Concept

Priority Monism

Intro

Priority monism is the view that the whole universe comes first and its parts come second. There really are many things, such as atoms, trees and people. But only one of them is basic: the cosmos itself. Everything else is a piece of that whole and depends on it, the way a slice depends on the cake rather than the cake on the slice.

The leading defender is the philosopher Jonathan Schaffer, who argues partly from quantum physics, where linked particles behave as one system that cannot be split into separate pieces. For the believer, the view raises a sharp question. If the universe is one fundamental whole, is that the end of explanation, or does the whole itself need a cause?

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In full

Priority monism is the thesis that exactly one concrete object is fundamental, the cosmos, and that every other concrete object exists derivatively, as a dependent part of it. It is equivalent to the classical doctrine that the whole is prior to its proper parts. Its rival is priority pluralism, the more common modern view that many concrete objects (for example, fundamental particles) are basic and wholes are built from them.

The view's leading contemporary statement is Jonathan Schaffer, "Monism: The Priority of the Whole" (Philosophical Review 119, 2010, 31-76). Schaffer frames the debate in terms of metaphysical grounding: the question is not how many things exist, but which things are fundamental and which depend on them.

For the theist, priority monism is both an ally and a rival. It is an ally because it treats the unity of the world as a real, positive fact rather than an illusion. It is a rival because it can be offered as the final stopping point of explanation: the cosmos is fundamental, so there is nothing more basic to appeal to.

Two kinds of monism

View	Claim	Counts	Leading defenders
Existence monism	Exactly one concrete object exists	Every concrete thing	Terence Horgan and Matjaž Potrč
Priority monism	Many concrete objects exist, but exactly one is fundamental	Only the basic things	Jonathan Schaffer
Priority pluralism	Many concrete objects exist, and many are fundamental	Only the basic things	Most contemporary metaphysicians

Existence monism. Terence Horgan and Matjaž Potrč, Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology (MIT Press, 2008), defend "blobjectivism": the only concrete particular is the whole cosmos, "the blobject," which has vast spatiotemporal variety but no genuine proper parts. Ordinary talk of tables and mountains can still be true, they argue, because truth is semantic correctness under contextual standards, not a one-to-one match with objects.
Priority monism. Schaffer keeps the parts. Tables, mountains and electrons exist. They are simply not basic. The cosmos is.
History. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on monism, written by Schaffer, lists Parmenides, Melissus, Baruch Spinoza and F. H. Bradley as candidate existence monists, and Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Spinoza, Hegel, Lotze, Royce, Bosanquet and Bradley among historical priority monists. The entry treats several of these attributions as controversial.

The arguments for priority monism

The argument from entanglement. Quantum entangled systems have states that do not factor into the states of their parts, so the whole carries information that no list of the parts' intrinsic states contains. If a whole has such emergent properties, it is prior to its parts. Because the contents of the observable universe interacted in its hot early state, Schaffer suggests the cosmos may be one entangled system, and so prior to everything in it. The last step is a philosophical extrapolation, not a measurement.
The argument from common sense, reconsidered. Common sense treats the parts of a mere heap as prior to the heap, but treats a genuine unity (an organism, a work of art) as prior to its parts. Schaffer argues that common sense is more nuanced than pluralists assume, and that it leans weakly toward treating the world as a genuine unity.
The argument from gunk. If it is possible for matter to be divisible without end, with no smallest parts, then in such a world there are no ultimate parts to be fundamental. Only the whole could be basic. Schaffer argues this possibility favours monism as a general thesis about fundamentality.
Internal relatedness and nomic integrity. In "The Internal Relatedness of All Things" (Mind 119, 2010), Schaffer argues that if all things are internally related, so that the parts cannot be freely recombined, the whole is prior. He also argues that the fundamental laws govern the evolution of the cosmos as a whole, which suggests the cosmos is the one basic object.
Common-ground holism. Jenann Ismael and Jonathan Schaffer, "Quantum Holism: Nonseparability as Common Ground" (Synthese 197, 2020), argue that the best explanation of nonseparable quantum correlations is a "common ground," modelled on common-cause explanation: the correlated systems are partial aspects of a more unified underlying reality.

The main objections from within philosophy

Entanglement as a relation. The pluralist can treat entanglement as a fundamental relation between particles rather than an emergent property of the whole. Schaffer replies that this requires irreducible relations with many places, or relations between particles and composite systems, which brings non-fundamental wholes back into the fundamental level.
Heterogeneity. If fundamental things must be uniform, the obviously varied cosmos cannot be fundamental. Monists answer that variety can be modelled with distributional properties, which describe how a single thing is varied across its extent.
Intrinsic properties. Theodore Sider argues that a good account of intrinsic properties requires fundamental parts, which priority monism denies.
Island universes. Sam Baron and Jonathan Tallant argue that the possibility of causally isolated "island universes" counts against the claim that the cosmos is the only thing whose evolution the basic laws govern.
Status. Priority monism remains a minority view. Schaffer's own Stanford Encyclopedia entry on monism concludes that none of the arguments on either side is clearly decisive, so the view deserves serious reconsideration rather than acceptance by default.

