Leibniz: Every soul is a world apart
I'd like to use this thread to explore what Leibniz meant by this, why he believed it, and how it fits into his overall outlook. I've come across a number of angles on it. Feel free to add insight.
Angle #1:
It's an answer to the Mind/Body problem. Leibniz says it was a mistake to expect a causal relationship between mind and body. Mind and body are both substances (defined by Leibniz as a subject which can't be the predicate of another subject). He thought in terms of a hierarchy of substances, mind being higher than body. Substances don't relate causally.
Students of Leibniz divide his writings into esoteric and exoteric. Exoteric explanations are simpler and meant for the general public. Esoteric explanations are more technical and difficult to follow.
An exoteric explanation of the independence of substances is the double pendula image. Imagine a mobile (of the sort people hang over cribs). Mind and body could be thought to move in a coordinated way because they're connected to the same cross piece.
Per Leibniz, there is no connecting cross-piece. The explanation for the coordinated movement is God.
Tune in later for a more esoteric explanation.
Angle #1:
It's an answer to the Mind/Body problem. Leibniz says it was a mistake to expect a causal relationship between mind and body. Mind and body are both substances (defined by Leibniz as a subject which can't be the predicate of another subject). He thought in terms of a hierarchy of substances, mind being higher than body. Substances don't relate causally.
Students of Leibniz divide his writings into esoteric and exoteric. Exoteric explanations are simpler and meant for the general public. Esoteric explanations are more technical and difficult to follow.
An exoteric explanation of the independence of substances is the double pendula image. Imagine a mobile (of the sort people hang over cribs). Mind and body could be thought to move in a coordinated way because they're connected to the same cross piece.
Per Leibniz, there is no connecting cross-piece. The explanation for the coordinated movement is God.
Tune in later for a more esoteric explanation.
Comments (99)
So keep expecting more... numbers.
One feature of Leibniz is that he believed that all monads see truth to some degree. So all philosophers are right about some things.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/
I thought -at last! Now I'm starting to get 'monads'.
So, the individual is a 'windowless monad' who embodies the memes of the culture that's sorrounded him, interpreted according partially to adaptive necessity, and partially according to 'mimetics'.
It's all falling into place.
For me, that passage presents a gross misunderstanding of Hegel. (Where does it come from?). If what it says were true then Hegel would just be another philosopher of the noumenal, as Kant was. Hegel believed we see things exactly as they are in themselves; that is just what 'absolute idealism' means.
Seriously, if you follow that line of thought I would say that things are not falling into, but out of, place. :s
Can you substantiate that? Every definition I read of 'absolute idealism' emphasises the primacy of mind. I perfectly aware that Hegel didn't concur with Kant's 'ding an sich' but to reject that doesn't imply the opposite.
I's a complex issue, but for me Hegel is a kind of spiritual monist. The Phenomenology of Spirit had earlier been called The Phenomenology of Mind which I think is misleading. Hegel is very much a thinker of trinity and very much a Christian. So my interpretation is that the Father (the mind) is related to the Son (the world) via the Holy Spirit. Looked at in terms of dialectic the spirit is the synthesis (although it doesn't exactly work to think of mind and matter as thesis and antithesis, and actually Hegel never explicitly proposed that commonly used formulation).
A very interesting read is Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Hermetic-Tradition-Glenn-Alexander/dp/0801474507/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474069419&sr=1-1&keywords=hegel+and+the+hermetic+tradition which I think convincingly corrects mistaken modernist materialist readings of Hegel. Modernist materialism is not a superioir result of intellectual progress, but merely a ( hopefully) transient intellectual fad, that is terribly spiritually limiting, in my view; and I have little doubt you will disagree with that.
Hegel rejected Kant's critical philosophy on the basis that it leads inevitably to skepticism about knowledge; and in the Phenomenology worked out a system of thought that culminates in absolute knowing. The passage you quoted represents the view that spirit is nothing more than inter-subjectivity; and from there it can easily be seen to devolve to the merely subjective. Hegel was not a subjective, but rather an objective, idealist. He took Kant's formulation that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B76), elaborated in this passage:
"Intuition and concepts … constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind . It is, therefore, just as necessary to make the mind's concepts sensible—that is, to add an object to them in intuition—as to make our intuitions understandable—that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers, or capacities, cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only from their unification can cognition arise."(A50–51/B74–76), very seriously and took it to what he understood to be its logical conclusion, which is a monism consisting of mind, matter and spirit. For Hegel this is the very meaning of the Incarnation.
