The One?

Whether or not there is a One, it and the Others are and are not — and appear and do not appear to be — all manner of things in all manner of ways, both in relation to themselves and to each other.

Such was the cryptic conclusion of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. The Parmenides provides the most extensive and technical example of Plato’s concept of dialectical argument, which revolved around thorough exploration of both sides of binary alternatives. Some early Platonists and a number of modern readers thought it was mainly a logical exercise.

Plotinus followed the lead of the neo-Pythagoreans in treating the One far less equivocally, as the main theological principle. He explicitly identified it with the Good from Plato’s Republic, and made it the source of all things. In the wake of Plotinus, later neoplatonists read the Parmenides as a theological treatise.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 Phenomenology of Perception argued that Plotinus was misguided, and really there is no One. Foucault’s 1969 Archaeology of Knowledge was devoted to questioning presumed unities of all sorts. Other pluralists from Aristotle to William James have made broadly similar arguments.

Talk about whether there “is” a One gets tricky. Plotinus associated Being only with his second principle of intellect (nous), not with the One. The 20th century theologian Paul Tillich gave a nod to this when he humorously suggested that to attribute to God the same existence we attribute to objects in the world should be considered blasphemy. In the middle ages Thomas Aquinas went somewhat in the opposite direction, identifying God with pure Being, and therefore he felt no need for a One above being. But the pure Being Aquinas spoke of was a new and innovative concept that is not the same as any worldly existence, so perhaps the two could be reconciled after all.

“The One” has historically been said in many ways. Usually it does not refer to any sort of entity, but rather to a sort of cosmic fusion in which all things participate; or, more properly, to a pure Platonic form of such fusion, perhaps even the form of something slightly anticipating Kantian unity of apperception. Sometimes on the other hand it seems to be beyond form altogether. Plotinus himself largely invented negative theology, and at one point even said the One was just a conventional name for the utterly ineffable. (See also One, Many; Identity, Isomorphism; Univocity; Theology.)

The Good

Plato suggested the idea (later much expanded upon by Plotinus) that a single ineffable Good is the highest principle of all things. The Good was characterized as hyperousia, or “beyond ousia“, where ousia is the same word Aristotle glossed as “what it was to have been” a thing, later misleadingly translated into Latin as substantia or substance. In discussions of neoplatonism, hyperousia used to be often loosely understood as “beyond being”, which is confusing and engendered all sorts of arguments. The problem is that modern people tend to think of being primarily in terms of what is really a kind of brute existence, whereas Plato and Aristotle were more concerned with intelligibility. Even existence in its Greek root has more to do with being able to be picked out than just being there indiscriminately. At any rate, Plato and Aristotle both considered ousia something definable (“intelligible being”, if you will), and they both agreed that the Good as such is undefinable, while drawing different conclusions.

The Platonic Good is the archetype of what Aristotle called an end. Plato held fast to the notion that there should be a single idea of the Good, even if we cannot comprehend or define it. He gave it a quasi-definition as that at which all things aim. Aristotle agreed that all things aim at some good, but pointed out that “good” is used equivocally when we say this. He preferred to say that each thing has its own good that is in principle intelligible. To say something is intelligible for Aristotle still does not mean all details are determined in advance. As Brandom has also emphasized, purpose and contingency are deeply interwoven.

Putting aside this difference between Plato and Aristotle for the moment, I want to suggest that for both of them, a consideration of ends and of what ought to be (and thus of ethics and meta-ethics) implicitly comes first in the order of explanation, before any ontology or any putative facts about what is. Kant made this more explicit as what he called the primacy of practical reason. Plato’s first principle is the Good. Aristotle’s nominal “First cause” of pure actuality or at-work-ness is a generalized end implicit in the ends and proper activities of particular things or kinds.

Dialogue

The ethical importance of dialogue can hardly be overstated. The key to ethical dialogue is mutual acceptance of sincere questioning about reasons. To ask a question is not to make a counter-assertion, and no one should ever take offense at a sincere question.

To qualify as based on good judgment or sound reasoning, a commitment or one’s reasons for holding it must be explainable in a shareable way. Sharing of the kind of meaning-based material inference used in everyday reasoning and judgment (as well as most philosophy) is a social process of open-ended dialogue.

