The Unity of Being
Part I Section 2
[8]
Section 2
Historical Affiliations of The Theory of Teleological Monism
1. The Monism of Plato. If philosophy may be said to have a tradition, then that tradition assuredly is more nearly summed up in the conception of Immaterial or Spiritual Monism than in any other. Indeed the philosophic quest has prevailingly appeared as the search not merely for first principles, but for The First Principle. And it has been readily seen that such an Ultimate Being can hardly be conceived of as, in the words of Plato: “without life or mind, in awful unmeaningness an everlasting fixture.”1
In the thought of Plato, the main foundations of a Spiritual Monism are, once and for all, established. In the first place the Parmenidean argument for the unity of being as such, is incorporated in the Theory of Ideas — and at the same time freed from its essential defect. Plato agrees that “to be” must have one ultimate identical meaning, and that nothing can be saved by entering into a relation to this one being which alone lifts it appreciably above the level of non-entity. The theory of matter is in some slight conflict with this principle, but the principle is not as such attacked. On the other hand, in the Parmenides, Plato points out that the “one” and “the many,” taken as such seem to contradict each other; while in the Sophist the conclusion is drawn that the one must enter into each [9] of the many, while yet remaining itself, or — the same conclusion from another angle — that “being” must partake of otherness or difference, which since it is not simply identical with “being,” is called not-being.
If being were merely itself, then as the Dialogue makes clear, it could not even be called one. For there must be a difference between “being” and “one,” and therefore both cannot have being as sole predicate.2 If there are other predicates than being, still these predicates partake of being and hence being enters into or itself partakes of an other than just itself as mere “being.”
“The One” may be called equally well Individuality, and Plato has here discovered a new argument for monism. Nothing can be except as individual, a one distinct and (at least numerically) unique something. In short every thing is a thing, and thinghood or entityness is essential to it. If it ceased to be a definite determinate being, it would cease to be anything other than nothing. Whatever this one-ness or this-ness or uniqueness, or determinateness, is, it is clear all things are internally related to it. Moreover, as Plato acutely shows, the many as a whole, as a many, becomes also a one, an individual, possesses the very same element as each of its members. Thus “the one” is a concrete universal, a one expressing itself in many as entering into their very essence, and also into the many as a whole or totality.
[10] “Being” thus, is shown to be essentially capable of differentiation without destroying its identity. All differences must affect being or they are nothing. Yet being must not cease to be itself. Hence “not-being” is concluded to belong to the nature of being. Self-differentiation is the interpretation of this conclusion. In a sense, as Parmenides said, nothing can have more or less being than anything else, since all must have being as a whole, or in its identity. It cannot have merely a part of being, because into such a part being in its identity or wholeness must enter. What is sought then is a principle capable of modes of self-manifestation or self-activity, in the very texture of which the principle is immanent as their sustaining creative ground, and yet though present everywhere in its self-identity or — in that sense — in its wholeness, does not manifest the full richness of its power equally or entirely at every point, but only in all taken together.
The whole structure of Monism depends upon this point. Plato leaves the problem without further development on its abstract or rigorously analytical side. On the other hand he bequeathed us some immortal suggestions, drawn from his fundamental insight into the nature of man and human powers and hence into that which is capable of being indicated by the human concepts of truth or goodness, immortal suggestions toward the last possible solution of the last problems.
In the first place, Plato perceives, the “ideas” or [11] universals are not what they are merely in their own or private terms; but are essentially related to each other. In the end this leads logically to a supreme Idea, on pain of an endless regress which would contradict all determinate knowledge.3 Without any complete analysis, the author of the Dialogues appears to have seen the necessity of this monistic conclusion. What, however, of the supreme Idea —must it remain mere Being, — as it stands (or without elucidation) a pale empty word? By a variety of avenues the conviction becomes clear and profound in Plato’s mind that the key principle of the system of the ideas is to be sought in the nature of the good. The good is declared to be superior to being and essence, not only in “dignity,” but in power. Only mind is powerful, for only mind is “self-moved.” But the essence of mind is its pursuit and realization of the good. The good is that which draws it onward, is the secret of its activity, the creative principle and explanation of its knowledge. In the symposium, we have the essence of the soul portrayed as the love of the absolute beauty, the ultimate good.
Again, there is in the Dialogues a sublime apprehension of the infinite value of the truth. “The whole soul must be turned toward the truth,” as its supreme good or ultimate and ideal fruition. If the truth were not knowledge of being as perfection, the entire enthusiasm for truth (amounting, in the genuine philosopher, to reverence and a love without [12] reserve) could find no reasonable account, except as a supreme illusion.
