefulness in regard to our projects and needs. While it is true that we do construct local conceptual frameworks based on imminent needs and wants, I believe the human intellect is also ordered toward something more than pragmatic coherence. It seeks intelligibility as such, an account of truth beyond usefulness or situational necessity.

Furthermore, the pragmatist accounts presuppose a horizon of intelligibility that is hard to explain from within its own world picture. Why? What counts as useful is always useful for some end and is recognizable as useful only within a larger field of significance. The contemplative intellect, in its classical mode, just is the capacity attuned to this prior intelligibility that shapes our various priorities and actions, even as that understanding is also mediated through particular languages and concepts.

One might also press here that the cultivated character of perception is precisely what a sophisticated constructivism would predict. If intelligibility shows up only to a mind trained in certain ways, why describe this as reception rather than as construction by our practices of attention? This objection to my mind assumes a binary that the participatory account I offered above is meant to displace. To say that form is received is not to say that the mind is a passive blank slate, as though intelligibility were imprinted on a waiting and ready surface. Here I can agree with the constructivist that local practices of attention and discernment do help articulate the field within which form appears and are in turn drawn into that appearing in the act of contemplative beholding. My point is that we cannot shape or construct what these forms are wholesale; we must to a certain extent acquiesce to their independent natures in our perceiving.

What distinguishes my view from constructivism, then, is the answerability of the act of thinking to the world itself. In this sense, participation suggests that the ecology of form meets the ecology of perception. The two are entangled and imply one another. In other words, cultivated attention can be more or less adequate to what shows itself, more or less fitted to things and their doings. This is not the same as saying that the novice and the practiced perceiver merely organize their experience differently. The practiced perceiver sees more of what is there to be seen in reality, and the novice can come to recognize this fact in retrospect.

To accept any of these criticisms without qualification is to participate in a redefinition of the human intellect, no longer as a faculty oriented toward the apprehension of Being, but as an instrument for producing useful representations or functional models. As a result, the scope of intelligibility contracts, and what cannot be measured or understood in these ways is treated as epistemically irrelevant. Entire dimensions of reality, such as form and intrinsic value, are gradually excluded from view. The contemplative posture, often marked by receptivity and wonder, gives way to modes of thought shaped by mastery or usefulness, thus reduced in scope and integrity.

III. The Bifurcated World

I want to point out that each of these objections is itself a version of a more general move, one that takes many shapes across contemporary thought but shares a common undermining structure. The view is that appearances may be granted as appearances, but these are then routed through some more primary constituting condition, such that the appearance never quite gets to count as evidence of anything beyond itself.

This basic move runs through any number of perspectives: reality only looks that way because we are organisms with sensory architectures evolved for adaptive coarse-graining rather than ontological accuracy; reality only looks that way because we are noun-and-verb-using creatures whose grammar imposes a substance-attribute structure on what is, in itself, indifferent to those divisions; reality only looks that way because we have been habituated to concepts and schemas that chunk the world into discrete unities for practical and cultural purposes; reality only looks that way because we are incapable of perceiving the more primary flows and processes of which these apparent unities are merely surface effects; reality only looks that way because intelligibility itself is a transcendental condition of possible experience on the side of the subject rather than a structure encountered in beings themselves; reality only looks that way because we are historically conditioned meaning-making creatures who project our relative values onto an inert and indifferent material. One could go on.

My point is that when such objections gain cultural purchase, they hollow out an entire mode of perception by evacuating the field in which its proper objects could be given. As the faculty weakens, a self-fulfilling circle arises, one wherein the discredited object, once removed from the field of epistemically legitimate beings or causes, recedes further from an experiential horizon now made thinner. The object then disappears from view, making it appear, retrospectively, as though the a priori denial was justified all along.

Crucially, rather than merely losing a kind of knowledge, we lose an orientation to Being itself in its deeper qualitative and aesthetic richness.

I don’t raise these issues to deny what modern ontology has made possible. The achievements modern thought has enabled in medicine, energy, agriculture, engineering, and physics have been made available in part by the very reduction this essay has diagnosed. In a certain sense, these achievements are possible because of this displacement, and my view is that any recovery of what has been lost through this reduction must hold together with what has been newly gained through an as-yet-to-be-achieved synthesis of science, form, and cultivated perception.

