Monism

MONISM. - From μόνος, single, it is, in the proper sense, every system that regards the multiplicity of things as apparent, resolving it into a fundamental and absolute unity. The term is due to Chr. Wolff: «Monistae dicuntur philosophus qui unum tantummodo substantiae genus admittunt» (Psych. ration., § 32). The meaning of m. is therefore first of all metaphysical, since it presents itself as a system of interpretation of reality in its constitutive and resolving principle, both as regards being and as regards operation.

On this plane m. defends the absolute unity of being and of substance, opposing every dualism (v.) and pluralism (v.) that admits an ultimate constitutive heterogeneity in the various orders or moments or values of the real. It affirms accordingly the fundamental identity of matter and spirit (v.), body and soul (v.), being and operation, substance (v.) and its determinations, nature and consciousness (v.), physical laws and biological laws, sense and intellect (v.), object and subject (v.), world and God (v.). The various qualifications of m. depend on the different conceptions of reality that are placed as the foundation and resolution of the whole. For materialistic m. the only absolute reality is matter (v.) as the principle of force, of energy, of life, of spirit, of thought, of consciousness. Another expression of materialistic m. is energetism (W. Ostwald, Die Energien, Leipzig 1908; v. DYNAMISM), insofar as it too resolves every reality and phenomenon into the materialistic principle, considered essentially as force. Naturalism (v.) and evolutionism in their most rigorous meaning are further determinations of materialistic m., elaborated from the prevalently dynamic point of view of the same material reality. Opposed to materialistic m. (but in the last analysis only on the systematic and phenomenal plane, because of the final resolution, common to both, of being and experience into absolute unity) is spiritualistic m. This is twofold: voluntaristic (or telistic) if it understands fundamental reality as tendency or Will; intellectualistic (or logical) if the only absolute reality is understood as Spirit, Thought, Intellect, Consciousness, Self-consciousness, subjective Act (idealism [v.], panlogism [v.], actualism [v.]). Spiritualistic m. can be conceived either with a static meaning (resolution of the whole into an immutable spiritual Principle), or as emanatistic (the world posited through a process of derivation from the spiritual principle), or as dialectical (reality as the very immanent process of spirit). Between materialistic m. and spiritualistic m. there can be placed (but here too the difference is only systematic) synthetistic (or identitarian) m., which understands the one fundamental reality as an original indeterminate synthesis of matter and spirit; and ontological m., which prescinds from any original determination of reality, affirming absolute Unity on the transcendental plane of pure being. Monistic are the absolute forms of immanentism (v.) and of pantheism (v.), which differs from m. in general in that it recognizes divine value and meaning in the whole of reality.

The further particular acceptations of the term m. are for the most part, but not necessarily, derivations and applications of its fundamental metaphysical meaning. Physical m. defends the specific identity of substance within the sphere of the physical world: physical m. is therefore every system that affirms the original unity of matter, attributing the specific diversities of bodies to merely accidental determinations (quantitative variations and aggregations: atomism, mechanism, v.). To physical m. belong certain forms of hylozoism (v.) that conceive the world as a single organism informed by a living principle, naturalistic or divine. Anthropological-psychological m. is the actualistic theory (v. ACTUALISM) that maintains the identity of physiological phenomena and of conscious ones, as expressions or parallel series of one and the same fundamental reality. It is also called the «theory of identity» and rejects the conception of the soul as a substance distinct from the body. Gnoseological m. denies every essential difference between sensitive knowledge and intellectual knowledge: in this sense empiricism (v.) and nominalism (v.) are m. With a broader meaning, gnoseological m. is the affirmation of the absolute identity between subject and object. Ethical m. is every conception that defends the autonomy (v.) of morality, whether in a spiritualistic sense (morality as a universal value immanent to reason) or in a materialistic-hedonistic sense (morality as a pure derivation and transformation of the egoistic, utilitarian, altruistic tendencies of human nature, and as a production of sentiment, custom and usage). Social m. (opposed both to the atomistic and to the personalistic conception of society) posits the State as the supreme value over against individuals and therefore as the sole measure of law, source and end of every right and duty (v. INDIVIDUALISM; PERSONALISM; SOCIETY). Historical m. is finally the conception of history (v.) as the necessary process of a single absolute reality, with every real indetermination or self-determination of human freedom excluded.

