Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview

Monism is a devilish shapeshifter. This volume takes up the challenge of recognizing and analysing monism in a wide diversity of forms, from the early nineteenth century to 1945. Collectively, its authors deepen the discussion of monism as a worldview while extending our understanding of its philosophical, social and political locations. Even more than most collections, this one is anchored in its introductory essay. Todd Weir’s ‘The Riddles of Monism’ is foundational, not only for the volume, but for understanding the complexity of monism itself. Weir begins by briefly sketching what he calls the ‘narrow’ history of monism, mostly surrounding Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary religion of science, Wilhelm Ostwald’s energeticism, and the Monistenbund —a reform organization originally known for advocating religious free thought, a scientific worldview, and various life reforms (including eugenics), which by World War I would become outspoken in its German nationalism. Weir then offers some useful distinctions. Monistic science focused on two aspects of unity—the unity of life with non-life and the attribution of consciousness to all matter. But as a worldview, monism was a totalizing system that directed individual action and community formation and thus provided normative guides for behaviour. Weir insightfully calls it a ‘symptomatic expression of an age that was marked by secularism but was not yet secular’ (p. 3). Finally, monism operated in the world of social action, aiming for ‘the amelioration of all social conflicts through the application of scientific rationality’ (p. 27). Scientism was thus axiomatic to this worldview.