Monadology

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The Monadology (Monadologie, 1714) is one of Gottfried Leibniz’s works that best define his philosophy. Written toward the end of his life in order to support a metaphysics of simple substances, the Monadology is thus about formal atoms which are not physical but metaphysical.

Contents

[edit] Ground

The rational ground given by Leibniz to the monads in his works is quintuple:

  1. Mathematical, through infinitesimal calculus and its antiatomistic conclusions (against materialists like Epicurus, Lucretius and Gassendi).
  2. Physical, through the living forces theory and its implicit criticism to Cartesian dynamics, whose experimental errors were shown by Leibniz himself.
  3. Metaphysical, through the principle of sufficient reason, which, like Ockham’s Razor, cannot be infinitely multiplied and needs a start in every action.
  4. Psychological, through postulation of innate ideas, especially in the New Essays on Human Understanding, which inspired Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
  5. Biological, through the theory of preformation or encasement of the bodies and its functional subdivision in its organic development.

[edit] Text

The Monadology is written in short logical paragraphs, generally following each one from the previous, completing a number of ninety. Its name is due to the fact that Leibniz, imitating Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno and Anne Conway, wanted to keep together the meanings of “monas” (in Greek, “unity”) and “logos” (“treatise” or “science”, literally "word" or "speech"). Therefore, the Monadology came to be the monad’s treatise or the science of the unity.

The text is reasoned in a dialectical way, facing questions and problems that help the reader to advance in his learning. Thus, for instance, it can be accepted that composed bodies are something derived, extended, phenomenical or repeated according to simple substances (which will be later expressed by Kant in his dichotomy phenomena-noumena). Is the soul a monad? If the answer is affirmative, then the soul is a simple substance. If it is an aggregate of matter, then it cannot be a monad.

[edit] What is a monad?

Monads are non-extended, soul-like, metaphysical simples. Everything material that exists, according to Leibniz, is composed entirely of monads. These monads have no causal relationship to one another, or to any other monads, and are moved about (and appear to affect each other) through what Leibniz called pre-established harmony. In other words, without God overseeing and directing every action of every monad, the entire universe would fall apart.

Our souls are of a special kind of monad, termed dominant, or rational, monads. These dominant monads give us consciousness, which is a reflection on what happens to us, and which Leibniz terms apperception. All other simple monads have two basic qualities, appetite and perception, while some monads also have memory.

Monads are eternal, having existed since God created each one, indestructible, and immutable.

[edit] Controversy in Rationalism

When it was written, the Monadology tried to put an end from a monist point of view (but rejecting Spinoza’s panpsychism) to the main question of what is reality, and particularly to the problem of communication of substances, both studied by Descartes. Thus, Leibniz offered a new solution to mind and matter interaction by means of a pre-established harmony; in other words, he drew the relationship between “the kingdom of final causes”, or teleological ones, and “the kingdom of efficient causes”, or mechanical ones, which was not causal, but synchronous. So, monads and matter are only apparently linked, and there is not even any communication between different monads, as far as they act according to their degree of distinction only, as they were influenced by bodies, and vice versa.

Leibniz fought against the Cartesian dualist system in his Monadology and tried to surpass it through a metaphysical system considered at the same time monist (since only the unextended is substantial) and pluralist (as far as substances are disseminated in the world in an infinite number). For that reason the monad is an irreductible force, which makes possible for the bodies to have the characteristics of inerty and impenetrability, and which contains in itself the source of all its actions. Monads are the first elements of every composed thing.

[edit] Paradoxes

Monads are matter, since they are everywhere, and there is no extension without monads. They are, then, the plenum, that is to say, the condition of an infinitely dense universe, but nevertheless they are unextended. However, this doesn’t mean that they lack of any function (as far as they project and reflect force), matter (since they come with it) or that they are extended (considering that they don’t interact with anything in the world).

Extended matter would be the impenetrable quality of the unextended—the monad, without any doors or windows—as passively transmitted according to movements which, together with perception and apperception, compose action. In spite of that, monad cannot remain placed in matter, which follows the monad itself, previously to the generation of matter in time. So, extension and monads coexist acausally by the means of a timeless creation, although they are reciprocally binded according to the appearances.

In brief, Leibniz states that matter is extended, but not only extended. It is, in addition, formed by unextended monads. Then, is matter both extended and unextended? No, accepting that, as far as monad constitutes matter, matter is nothing in itself, as an isolated being.

[edit] Philosophical conclusions

This theory leads to:

1. Idealism, since it denies things in themselves (besides of monads) and multiplies them in different points of view. Monads are “perpetual living mirrors of the universe”.

2. Metaphysical optimism, through the principle of sufficient reason, developed as follows:

a) Everything exists according to a reason (by the axiom "Nothing arises from nothing");

b) Everything which exists has a sufficient reason to exist;

c) Everything which exists is better than anything non-existent (by the first point: since it is more rational, it also has more reality), and, consequently, it is the best possible being in the best of all possible worlds (by the axiom: "That which contains more reality is better than that which contains less reality").

The “best of possible worlds”, then, is that “containing the greatest variety of phenomena from the smallest amount of principles”.

3. Justification of free will, through pre-established harmony. This refutes fatalism of efficient or geometrical causes (Spinoza), by separating between predetermination (since everything has a reason to be) and necessity (since everything could have been in a totally different way in the infinity of possible worlds).

[edit] External links

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