M. found expression in Indian pantheism (Upanishads), in which Brahma is understood as the supreme reality impersonal of which the world is but a manifestation. The first Greek philosophers who attempt the resolution of nature into a single principle (ἀρχὴ φύσεως) are monists: Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander ("infinitatem naturae dixit esse a qua omnia gignerentur": F. G. A. Mullach, Fragm. philosophorum graec., I, p. 237), Heraclitus (op. cit., p. 312 b.; cf. Aristotle, Met., I, 3). Monistic, so far as appears from the fragments, is the doctrine of the Eleatics. Xenophanes identifies God, one-all (ἐν καὶ πάν), with the world (theological m.); everything therefore leads back to the identical and "is resolved into a single nature" (μῶν εἰς φύσιν: Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrh. Hypot., I, 224; cf. Plato, Soph., 242 d). For Parmenides being is unbegotten, immortal, complete, unitary, immobile, everlasting (οὐλῶν, μονογενὲς τὰ καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ' ἀτέλαστον: Mullach, op. cit., p. 120, 60; cf. Plato, Soph., 244 e). There is no origin, multiplicity or becoming in being, and there is identity between being and thinking: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοῦν ἐστὶν τὰ καὶ εἶναι (Mullach, op. cit., p. 118, 40). The ontological m. of Parmenides is resolved into materialism, through the identification of being with corporeality (το πλῶν).

The atomists are monists in the materialistic sense (Democritus, Leucippus: cf. Aristotle, Phys., I, 4, 5, Met., I, 8; Epicurus, Lucretius). The Stoics, dualists in ethics (opposition between virtue and passion, sense and reason), defend a metaphysical m.: the λόγος (reason) is the universal reality that vivifies and unifies the universe: "Dei vero substantiam Zeno quidem ait mundum totum atque coelum" (Diogenes Laertius, VII, 1, 148). Plotinus (v.) too tends toward spiritualistic m., inasmuch as matter itself seems to have to be conceived as an emanation of the One. Expressions in a pantheistic sense are found in John Scotus Eriugena (v.), even though in the end he seems to free himself from a true and proper m., and in David of Dinant. A form of anthropological m. is offered by the doctrine of Averroes (v.) concerning the uniqueness of the intellect. The philosophy of the Renaissance, with Neoplatonic and Stoic derivations and dependently on the new scientific conception of the universe (v.), returns to the immanence of the "divine force" in nature. For Bruno (v.) God is the formal cause and internal principle of the world, which from its inmost being expresses aspects and forms; and it is the single life of God that manifests itself in all the worlds (Della causa principio e uno, II, ed. G. Gentile, Opere italiane, I, 2nd ed., Bari 1925, p. 178 ff.). Similarly Paracelsus, V. Weigel, G. C. Vanini, J. Böhme (Morgenrät, chaps. 2-3). In modern philosophy the immaterialism of Berkeley (v.) presents a form of anthropological m.: man is only spirit; the body (and matter in general) is pure representation. Metaphysical m. is defended above all by Spinoza (v.), for whom thought and extension are pure manifestations of the single divine substance: "substantia cogitata et substantia extensa una eademque est substantia" (Ethica, part 2, prop. 6, scholium; ed. G. Gentile, 2nd ed., Bari 1933, p. 53; cf. pp. 4, 6). Materialistic m. is defended by Cl. Helvétius, D. Diderot (Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, London 1754), J. O. La Mettrie (L'homme machine, Paris 1748), P. H. Holbach (Système de la nature, London [Amsterdam or Leiden] 1770), P. J. Cabanis (Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, Paris 1802), J. Moleschott (Der Kreislauf des Lebens, Mainz 1852), L. Büchner (Kraft und Stoff, Frankfurt 1855), C. Vogt, H. Czobło (Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft, Giessen 1854; Vorlesungen über den Menschen..., ibid. 1863); by Darwinian evolutionism; in particular by E. Haeckel (v.). For Haeckel (whose system may be considered a synthesis of Spinoza, Bruno and Darwin) the substance of the world is at once God and nature and has as its attributes matter and force. Excluded, consequently, is every spiritual order that sets itself up as distinct from and transcendent to the order and finality of the body (Die Welträtsel, chaps. 18-19). Similarly to Haeckel, H. Münsterberg (Grundzüge der Psychologie, Leipzig 1900), Th. Ziehen (Gehirn und Seelenleben, ibid. 1902). Monistic is post-Kantian idealism. For Schelling (v.) reality is the interior process of the absolute as an originary principle and infinite tendency (infused with Bruno and Spinoza) in whose identity every distinction is resolved. For Hegel (v.) multiplicity is a pure dialectical moment in the becoming of the single and supreme reality, the idea: "only the absolute idea is being, life that does not pass away, truth conscious of itself, and it is the whole truth" (La scienza della logica, Ital. trans. by A. Moni, III, Bari 1925, p. 305). Monistic is the conception of E. v. Hartmann (v.), for whom the Unity, even while expressing itself, through its dynamic functions, in a multiplicity of individuals, remains immanent to them; and of A. Schopenhauer (v.), for whom the world and man and all their phenomenal manifestations are the expression of the single fundamental reality, the Will (Wille zur Leben). Similarly A. Fouillée (v.), who admits the fundamental identity between nature and thought inasmuch as the will, dispersed in the world and in eternal expansion, reflects upon itself, concentrating and becoming conscious in man. Monistic is the dialectical materialism of L. Feuerbach (Gottheit, Freiheit u. Unsterblichkeit, Leipzig 1886) and Marxism, to which belongs the affirmation of the exclusively naturalistic-economic meaning of the world of the spirit. The psycho-physical anthropological m. is defended by G. Fechner (Elemente der Psychophysik, Leipzig 1860: the "physical" is the external aspect, the "psychic" the internal aspect of a single reality), F. Paulsen, W. Wundt and furthermore by H. Taine, A. Bain, Fr. Jodl, H. Ebbinghaus, H. Spencer, who hold the "physical" and the "psychic" to be manifestations of a further reality (neo-Spinozism). For Spencer consciousness and matter are "pure symbols of a Power to us forever and absolutely unknown" (Princ. of psychology, n. 63). Monistic is the actualism of Gentile: "the finite thing is always the reality of God itself" and the world "an eternal theogony that is accomplished in the inmost part of our being" (Teoria gener. dello spirito come atto puro, 5th ed., Florence 1938, p. 265). Of fundamentally monist inspiration is also existentialism (v.) in its atheistic and agnostic forms.

