On Attempts at Reduction

by Richard Stoltzfoos

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe in Unity, and those who believe in Multiplicity. This is far from being a joke. 

Your average Sam on the street takes for granted a pragmatic Multiplicity. Sam uses a toaster in the morning and a filing cabinet at work, has a strong preference for black raspberry jam on his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and needs to pay his bills before the quarter’s out. There is no deep connection among these activities in Sam’s mind, nor does there need to be. There are different systems for different things, and that’s the way it is. 

Yet in the schools of philosophy, poetry, and even science, the belief seems to be strong that we can and should seek a coherent Theory of Everything. Poets seek to explain a thought through the tactile, quantum scientists seek to explain quarks through strings, and some Asian philosophers say desire is behind it all. Here are a few rhetorical reductions of some famous attempts: 

Marx tried to reduce everything to economics. 

Freud tried to reduce everything to sex. 

Nietsche tried to reduce everything to power. 

Buddha tried to reduce everything to the spiritual. 

Jung tried to reduce everything to archetypal patterns. 

Hume tried to reduce everything to the material. 

Edward Wilson tries to reduce everything to biological evolution. 

Hitler tried to reduce everything to heredity. 

Skinner tried to reduce everything to conditioning. 

Philosopher Ephraim Radner has noted that philosophers tend to fall into two categories, hedgehog or fox, as in the fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one. One good one1.” Some philosophers (the foxes) are content to interpret using many explanatory theories, others (the hedgehogs) drive toward a single unifying principle that makes sense of all of reality. The foxes believe in Multiplicity, and the hedgehogs in Unity. 

Multiplicity is the belief that there are multiple principles which explain reality. It is the general belief that everything does not cohere in a single principle, or that if it does, that principle is all but incomprehensible.  

Unity (as used here) is the belief that everything coheres in a single principle. Philosophers conjecture this single principle to be any of the things listed above. It could be being itself, or goodness itself, or a hierarchical structure found throughout nature. Perhaps the human body is the model of everything; or perhaps the Yin-Yang concept of male/active and female/passive explains all of reality. Perhaps the unifying principle is God Himself. 

Attempts at unity usually seem to succeed to the person who attempts them. When you try to reduce reality in your mind, you reduce it in reality. Twenty million Chinese later, Marx’s worldview (correctly) appears pretty narrow. 

Omission is the earmark of all unity theories. The explanatory scope of a Freudian sexual unity is limited to human and animal behavior, and possibly plant behavior. A Marxian economic unity says little about the origins of the universe. A Nietzschean power-based unity rather ignores the purpose of beetles. I don’t see how Buddhism could make very much progress in investigating the nature of laughter. The hedgehog finds that he always has a few more Legos than the box will hold. 

A person’s love for a particular unity structure blinds him. When some datum doesn’t easily fit his structure, the hedgehog has a confirmation bias. The options are to force it to fit or to discard it. Incidentally, conspiracy theories are all attempts at unity structures. As one becomes more committed to a particular unity, he is increasingly confined to these two options. The fox, however, has a third option, at least in theory; he can retain the data, holding it in a balance (usually a tension) over against the data he knows. 

All such theories leave out or ignore something, because the individual finite human mind generally cannot or does not hold enough data when it generalizes (and if one smells a community emphasis here, he is smelling correctly), easily makes mistakes, and even rejects the truth it finds. This discovery will throw this whole essay into question unless the generalizations in this essay have room for exceptions (and they do). 

Something always slips through the cracks, and this is the weakness of Unity views. Every theory neglects some aspect of reality. Generally, Eastern spiritualistic worldviews have a hard time explaining material reality, while Western materialistic worldviews tend to neglect spiritual realities. Integrationist views (most worldviews, Christian or otherwise) struggle to explain the mediaries – the Incarnation, for example. An exception to the above statement is the tendency of Christian fundamentalism not to explain the material world, insisting that since the world will burn one day, it is a passing reality and contains nothing of value to the Christian. 

Motion from Unity to Multiplicity, or the reverse, radically reshapes a person’s worldview. Many Anabaptist young folks lose their faith when they go to college and find some apparent chink in the stalwart constraints of their fundamentalist worldview. Other young collegegoers come from homes largely ignorant of defined theology, hear a theory that seems to make sense of everything, and redefine what they knew. College is only one example of an arena in which we need a principle. 

