I may be at a disadvantage because I do not share the community of
vocabulary generated by a reading list in common. If my remarks do not
compute in the context defined by S & D, ignore, please.
A paradigm of paradigms is - natch - a model of models. It is the form
according to which we can see other forms generated, more than a
generalization or formula. A p of p is generative, active potentiality,
creative, not a mere ghost or chimera or abstraction.
Aristotle defined the human soul as the "form of forms."
Quick example. I once created an intensive one-day event for a church
community called New Life. I used the six traditional seasons of the church
year translated into experiential opportunities as a framework. One
participant said afterward, "You must know the twelve steps of AA - that's
what we followed today." A Jewish friend "you know, the same structure
undergirds the mythic history of Judaism as well." Light goes on: there is a
spiralling structure of generation and regeneration that is manifest in all
spiritual communities. It is the paradigm of the Christian paradigm, the
12-step paradigm, the Jewish paradigm - etc. The particulars - the stories
or histories or lived experiences of each community - are manifestations of
it. Maybe it is like Jung's archetypes.
Maybe it is the "formless form" of Taoism.
Maybe it is the "nothing" out of which "everything" was generated.
Maybe it is a "script" according to which real behaviors happen. But if the
script is an abstraction, a chimera, a formula, then people laugh - they see
it has no relationship to "real" behaviors. They laugh at academics who are
"divorced from reality" and guys like Jonathan Swift describe them as so
lost in their own thoughts that groundlings must beat them on the head with
bladders filled with dried beans to get them down to the level of real human
experience and conversation.
Richard Thieme