Theōria and the Disappearance of Form

What happens to the contemplative intellect when the reality of its objects is denied? A reflection on perception, practice, and the intelligibility of being

Photo by Aleksandra Sapozhnikova

“Without forms, not only language and thought but reality itself collapses. In order to be anything at all, a thing must be something, that is, it must have and display certain ‘looks,’ characters, identities, in virtue of which it is what it is rather than—nothing.”

“This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by thought.”

— Eric Perl

1. Faculty and Object

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What follows is a reflection on theōria and the reality of form.

In more general terms, I am trying to think through the relation between a cognitive faculty and its proper objects, and what might happen when a culture comes to deny the reality of those objects. I offer these reflections as a hypothesis about how perception, ontology, 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 the contemplative intellect) in particular—requires and assumes the presence of those objects toward which the faculties are directed.

Classical thought recognized a plurality of cognitive modes—aisthēsis (sensation), phantasía (imagination), dianoia (discursive reason), phronēsis (practical reason), mnēmē (memory), theōria (contemplation)—each oriented toward phenomena that they apprehend and through which they can be trained and developed.

For example, the senses are trained through repeated exposure to particular 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 particulars, 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.

And the contemplative intellect is shaped in part by attending to form or essence—to those intelligible structures that disclose what a thing is across instances.

I will reiterate my constant refrain: Perception is a skill that needs to be trained.

However, as we see here, perception is not one thing, but an integrated and variegated continuum of faculties, each with their own objects of concern, and, in turn, each with their own training regimens that allow for skilled perception at each level.

In other words, at every level of apprehension, there is an interdependence between faculty and object, mediated by practice. The development of a faculty presupposes the givenness—and the acknowledged reality—of the kind of object it is meant to apprehend. Where those objects are taken seriously, the faculty has room to grow and engage; where they are denied or rendered invisible, the faculty begins to atrophy.

Thus, if theōria is the faculty that perceives form or essence, and if those have been denied real existence in the reigning ontology of the day (as is the case at present), then theōria will be left with no proper objects of perception.

In turn, lacking its proper objects, the faculty will come to seem no longer worth cultivating, and so will wither on the vine. Over time, it may fail to develop at all, since its objects will be assumed a priori to be nothing more than projections or illusions—artifacts of our own pre-modern and mistaken ontology.

But as we can note, with Eric Perl, appearance is not the same as illusion.

That something shows itself only under certain conditions of awareness does not make it unreal. To mistake appearance for illusion is to undercut the very grounds on which intelligibility rests.

Treating appearance as illusion alone flips the older epistemological hierarchy on its heads; the highest mode of apprehension—theōria—becomes nothing more than an illusion to be overcome rather than a height to be ascended towards in our truth claims. (Or, in Kant’s case, the form is retained but repositioned as a regulative idea constitutive of our experience, rather than a substantive feature of being itself.)

A cultural and ontological shift, in other words, can hollow out an entire mode of perception by discrediting its referents. As the faculty weakens, a self-fulfilling circle arises, as the discredited object, once removed from the field of epistemically legitimate beings or causes, recedes further from experience.

In effect, the object disappears from view—making it appear, retrospectively, as though the a priori denial were justified all along.

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2. Intelligibility Without Form?

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Now, one could argue against this view of substantial form by claiming that faculties do not require the real existence of their objects to function or flourish. From a constructivist or pragmatist point of view, what matters is not whether an object like “essence” or “form” exists independently, but whether our concepts and practices involving them prove coherent, fruitful, or socially useful.

On this view, theōria may evolve, not wither, as its focus shifts toward new modes of intelligibility without any need to posit formal realities in the classical sense.

This criticism may challenge the substantial realism of a Plato or an Aristotle, but it overlooks the phenomenological depth of how human faculties are formed and shaped in relation to being, not merely in relation to usefulness. This, while it is true that we do construct conceptual frameworks, the human intellect appears to be ordered toward something more than pragmatic coherence. It seeks intelligibility as such.

And even constructivist traditions rely on normative assumptions or regulative ideals.

Consider that what counts as coherence or fruitfulness already presupposes a horizon of intelligibility that cannot be entirely explained by social utility or linguistic practice. The contemplative intellect, or theōria, does not simply produce useful cognitive structures. It seeks to behold what is, even if this is mediated through language, metaphor, or conceptual thought.