Of course I am with you in rejecting materialism. But the point I was making above in relation to Hoffman-Leibniz-Hegel is an understanding of the sense in which 'the real is a structure in consciousness'. Of course that sounds just like Deepak Chopra, but I would really rather related it to the Western philosophical tradition. That quote I found was in some cribbed lecture notes on Hegel, but I think it makes a fair point. (Spouse is calling, back much later.)
On one hand, I would certainly agree that Hegel didn't "reject Kant's critical philosophy outright", if by "outright rejection" you meant that he considered it to be of no importance. Hegel considered all moments in philosophy to be of essential significance in the whole evolution of spirit.
On the other hand, I do think Hegel rejected Kant's conclusions concerning the limitations of reason that are inherent to the culmination of his critical project of 'determining the limits of reason".
And I don't think the real is, for Hegel, a structure in consciousness. The trajectory of that kind of terminology is very alien to the movement of Hegel's thought. For Hegel "the Rational is the Real", and the Real is presented aspectually as each moment of consciousness, and presented fully as the whole movement of consciousness. At least that's my interpretation.
So reading that - and I will now go back and read Hoffman in more detail - was a real lightbulb moment about the so-called 'windowless monads' of Leibniz. Hope you can see why.
So whence true unities? Leibniz thought that the nature of aggregates presupposes true unities. And true unities alone qualify as substance. Arnaud accused him of simply stipulating a peculiar definition of substance, so we have the reasoning Leibniz offered:
"To cut the point short, I hold as an axiom the following proposition which is a statement of identity which varies only in the placing of the emphasis: nothing is truly one being if it is not truly one being. It has always been held that one and being are reciprocal things. -WF 124
So Leibniz, being of a rationalist tradition, is doing ontology by following apriori knowledge. There are aggregates and unities because these categories are residents of the mind. Only unities qualify as substance because by the LONC, a being can't be a crowd.
It's not that Leibniz was totally unconscious of the pending questions about proceeding in this way. All roads come back to God, for him. What's peculiar to him about human substance is that a human reflects the mind of God. So humans have direct access to Truth via rationality (not that there are any guarantees that Truth will be seen accurately, but the possibility is there.). In this way, regarding certain topics, there is no distinction between subjective and objective truth.
Such a description contains expectation that a monad is an account of everything else. Here the point a monad is distinct from the divisible. It's its own logical expression which is not any of the endlessly divisible extensional entities-- which is why it doesn't relate causality. To say "unity is a cause" make no sense. Unity is not an extensional entity that acts.
But the problem is conceiving of what it is that is *not* extended. It's more like a 'principle of unity' than an actual numerical unit of something. Here's one analogy from modern technology - if a holographic image is broken, then each part of resulting pieces contains the whole image, but at a slightly lower resolution. So the original image may be physically divided but still retain its 'wholeness'. I think that is nearer the idea than 'solidity' which is too much like atomism.
Missed this one before! I'm not convinced that Hegel would agree with the idea that mind is the primary reality. The way I read Hegel, he thinks spirit is the primary reality; which manifests 'dualistically' (or better, dialectically) as mind and matter (think Spinoza though, not Descartes, because mind and matfer are not substances but modes).
So if one of either mind or matter is thesis then the other is antithesis and spirit is synthesis (to use a simplistic way of formulation that Hegel never himself used).
So, neither matter nor mind are primary; they are codependently and at least implicitly original. Spirit is primary and precedes the moment of consciousness wherein matter and mind arise explicitly together.
Where I chimed in was the quotation above in the article about Hoffman:
I still think that is very close in meaning to what Leibniz must have meant by the monad:
Maybe - just maybe - closer to what would later be called the 'actual occasions of experience'. But the second of the above quotes also addresses the issue of the 'subjective unity of experience', i.e. that even though we know the body is composed of parts, one's experience is appears as a unified whole.
I can point to, say, an apple in front of us, to a precise spot on its surface where there is an uncharacteristic white streak roughly 50 mm long and 5 mm wide and ask you what you see there, and be confident that you will say you see a white streak of the same dimensions.