The world’s oldest preserved examples of such rational dialogue (or any kind of rational development) are contained in the works of Plato. Earlier figures just wrote down what they saw as the truth. Plato provided many examples of a method of free inquiry. (Aristotle says the atomist Democritus was another initiator of rational inquiry, but the works of Democritus do not survive.) This is yet another reason why Hegel called Plato and Aristotle the greatest teachers of the human race.

Plato bequeathed to us many idealized examples of reasoning by dialogue. He raised them into an art form, creating a new literary genre in the process. His dialogues vary in the degree to which they approximate free open-ended discussion; most often, one character leads the discussion through question and answer, and sometimes even the question and answer is limited. However, since Plato’s dialogues are like plays portraying self-contained conversations, they are very accessible.

The style of question and answer often practiced by Platonic characters like Socrates — commonly known as Socratic method — provides a model for how anyone can contribute to such a development. The questioner tries to reason only from things to which the answerer agrees, but often has to keep questioning to draw out the needed background.

In a fully free and open dialogue characterized by mutual recognition, any party may make contributions of this sort. As Sellars and Brandom would remind us, to assert anything at all is implicitly to take responsibility for that assertion, which is to invite questioning about our reasons.

Untimely

We aiming-to-be rational animals are all deeply conditioned by our development in particular social and cultural circumstances. A truly great philosopher like Aristotle perhaps comes closest to becoming “untimely” in something like a Nietzchean sense.

Though I know of no explicit textual evidence for it, I wonder if Hegel resolved the material incompatibility between his mature patronizing attribution of naive realism about norms to the ancient world as a whole on the one hand, and all the insights he attributes to Plato and Aristotle on the other, by implicitly exempting them from the generalization about the ancient world. That generalization is sound at a broad sociological level, but we should not assume without specific evidence that sociological generalizations about a philosopher’s time and place apply to the philosopher.

Euthyphro

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether it is better to say that a thing is holy because the gods love it, or that the gods love it because it is holy. Socrates clearly favors the second option. To use “because the gods love it” (or, implicitly, “because it is God’s will”) as an unexplained explainer is to assert a form of theological voluntarism. As Leibniz said much later, this is to make of God a tyrant or a despot, arbitrary rather than wise and good.

It turns out that assertions of the form “it is God’s will” necessarily involve argument from authority. The exchange between Socrates and Euthyphro exhibits the hollowness and nonrational character of argument from authority in general.

Elsewhere, Plato famously makes Socrates argue that only the wisest should rule. The best rule is based on wisdom; only the worst is based on sheer power. (See also Freedom and Free Will.)

It might seem that to say that the gods love a thing because it is holy is implicitly to presume that what is holy is somehow simply given. Leibniz may or may not have presumed this, but I think Plato did not in regard to anything practical, because I don’t think Plato regarded anything in becoming as simply given.

Hegel on the Ancients

In early writings predating the Phenomenology, Hegel argued that the modern Christian world needed to learn spiritually from the ancient world to overcome its alienation. Starting with the Phenomenology, his mature public view made the Christian world a big step forward from the ancient world instead. But in the late History of Philosophy lectures, Plato and Aristotle are praised above “all others” — even above Kant, who apparently comes third.

Already in the early period, Hegel tried his hand at a retrospective reconstruction of the Christian gospel in terms of Kantian ethics. The later Philosophy of History lectures trace a line of development from primitive Christianity via Lutheranism to Kant and German idealism, retrospectively using key German idealist terms like freedom and subjectivity to explicate the whole development. The here assumed high value of German idealism is used to show the value of the earlier stages. In the Philosophy of Religion lectures, he argues at length for the superiority of what he calls revealed religion, but his notion of revelation is making things plain and open to all, not any kind of supernatural special knowledge. Religion is said to express in images what philosophy expresses in concepts.

The idea of making things open to all is consistent with Hegel’s rejection of aristocracy in favor of a modern civil state based on a constitution rather than the mere will of a monarch or ruling class. But Aristotle too regarded constitutional rule as vastly superior to any form of tyranny or despotism.

Plato and Aristotle thought we would be better off if society were governed by those best capable of normative reasoning. Hegel criticized Aristotle’s view that some people turn out to be incapable of adequately reasoning about normative matters for themselves, and that they ought to be ruled by people who can do this adequately. But Aristotle already noted that existing social distinctions did not just reflect this.

