#monism

[rini-descartes]

“Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it is a state of vulnerability.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurthy

[alephskoteinos]

I'm curious. By the "late pagan" periods of Rome, Greece, and Egypt you start seeing a lot monistic and even quasi-monotheistic solar theology in a lot of places, so did Christian theology adapt that by identifying God with the sun or did they make the sun subordinate to God?

I will say though that, in the Greek Magical Papyri, there are spells or prayers on the one hand in which Helios could be identified with Iao, or on the other hand spells or prayers where Sabaoth or one of the other forms of the God of Judaism is placed above Helios or the sun.

[star-struck-sea-lestial]

hi!! this is my spiritual blog :) ˚˖𓍢ִִ໋🌊˚˖𓍢ִ✧˚. (〜^∇^)〜

i’m 19 years old and currently in college! life can get very busy but i am exploring the ways that i want to engage in my spiritual philosophies. i want to share the things that i learn with a community that welcomes things like polytheism (my version of it as time moves on) and brujería (latin witchcraft), and i am very excited to start crafting blogs for my practices. can’t wait to meet and learn from you all!!♡⁺. ༶ ⋆˙⊹_. ༶ ⋆˙⊹⁺♡🌅🌊🌲🪐

[ylespar]

"This issue leads us directly to touch upon a philosophic position known as 'dual-aspect monism' adopted first by Spinoza (see Ravven, 2013) as well as by Jung and Pauli many years ago (Atmanspacher, 2012), and recently re-proposed by Mark Solms and other neuro-psychoanalysts (Kaplan-Solms and Solms, 2000). According to such a view, the material and the subjective worlds are two complementary manifestations of a unique, albeit perhaps unknowable unitary reality, to which Jung refers with the concept of 'psychoid'. The presence of such underlying dimension has been widely underlined in Eastern cultural tradition, as well in some Western philosopher, such as A.N. Withehead (1929). In the 20th century, its existence was revealed by the study of quanto-mechanic processes in physics, and of unconscious processes in analytical psychology. Both disciplines recognized the influence of unobservable (paradoxical) phenomena within the normal flow of observable material and mental events."

Antonio Alcaro, Stefano Carta, and Jaak Panksepp, "The Affective Core of the Self: A Neuro-Archetypical Perspective on the Foundations of Human (and Animal) Subjectivity," p. 7.

[wisdomfish]

Naturalism

Naturalism is the belief system that regards the natural, material, and physical universe as the only reality. Nature is the whole show. This viewpoint is often characterized by corollary beliefs such as monism (all reality is one), materialism (reality is ultimately matter), antisupernaturalism (all supernatural explanations are to be rejected a priori), scientism (only the scientific method yields “truth”), and humanism (humanity is the ultimate outcome, hence “value”). According to naturalism, everything (things, people, and events) can be reduced to “matter in motion.” Everything is reducible to, or explained in terms of, certain fundamental natural phenomena (physics, chemistry, and biology). Carl Sagan expressed the position of strong naturalism in a famous statement in his television series Cosmos: “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”

~ Samples, Kenneth Richard. ‘Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions.; p. 195

[the-feminist-philosopher]

I've talked at length on here how trans-exclusionary movements are founded upon a sex-essentialist ideology. I want to discuss more about how they use ad naturam fallacies and equivocation fallacies to push their agenda.

Trans exclusionary activism is founded upon a sex-essentialist ideology where the definition of ‘woman’ is reducible to any number of essential biological attributes or characteristics like chromosomes, fecundity, gametes, or bone morphology, where the presence or absence of these 'essential' attributes defines a woman's "material condition."

Sex-essentialist rhetoric is predicated on "authenticity" morality where there exists a discrete sexed woman who is "authentic" and a "synthetic," "interloping" one who is not... Under their ideology, [trans people] are opposite the cissexual body, making them "violence" and "mutilation" as opposed to "holistic" and all-natural (no "plastic"). The mere existence of trans bodies is seen- by cis people- as a violation of an "authentic" body, sexuality, identity, and [even] spirit. They're "interlopers," wolves in sheep's clothing.

[F]or feminists like Wittig and Dworkin, the move to “root feminism in an inherent biological, psychological, or reified ontology” would be to endorse the very essentialism upon which the patriarchy was built. X

Their ideology depends non only on upholding this idea that there is a universally "correct" course of sex development, sex outcome, sex appearance, and sex combination, but it also depends on the use of an ad naturam fallacy. One of the ways this ad naturam fallacy manifests is through the way they talk about social constructs.

