If this asymmetry is rethought in terms of the presence required for the creatures to be all that they are by nature, it will turn out that God (or the One in non-Christian Neoplatonisms), the greater and prior reality, must always be there if creaturely reality is to be forthcoming and to continue.
To be more precise, it seems that such words as 'good' and 'wise' must involve a relationship to one prior reality, and they must be predicated in a prior and a posterior sense, for these are the marks of analogical terms.
It is only in the intellect, through abstraction, that they become separated from matter, and their presence in matter is due to the nature of matter, not to any sort of prior mathematical reality.
For Mulla Sadra, existence is ontologically prior, a unified reality graded in degrees of intensity and an elusive reality that cannot be fully grasped.
It marks the moment when a gap appears between words and reality: prior to this, God's speech correlates perfectly with his creation.
Everywhere, the ingenious adjective turns up to alter its noun, where "adjective" stands for the imagination and "noun" for reality prior to aesthetic transformation.
In his great essay "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," the art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote of art in the movies that "to pre-stylize reality prior to tackling it amounts to dodging the problem.
If a mortgage banker who handed out irresponsible loans during the housing bubble were now to send each client a small check toward a new nest egg, the gesture would feel a lot like "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist," an act of restitution for prior misdeeds of reality television.
Quine takes seriously the idea that "it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described" (1981, 21).
At one point, he describes naturalism as "the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described" (1981, 21).
While the precise meaning of Ibn Gabirol's idea is open for interpretation, Schlanger suggests that matter per se exists for Ibn Gabirol only as an idea in the mind of God, and not as an actual reality prior to Intellect (see Schlanger 1968, p. 294).
