Monadology

What Is A Monad? Leibniz’s Monadology

John C. Brady

Leibniz’s Monadology is a wild text. Famously in it he argues that everything is monads, more or less. But what does that mean? I want to here trace a line through the text and hopefully make things a bit clearer, and also try to illustrate some of the awesome weirdness that Leibniz courageously dives into. These aims will, understandably, occasionally be at odds with one another.

First off, Leibniz gives the name ‘monad’ to an absolutely simple substance. These absolutely simple substances must exist, because composite things exist. If we grant the existence of some composite thing — water molecules built of hydrogen and oxygen, for example — then we also grant the existence of the simpler elements of which the composite is composed (hydrogen and oxygen in our example) even if we can doubt that these ‘pieces’ may ever occur in isolation from the composite. Now, when we break a composite into its constituent parts, we can ask of those parts whether they are composite or simple. If composite we repeat the procedure, until we get to something absolutely simple — i.e., possessing no constituent parts. Leibniz calls this simple stuff ‘monads’.

The next step is to see what we can infer about the features of these newly titled monads just based on their absolute simplicity. If we’ve been following the above argument with an image of some fundamental teeny-tiny ‘grain’ of matter at the root of all composite things we’ll be here frustrated, because monads cannot have any shape, and thus have no size, teeny-tiny or otherwise. Why? If a monad had a shape (which it would need to have in order for it to have a relative size to other shaped things) then it would, by rights, have constituent parts — a ‘left half’ and a ‘right half’, for example, or a ‘surface’ and an ‘inside’. The problem is not that a thing with a shape is always in fact divisible into components, because this is not true, but rather that it is de jure divisible into components, and thus we can entertain the idea of ‘half a monad’ which contradicts the idea we started out with: absolute simplicity.

We should get the direction right here. It’s not Leibniz is arguing there are these monad things, and they are all such-and-such, it’s rather that the argument goes ‘there has to be something absolutely simple, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything composite’ and in line with this absolute simplicity we argue that if some fundamental particle is offered up as the most basic constituent of everything, if that particle has some shape, then we can ask that: within the confines of its shape, what’s that stuff that it’s ‘filled up’ with? What’s the ‘particle juice’ the form of the particle encloses? And of this ‘particle juice’, what is its structure such that we can explain its possibilities, of what constituents is it composed? The name ‘monad’ Leibniz gives to wherever this game ends, where no further questions can be raised concerning composition, his wager is this will not happen until we have gone ‘beyond’ any possible talk of shape, and thus size, because as long as we have some shape, we can always ask ‘yeah, but what’s it made of?’.

[Laird]

The Monadology sounds quite a bit more fascinating, and perhaps more sensible, than it originally seemed to me.

This seems to be an English translation of the work itself. It's not all that long. I'll try to read it before continuing our conversation in the other thread.

The Monadology sounds quite a bit more fascinating, and perhaps more sensible, than it originally seemed to me.

This seems to be an English translation of the work itself. It's not all that long. I'll try to read it before continuing our conversation in the other thread.

Yeah at first it seemed absolutely bonkers. Why bother with the claims like this ->

From this it is evident that there is a world of created things — living things, animals, entelechies, souls — in the least part of matter.

Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each limb of an animal, each drop of its humours, is also such a garden or such a pond.
And although the earth and the air interspersed between the plants in the garden, or the water interspersed between the fish in the pond, are not themselves plant or fish, yet they still contain them, though more often than not of a subtlety imperceptible to us.

Thus there is nothing uncultivated, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusions, except in appearance. This is somewhat like what is apparent with a pond viewed from a distance, in which we see a confused motion and swarming of the pond’s fish without making out the fish themselves. (§66–§69)

But now I see Leibniz's issue was that any extended thing would, in his view, be infinitely divisible until you reach something "simple" which cannot have any size.

