QUESTIONS #5  

1. Explain the basic problem of the One and the Many.

-  It is the ultimate paradox of being and the deepest and most fundamental
problem of all metaphysics, of every intellectual effort to achieve a total,
unified vision of all reality. It is a question which all the great thinkers of both
East and West have grappled with down the ages.

2. Explain the basic positions of:  

2.1. Radical Monism  
2.2. Mitigated Monism;  
2.3. Radical Pluralism; and  
2.4. Participation doctrines. 
-Radical Monism: Now if A and B are both real, and yet different from each other, they
must differ by something real. But then this, too, must be being. Now it is impossible for
two things to differ by what they have in common. Two things equal to the same thing,
being, are equal to each other. Hence all things must really be one single being. And
since real change implies real difference before and after, there can be no real change
either.
Mitigated Monism: Under this heading would fit the various forms of so-called
pantheism (pan-theos = all things are God), which does admit real diversity, but only as
modes or modifications or “parts” of a single all-embracing Divine Being or substance,
not as distinct beings existing in their own right with their own autonomous existence.
Radical Pluralism: Only the plurality and diversity of things are real. There is no
underlying real unity or unifying bond among them distinct from their irreducible
particularity, not even the unity of one common Source (at least knowable to us).
Unifying terms like “being” our mere mental abstractions, mere verbal conceptual
devices made up by our minds to help us conveniently speak about them all together in
our limited vocabulary.

Participation Doctrines: These more richly complex and synthetic doctrines try to do
justice both to the real multiplicity and diversity of beings and also the intrinsic bond of
unity among them. This intrinsic unity is usually interpreted as some kind of
“participation” in a basic common attribute; but this is interpreted diversely by the
different schools. Thus, the long Platonic tradition (Plato, Plotinus, Neoplatonists)
interpret this common attribute as unity/goodness, deriving from the Ultimate Principle =
the One/Good. Being for them is not ultimate, since it signifies only the system of
determinate, finite essences, beyond which is the absolute One, the Good, “beyond all
being and essence” (Plato’s Republic, Book V).

St. Thomas’s Solution:  

3. Why must we take seriously both the one and the many?  
- The bond of unity comes from diverse participations in the act of existence,
the common perfection embracing all levels of being, finite to Infinite, deriving
from the Ultimate Source, the pure Subsistent Act of Existence with no
limiting essence, which is God.
 4. The Argument:  
4.1. Basic data of problem?  
4.2. Why must there be a real distinction of co-principles in all beings save perhaps one?  
4.3. Nature of this “real metaphysical composition”?  
4.4. How best name the components?  
4.5. Relation between the two?
-  The diversity and multiplicity cannot be denied as illusory without contradicting
an essential dimension of my experience, more certain than any theory that tries
to explain it away: I experience myself—and so do most other adult human
persons—as a free responsible center and initiator of action, in interaction with
other such independent centers, now agreeing with them, now disagreeing and
acting against them, struggling to develop myself and attain my own happiness,
making friends with others, whom we realize we cannot control; we take
responsibility for my own morally good and evil actions. It is not the same to
affirm what something is and that it is. All this points to the objective fact of a
similar state common to all real beings, which we express in English by “being,”
“is,” “exists,” “is actively present to other real beings,” etc., which we might call
the fact of existence as an attribute common to all. this fact or truth about real
things must be rooted in some intrinsic property, some real act of presence
within the thing itself, which grounds and justifies my judgment about it that “it
is, is real.”

5. Main Objections:  
5.1. Misunderstanding of “composition”?  
5.2. Misunderstanding of participation “in the act of existence”?  5.3.
Misunderstanding of “essence as limit”?
- The misunderstanding of composition is that their distinct reality
must be less than that of a complete being or thing, but rather that
of two mutually correlative co-principles or co-constituents, each
incomplete by itself, within the enveloping unity of the one
complete being, distinct but inseparable, i.e., one cannot exist alone
without the other. A helpful image might be that of the two poles,
positive and negative, of an electrical system. One is not the other,
but unless the two are there no current will pass between: so, no
real being, unless both co-principles are present and functioning.

6. Key Implications? 

- Reconciling the One and the Many in the universe as diverse participations of all
beings in the central perfection of existence through limiting essence—if properly
understood, opens up a magnificent synoptic vision that can easily deepen into a
religious or mystical vision of the whole universe of real beings as a single great
community of existents, with a deep “kinship” of similarity running through them
all, which turns out when fully analyzed to imply that all are in some way images
of God, their Source, each in its own unique but limited (imperfect) way.
 
7. Sit back now and try to get a synoptic vision of the whole universe as  both Many yet
somehow One: Can you get a feel for this whole vast  universe of real beings as
somehow a single great community of actual  existents joined together by the same
bond of similarity that is their sharing,  each in its own distinctive way, in the one great
central perfection,  analogically common to all—actual existence, co-presence in some
way to  all the others? 
- Yes, the act of existence as the central perfection of all things, diversely
participated in by limiting essences, is that it helps to clarify the relations
between God as the unique ultimate Source of all being and the world of finite
creatures. On the one hand, it is clear how God, as pure Subsistent Act of
Existence (Ipsum Esse Subsistens) with no limiting essence, transcends all his
creatures as composed of existence and limiting essences, and yet, on the other,
why there is a deep similarity to God running through all creatures as all
participations in the one central perfection of God himself, so that they can all be
truly called “images of God.”