Monism

The philosophical positions that maintain that the universe is made up of a single substance (arché), cause or primary substance are called monism.

According to materialist monisms, everything is ultimately reduced to matter, while for spiritualists or idealists (especially Hegelian idealism), that unique principle would be spirit, and for pantheists it would be God himself. On the other hand, for non-dualist doctrines, such as advaita, which affirms the unity between souls (atman) and divinity (Brahman) , postulates that the cosmic consciousness in which this unity exists would be the "true substratum" of everything.

For ancient Hindu philosophers, what is observed by the senses and causal relationships are an illusion; there is only one reality: Brahman. Therefore, Brahman will be that first cause that explains the rest of the universe. For contemporary materialist monist philosophers, the matter formed in the Big Bang gave rise to the universe and only this matter explains reality.

Monistic philosophers are Thales of Miletus, Parmenides, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume and Marx.

Neutral monism is a philosophical theory that preaches that the basic substance is neither physical nor mental, but can be reduced to neutral matter whose nature would be neither physical nor mental. Neutral monism was introduced in the 17th century century by the Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza. At present a version of this theory has been developed by the American philosopher Donald Davidson.

Traditional materialism, a variety of monism, views primary substance as material and physical.

Idealism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that the basic principle of the universe is spiritual.

Monistic explanations

Monistic approaches, unlike dualists, consider that the human being is a single reality, that it is unitary, thus denying the existence of the mind as a reality other than the brain.

Materialistic Monism

Democritus (whose constitutive principle of the universe, or arche, was the atom) maintained that all reality is a material compound resulting from the union of atoms, and explained that both what is and what is not, the solid and the empty, they exist equally and one depending on the other. The human being is purely matter, and therefore there is no immortality of the soul. Democritus' materialism strengthened over the XVII centuries to the XIX and XX, through philosophers such as D´Holbach, Diderot and La Mettrie, who wrote Machine Man. For him, the soul is a material part of the body identified with the brain. Thus, we are very complex machines that do not need external direction (soul) to carry out their functions. The mechanistic materialism of La Mettrie was replaced in the 19th century by the dialectical materialism of Marx. Within materialistic monism, several positions such as behaviorism and physicalist reductionism are distinguished.

Spiritualist Monism

Opposed to the previous one, it affirms that everything that exists is perception. In Berkeley's words, "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived), that is, reality consists in perceiving or being perceived. So it does not make sense to affirm the independence of body or matter, since everything is perception.

As a particular example, we can take the Hegelian idealist monism that, based on the historicity of being, maintains that the being of objective reality is non-being: it only exists in an ideal way (in the sense that it only exists in the idea) and this is the reality. In turn, the permanent tension between being and non-being (in this case between the ideal and the real) is what gives rise to the dialectical development of the human spirit (in the German sense of the concept).

A concrete application of the analysis of the idealist dialectic is the case of the historical development of language, as a unit of language and speech. Here it is observed that language is ideal and general, while speech, its practice, is completely particular; furthermore: speech is a set of concrete realizations of its ideality. However, the tension between language and speech, as an example of being and non-being, leads to its historical development and transformation of both the ideality of language and the practice of speech. It is by following this pattern that we can understand the transformation from Latin to each of the Romance languages.

The Intermediate Monism

Spinoza (1632-1677) proposes a neutral solution. Spinoza does not admit the Cartesian dualism of the two substances (material and spiritual). For him, we are composed of a single substance that is God, of which we only know two attributes: extension and thought. They are two attributes of the same reality, so that intermediate monism considers that there is a single substance of which we only know two attributes. Then body and mind are two aspects of the same thing and, therefore, it is no longer necessary to raise the problem of their interaction.

Evolution of the term

As Max Kistler refers, proving the existence of mind is a challenge to monism. The most powerful dualism has been Cartesian, which has not been sufficiently saved and has led to the postulation of substances that are independent of each other, whether they are bodies without mind (res extensa) or minds without bodies (res cogitans).

Extreme forms of monism have led to logical behaviorism and psychophysical identity theory, both of which have been rejected. The first is that higher forms of behavior (eg language) are not reducible to behavior. The second, interposing the argument that it does not contemplate the qualitative nature of experience and consciousness, terms that today are very similar.

The current debate has shifted to testing not the thinking substance, but the mental properties.

Another form of extreme monism, eliminativism, attempts to prove that there are no mental properties. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism holds that every mental state is identical to a physical state. Epiphenomenalism has mental properties as a supervenience of underlying physical properties.

Finally, the most popular position is, according to Kistler, functionalism: a sort of dualism between mental and physical properties.

History

The term monism was introduced in the 18th century by Christian von Wolff in his work Logic (1728), to designate types of philosophical thought in which attempts were made to eliminate the dichotomy of body and mind and explain all phenomena by a unifying principle, or as manifestations of a single substance.

The mind-body problem in philosophy examines the relationship between mind and matter, and in particular the relationship between consciousness and the brain. The problem was addressed by René Descartes in the 17th century, resulting in Cartesian dualism, and by pre-Aristotelian philosophers, in Avicennan philosophy, and in earlier Asian and more specifically Indian traditions.

Later it was also applied to the theory of absolute identity expounded by Hegel and Schelling. From then on, the term was used more broadly to refer to any theory that posited a unifying principle. of dualism was also expanded, to include pluralism. According to Urmson, as a result of this widespread usage, the term is "systematically ambiguous".

According to Jonathan Schaffer, monism fell out of popularity due to the rise of analytic philosophy in the early 20th century, which rebelled against the neo-Hegelians. Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer, who were strong advocates of positivism, "ridiculed the whole thing as incoherent mysticism."

The mind-body problem has resurfaced in social psychology and related fields, with interest in mind-body interaction and the rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism in the identity thesis, a modern form of monism. Monism also remains relevant to the philosophy of mind, where various positions are advocated.

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