It would be even worse if the reductionist scientific image was that of particles, because for each particle its causal dependency would rely on some parts within it that are smaller. [Which, if you have an infinite "vertical" dependency, means no change can ever get started.]

However I'm not sure if the problem still holds if we consider particles as emergent - in the "weak" philosophical sense - from fields...Though this make it seem as if a fundamental Wholeness would have to underlie extension?

[Laird]

Yeah at first it seemed absolutely bonkers.

I still suspect that it is! I am yet to investigate fully though, and it is in any case very interesting even if it is a work of fiction masquerading as metaphysics (so to speak).

Though this make it seem as if a fundamental Wholeness would have to underlie extension?

That's at least a more appealing idea than endlessly yet-smaller particles.

That's at least a more appealing idea than endlessly yet-smaller particles.

Yeah it seems Leibniz felt this had to be the case because everything in the seemingly extended third party consensus was to him infinitely divisible, AND that our perception of these divisible objects was really made from the blurry-in-some-sense perception of an infinite number of Monads.

What's interesting to me is Leibniz seems to have started with the idea of a simple - as in noncomposite - substance and then realized that minds were what he was looking for?

I don't know that's the truth of it given his religiosity he prolly needed to find a place for immortal souls, though nevertheless Persons as Monad are a powerful argument for Personal Survival.

If we have all that is extended arising and seemingly divisible actually made from Fields it does seem like we get something that is simple but also - at least potentially - infinitely large. I still think Persons are Monads because their nature as immaterial and simple holds but it does lend potential credence to Sheldrake's idea of Minds as fields.

Or, as Attanasio writes, the corporeal body being within the "Cosmic Immensity" of one's soul...

From Reddit:

Leibniz: Why don't individual substances interact causally?

User "SomeIrishGuy":

    So if we were to somehow have a complete list (impossible given that it would be infinite) of the properties of any given object (i.e. monad) we would also have a complete understanding of the entirety of the universe. Each Monad contains a complete reflection of all the other Monads.

    One problem that occurs with this metaphysical picture is the following. Consider:

 1. The ball was tossed into the air by SomeIrishGuy (i.e. "The ball" has the property of "being tossed into the air by SomeIrishGuy")

    and

    2. SomeIrishGuy tossed the ball into the air (i.e. "SomeIrishGuy" has the property of "having tossed the ball into the air").

    The first of these statements declares that some particular Monad has a particular property (Fa). The other statement declares that some OTHER Monad has some OTHER particular property (Gb). And so the truth of these two statements (counter-intuitively) does not appear to have any necessary connection. Could one be true without the other? We would seem to want to say that the truth of one guarantees the truth of the other. But the metaphysical picture painted by Leibniz does not at this point provide us with such a guarantee. Which is why Leibniz introduces the concept of the pre-established harmony. God is ultimately the guarantor in this situation (and all other such situations). The illustrative metaphor frequently used here is two clocks striking 12 at the same moment. Absent and understanding of the operation of clocks, on regularly observing such an event we might naively assume that one clock must have caused the other to have chimed. But we know that the synchronicity is not a result of causality (nor indeed of coincidence) but rather a result of the skill of a clockmaker. In the case of Monads, God is the ultimate clockmaker who established this pre-existing harmony that ensures the individual Monads are in sync without any necessity (or mechanism) of interaction.

[Laird]

After reading through The Monadology itself a couple of times, taking notes, I've come to the conclusion that it's not, in fact, a type of idealism. Bear in mind though that all of this is strictly from reading the text itself. Leibniz might have written other things elsewhere that would affect this reading.

