Episode 64: Dreams and Shadows: On Ursula Le Guin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea'
Weird Studies
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The Singularity of Being
In Tolkien, the orcs are elves who were engineered by Saruman. They're not even human to begin with. This is not taking place in our historical universe. It's a world of essences. But there is an essence of the human, and part of that essence is the singularity of the individual human. That might be true of all things. Maybe all rocks are both instances of the universal rock, but also singular in its this rock. I think it was Dunskotus, and one of the great scholastic philosophers developed the concept of hexady to try to explain the singularities of each thing. The only being who could know the true singularity of each thing
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