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By: Jay Dyer
One of the central, most basic and ancient questions of philosophy is that of the one and the many. This question even transcended cultural barriers and mysteriously appeared in both ancient Chinese and Hindu thought, which cannot be said of every philosophical speculation. A familiar issue to philosophers and mathematicians, it is surprisingly an obscure topic, now that philosophy has died in the West. Does the end of philosophy in the West herald the end of this question? It does not. In fact, the problem for man in our age remains this perennial issue, and it is one of dialectics.
The question of dialectics is perennial because the one and many are fundamental to man. We possess both an idea of unity, as well as diversity, that seem to present themselves to us in all phenomena. Whether in the mundane actions of daily life or in the highest speculations of mathematical theory, the fundamental principles at work involve the notions of one type of thing over and against multiplicity. To further mystify the matter, what exactly is the nature or essence of these principles, if they can even be called such? Are they merely sociological conventions, created for utility? Are they real, externally existing principles or ideological forms? In any case, man is ever confronted with this challenge in all areas of life.
The post-human deception: same ancient lie, shiny new packaging.
Early Greek philosophy began with this question, but certainly there were earlier postulations – in both Indian and Hebrew thought, for example. Job’s ruminations on the nature of suffering and righteousness with respect to a just God’s permission also have their philosophical aspects, and may likely be dated prior to the Pre-Socratics. Modern man, in his hubris, believes himself a perfectly self-sufficient atomized meaningless unit, having simultaneously accepted two contradictory presuppositions. The first is that the universe is wholly irrational, chaotic and meaningless, apart from his self-imposed meaning. The second is that his “scientific” endeavors and technological meaning are still impelled by the fuzzy, inchoate concept of “progress.”
The presuppositions of meaninglessness and “progress” are mutually exclusive, but men do not always live out their assumptions consistently. Indeed, it often takes a lifetime, or even generations, for a certain idea or belief to germinate and bear the fullness of its fruits. We are presently situated at the turning point – a pivot towards an entirely new epoch in which these two conflicting ideals will simultaneously collapse into, and then devour, one another. The universe cannot be both, as both are impossible to maintain without thoroughgoing indoctrination into doublethink, a state that perfectly characterizes the psyche of modern man.
Implicit in this contradiction is the work of dialectics, which I have so often commented on. For ancient man (outside the biblical tradition), the norm appears to consistently be that the ultimate principles of the one and the many are in tension. Ultimate unity, the One or Monad, at some point experienced a schism, split, division, etc., what was an unintended scattering. In fact, we may even categorize the Big Bang into this idea, as it attempts to explicate a still-ancient notion of multiplicity arising from a primordial, primeval Unity. Even so, this expansion from a completely theoretical supremely dense “point” is nothing more than the displacement of the older notion of the Monad’s division onto the material plane.
Thus, even with the Big Bang, we are still encountering fundamental philosophical questions of unity, division and particularity. For that “theory,” the collapsing of the principles just mentioned is analogous to the Western hermetic tradition’s collapsing of the divine One and Three, the Triad, into the material plane as a topological metaphor. Aristotle can be seen a father of this tendency, even though Platonism itself in its later forms, the placement of mirrored “fragments,” might also be considered as a monist perspective – where all reality is still one kind of “stuff,” just in variegated levels of being.
The advantage of the platonic view is that it maintains the ultimate rationality of all existence and the primacy of logic (and in Pythagorenism, geometrics and math) as the fundamental substructure of all reality. I have cited Philipp Sherrard many times when articulating this position, and its arguments still hold. We also cannot account for the evils in that position as anything but another manifestation of dialectical tensions, as well. This is proven by the many far-eastern religions heavily influenced by Platonism and its older Egyptian esoteric forebear. If evil is located in being itself, or in multiplicity or matter, or whatever existing thing possessed of ontological status, we are left without any reason to oppose it. Evil in this view is either illusory maya or identified with this plane of existence itself. Like Adam in the garden, blame for one’s own fault is placed on external factors – the serpent, the woman and the very garden are to blame!
