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Today, I was in Professor Winfried Bilo’s ontology class. I listened while multitasking, and he began discussing the concept of categories—kategorein, as Kant put it—something I had also encountered during the Aristotle seminar over vacation.
He explained that to construct a sentence—which I perceive as an entity within the cognitive plane—it typically unfolds as: subject (S), copula (which connects subject and predicate), and predicate (P). The result is a structure like “S is P,” such as “All humans are mortals” or “Not all humans are old.” These formulations can vary, depending on what we intend to express or represent.
As he spoke, he mentioned that objects, within this plane, are viewed through multiple lenses or perspectives. That is, one person may perceive the object through lens A, another through B, C, D, and so on. Yet the object itself remains—though not fully apprehended as the thing, but rather a thing.
This reminded me of something he’d addressed during the seminar:
He taught us that Plato believed in two realms: the world of perception (which we access via our senses—fallible as they are), and the world of ideas, where the true form of things exists in itself. Aristotle added that something like a perfect sphere can’t truly be understood in isolation—we comprehend it only when it becomes part of a greater structure, like an iron sphere or a printed numeral on a page. The pure form exists beyond ordinary reach, in a realm we strive toward, though rarely touch.
Taking this into account, I began mentally piecing things together and wrote the following reflection:
The being—specifically, the human—constructs lies around himself. I’ve reflected on this before, and I don’t see it as inherently wrong. Rather, it’s a mechanism for grappling with the ontological nature of our surroundings—a way to navigate the structure we inhabit and its underlying mechanics.
To understand any object—regardless of its nature—as one or multiple entities, depending on perception, seems to me less an ontological concern and more an epistemological one. We often fail to fully comprehend what surrounds us, erecting barriers—perhaps out of ignorance, or in self-defense against something we subconsciously fear. Death may be one such specter: inevitable, yet not fully embraced or accepted.
So, with the being now placed into this field, let us continue. The human creates masks—fictions—to shield himself from fear. He feigns understanding of his environment, but has yet to grasp its pure essence. His mind cannot fully fathom it, which is why barriers persist within cognition. These masks may be necessary, as we attempt to confront the metaphysical dilemma of the universe.
This, I believe, is what drives madness: the replacement of one lie with another, more palatable lie. These become provisional truths—acceptable within our current cognition or psyche. Once an older concept is displaced by a newer one, returning to the prior framework becomes nearly impossible, whether the knowledge was a priori or a posteriori. Through this process—of assimilating “new lies”—we inch closer to the pure essence of being. Once we’ve dismantled all barriers and exhausted all variations, cognition may ascend to a new plane, enabling us to perceive the object in its truest, most unfiltered form.
In short, when someone “goes crazy”—or deviates from social norms—it needn’t be seen as something negative. That individual may have shattered one of the barriers guarding essence, risen beyond conventional cognition, and detached from the perceivable world.