In anti-trans circles, there is this idea that what is not natural is not good. In the passage above, I discussed how "whole" or "holistic" cis bodies are constructed as morally good by contrasting them with "mutilated" or "synthetic" trans bodies. Most people can recognize this for the ad naturam fallacy it is. They also do this with social constructs. They often use "social" to mean "unnatural" and "biological" to mean "natural."

Their logic would look something similar to this:

If something is ~biological -> it is ~natural If something is ~natural -> it is ~true Thus. If something is ~biological -> it is ~true

This leads them to an ideological framework that holds: because a social construct is "not biological," it is thus "not natural" and thus "not true." They will try the inverse of this statement without realizing that 1.) an inverse is not logically equivalent to the original conditional proof, and 2.) they're not replacing "social construct" with anything in their inverse of the proof, leading to circular logic with "biology" being "biological" and thus natural and true.

My readers may recognize that humans are a social species and, as such, every interaction with other individuals and within groups is subject to social constructs. A social construct is not inherently bad because it is not created through some impartial or objective evolutionary process. Social society is tasked with analyzing the harms and benefits of a system and then deciding what society should do going forward in a way that eliminates or reduces any harm or damage done to a group of people. Social society determines whether something "should be" based on whether or not it has merits or does harm, not on whether it is most truthful or based on whether it is "natural."

Trans-exclusionary radicals believe that society's morals should instead be dictated by that which is "biologically true" or "ultimately true," something they perceive to be most-natural and thus "good," and also something they perceive to be knowable.

Those who are not trans-exclusionary monists will recognize that what we consider "biologically true" or "ultimately true" is shaped by the social, economic, political, and cultural conditions we live within. Readers might recognize that a determination of "what is reality" or "what is true" is knowable on the basis of experience rather than knowable independent of experience. Trans-exclusionaries seem to exclusively believe a "reality" is knowable independent of experience- like through theoretical deduction, making them capable of being "experts" on other people's lived realities through "theory" (see this post for an example). Readers might also recognize that consciousness is a by-product of biochemistry and that human biochemistry is influenced by the environment a human has lived in. While- yes- humans perceive the world through senses, that sensory input is interpreted individually by the human brain, a brain shaped by sociopolitical and economic conditions. Trans-exclusionary radicals instead see humans as nothing more than their biochemistry or biology, often independent from the environment which shapes it. They believe the human body exists outside a meaning-making process in that they don't believe we interpret ourselves and others subjectively and through the lens of our "material reality" (see this post and this post for examples).

They forget that humans are shaped by their environment, whether it be the colors people can physically see or how people's brains handle stress. That environment *is* created by social, economic, political, and cultural conditions. These sociopolitical conditions are what Marxists & leftists refer to as an individual's "material conditions" or "material reality," leading me to my next critique: their use of equivocation fallacies for the word "material."

For the trans-exclusionary, "material" refers to features of a distinct and discrete sex caste constructed by essential corporeal attributes. They use "material" exclusively to mean "corporeal," "biological," or "physical."

For context:

Material monism-- sometimes referred to as materialism or physicalism-- is the idea that everything is "matter" and everything is physical. "Physical" or "material" under this philosophy refers to things relating to the body or relating to things perceived through the senses. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, was a materialist (and, yes, also a Marxist, but monism and Marxism are not one and the same), as exemplified in one of her famous quotes:

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other. Inasmuch as he exists for himself, the child would not grasp himself as sexually differentiated. For girls and boys, the body is first the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that brings about the comprehension of the world: they apprehend the universe through their eyes and hands, and not through their sexual parts."

Modern trans-exclusionary movements have forgotten that the "material" referred to in "material conditions" in Marxism and the "material" referred to in "material monism" in Physicalism do not mean the exact same thing. There is a crucial distinction.

One refers to the sociopolitical conditions that create an individual's lived reality- the one perceptible to them via their senses- and the other *only* refers to that which is corporeal and can be perceived through the senses. This leads to a frequent equivocation on the meaning of "material" in anti-trans arguments and, most crucially, has led to a false assumption that there is room for transphobia in any Marxist philosophy. Are there materialist principles in Marxism? Yes. Is materialism or monism Marxist? No.

