Monism and Pluralism

What we're seeing in this quest for ultimate reality of the ancient pre-Socratics is really what we would call the pursuit of God. And in Greek philosophy, the idea of monotheism is a relatively late development, whereas to the Hebrew thinker, he starts with the infinite and the eternal. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. To study the history of human thought, the work of philosophers, is often to observe what R.C. Sproul just called the pursuit of God. It's to see people seeking to make sense of the world, and many times, sadly, doing it outside of a biblical worldview. But that's not something reserved for philosophers or ancient history.

People do the very same thing today. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Ideas have consequences, and this week, R.C. Sproul is tracing the history of Greek philosophy and the consequences of those ideas. Yesterday, we met Thales and his idea that water was ultimate reality.

Well, many others would follow him and disagree and come up with their own interesting answers to that question. Here's Dr. Sproul as he introduces us to these ancient philosophers. In our first session, we took a brief overview of the first man who is usually considered to be the father of ancient Greek philosophy, namely Thales.

And we saw that Thales had his quest for the R.K. or the ultimate reality that would explain everything else, and he found that in water. Now, between the work of Thales in the sixth century B.C. and the appearance of Socrates a while later, there was a series of significant pre-Socratic philosophers.

And we're not going to have time in this brief overview to look at each one of them in detail. But there was a progression of thinkers who built upon the preliminary work of those who went before them, and they had some strange names. For example, we meet a man by the name of Anaximenes and another one whose name is very similar, Anaximander. And we run into people like Empedocles and Athenagoras and Democritus, and there's a whole series of these people. And they debated among themselves what was ultimate reality. Anaximenes, for example, challenged the thesis of Thales that ultimate reality was water. And he substituted for the concept of water the idea of air. He thought that that was a superior substance to explain ultimate reality from water.

Now, remember how we looked at Thales and we saw that Thales was interested in questions of being, questions of life, questions of motion. And Anaximenes came on and said, well, if water can account for these things, what about air? Because air is something that every living thing needs in order to survive. And if we think that water has the ability to propel itself, that is, is highly zoonistic, it can move on its own initiative, what about the wind? What about the air currents that seem to be able to come up and move without anything pushing them or pulling them? And he said, air, like water, has the ability to be involved in condensation or rarefaction.

You condense air and you will get forms of moisture and things of that sort. And out of rarefaction, rarified air, you get gases, you get fire, you get things of that sort. And so he argued against Thales that the ultimate substance was air. Now, other philosophers came along and said, well, it's not water or air. It's earth.

It's the substance of the ground. Or another one would come along and say, no, it's fire. And we'll look more at fire later on. And still another one would come along and say, no, it's not any of those four things, but it's really all four of them together, that there are four basic elements beyond which you can't reduce things, that all things are made up of either earth, air, fire, or water.

Now, you've heard that. You've heard of the four basic elements of reality according to the ancient world, earth, air, fire, and water. But no sooner does that theory come to center stage than somebody pops up and said, no, wait a minute. If there are four basic elements from which everything comes and the ultimate reality is not singular, but plural, doesn't that leave us with the many and not the one?

It leaves us with diversity without unity. So there's got to be something behind these four elements of earth, air, fire, and water that gives purpose and order and harmony and unity to those four primary elements. And so now the quest was on for what they called the fifth essence. Now you might say that this was the quintessential philosophical inquiry.

You've heard that word, haven't you? Quintessence or quintessential? Well, what does it mean literally? Quint means five, five or the fifth essence, that which is above and beyond the four basic elements. That which explains all of the four basic elements is called that which is not just essential but quintessential. And so we get the word from that. Well, in this whole process, one Aximander comes up with an idea that from the perspective of history was extremely important. He said that ultimate reality, really ultimate reality, is what he called, I'll transliterate it, the apiron, or the apiron from the Greek language.

Now you've probably never heard of that word in your life, and that's okay. But what he meant by this little word apiron was that which is boundless and ageless. That which is boundless and ageless. Now for something to be boundless means that it doesn't have any boundaries.

