ABSTRACT
Chameleonic man is established as the "midpoint" between the four determinate worlds of the organic or vegetative, the animal, the celestial, and the intellectual or angelic. But he himself is a work of indeterminate form, with "no fixed seat", "no distinguishable semblance, no "gift" peculiarly his. Pico is portraying Adam at that primal and originary moment as lacking distinguishing features, lacking determination and a face. The notion of indetermination has a number of problematic, at times even negative, connotations. One of the most vexed questions in the history of Platonism has always been the status of the Ideas, the most penetrating attacks on the theory being that by Plato himself in the first part of the Parmenides and that by Aristotle in the Metaphysics. Behind the injunction in the Oratio to choose to be what we exists another metaphysical tension intrinsic to Neoplatonism. As both an individual and a species man is potentially all things.
