The potential reader is introduced to this fascinating, wide-ranging collection of essays on the historical development of monism from the early-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century by a cover photo of the statue of “Transparent Man” acquired by the Buffalo Museum of Science from the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden in 1935. This image of a transparent human body lifting its arms in self-worship, the editor suggests, captures the assumptions of a monistic worldview in which the apparently irresolvable dualism of object and subject, matter and mind, nature and spirit was resolved in the vision of an immanent unity “completely penetrated by the gaze of natural science” (p. ix). The explanatory note ends with the comment that the statue was returned to the Hygiene Museum in 1989 because of its tainted association with National Socialism. Although this might suggest a narrative arc moving from totalizing dreams of cosmic unity to the disillusionment produced by the consequences of ideological appropriation in historical practice, the lengthy introduction to the collection by Todd Weir begins on a strikingly different note—with suggestions that the monist dream of overcoming traditional dualisms in a scientifically grounded knowledge of ultimate unity has been revived in recent decades by claims of neurophysiologists and evolutionary psychobiologists that the duality of objective processes and subjective agency, of immanent realities and transcendent conditions, is finally on the cusp of scientific resolution. So perhaps 1945 did not so much mark the end of the “monist century” as a transition to the next stage in an ongoing project in which the conception of “transparent man” and the ontological assumptions that inspired it remain vital and contentious issues, although, as Weir suggests, they operate (at least for the present) as “untethered” worldviews, as “goods in the secular marketplace of religious ideas” (p. 27). That is all the more reason, perhaps, to examine historical traces from the original monist century with the critical care of discerning consumers.
Weir's introductory essay does an excellent job of providing the nine, often disparate pieces that follow with a relatively coherent intellectual and historical framework. As a distinctive intellectual project, monism addresses what Weir, following the conceptualization of the most famous nineteenth-century monist—the Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel—called the “world riddles” that emerge from human experience of the irreducible reality of both objective natural process and subjective agency. These riddles encompass not only the apparently insurmountable dualities of experience but also the enigmatic ground (transcendent or immanent) from which those dualities emerge and that makes them possible. The resolution of duality can easily fall into a reductionism that explains one of the poles of existence through the other. But monism per se also implicitly or explicitly involves the search for a perspective that recognizes and encompasses the dualities from a broader or deeper perspective. This attempt to make transparent the immanent ground of life's dualities leads monism into the realm of worldviews that emerge as “religious” claims about the embodiment of meaning and value in material reality, claims that can bind individuals together in secular belief systems and be appropriated by communities or movements that seek cultural identities subversive of an established cultural order that claims transcendent authority for its meanings and values.
The essays that follow are roughly grouped around the conceptual distinction between intellectual projects aimed at resolving the riddles of experience and more broadly defined sociocultural movements and institutions that appropriate and embody monistic claims in historically situated worldviews. This distinction is also roughly chronological, moving from the philosophical-scientific quest to overcome Kantian dualism to the partial and/or critical instrumentalization of variants of naturalistic scientific monism in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century oppositional social movements and ultimately in the communist and fascist regimes of the mid-twentieth century. At the center of this historical narrative lies the life and work of Ernst Haeckel, whose confident assertion of the resolution of the world's riddles from the perspective of evolutionary biology inspired the creation of an organized monist movement. Interestingly enough, this “center” from which the other studies radiate is not itself the subject of an extended historical analysis in this volume, although Weir's introductory essay and the article on Haeckel's followers by Sandor Gliboff do refer to it at some length.
The first two historical essays are devoted to the prehistory of Haeckel's naturalistic monism and the official monist movement in German thought during the first half of the nineteenth century. Frederick Gregory's insightful essay examines philosophical positions from the post-Kantian German traditions of dialectical Idealism (Hegel), Romantic nature philosophy and immanent theology (Schelling and Schleiermacher), and post-Hegelian naturalism (Feuerbach and Strauss) as “proto-monisms” that sought to penetrate and make transparent the immanent unity of a world normally experienced within the frame of dualism, to ground experience in a cosmic order in which truth, value, and meaning emerge from within “nature” or “life,” and not in a transcending separation from it. The proto-monist affirmation of the unity of being and meaning, of matter and spirit, made it possible for monism to take on the character of a worldview or secular faith. Pursuing this idea, Nicolaas Rupke's chapter on “Alexander von Humboldt and Monism” describes the way in which Humboldt's Kosmos created a model for envisioning the world as an immanent structured unity in which the scientific transparency of the nature was articulated without transcendent reference and could thus be appropriated and popularized as a secular, anti-ecclesiastical worldview that legitimated a liberal/democratic national politics.
