1 Question
Let’s stand back from the material of the course so far to gain some general perspective. What’s the broader issue?
I want to propose that the broader issue is not just a crisis of subjectivity, a set of questions about ‘who’ we (as humans) are, or who I am—questions that nevertheless emerge with pointed uncertainty in the modern era—but a crisis in how we can map our individual experiences to a world—to a world that is objective, out there, and that is also shared with others.
Here’s what, in other words, I think joins the (intensity, violence, and philosophical uncertainty of the) colonial experience with the early modern ‘introspection obsession’, as it were: that uncertainty about the self is uncertainty about how to bridge the gap between experience and the world. Imperialist expansion results in encountering new people, new cultures, entirely new ways of conceiving of what it means to be human, what the world is; and this fundamental novelty challenges how Europeans understand themselves as humans, and also challenges how Europeans understand the world as a shared object of understanding.
The pressing question is thus not only, What does it mean to be a subject? but, How do I infer knowledge about the (shared, objective) world from my (private, subjective) experience?
2 Background
Like Dasein in Heidegger, there is a more precise sense in which we are not actually monads, but your best way into reading the Principles and the Monadology is just to assume that monads are humans; that you are a monad.
Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German philosopher as well as a mathematician, scientist, etc.
3 Monad, substance, actuality
What is a monad? A monad is a simple substance. A simple substance is a substance that has no parts. “Substance” is a traditional philosophical term of art. It means, let’s just say, the same as “thing.”
There is an Aristotelian background, not only to the concept of substance, but to the particular set of associations and equivalences that Leibniz takes for granted. Chief among these is the idea that substances are not only “capable of action,” as Leibniz says up front, but essentially active.
Aristotle’s question in the Metaphysics is what makes something what it is. And the short version of his answer is that everything (every substance) has a characteristic sort of task or action, and doing or carrying this out is what makes it what it is. Doing what it is that makes something what it is, is what Aristotle calls the actuality (entelekheia) of a thing.
If you begin from this background claim, that first sentence should make sense: that “a substance is a being capable of action.”
For Aristotle, moreover, the relative simplicity or compositeness of a thing is a measure of its metaphysical priority. What does that mean? It means that things composed of other things can’t exist without (are metaphysically posterior to) the things from which they are composed; so that simple things (which are not composed of other things; that’s what makes them “simple”) are more metaphysically basic and fundamental than compound things, which depend on or derive from them.
Interest in what is ‘metaphysically prior’ depends on the argument that:
- compound things exist owing to or as effects of the existence of simple things, so that:
- an account of the simple things from which compound things are derived suffices as an account of compound things, and
- all things are compound or simple, so
- an account of simple things suffices as an account of all things (all beings)
Metaphysics—a theory of reality—is thus entirely contained in a theory of simple substances.
In Leibniz, a monadology (a study of monads, which are simple substances) is metaphysics.
There is one further ingredient in §1, but we’ll come back to it. First let’s summarize what’s going on in the following §2.
4 §§2–4
Monads are without beginning or end and do not change, for all of these imply and require having parts, which monads don’t have. Moreover, monads don’t have shape (don’t have beginnings or ends in space either), because they don’t have parts, and shapes have parts.
The difference(s) between two monads cannot therefore be measured by any external means (by space or time). Their differences must be internal then. Of course these internal differences cannot have parts (so they cannot be like internal organs or body parts).
I think in lieu of the language of perception, we might think of a monad as having a number (like the center of a circle: an infinite number) of indices or points of reference in relation to the things outside it. These aren’t points of contact (for touch implies compositeness, parts, etc.). Instead they are like bare representations or reflections of the relation between monad and world.
Although monads don’t come into existence and so on, Leibniz allows that they may undergo modifications; they do this in the form of perception and appetite, which also happen to be, he claims, “the principles of change,” the basic constituents of the possibility of change.
This basic picture gets sketched in this passage from §3 highlighted on p. 2.
A monad is the center of a being, with an associated body making up the rest of that thing. “Each distinct simple substance or mand . . . makes up the center of a composite substance (an animal, for example) and is the principle of its unity, [and] is surrounded by a mass composed of an infinity of other monads, which constitute the body belonging to this central monad” (p. 2).
4.1 ‘Fullness’ and ‘life’
The two claims missing from Leibniz’s introductory characterization have to do with the ‘fullness’ of nature and the specific fact that nature is full of life.
- Leibniz at the beginning of §3 claims: “Everything is full in nature” (p. 2). This means: Everything is either a composite substance or a simple substance; the former are full of the latter, indeed an infinite number of them.
- At the beginning of §4 Leibniz adds: “Each monad, together with a particular body, makes up a living substance” (p. 2; my emphasis).
We might also note that simple susbtances come in three sorts: “lives, souls, and minds” (§1), and that the second two presuppose the first.
And all of this, finally, I’m mentioning in order to explain the last section of §1. Let’s now read that first section on p. 1 in its entirety.
5 Perception, appetition, and harmony
Leibniz has simple substances perceiving. That seems weird. A simple substance has no parts. How does it perceive? The clue to answering this has to do with understanding that “the representation of the composite” (p. 1), Leibniz’s definition of perception, could only be accomplished by a simple substance. We think of perceptions as having many parts, and they do, but they are functions of a unified consciousness. A composite thing would not be capable of a perception of a composite thing, because it is a composite; it could be capable of many simple perceptions, that is, as many simple perceptions as there are parts to the composite. (Here note that perceptions would be activities of simple substances.)
Sequences of perceptions are governed by “appetition,” which Leibniz defines as “a tendency to go from one perception to another” (p. 1). One way of thinking about this would be to think of how seeing something (perceiving) gives rise to a particular sort of thought or memory (also perceiving). This sequence is governed entirely by the monad.
“Appetites” are like desires; they have an intentional structure; they project some good. Thus sequences of perceptions are governed by this intentional structure, which is teleological. When we say that appetites are ‘teleological’, we mean that they have an ‘. . . in order to . . . ‘-like structure. When we appeal to an appetite to explain something we do or did, we appeal to to it as the purpose or goal served by that action. This sort of causality is also called final because the purpose or goal of an action is sometimes called its end.
Outside of us “external phenomena arise from one another by the laws of efficient causes” (p. 2). Efficient causality differs from final causality. Efficient causality is billiard ball causality, which works as it were directly on an object. You could also think of efficient causality as simply physical causality, the sort of causal relation physical things have to another: One thing pushes another, and the other is pushed.
Now, consider a relatively simple instance of perception and a ‘corresponding’ physical event. I see a hammer, pick it up because I want to drive a nail into something; I swing it, hit the nail with its head, and indeed everything goes to plan. (In addition to doing it, I also watch it unfold.) Here you have a sort of ‘marriage’ of the intentional or final causality in me and the efficient causality of hammer, nail, and wood. How is it possible for these to ‘get along’ in the way that they do? You could see this moreover as structurally the same as the question: How do my mind and my body (since my body is a physical thing, governed by the mechanical laws of nature) work together?
Leibniz’s answer, which he presents here more or less as a bald conclusion, is that there must be a “pre-established harmony” between the two.
Let’s look at this green passage on p. 2.