“The One” vs. “The Naught”

”The One” (τὂ έόν (“tah eh-ON”)) is a major theme of the Greek philosopher Parmenides (late sixth or early fifth century BCE). For Parmenides, everything is One — indeed, any appearance of variation or movement in the cosmos is illusion.

Later Greek philosophers — beginning with Plato (c.428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) — instead viewed the cosmos as a “Great Chain of Being” — that the cosmos consisted of various layers of existence with insentient rocks at the bottom and The One — what we might call ‘God’ — at the top. The Great Chain of Being consists of all that exists from the most basic (e.g. rocks) up to the very highest and most perfect being (The One), saying they are hierarchically linked to form one interconnected whole. That is, a ‘chain’ of ‘being’ from the most mundane and earthly to ‘The One’ at the apex.

So according to Parmenides, The One is basically everything that is, whereas in Plato and successors, The One was at the top of the Great Chain of Being.

It’s important to note that in speculative Greek thinking, numbers weren’t just about counting, as they are essentially for us moderns. To the ancient Greeks, each number was also a unique entity with its own unique qualities — the number ‘one’ had ‘oneness’, the number ‘two’ had ‘twoness’, and so forth. So the phrase ‘The One’ meant much more to them than just the counting number one — ‘The One’ was ‘oneness’ and ‘unity’.

Later, especially with the philosopher Plotinus (205–270 CE), the idea was proposed that ‘God’ or ‘The One’ is beyond describing. That at best all one can say about The One is what it is not — it is ‘not-finite’ (infinite), for example. Which to me makes sense — how well can an ant understand or explain Einstein? Later Christian mystics applied this idea to God — that S/He is inherently unknowable. This came to be known as ‘apophatic theology’, or ‘negative theology’ — a religious methodology (anti-methodology?) that describes God by what cannot be said about Him/Her. This approach is also called the via negativa (the ‘negative way’). This approach is a favorite among mystics who believe that their experiences of divinity are beyond describing.

Meanwhile, a “Grand Unified Theory” has been an abiding agenda of Western philosophy and science, and still is. Indeed, a major unsolved problem in current physics is how to reconcile Quantum Mechanics — which concerns itself with the unimaginably small, and Relativity — which concerns itself with the unimaginably vast. (See this article for a reasonable lay discussion).

Meanwhile, one of the major results in mathematics in the 20th century were the ”Incompleteness Theorems” by Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), which basically say that a complete logical/mathematic system is inherently incomplete. And that its self-consistency cannot be proven. Using high school geometry as an example, there will always be geometric statements that can neither be proven true nor false — not even if one had an infinite amount of time to derive them. So, although there is no practical end to the systems we can build to explain the cosmos, in fact such systems can never be complete. Nor provably self-consistent.

The idea that the universe is understandable is known as the Principle of Intelligibility. This principle is based on the assumption that the universe is orderly and follows certain laws, which we are capable of discovering and understanding through scientific inquiry. But physics is a mathematical system, and as such is physics also prey to the same limitations outlined in Gödel’s theorems?

This would suggest that at least part of the Cosmos, and maybe all of ‘God’ (whatever S/He is) is ineffable. Unknowable. Indescribable.

The atheist might argue that where ‘God’ is concerned there is nothing. Whereas the apophatic theist might say there is The Nothing!

In ancient Greek times there was no number ‘zero’ . The concept of zero is thought to have originated in Hindu culture and spirituality around the 5th century CE. In Sanskrit, the word for zero is śūnya, which means ‘nothingness’. (One wonders what Parmenides would have done with the concept of ‘zero’!)

One doesn’t have to ask oneself questions like “What is nothing?” or “Is nothing something” for long before wondering if ‘nothing’ is as ineffable as ‘The One’. So perhaps in a certain sense it might be better to refer to ‘The One’ instead as ‘The Zero’. Except that calling someone a “zero” is rather pejorative, and we certainly don’t want to do that! Instead, perhaps “The Naught.” Which is a homophone for “The Not.” And “The Knot.”

In other words, at the pinnacle of the Great Chain of Being we may not find The One, but rather The Naught.

“The Naught” (An mp3 on SoundCloud)

“The Naught” (A pdf of the round.)

One could argue that the only possible piece of music one could write about The Naught is silence. But I opted for composing something instead of nothing! Instead, I have tried to invoke the feeling of attempting to contemplate The Naught.

One characteristic of The Naught is timelessness. A musical device for that is the ‘round’ (aka “perpetual canon”) — like “Row, Row, Row your Boat’ (a three part round). Mine is in seven parts (seven being the ‘mystical’ number). And the round is five bars long (the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) plus the ‘quintessence’).

Also, the round melody has lots of ‘holes’ in it that get filled in by the round itself as the piece unfolds (known as ‘hocketting’). In other words, the round starts out as more ‘nothing’ than ‘something,’ and gradually fills itself in.

Finally, the beginning of the piece is a loosely a palindrome of the ending.

This article can also be found on William’s website: www.GrailHeart.com