The difficulty, as Charles Taylor has argued across his works, is not with these achievements per se but with the ontological settlement that takes them for the whole of what Being is and does, on the one hand, and with what this arrangement means for the development of the person when they are taken for the whole of reality, on the other. Taylor uses the figure of the buffered self to describe this particular kind of human formation. The concept is worth dwelling upon for a moment. The buffered self is the self sealed off from the form and meaning once received as given through the world’s appearance to perception, a self no longer porous to what the older modes of form contemplation sought to receive.

In turn, the world now appears inert, drained of the meanings it was once understood to bear, and the self becomes the sole remaining source of significance, tasked with constructing from within what it can no longer receive from without. This interiorization, as Taylor often underscores, is double-sided. On the one hand, it has opened forms of civic and personal freedom that premodern social structures could not accommodate, affording new spaces of reflective judgment that are among modernity’s real achievements. On the other hand, when human interiority is taken as the totalizing condition of meaning-making rather than only one of its creative modes, the same buffering can produce alienation and a sense of stupefying nihilism, the characteristically modern suspicion that all significance is projection—or worse, is just the hidden workings of power—and that nothing in the world meets us with its own intrinsic value.

We can think here again of Whitehead, who called the division at the heart of modern thought the bifurcation of nature, or the splitting of reality into measurable structures on one side and a subjective overlay of qualities on the other. On this view, the former is taken as what nature actually is and the latter is only the mind’s contribution onto it. I think we can read Taylor’s diagnosis as an anthropological extension of Whitehead’s insight, tracing what this bifurcation becomes once it is lived out across generations of developing individuals and communities. The buffered self, inhabiting an immanent frame from which transcendence has been bracketed as an essential possibility, finds itself sealed off from meanings once received as given: a self, then, both buffered (from without) and bifurcated (from within).

What is at issue in this drama is whether our civilization can hold together the technological and scientific gains and the freedoms of autonomous selfhood with the contemplative reception of form these achievements have displaced, where each avenue of understanding furnishes an important aspect of life that the others cannot supply. If this is right, then what is ultimately at stake in this discussion is not just a set of metaphysical commitments or arguments about epistemic deliverance but the continued possibility of a kind of knowing that discloses Being rather than replaces it with a representation that lacks fullness and depth, all the while resisting the simple-minded temptation to return to the past.

IV. Askēsis and Soul

There is, I take it, little dispute about a basic phenomenological observation: in the ordinary attitude of our naive and unexamined experience, the world does present itself to us as populated by beings that show up as intelligible unities, forms, of a certain kind. We do not first encounter a chaos of unrelated sensations and only afterward invent the coherence of things by an act of conceptual imposition, at least not in our regular everyday dealings as sober, adult persons. Rather, what appears ordinarily shows itself as already gathered into relatively selfsame wholes: this tree, this animal, this face, this action, this living thing. What is contested is the status of this showing. I have already enumerated the various ways contemporary thought reduces that showing to some more primary constituting condition. Here I want to ask what we are committed to if we resist that routing and what opens up in that wake of possibility.

The real philosophical dispute, I want to say, is whether the showing-up of things as intelligible unities tracks something in the beings themselves or is fully accounted for by the conditions under which they appear. Is such intelligibility merely a contribution of the subject—or of the species, the language, the schema, the transcendental architecture—a way the mind organizes what would otherwise remain indifferent to form? Or does the world show itself in this way because form belongs, in some real sense, to the beings themselves, as a feature of reality and not only of cognition?

I think the latter option, that form is a feature of reality rather than an artifact of our peculiar cognitive system, is the truer description, though I do think there is something right and commendable in all these contrary positions, but I am not willing to cede the territory to any of them. My argument is that the answer to this question depends, again, in part on the skills of perception we bring to bear on the phenomena of our experience. On Perl’s reading, to which I gestured earlier, to speak of form is to speak of the intelligibility of this world, not of a separate one, the to ti esti, the “what it is” by which any given thing is the thing it is, intrinsic to the being it makes intelligible rather than another individual thing standing alongside it.

I want to be clear that Perl’s thesis is a particular one, as it rejects three common misconceptions in our understanding of form. The first treats form as a static object in some eternal elsewhere, distant and detached from the object of our own perception. The second treats form as a subjective overlay that misses reality for its own constituting constructions. The third treats form as an effect of a more primary process alone. In contrast, form, for Perl, is an immanent look or appearance, something that shows itself in a particular way to a particular mode of awareness, and thus requires a worldly competence to receive and relate to as it appears within the cultivated conditions of the perceiver.

