can’t see the forest

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I’ve revamped this essay, and I apologize for any inconvenience to those of you who’ve come by in the interim hoping to check it out. Please trust me that the original product . . . lacked panache. The discussion was framed in too-ambiguous terms, and was, in places, enthusiastically circular. To be searingly self-critical, reading that essay was rather like listening to a career sot casually babble himself to sleep.

And, while the perfectionist in me doesn’t like being pinned down to the finished product at any point ever, no way, no how, uh-uh, I feel that this new version is much more representative of my thought and substantially more deserving of your attention. So I’ll leave it, but with the contingency that I may make modifications to correct clumsiness as I spot it or as it is pointed out to me.

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ONTOLOGY WE DEFINE as the study of existence, the examination of our conceptions of what constitutes reality. To define reality, we will use any of various terms: the world, the Universe, etc. I want to consider two ways of looking at ontology and at the issues of ontological dualism and monism:

• Metaphysical - In this sense, we attempt to consider the nature of reality as a thing unto itself—that is, as something independent of our perception and cognition.
• Epistemological - From this posture, we explore reality in the context of our own knowledge of it, and as inseparable from our experience.

It’s appropriate to engage in a preliminary explication of what is meant by dualism and monism. These terms can be employed in any number of ways, so it is impossible for our discussion to have any meaning unless we are explicit about what these terms mean for our purposes:

• Dualism - By far the most prevalent ontology in contemporary thought, dualism (which, it is to be noted, is really just the simplest form of a more general ontology we might call pluralism) is the position that there is more than one kind of existence or existential substance. Dualism is most frequently entangled with conceptions of mind, i.e. mind-matter or mind-body dualism. To the dualist, mind is not the same thing as matter and cannot be reduced to matter. Cartesian dualism goes so far as to say that the ‘mental’ is a different type of substance than the ‘physical,’ but that both types of substance are more or less equally real (ontologically valid). Dualism is a necessary prerequisite to most conceptions of spirituality (spirit-material dualism). That is, for one to say that one believes in spirit, one must establish that spirit is real in the same or a similar sense that the material world is real. For this reason, one can see that dualism is extremely pervasive in human thought. Consider the concept of the supernatural, for instance. This is an embodiment of dualism in that it supposes there is an existence outside of the space and the rules of natural existence. Dualism, then, is really a given for those who espouse the necessity of an Aquinian “first cause.” Here we do not consider the dualism of opposites (good/evil, light/dark) because it seems so patently obvious that it is a cognitive construct of comparison that can say nothing about the nature of existence.
• Monism - Monism is the opposite view, the assertion that, by its very nature, the substance of existence is singular in quality. From this, any number of premises of varying extremity can be seen to follow—weak monism we might define as a sort of naturalism, the view that everything is a part of nature and that nothing is outside of it, while strong monism would hold that “all is one” and that there really are no fundamental material divisions, that the whole of the Universe is the only really existent, ontologically valid thing. It is this “strong monism” which I will propound and defend—the view that the Universe is really just one concrete object of tremendous, perhaps recursive complexity but with no genuine, extricable parts. To the logicians among us, that’s: ∃x(Cx & ∀y(Cy → y=x)), where C denotes the property of being an object, a concrete thing^[1]. Anaximander (likely the figure pictured here in Raphael’s School of Athens), a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and the teacher of Pythagoras, among others, is widely viewed as the father of monism in the Western tradition. Since virtually the whole of Western philosophical literature is in some measure descended from Aristotle’s later attempts at systematic categorization (his “causes,” etc.), one quickly finds that monism is not at all a popular view among “educated” or “traditional” philosophers. The literature is liberally sprinkled with references to monism as “indefensible garbage” or “summarily nonsensical.” And that ticks me off.

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