This leads to anti-trans radicals believing that they are "Marxists" despite 1.) their ideology having no roots in Marxism (see: Devra Weber's, "the radical feminists were opposed to patriarchy, but not necessarily capitalism."), and 2.) them not supporting or upholding any explicitly Marxist principles (see this post for a breakdown). It also leads to an ideology-wide assumption that "material reality" refers to the corporal being the ultimate reality. That's why when anyone critiques anti-trans ideologies, they get hundreds of broken records saying the exact same thing: "vaginas are real" or "sex is real" or "gametes are real." This leaves many feminists and LGBTQ+ rights activists scratching their heads and saying, "Well, yeah, vaginas exist. Saying that a woman's material reality is constructed by sociopolitical conditions is not saying there's no such thing as a vagina." Saying that "the ability to have kids or the ability to produce ova or the ability to menstruate or the presence of a uterus does not define womanhood" is not saying that uteri are mythical or fabled or "make-belief" organs. Saying- as Simone de Beauvoir did- that it is society; it is patriarchal social constructs, that define "female" and socialize us to see ourselves as inherently sexually discrete, sexually self-evident, sexually immutable, and sexually differentiated is not saying that a vagina is a mythical organ and thus the social institutions the patriarchy has created around the presence or absence of one don't exist.

But because they equivocate on the meaning of "material" in "material reality" and "material monism," they believe that "material reality" refers to the corporeal ("biological") being what is ultimately true and perceptible (by the senses). What's nice about this- for them- is that it confirms for them their ideological beliefs founded on ad naturam fallacies. It also factors into the sex-essentialist foundations of their beliefs. For them, "material" in "material condition" refers to those things which are corporeal- like bone morphology- rather than the Marxist principle. So, to them, a woman's condition in society is a result of what they consider the "natural," the corporeal, leading me- once again- to that thread with trans-exclusionary @/greenwave and my largest philosophical question:

If our sexes are self-evident, and if our separation is self-evident, and if this separation and differentiation and the conscious recognition of there being two sexed castes is as old as our species, then how does one fight against patriarchal institutions which base their legitimacy in the 'naturalness' of our divisions and justify oppression with 'bio-logics'? How does the idea that "sex is immutable" and "there are two discrete sexes" (meaning: separate and distinct) meaningfully challenge the patriarchy? How does defining women as ova producers and offspring bearers (i.e., *the* definition of female: the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs) meaningfully challenge the patriarchy's insistence on defining "woman" as a biological caste subordinated by the ability to produce ova and bear offspring?

Sexist oppression is sex-based, right? Right. So, how do you challenge systems justified by the supposed discretion of sex without critically analyzing how sex is defined? How do you fight sex-based oppression when it is exactly the thing you fight for- the discretion of sex- that is used to justify keeping men as men and keeping women segregated from them? If sex, if the "natural," creates oppression, and if oppression is found in sex itself, then how does one combat the idea that our hierarchies and sex relations are found outside social constructs (outside society) and are found in the "natural?" If the bodily oppression of women is created by the "natural," how does one combat the idea that the bodily oppression of female people is natural?

Related to this is their equivocation on "class." As they assume they're Marxists, these anti-trans activists assume they're fighting to define "woman" as a class. They ignore that, in Marxism, a "class" is not something so strictly defined, especially by "essential" and "biological" attributes. They seek not class consciousness but to reinforce the bounds of "male/man" and "female/woman" as laid out by the patriarchy.

They use "class" similarly to "classification" or "caste." They use "class" as if it is an inherited social rank or position in society rather than a relationship between groups with competing interests in relation to the mode of production, as Marxists would. In Marxism, a class is permeable and can be made and remade between any two groups with competing interests. You need to work to define "woman" as a "caste," but you don't need to put work in to define "woman" as a class. "Woman" becomes a class as soon as there is an "other" with a competing interest in relation to the mode of production. This is why Marxist feminism focuses on principles such as "domestic slavery," the "double burden," women's unwaged labor, a woman's requirement to fill the role of the emotional laborer, a woman's alienation from her reproductive labor, and the invisible nature of women in the labor market and "women's work." Marxist feminism does *not* focus on an inherent biological existence, becoming, or reality (ontology). Marxist feminism also does not define "class" through any biological ontology.

Think of that Simone de Beauvoir quote again: "Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other" and "it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch."

