by Rev. William M. Brennan, TH.D.
INTRODUCTION
The mirrored arcs of ancient and modern philosophy demonstrate that the problem of the One and the Many cannot be resolved by autonomous reason. Whether irrationalists precede rationalists (as in antiquity) or rationalists precede irrationalists (as in modernity), the trajectory is the same: a monumental effort at synthesis (Plato, Kant), followed by collapse into irrationalism (Neoplatonism, existentialism).
The reason for these repeated failures is not simply intellectual miscalculation but a deeper epistemological defect. Each attempt sought to establish truth apart from the source of truth, God Himself.
Both Plato and Kant assumed that human reason could discover the ultimate harmony of unity and diversity while bracketing the question of God’s existence or treating it as secondary. In this framework, truth becomes uncertain, precarious, and unstable, because it is detached from the one true foundation: the self-revealing Triune God.
By refusing to presuppose God’s self-attesting revelation, philosophy is left to oscillate endlessly between rationalism and empiricism, unity and plurality, permanence and flux.
Only when truth is sought in submission to the ordered control of creation’s diversity—as revealed through Scripture, through the created order, and through the innate knowledge of God impressed upon every human heart—can the One and the Many be reconciled without contradiction.
The history of philosophy can be read as a long series of attempts to resolve the tension between the One and the Many without reference to divine revelation. From Plato to Hegel, philosophers have constructed intricate metaphysical systems to reconcile unity and diversity, permanence and change, necessity and freedom. Each has enjoyed temporary success, often producing monumental insights that shaped entire eras of thought. Yet in every case, the edifice has collapsed. The reason is not simply that each thinker made minor intellectual errors, but that the very foundation upon which their systems were built was fatally flawed: all of them sought truth apart from the source of truth, the Triune God.
1. Plato and Aristotle
Plato’s theory of Forms was perhaps the most brilliant attempt in antiquity to harmonize Heraclitean flux with Parmenidean permanence. The eternal Forms provided the unity and permanence that reason demanded, while the sensible realm, as a world of becoming, accounted for diversity and change. Yet Plato’s system faltered on the problem of participation: how do the many particulars “share in” or “imitate” the one Form without collapsing either the multiplicity of the sensible realm or the unity of the intelligible realm? The “third man argument” exposed this weakness, revealing that the Forms could not finally explain the relation between unity and diversity.
Aristotle responded by grounding universals within particulars, making them immanent rather than transcendent. His doctrine of substance, as the union of form and matter, sought to balance unity and multiplicity. Yet Aristotle’s resolution also proved unstable, since the immanent universal does not fully satisfy the rational demand for permanence and necessity. Moreover, Aristotle’s framework could not ultimately prevent the drift toward a universe that is eternal but impersonal, leaving unity and diversity precariously related.
Both Plato and Aristotle, while monumental, failed because they attempted to explain the order of reality without reference to the God who created and sustains it. Their search for universals was severed from the one true Universal: the eternal Logos.
2. Kant and Hegel
Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” sought to reconcile the rationalist–empiricist conflict by locating necessity not in transcendent Forms but in the categories of the human mind. By this device, he imposed unity and order upon sensory diversity, making experience possible. Yet Kant’s solution came at a steep cost. The noumenal realm was consigned to unknowability, and freedom was exiled there as a postulate of practical reason. The synthesis held only so long as one accepted a dualism between phenomena and noumena. This dualism, however, rendered ultimate reality inaccessible, leaving knowledge restricted to appearances.
Hegel sought to overcome Kant’s dualism by means of dialectical logic. For Hegel, unity and diversity, permanence and change, necessity and freedom, are reconciled in the Absolute Spirit through historical development. His system was arguably the most ambitious attempt in modernity to integrate the One and the Many. Yet it too collapsed under its own weight. The dialectic, intended as the final resolution of contradiction, generated an ever-expanding totality that required irrational leaps. Post-Hegelian philosophy splintered into existentialism, nihilism, and subjectivism—forms of modern Neoplatonism in which the search for unity dissolves into the irrational affirmation of diversity.
Kant and Hegel, like Plato and Aristotle, failed because they sought to explain order, freedom, unity, and diversity within a framework that bracketed the existence of God. They treated the possibility of divine revelation as unnecessary or irrelevant, presuming that human reason could provide its own foundation. In doing so, they built elaborate systems of thought upon shifting sand.
3. The Structural Failure of Autonomy
The repeated collapse of these philosophical syntheses reveals a deeper pattern: autonomous reason is structurally incapable of resolving the One and the Many. Whenever man begins his search for truth from himself, he oscillates endlessly between two poles:
Rationalism, which privileges unity, necessity, and permanence, but at the cost of denying the reality of multiplicity and change.
Empiricism, which privileges diversity, contingency, and flux, but at the cost of undermining the stability of knowledge and the possibility of truth.
Each side is partial, and every attempted synthesis—whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian, or Hegelian—proves temporary. Without revelation, human thought cannot provide a non-contradictory reconciliation of unity and diversity.
The failure is not due to lack of genius. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel are among the greatest minds in history. The failure arises because they sought truth in a world where God “might or might not” exist, rather than beginning with the presupposition of God’s self-attesting revelation. By placing human reason at the center, they treated creation as if its order and diversity could be explained independently of the Creator.
4. The True Presupposition
The Christian faith, however, declares that all men already know God (Rom. 1:19–20). He has revealed Himself in Scripture, in nature, and in the innate knowledge impressed upon every human heart. Truth is not something to be discovered in autonomy, but something to be received in dependence. The order and diversity of creation are not brute facts to be explained by reason alone; they are the handiwork of the Triune God who reveals Himself clearly and persuasively.
Thus, the One and the Many cannot be reconciled apart from the presupposition that God exists and has spoken. Any system that seeks to “test” whether God might or might not exist already ensures its own failure, for it places human reason above the divine revelation that grounds all knowledge.
5. Pivot to the Theological Resolution
The comparison of philosophical attempts therefore demonstrates that no purely human synthesis can succeed. The ancient arc (Heraclitus → Parmenides → Plato → Neoplatonism) and the modern arc (Descartes/Spinoza/Leibniz → Locke/Berkeley/Hume → Kant → Hegel → existentialism) both tell the same story: the failure of autonomy, the instability of human systems, and the collapse into irrationalism.
The resolution must come from outside philosophy’s autonomous quest. It must be grounded in the self-attesting revelation of the Triune God. Only in the ontological Trinity—where there is eternal unity of essence and eternal diversity of persons—is the One and the Many harmonized without contradiction. Only in the Word of God is human knowledge secured, because only there is reality disclosed as it truly is.
When we turn from anti-theistic philosophy’s futile attempts to theology’s final resolution. In the Reformed presuppositional tradition, particularly through the insights of Cornelius Van Til and John Frame, we will see how the self-attesting ontological Trinity and tri-perspectival epistemology provide the true and ultimate answer to the problem of the One and the Many.
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