The One and the Many

The perennial problem

How can reality be one and yet many? The question runs from the Presocratics through Plato’s Parmenides, where the young Socrates’ theory of Forms is tested against it, to the Neoplatonic descent from the One into multiplicity. The Platonist answer is that the many are not simply set against the one but flow from it and depend on it: unity is prior, and plurality is unity unfolded and shared out by participation.