And I cannot entirely fault them for their equivocation on this word as the colloquial use of "class" is quite broad. They're very fond of simple dictionary definitions (they help avoid larger philosophical thoughts or challenges to their worldview). So, when they look up "class" in a standard dictionary and see "a set or category of things having some property or attribute in common and differentiated from others by kind," they have found a definition that can be used to argue for their sex-essentialist worldview. Meanwhile, they ignore how "class" is not exclusively defined as a category differentiated through essential attributes. "Class" is also defined as "a system of ordering a society in which people are divided into sets based on perceived status." That second definition more closely reflects the Marxist idea of "class," while the first definition more accurately defines "caste" (any group of people who are perceived as a distinct, hereditary class; the system of dividing society into hereditary groups).

Readers may be thinking that "caste" sounds a lot like the system we have right now, where "female" and "male" are considered distinct social groups which one inherits at birth through any of a number of genetic or biological attributes. They'd be correct. As I've said before, and I'll say again: "The patriarchy has long sought to define women as a discrete biological caste subordinated by the ability to produce ova and bear offspring; as 'females.'"

[poimandresnous]

Monistic polytheism

This is essentially my beliefs. To make this more clear let’s define Monism & polytheism separately and then see if we can’t merge the two and find examples of this kind of system in history.

Monism is essentially, according to Wikipedia has two definitions—The wide definition: a philosophy is monistic if it postulates unity of the origin of all things; all existing things return to a source that is distinct from them.The restricted definition: this requires not only unity of origin but also unity of substance and essence. We see all through your Gnostic, hermetic, Neoplatonic literature that this monad is Unfathomable, incomprehensible. Keep this in mind.

With this in mind let’s look at polytheism. Wikipedia defines polytheism as follows: “Polytheism is the belief in multiple deities, which are usually assembled into a pantheon of gods and goddesses, along with their own religious sects and rituals.”

Now I’m aware of all the stigmas that come with being a monist polytheist. “You’re a soft polytheist” or I’m just using a “back door to monotheism”

I don’t believe all the gods are just mere archetypes. They are real. They manifest themselves in our mundane lives everyday, and as well in dreams and meditative states. So they are a little of both in my opinion but they are definitely REAL. They are gods after all.

So if everything is a product of the Nous like we see in hermeticism, if everything, including the gods come from “one thing” how is that not a soft polytheistic view? Your free to see it as that but I truly do not.

The idea is that we are mere fractals of the one Source, I call it the Monad—the Monad in the way that the Gnostics understood the Monad, but our gods and goddess are not “degraded” from their remoteness from the Monad as we see in classic Gnostic dogma. I despise the terms “demiurge and archons”

The gods and goddesses are fractals. A fractal is a never ending pattern. This in turn allows me for a very animistic view of the world.

In conclusion my monistic polytheistic setup is that I believe all the gods across the cultures are real. We see similar Deities who, are the same but because they manifest themselves to the respective culture, they are very different deities. See Jörd and Gaia for example. They are fractals (this includes angels and demons, humans, rocks, animals/fish) of this Monad I crave oneness with. How can be one with something that is indescribable and Unfathomable to the human mind? The gods and goddesses are precisely how I achieve this Oneness.

[red-day-of-rest]

Solipsism is just Monism's edgy self-insert oc.

[andromeduss]

Reality is composed of mathematical energy: analytic sine and cosine waves. These are the basic units of thought; hence a universe of sinusoidal waves is a thinking, mental, purposeful, meaningful, striving, evolving universe, seeking to optimize and perfect itself.

[iisthepopeoffools]

On A New Approach to Absurdism

Existence can be described as absurd in more ways than one. No matter how much we try, we cannot discern the nature of the world, for our own reason and minds cannot possibly comprehend the full extent of existence. In addition, our reasoning is a cycle of circles. We take certain beliefs as given and then build on them, bias our reasoning to what we want to believe, etc. Any debate about things can be won not by truth but by skill at rhetoric - ultimately there is no grounds to believe we are capable of discerning truth outside of our own perspectives and biases.

Furthermore, any quest for meaning in our lives seems to come up empty. Everything we strive for ultimately crumbles to dust - life follows no grand plan or idealistic pattern that can be seen without heavy use of confirmation bias. Life is full of suffering that seems to only happen because that is how life happened to develop. However, we still need the feeling of our works being meaningful - we strive for meaning in a world that does not show any - or, to put it another way, we have both the desire for meaning and the capacity to see that whatever meaning we give existence falls apart under inspection.

