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 appears to have been coined in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher Christian Wolff — introduced, by the usual account, in his Logic of 1728, though the standard philosophical reference works are silent on the point and the attribution is best held lightly. The position it names, in any case, is far older than the label, 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 — and that is the neighboring entry’s to argue; pluralism holds that there are many. Monism denies the cut. But there is a sharper way to see what divides these positions, and it clears away most of the confusion the word causes: every monism attributes oneness, yet they differ on two axes — what exactly is said to be one (the target: substances, kinds, fundamental things), and how the counting is done. Read this way dualism is simply the two-membered case of pluralism, and monism is the denial that the count exceeds one. This is why “monism” can mean radically different things in different mouths, and why its varieties must be kept apart.

Two of those varieties are easy to confuse and worth holding distinct. Substance monism, in the strict modern sense, is a claim about kind: every concrete thing is ultimately of one single substance or highest type. Existence monism is the stronger and stranger claim that only one thing exists at all, the apparent crowd of separate beings being modes or aspects of that one. The exemplar of both at once is Spinoza, for whom there is one and only one infinite substance, with infinitely many attributes of which the mind knows only thought and extension; every particular is a mode of it, and God and Nature name the same thing — Deus sive Natura. Spinoza uses the word “substance” for the one, which makes him the textbook substance monist; that the one is also the only thing places him at the existence-monist intersection as well. The two senses meet in him, but they are not the same claim.

From these the other types branch by what they make the one out of. A material or physicalist monist holds that everything is matter or physical — the Stoic cosmos, one rational living body pervaded by logos, is the great ancient instance. An idealist monist holds that everything is mind or idea: Berkeley, for whom to be is to be perceived, in the small register; Hegel, for whom ultimate reality is a single self-developing spirit unfolding through nature and history, in the grand one. A third option, which the older textbooks tend to omit, is neutral monism: one underlying stuff that is neither mental nor physical but neutral between them, of which mind and matter are derivative arrangements. Russell put it that mind and matter alike are “composed of a neutral-stuff which, in isolation, is neither mental nor material”; Ernst Mach and William James held the view before it had the name, Mach with his neutral “elements” and James with the “pure experience” of his radical empiricism. It is the near neighbor of panpsychism, with which it shares the refusal to make mind a separate kingdom while declining to make everything mental.

A further refinement, the live contemporary face of the doctrine, separates what exists from what is basic. On Jonathan Schaffer’s revival, priority monism grants that many things exist but holds that exactly one is fundamental — the cosmos as a whole, prior to its parts — so that monism becomes a thesis about dependence rather than mere number. This connects directly to the oldest esoteric intuition the archive records, that the whole is the real thing and its members derivative.

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. Parmenides stands at the head of the Western line: “what is” is one, ungenerated, imperishable, indivisible, unchanging, a perfect whole — Eleatic strict monism, though whether he meant that literally one thing exists, rather than that being is of one nature, is a reading as old as it is contested. 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 first principle treated in its own entry, cited here only as the archive’s strongest monist lineage. 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,” and is at once a metaphysical claim and a soteriological one, not a mere count of substances. 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 claim about the number of substances, a 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, and it sits close to Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as the objectification of a single underlying Will. 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 — Parmenides, the Stoics, Śankara, Spinoza, Hegel — and tried to say what followed from it.

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