THE ONE AND THE MANY • PART 1
Note to the Reader: This is the first of three short reflections exploring the ancient philosophical theme of the One and the Many. The series concludes with an invitation to join an online reading group on Plato’s Phaedo, one of the most profound explorations of the nature of the soul and eternal Ideas.
Have you ever heard the ubiquitous saying, it’s impossible to see the wood for the trees? So true. The manyness of the trees obscures the wholeness—or unity—of the wood. And yet, the wood and the trees belong together.
The Stymphalian Birds and the Problem of the Many
One of the Twelve Labours of Hercules is called The Stymphalian Birds. According to different accounts, these birds inhabit, variously, a marsh, a lake or a forest. The fifth-century philosopher Proclus describes them as flying about within us, inasmuch as they present to us “evils of form and shape”, preventing our intuition from grasping the wholeness of Ideas, free of any particular conceptions our imagination might endow them with. These Ideas or Forms are pure, abiding and eternal. Above human conceptions and imaginings, they are Divine Ideas.
What does this mean exactly, and how is it relevant to us?
It speaks, perhaps, to the ancient idea of the One and the Many. The partless Form cannot be divided—it is unific—whereas the many shapes and images invariably draw us away from unity. The unific and pristine nature of real Ideas (as opposed to images or shadows of Ideas) was beautifully described by the late sixteenth-century German philosopher and mystic Jacob Boehme, who likened Ideas to beautiful virgins.
Of course, the ‘manyness’ of things can be a cause for celebration, but it can also become a distraction. Invariably, our thoughts become fragmented as we turn our consciousness towards the world of the senses, and they proliferate endlessly. This is what Buddhist traditions sometimes call the monkey mind—the pristine unity of consciousness becomes involved (literally, “rolled into”) the five senses, which have that hydra-like quality of one thought giving rise to another.
This is perfectly natural when we are aware of what is happening. But when we are not, we can all too easily become lost in an endless variety of possibilities. Yet, as we shall see, exploring images, likenesses and fragments—in themselves and in relation to one another—seems to be necessary if we are to ascend to the essence, or true meaning, of a thing.
Material Proliferation and the Search for Unity
The Stymphalian Birds—and indeed all the Labours of Hercules—concern our journey through life: our challenges, our perspectives and what we may learn from them. One of the perennial problems is our entanglement in material concerns.
This has always been the case, but perhaps even more so in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as the material world has proliferated. Even choosing items in the supermarket consumes time as we decide between countless alternatives, ingredients, cost and environmental impact. From every side we are buffeted by the many.
How do we return to Unity?
This question has occupied philosophers and mystics for centuries. If the many forms of the world continually draw our attention outwards, is there a way of seeing through them without rejecting them? Can we learn to recognise the unity that lies behind the multiplicity of appearances?
In the next reflection, we shall turn to two of the great philosophers of the Platonic tradition—Proclus and Porphyry—who suggest that the answer begins with learning to go beyond the outward forms of the sense world to the eternal Ideas that give them meaning. This brings a greater appreciation of the outer forms and allows us to see them in the context of their causes.
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Read the Series | The One and the Many: Returning the Many to the One
Part 1: How We Can Enjoy the Trees Without Losing Sight of the Wood
Exploring how sensory multiplicity fragments consciousness and how we lose unity.
Part 2: Looking Beyond Appearances
Drawing on Proclus and Porphyry, this post invites us to appreciate the world’s beauty without losing touch with the unifying truths of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty itself.
Part 3: Gathering the Many Back to the One.
Practicing dialectic—plus an invitation to our online reading group on Plato’s Phaedo.