Hegel’s mature vision for the future was a synthesis of the best of the ancient and modern worlds. If we compare that synthesis to his view of the modern world, it differs by what it incorporates from the ancient world. Hegel would never have wanted to roll the clock back, but even in his mature view, I think he still believed the moderns had something to learn from the higher-order and normative approach of Plato and Aristotle. (See also The Ancients and the Moderns; Untimely.)

Higher Order

Before and after early modern mechanism and in contrast to it, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all broadly agreed on the normative importance of higher-order things.

In modern terms, Plato’s forms are higher-order things, as distinct from first-order things. Plato trusts higher-order things more than first-order ones, because he considers only higher-order things to be knowable in the sense of episteme, because only higher-order things contain an element of universality, and episteme applies only to universals, not particulars.

Aristotle agrees that higher-order things are ultimately more knowable, but believes it is possible to say more about first-order things, by relating them to each other and to higher-order things; that our initial rough, practical grasp of first-order things can help us to begin to grasp higher-order things by example; and that going up and down the ladder of abstraction successively can help us progressively enrich our understanding of both.

(Incidentally, I have always read the Platonic dialogues as emphasizing the normative importance of acquiring a practical grasp of forms more than specific existence claims about “the forms”. Aristotle’s criticisms make it clear that at least some in the Platonic Academy did understand Plato as making such existence claims, but particularly in what are regarded as later dialogues like Parmenides, Sophist, and Theaetetus, what is said about form seems relatively close to an Aristotelian view. It is even possible that these dialogues were influenced by the master’s even greater student.)

Early modern mechanism completely discarded Plato and Aristotle’s higher-order orientation. Descartes famously recommends that we start by analyzing everything into its simplest components. This temporarily played a role in many great scientific and technological advances, but was bad for philosophy and for people. Hegel calls this bottom-up approach Understanding, as distinct from Reason.

Early and mid-20th century logical foundationalism still adhered to this resolutely bottom-up view, but since the later 20th century, there has been an explosion in the use of higher-order formal concepts in mathematics, logic, and computer science. It turns out that even from an engineering point of view, higher-order representations are often more efficient, due to their much greater compactness.

Leibniz already tried to reconcile mechanistic science with a higher-order normative view. He also contributed to the early development of higher-order concepts in mathematics.

Kant and Hegel decisively revived an approach that is simultaneously higher-order and normative.

Freedom and Free Will

Plato and Aristotle got along perfectly well with what many people think was no concept of a separate “will” at all. Aristotle nonetheless develops a nuanced account of deliberation and choice, which should have made it plain for all time that no extravagant assumptions are necessary to provide a basis for morality. All that is required for ethical development is that there be things within our power, not that we can somehow magically escape from all determination.

Curiously, the notion of a “freedom of indifference” emerged in Stoicism, generally thought to be a haven of determinism. The Stoic sage is claimed to be completely indifferent and unaffected by passions, therefore completely free. Some monotheistic theologians later applied an even stronger version of this to God. God in this view is absolutely free to do absolutely any arbitrary thing. Some even claimed that because man is in the image of God, man too is supernaturally exempt from any constraint on the will. Descartes claimed that the physical world was wholly determined, but that the human soul is by the grace of God wholly free. (See also Arbitrariness, Inflation.)

Others thought we are free when we are guided by reason. This view takes different shapes, from that of Aquinas to that of Spinoza.

Kant introduced another kind of freedom, based on taking responsibility. Where I decide to take responsibility, I am free in that sense, with no need for a supernatural power. I can take responsibility for things that are by no means fully within my control. Kant unfortunately confuses the matter by talking about freedom as a novel form of causality, while denying that this makes any gap in Newtonian physical causality. (See also Kantian Freedom; Kantian Will; Freedom Through Deliberation?; Beauty, Deautomatization; Phenomenology of Will.)

Hegel too reproduced some voluntarist-sounding rhetoric, but his version of freedom is a combination of both the reason and responsibility views with absence of slavery or oppression. (See also Independence, Freedom.)

Confusion continued into the 20th century notably with Sartre, who claimed that man is free even in prison, and attacked so-called structuralism for allegedly undermining said freedom.

