“The most practical and important thing about a man, is still his view of the universe.” – G. K. Chesterton
It is important to think about our most basic ideas, conceptions, and assumptions. After all, our foundational principles and ideas shape and inform what we think and how we act towards many other things in life. It is even more important to think about the first things of all reality. How we decide these questions will determine how and what we think about other things. For example, someone thinks that all reality is really mass and energy in motion, then it will be easy to understand where they fall on moral issues regarding the beginning and ending of life. On the other hand, if one believes in a supernatural or incorporeal reality then we know what he or she thinks in a variety of other things. Our most commonplace expressions of political policy, ethical decisions, and our understanding of the natural world such as change, cause, mass and energy, reflect assumptions about our basic ideas of the universe and our place in it. As G. K. Chesterton explained, “The most practical and important thing about a man, is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.”1 Everyone, whether we realize it or not holds basic ideas—a philosophy—regarding humankind’s curiosity about itself and the universe of which he or she is a part. I’m convinced that the most important questions in life are metaphysical in nature. All the important questions we can explore are, in the final analysis, a result of what we think about the nature of reality.
This is just as true today as it was for a collection of philosophers who lived in the ancient world known as the pre-Socratics. I will explain who the pre-Socratics were and what they believed in an upcoming post. For now, it is enough to know that the pre-Socratics were the world’s first metaphysicians and in one way or another shaped the field of philosophy ever since. This post will focus on their influence and seek to explain why their primary question—the problem of the one and the many—is a significant difficulty for us today. I will post an essay or two to explain how different pre-Socratic philosophers answered the question. Then, we will discover how nearly every philosopher from Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Augustine through Aquinas, Kant and Hegel and even postmodern and critical theorists today still struggle with the question of the one and the many and its relevance for us in our current intellectual and cultural climate. First, however, let’s examine the classical problem of the one and the many and why it is still important.
What is this problem of the one and the many? Philosopher Ed Miller articulates the problem this way: The problem of the one and the many is “the problem of identifying the ultimate reality (the One) that underlies all things (the Many) and of explaining the relation between them or how the Many derives from the One”.2 It is a problem because logically the many can not be one (or it would not be many) and the one can not be many (or it would not be one). According to the law of noncontradiction, the one cannot be many at the same time and in the relationship.
The pre-Socratic philosophers were perplexed by the question of reality. They were puzzled by the nature of existence and what it means to exist in a world of change, contingency, and finitude. Yet somehow something holds this world together in unity. How do all things relate to one reality? Not everything is pure chaos. Finite things have unity or oneness. At the same time, all of reality (Being) seems to be coherent, ordered, and rationally discernible. Could it be there is an underlying reality that is revealed in the many things around us? If so, how is this underlying reality related to or connected to the individual things we encounter every day?
The fundamental issue is, coming from the fact of existence (Being), what do all things have in common? It seemed to the pre-Socratics that behind the vast multiplicity of things that make up the universe, there is some principle of unity, the very insight that is embodied in our word universe, which means “combined into one”.3
This quest to find unity out of diversity demonstrates the human impulse to seek an explanation for things. Generally speaking, the best explanation is the one that is simple, unified, and rationally coherent—what philosophers call the principle of simplicity. This principle states that one explanation is preferred over another by virtue of its employment of fewer and/or simpler factors. In philosophy, science, and everyday life, we tend to accept the simplest explanation that makes the most reasonable sense out of the given facts. We take unity as a principle of explanation because it unites, integrates, and encompasses that which is known. We do not like needlessly complex answers to questions. Complex answers certainly can be found for complex questions but the principle of simplicity explains why a single simpler answer that incorporates and makes sense out of a diversity of facts is often preferred. As we shall see in upcoming posts, the pre-Socratics may seem to be naive and unscientific, but their quest for an account for the unity from the many and what it means to provide an explanation for something is not at all unreasonable or irrelevant.
The question of the one and the many shapes how we think about a variety of things. It is not an abstract problem strictly for the amusement of philosophers. In history of Western thought, the basic themes of being and becoming, the intelligible (mental and conscious) and sensible, the definite and infinite, same and other, particular and universal, and existence and nothingness all relate to the question of what reality is and how the many diverse things that exist relate to it. These themes point to the relationship everything takes part in and the underlying reality that makes things one, in other words, the unity of Being. The question of the one and the many may take on different names but in various ways, the inquiry is the same.
We can see how the issue works out today. Physicists have been concerned with the divisibility or indivisibility of matter and the strange behavior of sub-atomic particles for a long time. Why is it that physics is fairly regular and ordered at the macro level but not at the quantum level? Nevertheless, something unites the two. This is what John Boslough was getting at when he wrote, “Only by reconciling the two seemingly irreconcilable areas of physics can theorists hope to find a unified field theory that will explain the workings of the entire universe”. In some ways, the question of the one and many has become more relevant today than it was for the pre-Socratics. The quest, however, to find an underlying reality which unites everything else remains. How is it that time keeps moving forward when sensible particular things stop? What keeps time continuous? Time seems to be divisible yet there is an underlying unity to it. This is a question of the one and the many. In the realm of politics, one might ask, does the individual exist for the benefit of the state or the state for the individual? If so, in what way? How should the state be united for the common life of the many? What unites a community into a state? During the founding of America, the Federalists solved this problem with the slogan, e pluribus unum, “from the many, one”. But what happens when unity breaks down? These are important existential questions that will affect everyone at one time or another.
In the following posts, I hope to explore the ramifications of important metaphysical questions that center around the problem of the one and the many. We’ll discover how physics is applied metaphysics, social science is applied metaphysics and why Kant was right when he argued for a metaphysical foundation for ethical decisions.
We will continue to explore the question of the one and the many. For now, I hope that we can see that we all have been influenced and impacted by this most practical and metaphysical question of reality.
[Note, some of my readers have indicated that my posts are conceptually difficult for them. I apologize. I have tried to write at the beginning and intermediate levels but I know I often fail. In light of this, I have created a philosophical glossary to help out. In the meantime, I will still try to explain things more carefully because philosophy is important for all human flourishing.]
1G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1905) P. 15.
2Ed Miller, Questions that Matter, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1996) P. 59.
3Daniel Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition, (Tan Books, 2009), P. 12.
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