Christian assessment

Where the theist agrees. The world's unity is real. Physics finds a cosmos whose parts are bound together more deeply than classical atomism supposed, and Scripture describes exactly such a cosmos, held together in the Son:

and he is before all things, and in him all things consist. (Colossians 1:17, ASV)

The theist has no stake in priority pluralism. Whether the parts or the whole come first within creation is a question inside the created order.
Fundamental is not the same as self-explaining. Priority monism is a claim about which concrete object is basic relative to the others. It does not say the cosmos explains its own existence. A fundamental object can still be contingent, and a contingent thing still invites the question of why it exists. Priority monism therefore answers "what is the most basic part of the world?" without answering "why is there a world?" See Contingency Argument and Principle of Sufficient Reason.
The brute-whole objection. The strongest rival use of the view is to say the cosmos is fundamental and its existence is a brute fact. The theist replies that this stops inquiry at exactly the point where the question becomes most pressing. Inside physics, Ismael and Schaffer themselves explain correlated parts by a common ground. Asking what grounds the whole applies the same rule one level up. See The Unbroken Whole Argument and Causal Principle.
Is the whole necessary? If the cosmos were a necessary being, it could end the regress. But the cosmos has specific laws, constants and an initial state that physics measures rather than derives, and consistent models with different ones are studied routinely. A necessary cosmos would owe an account of why its arbitrary-looking features could not have been otherwise. The theist posits instead a necessary being who is not a concrete physical whole. See Necessary vs Contingent Being and Third Way - Contingency.
The pantheist temptation. A fundamental, necessary whole is close to Baruch Spinoza's God-or-Nature. The theist distinguishes the world, which is unified and dependent, from its Creator, who sustains it without being a part of it or identical to it:

for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain even of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. (Acts 17:28, ASV)

See Pantheism, Panentheism and Divine Conservationism.
Honest limits. Priority monism is not an argument for God, and the theist should not claim Schaffer's support for theistic conclusions he does not draw. What the view contributes is a respectable, secular case that the world's unity is a positive fact needing to be taken seriously. Whether that fact is brute or grounded is the question the cosmological arguments answer.

Where the codex uses this rival

The Unbroken Whole Argument uses priority monism as support for its premise that the whole is unified, and steel-mans the brute-whole reading as its main rival.
Meta-Ontological Argument for Theism and Meta-Ontology draw on Schaffer's grounding framework.
One and the Many Problem sets the ancient debate between unity and plurality to which priority monism is a modern answer.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

Terence E. Horgan and Matjaž Potrč, Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology (The MIT Press, 2008). doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262083768.001.0001
Jenann Ismael and Jonathan Schaffer, "Quantum holism: nonseparability as common ground," Synthese 197 (2020). doi:10.1007/s11229-016-1201-2
J. Schaffer, "The Internal Relatedness of All Things," Mind 119 (2010). doi:10.1093/mind/fzq033
Jonathan Schaffer, "Monism: The Priority of the Whole," The Philosophical Review 119 (2010). doi:10.1215/00318108-2009-025

Common questions this page answers

Q: What is priority monism?

Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the one fundamental concrete object and that all its parts, from particles to people, exist derivatively as parts of it. Its leading defender is Jonathan Schaffer, in "Monism: The Priority of the Whole" (2010).

Q: What is the difference between existence monism and priority monism?

Existence monism says only one concrete thing exists at all; Horgan and Potrč call it "the blobject." Priority monism says many things exist but only one, the cosmos, is fundamental. The first denies that the parts exist; the second says they exist but depend on the whole.

Q: How does quantum entanglement support priority monism?

Entangled systems have states that cannot be broken down into the states of their parts, so the whole has features the parts lack. Schaffer argues that since everything interacted in the early universe, the cosmos may be one entangled system and therefore prior to its parts. That extension from local systems to the whole cosmos is a philosophical inference, not a measured result.

Q: Does priority monism make God unnecessary?

Not by itself. Priority monism says which object within the world is basic. It does not say the world explains its own existence. If the cosmos is contingent, it still needs an explanation outside itself, which is where the contingency arguments for God begin.

Q: Is priority monism the same as pantheism?

No. Priority monism is a thesis about the structure of the physical world and says nothing about divinity. It would move toward Spinoza's pantheism only if the cosmos were also claimed to be necessary and self-explaining. Christian theism holds that the world is unified but dependent, sustained by a Creator who is distinct from it.