"...as far as he could tell it was utterly impervious to any harm. It never needed to be oiled or wiped down...or taken to a sharpening stone...
"...He wasn't altogether sure it was physical matter at all as humankind understood the term, perhaps instead an embodied concept, a thought that could be touched."
-SM Stirling, The Given Sacrifice (New York, 2014), Chapter Twelve, p. 241.
No philosophy graduate can pass by such a passage without making a comment. Philosophers ask: what is the relationship between mind and matter or between being and consciousness? Idealist philosophers answer that the mental is realer than the material but their answer takes different forms -
Theism: God created the world;
subjective idealism: the world is nothing more than the sum total of sense impressions existing within individual minds;
solipsism: subjectivism with only one individual mind;
Platonic-Hegelian objective idealism: eternally real concepts are instantiated/embodied in space-time.
We recognize one colour red in many red things. There are shades of red but we recognize the same redness in all the shades. Does it follow that "red" and every other concept is timelessly real whereas the particular objects instantiating the concepts are less real than the concepts? Does it heck as like? - as one of my former work colleagues, a very down to Earth man, would have replied.
Thus, when Rudi speculates that the Sword might be an embodied concept, he echoes what many philosophers have theorized about all matter.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I don't know if you have heard of the English author Charles Williams and read any of his works, but his novel THE PLACE OF THE LION shows us what happens when Platonic archetypes become physically present in an English town and how that affects people.
Sean
Sean,
A friend of Lewis and Tolkien and member of the Inklings? I read one of his novels featuring "primal matter" (or something). It referred to Islam rather than to Christianity and might also have had some (wrong) time travel in it.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, that was the Charles Williams I had in mind, who was a friend of Tolkien and Lewis. The novel of his you have in mind was MANY DIMENSIONS. But I don't recall time traveling being part of that story.
I was enough of a fan of Charles Williams that besides his novels I read some of his non fiction: WITCHCRAFT (a Christmas gift from my parents as a boy) and THE DESCENT OF THE DOVE.
Sean
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