In any case, there are two main reasons for my conclusion:

Firstly, its Monads are the simple substances out of which composites are formed, and these composites seem to be matter, in a basically physical sense. It is hard to see what else they could be, especially given my second reason for concluding that this isn't idealism:

The Monadology never explicitly rejects the physical, but rather more or less explicitly affirms it in a variety of ways. The word "matter" appears in the sense of "physical stuff" nine times (in #61, #62, #65, #66, #67, #71, and #80). Bodies and organs in the physical sense are referred to many times (in #14, #25, #36, #42, #61, #62, #63, #64, #70, #71, #72, #73, #74, #78, #79, #80, #81, and #89). Twice, both matter and bodies are said to be infinitely subdivided (#36 and #65). Space (the plenum) is referred to three times (in #8, #61, and #62).

In none of this is it qualified that by matter, bodies, organs, divisibility, and space are meant "merely as they appear to a mind"; rather, a realism about them is implied.

For example, we have: "all is a plenum (and thus all matter is connected together) and in the plenum every motion has an effect upon distant bodies in proportion to their distance" (#61).

For another example, we have: "nature has given heightened perceptions to animals, from the care she has taken to provide them with organs, which collect numerous rays of light, or numerous undulations of the air, in order, by uniting them, to make them have greater effect. [...] [T]hat which takes place in the soul represents what happens in the bodily organs." (#25)

Moreover, The Monadology appears to affirm a sort of dualism between body and soul (#63, #70, #78, and #80):

"The body belonging to a Monad (which is its entelechy or its soul) constitutes along with the entelechy what may be called a living being, and along with the soul what is called an animal." (#63).

and

"Hence it appears that each living body has a dominant entelechy, which in an animal is the soul; but the members of this living body are full of other living beings, plants, animals, each of which has also its dominant entelechy or soul." (#70).

and

"These principles have given me a way of explaining naturally the union or rather the mutual agreement [conformité] of the soul and the organic body. The soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws; and they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe." (#78).

The clincher against an interpretation of Monadism as idealistic for me is the last of those four references to dualism:

"Descartes recognized that souls cannot impart any force to bodies, because there is always the same quantity of force in matter. Nevertheless he was of opinion that the soul could change the direction of bodies. But that is because in his time it was not known that there is a law of nature which affirms also the conservation of the same total direction in matter. Had Descartes noticed this he would have come upon my system of pre-established harmony." (#80).

Here we see that the idea of pre-established harmony seems to be motivated by an affirmation of the causal closure of the physical. By strong implication, then, the physical is being conceived of as in a meaningful sense really existent, not merely mind-dependent.

It might be counter-argued that dualism is explicitly rejected in the form of "the Scholastic prejudice of souls entirely separate [from bodies]" (#14), as well as physicalism via the mill analogy (#17), and therefore that idealism is the most likely remaining alternative. It seems to me though that despite a rejection of Scholastic dualism, another form of dualism is affirmed, in which souls are not totally distinct from their bodies in that both are either Monads themselves (the souls) or are composed of Monads (the bodies).

This brings me to what I see as a fatal problem with Monadism: given that Monads are extensionless (#3), they could not - as essentially point-like - fill up the plenum of space, nor even comprise a body: no matter how many points - even an infinity - you fill a space with, their total volume - and thus their perceptibility to the visual senses - will be zero. Likewise, no matter how many points you assemble, you cannot construct a body.

A closely-related fatal problem is that, logically, no point can touch another - no matter how close they are to each other, unless co-located, an infinity of points can be placed between any two points - yet bodies are said to be "in contact with" each other (#61). By rights, a monadic causality must be based on forces at a distance, yet there is no mention of such forces in The Monadology.

John C. Brady in the article you shared a link to in the opening post seems to read The Monadology differently. He writes that "Monads don’t interact, nor do they have shapes, so they are not little atom things flying around in space-time. However, they are ordered: each monad perceives all of the others, which it represents in its states."

This seems to be a more idealistic reading in which there is no real matter other than as perceived by the Monads, which are ordered but not physically existent in space-time. I am not sure how to square this with my own reading though; nor am I able to square my reading with his fair point that Monads don't interact, such that it's unclear how they could be atoms of matter flying around in space-time. I put this confusion down to a lack of clarity in Leibniz's writing. To me, it is not clear quite what he thinks matter is, nor how it relates to Monads.

