Abstract
Depending on the definition of the word, monism has been around for some time. If we define monism as the theory that all spirit and matter are united in a single original substance, we are reminded of Spinoza and even of Eastern thought. The heritage of monism, then, lies deep in the past. Still, monism is most commonly encountered as a phenomenon of the later nineteenth century. It is usually associated with Ernst Haeckel, since it was from his General Morphology and the Natural History of Creation that the word came into general parlance.1
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Notes
Haeckel was clear about his sources for the notion—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and August Schleicher. It was Schleicher’s use of the term that influenced Haeckel to adopt it. See Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 125–126.
Cf. Tilman Matthias Schröder, Naturwissenschaften und Protestantismus im deutschen Kaiserreich: Die Versammlungen der Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte und ihre Bedeutung für die Evangelische Theologie (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008), 408, n. 112; Horst Robert Balz, Gerhard Krause, and Gerhard Müller, eds. Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 23 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1994), 213.
Otto Liebmann, “Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 37 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1894), 566–567.
Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Ambrosius Barth, 1816), 33. The German is “In Ansehung des Wesens der Dinge [wird Dogmatismus] Dualismus oder Monismus, und der letzte entweder positive und negative zugleich Materialismus oder Spiritualismus, oder positive allein, das Absoluteidentitätsystem.” The English translation used in the OED citatation comes from the 5th ed. of 1829, which had been edited after Tennemann’s death. The above section is quite different there with an even more ambiguous meaning. See Manual of the History of Philosophy, trans. Arthur Johnson (Oxford: Talboys, 1832), 34.
Decades later, in 1841, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV called Schelling to Berlin from Munich in conjunction with his vision to revitalize the cultural life of Prussia on the grounds of a “Christian-German” cultural consciousness grounded in a “historical principle.” The king and his ministers believed they could bring about a cultural reformation of religious, ethical, and political life through a renewal of Germany’s intellectual heritage; specifically, they proposed that the historical experience citizens shared so defined them as Germans that a philosophical exposition of this historical shared memory could be used both to counter the dangerous philosophical ideas of left-wing Hegelians like David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach then circulating and to provide the foundation for cultural renewal. To accomplish these goals, they brought Schelling to Berlin because they had become aware that he had moved away from his earlier pantheistic philosophy to one more recognizably Christian and based on Revelation. These ideas of the later Schelling, then, contrasted both with those of his youth and with the nascent monism of Strauss and Feuerbach, who are discussed in the chapter. For a treatment of the call of Schelling to Berlin and the larger movement of cultural reformation of which his call was part, see John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Friedrich Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1988), 41.
Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper Torchbook Edition, 1960), 316.
Todd Weir, “The Secular beyond: Free Religious Dissent and Debates Over the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Church History, 77(September 2008), 652.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965), 22. Kant’s discussion of Copernicus comes in the preface to the second edition of the Critique.
Gerald Holton, The Advancement of Science and Its Burdens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 25.
Jakob Moleschott, Ursache und Wirkung in der Lehre vom Leben (Giessen: Emil Roth, 1867), 8.
Ralph C. S. Walker, The Coherence Theory of Truth: Realism, Antirealism, Idealism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2.
Cf. Kant’s Prolegommena zu jeder künftigen Metaphysik, in the Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV (Berlin: Reimer, 1911), 306.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Sämtliche Werke, 2nd ed., eds. Wilhelm Bolin and Friedrich Jodl, 10 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag, 1904), II, 271. The scientific materialist Ludwig Büchner later declared that it was knowledge, not ignorance, that was the goal of science. He called the back-to-Kant movement of his day “the saddest testimonium paupertatis that modern philosophy could give itself” and declared that truth had never failed to be of service to humanity. Cf. his Aus Natur und Wissenschaft: Studien, Kritiken und Abhandlungen in allgemeinen Darstellung, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Leipzig: Theodor Thomas, 1884), 252. Cf. also Büchner’s Im Dienst der Wahrheit: Ausgewählte Aufsätze aus Natur und Wissenschaft (Giessen: Emil Roth, 1900), 268 and Über religiöse und wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung: Ein historisch-kritischer Versuch (Leipzig: Lenz, 1887), 65.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, vol. 2, part 1, Schleiermachers System als Philosophie, ed. Martin Redeker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966), 451.
Schleiermacher credits a follower of Schelling, Henrik Steffens (1773–1845), with helping him to see that Schelling’s “Naturphilosophie” could play a major role in grounding ethics. Cf. Ueli Hasler, Beherrschte Nature: Die Anpassung der Theologie an die bürgerliche Naturauffassung im 19. Jahrhundert (Bern: Peter Lang, 1982), 73.
For Schleiermacher’s thoughts on the relationship between nature, natural science, and morality, see the English translation of his ethical writings in Robert B. Louden, ed., Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, trans. Louise Adley Huish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151–162.
Humphry Davy, Consolations in Travel: The Last Days of a Philosopher (London: Murray, 1830), 219. Cited in David Knight, “Higher Pantheism,” Zygon, 35 (September, 2000), 606.
On Tyndal’s pantheism, see Knight, “Higher Pantheism,” 609ff.; on John Nichol, see David Knight, “The Spiritual in the Material,” in R. M. Brain, R. S. Cohen, and O. Knudson, eds., Hans Christian Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 420.
Schelling, Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus (Hamburg: Perthes, 1798). The relationship between Ørsted’s embrace of Naturphilosophie and his natural science, for example, his discovery of electromagnetism, is summarized in my Natural Science in Western History (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2007), 331–334.
I have not found an English translation of the exchange between Gruntvig and Ørsted, but the account and quotation (p. 58) may be found in the translators introduction of a work by Hal Koch, Gruntvig, trans. L. Jones (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1952), ix, xii. Cf. also
Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1848), ix.
David Friedrich Strauss, Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft dargestellt, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Osiander, 1840–1841), I, 681–686.
David Friedrich Strauss, Der Alte und der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntniss (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872), 5–6.
“Éin Nachwort als Vorwort,” 255–278 in Der Alte und der Neue Glaube, 4th ed. (1872), in Eduard Zeller, ed., Gesammelte Schriften von David Friedrich Strauss (Bonn: Verlag von Emil Strauss, 1877), vol. 6, see esp. 268.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “David Friedrich Strauss as Confessor and Writer,” 3–55 in Untimely Meditations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), see esp. 8–9, 27.
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Gregory, F. (2012). Proto-Monism in German Philosophy, Theology, and Science, 1800–1845. In: Weir, T.H. (eds) Monism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011749_2
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