May 6, 2023 03:24 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/monist-philosophy...all-is-one
INTRO (Heinrich Päs): From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolised by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as ‘all that has been and is and shall be’ and the ‘mother and father of all things’.
This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: ‘entanglement’, nature’s way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and ‘decoherence’, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives.
Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea.
It wasn’t always that way. In ancient times, the concept of monism held more weight in the popular mind. Philosophers in the school of Pythagoras (c570-490 BCE), renowned for his alleged discovery of the geometrical relation among the three sides of a right triangle, identified the number one as the centre of the Universe. Heraclitus’ contemporary Parmenides (c520-460 BCE) believed in reality as a timeless ‘one, that is and that is not not to be’. And Plato, arguably the most influential philosopher ever, is said to have taught monism as a secret doctrine at his academy, to be disseminated only orally. Indeed, monism later evolved into a trademark of his school, and Neoplatonists such as Plotinus (c205-270 CE) wrote about ‘the one’ that is ‘all things’ and ‘being’s generator’. Around the same time, mystery cults popular in late antiquity advocated a hidden unity behind the many gods of the Greco-Roman polytheistic pantheon, and understood the different deities as representations of the various facets of a single, unified reality.
Later on, philosophical ideas derived from Plato’s monistic instincts competed with Christianity to become the dominant worldview of the Roman Empire. Christianity prevailed.
Even then, Christianity adopted Platonic ideas by identifying the monistic ‘One’ with God. But Christianity drew also on dualistic philosophies such as Manichaeism, which advocated a world caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. This is how concepts such as God and devil, heaven and hell, or angels and demons received their prominent role among Christian beliefs. At the same time, the monistic influences were pushed into an otherworldly beyond. The Christian God was understood as different from the natural world that he governs from outside.
With the Christian Church rising to political power and the fall of the Roman Empire, much of antiquity’s culture and philosophy got lost, and monism got suppressed as a heresy. If ‘all is One’, God gets conflated with the world, and medieval theology understood that as atheism or a devaluation of God.
When in 855 John Scotus Eriugena, a medieval philosopher at the court of the Frankish emperor Charles the Bald, described God as an ‘indivisible unity’ holding together ‘all things’, he got condemned and his books forbidden. Sure, these monistic ideas inspired philosophers, but theologians saw them as an intrusion into the realm of religion. By the 13th century, a group of scholars in Paris had resorted to the stance that there exists a double truth: that what is right in natural philosophy may be wrong at the same time in theology, and vice versa.
These conflicts framed the relationship between religion and the developing sciences... (MORE - details)
INTRO (Heinrich Päs): From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolised by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as ‘all that has been and is and shall be’ and the ‘mother and father of all things’.
This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: ‘entanglement’, nature’s way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and ‘decoherence’, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives.
Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea.
It wasn’t always that way. In ancient times, the concept of monism held more weight in the popular mind. Philosophers in the school of Pythagoras (c570-490 BCE), renowned for his alleged discovery of the geometrical relation among the three sides of a right triangle, identified the number one as the centre of the Universe. Heraclitus’ contemporary Parmenides (c520-460 BCE) believed in reality as a timeless ‘one, that is and that is not not to be’. And Plato, arguably the most influential philosopher ever, is said to have taught monism as a secret doctrine at his academy, to be disseminated only orally. Indeed, monism later evolved into a trademark of his school, and Neoplatonists such as Plotinus (c205-270 CE) wrote about ‘the one’ that is ‘all things’ and ‘being’s generator’. Around the same time, mystery cults popular in late antiquity advocated a hidden unity behind the many gods of the Greco-Roman polytheistic pantheon, and understood the different deities as representations of the various facets of a single, unified reality.
Later on, philosophical ideas derived from Plato’s monistic instincts competed with Christianity to become the dominant worldview of the Roman Empire. Christianity prevailed.
Even then, Christianity adopted Platonic ideas by identifying the monistic ‘One’ with God. But Christianity drew also on dualistic philosophies such as Manichaeism, which advocated a world caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. This is how concepts such as God and devil, heaven and hell, or angels and demons received their prominent role among Christian beliefs. At the same time, the monistic influences were pushed into an otherworldly beyond. The Christian God was understood as different from the natural world that he governs from outside.
With the Christian Church rising to political power and the fall of the Roman Empire, much of antiquity’s culture and philosophy got lost, and monism got suppressed as a heresy. If ‘all is One’, God gets conflated with the world, and medieval theology understood that as atheism or a devaluation of God.
When in 855 John Scotus Eriugena, a medieval philosopher at the court of the Frankish emperor Charles the Bald, described God as an ‘indivisible unity’ holding together ‘all things’, he got condemned and his books forbidden. Sure, these monistic ideas inspired philosophers, but theologians saw them as an intrusion into the realm of religion. By the 13th century, a group of scholars in Paris had resorted to the stance that there exists a double truth: that what is right in natural philosophy may be wrong at the same time in theology, and vice versa.
These conflicts framed the relationship between religion and the developing sciences... (MORE - details)
