The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 1

Western philosophy begins with Plato. He was the first to pose the question of what makes a thing what it is and answered it in a way that turned the subsequent centuries of thought into a response to him. Even those who declared Platonism surpassed defined their position through their relation to it.

Plato's central move is the doubling of the world. There are things we touch and name: this table and that horse. And there is that which makes the table a table and the horse a horse — the idea. The table can be broken, the horse will eventually die, but "tableness" and "horseness" remain untouched. They reside in a separate domain accessible only to the intellect, the world of things is its shadow.

This move determined everything that followed. From it grew metaphysics as a discipline: the search for what stands behind the visible. It gave rise to God as the highest idea or the source of all ideas, the universals of the medieval realists, the eidetic intuitions of Husserl, and mathematical Platonism.

How does Plato know that ideas exist?

Philosophy is the art of distinction. The dialectician knows how to divide, to separate essence from appearance. In the Sophist, Plato introduces the five great-est kinds: being, rest, motion, sameness, and difference. Sameness and difference are the conditions for the existence of all the rest. For being to be being, it must be identical with itself and distinct from non-being. For rest to differ from motion, difference is required. Without it nothing is determined, everything merges into an undifferentiated mass. Plato sees this, and places difference among the fundamental categories.

The further question is what makes difference possible. The answer is unity.

One can distinguish A from B only if each of them is something identical with itself. A multitude is possible only as a plurality of units. Without the unity 2

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of each element, multiplicity turns into indeterminacy and difference loses its footing. Therefore, the One is more fundamental.

Another argument unfolds in the Parmenides and is systematized by the Neoplatonists. Everything composite depends on its parts and on whatever binds them together. Moving toward the ground, we must arrive at something absolutely simple — at that which can no longer be decomposed. The One is the limit of simplicity: it has no parts and no internal difference. Everything else requires something to hold its parts together, and this chain of dependencies terminates only in that which itself requires nothing.

The final evidence comes from the Republic. The Good, the highest idea, stands

"beyond being and essence." It is that which grants things the capacity to be known and determined. As the sun gives the light by which the eye sees objects, so the Good sheds the "light" of intelligibility by which the mind distinguishes ideas. Without this source of determinacy, nothing is knowable.

Three paths lead to a single conclusion: the One is primary because it is the condition of everything else. Plato constructs an edifice that seems irrefutable.

The problem is that Plato reasons as though there is no one reasoning. This seems entirely natural. A syllogism does not depend on who constructs it; two plus two yields four regardless of who counts. Logic and mathematics appear to live in a universe purified of the thinker and it does not matter whose hand writes the conclusion down.

The Good is the condition of all determinacy, as the sun is the condition of all visibility. Yet visibility is for an eye, determinacy is for a mind. Remove the knower and "intelligibility" has no referent — there is no one for whom things are determined. Plato's analogy works against him: it requires the perceiver that the argument has written out of the picture.

What does the primacy of the One mean?

If the One is all there is and nothing exists beside it, then it does not exist at all. To exist is to be bounded, to differ from what one is not. A One that has nothing outside itself has no boundary and no determination. Parmenides ac-

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cepted this and described Being as a homogeneous sphere about which nothing can be said. Plato wanted more: he wanted the One and a world of forms, the absolute unity and the rich multiplicity it supposedly grounds. But the moment anything accompanies the One (even the illusion of multiplicity) there are many: the One and whatever else is there, even if the "else" is called illusion or Maya. This distinction is already a duality.

If the One is primary in the sense that multiplicity arises from it then the question is how. The One is not a mathematical unit that can be added to itself. It is, by definition, the absence of all internal difference: no parts, no boundaries. A boundary requires three things: what is on one side, what is on the other, and the line between them. Nothing in the One can produce a boundary, as producing would require a distinction that the One, by its nature, does not contain. To generate multiplicity the One would need something it does not have

— a second term, a difference. But if that second term exists independently of the One, then the One and the Many are co-original, and the claim that one precedes the other is the decision of the philosopher who drew the boundary between them. The One is an abstraction of the second order — a distinction drawn across distinctions, a pattern extracted from the comparison of individual unities. It cannot precede multiplicity any more than "green" can precede the grass and the leaf from whose comparison it was extracted.

