David Cowles
Apr 1, 2025
“Most humans share about 96% of their DNA coding with common swine; politicians share 98%.”
When you think about the history of Western philosophy, you probably don’t think of Anaxagoras (d. 428 BCE), Pico Della Mirandola (d. 1494 CE), or Alred North Whitehead (d. 1947 CE). Face it, they’re not A listers; they probably don’t even rate a mention in most Phil 101 survey courses.
Rather, they are among a small group of somewhat obscure Western philosophers who advance the peculiar notion that ‘everything is in everything’, including itself. Pan in Panti, is how Anaxagoras described it.
Not only is this view counter-intuitive, it’s incompatible with Logic itself, at least according to the 20th century’s ‘dean of mathematics’, Bertrand Russell (d. 1970 CE). Russel’s Paradox is said to show that nothing can be part of itself (i.e. no set can be a member of itself).
Like other famous paradoxes (e.g. Zeno’s), we know the premise is false. Achilles can beat a tortoise in a road race. When Longfellow “shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth (contra Zeno),” he knew not where. And the set of all mathematical objects is, presumably, itself a mathematical object (contra Russell).
A paradox sits at the intersection of ‘what must be so’ and ‘what can’t be so’. Suicide Corner, they call it; someone really should put up a traffic signal.
In a nutshell, paradoxes prove a disconnect between the world as it must be according to theory and the world as it appears to be according to observation. One is reminded of the Catholic doctrine of Eucharist: what appears to be bread and wine is in fact Christ Jesus, body and soul, humanity and divinity, whole and entire!
Turns out, the 20th century was all about paradox. In an earlier post, Zeno we explained how Zeno proved that the axioms of arithmetic are incompatible with the real world. 2400 years later, Godel proved that all mathematics is inherently incomplete; and in 1964 Bell proved that all classical models of spacetime (Newton, Descartes, Einstein) are incompatible with the ‘real (non-local) world’.
Of course, all of Quantum Mechanics can be considered paradoxical: light is both a wave and a particle, Schrödinger’s Cat is both alive and dead, future measurements determine prior states, etc. A philosopher uncomfortable with paradox is SOL in this cosmos!
Nicknamed L’Absurd, cosmology based on paradox expressed itself in 20th century painting (Picasso), drama (Ionesco), literature (Robbe-Grillet), and philosophy (Camus). In all of these oeuvres, paradox is paramount!
Smoothing over differences in detail, we can say that according to Anaxagoras, Mirandola, and Whitehead, the universe consists of events…and only events. Whatever is not an event per se exists only in and through events. The color ‘green’, for example, is not itself an event but it qualifies myriad events; it exists, but only as an element in the events it qualifies.
Each event expresses the Universe in its entirety. Therefore, every event must include and be included in other events. It must also be included as an element in itself. That’s what makes an event an ‘event’. An ‘event’ is a non-linear knot in the fabric of spacetime.
Even God (or Gaia or Kosmos if you insist)! In fact, every event is included in God and God in every event, and of course, God too in an event, an element included in himself.
Sorry Bertrand. Your Logic is falsified, not just by one event, but by every event. We replace your ‘no set can be an element of itself’ with our ‘every event must be an element of itself’. If there is such a thing as an event, and how could there not be, and if Universe consists only of such events, and what else could Universe consist of, then it cannot be otherwise.
There is enormous irony here. Russell and Whitehead collaborated in their youth on a modern Principia Mathematica. After that, they went their separate ways, Russell proclaiming himself an atheist, Whitehead embracing Christianity.
So where’s the irony? In his haste to preclude ‘God’ from any future metaphysics, Russell created a hierarchical model of Being. He separated sets of ‘objects’ from ‘classes’ of sets. The ‘set of all sets’ is not a set but a ‘class’, giving that great ontological democrat, Nietzsche, an acute case of heartburn.
Whitehead, on the other hand, based his metaphysics on God. In his system, God is an event like every other event. Russell, pursuing democracy, created hierarchy, while Whitehead, embracing hierarchy, restored democracy.
