The One and the Many Conundrum:

[Triton]

The One and the Many Conundrum:



"The metaphysical rhetoric about the One -even with the capital "O"-
takes us back to the superiority and arrogance of classical
monotheism, which always insists that the many derive from the one. I
prefer to think that the one is one among many, that even a primus
inter pares, but just one of the gods among many other Gods and not
above them, except in its own self-presentation (rhetoric) that places
itself above and beyond them; but this statement need not be taken
literally (metaphysically).

[James Hillman - interview with Fabio Botto]



Psychological Polytheism

"character must consist of several characters -"partial
personalities," as psychology calls these figures who stir your
impulses and enter your dreams, figures who would dare what you would
not, who push and pull you off the beaten track, whose truth breaks
through after a carafe of wine in a strange town. Character is
characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic
polysemous weave…..A character is "not presumed to be strictly unified…
The character is the entire configuration without the traits seen as
layers with a core holding them together," writes the philosopher
Amelie Rorty. "

[James Hillman - The Force of Character]