N one

Number 1 or an essay on friendsheep.

It is perhaps still necessary to calculate, but differently, differently with one and with the other.

The Politics of Friendship. Jacques Derrida.

Can’t sleep? There is an advice: if you can't get to sleep, just “count sheep.” It is believed that the saying stems from sheep herders who couldn't sleep until they had counted all of their sheep to make sure none were missing.

The rationale of counting seems self-evident. But what do we actually do by its ever-ready logic? To make this understood, we will begin with what is proper and essential to counting - start. We open counting with something that counts - 1 is at the outset of a tally. The history of 1 sets an example of comparison between the 1 of now and the 1 of the Ancient Greeks. The Greeks didn't know and need 1 as a number, because the basis of counting was unity. 1 was a divisor of a whole. Euclid of Alexandria, who systematized Ancient Greek mathematics, wrote:

 “A number is a multitude composed of units.”

 Euclid defined a number as a multitude of ones. Since 1 is not a multitude of ones, 1 is not a number. Thus, an Ancient Greek followed this logic of 1 which calculated each sheep in a whole herd. Each animal was an object in a unity of a herd. 

The account of number 1 as we know it today is attributed to the fifteenth century, when the engineering thinking of the Renaissance tried to divide objects into elements. The notion of 1 underwent a conceptual transformation, when 1 acquired another meaning. The first element of an object became number 1. As a result something strange happened:

1 sheep + 1 elephant = 2. In this case a sheep and an elephant are not units, but elements. So what do we do by counting today? We include elements into the count. 

Can’t sleep? Just count sheep. Today we can’t sleep until we count all of our sheep to make sure each one of them is missing.