​Chapter 5. The Case for the One

Unity now deserves its strongest defense, as the case for the primacy of the One is not a prejudice to be brushed aside. It is among the oldest and hardest claims philosophy has made, and much of the strongest philosophy was thought within it.

To be is to be something, and to be something is to be one. A thing that is not one thing is not a thing at all; it is either nothing or a heap, and a heap is real only in its members, each of which is again one. Scholastic metaphysics fixed this in a formula it took as bedrock: ens et unum convertuntur, being and unity are convertible: every being is one, and whatever is one has being.

To lose unity is to lose existence in the same motion. A world, a self, a thing persists just so long as it holds together as one and dissolves when that unity fails. Multiplicity does not threaten this; the many are simply many ones, and each owes its being to the unity it has. Difference, on this account, is always a difference between unities and within a unity that frames it. Take unity away and nothing is left to differ.

Another argument is from value. Good is a gathering, evil is a scattering. Health is the body's parts working as one; sickness is a faction breaking from the whole. A soul is well when its powers align and ill when they pull apart; a city stands when its citizens will as one and falls into civil war when they divide. For the Greeks, the good is what all things desire, and what they desire is completion, which is their gathering into the one they are meant to be.

For Plotinus the One is the Good as such, and the descent from it is the fall into greater division, greater distance from the source; evil is the privation that sets in as unity thins out. To be good is to return, to be lifted back toward the One. To be evil is to fall apart. On this reading any purpose whatsoever is a movement toward unity, and a thing that willed pure division would be choosing its undoing, which is to say willing nothing, since there would be no one left to have willed it.

To think is to gather a manifold into one. A perception that did not unite its moments would perceive nothing; a judgment that did not hold subject and predicate in one act would judge nothing; a self that did not bind its experiences into one consciousness would not be a self to which anything could appear. Kant found at the root of all cognition the unity of apperception, the single "I think" that must accompany any representation, without which the manifold of sense would be less than a dream, an unowned scatter belonging to no one. Before Kant, Parmenides had said that thought and being are the same, and what is, is one, and the many and the moving are the way of seeming, not the way of truth. To think the many is already to have unified it into a thinkable many. There is no thought of sheer difference, because to think difference is to hold its terms together in one regard, and that is unity at work. The One stands as the condition under which there is anything to be said at all.

Each argument supports the next: thought requires unity; being is one; the good, which is being's completion, is unity recovered. To oppose this looks like opposing intelligibility itself, against the very conditions under which anything determinate could be said. The defender of the One can rest here and seem to have won the ground entirely.

Consider the word on which the first two arguments turn. Both run on "one," and it carries two senses the case lets slide together. There is one as unit, the unity by which a thing is one thing at all and a self holds together or comes apart. And there is One as Unity, the source before all division, gathering everything home. The dissolution argument earns the first sense and is handed the second. That a thing must cohere as a unit to exist is granted in full. It reaches nowhere near the Unity set first and made the end. The slide appears when the argument moves from the unity of each thing to the unity of the whole. To be one unit is to be one thing counted off from the rest, bounded, set as this against what it is not; the marking off is a difference already drawn. The case concedes it in passing: the many are simply many ones. Difference sits with unity at the root of a thing's being one, the ground on which counting to one is possible at all. What the argument still owes is the unity of the field itself. Grant a unit its unity and there is a field of ones, each one among others. To call that field One is a further act the dissolution argument does not fund, since the coherence a unit needs is the unit's own, drawn from the very others it faces.

The value argument carries this debt too. Health gathers a body, with other bodies around it, and the good of gathering is the good of an individuated one resting on its manifold. That gathering is good for a unit and tells us nothing of a Unity to which it must climb back. What binds a manifold is internal coherence, owing nothing to a One set above it. Press the monist's last move, that the field of ones is one field after all, and it comes apart in the hand. Counted, the one field is one among the fields that might have been marked instead, a unit like its members, carrying no primacy. Raised to a Unity over the members, it is the thing to be proved.

The same law reaches the third argument, the case's firmest ground. What held of the unit holds of thought, which is determinate like anything else, and nothing is thought except by the not that bounds it. To think is not only to hold predicates together in one act; it is to stand as a thinker over against what is thought, an "I" marked off from what it thinks. The unity of apperception that was to be the root of all synthesis is already a cut, the subject severed from its object before any manifold is gathered, a severance the argument uses and never counts. Apply this move to the One. To think the One is to hold it as this and not another, bounded by the not-One; the act meant to prove unity has first laid a difference beneath it. A One with nothing to differ from is the blank set above Kether and cannot think. Difference is what any unity is drawn from, presupposed wherever a one is thought.

Only one retreat is left. The One lies past everything thought can reach, the defender says; it is placed epekeina tes ousias, beyond being, above the mind that would fix it, and the determinations the critique fastens on it fall short by design, since the critique works within the determinate and the One lies outside that order. But to originate is to enter a relation of that-from-which to that-which-proceeds, and a relation holds only between terms marked off from one another and distinguishable from what they face. To emanate is to act, and to act is to do this and face that. A boundless with no edge faces no term and performs no act; relation and action would both give it limits it was said to lack. The One kept pure of all determination cannot originate anything, and whatever initiates the descent is already turned toward what proceeds from it.

The order of the descent turns back on the hand that drew it. Chokhmah was set first, the undivided same, with Binah second as the difference derived from it. But identity cannot be first, because "the same" means not the different; it carries its other inside it as the condition of its sense. The terms the Tree presents as step one and step two, source and derivative, are neither prior nor posterior; they arise together, each the condition of the other, and the precedence the Tree assigns to identity is imposed on thought.

Now the empty station can be seen for what it is. Between the supernal pair, where identity and difference are held together, the tradition drew a place and set nothing in it. Read against the foregoing, the vacancy is the station where they are held as equals, neither one beneath the other, the relation in which the same and the other condition one another. And that is the one thing the principle of unity cannot inscribe. To write that station into the Tree would incorporate the very thing the case for the One was built to deny: that difference conditions the source and is no mere fall from it. The station is empty because what belongs there cannot be admitted without the whole edifice of primacy giving way. The defender of the One reaches this spot in his deduction, finds that the place should be filled, and cannot fill it.

The descent can arrive at the vacancy, but it cannot account for it in its own terms. It stops there with the question left open.