The Idea of Unity in Ancient Culture: From Intuition to Conceptualization

The article analyzes the movement of individual consciousness to the intuitively guessed unity of being. This spiritual movement takes place in different spheres of cultural life and manifests itself in creative searches of politicians, poets, religious mystics and wisdom lovers. Gradually a circle of images-concepts is formed, thanks to which the idea of unity receives its expression, as well as images-concepts that carry the opposite content. Rationalism played an essential role in this spiritual search, since the polis organization required explicit verbal justification of legal institutions. Already in Homer and Hesiod some speculations about the power behind the diversity of the visible world ruled by numerous deities slip through, and subsequent poets directly express this idea, comprehending in an appropriate way such images-notions as Moira, Themis, Dike, Eunomia. Orphics move to the understanding of the unified beginning through the opposition of the divine and human, and Zeus eventually acquires by the beginning of the 5th century the meaning of the universal beginning, and then by the Hellenistic time the picture of the hierarchically organized intellectual world is formed. The philosophers (literally “lovers of wisdom”) move towards an understanding of the unity of being by discussing the problem of the relation between the One and the Many. Differences in the approaches of the Milesians and representatives of Magna Graecia are discussed. Deep realization of the One, which determines everything but is inaccessible for interaction, means a breakthrough to the consciousness of the transcendent.