Plato's Theory of Forms

Platonism is a kind of antidote to that. It sees higher patterns as being kind of fixed and eternal, and then all the material mass as somehow embodying those patterns. One reason why plato might have introduced theory forms was that his society was going through a very similar meaning crisis to what we are experiencing to day. I think there's no coincidence that we turn to examining top down, from our conception and bottom up from our phenomenology.