“One speaks flatly, without thinking, of a Platonic or Aristotelian system, or of a Thomasic system, in spite of the fact that these thinkers would have raised their hands in horror at the idea that their empirical exploration of reality could ever result in a system. If anything was ever clear to a thinker like Plato, who knew to distinguish between the experiences of being and of not-being and acknowledged them both, it was that for better or for worse reality was not a system. If therefore one constructs a system, inevitably one has to falsify reality.”
Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections