Monism: The evolution of a world-view in Germany from 1770 to 1930

The most salient characteristic of Spinoza's cosmology was its identification of “mind” with “matter” and “God” with “Nature,” for which reason Spinozism can be characterized as “dual-aspect monism” and distinguished both from “dualist” cosmologies and from one-sided or “single-aspect” monisms, whether idealist or materialist. From 1770 to 1930, dual-aspect monism has been adopted by many German poets and thinkers as an esthetically satisfying and morally acceptable, though not always explicitly morally justified world-view in accord with science. As they attempted to understand human beings as a part of the cosmos and as subject to its laws, the monists often risked robbing human beings of their self-respect as free spirits or as children of a transcendent Creator. A few of the most uncompromising German monists, above all the strident social Darwinist Ernst Haeckel, were only dimly aware of this problem and failed to solve it. Other monists, both before and after Haeckel, fared better and demonstrated the humanist potential of monism. Goethe, the young Schelling, and Gustav Theodor Fechner sought to avoid reducing human beings to mere “matter” by ascribing a greater role for Spinoza's “mind” throughout nature. The latter concept (called “Geist” or “Seele”) increasingly came to be understood, most explicitly in Fechner's “psycho-physical parallelism,” as the ability of a living thing to experience its own existence subjectively. Several German monists who were humanist egalitarians, above all Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche, recognized the threat that monism posed to traditional humanism, and they averted the threat by elevating their esteem for nature and by raising the status of animals and even plants from that of mere “things” to that of beings with feelings all their own. Additionally, the most ethically discerning monists used their cosmology to argue for a better understanding and more humane treatment of human sexuality, mental illness, and even criminal behavior as resulting from natural causes. Despite the unacceptable prejudices of the German monists of a century ago, and despite the advances in science that render their monist cosmology obsolete, the ecological and humanist insights of monism are arguably no less valid today than in Bölsche's time.