On The Historical Origins of Metaphysical Induction

In my two first articles toward developing a comprehensive answer to the question, "What is being?", "What is reality?", or equivalently, "How do the One and the Many relate" (One = the whole/totality of reality, the many = all things within the One), I arrived at a startling conclusion about the structure of all reality. It is startling because I believe that the conclusion is really proven. The argument is so strong that its conclusion can be put in these terms: EITHER the conclusion is true OR being itself does not exist and thinking does not exist. This conclusion, in other words, embraces the kind of necessity which philosophers call metaphysical necessity. Were the conclusion to be denied, the denial would logically imply that neither reality nor even thinking could exist. This is what is called a metaphysical truth, and there is no truth stronger than such truths. Of course, reality is, and being is, and thinking is; so the denier would be compelled to accept the conclusion of the One's existence under penalty of falling into the absurd.

What was my conclusion? That Reality consists of "God" and a "Totality" of finite things absolutely dependent on God. That there exists the Reality of an ultimate, supreme, unique, absolute being (independent of all other beings) that is actually infinite and unbounded, suffering no external or internal limitations, nor any internal "separations" from moments in time; it is eternal: i.e., necessarily containing within itself all it needs to exist forever, and absolutely sufficient onto itself. In sum, it is necessarily and absolutely self sufficient. I called this "The One" or "God". Furthermore, besides this "God", reality was found to have a finite "Totality" (let's call it that) of finite beings, which absolutely depend on the One, and cannot influence the One. True, finite realities (trees, stones, minerals, plants, planets, human beings, and all other finite beings and their relations) act on each other, depend on each other. But ultimately, there is the One that towers over all else, and cannot be influenced or affected by anything other than Itself. This was the conclusion of our first two posts, and I believe the argument supporting it is so strong as to be incontrovertible.

In these earlier articles or posts, I made a promise to develop the ontology more, to say more about the interrelations within each being and among the finite things in upcoming posts. I renew the promise now for the future. I think that the discovery of this "Mount Everest" of the One, and the scaling of its colossal proportions, and the power of the proof backing these discoveries should be reexamined critically.

The Responsible Philosopher, Like The Responsible Climber, Checks His Footing Lest Someone Climbing Behind Him Fall!

Life and death can depend on having the right tools, skill set, provisions and physical preparation for the climbing of a great mountain. The conquest of the existence of the One and the Many deserves no less attention to detail and preparation. I have therefore thought it prudent to dedicate this piece to rechecking my methodology; to assure as best I can that I am not walking out over an abyss hidden by an overhang of frozen snow, or in danger of a slip up or a fall into a glacial crevice. Such an intellectual error could bring me down, or any other poor wanderer who follows me. Out of responsibility for the truth, for me and for anyone who follows, I am obliged to double check my methodology and starting point.

Specifically, I refer to the Principle of Metaphysical Induction. It is my personal discovery after much arduous jostling of ideas in my journey. It is astonishingly simple and powerful. After discovering it and applying it, I also felt obliged to research its historical roots, if indeed it has any. The Principle of Metaphysical Induction seems to appear partially formed in the first philosophers of which I can mention Thales of Miletos, and his disciple, Anaximander of Miletos, who first discovered and used the two key notions of "arché" and “ápeiron” (ἄπειρον); i.e., principle/origin and infinity. Anaximander took steps towards the discovery of Metaphysical Induction, but his disciple, Anaximenes, botched it, and went off searching for other principles, not making a necessary correction to his master's doctrine that I can see, thanks to hindsight, and plan to report elsewhere. The first sprouting of the Principle of Metaphysical Induction thus came to naught.

The Fragmentation of Anaximander's Infinite One: Plato's Parricide and Aristotle's Substantialism

There arose the great Plato and Aristotle, who conceived being as a composite of being and non being: as a composite of the One and Dyad in Plato; or act and potency (or form and matter) in Aristotle. They rejected that being/reality could be absolutely infinite (i.e., actually realized) because they thought this would annihilate finite being (I am oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, entirely skipping over the matter of the univocal being of Parmenides and the other Eleatics, which is more or less well known and accessible on internet). Therefore, in his dialogue, "The Sophist" (cf especially 241 E 3 - 242 A 4), Plato destroyed Anaximander's infinity with what he called "the parricide of Parmenides", and Aristotle doubled down with what I call, "the Slander of Melissus". That is, Plato (and later Aristotle) insisted that nothingness (or more precisely, that-diverse-from-being or héteron, ἕτερον, cf Plato's “The Sophist”, 240 A 7) was an intrinsic constitutive element of being. Consequently, being had to be intrinsically limited, therefore, intrinsically finite; rendered so by the nothingness that intrinsically divided and impeded it.

