Ever since Socrates and Plato, the philosophy of the absolute had held sway-the emphasis on essence at the expense of concrete appearance, the insistence on a coherent universe, abstract, timeless, finished, enclosed in its totality. own thinking led him to renounce monistic idealism and the intellectualization of all "truth." Going against the grain of entrenched philosophy. He honors the human experience of manyness and disconnection (and various kinds of unity) in the world of flux and sensation, a world that is discounted scornfully by the monists.