Derivative of this confusion is that, despite the quotes I shared above, it is also not clear to me how Leibniz thinks the soul relates to the body.

John C. Brady's interpretation such that a Monad can be something like an elbow only adds to this confusion. An elbow is not a simple substance but a compound one, whereas a Monad is a simple substance.

Finally, in the other thread I raised the issue of free will, so here are the arguments for and against The Monadology itself being compatible with free will now that I've read it:

Arguments for an interpretation of Monadism incompatible with free will:

• That it affirms not just Monads as automata (#18), and not just bodies as automata (#64), but the entirety of God's creation as a machine that He invented (#84).
  
• That it apparently commits to full predictability of both past and future given full knowledge of the present (#61): "every body feels the effect of all that takes place in the universe, so that he who sees all might read in each what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened or shall happen, observing in the present that which is far off as well in time as in place" (#61).
  
• That it affirms that Monads cannot affect one another directly (#51), yet that all remain in pre-established harmony with one another (#78 and #59; arguably also #56 and #57) despite changing internally (#10 and #11).
  
• That it affirms that God chose the best possible universe from the infinite possible universes (#53).
  

Arguments for an interpretation of Monadism compatible with free will:

• That it references rewards and punishments (#88, #89, and #90), including reference to "sin" being deserving of punishment (#89), which seem compatible with free will: why would one punish a mere automaton? Perhaps this is a Calvinist approach, by which God elects in advance who will be saved and who damned, which would make Monadism incompatible with free will after all.
  

Because I don't see Monadism as idealistic, I suggest that it is not relevant to the other thread, and that we discuss it here rather than there, switching to a discussion of a "pure" pluralistic idealism there.

After reading through The Monadology itself a couple of times, taking notes, I've come to the conclusion that it's not, in fact, a type of idealism. Bear in mind though that all of this is strictly from reading the text itself. Leibniz might have written other things elsewhere that would affect this reading.
...

Because I don't see Monadism as idealistic, I suggest that it is not relevant to the other thread, and that we discuss it here rather than there, switching to a discussion of a "pure" pluralistic idealism there.

Hmmm I would agree it was not necessarily Leibniz's intention to say Monadism is an Idealism, however it still seems to me that it is an ontology/metaphysics that is what I'd call "Person-Only".

I also don't know if Leibniz wanted Monads to be a sort of Dualism, but even there it seems he would want them to remain "simple" in the sense that they don't have internal parts whether those are organs, mechanisms, etc.

I don't think Monads are meant to be 0-Dimensional points either, but I would agree that it seems Leibniz's big issue was the infinite divisibility of an extended substance. This is why he says - or has been interpreted to mean - what seems to be extended is actually a representation of other Monads to any particular Monad...or that's how I understood it.

The way I pictured  §66–§73 is that if we zoom infinitely, so going from my table to atoms to subparticles and so on, whatever I see is actually just representations of more and more Monads.

Bodies then would also be made up of other Monads, akin to the fact bodies are made by cells which are in turn made by atoms and so on. Of course the question is why does he then say bodies and souls follow different laws? If he accepts genuinely extended bodies, why did he even bother with the Monads in the first place given they are supposed to be maximally simple and beyond division? 

Regarding mental volition of Persons, Leibniz seems to say different things at different times to different people. Sometimes he will talk about pre-established harmony so everything is - as he puts it - an orchestra where none of the players sense each other, only play their parts. Other times he seems to believe God has given the gift of mental volition to all souls.

One can't help but wonder if he was trying to dance around - for others if not for himself - any potential blasphemy. Also unclear what he would've made of fields, or the generally accepted fact that space itself has qualities. (I dislike "space-time" as a term, agreeing with Bergson that Time and Space are fundamentally different.)