Afterward, Aristotle concentrated all being in his universe in the finite substances (which can be defined as finite unities with several or many aspects adhering in them without disrupting their unity; e.g., a child's toy ball is a substance as inherent in it are the various aspect of color, shape, weight, texture, etc.). I call Aristotle's view of reality: substantialism. In this view, reality is the sum of the finite substances (with their adherent aspects or accidents). The infinite one of Anaximander has no place in substantialism, in which the whole is conceived as the effect of its causes, which are the finite substances.

True, Aristotle did arrive at a finite "God" as the First Mover of his system. But it was a finite God, and contributed to the unity of movement in things, not to any unity of being. Aristotle explicitly rejected a single principle as the origin of beings and reality, but followed his master, Plato, in insisting in more than one principle. (Cf Aristotle's discussion of the principles in his polemic with the Eleatics in his Physics, A1 - A5.)

This thesis that being is intrinsically finite I have named finitism. The finitism of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies would later compel Christian thinkers like St Augustin and St Thomas Aquinas to adapt them ("baptize them"), so as to make space for the infinite God of Revelation. While Plato's universe still has a One that is more than the sum of the parts, and still "aspires", as it were, for the infinite, Aristotle rejected the infinite One completely, and bequeathed us a notion of reality hemmed in on all sides by finitism, even more so than Plato. With little exaggeration, his universe is a handful of marbles (substances) scattered into outer space with almost nothing to connect them but the movement that the First Mover and the lesser celestial spheres propel in them.

With the Suppression of the One, the Connections among the Many are Extenuated to the Point of Vanishing.

Once Plato and Aristotle had introduced the diverse into the innermost viscera of being, notionally fragmenting reality into a Many of disparate pieces, reasonings pretending to lead from one or several of these pieces to an overarching principle embracing all things, became suspicious and unacceptable. How could anything bridge the gaps between the fragments left over from the parricide? From where could come the material -- to replace the shattered being -- strong enough to support the ripping tension within these connections, which even their original being could not support? I believe that Plato's parricide spelled the theoretical doom for any hope of attaining to a common oneness or sameness among all the fragments left over from the shattered apeiron/infinite of Plato's parricide.

But more devastation was yet to come. The modest, original sprout of the Principle of Metaphysical Induction had already been crushed by Plato, when Aristotle, for good measure, ripped to shreds reasonings leading towards justifying metaphysical inductions. Aristotle's logic-based polemics against the Platonists killed their "One over Many" argument (which was possibly misinterpreted by Aristotle, to begin with). I think that this successful polemic decisively put an end to the Principle of Metaphysical Induction in history.

Metaphysical Induction On The Ropes. Woe Betide Metaphysicians In Search Of The Infinite!

Why? Because it and practically any other reasoning attempting to logically justify metaphysical inductions look like the Platonic induction realized by their "One over Many" argument, which, to the eyes of many scholars including my own, is clearly erroneous. Add to this the monumental authority of Aristotle that he, as both philosopher and historian of philosophy, exercised over future generations: he effectively poisoned the well even to our day, rendering it uncouth and shameful for anyone to propose anything appearing similar the Platonic induction. All inductive procedures of reason, which start from a many to arrive at the affirmation of some sort of one, had been made suspicious. Henceforth, any adventurous "mountain climber", courageous or foolhardy enough to propose climbing Mount Everest with any sort of induction would immediately be branded a "monist", and exiled to wander as a leper in the corridors of universities (safely far away from appointments to faculty chairmanships), and all but obliged to ring a bell, shouting, "Unclean! Unclean!". This mindset of fear or revulsion, which I've come to call, "The Specter of Parmenides", still haunts the halls of many and perhaps all universities and faculties of philosophy, scaring all but the most wayward back into the fold.

Diogenes of Apollonia and his Principle

Before moving on, there was one such wayward "leprous exile" of whom we have a record and who is worthy of mention: Diogenes of Apollonia, whom the historian of ideas, Giovanni Reale, classified as a pre-Socratic "Eclectic Naturalist”. If the gentle reader has wondered why I took the steemit ID of "Apollonius", he need look no further. (Besides, "Diogenes" was already taken.) I believe that Diogenes articulated perhaps half of the Principle of Metaphysical Induction in his work, "On Nature" (cf 64 B 2 Diels-Kranz):

To be concise, it seems to me that all things exist either by alteration of the same [my emphasis], or by being the same. And this is clear: because if the things that now exist in this world, earth and water and air and fire and all the other things that exist in this world, if, I say, anyone of these were different from the others, and different by its own nature, and were not instead a form of the same, which transforms and mutates, the things would never be able to mix together, nor act upon nor suffer one another; and from earth no plant could sprout nor animal be engendered nor anything else whatever, if it were not, as I say, composed in such a way as to be the same. Above all else, all these things are engendered from the same, as they always vary in their modifications, and into it return.

