Plato […] was not engaging in flights of fancy when he concluded that forms are things with outright and independent existence apart from substance. He was attempting to confront, head on, the challenge of explaining our experience of meaning; and he was willing to bite the ontological bullet, as it were, rather than let go of the power and reality of that experience. Western European languages don’t have a term for entities that are like ideas yet exist independently of any mind. ‘Angel’ may be the closest that they get. But to claim forms are like angels is, these days, to ask for trouble rather than to solve it.

Jan Zwicky, The Experience of Meaning