MONISM.

Monism is the doctrine that there is only one principle in terms of which all reality is to be explained. Doctrines differ as to the nature and activity of this principle and its relations to the appearance and experience of multiplicity. Monists explain multiplicity or plurality in the world either as derivative from the one principle or as an illusion. Monism is found in philosophical, religious, and cosmological doctrines. The concept itself is ancient, though the first appearance of the term monism in Western philosophy is in Christian von Wolff's Logic (1728).

Religious Systems

Religious monism has two forms: atheism and pantheism. Both deny that there is a transcendent deity. Pantheism posits a deity that is immanent to the world and on which the world completely depends. Atheism states that there is no deity at all. Critics of pantheism sometimes conflate it with atheism, on the grounds that a true God must be transcendent.

Brahmanism.

Among the most ancient forms of pantheism is Brahmanism. Many of its main tenets were expressed in the Upanishads and systematized by the Vedanta-sutras. Its beginning is traced to the seventh-century thinker Gaudapada, who denied individuation and plurality. Appearances, as well as individual minds, are only temporary manifestations of the all-soul. Master Sankara (c. 700–750, India), author of commentaries on the Brahma-sutra, on parts of the Upanishads, and on the Mandukya-karika, studied with a pupil of Gaudapada. For Sankara, only the Brahman is real, and plurality and difference are an illusion.

Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is the name given to various doctrines of salvation through knowledge. The first gnostic sects were pre-Christian. Scholars argue about Persian Mazdeism, Greek mysteries, Egyptian doctrines, or Babylonian astrology and religions as possible roots of Gnostic thought. Gnosticism came into contact with Judaism and early Christianity, borrowing some names and concepts, though refusing the main tenets. Ancient Gnosticism held that everything flows from one purely spiritual principle. The origins of matter were explained as a flaw in a long line of successive emanations from the one principle. While matter is impure, its existence is temporary: Gnostic eschatology states that ultimately the original unity and purity will be restored. Gnostic sects include the Syrian school and the Alexandrian school (early second century).

Sufism.

Only rarely do Judeo-Christian forms of mysticism accept monism. John Scotus Erigena (c. 810–c. 877) in Ireland, Johannes Eckehart (Meister Eckehart; c. 1260–?1327) in Germany, and Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) endorsed forms of pantheism. The same is true for Islamic Sufism, which appeared as a reaction to the overly worldly tendencies of Islam in the late seventh century c.e. While most Sufi authors stressed personal discipline, asceticism, and purity as necessary elements to prepare the soul to know and unite with a transcendent God (which hardly qualify them as monist), it is interesting to mention figures that stressed a metaphysical unity of all beings in God. In the thirteenth century, the Spanish-born Ibn al-'Arabi (1165–1240) created a theory of the "Unity of Being." According to this theory, all existence is one, a manifestation of the underlying divine reality. Sufi currents that stressed the unity of all reality were present also in Indian Muslim communities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Mainstream Sufi authors reacted against monistic trends, stressing that a unity of vision (the mystical experience) did not correspond to a unity of reality.

Philosophical Systems

In philosophical systems, three forms of metaphysical monism can be identified: materialism, idealism, and neutral monism (in which the first principle is neither matter nor mind).

Neutral monists.

Parmenides (b. c. 515 b.c.e.) juxtaposes doxa (mere belief or nonbeing) and aletheia (truth or being). Being is one, unchangeable, and atemporal, and the experience of change and plurality is illusion. Parmenides's student, Zeno of Elea (c. 495–c. 430 b.c.e.), argued against the reality of plurality and motion. Plotinus (205–270 b.c.e.), the most famous and influential of the Neoplatonists, held that everything is an emanation from the One, flowing to lower and lower degrees of reality until matter is formed.

Another famous monist was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). In his Ethics (1677), Spinoza argues that there is at most and at least only one substance, God. His study of René Descartes (1596–1650) and the new science resulted in a metaphysical system where everything is a necessary manifestation (mode) of this single substance, which is conceived under the attributes of extension and thought.

Materialism.

Materialists deny the existence of any nonmaterial substance. Materialists are often, but not necessarily, atheists: some, such as the Stoics, or Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), held that God is corporeal. Among the earliest forms of materialism was atomism. Leucippus (5th century b.c.e.) and Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 b.c.e.) believed in an infinite number of indivisible bodies (atoms) moving in a void (nonbeing). Their movements, aggregations, and interactions explain every aspect of experience, including mental life. Epicurus (Greece, 341–270 b.c.e.) developed an atomistic ethics, claiming that the pleasures of the mind and the deliverance from passions constitute human happiness. Lucretius's (c. 100 to 90–c. 55 to 53 b.c.e.) poem De rerum natura (On the nature of things) had the most developed exposition of ancient atomism. Other atomist-like schools include the Indian school of Vaisesika, founded presumably by Kasyapa (c. 2nd–3rd century c.e.), which posited an infinity of atoms, of which nine kinds are identified, which constitutes all reality. The Medieval Islamic group of Asharites known as the mutakallimun (8th–12th century) held that God was the direct and continuous cause of all created beings (composed of atoms) and of the maintenance of each atom, from instant to instant. This doctrine of atomic time presaged Descartes and the Occasionalists, though without the commitment to a transcendent God.

Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century materialism arose with the scientific revolution's mechanical philosophy. Most natural philosophers were not materialist monists (because they believed in a transcendent God and in incorporeal souls), yet there are exceptions. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who was burned as a heretic, presented a pantheistic system in which the world and its soul are one. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) developed a geometrical account of natural, human, and political science, where he argued that reality is only bodies in motion and these explain perception, our human ideas and volitions, and the body politic.

During the Enlightenment materialists like Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709–1751) and Baron Paul-Henri-Dietrich d'Holbach (1723–1789) wrote about the material and "mechanical" nature of man and rejected any immaterial God. Some Enlightenment philosophers (Denis Diderot, Holbach) were atheists, others opted for deism, or the belief that God acted exclusively through natural laws. The borders between deism, pantheism, or downright atheism were often quite blurred (as in Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, or Jean Le Rond d'Alembert).

The first half of the nineteenth century saw a strong idealistic and romantic reaction to materialism, yet materialism returned with a vengeance in the second half with the successes of the theory of evolution by natural selection and of Marxism. Karl Marx (1818–1883) focused on economics, yet, in reacting against Hegelian idealism, endorsed a metaphysical materialism and atheism. In Marx, ideas (intellectual contents) are determined and explained through the material, economic processes of production and ownership, upon which rise social and political superstructures.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) by Charles Darwin (1809–1882) made it possible, in Richard Dawkins's words in The Blind Watchmaker, "to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Darwin was held by many to have produced a fully naturalistic and scientifically robust explanation of the nature of life. Darwinian evolution and natural selection were taken to be a serious challenge to explanations of the creation and development of life by a designing God. While many aspects of Darwin's own theory underwent major revisions with the discoveries of molecular biology and genetics, natural selection has lost nothing of its power as an explanatory tool in contemporary evolutionary biology and is used in many fields to explain structures and functions that are seemingly designed.

Idealism.

Idealism is metaphysical monism that rejects the existence of matter and founds the experience of matter on the mental. Ancient forms of idealism can be found in Buddhist schools.

The Yogacara (or Vijnanavada) school started around the fifth century c.e. in India. Its central doctrine is that only consciousness (vijnanamatra ) is real, that thought or mind is the ultimate reality. External things do not exist; nothing exists outside the mind. Ultimately, the purified, undifferentiated state of the mind without objects or thought processes is what constitutes "Buddhahood." Among the principal figures were the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu.

The Zen, or Chan school was founded by the Indian monk Bodhidharma, who traveled to China around 520 c.e. (according to the tradition). Zen stresses the use of meditation to experience the unity and indistinctness of reality, which cannot be understood otherwise (any form of verbalization or conceptualization falls into the trap of dualism).

In the Western tradition, idealism was reprised by George Berkeley (1685–1753), bishop of Cloyne, who held that all we can know are the ideas in our minds. All objects of perception, including matter, are only ideas produced by God. German idealism started later with Johann Gottlieb Fichte's (1762–1814) transcendental idealism, which he saw as a development of Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) ideas. For Fichte, God is the All, and particular objects result from reflection or self-consciousness through which the infinite unity is broken up. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) held that there is a unity between ideal and real. Absolute idealism explains the process of division of consciousness and nature, and their return to unity.

The culmination of German idealism came with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who believed that understanding Geist (Absolute Spirit) would overcome all (Kant's) contradictions in the realms of reason and science. Geist is the principle of reality that makes the universe intelligible as an eternal cyclical process whereby Geist comes to know itself, first through its own thinking, then through nature, and finally through finite spirits and their self-expression in history and their self-discovery in art, in religion, and in philosophy. Later in the century, Hegel's doctrines were developed by a group of English idealists, most notably Francis Bradley and John McTaggart Ellis.

In contemporary philosophy, monism is mostly materialism or physicalism. In psychology and philosophy of mind, it is held by many that the mental is reducible to the physical and may be explained in terms of physical laws. Eliminative materialism (Patricia and Paul Churchland) denies that the mental exists and claims that all "mental" talk will be ultimately eliminated as science progresses. Functionalism is a noneliminativist form of materialism claiming that descriptions of mental events and their intentional natures may be explained by systemic relations among the parts of the material brain (Hilary Putnam and William Lycan).

Anomalous monism (Donald Davidson and John Searle) holds that mental events are ultimately identical to brain states, but that there are no laws (hence anomalous ) that connect brain states to mental states.

See also Atheism ; Deism ; Gnosticism ; Historical and Dialectical Materialism ; Idealism ; Materialism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought ; Zen .

bibliography

Bakar, Osman. The History and Philosophy of Islamic Science. Cambridge, U.K.: Islamic Texts Society, 1999.

Block, Ned, Güven Güzeldere, and Owen Flanagan, eds. The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.

Chittick, William C. The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-'Arabi's Cosmology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Churchland, Paul M. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986.

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Filoramo, Giovanni. A History of Gnosticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Lloyd, A. C. The Anatomy of Neoplatonism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Lusthaus, Dan. Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch'eng Wei-shih Lun. London: Routledge Curzon, 2002.

Lycan, William, ed. Mind and Cognition: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999.

Moran, Dermot. The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Phillips, Stephen H. Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of "New Logic." La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1995.

Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999.

Searle, John. Minds, Brains, and Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Stern, Robert. Hegel, Kant, and the Structure of the Object. London: Routledge, 1990.

Wallis, Richard T., ed., and Jay Bregman, assoc. ed. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. Albany: State University of New York, 1992.

Westphal, Kenneth R. Hegel's Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit." Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989.

Peter Machamer

Francesca di Poppa