'"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

(Keats, 1819)

This paper creates a context of embodied scientific realism, and puts the interaction of form with consciousness central in this context. It reasons that we have postmodern methods, but no postmodern writing forms. It proposes the aphorism as a postmodern scholarly writing form, and contrasts it with the argument as an example of modern writing form. It then examines the form and style of Adam Smith and Friedrich Nietzsche to get beyond the simplification of this contrast. The piece concludes that the aphorism is a form well suited for the generation of research questions and the exploration of research topics, while the argument is a form that fits well with answering them.

Different forms of matter make different forms of consciousness. Both physical and abstract, visible and invisible, tangible and intangible, inside and outside, forms of matter and consciousness are crafting our experience in a continuous dialogue.

One way to explain how this works is with the story of the Müller-Leyer optical illusion (see illustration 1 below). This illusion shows us how we perceive two lines of equal length to be different because of the shapes and directions of the arrows at the ends of the lines. Most people perceive the upper line to be shorter than the lower line. Merleau-Ponty (2005) thought that we have mistakenly created two forms of thought that make the illusion possible: one is that we think that an object or form is an object of consciousness rather than an object for consciousness; the other is that we think that what we look at with the center of our attention is isolated in a black and white way from the periphery of our perception. Today, we know that both the interaction of our consciousness with the form, and the periphery of the form itself are at play in the way forms of matter and consciousness interact.

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