Before aesthetics, there is sensation. At the end of the fifteenth century, white western philosophy entered a phase of scholarship in which the relationship between material objects, sensation, and Truth was a problem. The desire to absolutely know what objects are, without a doubt, is at the forefront of western philosophy and science. Science seeks to know objects so humans can know how to manipulate them to their advantage. The empirical search for understanding begins with the ancient Greeks in the West. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato continues to influence western philosophy and metaphysics, especially with his theory of the Form. Metaphysics deals with questions about existence and consciousness. How do you know you exist? How do you know that other things exist? Can you know everything there is to know about a given thing/object?

Plato’s theory of the Form aims to show how a complete understanding of the world outside the human subject is possible through a complete understanding of the Form of objects. The Form is not a physical characteristic of an object but is the sum of all possible things to be known about an object that will remain valid throughout all time and space. To know water, one cannot merely see or interact with water; one needs to know it in all its appearance variations in all possible spaces and at all possible times without exception. For Plato, what we see in the world is a piece of the Form (never the complete Form). So the object sensed becomes a sign of the object’s eternal, immutable Form of the object, which can only be thought about and never directly sensed because that would require the knower to detach from all their experiences and place in time and space to assume a view from nowhere. For Plato, all objects have to have an unchanging essence, or they are unknowable, even if most humans cannot know the essence due to limited logical skills and limited experience.

The counter to Plato is his student Aristotle, who spent many years training under Plato. On most points, he disagreed with his former teacher. Aristotle spent a great deal of time in De Anima and The Metaphysics, contemplating the role of sensation in understanding the world outside the human subject, and concluded that there is no possibility of a Form that remains unchanging and the same across all time and space forever.