monism

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Monism is the metaphysical position that reality is, at the deepest level, one: one substance, one principle, or one kind of thing. The word was coined in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher Christian Wolff, but the position it names is old, and it covers more ground than a single doctrine. To call a view monist is to say where it lands on a question older than philosophy itself — whether the many things that appear are, in the end, expressions of a single underlying reality.

The term gets its meaning by contrast. Dualism holds that there are two irreducible kinds of thing — mind and matter, say, or spirit and the world; pluralism holds that there are many. Monism denies the cut. But it can deny it in more than one way, and the differences matter. A substance monist holds that only one thing ultimately exists, and that what looks like a crowd of separate beings is in truth modes or aspects of that one — the position usually attached to Spinoza, for whom God and Nature are a single infinite substance. A material monist holds that everything is matter; an idealist monist, that everything is mind or idea. Each is monist in form while disagreeing flatly about what the one thing is made of.

The intuition runs deep in the traditions this archive gathers, though they phrase it in their own terms and do not always mean the same thing by it. The Neoplatonists derived all reality from the One, beyond being and beyond name, from which Intellect and Soul and the sensible world flow without the source being diminished. The Advaita Vedānta of Śankara taught that Brahman alone is real and that the appearance of a separate self and a separate world is, in the end, a misperception to be seen through — a monism so thoroughgoing it is more exactly called non-dualism, advaita, “not-two.” The Daoist sense of the Tao as the one source from which the ten thousand things issue circles a kindred idea. These are genuine resemblances, and worth tracing. They are not interchangeable: a metaphysical claim about the number of substances, a soteriological claim about what blocks liberation, and a cosmological account of generation are doing different work, even when each lands on oneness.

Within Western esotericism the monist intuition does heavy lifting. The recurring conviction that all things are linked, that “as above, so below,” that the cosmos is a single living whole answering to itself — this is monism worn as a working assumption rather than argued as a thesis. Whether such a whole exists is exactly the question philosophy leaves open. What the term marks is not an answer but a fork in the road, and the long record of those who took the one-substance turning and tried to say what followed from it.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna) · The Vedānta-Sūtras with Śankara's Commentary (Thibaut)

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