The developmental biologist Michael Levin uses form language, and even appeals to Plato, to offer what is perhaps the most robust contemporary defense of form in biology today, arguing that a “structured latent space of patterns” is essential to our understanding of development in living and cognitive systems. But, like Perl, Levin also insists that we shouldn’t parcel out living systems into physical bodies on one hand and informing patterns on the other. Instead, we should see that such bodies just are these patterns ingressing into the world. I read Levin as one site where the synthesis of form, science, and perception I gestured toward earlier is being empirically explored.

Does this mean form is entirely immanent? I don’t think so. It just means that form fully saturates the immanent world of perception and action, but that is not the same as saying that form is exhausted by that immanence. We can thus hold onto the transcendence of form whilst still acknowledging its immediate presence in the here and now. If one wants to understand form and process together, one could say form is what offers, but also constrains, the flow-shaping contours that groove the processual world, giving it definite shape and arrangement across time and space, and inevitably so.

If my case is defensible, then it is not enough to ask whether forms exist; we must also ask how they appear, and to whom. What I am claiming is that the appearance of form is conditioned by the soul’s orientation to Being, by the perceptual stances and habits of attention it brings to the world as that world comes to presence through practice and experience. In other words, the ontological and the ascetic are two faces of the same claim.

In this sense, askēsis, or spiritual and philosophical exercise, is how the soul becomes capable of receiving form as form. As Pierre Hadot’s work has shown, in classical philosophy such an askēsis was the very condition or medium of flourishing for philosophy as such. That is, the exercises that train perception and action are what make the philosophical life possible in the first place, including in its discursive and conceptual expressiveness.

Such practices may include the cultivation of attention (prosochē), the examination of impressions, and the ordering of desire toward the Good, among many others. While Hadot does not make this exact point, I think we can extend his view of philosophy as perception transformation and say that, in this context, askēsis is the discipline through which the soul is shaped to receive form rather than merely represent it or reduce it to usefulness. To see Being as intelligible, then, requires the cultivation of the very capacities by which intelligibility is disclosed. In a phrase, askēsis is what shapes and develops this participation into skilled forms of contact with reality.

Perception in this fuller sense cannot be specified apart from what it apprehends and is itself shaped through askēsis. In this context, contemplative receiving stands in circulation with cultivated sensation and perception rather than following upon them as a later stage of cognition only (though of course modes of after-the-fact self-reflection are also possible and important). In more direct phenomenological terms, we can say that form appears within a field of awareness whose articulation perception itself has helped to shape, and attention is then drawn into that appearing in the act of contemplative beholding, each disclosing and shaping the other in successively deeper acts of relating.

Thus, if theōria is the contemplative capacity by which the soul attends to form itself, then what is ultimately at stake in denying the reality of these objects is more than a metaphysical thesis about what is the case in our understanding of the world; it is also about the viability and development of a mode of perception that underwrites this apprehension to begin with. Put differently, when the intelligible structures that theōria seeks are dismissed as projections, illusions, regulative conditions, or pragmatic tools, the faculty itself gradually loses its orientation. It becomes like an antenna array without a signal to receive. To mix metaphors, it no longer has a field of reference in which to take root, and over time the very existence of such a field begins to seem implausible.

Through this historical transition, what was once seen as a cultivated skill of perception comes to appear obsolete or illusory, and eventually it is forgotten altogether.

In this way, the loss of belief in form leads to a thinning out of experience itself, turning us toward a world where certain ways of seeing and being no longer arise because the soul has been disoriented from those aspects of reality that once called them forth. As the capacity for theōria fades through its lack of use, intelligibility recedes, and with it the very conditions under which perception and Being can meaningfully cohere. My contention is that this disappearance of form does not register as a loss because the faculty that would have registered it has already fallen astray.

My estimation is that what moves out of sight through this loss of agency is the possibility that the intellect can be oriented toward Being’s own aesthetic richness and intrinsic value for its own sake. Along with this possibility go several other commitments that depend on it: that things have intelligible and formative essences, that those essences can be beheld and appreciated, that contemplation is a genuine mode of knowing rather than a subjective disposition, and that the ends toward which beings are ordered disclose something real about what they are. These are the conditions under which philosophy can understand itself as a practice of deepening its perception of Being, a practice that sometimes falls under the name theōria physikē, or natural contemplation.

In the end, then, my argument is not that form disappears in some ontological sense because of our lack of attention to it, but that the soul’s capacity to perceive it diminishes in the absence of our cultivated engagement with form’s reality. What is asked of us now is the harder act of attending again, under conditions that no longer make such attending publicly credible, to what shows itself in perception when we let it.

— Adam Robbert