Dictionary

indifferentism en · NOUN

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Italic *n̥- Latin in- Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁ ▲ Proto-Indo-European *trísinflu. Proto-Indo-European *d(w)is- Proto-Italic *dis- Latin dis- Proto-Indo-European *bʰer- Proto-Indo-European *-eti Proto-Indo-European *bʰéreti Proto-Italic *ferō Latin ferō Latin differō Latin differēns Latin indifferēns Old French indifferent English indifferent Proto-Indo-European *-id- Proto-Indo-European *-yéti Proto-Indo-European *-idyéti Proto-Hellenic *-íd͏̌d͏̌ō Ancient Greek -ῐ́ζω (-ĭ́zō) Proto-Indo-European *-mos Proto-Indo-European *-mós Ancient Greek -μός (-mós) Ancient Greek -ισμός (-ismós)der. English -ism English indifferentism From indifferent + -ism.

Meanings

1. (uncountable, usually) The doctrine that all religions are equally valid.
   • The second class of parishioners were less Philistine, certainly, but even more hopeless from the parish priest’s point of view. In their luxurious houses they lived an easy, selfish, and sensual life, beyond his reach, surrounded by a wall of indifferentism, and contemptuous of all that was not tangible and material. 1904, Guy Thorne, chapter 2, in When It Was Dark, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, page 7:
   • To the pantheist or monist [mystical experiences] are experiences of the One, which is identical with himself, and which is probably the same in all religions and even in secular mysticism. In face of this easygoing tolerance or indifferentism it is perhaps not surprising that monotheists are often intolerant, believing that God has chosen them and by implication not others. 1976, Geoffrey Parrinder, chapter 3, in Mysticism in the World’s Religions, Oxford: Oneworld, published 1995, page 20:
2. (qualifier:more broadly, uncountable, usually) Relativism, agnosticism; apathy, indifference.
   • This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a motley costume, induced in him a Frenchified—but most un-French—cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. 1904, Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Part 2, Chapter Three:
   • A creature, so to speak, only half awake, or awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her books and tried to puzzle out her mathematical problems; and going through life by the side of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, in a kind of somnambulistic indifferentism, perhaps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless liberty, their inane lovers, their empty wholeness of life. 1884, Vernon Lee, chapter 5, in The Countess of Albany:
3. (countable, usually) An expression of such a doctrine or view.
   • Here and there you may still see a man—even a youth—with a single eyeglass, an elaborately bored and weary air, and a little stock of cynicisms and indifferentisms contrasting oddly with a mortal anxiety about his clothes. 1913, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, edited by Dan Laurence and Martin Quinn, Hard Times, London: Waverley edition, quoted in Shaw on Dickens, New York: Frederick Ungar, published 1984, introduction, page 34:
4. (uncountable, usually) The doctrine of absolute identity, i.e. that to be in thought and to exist are one and the same thing.

Forms

Relateds

indifferentist · indifferentistic

Translations (1)

pt indiferentismo (the doctrine that all religions are equally valid)