Argue it as we will the soul’s homage to truth transcends all utilitarian and practical implications and aims at a supremely worthy reality, the knowledge of which is bliss because it is the conscious possession of an infinitely precious object. The value of knowledge implies the value of reality simply because a worthless reality could not be greatly worth knowing. No sacred obligation can attach to the truth if the truth is merely the fact that the universe is a gaping inanity or a makeshift of partial goods and bads. Unless the entire scheme of things is divine, the conscious harmony with it which is knowledge cannot be a supreme good either. Hence we have no cause to reproach ourselves in the name of truth for our efforts to justify a faith which alone gives that name authority and power.
Plato’s conscience, at any rate is clear — although he is careful to confess that his manner of expressing the supremacy of the good, and his ability to demonstrate it, are doubtless inadequate enough. He even declares that “God only knows if his opinion is true or false.” But serious doubt of its truth is nowhere apparent, and the faith that the good is the ultimate principle of the intellectual world, the genuine author or “parent of reason and truth,” shines forth from and illuminates the pages of the Dialogues at almost innumerable points.
[13] As to the nature of the Good, it is really not difficult4 to detect a strong tendency at least toward a virtual identification of goodness with the Divine, with the nature of a God in whom is no jealousy, whom to resemble is perfect happiness, and who is possessed of all righteousness. The convergence of the two ideas of value and deity is indicated for example by the parallelism between the treatment of the Good as the source of the being of all things good, and of God as likewise the author of all goodness in the world. It is also to be approached by way of the discussions of the primacy of mind in reality, as the sole principle of self-motion5 — and by the kinship declared to obtain between the mind and the ideas generally — a kinship not to be interpreted as a mere leveling of mind to the character of the ideas, or the reduction of it to a relation between them. For Plato is quite aware that mind actually includes the ideas (like birds in a bird cage) and yet remains a simple uncompounded entity (unlike “the day” in the Parmenides, which is composed of parts).
The manner of this inclusion which is thus obviously very different in the end from that of birds in a cage o. any such spatial analogy, is left obscure enough; but that [14] the conception of mind supplies something not provided for explicitly in the conception of the ideas as purely objective forms, is seen very well.
We may refer once more to the absolute refusal to countenance even for a moment, the hypothesis that the idea of being, or Ultimate Being, can fail to possess life and thought. Thus the kindred nature of mind and idea is taken perhaps even more as a means of interpreting the ideas by the mind, than the mind by the ideas. Lutoslawski goes so far as to regard the Platonic discovery of the soul or self, in the proper sense, as of greater significance than the Platonic Ideenlehre (The Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic).
Finally, in regard to the Platonic good we may mention the remarkable passage describing the misery of the unjust man as the tragic fact that he is cut off from genuine social intercourse or “communion” (Jowett’s Translation) which, with fellowship and harmony, are declared to bind together men and gods and the entire universe. This is a way of stating that view of the absolute primacy of social values which we wish to defend, and which reappears today in Professor Ward’s The Realm of Ends or — minus the religious aspect in McTaggart’s form of “Hegelianism.”
In contrast to the foregoing discussion of Plato from the monistic angle, an insistence might be made upon the recalcitrance of the Platonic “matter” to the ordering [15] Good. Creation finds its materials, matter appears as “a datum objective to God.” Two points may be stressed in answer. One, that the existence of matter is very shadowy indeed in Platonism except when it is called upon to stand between the Creator and the evil of the world.
In other contexts it appears as falling short of being by a far greater gulf than it surpasses non-being — it appears at most as something which might be if true being allow. The other point in that a fuller discussion of freedom, responsibility, and ethical values might have made the existence of evil a fact referable to the action of the creatures rather than to the primordial nature of matter. This most difficult of all problems for the Monist is indeed incapable of any sort of solution in the Greek Pre-Christian atmosphere. It remains the great obstacle to a monistic faith, but it does not stand with quite the implications indicated in the Platonic dialogues.
On the whole we believe it is just to regard Plato as the great founder of Teleological Monism. Subsequent philosophy has been overwhelmingly an attempt to elaborate and fortify the grand structure whose foundations he so well established.
2. Later Monistic Arguments. In this subsequent development further arguments for the general view were discovered. The Ontological argument is the chief addition, unless perhaps we except the explicated form of Plato’s [16] implied argument from the identity of mind and its objects in knowledge — the two-fold character of ideas as essentially of the nature of mind, and at the same time the inner realities of things. In short, the “Cardinal Principle of Idealism.”