To concede the point entirely, then, would be to risk collapsing knowledge into a form of solipsism or cultural relativism, where nothing is known apart from what is instrumentally useful or linguistically and historically sanctioned.

Such a view would sever thinking from the very reality it seeks to understand.

Likewise, one might say that what I am naming the decline of theōria is not a loss but a transformation of a different kind. The modern intellect, one could argue, is not bereft of contemplative capacity but rather orients it differently—toward the abstract structures of physics or the logic of computation, for example.

If theōria has changed, then, it may be because our understanding of intelligibility itself has deepened or pluralized, not because it has vanished.

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So, to be sure, forms of contemplation still exist in contemporary domains such as mathematics and theoretical physics. However, what is often missing from these modes of inquiry is the sense of final causality or intrinsic intelligibility. Much of modern theorizing operates within a deflationary ontology, where being is treated as reducible to function, probability, or mechanistic explanation.

The structure of contemplative inquiry may remain, but its depth is flattened. The search for form, essence, or purpose is replaced by interest in models, simulations, or abstract relations. If contemplation is reduced to pattern recognition or systems analysis, then it risks becoming detached from any encounter with being as such. (One could contrast this kind of thinking with Goethe’s contemplative phenomenology of forms in nature, just to highlight the difference.)

To accept 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.

In doing so, the scope of intelligibility contracts.

What cannot be measured, operationalized, or discursively justified is treated as epistemically irrelevant, and entire dimensions of reality such as form and intrinsic value are gradually excluded from view.

The contemplative posture marked by receptivity, wonder, and attunement to what is gives way to modes of thought shaped by mastery, control, and utility. As this shift settles in, the disappearance of the objects once perceived by theōria is mistaken for their nonexistence, completing, to say it again, a self-fulfilling loop in which the atrophy of a faculty is taken as evidence that its objects were never real to begin with.

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

If this is right, then what is ultimately at stake is not just a set of metaphysical commitments but the continued possibility of a kind of knowing that discloses being rather than replaces it with a representation that lacks its true fullness and depth.

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3. Appearance, Askēsis, and Soul

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To be clear, I don’t think there is any real philosophical dispute about the fact that something is given to perception that has the appearance of substantial form.

The only question—and it might be the central technical question in philosophy—is the status of this appearance. Is it appearance only? Worse, is it illusion only?

Or does form appear the way it does because the appearance itself betokens an actually substantive existence?

My argument, which I’ve explored before, is that the answer to this question is indexed against the skills of perception we bring to bear on the phenomena of our experience. I have taken up this question through a phenomenological reading of Plato, drawing on interpreters like Eric Perl and John Sallis.

On that view, form is not a static object existing in an eternal elsewhere alone but an immanent look or appearance—something that shows itself in a particular way to a particular mode of awareness. If this is the case, then it is not enough to ask whether forms exist; we must also ask how they appear, and to whom.

What Plato’s dialogues suggest, especially when read through this interpretation, is that the appearance of form is conditioned by the soul’s orientation—by the perceptual stance and habits of attention it brings to the world as that world comes to presence through practice and experience.

In this sense, askēsis, or spiritual and philosophical exercise, is the means by which the soul becomes capable of receiving form as form. To see being as intelligible requires the cultivation of the very capacities by which intelligibility is disclosed.

In this way, if theōria is the contemplative capacity by which the soul attends to form, then what is ultimately at stake in denying the reality of these referents is not only a metaphysical thesis about what is the case but the viability and development of a mode of perception that underwrites this apprehension in the first place.

Stated another way, when the intelligible structures that theōria seeks are dismissed as projections or illusions, the faculty itself gradually loses its orientation—it becomes like an antenna array without a radio signal. It no longer has a field of reference in which to take root, and over time the very possibility of the existence of this field begins to seem implausible. What was once 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 of experience itself, turning us towards a world where certain ways of seeing, knowing, and being no longer arise because the soul has been disoriented from the realities that once called them forth.

In the end, it is not form that disappears, but the soul’s capacity to perceive it. As theōria fades through lack of use, intelligibility recedes, and with it the very conditions under which language, thought, and being can meaningfully cohere.

This strikes me as a less-than-ideal epistemic scenario.