Freedom as reason, freedom as responsibility, freedom as absence of slavery and oppression are all things we should want. As for the rest, see the Appendix to Book 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics (though unfortunately Spinoza is unfair to Aristotle in treating all teleology as supernatural in origin). (See also Subject; God and the Soul; Influence.)

Brandom explicitly mentions theological voluntarism as associated with what he calls the “subordination-obedience model” of normativity. (See also Voluntarism.)

God and the Soul

In the tradition, monotheistic notions of God and the soul were read into Plato and Aristotle. Just using the word “God” or “soul” in later times immediately invoked strong connotations from a monotheistic background that were very different from Plato and Aristotle’s context.

Plato’s dialogues do famously talk about immortality of the soul, but the notion there has neither the very strong unity nor the strong personal identity attributed to the soul in the monotheistic religions. In the Republic, the unity of the soul is likened to that of a city, and elsewhere there is talk of reincarnation. (See also Plato on the Soul.)

Aristotle’s notion of soul is biological (way of life of a living body), not metaphysical. He specifically says the soul is not like the pilot of a ship, and that memory (which Locke made the basis of personal identity) depends on the body. (See also Parts of the Soul; Aristotelian Subjectivity.)

Plato and Aristotle speak of theos or theoi (the divine or god, or gods) as good, as intellect, and as in a state of perfect happiness. Most of what Plato says is in his poetic mode. Aristotle is extremely circumspect.

There is no creation from nothing in Plato, and no creation at all in Aristotle. There is some kind of providence, but it is very general, for Aristotle clearly applying only to the order of the cosmos and not to particular events. Plato’s dialogues speak of divine inspiration, but also compare it to a kind of madness. Aristotle says philosophy begins in wonder, and that the delight we take in the senses shows that man by nature desires to know. Both emphasize the eternity of the divine and the divinity of the order of nature. There is no concept of any special intervention in the order of nature.

I believe Plato and Aristotle would likely have endorsed Leibniz’s critique of the consequences of attributing an unconstrained, counterfactually omnipotent will to God. Leibniz said this was a theological disaster that made of God an arbitrary tyrant. (See also Euthyphro; Tyranny; Fragility of the Good.)

Theological and anthropological voluntarism have a long history. Philo of Alexandria, early Augustine, al-Ghazali, the Franciscan theologians, and Descartes all contributed. Spinoza and Leibniz spoke well on this subject. (See also Psyche, Subjectivity; Theology.)

Plato and Aristotle Were Inferentialists

In the context of modern philosophy, Brandom has developed an important contrast between representationalism and inferentialism. Representationalism says that representation comes before inference in the order of explanation, and inferentialism says that inference comes first.

Plato was very pessimistic about the potential of representation, as witnessed by the dialogues’ discussions of “imitation”, and the treatment of writing in Phaedrus. By contrast, inference or reasoning is presented as the main way to truth in the dialogues. Inference — and not representation — is what is primarily appealed to in the validation or invalidation of assertions. (See also Dialogue; Platonic Truth.)

Aristotle was less pessimistic about representation, but even more concerned with inference. He was the great originator of the world’s first developed logic, which was in fact centered on inference rather than truth values. While taking pioneering steps toward formalization, he also devoted much attention to definition, meanings of terms, and their distinctions and ambiguities in concrete usage (see Aristotelian Semantics; Aristotelian Demonstration). Aristotle distinguishes between inference based on the fact, which is a kind of formal inference, and inference based on the meaning, which is the material inference of Sellars and Brandom, also known to medieval logicians. Further, Aristotle’s elementary criteria for truth and falsity depend on material inference (see Aristotelian Propositions).

The kind of representation Brandom is particularly concerned with, which he attributes to Descartes, is based on isomorphism rather than resemblance. As an aside, I tend to think there was a notion of isomorphism in the ancient world, though it is a little hard to separate from resemblance. Euclid talked about similar triangles, which are technically an example of both. Aristotle would certainly say that resemblance is “said in many ways”, one of which could be isomorphism. I think given the opportunity he would say, for instance, that individual concretely uttered words are at some level isomorphic to whatever meanings those words turn out to have in some context. The words do not resemble their meanings. (See also Historiography, Inferentialism; Inferentialism vs Mentalism;.)