Sidebar: The lengths some folks will go to to protect themselves from ‘God’! A PhD friend of mine would not listen to any classical music because it sounded too churchy.(My friend was raised a non-observant Jew; he had only been in a Christian church a handful of times for weddings and such. Didn’t matter! Beethoven’s 9th was too churchy for him!)
Mirandola, one of the last great European philosophers before our culture’s 500 year decent into darkness (aka ‘the Renaissance’), wrote:
“Oh wonderous and unsurpassable felicity of man (sic) to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be!” Not until Jean-Paul Sartre (d. 1980 CE) et al., were Europeans once again routinely capable of such insight. Mirandola continues:
“But upon man, at the moment of creation, God bestowed seeds, pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life.” Mirandola compares human beings to Proteus, the shapeshifter, and adds:
“…designated sometimes by the term ‘all flesh’ and sometimes by the term ‘every creature’ because he (man)…assumes the characteristic power of every form of life.” (Oration on the Dignity of Man)
In this model, each day of creation recapitulates each of the days that came before it; Adam and Eve are not one species beside others; they embody all previously created life forms. This gives new meaning to the old saw, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
Of course, these Monistic philosophies have their own problems: If everything is in everything else, why don’t we experience things that way? Why don’t we see Blake’s ‘world’ in every grain of sand?
To deal with this obvious ‘defect’ Whitehead developed an elaborate, if not entirely convincing, system of ‘graded relevance’ based on what he called prehensions. I think we can propose a better model. Whitehead called his system, the Philosophy of Organism, so it is appropriate that we turn our search to the organic world.
In defense of Whitehead, et al., our model depends on ‘facts not in evidence’ 50 years ago. Of course, I’m talking about recent advances in the Science of Genetics. The Human Genome Project (1990 – 2003) has given us a treasure trove of new heuristic tools.
We now know, for example, that every cell in the human body is an expression of the DNA synthesized at the union of two parental sex cells and then copied 100 trillion times over normal life expectancy. We also know that our DNA is directly descended from a single, primordial RNA/DNA molecule synthesized almost 4 billion years ago. Further, most humans share about 96% of their DNA coding with common swine; politicians share 98%.
Our bodies consist solely of such cells, along with water and a few inorganic minerals. But our beautiful model has a problem. To paraphrase St. Paul, “Is a hand a foot (other than in Whist)? Does an ear see or an eye hear?”
We are one body composed of many organs with many different functions. They do not look the same, they do not act the same. Blood is not bone. Some neurons last a lifetime, most skin cells only a few days. Yet all our cells embody the same DNA code. How so?
Another paradox? Not really. Small differences in genotype can translate into major differences in phenotype. It’s the genetic version of the Butterfly Effect! That’s why humans can give mind numbing 2 hour speeches while pigs just say, “Oink! Oink!”
Further, we now know that only 50% of the genes in our genome are expressed at any one time. Which genes are expressed determines the structure and behavior of each cell at any one time and can and will vary over time and in response to the environment.
Currently unexpressed genes remain in inventory; they can be activated as needed to respond to environmental stressors or to carry out instructions communicated electrically and/or chemically from other cells.
Pan in Panti. The entire human genome is reproduced in the DNA of each nucleus but at any one moment only about half of those genes are expressed; the other half remain in potentia. Typically, two-thirds of these ‘red shirted’ cells will be expressed at some point in the life of the organism but another one-third will remain on ‘permanent standby’. It’s nice to know that evolution has taken such good care of us.
Every novel event (all events are novel) prehends all prior events but only some of those prior events figure positively and prominently in the new event. Whatever is not expressed remains ‘on deck’.
Apply this biological paradigm to cosmology. Every event in cosmos recapitulates every other event. but only some of those other events are manifest in each entity. As in cells, the ‘DNA’ of events massively overlaps and yet no two events seem the same. Switching our model of universe from mechanical to organic makes all the difference and allows Anaxagoras, Mirandola, and Whitehead to emerge from B List obscurity to assume leading roles in our new production of Western Philosophy, headed to Broadway as soon as Hamilton closes. Contact Ticketmaster for preferred seating.
Image: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Allegory of the Planets and Continents. 1752. Oil on canvas, 73 x 54 7/8 in. (185.4 x 139.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1977.
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.
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