The only reason I'm pointing this out, is that I think Hoffman's basic point converges with Leibniz's in some respects. Whilst we appear to be experiencing an 'external world', in fact what we take to be 'external' is really happening in the mind as a consequence of the process of perception>assimilation of sense data>cognition.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10930
obviously, Hoffman does not appeal to 'god', in his theory, the process is driven by natural selection. But in other respects I think the schemes map quite well.
I think 'philosophical idealism' is coming back with a real vengeance in some of these types of theories. Not that it ever really went away.
All of what we measure, amounts to the fact that as a species, we all interpret and understand the same units of measurement, we share a kind of baseline of perception against which we can measure and predict with accuracy and reliability.
But what philosophy has always told as, and what science is now also starting to realise, is that the complete picture includes the observer. This doesn't mean that units of measurement are unreal or subjective, but they're still dependent on a perspective - in our case, a shared perspective. I don't want to be taken as one of those who says that scientific measurement is merely or only subjective or conventional, as some appear to do, but neither is objectivity absolute.
I haven't read Leibniz, but I'm wondering if the esoteric explanation is that the role God is playing is from our perspective like (rather crudely) someone spinning and balancing plates on top of poles, and has to tweak them all continuously to keep them balanced. Each plate could represent an atom. God could delegate the tweaking to a team of angels, infact many teams and hierarchies, these could be the kingdoms of nature. I mean the transcendent spirits in nature not their outer casing(expression) or physical vehicles?
What science?
What is the "original image" you mentioned? A monad? Or God?
:) I'm not sure. I don't think Leibniz would like the idea of continuous divine intervention. Newton actually proposed that and the reaction of Leibniz was kind of ridiculing and dismissive (there was bad blood between Newton and Leibniz... maybe between Leibniz and England in general)
Or in other words God(the supernatural) provides(facilitates) the stage upon which the world happens.
Physics! 'The atom' was supposed to be the 'indivisible unit'. Didn't work out! So Leibniz' assertion that 'everything extended is aggregate' still looks good.
Sorry, what I mean is: a hologram of anything is different to a photograph (it doesn't matter what the image is of). Take a photograph, and cut it up, and you get bits of the image. Take a hologram and break it, and each piece has a whole image, albeit at lower resolution than the original.
The reason I mentioned it, is because it illustrates the 'principle of unity' by analogy.
The problem I see is that without the work of a 'Master Monad', or some other form of spiritual work to coordinate the experiences of all the monads, there can be no explanation for the commonality of experience. There is no plausible, or even imaginable, physical mechanism which could do this work. The only plausible purely materialist explanation is that of the sheer independent existence of material entities.
An alternative metaphysical explanans to the "Master Monad" would be that the physical world is an expression of a spiritual world where souls in between death and rebirth do the work of coordinating the experiences of souls on the physical plane of existence Steiner suggests something like this. In that case the explanation is obviously not purely a material one, but in a formal sense the result is still that there are material entities which are independent of any and all individual percipients.
Or take Berkeley's explanation that entities are held in stable existence in the mind of God, and given by Him to all human (and presumably animal) minds. But, here again the result is that there are existent material entities that are independent of any and all individual minds. It doesn't really matter what the final metaphysical explanation for the existence of identifiable material entities is (it's not knowable discursively anyway); but in any case we know that there must be such, simply because we are able to experience a world in common.
But the idea of the 'independently existing material object' - that is surely what has been called into question by science itself. That is what Hoffman alludes to in that quotation above - he's referring to the observer problem, which is exactly that the purported 'mind-independent' sub-atomic particles, only exist as a kind of distribution of probabilities, up until the moment that a measurement is taken. Of course this fact has triggered enormous volumes of debate and theory, and I'm not wanting to open that can of worms here. But it is precisely the notion of the 'mind independent reality' that has been called into question by that.
There was a physicist by the name of Victor Stenger who was a vociferous critic of what he and others called 'quantum woo' - the tendency to appeal to quantum physics in support of an idealist metaphysics. He wrote books against the idea, which were published by Prometheus Press (which publishes a lot of anti-spiritual books, kind of a mirror image of Quest Books).
Stenger's last published piece was in HuffPo, titled 'Particles are for Real'. It was a plaintive appeal to the reality of sub-atomic particles, against all those who say that the wave-particle nature of such things, demonstrates that they don't really exist as particles at all.
