Which Came First, the One or the Many?

Despite editing and synthesizing a couple of old posts into this new one, it's just more of the same, so I would skip it if I were you. 

This question of the one and many is said to one of the oldest and most persistent problems of philosophy, which is to say, if the cosmos is one, how can it be so diverse? And given the obvious diversity, how can it be one? 

It seems that the underlying unity of the cosmos is a necessary condition for saying anything about anything in or of it, which goes to the relationship between intellect and being, in a word, affirming the isness of things. 

As mentioned in the previous post, to say something is true may be reduced to the statement that something either Is or Is Not.  

But again, how are such statements possible unless there is a real underlying unity between knower and known? We cannot know a thing about a thing that is fundamentally unconnected to us.

As Garrigou-Lagrange reminds us, "the first operation of the intellect" -- the operation we always do and cannot help doing -- is "simple intellectual apprehension." According to Thomas, 

The gaze of our intellect is fixed first upon the natures of sensible things.... To understand is a kind reading into the interior.... For sense knowledge is occupied with sensible, exterior qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates all the way to the essence of the thing (emphasis mine).

Ultimately, "the object of the intellect is that which is," AKA being. Sounds like a modest claim, but to say that being both is, and is intelligible, is probably the most profound -- and surprising -- thing one could say about the world, for the implications are literally endless. 

Do things make sense? Or does sense make things? Sounds like a joke, but for Kantians what we call things are just consequences of our own psychic categories. But for common sense realism, it is the things themselves that truly make sense, i.e., disclose their real natures to the intellect.

After all, if they don't, then the world is but a projection of our own neuropsychology, which eventually leads to the barbarous idea that perception is reality. 

But if perception is reality, then there is no reality, precisely. To even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own perceptions, and will still be there when we look away.

Having said that, to say reality is to say appearances; but this is a complementarity, not a duality, for appearances are of reality, not a negation or occlusion of it.

Now, along the vertical spectrum there are three principle degrees of abstraction to which we have access; from the bottom up, they are 1) the positive sciences, which still have one foot in matter, 2) mathematics, and 3) the metaphysical, this latter being completely immaterial and going to the sort of cosmos in which math and intelligible matter can even exist. 

The vertical spectrum can be further subdivided in any number of ways, for example, between physics and biology, psychology and neurology, theology and metaphysics. Nevertheless, despite these subdivisions, it's still One Cosmos, albeit both divisible and indivisible, continuous and discontinuous.

This question of continuity and discontinuity goes to another one of those primordial complementarities we've heard so little about. 

However, as with all such complementarities, one pole must be prior, and in this case it's the continuity, for the alternative is both inconceivable and impossible: no amount of parts adds up to the whole if the whole isn't already implicitly present in the parts. 

In the absence of this prior unity, the best we can accomplish is an aggregation, agglomeration, or agglutination; a blob, a glob, or a mob. 

Garrigou-Lagrange agrees that 

A being's quantitative unity in space is not the criterion for its substantial unity. This quantitative unity presumes only an accidental union (an aggregation of molecules).

In short, there is the accidental unity of the blob and the substantial unity of the whole, which is to say, the substantial oneness prior to the accidental manyness. 

And God is pure substance, or so we have heard from the wise. And the fact that this substantial unity is present in three persons seems important, for even in God it seems there is a kind of distantly analogous manyness that eternally resolves into a unity of perfect truth, love, and beauty, or something.