As to the relevance of Monads...we can probably leave behind some of Leibniz's odder ideas but I think the Person as Monad is the first step out of epistemology into ontology. The next question being what exists besides Persons, in the sense of whether something *impersonal* is needed....right?

[Laird]

Hmmm I would agree it was not necessarily Leibniz's intention to say Monadism is an Idealism, however it still seems to me that it is an ontology/metaphysics that is what I'd call "Person-Only".

After having read in full through that IEP article to which you linked, I now agree: it is, after all, a pluralistic idealism as I've defined that term, or a person-only ontology/metaphysic as you put it. I'm now very glad that I included this caveat in my last post:

Bear in mind though that all of this is strictly from reading the text itself. Leibniz might have written other things elsewhere that would affect this reading.

Based on that IEP article, it seems that he had clarified elsewhere that all matter, space-time, and bodies, etc, are merely (harmonised) illusions, with only Monads truly existing metaphysically.

The only new caveat I'd add (regarding Monadism being a form of idealism) is that it seems that many Monads, despite having perceptions, are not conscious of them, nor even conscious at all. It might be argued that in this sense they are not truly minds/persons in the strict sense required by an idealism.

I also don't know if Leibniz wanted Monads to be a sort of Dualism, but even there it seems he would want them to remain "simple" in the sense that they don't have internal parts whether those are organs, mechanisms, etc.

Agreed.

I don't think Monads are meant to be 0-Dimensional points either, but I would agree that it seems Leibniz's big issue was the infinite divisibility of an extended substance. This is why he says - or has been interpreted to mean - what seems to be extended is actually a representation of other Monads to any particular Monad...or that's how I understood it.

The way I pictured  §66–§73 is that if we zoom infinitely, so going from my table to atoms to subparticles and so on, whatever I see is actually just representations of more and more Monads.

Bodies then would also be made up of other Monads, akin to the fact bodies are made by cells which are in turn made by atoms and so on. Of course the question is why does he then say bodies and souls follow different laws? If he accepts genuinely extended bodies, why did he even bother with the Monads in the first place given they are supposed to be maximally simple and beyond division?

Good points and questions. To add to those with a sort of inverse of your last question: why bother with the harmonised illusion of matter in which Monads - really totally distinct and causally unrelated persons/minds (albeit that some are non-conscious) - appear to be matter which is intricately interrelated and which causally interacts?

Regarding mental volition of Persons, Leibniz seems to say different things at different times to different people. Sometimes he will talk about pre-established harmony so everything is - as he puts it - an orchestra where none of the players sense each other, only play their parts. Other times he seems to believe God has given the gift of mental volition to all souls.

Based on that article, Leibniz seems to have made some interesting and considerable arguments for the existence of free will despite God's having chosen a possible world to be the actual one. I'm not convinced by them though. At the least, I think that considerable opposing arguments can be made (and apparently have been).

One can't help but wonder if he was trying to dance around - for others if not for himself - any potential blasphemy.

Perhaps.

Also unclear what he would've made of fields, or the generally accepted fact that space itself has qualities.

Yes, and the latter in particular might void his argument against space from the identity of indiscernables.

(I dislike "space-time" as a term, agreeing with Bergson that Time and Space are fundamentally different.)

I don't know Bergson's view, nor enough about the concept of spacetime in modern physics to argue one way or the other, but I do tend intuitively to your view that space and time are distinct.

As to the relevance of Monads...we can probably leave behind some of Leibniz's odder ideas but I think the Person as Monad is the first step out of epistemology into ontology. The next question being what exists besides Persons, in the sense of whether something *impersonal* is needed....right?

Sure. Are you happy to discuss that further in the other thread, where we already have an ongoing discussion to that effect, rather than this one?

Sure. Are you happy to discuss that further in the other thread, where we already have an ongoing discussion to that effect, rather than this one?

Yeah, we can just go there.  

(Link for other readers)