Two insightful and complex essays by Gauri Viswanathan (“Monism and Suffering: A Theosophical Perspective”) and Tracie Matysik (“Spinozist Monism: Perspectives from Within and Without the Monist Movement”) at the center of the collection examine the ways in which certain thinkers in the late-nineteenth century, who were themselves committed to the task of resolving the world's riddles without recourse to a transcendent power, developed a critical stance toward the perceived reductionism of Haeckel's mechanistic scientific naturalism and sought to develop monism as a worldview and as a philosophical position in ways that encompassed the reality of subjective agency. Viswanathan analyzes the ways in which theosophists such as Blavatsky, Besant, and Kingsford engaged the problem of suffering in a quest for an immanent foundation of normative value and historical meaning. Matysik moves from Wilhelm Dilthey's specific attempts to differentiate a vitalistic form of monism that built on the thought of Giordano Bruno from the alleged mechanistic materialism of Spinoza into a discussion of the ways in which vitalistic and mechanistic modes of thinking about totality shaped the history of modern German Spinozism itself. Concluding with a brief synopsis of opposing perspectives on the implications of Spinozist monism articulated in the wake of National Socialism by Max Horkheimer and Hans Blumenberg, she brilliantly unveils the ways in which historical appropriations of both strands of monism were susceptible to reductionist interpretations with totalitarian implications in response to the pressures of the sociopolitical crises between the world wars.
Essays by Sandor Gliboff and Paul Ziche continue the discussion of differing appropriations of Haeckel's monism, but from within the framework of the official monist movement itself, as Haeckel's students and followers worked through the implications of his mechanistic naturalism in the context of opposing monistic worldviews in the early-twentieth century. Gliboff's “Monism and Morphology at the turn of the Twentieth Century” argues that the work of Haeckel disciples such as Ludwig Plate, Richard Semon, and Paul Kammerer emphasized and defended the line Haeckel had drawn in evolutionary biology between “mechanistic, external causes of variation and internally generated, vitalistic, and teleological ones” (p. 153) and that their defense ultimately sustained not only a conception of immanent unity as a mechanical system of relations that were ultimately unpredictable and purposeless, but also a worldview that tied scientific monism to progressive social politics based on technocratic environmental manipulation. Ziche expands the discussion of post-Haeckelian scientific monism into attempts by individuals such as Wilhelm Ostwald to develop a unifying language, method, and conceptual structure that would articulate the immanent unity holding together the increasingly perspectival and functional diversity within the communal or “organic” relations of natural scientists, without imposing a reductionist foundationalism or creating a new functional specialization of scientific meta-reflection. The monistic conception of the philosophy of science, as articulated by Ostwald, Ziche contends, was conceived as an incorporation of philosophical meta-reflection on science not only into the work of each specialized scientist but also into the broader cultural debate about the immanent foundations of universal human value and cosmic meaning. Like Gliboff, Ziche suggestively portrays ways in which monism was integrated into major twentieth-century trends in scientific practice and the philosophy of science and not necessarily marginalized or repudiated as a form of secular religiosity that narrowed or distorted the evolution of natural scientific knowledge.
The final three essays are a bit anticlimactic. Focused on the popularization and instrumental ideological use of monistic conceptions in Anglo-American popular scientific culture, Soviet medical ethics, research, and practice, and the eugenics and racial hygiene pursued under National Socialism, the contributions by Peter Bowler, Igor Polanski, and Heiner Fangerau provide detailed descriptions and analyses of the ways in which the search for an immanent unity transparent to the scientific gaze, amenable to ideological use as a form of secular faith, and instrumentally valuable to justify social policies and practices that were designed to produce or impose collective identities led increasingly to a dilution and corruption of the term monism, to the point where it became an umbrella term that could justify almost any perspective—a protean and increasingly worthless, occasionally dangerous designator in the world of ideas. Even those contemporary thinkers who adhere to ontological monism (that is, to the belief that the dualities we experience in our existence as embodied subjective agents are ultimately irreducible forms of a single underlying substance) would hesitate to use the term to describe their perspective or worldview. The decision of the Buffalo Museum of Science to return “Transparent Man” to Dresden as a historically “tainted,” or at best easily misunderstood, image thus seems perfectly understandable.