In Germany the Monistenbund association had a wide diffusion in the first decades of the 20th century (founded in Jena in 1906; before the First World War it counted about 7,000 members in 45 sections; cf. Monistenbund, in LThK, VII, coll. 281-82). The purpose of the Monistenbund, openly anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, was to spread the naturalistic conception, excluding from science and philosophy any supernatural factor. Less radical was the journal The monist (founded by P. Carus, Chicago, Jan. 1891), which intended to defend the unity and agreement of all truths and therefore also the reconciliation between science and faith. Nevertheless it too welcomes the fundamental monist idea of an inseparable unity of the whole, and in science the monistic conception of Haeckel.

Monism, considering here its fundamental, metaphysical expression, is radically irreconcilable with Christianity. It involves in fact the denial of the transcendence and personality of God and therefore, besides evidently opposing the very possibility of a supernatural order, suppresses the only valid foundation of religion, of a universal ethics and of an authentic spiritualistic conception of life. Understood in a materialistic as well as an idealistic sense, monism is incapable of preserving the Christian concept of freedom, responsibility, obligation, conscience, sin (v. the respective entries). From a philosophical point of view it must be observed that the multiplicity and irreducibility of personal consciousnesses, of which the whole human world is a clear manifestation, finds in monism no real explanation. In the very order of lower nature the plurality of structures, living and non-living, manifests on the empirical-phenomenological plane a specificity so profound that it cannot have its adequate reason except in a diversification that reaches down to the very ontological plane of being. "It is impossible to resolve all things into unity" (ἀδύνατον φαίνεται τὰ ἕνα ἐν εἶναι: Aristotle, Phys., I, 3, 186 a 4; cf. De generat. et corrupt., I, 1, and Plato, Soph., 244 b). It must further be noted that monism, by closing the becoming of reality in upon itself, is ultimately forced into a radical irrationalism (v.) that makes act (v.) derive from potency, the determinate from the indeterminate and therefore being from non-being. Conclusions that Christian thought is able to avoid, by positing the ontological distinction between absolute and relative, being per se and participated being. This does not remove the fact that the positive demand of monism, that is, the exigency of explaining and reducing all reality to a single Principle, in opposition to the extreme expressions of dualism, is fully preserved in Christian thought. Only, the unity of being is here attained not through identity, but on the basis of the relation of causality, the sole dialectical moment which, by founding the derivation of the relative from the absolute, opposes at the same time its resolution into the absolute itself and guarantees for it, on the plane of being, a consistency of its own. See also the individual authors and further the entries CONOSCENZA; DIO; ENTE-ESSERE; PANTEISMO; SOSTANZA.

Ugo Viglino