(Of course, Diogenes's term, the same, is closely related to oneness. Oneness is a sort of sameness, except stronger, in that oneness excludes internal separations or divisions. And since Diogenes is speaking in general, I agree with him that it is better to use the term the same rather than "the one" or "oneness".)

Diogenes came within a razor's edge of declaring explicitly that the sameness or oneness of a plurality must preexist the plurality as its necessary condition for existing. This sameness he writes about points to the arché, the mysterious principle/origin of the earlier naturalists (Thales, Anaximander, et al.), and which I want to investigate further as promised in a future post. Now I shall cite my own comment (copyright pending) in which I articulate more fully the necessary preexistence of this sameness or oneness.

Change implies a preexisting and stable sameness in what changes or is undergoing change. In other words and more generally, any difference or diversity among things presupposes a common sameness, “the same”, as Diogenes puts it, so that the diverse things can coexist, not only act on one another. Otherwise, it would seem, diversities would be isolated, each in its own absolute solipsism with respect to the others, for they would have no common aspect or being by which they could communicate or interact. Thus commonness or sameness among things must always take precedence over their differences, because the differences can only exist thanks to the sameness in which they commune in being and by which they can be effective presences for one another. Without such a preexistent sameness, the differences would vanish and existents be annihilated. We shall call this Diogenes’s Principle, and state it thus: If things are different, then they must (in some sense) be the same. They cannot be absolutely different because then each would be isolated in solipsism, which is impossible.

I have studied philosophy for years among many professionals, none of whom have ever mentioned this sort of "pure" inductive principle to me, except in negative terms, as dangerous dead end streets. I shall hold, until someone can show me otherwise, that metaphysical induction died with Diogenes of Apollonia. After him, and after Plato's parricide of Parmenides, Philosophy went off on another track entirely. Henceforth, being and reality have been conceived by the greater portion of humanity, maybe all of humanity, as inherently finite (rendered finite by at least internal limitations if not external limitations). Conceptually, for the man of today, there is no absolutely infinite One. Today, the Many is the predominant theme of reality; the One, at most if it exists at all, is conceived as the sum of the effects of the Many.

Can Diogenes's Principle Really Be True?

I leave these historical considerations on the origins of the Principle of the One and the Many, and refocus onto its philosophical dimension. Here again is Diogenes's Principle:

If things are different, then they must (in some sense) be the same (or one)!

Correctly interpreted, this snippet of a phrase contains the essence of the Principle of Metaphysical Induction. At most, it seems a clever aphorism, and it could easily be overlooked as silly or flippant. I want to test it's mettle, press it to see if it can hold up under aggressive scrutiny.

A frog in a scummy pond and a star in the crystalline sky seem quite different. They belong to entirely different worlds. So different that they can't have anything in common, right? So let's suppose they have absolutely nothing in common. What follows?

As they have nothing in common, it is impossible for any common thing to be present in the universe of each. If a cloud exists in the frog's sky, and that cloud also exists in the star's sky, we have a violation of our assumption. That cloud must exist either in the frog's universe or in the star's universe. And the sky: is it not both the frog's and the star's? Of course. But now the sky, too, must either belong to the frog's universe or belong to the star's universe, or be torn asunder, half going to the star, half going to the frog. Absurd? It gets worse. The mind with which I am thinking of both star and frog is also something they have in common ! Now it is my mind that must be torn asunder to be consistent with our assumption.

So if there exist two realities, frog and star, or more generally, "X" and "Y", that are absolutely diverse and separate, having absolutely nothing in common, then each must exist in its own absolutely separate universe in which each thing in one universe does not exist and cannot exist in the other. This is absolute diversity, and its consequences are (1) to isolate each finite being in its own solipsism (from Latin, solum + ipsum, "alone by itself"), and (2) to destroy the mind's capacity to form a cognitive relation with both frog and star, X and Y. Hence two more consequences follow immediately. (1) Being is annihilated. The being of the frog (X) is annihilated. Why? Being resists nothingness. Being is anything insofar as it is an effective presence. Now clearly, the frog (X) is neither a presence nor effective, clearly it has not resisted nothingness but absurdly imploded by its "touch" (another absurdity, nothingness in this case would be transmuted into being, an effective presence!).
(2) Thinking in my mind both the frog and the star is absolutely impossible. It's obvious that under the assumption of the existence of absolute differences between things, my mind could at most form a cognitive relation with one of the two solipsistic universes and its contents.
(3) The separation between frog and star is necessarily eternal.

