☁️ The Cloud of Many Names — A Story of the Problem of Universals ☁️

After leaving the glade of the Unasking Fox, Liora climbed a gentle hill, where the air shimmered with silver mist. The clouds above were not ordinary clouds: they glimmered like spun crystal, constantly shifting shape, scattering light into countless fragments.

As she reached the top, a soft hum filled the air, and a shimmering cloud descended toward her. Within it, shapes and forms appeared and disappeared: a bird, a tree, a mountain, a river — each morphing seamlessly into another.

“Who are you?” Liora asked, curious.

The cloud quivered and seemed to respond, though not in words. Its forms refracted differently depending on how she looked, and each glance revealed something new.

Suddenly, the forms began to relabel themselves: the bird became “sparrow,” then “eagle,” then “winged one”; the tree became “oak,” then “willow,” then “branching life.” Yet the essence of each form remained, even as the names shifted.

A soft, melodic voice drifted from the cloud:

“Universals do not exist apart from the world or your gaze.

They are potentials, systemic patterns that take shape only when noticed.

Names, like forms, are fleeting — yet they reveal the structure that underlies possibility.”

Liora reached out, and the cloud rippled around her fingers. She realised she could touch the pattern without fixing it, feel the unity without demanding permanence. Each form existed in relation to the whole, and the whole existed as a web of perspectival actualisations, never as a fixed object.

“So, a tree is not ‘just’ an oak or a willow?” Liora whispered.

“It is the potential of treehood itself, realised in infinite forms,” the cloud seemed to hum.

The shapes swirled around her, teaching Liora a luminous lesson: identity, category, and generality are relational, not absolute. Universals are not objects floating in space; they are structured potentials actualised through perspective, alive only when the world is construed.

As she descended the hill, the Cloud of Many Names drifted upward, scattering into countless glimmers, leaving Liora with the insight that all things are patterns of possibility, shimmering between system and instance, waiting for construal to bring them forth.