The riddle of Monism

 

“Monism as Connecting Religion and Science” is an 1892 article by Ernst Haeckel, the controversial German evolutionist and scientist. I admit that it didn´t clarify as much as I hoped! Is Monism really just materialism under a fancier designation, complete with quasi-religious terminology? To make its mass appeal easier, perhaps? Or is it actually a covert form of panpsychism and pantheism?

The religious terminology is immediately obvious. Haeckel talks about “scientific articles of faith”, he says that the human soul is part of a “world-soul” (albeit in quotation marks), that the one fundamental law that makes the universe move and evolve could be called “God”, and denies being a “materialist” (apparently a frequent theological reproach against his Systeme). In a footnote, he refers to the ether as “God the Creator”. While admitting that there is no individual immortality in his worldview, he points out that some religions don´t believe in that either, specifically early Buddhism and ditto Judaism. Besides, matter and energy are immortal and will always take new forms. But is all this just exotic rhetoric from a materialist too drunk on Goethe? Or does it mean something? At one point, Haeckel does call his worldview “pantheistic”, but it´s possible that the term had a different connotation in 19^th century Germany than it has today. Mabe “pantheism” was just another fancy term for (de facto) materialism (and another theological reproach), while today, I would rather suspect a self-professed pantheist to be into something like Theosophy! Madame Blavatsky, as is well known, constantly dunked on Haeckel…

Most of the speech sounds materialist enough. Everything evolves from simple, non-conscious, and material beginnings. Human consciousness is a product of the brain and its ganglia. No immortal soul exists, nor do ghost, spirits or gods. Humans and non-human animals are only quantitatively different, indeed, Haeckel explicitly rejects anthropocentrism and regards Darwin as the Copernicus of biology. He criticizes teleological reasoning and final causes. The only “dualism” permissible is the dualism between the luminous ether and mass-atoms, and even this dualism will probably be resolved one day by science in favor of strict monism, with the ether being the primordial substance everything is ultimately made of. The ether has something to do with light and electricity. Indeed, Haeckel likes the ether precisely because it would do away with all spooky action at a distance (in contrast to, say, empty space being somehow fundamental).

And yet, at the very end of the article – when rejecting the label “materialism” – Haeckel actually says the following: “Our conception of Monism, or the unity-philosophy, on the contrary, is clear and unambiguous; for it an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as a dead, spiritless material; the two are inseparably combined in every atom. The opposed conception of dualism (or even pluralism in other anti-monistic systems) regards spirit and material,  energy and matter, as two essentially different substances; but not a single empirical proof can be adduced to show that either of these can exist or become perceptible to us by itself alone”.

But what is this if not actual pantheism or panpsychism? The key words being that an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as dead spiritless matter, the two being inseparable “in every atom”. This sounds more like Whitehead´s later process philosophy. Or indeed some forms of occultism.

What is the solution to the riddle of Ernst Haeckel?