Monism

Monism occupies a charged and contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, appearing less as a settled metaphysical doctrine than as a psychological tendency whose consequences demand scrutiny. Jung identifies monism explicitly as a ‘universal psychological tendency’ — a disposition to seek a single, unifying principle — and diagnoses it as the structural error underlying therapeutic impasses when one pole of psychic life is permitted to eclipse its opposite. Hillman extends this critique by aligning monism with monotheistic psychology’s drive toward unity, wholeness, and systemic coherence, arguing that such ‘fundamental monism’ suppresses the irreducible plurality of archetypal life. Corbin, engaging Ibn ‘Arabi, distinguishes sharply between the philosophical monism required as a transcendental schema for meditating unio mystica and the cruder ‘existential monism’ that would collapse the dialogical structure of divine-human relation; he further warns that Western philosophical monism and abstract monotheism share a common totalitarian drift incompatible with theophanic plurality. Seaford situates early Greek material monism within the monetisation of archaic society, tracing the emergence of logical over material monism from Parmenides as a solution to the contradictions of reducing the manifold to one of its physical components. Across these voices, monism is simultaneously a cognitive temptation, a metaphysical research programme, and — when applied uncritically to psychic life — a source of pathological one-sidedness.

In the library 13 passages

The disposition to do this is encouraged by the monistic tendency, which everywhere and always looks for a unique principle. Monism, in so far as it is a universal psychological tendency, is a characteristic peculiarity of the manner of feeling and think

Jung identifies monism as a pan-human psychological disposition to seek a single governing principle, diagnosing it as the root error that permits either the collective or individual pole of the psyche to exclude the other.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1953thesis

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we should lose sight of this essential bi-unity by reducing the doctrine of Ibn ‘Arabi purely and simply to what is known to us elsewhere as philosophical monism, or by confusing it with an existential monism of mystic experience.

Corbin argues that Ibn ‘Arabi’s theosophy is irreducible to either philosophical or experiential monism because it preserves an essential dialogical bi-unity between worshiper and worshiped that monism would dissolve.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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neither the abstract monotheism of the orthodox Islamic theologians nor what in the Western history of philosophy is commonly termed monism. Abstract monotheism and monism, which is its secularization as social philosophy, reveal a common totalitarian trend

Corbin links philosophical monism to abstract monotheism as twin expressions of a totalitarian tendency, contrasting both with Ibn ‘Arabi’s theophanic pluralism that requires diversity for the self-manifestation of the One.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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Ibn ‘Arabī rejects all perception of the waḥdat wujūdīya in this world (and consequently rejects all ‘existential’ monism). To his mind it is an absurdity to say that the servant, in a state of fonā’, has become God (Ḥaqq), since ‘becoming’ (sayrūra) postulates duality and duality excludes unity.

Corbin demonstrates that Ibn ‘Arabi grounds his rejection of experiential monism in logical necessity: any act of becoming or perceiving presupposes duality, rendering existential union with the One a philosophical absurdity.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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if there is any justification for speaking of monism here, it is in the sense of a philosophical monism formulating the transcendental condition of being, and only because this philosophical monism is precisely the necessary schema in which to meditate unio mystica and unio sympathetica, that is to say, the fundamentally dialogical situation.

Corbin concedes a limited legitimacy to the term ‘monism’ when understood as a transcendental schema enabling meditation on mystical union, precisely because it preserves rather than abolishes the dialogical structure of that union.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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Organicism, holism, unified-field theory, monistic materialism, and other psychologies express their fundamental monism through insistence upon clarity, cohesion, or wholes.

Hillman identifies monism as the tacit metaphysical commitment underlying dominant psychological paradigms — including organicism and holism — arguing that their insistence on unity forecloses the archetypal plurality that soul-life requires.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

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Monism and dualism share the same cosmos. The fantasy of polytheism permits no single one to be elevated to The One in a literalistic manner.

Hillman argues that monism and dualism are structural complements within the same metaphysical universe, whereas polytheistic imagination dissolves the problem by refusing any single principle’s absolute sovereignty.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

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a consistently monistic representation of reality cannot be attained on the basis of reducing the manifold to one of its components. From this it follows that in order to arrive at a truly monistic conception, the higher unity of things should be conceived as a logical and not a physical unity.

Seaford traces the internal logic by which Presocratic material monism gives way to Parmenidean logical monism, showing that the failure of physical reduction necessitates a conceptual rather than material account of unity.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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there is indeed, if our argument is correct, an explanation of the sixth-century adoption of monism – in the monetisation that Stokes fails to see at the heart of the economic change that he reluctantly abandons as an explanation.

Seaford proposes that the historical adoption of monism by early Greek philosophers is explicable through the social process of monetisation, which generated the cognitive conditions for imagining a single substance underlying all things.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Eucleides was receptive to Eleatic monism because he too, like Parmenides, was living in a recently monetised society. The unitary value of money, which persists through its transformation into different things, was a factor in his refocusing of monism from being onto value.

Seaford argues that Eucleides’ appropriation of Eleatic monism reflects his monetised social context, and that his redirection of monistic inquiry from ontology to value anticipates Platonic synthesis.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still to-day) that unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left

James identifies the monistic view’s central apologetic claim — that security and guarantee require an all-inclusive unity — while simultaneously entertaining polytheistic alternatives that the facts of religious experience do not exclude.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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The greater the fragmentation the greater is the peril — and the attractiveness — of some monistic organization of study or devotion.

Miller observes that psychic and social fragmentation paradoxically intensifies the appeal of monistic organisation, framing monism as a compensatory temptation within pluralistic modernity.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974aside

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Monotheistic psychology counters what it must see as disintegration and breakdown with archetypal images of order (mandalas). Unity compensates plurality.

Hillman identifies the compensatory logic of monotheistic — implicitly monistic — psychology: it responds to plural fragmentation by imposing unifying images, a move he contrasts with polytheistic psychology’s capacity to meet plurality in its own idiom.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989aside

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