The point is, Stenger had to believe there are ultimately-existing particles - true atoms - because otherwise, he had to acknowledge that his materialist model couldn't be supported.
Now materialists say that the 'real substances' are fields and field equations, and the like. But any undergraduate can see that 'an equation' is an intellectual object, i.e. something that can only be grasped by a rational mind. There are no equations in nature. Nor any 'ultimately-existing particles'.
So Leibniz was correct in calling the existence of atoms into question.
I have wondered whether the whole universe is like a hologram. One particle but creating almost infinate wave patterns.
Our brains are very good at joining up gaps too.
Who cares, it's still fun...
I don't know; for whatever reason I can't see why fundamental particles as energized fields could not explain the existence of more or less (but never entirely) self-contained energetic aggregates that could be reliably perceived as individual objects and entities. Of course this wouldn't explain the mystery of perception itself; the mystery of how mere energetic movements in space-time can become experience. So, I don't for a moment believe that something like what is presented in the matter/energy story is all that is going on; that is I do think it might be a sufficient explanation for material things, but I don't believe it could ever explain how those things come to perceive and be perceptible.
Or from another perspective the human race could be viewed as a closely related family of beings, it's only natural that they would experience things similarly, then. But this could also be viewed as humanity is one being, explaining the common experiences. Also all the other animals and plants may be our "brothers" and "sisters". So the biosphere is privy to one global sphere of experience via the planet which is a more distant relative. The kingdoms of nature. This perspective allows for an external reality, which may also be mentally generated. Somewhere in between the two opposite views(poles) of mind or matter.
'Energised fields' and 'fundamental particles' are different things. As I understand it (which is not much) you can describe the relationships between particles and fields very precisely using field equations - but what is 'a field'? And where does mind come into the picture?
The usual explanation nowadays is that this has occurred through the processes described by evolution. But the philosophical issue of the nature of mind and matter are barely touched by those explanations (which is what Nagel's Mind and Cosmos is about.)
One of the things that keeps Leibniz's view from being a variation of Spinoza's is his insistence on moral agency. Ironically, the way it works out is that every victim is basically waltzing with the villain. For L, the victim is not powerless. That's just an appearance, as in a play. In fact L's view is very much in line with the notion that life is a stage and monads are merely actors upon it..
His mill story is interesting. He proposes a machine that can think. He says if we enlarged it to the point that we could walk into it, all we'd see is mechanical stuff. We'd see nothing that accounts for perception.
I think he's probably right about that.
His mill analogy is frequently cited in support of the 'hard problem of consciousness'.
The way I interpret Leibniz, the monads do not really see each other, they only see each other's physical forms, and the physical forms are not themselves monads; and they are not real, since only monads are real. The physical form 'belonging' to each monad is associated most strongly (apart from its association in God) with that monad in the internal story of its life. The story of the life of each monad is entirely 'inner', there is no externality. So the physical body associated with monad-me also appears in the internal story of the life of monad-you and vice versa ( if our life stories are appropriately coordinated). The analogy is with clocks that all tell the same time, but do not affect (see or know of) one another. We know of other monads but we do not know them, or see them, since they are not physical objects that could ever be seen.
Locke appears as a character in the life stories of all those monads that know of him (i.e. those monads whose own stories are sufficiently coordinated with the Locke-story. Some of those monads may think the Locke character is shallow.
Didn't Leibniz think that the life story/experience associated with each monad is a unique expression of the nature of that monad? Remember, Locke's body is not a monad, for Leibniz, so is it the behavior or the productions (the philosophy for instance) of the Locke-body which are shallow, or is it that the productions are an expression of the shallowness of the Locke-monad?
Yes, I think that's exactly it for Leibniz; the degree to which the mind reflects the divine mind indicates its profundity/ shallowness.
Leibniz would have thought Locke was just plain wrong insofar as he thought that all knowledge comes not from the soul, that is not from within, but from the senses, from without. For knowledge to come from without would mean that what is known, the essential nature of things, must itself be perceptible, which is absurd.
To expand on what John was saying, what a monad can see of another monad is bits and pieces of its complete concept. For instance, we all know Locke was English. To know the complete concept of Locke is to know how the whole universe is expressed as Locke (or perhaps how the whole universe from beginning to end is implied by him.)
