“Totality is nothing else but plurality contemplated as unity.” – Immanuel Kant
I have heard the word “unity” or “unified” used quite a bit recently. Some people think there is now more of it, while some people think there is less.
And like many terms we use on a regular basis, “unity” has a “you know what I mean” sense. The country might look more unified if there were fewer public disagreements, or protests, or if our core beliefs were more similar.
Aside from the “you know what I mean” way the term might be used, we can get a little more specific about unity if we borrow some ideas from metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics.
One of my favorite areas within metaphysics is mereology: the study of the relation between a whole and its parts. After doing some reading in that literature, I can’t unsee how unity is just another way of talking about oneness.
And whether something is one or many involves counting.
As you would expect, philosophers have had a lot to say about something as seemingly straightforward, but extremely complex, as counting.
The literature on counting the infinite hurts the brain, so I won’t go down that rabbit hole. (If you're interested in how there are different sizes of infinity, there's a big rabbit hole just waiting for you.)
But a philosophy of counting is crucial to any metaphysical theory of existence, and here’s why:
If you want to claim that something is one, what do you mean by that?
The obvious next question is, “One what?”
That’s the right question, because according to Frege and others, counting something as some number—one or otherwise—is always relative to a concept or kind.
For example, when I talk about this in class I hold up a marker and ask, “How many is this?”
The answers almost always start as “one”, and after I pause with a skeptical look we hear some variety in the responses. “Well, it’s one marker, but there’s also the cap, and the casing, and the molecules that make it up…”
Marker, cap, casing, molecules…those are all different kinds of things, so the number will change relative to which kind we’re talking about. I hold up one marker, many objects, billions of molecules, and those differences in number are not contradictory because each thing we count is relative to a different kind.
Here's how philosophers Francesco Berto and Massimiliano Carrara put it in their paper, "To Exist and to Count: a Note on the Minimalist View":
A given object or a collection can be thought of in many different ways. Take for example the Iliad. One could think of it as one poem, as twenty-four books, or as a large number of verses. Or take a group of soldiers: one could think of it as one army, two divisions, or five hundred men. The ascription of a number to something would therefore be relative. But what would it be relative to?...Things are not counted simpliciter; they are counted under a certain sortal. Under one sortal they can be many, under another sortal something can be one.
(We can think of a sortal like a kind or concept.)
According to this popular philosophy of counting, we count things according to a kind; something is one relative to a kind, and it might be many relative to a different kind.
It doesn't make sense to say something is one without qualification.
Ok, maybe this philosophy of counting makes sense, but what are we talking about when we talk about kinds?
Distinguishing one kind from another kind takes hard philosophical work, and--no surprise--there's a lot of philosophical literature on distinguishing kinds as well.
In fact, kinds seem similar to concepts, and many people think that a good chunk of what philosophy does boils down to analyzing concepts. The history of philosophy is, according to some, a history of conceptual analysis: knowledge, truth, goodness, beauty, existence...
So kinds and concepts seem central to any philosophical work.
But generally speaking, we can think about kinds in terms of their conditions that are satisfied. Different conditions for each kind do the job of separating one kind from another.
For example, there are conditions that separate the kind mammal from the kind reptile and from the kind stapler. Those conditions might involve DNA, the way those animals breed offspring, etc.
Now we can bring it back full circle: when we are talking about the unity of a nation or a group or a community, we are counting according to some kind, and it would be nice to know what the conditions are that count as satisfying that kind.
That's the difficult part.
Assessing unity, or its lack, involves specifying what kind we have in mind that would count as one.
Maybe we want a group to be unified in the respect we show to one another. Or maybe agreement at some fundamental level. Or maybe at the end of the day it really is just a shared feeling.
Whatever the conditions are for the kind in question, it's worth thinking about, if we care about unity.
Until next time.
Jared
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