ABSTRACT
A logic of multiplicity is not opposed to unity (the inclusive sense of One) or oneness (the exclusive sense of One), which means that divine multiplicity does not exclude either unity or oneness except in their absolute or eternal sense. Oneness and unity are proximal and partial aspects of the divine; they are true in any given space-time occurrence or center, but they are never the ‘‘whole’’ story of divinity and reality. We have discussed how divine multiplicity-and so reality-is rhizomatically adaptive; the Divine is always changing, always beginning, again, and always enfleshing because divinity exists. ‘‘Always’’ is therefore a located, context-driven notion rather than some time-and-place busting absolute. It is tied to existence, which occurs in space-defining ways, like breath. And so, always changing, divinity generates space and expresses time by being. Put even more starkly, divinity generates space and expresses time in order to be. This is the reality of divinity. If the line of flight that we have traced here beyond monotheism and the
logic of the One is valid, then we can say with some confidence that incarnate divinity is multiple beyond the One-Many divide, opposed neither to oneness nor to unity, but unlimited by both just as the simplest earthworm, in its ever-changing existence from morning till night, is neither an unchanging one nor is it without a certain slant of unity. It goes on about its business with dirt confounding the One at every turn and yet it is an inexchangeable individual, a kind of One-itself that occurs in the specificity of worm-flesh and a patch of soil. The logic of multiplicity, expressed in this
worm, allows for its own never-the-sameness (from itself and from all other worms) and for its own unity, its interconnection with the world and with other worms, other creatures, other ones. The logic of multiplicity has room for individuals-whether atoms or agreements of atoms-in the place and time that makes them. So if the logic of multiplicity is not opposed to oneness and unity, why
develop this whole argument against the logic of the One, and especially against monotheism? This project is necessary because the logic of multiplicity and the logic of the One are incompatible at least at one point: the logic of the One mistakes the nominal, sanity-producing value of oneness and unity for ontology, for reality. Or, to put it the other way, the logic of multiplicity denies the ontological status of eternity and stasis, upon which the logic of the One depends. Furthermore, as a theological form of the logic of the One, universal monotheism opposes fluidity, change, and partiality. Because universal monotheism is an absolute claim, it theoretically requires strong apophatic assertions of infinity, inconceivability, and eternity to maintain its universality in a world of difference and particularity. In the logic of the One, anything less than superlative and solitary greatness
cannot describe the Divine. And if there is only one God, there is only one truth. Contradictory, finite and unexchangeable bodies undermine both the oneness of God and the oneness of truth. Monotheism ends up protecting divine greatness through denials of the world in its particularity, finitude, conceivability, and temporality, and so cannot avoid denials of multiplicity and therefore of incarnation itself. Monotheism so constructed is incompatible with multiplicity, although the logic of multiplicity remains compatible with individuality in the form of ones that come and go, as they do. The point here is that oneness and unity are not false; rather they are
necessary temporal arrangements. The idea of oneness and of unity is useful. It is this that prompted Ibn Sinna (known in the Latin west as Avicenna), an eleventh-century Muslim doctor and philosopher from Persia to repeat often ‘‘Intellectus in formis agit universalitatem’’ (‘‘the universality of our ideas is the result of the activity of the mind itself’’).2 The ideas of oneness and unity function in religion, politics, psychology, and history to generate meaning and orientation. And unity actually occurs, in partial and temporal fashion. Without functional unities there would be no groups, no species, no languages, no possibility of societies which, as Deleuze says, can then productively and creatively leak. Ibn Sinna was profoundly aware of the need that humans have to build
habitable structures of meaning out of the vastness of the cosmos. The story of One, especially in the story of monotheism, is a kind of hedge that the Greeks, the Jews, the Egyptians, the Hellenized Christians and the Muslims constructed against all that is changing, unknowable, new. But what most of them could not see, and what strict monotheists of all stripes today generally cannot see, is that both oneness and unity are functional, nominal, and event-based. Both unfold in centers of time/space and, as
organizing ideas, serve as a kind of boat on which one can ride the surging waves of fluid, porous, interconnected, and heterogeneous reality. Oneness and unity, like all abstractions (including the abstraction of
divine multiplicity) are vulnerable to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Their usefulness makes it easy to forget that they are concepts placed upon reality to sort its ontological multiplicity. No matter how many times we may wish to lift our gaze from the cacophony of embodied existence toward the serenity of unifying concepts in the hope of bringing closure to the world’s actual unruly shiftiness, the attempt to construct a summary ‘‘after all’’ fails. As Rajchman summarizes Whitehead’s sense of the problem, ‘‘the abstract doesn’t explain; it must itself be explained by reinsertion into a multiplicity.’’3 Whitehead himself cautions, ‘‘Have care, here is something that matters! Yes-that is the best phrase-the primary glimmering of consciousness reveals, something that matters.’’4 The ethics of unity, therefore, lie inescapably in matter. Or the heart of the matter, in pursuit of unity, is matter. Giorgio Agamben makes this link explicit:
That the world is, that something can appear and have a face, that there is exteriority and non-latency as the determination and the limit of every thing: this is the good. Thus, precisely its being irreparably in the world is what transcends and exposes every worldly entity. Evil, on the other hand, is the reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact like others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in the very taking-place of things.5