Both these modern forms of argument have suffered considerable bombardment by bitterly hostile attacking critics; but we are unable to perceive the relevancy of these criticisms to the genuine issues involved, even though these issues are sufficiently subtle to fall an easy prey to misstatement, or misinterpretation of insufficiently guarded statement. Whether the subtlety is not so great as to render impossible a completely guarded statement is a question which may as well be left open, although an affirmative answer is only too plausible. Something perhaps can be done to show how the criticisms do not reach the real thought of the men they attack, their basic logical insights, whether we consider Anselm or Berkeley.6
3. Hegel’s Argument. The mode of argument we find in Hegel is really an elaborate statement of the Platonic perception of the interdependence of universals, and hence their dissolution into one another unless there is [17] an ultimate Universal which sustains them in interdependence and yet distinguishes them as varying manifestations of itself.
The Concrete Universal is the Platonic highest unhypothetical first principle reached by a self-establishing or indubitable dialectic. It is also one with the Idea of the Good, or of “Perfect Being,” as expressing the nature of the Ultimate Universal. However differently Hegel may have interpreted the Supreme Reality, he has not discovered a radically new mode of demonstrating the Monistic hypothesis. Still, as novelty is in general a matter of degree, it may be true that the conception of the contradictions inherent in any statement of the ultimate truth of things in terms of subordinate or partial ideas, is brought to such unprecedented distinctness and fullness by Hegel as to entitle him to the credit of having discovered its fuller possibilities. On the other hand the Hegelian argument is attended with many excrescences which are less and less thought to be defensible, and is nowhere carried out in a manner that from step to step is satisfactory. The simpler and less pretentious forms of the demonstration that the whole truth is somehow inherent in every part, the supreme idea in all concepts, appear to us the better. And the notion that the replacement of partial or inadequate ideas by adequate ones is a literal analogue of the movement of all reality, and its motive-force, is a gratuitous outgrowth from the perfectly modest [18] contention that to comprehend our ideas and their objects we must behold all as the expression of one highest principle. The manner in which we criticize concepts and thus elevate ourselves to a complete point of view is in a sense arbitrary, and not the very movement of the real and. its self-relation of part to whole. It is but analogous and the degree of analogy is no readily soluble question — and must be discovered for itself. In some sense the immanence of the One in the many must be represented in the relations of our ideas to ourselves as subjects, for this is the sole type off immanence we experience; but the same principle is involved in the identity of self and object in emotional experience or experience explicitly of value, and the merely conceptual identity in difference may after all be but a partial aspect of a unity which at bottom is a matter of value. In that case contradictions are but conflicts in valuations, their failure to realize in harmony the ultimate or whole value they seek, and the attempt to overcome contradictions by adequate ideas may be viewed as really the attempt to attain a full realization of the essential values of experience and reality. If so, it is not a case of “Panlogism” but only of Teleology, which is another matter.
4. Teleological Monism. This principle of the primacy of value is largely recognized by the great constructive successors of Plato, from Aristotle downwards. But it is imperfectly carried out in the dualism of [19] Descartes; in the somewhat equivocal implications of value transcendence in the Spinozistic Substance; in the subordination off the good, as free self-realization, to logical necessity, in the Monadism of Leibniz; and notably in the subjectivist interpretation of aesthetics in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Moreover, throughout the history of philosophy, until the recent work of Royce and the pragmatists (and in considerable degree, of Bradley and Bosanquet) there is a large measure of failure to develop the full implications of the Platonic suggestion that the good is to knowing what light is to seeing, the very principle that interprets the relation of knower to the known. We shall discuss this in later sections. We hold the neglect of the conception of knowledge as essentially and in principle knowledge of the good or valuation, to lie at the root of the (on other grounds) insoluble epistemological antinomies of subjectivism, immanence, transcendence, etc., which rise from the history of philosophy like impassable reefs, strewn with the wrecks of epistemologies!
In regard to the teleological view in relation to the ontological problems of philosophy, we would note that although from Aristotle downward, with the not unambiguous exception of Spinoza (for whom God was not only an object of “love,” but “infinitely perfect” in all positive qualifications) the coextensiveness of value and being are recognized (even, by Kant in the end) the idea of value is [20] not the less neglected in endeavoring to interpret the fundamental ontological relations. The relation of the finite to the Ultimate Being is left in the contradictory state of total dependence plus externality — e.g., in the scholastic system in its accept ed. form.7 Or, where the many are included in the One, as in Leibniz, as the “objective thoughts of God,” the difficulty of conceiving self-active or rational individuals as mere aspects of the thinking of the One Individual is left in rather bald relief and there seems to be little or perhaps no suggestion as to how its acuteness may be mitigated.