//edit// hey that tune was the first on the Police's 1981 album, which was called (this is so cool) 'Ghost in the Machine'. //
But the thing which struck me, is that the common atheist response to the 'fine-tunning of the Universe' argument, is to argue that there really might be an infinite number of worlds (universes or multi-verses) and that we just happen to be in the one makes intelligent life possible. For that, among other reasons, quite a few cosmologists now routinely refer to the purported 'multiverse' as a postulate, even though there isn't, and can never be, any evidence for the reality of it.
Of course they're very different arguments, given by very different kinds of thinkers, but couldn't help but notice the convergences.
That's a good encapsulation of dualism's inability to take the existence of experience seriously. The notion that experiences and thoughts exist, not blended with a body, but as their own states is rejected without consideration. One can only not think in materialism if thoughts are mistaken as bodies and for the form the express.
Thinking might a universalising activity, but that doesn't make my thoughts universal.
The form of my thought is not limited to my thought. It's true regardless of whether I'm thinking it or not. To avoid the destruction of the universal, my thought's existence must also be distinct from their form, else I'm reducing the form to my existence.
Gerson is right about the distinction between form and existence. He's just left two important instances of existence off the list: thoughts and experiences.
So black boxes jigging about on a stage, perhaps the box is an atom, a special atom with a smidgeon of God in it, just jigging around with all the normal atoms. Maybe the're so special they are allowed to wear rose tinted glasses and see all the other atoms jigging about around them.
Anyway, I'm making my way back to the OP. Nicholas Jolley affirms that though Leibniz did say throughout his life that his scheme solved the Cartesian mind-body problem with the pre-established harmony bit, we're not sure why he advertised that since he denies substance-hood to bodies. He doesn't have any mind-body problem to solve.
So what were his thoughts on bodies? Two parts:
1. Recalling that each monad expresses the universe:
Your body is part of that which you are expressing, and for rational monads, there's a closer kinship found in ideas a monad has about its body.
2. I'm having trouble with this one.
Next: innate ideas
That is a recapitulation of an ancient idea of 'man as microcosm'. And if you use the word 'subject' instead of 'substance' it makes a lot more sense to modern ears.
For me this reads as some kind of feedback loop. Whereby in perceiving of one's expression, one expresses something more. Then one might percieve this extra expression and express something more again and this process of reflections of feedback becomes an expression itself. An interactive expression.
Except there is no stage, except for all the coordinated stages inside the black boxes. Well... actually.. there are no black boxes either...except for the coordinated black boxes inside the...black boxes???
Reminds me of something I read ages ago in a philosophy book called, if I remember right, What We Can Never Know. The jist of it was something like "look at those distant mountains rising up to meet the great blue dome of sky, and think about your eyes, looking out of your skull, your skull which is right here in the middle of the great vista, if you turn around, of 360 degrees out to the far horizons. Now realize that your real skull is out there somewhere beyond the horizon, forever imperceptible, and that the skull you feel and could see if you had a mirror, along with the vast landscape are images inside the brain which is inside your skull, which is inside the real landscape."
Sounds just like naive, or is it representational, realism...not that there's anything wrong with that.
I don't experience your self-awareness, you don't experience mine, we can't (unless we become the other) - we're apart (in that respect).
Self-awareness is essentially indexical, a kind of self-knowledge, and bound by ontological self-identity, like a kind of noumena.
Perhaps, by Leibniz, self-awareness is (implicitly or explicitly) integral to "soul", and thus inherently private (in part)?
As to phenomenological experiences, is your red my red, as it were?
This seems somewhat related to @Mongrel's angle #1.
Not all monads possess self-awareness. Monads are immaterial, immortal unities. There are an infinite number of them and each one has a unique perspective on the same world.
Both monads and the world are God's creation. It may be that Leibniz believed God stands in a causal relationship to the universe in the same way that Shakespeare does to things and events in the life of Othello.
Unfortunately, there is much that is unclear about Leibniz's outlook. Jolley leads his readers through a maze of candidates for his view about material objects, for instance. In some ways, it appears that he did philosophy backward. He started with conclusions and worked to support them. The insight I gather from that is more about me than him, though. It makes me realize the extent to which I assume philosophy ought to be like science (ideal science, that is).
*The Monadology is 13 pages give or take actually!
I don't experience your self-awareness, you don't experience mine, we can't (unless we become the other) - we're apart (in that respect).