I object: even if the two solipsistic universes and all their contents are absolutely diverse, having absolutely nothing in common now, they could change and find some sameness in the future.

Really? Can being ever approach absolute nothingness? No, because they have nothing in common, approaching would mean they have a common place to meet. As contradictory, they must remain contradictory under penalty of not being contradictory: and that's contradictory!

Hence, it is absolutely impossible that frog and star be absolutely different or diverse (I use difference and diverse as synonyms for the time being). Therefore, there must be something in common and one upon which depends their coexistence and possible interacting. Furthermore, on the metaphysical plain, there cannot exist any solipsistic universe, eternally separated from "the rest of Reality".
This, I believe, sufficiently establishes Diogenes's Principle. Oneness and sameness, therefore have precedence and are necessary conditions for multiplicity and differences.

Enough said about the history of metaphysical induction. I just wanted to sketch the background to give an idea of the idea's originality.

The Metaphysical Induction

I talked of a frog and a star, and then of a real thing X and another Y. If X is different or diverse from Y, and Y similarly with respect to X, this much is absolutely true, both for being and for our thinking: It is metaphysically impossible for X and Y to be absolutely diverse one from the other.

Therefore, the absolutely necessary condition for X and Y to be diverse or different is that something common between X and Y preexist, so that they can coexist as diverse. Let us call that common sameness, "C", which must preexist the diversity and difference between X and Y.

Now these are some of the ramifications for C:

(1) C exists, that is, it resists nothingness and is an effective presence.

(2) C exists as it makes X and Y exist: without C, neither X nor Y would be effective presences by being diverse or different from one another.

(3) C is "split" into two aspects: some of its being is in X and Y, and some is in C alone.

(4) But C is not internally divided by this "split". If it were, its being would be circumscribed ("trapped") within X and/or Y, and so C would not be able to act as a commonness between their diversities or differences. We would be back where we started under the assumption that X and Y were absolutely different, in two absolutely solipsistic universes. But we've seen that such a state is impossible both for being and for thinking of them (it would split the mind in two!).

(5) C is a oneness or a sameness.

If X and Y correspond to two organs in a living body, then C as the body is a oneness (for X and Y are not divided from C, the body). On the other hand, if X and Y represent two hens in the C of the whole species of chickens, then X and Y are divided, yet enjoy the sameness of being of the same species.

(6) C is transcendent.

C exercises its being "at a distance", that is, in itself as C, and also in X and Y; furthermore, X and Y depend on C for their being, as I noted in (2). Therefore C transcends X and Y. Its being unfolds and radiates from a "deeper" level of being than X and Y, C does not depend on X and Y. If it does, then they may be codependent, and "co-transcendent". Keep in mind the "transcend" comes from Latin: trans (across) + eo (go) = to go across. The being of C "goes across" from itself into X and Y, and back into C. That is what the term "transcendent" seems to depict. Later, I'll pick up this thread when I speak of "dynamism".

(7) A hierarchy of being is implied: as X and Y depend on C (if not in an equal co-dependence).

(8) The transcendence of being is necessary for the existence of being and thinking by the mind.

Why? If there were no transcendence, C would be "split" between X and Y, the diversity of X and Y would vanish, and X and Y would cease to be. The mind could not have commonness with both of them, and so, could not reach both without splitting itself.

What's Next?

What's next on the program? The Principle of Metaphysical Induction has been hammered firmly into the center of this nascent philosophical method, it's the tent peg hammered deep into the bedrock that can hold up the structure in process.

Similarly, the existence of the One, unique, absolute and eternal, has been "proven", I say reasonably, even formidably. It is established as a "metaphysical truth", which is to say, so powerfully argued and established that to attempt to contradict its absolutely necessary existence would logically imply that nothing at all exists. Even the thought "the One does not exist" could not possibly exist, if "the One does not exist" were a true affirmation!

In the relativist milieu of today's culture, this massive, some would say heavy handed affirmation of God's existence as a metaphysical truth appears as something of a joke or even worse, a form of insanity; the sign of a mind/ego that grossly overestimates its own powers.

Therefore, the program that follows, as I see it, must (1) finish sketching out the general structure of being. I must finish developing the notion of "the Totality" of finite things and how it fits in with both the One and the many individuals to form a cohesive whole. Furthermore, (2) I must sow some doubt into the relativists' minds regarding their certitude about being congenitally incapable of overcoming their incertitude. To make the blind see is already a challenge (cf John 9), but to make the "seeing" see will require something more than a miracle. I'll give it my best shot.

I'm going to have fun!