What you are about to read is as much a prayer as it is an exercise in reason. It is a logic quickened by spirit, an animated technology for the soul to reach back into the first principles within her. This will thus be the debut of an esoteric, enchanted logic. It will proceed as a deduction, and will be scientific in that respect. But it is the product of madness, and so an art. Sometimes my use of punctuation, constructions and even terms will be very peculiar. This is intentional. What follows is not meant merely to be read, as one views an object from without, but to be spoken back as if by your own lips.

The deduction itself could be condensed or enlarged, but it has the shape it does because these are the footsteps that I had to take to make sense of things as I sat in countless hours exploring these corridors.

The bottom line is that I have discovered–at least for myself–that there is something we might call the Each-Thing.

This is my articulation of what the ancient Platonists had likewise discovered. It is, as Eric Perl lucidly expounds, the beholding of “integration or identity as such as the condition for all being whatsoever,” (Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, 117). As Perl variously articulates throughout that entire section, this integration as such or “The One,” is not itself any ‘thing’ at all: it is not a First Cause, a Supreme Monad; not the greatest conceivable being, or ipsum esse subsistens, not actus purus, or anything else. It is rather the enabling condition of any thing whatsoever to be anything at all.

But this is a profoundly difficult notion to grasp. How is it that there is an enabling condition, and also that it is not anything? Perl suggests that

“In calling the One the ‘cause’ of all things, then, we are actually saying something not about the One but about ourselves and indeed all things, expressing the dependent, derivative nature of beings as such. The causation or generation of all things by the One is therefore nothing but the dependence of all things: in that they depend on integration in order to be, their existence, their status as beings, does not come from themselves, but is received in them,” (118).

But how are all things dependent if there is nothing for them to depend upon? How can all things derive if there is no thing for them to derive from? It would be like all of reality being suspended in vertical tension from wires affixed to…nothing.

And yet, the Platonists did not waver: the One “neither is, nor is one,” (Plato, in Parm. 141e).

What I hope to do is bring you to a conceptual location where you can see this for yourself.

And so we shall move from surface to reflection and there back again, ending with the Platonic doctrine of panta en pasin.

How can all things participate in or derive from something that is not even itself a thing?—we might take as our guiding question. “Because that is just part of being the condition of things,” one might say. But this is not to see for oneself this condition.

By coming into contact with the Each-Thing, or what we might call ‘Hekastos’, one can see the enabling condition of all things. Truly see it. In fact, it will be found to have been everything you’ve ever known, interlocking all of reality together, connecting everything at once.

This is the One, the power of all things, the Ineffable.

What follows is a device meant for disturbing the peaceful waters of shallowness. Its abstractness escalates. The longer you sit with this, the deeper you will sink. Do not say I did not warn you.

Let the argument be called Swirl, after the effect it has on the mind that wrestles with it.

Without further ado:

Swirl

1. There is something it is to be one thing—call it Unity, or the Each-Thing. [Axiom]
2. Whatever this is, it is not itself one thing. [LNC]
3. Whatever is not one thing itself is either nothing at all, or it is wholly something else. [Tertium non-datur]
4. But Unity is not nothing at all. [From (1)]
5. So, it is wholly something else. [(3), (2) M.P.; (4) Disj.]
6. Whatever is wholly something else is either reducible to that thing, or it is not. [Tertium non-datur]
7. If it is reducible to that thing, then it is itself one thing. [A fortiori]
8. But Unity is not itself one thing. [From (2)]
9. So, Unity is not reducible to the thing that it wholly is. [(6), (5) M.P.; (7), (8) M.T.; (6) Disj.]
10. Whatever is not reducible to another is such either because it is simply nothing at all in the first place, or precisely because it is something of its own, or because it is as yet still something else. [Premise]
11. But Unity is not nothing at all nor is there anything to it of itself. [(4), (8) Conj.]
12. So, Unity is not reducible to the thing that it wholly is because it is as yet still something else. [(10), (9) M.P.; (11) Disj.]
13. If Unity is not reducible to the thing that it wholly is because it is as yet still something else, then, for each thing that it is, it is wholly and singularly that one. [Ex hypothesi]
14. If for each thing that Unity is, it is wholly and singularly that one, then, because of what it is—viz.  the something it is to be ‘one’ thing—Unity is wholly and singularly each thing whatsoever. [Implicit in (1)]
15. So, Unity is wholly and singularly each thing whatsoever. [Iterate M.P. on (12)-(14) as needed]
16. If Unity is wholly and singularly each thing whatsoever, then what is constituting each thing—making it to be one thing—is the simultaneous singularity of each other thing. [Think e.g. if Unity is singularly each thing, simultaneously, then what is constituting each thing is not each other thing, one at a time, but the singular presence of each, all at once].
17. If what is constituting each thing—making it to be one thing—is the simultaneous singularity of each other thing, then, what each thing is, is Unity (i.e. the simultaneous singularity of each thing), but as a thing rather than as Unity. [Stay close to the data]
18. If what each thing is, is Unity (i.e. the simultaneous singularity of each thing), but as a thing rather than as Unity, then, what each thing is, is a non-simultaneous plurality of every other thing. [via negativa]
19. So, what each thing is, is a non-simultaneous plurality of every other thing. [Iterate M.P. on (15)-(18)]