Self-awareness is essentially indexical, a kind of self-knowledge, and bound by ontological self-identity, like a kind of noumena.
Perhaps, by Leibniz, self-awareness is (implicitly or explicitly) integral to "soul", and thus inherently private (in part)? — jorndoe Well said. curious
"Since Plato a recurrent theme of western philosophy is the contrast between appearance and reality: the nature of reality can be grasped only by turning away from the senses and consulting the intellect. This theme is present in Descartes's philosophy, but it is developed much further by Leibniz in his theory of monads, the metaphysics of his final years. The first section argues that Leibniz's theory of monads can perhaps be best understood as a form of atomism. Like traditional atoms monads are the basic building-blocks of reality, but unlike them they are spiritual, not physical in nature: the basic properties of monads are perception and appetite. The second section addresses the nature of Leibniz's monism by way of a comparison with Spinoza. Leibniz's final metaphysics is monistic in the sense that, although monads are hierarchically ordered, there is only one basic kind of substance. Spinoza's metaphysics, by contrast, is monistic in the sense that it recognizes the existence of only one substance, God. Indeed, Leibniz's theory of monads can be regarded as an attempt to refute Spinoza's objections to a plurality of substances. If successful, Leibniz's refutation of Spinoza's objections thus creates conceptual space for monads – monads are at least possible – but it still leaves open the question of why monads are actual. It is shown that Leibniz's arguments for monads turn on the need for basic substances which are not mere composites, and on the infinite divisibility of matter. The next section addresses a pressing question: if, as Leibniz says, there is strictly nothing in the universe but monads or simple substances, what is the status of bodies or physical objects? It is clear that Leibniz opts for a reductionist rather than an eliminativist approach to this issue: there are bodies, but they are not metaphysically basic entities. The nature of Leibniz's reductionism about bodies is controversial. Although Leibniz flirts with it in places, phenomenalism is shown not to be his preferred solution to the problem; instead Leibniz's official position is that bodies are aggregates which result from monads: the concept of resulting here is best analysed in terms of Leibniz's technical concept of expression. Leibniz's preference for the aggregate thesis over phenomenalism is probably best explained by his desire to provide a metaphysical foundation for his physical theory of force."
Jolley, Nicholas. Leibniz (The Routledge Philosophers) (pp. 90-91). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
The transposition is not perfect but I think it conveys the intention.
Leibniz believed that the basic building blocks of the universe are immaterial. His reasoning involves infinite divisibility of the material on the one side and unity of consciousness on the other.
"SubjectIve" is a kind of narrative. The philosophical subject is one pole of an opposition. That opposition is superficial to ontological questions, to my mind. Maybe you mean the word differently. Don't know..
As I said, 'subject' doesn't quite transpose correctly, but 'substance' is not right either.
The original Greek (not that I know Greek) was 'ouisia', which is nearer to 'being' than what 'substance' now means.
'In contemporary, everyday language, the word “substance” tends to be a generic term used to refer to various kinds of material stuff (“we need to clean this sticky substance off the floor”) or as an adjective referring to something’s mass, size, or importance (“that is a substantial bookcase”). In 17th century philosophical discussion, however, this term’s meaning is only tangentially related to our everyday use of the term. For 17th century philosophers the term is reserved for the ultimate constituents of reality on which everything else depends. ...
...at the very deepest level the universe contains only two kinds or categories of entity: substances and modes. ...Following a tradition reaching back to Aristotle’s Categories, modes are said to exist in, or inhere in, a subject. Similarly, a subject is said to have or bear modes. Thus we might say that a door is the subject in which the mode of rectangularity inheres. One mode might exist in another mode (a color might have a particular hue, for example), but ultimately all modes exist in something which is not itself a mode, that is, in a substance. A substance, then, is an ultimate subject. ...
...In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is. Given that there are only substances and modes, and that modes depend on substances for their existence, it follows that substances are the most real constituents of reality.'
But they're not objective constituents, in the way atoms are conceived to be; Leibniz posited monads in opposition to the purported 'material atom'; they're souls, rather than objects, in an ultimately mental or spiritual universe, of which this material world is only an appearance.
Yea. This definition wasn't sufficient for Leibniz. I think I explained that earlier (or did I hallucinate that?)
Quoting Wayfarer
Close, but not quite, Wayfarer. Monads are immaterial objects. It is entirely correct to think of them as atomic in character. Some partake of mind, some don't. There's a hierarchy.