What should Christians say about the concept of Unity and Multiplicity? It is not as simple as to say that ‘the principle of Unity exists, and his name is God,’ since there exist things that are not God. Nor is it so simple as to say that ‘everything has existence in common,’ since there are many concepts such as unicorns and square circles that do not really exist. Unicorns have only mental existence, and the concept of a square circle does not even exist coherently as a concept. Yet without these concepts, it would be a worse world for millions of little girls and thousands of philosophy professors. When Aquinas tried to define God as Being itself, the definition excluded some of God’s mystery. Attempts to reduce God inevitably produce idols. 

We Christians believe that there is an ultimate, all-inclusive truth of the cosmos. This is to say that a Unity does exist, if known only to the mind of God.  

But I hear some brothers ask, why not reject any attempt at Unity, given its dangers of pride and historic mass death? Why not rest in an incomplete understanding of the world? Can’t a simple person rest contented in inherently unsatiable human ignorance, and embrace Multiplicity, and trust God?  

No. Our heart is restless until it rests in God Himself. As God is One and Three, we must pursue Unity and Multiplicity. As Christ in the Incarnation folded the Divine Unity into the Multiplicity of the physical world, we are to do our best to bring Unity and Multiplicity together. To pursue both together is to pursue God. (Fortunately, God pursues us from the other direction, and even more avidly, and His grace can span a colossal gap.) We must pursue Unity in spite of the danger and in awareness of the danger. 

Multiplicity worldviews can be just as harmful as extreme hedgehog views. If the foxes are allowed to raid the henhouse, we lose all our good layers. Multiplicity worldviews tend toward despair. They make life meaningless. The principal meaning of ‘meaning’ is connection, relationship. Denying that all reality is fundamentally connected renders those connections tenuous, and circumvents the truth that everything does in some sense cohere in God. If you want to make a person despair, put him in a situation where he can’t connect anything to anything else. (I’m worried now that a psychologist would actually do this, or a terrorist for that matter; please don’t.) If a danger of a reductionist Unity is death by genocide, the danger of a meaningless Multiplicity is death by suicide; and it is no coincidence that the countries most troubled by the former are least troubled by the latter. 

We are lost in Multiplicity and ought to seek a Unity, with the understanding that attempts at Unity invariably fail, held together with the belief that some Unity exists. You should not abandon your attempts to discover Unity – these attempts make life meaningful – but neither should you insist too strongly upon them. Do not give up the things that don’t fit the scheme. Try to be a hedgehog, and you will find asymmetry ineradicable. Try to be a fox, and you will feel the tide of meaning ebb from the shores of your life. 

This notion of ineradicable asymmetry can be informed by the aesthetic. Imagine a painting that was simply a circle, or a point with lines radiating out, in perfect uniformity. Flat. Stale. But if some things defy the pattern, it makes good art. Or which do you find more satisfying? A simple geometrical picture, or one with some asymmetrical touches? While a triangle inscribed within a circle, visualized as pure idea, may be satisfying to a mathematician, the world of pure ideas is not the world of ideal/real mixture, that is, our world. Pure idea is not incarnate art. 

The biological world is a large component of the aesthetic world; and it seems that organic creatures prefer a bit of asymmetry. No plant grows in a straight line. Cells are orderly, but not exactly symmetrical. And while nautilus shells and oranges provide striking examples of symmetry, these symmetries cannot be overlaid with each other.  

So I suggest that all worldviews similarly have their little asymmetries. This essay, in fact, seems to be an anomaly regarding the worldview it sets forward, since it would be paradoxical to set forth a total theory which rebukes total theories. But the bean need not be the stalk, only have the same DNA. When we name things, we also name absences and gaps between things, such as ‘hole,’ ‘darkness,’ and ‘lack.’ This essay is a similar name – a word for the asymmetry of Unity theories. The tree does not need to explain why it throws its branches in different directions; the hymn does not need to apologize for not being sung as notated. It can be a better hymn off the page than on the page, a more beloved tree than the precluded sapling at the center of the garden. 

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Richard Stoltzfoos is the son of Adin,
son of Wilmer,
son of Elam,
son of Moses,
son of Samuel,
son of John,
son of Christian,
son of Nicholas Stoltzfus,
who in the year 1766 emigrated from Europe,
being born of Christian Gottlieb Stoltzfus,
of the Saxon line of that name
which began in the year of our Lord 400,
by the provision of God, in German Saxony.

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Artwork: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot 1796-1875 Honfleur ­ The Old Wharf