There is no finite dimension that can capture it or contain it. In a word, whatever is boundless must be infinite. And whatever is ageless doesn't have a birthday and has no birthday parties because if it has no age, it is somehow above and beyond the normal currents of time. So in a word, that which is ageless is that which is eternal. Now you and I have an age.

We all have birthdays. We all have a finite point of beginning in time. But we also have finite limits of space. As creatures we have natural boundaries. I'm experiencing that now not in an abstract philosophical way, but in a concrete existential way as we are videotaping this program. You see because behind the scenes, behind the cameras and the microphones, we have directors, and they wave their hands at me and tell me how much time I have. But the worst thing they do is that they put these things on the floor that I don't think maybe you can see right now through the camera.

But there are pieces. There's a piece of black tape right there, and then over here there's more black tape, and that black tape goes over here, and then there's another one along here. They've put me in a cage. They're saying, I like to walk around.

I'm a peripatetic teacher, and when I'm moving it's hard for the cameramen to keep me in focus and in sight. So they put me in this cage. They bound me. See, I am not infinite, but now I wish I were. Then I try to trick them.

I come right up to the edge of these tapes, and I lean and see what happens. But I'll, in the meantime, I'll be satisfied with my creatureliness and try to stay within the boundary. But nobody's going to mistake me for ultimate reality or the supreme metaphysical point of unity for the entire realm of existence. No, and Aximander said, that which is ultimate can have no finite bounds, and that which is truly ultimate cannot have a beginning in time or a definite age to its lifespan. But it must be infinite and eternal.

Now let me just make one observation at this point. What we're seeing in this quest for ultimate reality of the ancient pre-Socratics is really what we would call the pursuit of God. And in Greek philosophy, the idea of monotheism is a relatively late development after all kinds of preliminary stages have first been worked through. Whereas to the Hebrew thinker, he starts with the infinite and the eternal.

His wisdom literature begins with the words NRK, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. That is, at the very beginning of his literature, he introduces the abiron, the boundless, eternal, infinite one who creates all things. Now I also have to say at this point, as we will see further on, that even when the Greeks did come up with the idea of an infinite, eternal source of unity that holds all things together and brings purpose and harmony out of all things, for these thinkers at this time, the idea of the eternal infinite is just that, an abstract idea. What distinguishes that so sharply from biblical thought as to the Jew, for example, of the Old Testament, the one who is infinite and eternal is a one who.

That is, it is a he, a personal living being, not simply an abstract power or force, but rather has personality. That's radical in ancient theoretical thought. Now, in and among these other pre-Socratics, such as Anaximander and the rest, the tension that emerged was over different ways of understanding the arche or the ultimate reality.

And I'm going to try to give you a little chart here to make it easier to understand. Some of the thinkers, as we've already seen, believed that ultimate reality was a single substance, like air or water or fire or the quintessence, and so we will say of those philosophers that they were all monists. Now, a monist is one who embraces monism, and monism teaches that all reality in the final analysis is one.

It always leads to some form of pantheism. Monism says there really is only one reality. There is unity, and all diversity is simply an outward manifestation of that underlying unity. And that which is diverse does not have the ultimate level of reality that the single one. Many of the ancient philosophers spoke about God by calling Him the One, the One, because they were monists, you know, water, air. One substance explains everything, and everything that is participates to some degree in that single substance or single being that is the One. Now, other philosophers at this time were pluralists, and by that I mean that they believed that we could not reduce reality to one single substance or essence. As we've already seen, there were those who said there are four basic elements – earth, air, fire, and water. Those people would be pluralists. Others expanded upon that and said no, it's not merely four elements, but a multitude of elements. One philosopher, for example, said the world is made up of an infinite variety of seeds.

Now, where would they get an idea like that? Well, you see it from your gardening experience. If you want to grow cucumbers, you have to grow them from cucumber seeds, not from rose seeds. And if you want a geranium or whatever, each reality has its particular seed.