Leibniz explicitly stated that he was not eliminative about materiality. So if you mean by "only an appearance" that Leibniz declared the material world to be illusory, you are wrong.
I think the very idea of substance is problematic. Substance cannot be material if the material is infinitely divisible. And if substance is not material then reality cannot be fundamentally material either. The idea of constituents of reality is also problematic if reality is thought as one thing. Leibniz' monads are indivisible and utterly separated from one another, so it is not clear how they could ever be combined to constitute a unified reality; or in other words how they could be constituents of such a reality.
This seems to be a problem for any theory of multiple substances that wants to posit one reality; and that is precisely why Spinoza posited that there could be only one substance. Can Leibniz plausibly avoid thinking of his monads as substances, even if only as the indivisible substance of each monadic life?
In a mental or spiritual universe can there be but one reality, instead there must not be a plurality?
Except they cannot be like the atoms we know, because they cannot be combined together in causal relations. That begs the question as to how they can be combined. It doesn't seem very helpful if they can only be combined from the perspective of God. And is it even right if we say that, are they really combined even there, rather than merely synchronized? How can we understand this; it seems an insuperable difficulty?
I must read Leibniz again to see if I can find where he addresses these questions. I have both Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology on my shelves so I'll be up for a group reading if it happens.
:)
The reason I referred to the IEP article is because it addresses the question of how the philosophical idea of substance differs from the common-sense idea of it. Here 'fundamental substance' is understood not in terms of 'indivisible units', but in terms of 'proximity to the origin or source'. The origin is 'the uncreated', i.e. God. From the IEP article:
Atoms were also presumed to have these qualities, but Leibniz argued against atomism.
They are "like atoms" in the sense monads are substances distinct from each other. The monad of my body is not the same as the monad of my mind. Combination isn't a question of causality, but of being or presence.
With me, there is the monad of my body, my experiences, each atom which makes me up, and so on and so on. Every object we might think of has it's own monad. They are immaterial (i.e. not involved in casualty) but present in any instance of an object. An expression running parallel to material objects of causality.
No matter how many times we divide my body into its constitutes, it remains my body. A unity which cannot be broken. Even destroying my body cannot touch it, for the moment my body ceases to exist, it's no longer there to break a part. Anything remains whole in logic, for eternity.
Leibniz is (alas)reversing Spinoza insight. His monads pretty much correspond to Spinoza's mode of thought. They infinite logical meanings expressed everywhere which the emergence and destruction of the finite world cannot touch.
Spinoza (correctly) identifies these meanings in having no role in forming the world. The mode of thought might be expressed in every states of the world, but it's not the mode of thought on which states of the world (the mode of extension) dependent. Existing states come and go one their own terms. Their presence or absence is not governed by modes of thought.
Leibniz is arguing the opposite: states of existence are derived from eternal monads. Logical truth is argued to necessitate what exists in the world (i.e. PSR).
I'm not sure the hologram analogy works, though, because as you say each 'part' of the hologram embodies the same image as the whole, each part is identical to the others and to the whole. In the case of monads though, each part is precisely not identical with all the others. If we think of the experience of each nomad and also the experience of God as an 'image', then we might say that God's experience is the 'master image'. But the experiences of the monads experience do not reflect God's experience, which is the totality of all the monads' experiences, but only one tiny disparate, albeit synchronized, part of it.
I can't remember whether Leibniz thinks of the monads as being substances or not (it's a fairly long time since reading). Mongrel seem to have said not. This excerpt seems to be saying he does so think of them. It also seems odd to say that monad's last as long as the universe. If human souls are monads, that would seem to make their continued existence dependent on the existence of the universe. But form the point of view of the universe, it would seem that a monad goes out of existence when it appears no more on the stage.
What you are saying does not seem to be consonant with Leibniz: the body cannot be a monad because it is composite.
The material body, sure (i.e. the existing body). I wasn't talking about that. My point was about the "soul" of the body. The logical meaning of my body. That's a monad.
Anything can be said to be a composite. Experiences? I can divide those in to parts. The mind? I can divide that in to parts. The only thing that can't be divided into parts is unity. No matter how much division I do, every part of the would has a unity. A book is still a book no matter how much I divide it into pages. A page is still a page, no matter who many words I split it into. The world is still the world, no matter how many objects, beings, monads or substances we say belong to it.
