Aristotle's Ten Categories

Write in the concrete, not in the abstract. This is the overarching theme in my Creative Writing class with multiple Palanca winner Don Pagusara. Hence, the recent exercises in metaphor (of which you should probably expect more.) We are not to write, for example, "sadness" but instead "one bird singing terribly afar in the lost lands" (after e.e. cummings).

This lesson brought back some old lessons in metaphysics. Aristotle wrote in Categories about the different ways of being. The categories seem to be a suitable test for concreteness of concept. While I have not exhaustively tested for completeness, it might do for a rough guide.

Aristotle's Ten Categories are:

SUBSTANCE, what an object is, e.g., a human or a horse

QUANTITY, its measure, e.g., one, two, many, or few

QUALITY, the disposition of the subject, e.g., white, smooth

RELATION, as a comparison to another,e.g., double, half, larger

HABIT, what the subject has (habet), e.g., has shoes

POINT OF TIME, when the subject is, e.g., yesterday, in the year before

PLACE, where the subject is, e.g., in the market, in school

ORIENTATION, its position in space, e.g., lying, sitting

ACTION, what the subject is doing, e.g., cutting, burning, crying

PASSION, what is is being done to the subject, e.g., is being cut, or is being burned

We can't really apply these categories to abstract concepts -- but we can to concrete things. That's what makes it a good test to measure for concreteness and specificity.

Take, for example, the word "kiss." Is "kiss" an abstract or concrete concept?