The simple is prior to the composite, because the composite depends on its parts — this is Plato's second path to the One. Moving toward the ground, we must arrive at something that can no longer be decomposed. Plato himself showed what happens when the arrival is attempted. In the first hypothesis of the Parmenides the One has no parts, no shape, no place, no relation to time, cannot be named, cannot be known. This is meant to be the limit of simplicity — that which remains when every composition has been removed. But the stripping is itself an operation that leaves marks. To say that the One is outside space is to draw a boundary between the One and space. To say it has no parts is to distinguish it from everything that does. The result is a set of negative determinations, each of which positions the One against what it is not. The supposedly simple has been bounded on every side by what it excludes, and a thing defined by its exclusions is not simple — it is the product of as many distinc-

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tions as there are predicates denied of it. And it coexists with many: space, time, and so on must already be in place for the One to be defined against them.

Every argument establishes the One as the condition of everything else, and in doing so, relies on a duality it does not acknowledge.

Semyon Frank demonstrated in The Object of Knowledge that the so-called laws of logic are the fundamental mode by which consciousness apprehends anything at all. To know something is to distinguish it from what it is not, to divide the field of experience into A and not-A. The three classical laws are three facets of this single act. The law of identity states that a thing, once distinguished, holds its boundary. The law of non-contradiction emphasizes that the boundary is real: what has been distinguished cannot simultaneously be its opposite.

And the law of excluded middle means that the boundary is exhaustive: nothing escapes the cut. They describe one operation: the drawing of a line.

Plato takes the product of this operation, the concept "One" extracted by distinguishing unity from multiplicity, and declares it the ground of all distinction.

The conclusion is mistaken for the premise.

Before Plato, Protagoras declared that man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, and of those that are not that they are not. The formula places the subject at the center: what a thing is, is what it is for someone. This position faded since it arrived as a naked claim. Protagoras had no account of how the subject produces its measures, no explanation why "man is the measure" is anything more than the observation that people disagree. Without the framework the idea collapses into the trivial thesis that things seem different to different observers, and Plato dismantled it in the Theaetetus with a single reflexive strike: if every man's judgment is true for him, then the judgment "Protagoras is wrong" is also true for the one who holds it, and the doctrine devours itself.

The argument works only against a Protagoras who has nothing to say about the structure of the measuring.

A system that offers architecture will always displace a position that says "it depends on the observer" and stops. The observer needs his own positive idea, one

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that accounts for the production of rivals without turning into another fixture of a supposedly mind-independent world.

Plato knew this. In Parmenides he turns his method against his own doctrine, and the result is devastating. The first hypothesis strips unity of every predicate, the second hypothesis immediately generates everything the first argument denied: parts, whole, shape, number, time, knowledge. Plato saw that the One either collapses into silence or explodes into the very multiplicity it was supposed to ground. He published the dialogue and left the paradox standing. The tradition after him took the first hypothesis as the true account and built a theology.

The One cannot be anything determinate. If it were, it would already be bounded, split into itself and what lies beyond it. The Platonic tradition recognized this and drew the consequence: the One must be conceived as an amorphous totality prior to every division, an all-unity containing all possible distinctions within itself without being any one of them. It cannot be any particular being.

It cannot even be being as such, because being, once articulated, already stands against non-being and is delimited. Therefore, the One must be beyond being, supra-essential. This will echo through the entire subsequent tradition, from Plotinus to the German mystics.

Before accepting this conclusion or disputing it, we must pause and examine what has been taken for granted throughout. Every step of the reasoning relies on a single operation: the drawing of a distinction. The operation is used at every turn, presupposed by every argument, and never itself examined. What is this operation?

To answer this, we must set Plato aside for now and turn to distinction itself.