The One : a story of family

The false problem of the One. The connected notions order and unity are already present in everyday thinking. Such a domestic furniture as a wardrobe offers a lot of metaphysical suggestions about things, the place of things and the names of the places of things. Augustinus was probably thinking in his mother's wardrobe when he produced his beautiful definition of order: ordo est parium disparium que rerum suo cuique loco tribuens dispositio. Philosophically, the One emerged with contemptuous aggressivity; it pretended to tyrannize the whole field of being and thought. A well-timed dramatic performance by Plato, the so called “parricide of Parménides” rendered to the One its familiarity with a well ordered wardrobe. The great metaphysical improvement of Plato was the establishment of the unavoidable correlativitv of the great meta-concepts of unity and plurality, a case of the essential relativity of the metaphysical concepts in general. Plato proceeds to apply his logico-metaphysical doctrine to the rational explication of the physical world, adhibiting to that purpose the correlative meta-concepts of limit and unlimitated. An abstract of such enterprise we have in the description of the Platonic philosophy of nature in Book I of Aristotles' Metaphysics. According to Plato, the only limited concepts we are able to apply to the sensible world are mathematical notions. Hence, the logicometaphysical structures of the physical sciences are enterely and solely composed of arithmetical and geometrical notions. The hypostatical one of the religious philosophies. The One as an absolute, banned by the latter Plato, reappeared in the religious metaphysics of neoplatonism, typologically connected with the philosophical gnosis. There are highly abstract speculations about the one in the Vedas, in Christian gnosticism, in late neoplatonism. The transcendentist and apophatic terminology of all these philosophical movements offers astonishing parallelisms. All of them, however, agree to the ultimate ineffability of the One. We must, therefore, appeal to the Platonic expedient: being inable to speak about the One, we shall turn to the son of the One. The son of the One, the incarnate one, had an earthly birth, a temporal history. For the protogonos of the One is the meter, the fundamental pattern of the decimal metrical system. The One-relation of the decimal metrical system. In the year 1790 the Academy of Sciences of Paris resolved the establishment of a decimal pattern of length measures. The field mensurations of the meridian between Dunkerke and Barcelona were entrusted to the astronomers Delambre and Méchain. The latter performed the topographical work in the lands of Catalonia and Languedoc between the years 1732 and 1738. At the month of June of 1799 the National Assembly deposed the pattern of the new born metter in the archives of the Republic. The meter started to mensurate everything, while in itself it kept unmensured by definition.