The One and the Many
Referenced in: The One and the Many Have the Same Last Name
The oldest unsolved problem in Western philosophy: how do you relate the individual particular thing (this chair, that person, this moment) to the universal category (Chairness, Humanity, Time) without losing one or the other? Start with the particulars and you cannot build a universal without doing violence to the particular; you end up with a heap of unrelated things and no way to connect them. Start with the universal and the particular dissolves into a shadow; you get an abstract system with no room for individual existence. Every philosophical system collapses into one side or the other. Schaeffer argued that only the Christian doctrine of the Trinity solves this: God is simultaneously one (unity, the universal) and three persons (diversity, the particulars) without contradiction and without either side absorbing the other. The One and the Many share the same last name because they share the same nature; and they always have, in the eternal relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.