Creative Misunderstanding

CREATIVE MISUNDERSTANDING

“Men of old, being superior to us and dwelling nearer the gods, transmitted this saying: while the things that are ever said to exist consist of one and many, yet they also innately have within themselves limit and indeterminacy”- from Plato's “Philebus”

How can it be that things – some thing, many things, all things – are both one and many? Why would anyone even think that? After all, a natural reading of experience would suggest that there are “many things, all in processes of change” and we simply call it “the world”.

Well, it seems that the idea of an unchanging element, a ‘one’, more or less imposes itself at a certain point or points whenever we try to give a description, or account of the world of experience. It is already there in the mere aspiration; we want to give an account (singular) of the world/universe/reality (singular) even though the account may involve immense complexity, and a plurality of constituent parts or principles. There seems to be a priority afforded to the “one”, to simplicity, unity, completeness and comprehensiveness. And yet, if it were the case that things were simply and completely “one”, no such effort to find and account for ‘oneness’ would be necessary (since there would not be even the ghost of ‘twoness’ or ‘manyness’).

There are routes to take in dealing with the problem of “the one and the many”. The most obvious one, and especially in the modern context, is to deny it is a problem at all, or if it is, to relegate it to a linguistic peculiarity, or simply metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. A world-view which recognises nothing apart from the interaction of particles in space can probably dismiss the entire matter without remorse....Ok...

....But even the most uncompromising materialism cannot be completely free of, or immune to the attentions of the ‘questioner of the one and many’; after all, a world-view is a question of “the one” in both the world part, and the view part – it is undeniably a singular view assuming a singular object....

...It is interesting that such a crude understanding of the paradigm of “the one and many” was apparently already in vogue, as a kind of intellectual fad, by the time of Plato’s above-quoted dialogue; in the same, Socrates is depicted expressing something like boredom with the young men of Athens, much like college lads today, posturing and pretending profundity at having understood that any singular and identifiable thing is said to be composed of many parts.

One might also be inclined to take the problem in a more or less Heraclitean or Daoist sense; the one is simply the flow and transformation of the many, and that the distinctions of one and many are made depending on the purpose of expression.

Since I am primarily interested in the philosophies of the Platonic tradition, and through a Schopenhauerian lens, the problem of the “one and the many” is stated in terms of being-in-itself and being-for-another, or Will and Representation. The basic insight of Schopenhauerianism is that the world which appears, the visible universe including those minds to whom it appears, is the expression of a metaphysical principle, the so-called Will, which itself never appears, but which is present as the inner, unapparent force of the universe, as a whole and in every particular thing.

Between the will in itself, as it is by itself, and the experience of a world of changing phenomena in space and time which arises solely in the kind of consciousness we as human organisms find ourselves equipped with, there is something he calls the “adequate objectification of the will”. This latter relates to his understanding of the Platonic Ideas, or Forms. He claims that the Will, the inner being as a ceaseless urge to come to life, necessarily expresses itself. The most immediate expression of it’s own inner essence is in a series of graded forms, the archetypes of all that we subsequently experience as the ever changing phenomena of the world. These forms are Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Plato’s theory of the Ideas. They are not concepts, but concrete and fixed “forces”- gravity , electricity, the many species of animals, etc.

The trickiness of this situation is that all apparent change and development, and so, the entire scientific narrative about the emergence and evolution of life, is denied any real being or relevance outside of our own consciousness. Beyond merely existing as the way our mind perceives and seeks to understand the world, such intuitions and scientific theories have no reality. He does seem to suggest, although denying any differentiation to the ultimate metaphysical principle, the Will in itself, that it’s appearance, it’s objectification, does indeed necessitate differentiation (into the Platonic Ideas), even before there is any conscious subject to perceive such differentiation. Hence paradoxically, and in contradiction to his own insistence that there can be no object without a subject, a certain objectivity does precede subjectivity.

This is in fact the area where his successor, Eduard Von Hartmann, thinks that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is left in want of further development. Von Hartmann says, in contrast to Schopenhauer, that the Will alone would be insufficient to account for the appearance of the world, and thus, some other principle, or aspect of the same principle is necessary. What Von Hartmann proposes (with arresting insight) is that the Will is combined with the Idea (or the Platonic Ideas) in another super-principle which he names (for good reason) “the Unconscious”. The Idea is here identified as the content of the Will ( after all, as Hartmann says, the Will must have something to will, some idea of what it wants). And although consciousness is a later development, and in fact, something of a limitation, the Will and the Ideas, the expression of which are what the Will wills, belong together as coordinate poles or aspects of the same ultimate principle, the Unconscious.

The Unconscious for Von Hartmann is both the absolute subject and the absolute object. It is ultimate intelligence, yet without consciousness, which, as he articulates with reference to the Upanishads, is itself a limitation imposed by differentiation.

For Von Hartmann then, the One is a complex unity, containing inner duality and consequent “manyness” as it’s expression....

...Not unlike what could perhaps be gleaned of the philosophy of Plato’s immediate successor, his nephew, Speusippus. In the following fragment from a work by the later Platonist, Proclus, Speusippus is described as being a partisan to Pythagoreanism, of which he says -

“Holding the One to be superior to Being and the source from which Being springs, they freed it from even from the status of a principle. And so, considering that if one took the One in itself, thought of as separate and alone, adding no other element to it, nothing else would come into being, they introduced the Indefinite Dyad as first principle of beings”

Speusippus claims that the One, or Monad, is not even a Being, or at the level of Being, Rather, along with the ‘cause of plurality’ (possibly his description of the Indefinite Dyad) it is somehow beyond existence in all it’s manifoldness. It is also – ‘seen’ from the point of view of our mind within existence – a potential, rather than actual principle.

Of course, it may very well be that our intellect, with it’s unquestionable limitations as necessary compliments to it’s strengths and abilities, can never get beyond simply being bothered by, and then stating this problem of the “one and many”. The insistence on the omnipotence of the human mind is something that seems to have gained traction in the last decades of the 20^th century in circles of more or less analytical, computational science and philosophy. Not without significance is the fact that economic neoliberalism also emerged at around the same time; an economic model that claimed the individual entrepreneur could and should be free to do whatever they wished, and that there should be no such constraints as society and state. It was lubricated by an explosion of “self-help’ and positivity literature and other merchandise exaggerating human capability to almost divine levels.

However, I for one don’t think it at all unlikely that the human mind is inherently limited, and that some things, even though the problems can be expressed rationally, will never be rationally solved. There need be no shame in admitting human limitation. Nor does such admission necessarily imply a supra-human intelligence. What is true however, is that there are ways to deal with these problems, apart from seeking intellectual solutions.

We are, after all, not merely Intellects.

THE THREE CRANES OF MIDIR

“now this, so this” in endless play,

are Midir’s wading birds engaged,

within in a dour fenland, grey,

as words amid the hours rage

***

For time and space, effect and cause,

their raucous chatterings impress,

divine a face, reflecting draw

a caul of matter, barely dressed

***

But if at last a way be found

to bring the cranes of Midir still,

from cause and space, in time unbound

there hid, remains the king and Will