Abbasolute and Mamamaya

Probably the oldest philosophical dispute involves the one and the many, or the question of which is prior, unity or diversity. Which by implication entails stasis vs. process, being vs. becoming, eternity vs. time, permanence vs. change, whole vs. part, absolute vs. relative, immanence vs. transcendence, particle vs. wave, boxers vs, briefs, and even mom vs. pop, the latter standing for abbasolute, the former for mamamaya.

Heraclitus (H) is the grand poobah of the All is Flux Club, the motto of which is One can never step twice into the same river, because each moment it's a new river. To the extent that one sees the same river, that's an illusion or appearance, not reality.

Parmenides (P) is the high epopt of the rival gang, the All is One Society, the motto of which is... All is one, I guess. For these votaries of the Immutable, reality is unchanging, eternal, and indivisible, so change becomes the illusion. 

Things would occasionally get heated, P saying to H Flux you!, while P would grab his crotch and retort Change this! Likewise, H would accuse P of flaming homogeneity, P charging H with the privileging of cosmic heteronormativity.   

Bottom line it for us, Gemini: H

believed that change is the fundamental reality, and any appearance of stability is an illusion. He saw the world as a dynamic process, driven by opposing forces that create a harmonious whole. He also believed in a "logos" which is the underlying reason or principle that governs the ever changing world.

Conversely, P

argued that "what is, is," and "what is not, is not." He believed that reality is unchanging, eternal, and indivisible. He rejected the notion of change, arguing that it is logically impossible. He reasoned that for something to change, it would have to come from nothing, which he deemed absurd. 

He distinguished between "the way of truth" (reason) and "the way of opinion" (sense perception), claiming that only reason can reveal the true nature of reality.

This opposition set up a fundamental tension that influenced countless philosophers throughout history, only ending in the early 20th century when Nuncio "Toots" Mondello founded the Benevolent Order of Transdimensional Raccoons, the credo of which is Become what you are, for being is becoming and vice versa.  

For the Raccoon, reality is fundamentally relational, including the relation between the one and many. We root this in the Trinity, in which 1 + 1 = 3, which, as it so happens, is also the basis of creativity. More generally, bring any two people together and they generate a third who is a genuine other. It's another way of saying the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. 

Which is why Paul McCartney's solo work is so banal. In trying to be his own unrelated "one," he deprived himself of the greater oneness that resulted from 1 + 1. 

This post is going nowhere fast.

Agreed. Let me restore some order by methodically flipping through the book that inspired that halfbaked introduction, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. In it Gunton speaks of "the modern crisis of culture -- its fragmentation and decline into subjectivism and relativism," which you could say represents the triumph of Heraclitus, for whom everything is a process going nowhere because it has no telos, and everything is unrelated to everything else. 

But a human being in the image of God "is to be understood relationally," somewhat analogous to how part relates to whole. 

Now, God himself is a part-whole relation, but only in a manner of speaking, because each "part" is somehow the whole, in that the Son lacks nothing of the Father except a different mode of relation. I suppose it would be more accurate to call the Godhead holographic, in which the whole is in each part, and vice versa. 

Obviously there is unity, but it's somewhat like the unity of an organism, which changes in order to stay the same. But that's life.

No, literally, for what is life? It is a process-structure, a matter of flowing organization, so to speak. And any organization is a system of interior relations.

Except in the case of bad organizations, which are wholly rigid, top-down, and authoritarian -- my way or the highway. Apparently, God is not like that. Or so we have heard from the wise. The Father, for example, has "authority," but it is freely recognized, not imposed. Islam notwithstanding

Come to think of it, isn't this how Jesus rolled? He never came right out and said I AM GOD, rather, wanted it to be freely recognized and acknowledged by his interlocutors, most famously Peter, who said You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. My own mother used to say "let others sing your praises." If you sing them yourself, you come across like some desperate narcissist. Which God is not, being holy unnarcissary. 

No, literally: can you imagine the Father lording it over the Son? Hence the parable of the prodigal son, whose father doesn't say, for example, I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it.

Above we spoke of the Father as standing for absolute, the Mother for relative, or, we could say, Infinitude. We could even say that Infinitude is the maternal mode of Absoluteness, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Well, I'm going to jump ahead anyway. In chapter 5, Gunton reminds us that "in Parmenides' view" there is

only one necessary note of being: that is to say, being which is timeless, unchanging and absolutely unitary. There is no plurality in reality, and therefore plurality is only an appearance, and epiphenomenon, in no way part of the being of things.

Which is to say, all father and no mother. In fact, a note to myself says Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), essentially Joyce's name for the mother principle, connoting plurality and life, not to mention Mary's mother, Saint Anne. According to Campbell, she is 

Eve, Isis, Iseult, a passing cloud, a flowing stream. She is the eternally fructive and love-bearing principle in the world.... the entire book, in fact, is but a dreamlike emanation of [her] "untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest" written (time and place unknown) by ALP herself. 

This implies that creativity itself has something strongly feminine about it.  

But above all, Anna is a river, always changing yet ever the same, the Heraclitean [!] flux which bears all life on its current.

I say ! because it reflects what was said above in paragraph one with Parmenides standing for pop and Heraclitus for mom. 

It is even the role of Anna "to shatter HCE [universal masculinity] as the container of fixed energy.... Anna is the principle of vivid movement, ever setting in motion and keeping in motion the river of time."

But in an act of cosmic misogyny, the All is One Society regards "the ontological status of becoming" as "dubious," at once elevating "unity and intellect" and relegating "to varying degrees of inferiority the plural and material, the deficiency of the latter being so often seen to lie in its manyness."

In short, Platonic transcendentality -- which some of the early Fathers took on board uncritically -- "denies or subverts the rights of plurality," which is "the mark of the finite world" and "a defect of being." This is nothing less than an elevation of "the oneness of God" "over the plurality of the Trinity."

This rejection of the material world is also a rejection of mother, for matter is etymologically related to mater, or at least that's too good to check. But in excessively masculine types like Augustine, there is "an elevating of the one over the many in respect of transcendental status. Unity, but not plurality, is transcendental." 

But if HCE is not a confirmed old bachelor, and indeed if reality is a marriage of love between HCE and ALP, then this post is over, because we've opened a whole new can of words, and this post has already exceeded 1,300 of them. Gemini, what do you make of this digressive, tangential, and chaotic post?

This text is a fascinating, if somewhat chaotic, exploration of the philosophical tension between unity and diversity, as represented by Parmenides and Heraclitus, respectively. The language is highly informal, using slang and humor to convey complex philosophical ideas. The text frequently veers into tangents and digressions, creating a stream-of-consciousness effect.