adaequatio

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Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

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The wild mind of the planet blows through us all, ensconced as we are in the depths of this elusive medium. However, although it is our common element, every one of us experiences it differently. No two bodies or beings ever inhabit this big awareness from precisely the same angle, or with the same sensory organization and style.

Since the body is precisely our interface and exchange with the field of awareness, a praying mantis’s experience of mind is as weirdly different from mine as its spindly body is different from mine; and the dreaming of an aspen grove is as different from mine and the mantis’s as its own fleshly interchange with the medium is different from ours.

It is our bodies that participate in awareness.


—David Abram
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

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Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

Never did the eye see the sun unless it has first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.


—Plotinus

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This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adequatio et rei et intellectus—the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

[] “As above, so below’ the ancients used to say: to the world outside us there corresponds, in some fashion, a world inside us.


—E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed

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