5. Spinoza. In Spinoza the relation is one of logical implication, so far as it can be discovered at all. But then freedom indeed vanishes, even if we could form any conception of an implication of the particular by the universal.
6. Kant. Kant admits the highest or most complete form of unity we can imagine is one of “Zweckmäszigkeit,” and in his final view of things he admits such unity as the actual scheme of reality; but he does not with any thoroughness apply the notion to the discussion of the ontological antinomies in the first Critique,8 and hence is led to [21] reject a rational metaphysics as out of the question.
7. Royce. In the work of Professor Royce, the relation of the one and the many, and of idea and object, are interpreted in teleological terms. But the fundamental concept employed is that of purpose or will. The result is that the unity of many wills in One has to be regarded as a sheer identity. Each will is the One, the One is merely any of the many seen in its completeness. The upshot is a collision of the whole system with the facts of evil and error. A perfect will which divides itself into parts, in order to oppose itself, injure itself, and fall into innumerable misunderstandings of itself, is not a satisfactory solution.9 If each will is but a meaning or purpose of the One Will, the errors and evils in such meanings must be regarded as absolutely good and best in the end. And there remains but one real agent in the world, the One which ultimately means all meanings and so makes them what they are. If it does not so make them, then there is no power or self-determination in the world at all, and the concept of will is robbed of its contents. On the other hand, the meanings of the One cannot determine themselves, for then their status as nothing but meanings or purposes of the One is jeopardized. The sole agent must be the One in [22] each of its meanings, or we do not know what the “its” is to denote.
And if the sole agent is the One, the acts it brings about are strangely inadequate to its perfection; and at any rate the finite individuals as self-active beings, are banished from the universe.
8. Conclusion. Our own departure from Professor Royce consists briefly in a view of value as more than purpose or will, in an interpretation of these concepts themselves in terms of the more ultimate category of social harmony or identity with respect to interests which is given the name of love. The good for me must be felt by me as at the same time good for another, and felt as good in part for that very reason of being shared. The good, in other words, must not be simply purpose or self-realization. Purpose to do what? How does the self realize itself?
Let us answer, in joy. But what is joy. No joy is ever profoundly felt and comprehended in life except as a joy in something not merely ourselves but good to another in precisely the same sense as the joy itself is a good to us who experience it. The rejoicing in another’s joy, the happiness because we see and assist in the happiness about us, are the very essentials of joy and happiness. An unshared purely self-centered well-being is we believe an unrealizable because in essence a contradictory conception. In brief to experience the good is to love — to [23] unite with another in a satisfaction which is so to each because it is so to the other.
If this category be employed, the relation of the many to the Ultimate Reality can be conceived in outlines which we believe involve no genuine contradiction. These outlines will be significant in so far as the spiritual categories employed have been consciously realized in our experience. In the end philosophy must descend into the full concreteness of experience if it is to get its abstract or logical outlines filled with any significant meaning. It must rely above all upon that most profoundly empirical of all modes of apprehension — the religious. Otherwise it will fail, as in a measure philosophy has always failed, simply for lack of sufficiently profound (i.e., spiritual or valuational) conceptions to deal with.
Nevertheless, the history of philosophy, in its constant impetus toward spiritual unity has not — so far as our opinion goes — wandered so far from a truly concrete and adequate point of view as harsher critics may suppose. The great value aspects of experience philosophers have always endeavored significantly to relate to being as it is in itself, to the principle with reference to which alone it can be said of anything — There is such a thing.10
Herewith we close our rough and hasty review of some historical aspects of the problem.
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Endnotes
1. Sophist — Jowett’s Translation.
2. This is not quite the step taken by Plato’s argument at this point — though the conclusion is the same.
3. See Section 8.
4. Zeller, Grundriss der Geschichte der Griechischen Philosophie, p. 157.
5. To be correlated with the Good as the ordering and controlling principle of things.
6. Other modern arguments of which we hold the same view are those from the categories of space and time (Zeno, however) and of relation.
7. Although on the other hand, God being everywhere, everything after all may be said to be in God, on the Scholastic view.
8. Nor to the problems of knowledge.
9. If the injuries and misunderstandings are unreal as such, so much the worse, one would say, for ethics or else for the system.
10. Certainly Spinoza or Aristotle — in our own day Professor Alexander — have made this attempt.
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