An existing "body(i.e. present existing state)" might not be a monad, but those are not what Leibniz is talking about in positing a monad.
What of the unity of things other than our experience? Are we not made of atoms, fingernails, toes and teeth? If our mind (self-awarness & awareness) is our only monad, we do not have bodies.
My point here is the distinction Leibniz is trying to get is frequently misunderstood. People jump on it for not being a causal connection of the mind and body, even though Leibniz is trying to point out it doesn't make sense to posit such a relationship.
That's a good question; whether his monadology is consistent. I can't answer that.
It's true that our bodies are made of the things you mention; or at least that we can understand them to be. I don't know that Leibniz would say that our minds are monads; perhaps rather our souls (which would be the form, not merely of the body, but of the body/mind)? But that kind of language may be alien to Leibniz. We would need to investigate it.
I agree that Leibniz, like Spinoza, but in a very different way, is seeking to circumvent the difficulty posed by postulating any causal relation between the two substances that Descartes' philosophy introduced. Did he succeed, though?
Probably the most immediate evidence of your monadness is the unity of your consciousness. I was going to start a thread on that topic. but it's still percolating. Unity of consciousness (UOC) is supposed to be in evidence anytime you compare things... relate A to B... Some argue against UOC. And then there are brain diseases in which UOC is missing... don't know what to do about that. :)
Sounds like the Hindu "atman", atman is that bit of Brahman in each being.
From wiki;
In Hinduism, Brahman (/br?hm?n/; ????????) connotes the highest Universal Principle, the Ultimate Reality in the universe.[1][2][3] In major schools of Hindu philosophy it is the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists.[2][4][5] It is the pervasive, genderless, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes.[1][6][7] Brahman as a metaphysical concept is the single binding unity behind the diversity in all that exists in the universe.[1][8]
You were asking about seeing monads. It would mostly be with the mind's eye. Even unity of consciousness is really something detected by the intellect.
BTW: an interesting comparison is Leibniz to Einstein on the relativity of space.
E's Special Relativity is based on a thought experiment involving motion in a void. You watch someone getting bigger and bigger and then zoom by you. There's nothing (even in principle) that allows you to say who is moving.
L's criticism of Newtonian space is that if Newton was right, God could move the universe a few miles to the west. Even in principle, no motion would be observable. Therefore space is a relation between objects, not a container which holds objects.
Good luck making a pile out of anything with no dimensions.
Yes the intellect has to fashion a suitable conceptual form. I find this monad sort of disappears when I visualise it. But I still know it's there so that's sufficient to continue.
Yes, I quite like imagining a banana is the only thing in existence and then trying to visualise it, how big it is, is it infinitely large or small? What colour is it? However I imagine it requires some kind of sensual stimulus. I do know what it tastes like though.
Immaterial doesn't mean non-existent.... obviously. But note that when you invoke the concept of an object, space and time might run to the stage to play their roles. So you rightly point out a pending mind-explosion in regard to idealism. Where's Mariner? He explains this really well.
Quoting Punshhh
A suitable form for what? I've found since I've been reading about Leibniz that a sort of mathematical vibe has entered my experience.. kind of in the background. Just walking down the street, I find I'm thinking about substantiality and what it has to do with logical imperatives.
Quoting Punshhh
I know what you mean. Leibniz took pains to point out that he wasn't saying that motion requires an observer, but that in principle it has to be observable. He's explaining verificationism.
The void banana is (in principle) tasty.
Time is a circle. Laying an x-y axis over it, a sine wave can be generated. Add birth and death and we have the arc. Leibniz believed the monad is immortal, but denied that memory is lost in death. This moment is a facet of the eternal diamond?
More thoughts: for an idealist, mind is not a realm of illusion or a reflection of what is. At base, to know the truth is for mind to know itself. Intuitions regarding the ubiquitous point of view are a case of this. The monad is a unit of reality.
Yes the mind is not a realm of illusion, rather that distortion happens on the physical plain. And yes by knowing oneself one realises knowing itself.
Mind and body are both supposed to be structured in this way. So physical motion arises from structural features of the physical which are in turn rooted in micro-physical stuff.
One thing this reveals is that the notion that Freud's layering reflected the popularity of geology is at least partly bullshit. I knew it!