However, these traditions do maintain bits, pieces and fragments of whatever the original Tradition was, and it is for this reason we can wonder at the profound esoteric ideas that would become the secrets of technology. Understanding the secrets of Nature is what technology is, and this, in part, has a direct relation to the Tree of Knowledge. We are told it was good to make one wise in Genesis, but it was not permitted for man in his trial period to partake, due to his lack of perfection in virtue. Man was created good, but mutable. This mutability contained the potentiality for the turn away from virtue to vice, egoism, and self-destructive tendencies. Partaking of this tree led man to gain knowledge he would have later been given, were he perfected in virtue. In our day we are witnessing the discovery of those very secrets, as life will extend and fantastical inventions that hearken to a Golden Age of the gods become real.
That said, I am not advocating the popular “technology of the gods” notion so prevalent in alternative media and even the History Channel. Most of that material is pure rubbish, yet there are shards of truth can even be found at the trash heap. Within systems like Platonism, Pythagoreanism and the Quadrivium is a hermetic framework that provides the framework for discovering the technology of Nature itself. And, to make things worse, those in control of these ideas are intent on destroying man as he has traditionally existed. Works like James Kelley’s Anatomyzing Divinity have highlighted this pattern, particularly in the history of Western hermeticism and science, where the “Augustinian Shield” of medieval Roman Catholicism was collapsed into this plane and identified with the triadic patterns found in nature. Since, as Augustinianism argued, little trinities are present everywhere in Nature, and man is defined primarily as his intellect/soul, it follows that the course of life is a mirror journey through all the phantasms of this world back to the Unity of the One.
What could possibly go wrong?
Since Western man decided God was an impersonal Absolute and distant watchmaker, it is easy to understand why the scientific revolutionaries dispensed with the Triad on the metaphysical plane, and kept only the blueprints present on the physical plane. With the rise of Aristotelian impulses in Thomism (and yes, I realize Aquinas was also very Platonic), the transition to empiricism would triumph, as Thomist realism, with its empirical theology assumptions, eventually degenerated into rank nominalism. However, despite man’s fascination with techne and his supposed victory over superstition, numeric, philosophical one-and-many dialectics plague him more than ever. The specter of numbers themselves haunts man, as he has capitulated to the quantification of all things, as if it were rational. The dominance of quantification is the best image of this rational/irrational dialectic at work, especially evident today in computer technology or virtual finance.
The numeric-dominated realm of virtual finance, for example, is extremely complex, but it has as its telos a completely irrational destination – the end of man himself, with stages of transition from the cashless society into fully virtual realms where simulacra rule. And yet if we peer beyond the intricacies of the virtual financial system, the fundamental principles at work are still grounded in the one and the many. For modern political theory, too, the one and the many are in constant tension, as the struggles showcased are typically some anarcho-capitalist maverick “standing up” to collectivist tyranny, or the leftist progressive “speaking out” against the power of Wall Street. These modern manifestations of dialectics are piecemeal approaches to uninformed assumptions, all of them premised on classical liberal ideas.
What endlessly fascinates is that man is played for a fool, even by himself, in his idea of creating a great A.I. central god-system to run the future utopian SmartCities – do the proud architects not realize that they, too, will be enslaved? At all points we are confronted with phony dialectics, which are essentially false paradigms of opposition, and they are all mostly wrong, reflecting only a piece of the puzzle. The proper principle for true health and progress is balance in the one and the many, and in order for this to take place, most of Western philosophy must be jettisoned. Not excluded are classical Greek dialectics, as they are the chief source of Western man’s ills. Dialectics is the metaphysical problem of man, and man’s desire to transcend through dividing ad inifinitum, right down to a particle zoo, had led him on a futile quest. Where, and to Whom, will you turn when your “holy grail” is brimming with cyanide-laced Grape Kool-Aid?
