We cannot stop at a principle containing separate parts; there must always be a yet higher, a principle above all such diversity. – Plotinus.

In a recent post, I discussed the metaphysical problem of the one and the many. Although this question of reality has largely been forgotten in contemporary philosophical literature, it is very significant and does not seem to go away. After all, the human impulse to make sense of the many different and changing things around us is deep and profound. We can see this drive in almost every human endeavor. Whenever a historian creates a powerful story of the past using a multiplicity of evidence, he or she is confronting the question of the one and the many. When an attorney seeks an action in the court of law and gives diverse reasons or causes for that action, we see the question of the one and the many at work (or the legal question “how ought justice be correctly distributed?” is another form of the same question). The whole point of science is not to leave us with a diverse set of facts but to attempt a singular unified theory that makes the most sense out of those facts. That is why Aristotle devotes the first part of his Physics (a work about the foundation of science and the natural world) to the question of the one and the many. Even the postmodern critical theorist who wants to privilege the diversity of things to the detriment of unity and coherence still provides a narrative of why that is so (for to reject a “metanarrative” or to provide a “metanarrative” of another kind, is still to give a narrative in the attempt to make sense out of things). The question of the one and the many is with us today.

Some scholars think that the question of the one and the many was the original question of philosophy. One of the reasons for this is that it was the central question of the pre-Socratics who handed it over to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the rest of Western intellectual history. As the name suggests, the pre-Socratics were a group of philosophers that lived before Socrates. In fact, this group laid out the basic question that all philosophy and other fields still attempt to answer today. But who are these philosophers?

I can only give a brief overview of the pre-Socratics here. I will provide a list of resources at the end of this post for those who want to explore the topic further. For our purpose, and by way of introduction, I will discuss the important schools and ideas of the pre-Socratics, and in our next post, I will discuss the primary significance of Heraclitus and Parmenides. For now, let us examine the earliest of Western philosophers, Thales.

Thales, the first metaphysician in recorded history, lived around 600 B.C. and came from what is called the Ionian tradition. He lived in the city of Miletus on the western coast of Ionia (now Turkey). Thales and his followers have come to be known as the “Miliesian Monists” due to the fact that as they sought an answer to the question of the one and the many, they emphasized that all reality can be reduced to one basic principle. (Monism is the idea that all reality is in some sense one and unified in its essence or nature.) If all things have an essence or basic nature, they reasoned, so does the cosmos. In Thales’ case, he posited water as the basic essence of reality. It might seem odd that such an ancient thinker has become famous due his idea that water is the essence of reality. However, Thales is among the first thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition to ground his thinking on evidence, examination, common sense perception, and evaluation as authoritative in all matters of belief and conduct, what is now called rationalism. He did not turn to the Greek anthropomorphic gods, goddesses, or other mysterious forces to explain the natural world around him. He was the first to provide an argument based on evidence and reason regarding the natural world. We do not, however, know exactly why he chose water and not some other element. Perhaps he chose water due to the fact that all living things need it to survive, or that it exists in three different states (liquid, gas, solid), or that it is the most plentiful substance on the planet. After all, it is reported that Thales wrote a book about navigating the seas. The important thing to understand at this point is that Thales emphasized unity and “the one” when it came to the question of the one and the many and chose water as the essential nature of reality. Other early monists lived and worked in this tradition as well, such as Anaxemines (550 B. C.), who proposed that air was the basic essence of reality because it is a sort of life-principle, and Heraclitus (500 B. C.), who taught that although reality is always changing, fire was the one element that holds all things together and provides balance and order in the cosmos.

There also were pre-Socratics who emphasized change, the many, and the diversity we see all around us. These thinkers are known as “the Pluralists” because they sought to identify reality with a plurality of substances while maintaining that each particular thing is a Being and one and immutable. Of this school is Empedocles (450 B. C.), who taught that reality is combined of the four elements of earth, fire, water, and air and are held together by the force of Love which combines things, and torn apart by the power of Strife which separates. Among the Pluralists, we find the first atomists, Democritus (425 B. C.) and Leucippus (450 B. C.) who identified reality with an infinite number of indivisible material particles (atoms) moving randomly in space. The Greek word atomos means “uncuttable” or something that is irreducible. These thinkers believed that the universe came about by a mechanical combining or coagulation of an infinite number of atoms.

No matter which school of thought these pre-Socratic philosophers came from, it can now be understood why they are considered the first metaphysicians and cosmologists due to their investigation of nature and their desire to find a unifying reason or cause for the universe.

Things get really interesting when we come to Parmenides and Heraclitus. It has been said that all of Western philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. (Dr. Mortimer Adler once joked that it was Aristotle who wrote the footnotes.) Nonetheless, the metaphor might be more complete to say that all of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Parmenides and Heraclitus because of the foundational questions they raised about reality. The discussion between Parmenides and Heraclitus is so important that it will be the topic of my next post. For now, it is important to know that the problem of the one and many can also be understood as what philosophers call Being and Becoming, universal and particular, appearance and reality, unity and diversity.

Science still struggles to maintain a balance between these concepts (and we will talk more about that in future posts). For now, just one quick example of this tension between the one and the many can be seen in “chaos theory” and similar fashionable theories we see today. When scientists say things like chaos is an agent of order or that there is a thing called “sensitive chaos” they are really violating the law of noncontradiction and speaking nonsense. If chaos were to be an organizing process of a whole, or a creative agent, it would not be chaos. It is really a reformulation of the problem of the one and the many. If the one is many, it is not one. If reality is one, it is not many. The problem persists and it was the pre-Socratics who first pointed out this metaphysical situation. In additional posts, we will explore how Plato and Aristotle attempted to solve this problem (through the discovery of form or essence) and we will learn that how we answer this problem will affect how one does science and ultimately shapes our world view.

To dig deeper into the pre-Socratics, explore these resources:

Jonathon Barnes. The Presocratic Philosophers. Revised ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982

James N. Jordan. Western Philosophy: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987.

John Burnet. Early Greek Philosophy. Fourth Ed. Macmillan Publishing Co., 1930. (One of the best standard treatments of the pre-Socratics, although from a positivist perspective. Excellent selected fragments and commentary.)

Fredrick Copleston. A History of Philosophy. Baltimore: Newman Press, Vol. 1.