You don't get elephants from human seeds, and you don't get kangaroos from elephant seeds, that everything that is alive has its progeny through some seminal process through the use of seeds. And so this fellow said that there's an infinite number of seeds in the world from which everything is made. Another one, Democritus, for example, in his somewhat crude view of reality talked about a multiplicity of particular bits of reality that he called atoms. Maybe you've heard of the atomic theory of the ancient philosopher Democritus.

Now, it's not to be confused or equated with contemporary atomic theory, but there are certain things in common between modern atomic physics and the ancient thought of Democritus. And that which is common is the idea that reality is made up of these little units because the term atom means unit. And when we had an atomic bomb, we had a linguistic crisis all of a sudden because the word atom was thought to refer to that smallest indivisible particle bit of which all of reality is made. But then one afternoon, boom, somebody divided the atom and things got a little bit shaky out there.

But now we talk about subatomic particles, don't we? But we still have the idea that all forms of reality are made up of some kind of congregation or amalgamation of bits of reality that we call atoms or seeds or whatever. So anybody who believes that ultimate reality is more than one, I mean, a lot of philosophies, Eastern philosophy believes in dualism, saying that all of reality can be resolved or reduced to two equal and opposite powers or forces. But still, as long as there's more than one, you're in the pluralism. Monism refers everything back to one single substance. Pluralists can have two or an infinite number of units of reality. So the struggle in ancient philosophy was in the first instance between monists and pluralists. Now, Thales, for example, was a monist. Democritus was a pluralist.

But the plot thickens. Other question that came up was, what is the nature of these units of reality? Are these units of reality, whether singular or plural, are they physical or non-physical? Thales, for example, said that everything is water, and water is a substance, so that we would think, well, then he is a physical monist or what is called a corporeal monist.

Now, let me back up and make it simple. A corporeal monist is somebody who believes that everything that exists is simply one form or another or manifestation of a single physical substance, like matter, and nothing exists except matter. Now, there were also incorporeal monists who believed that all in reality is single, but it's not physical. It's like an infinite, qualitative, spiritual power that has no dimensions, has no weight, doesn't take up any specific amount of space.

Now, we have to be careful here, and you know, in a desire to simplify, I always run the risk of distorting. But when the ancient people were talking about spirit or incorporeal, many of them would include things like air or gas and things that we would look at as being physical, just in a different form of physical substance. But for them, anything that wasn't solid was considered incorporeal, for many of them at least. So, in any case, you have a debate between monists and pluralists, and then you have a debate between corporealists and incorporealists, so that a person could be a monist who believed that all of reality could be reduced to one physical substance, or they could say that everything is the manifestation of some unphysical, nonphysical substance, like, we might say, energy. You think about energy? You talk about energy?

What is it? I asked that to a physics professor once. I said, what is energy? He says, oh, that's easy. He says, it's the ability to do work. I said, I'm not asking you what it can do. I want to know what it is. He says, well, it's mc squared.

I said, I want to know its mathematical equivalence. I want to know what it is, because you people keep talking about it as if it is, as if there really is something out there called energy. Or is that just a word for unknown concept X? We don't usually think to that level. We just say, oh, okay, matter, energy, and go on with that.

All right. On the other hand, pluralists could also be corporeal or incorporeal, simply that all things can be reduced to several physical things, where others said no, it can be reduced to several nonphysical things. And so it's in this context that the next chapter of emerging Greek philosophy takes place, and we'll look at that in our next session. That was R. C. Sproul from his series The Consequences of Ideas.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind. We're right at the beginning of this series, but in the complete 35-message overview, Dr. Sproul will also introduce you to Augustine, Aquinas, the Enlightenment, and even modern philosophers. So add this resource to your library when you request your copy with a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. As I work through a study like this, I continually come away grateful that by God's grace, I have the answers to these fundamental questions that have been debated for millennia.

So I encourage you to request your copy at renewingyourmind.org, or by calling us at 800-435-4343. In a debate, have you ever heard of the concept of reducing your opponent's position to its absurd logical conclusion? You'd be saying, if your position is correct, that would mean you believe this, and therefore this, and then this. Well, that method comes from a man named Zeno, and we'll meet him and several others tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.