With this contradiction, several stances have been suggested. The first, suggested as a solution to the absurd by accepting that there is no point in living, is suicide. Very few people take this as a serious solution, with it being floated more as a potential implication of the absurd that has to be countered somehow. Suffice it to say, that there is no point in dying either under the absurd and that, due to the irreversible nature of such a situation, and how much it goes against the intuitions of most people, I would not recommend this as a solution, situations of dying with dignity or dying rather than submitting to bondage aside.

A second solution, is to take a “leap of faith” - to choose to believe that there is somehow a higher meaning and to participate in that - which would necessitate either not questioning what makes that higher meaning meaningful or moving the goalposts on that question. While this may serve to provide a sense of security, it also requires greatly forcing the world we observe to fit a box it doesn’t fit - which is both a denial of its incomprehensible sublimeness and likely to backfire when some inconvenient fact arises to undercut the certainties we’ve built our worldview around - as well as leading us to ignore all of what we perceive that doesn’t fit into that worldview or trying to distort it to make it fit.

The third solution is to embracee the meaningless of life but to live in spite of it - to rebel against the absurd by living fully by embracing freedom to act as one will and to live freely (despite free will being an illusion) and fully knowing it is meaningless but refusing to accept it. However, this option is based on the idea of the individual in opposition to the external and separate world - when the individual seems to just be the product of the world (or, from a more subjective view, there is no objective distinction between “me” and “not-me”) in a complex web of relations. The world seems to be a single substance when it comes to how much everything is interconnected, with people just being fluctuations within that substance - or the whole world could be viewed as an extension of the self - and it seems equally absurd to rebel against one’s own substance.

A fourth view is to maintain a sense of detached irony to the absurd - if there is a conflict between things mattering to us and things not mattering objectively, that can be solved by not having things matter to us. This is an ultimate extension of life-denying philosophy - it rejects the passions and inevitable interrelatedness we have for the sake of shielding ourselves from existential crisis by separating ourselves from the world we intimately interact with.

A fifth view is to remain ignorant of the whole issue - after all, awareness of the absurd seems to serve mainly to torment us and all non-human animals and most humans live their lives perfectly fine without concerning themselves with the ultimate meaningless of life. However, this does not seem to work for those already aware of the absurd. You might distract from something you know, but you can’t exactly will yourself into forgetting it.

So, what is then a solution to the absurd? Well, all of the above solutions could still work for people depending on what they value, but I like to come up with something new that I call harmonic absurdism - one that combines the best of many approaches. And that is to embrace life - to embrace one’s drives as existing for their own sake, not despite the world but as part of the world - to embrace one’s role in a network of connections - not in the sense of a divine or natural law but in the sense of a network of drives and relations - to live for living, with the only justification being that it is how circumstances have driven us to live and want to live, and distract from impractical crises that have no bearing on one’s lived experience, instead focusing on practical provisional truths, but to remain aware that the world is far more than what can be comprehended, while living a truth based on one’s experiences and relations and using models that work adequately but not being restricted by them or believing them to be gospel.

This solution allows the use of models to process information and manage terror without being blinded by making them gospel. It allows a way to embrace living without viewing oneself as a lone individual in opposition to existence, but as part of its great web. It embraces one’s connection with life rather than seeking to detach from it. And it provides a way to distract from existential terror with actual practical matters while not necessitating a lack of learning. And it provides a reason not to commit suicide - the drive to live and live as one is driven to is enough reason to do so.

[fieriframes]

[Monism or complete idealism invalidates all science.]

[mysticmarian]

[calling-abraxas]

Hegel's Closed Dialectics and Marx's Open Monism

Hegel writes, “What is rational is real; and what is real is rational”1, to which François Laruelle responds: “The real is communicational, the communicational is real”2, but why? Why this distinction? Is it a distinction? What’s at stake? In other words, what’s the difference between saying that something’s “rational” and that it’s “communicational?” Because Hegel wrote in the Enlightenment, or…

[limerenceobject]

from: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg6DGhPuRKe/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

[turiyatitta]

“Beyond the realms of oneness and separateness lies a profound truth – a state that simply ‘is’, unbound by definitions and untouched by the illusions of dualistic thought.”