In the above passage William James is basically summing up his argument for pluralism over monistic idealism, and I find it pretty convincing. To put it very simply, I think James’ pluralism is the most logical, common sense position to take since pluralism doesn’t deny the possibility of unity, but simply denies that things are necessarily unified.
I’ve been thinking about this more recently since I just began reading Deepak Chopra’s new book in my book group. I’ve never read him before but I did know coming in (from watching interviews and such) that Chopra was heavily influenced by various Eastern non-dual esoteric traditions; which is cool, I generally like esotericism. But wow, I didn’t realize just how much of a straight up open anti-real, monistic, subjective idealist he is. We were not even through the intro and I started to get the same “hold on a second” feelings I get when I read elminativist, physicalist, monistic, scientific materialist accounts. Both monistic materialism and monistic idealism are reductionistic in the sense that they each, in the end, want to collapse and negate very particular modes of existence. Both monistic materialism and monistic idealism owe their mistakes to dualism, I think, and they both end up denying us intuition and common sense. Monistic materialism denies us our basic instinct that life is purposive, and ends up claiming that our inner worlds are merely just secondary illusions that must be overcome to get to “objective truth.” Monistic idealism, on the other hand, denies that physical reality (again, something that is obvious to our experience) is fundamental and collapses it into the subjective; in the most extreme cases truth is hidden and only accessible by a special few (e.g. folks who are awesome at meditation, like Deepak).
Anyway, I think Deepak Chopra’s engagement with physical science can be a good thing in that it may help to balance out that monistic materialism a bit (I do know he drives scientific materialists crazy, and I think that’s great!); I’ll definitely give him a fair reading. That doesn’t mean that my panexperientialst, pluralist, organic realist sensibilities won’t be tingling like crazy, though…
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