Monads and Microcosms in the Chain of Being
Leibniz, Classical Theism, and the Problem of Evil - Chapter 2 (part 3)
Greetings, subscribers. As followers of Theological Letters know, I’m feverishly working to finish my forthcoming book on Leibniz and the problem of evil, and I have promised to post fresh installments of my progress every Sunday.
To date, I have posted the Introduction, Chapter 1, and the first two parts of Chapter 2. Today, I post the third installment of Chapter 2, Monads and Microcosms in the Chain of Being.
If you have yet to read all that comes before, I recommend you do so for context. Links to all prior sections are below. Be watching for the fourth installment of Chapter 2 next Sunday. Enjoy!
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Chapter 2
Monads and Microcosms in the Chain of Being
To grasp Leibniz’s second strategy, we must delve into the monadology proper. For those unfamiliar with it, I again commend keeping in mind Leibniz’s goal. No doubt, the monadology and its theory of causality (pre-established harmony) are some of the more disorienting dimensions of Leibniz for the uninitiated. But as we wade into these waters, if the novis can set aside concerns for the specifics and keep an eye fixed on the goal (i.e., to pack every inch of the cosmos with as much being as possible), then he is more likely to reach the shores on the other side without drowning. I ask the novis to hold his breath and tread as best he can for the next eight paragraphs, after which, we will come up for air.
Leibniz’s philosophy of organisms introduced us to an infinitude of living machines. But his monadology suggests that each monad is a cosmos unto itself. We bumped into this concept in Leibniz’s theory of truth. Recall that what makes a proposition true, according to Leibniz, is that the predicate is in the subject, and Leibniz did not limit the point to substantial properties, such as four sides or redness, but applied it to historical truths as well, such as “Caesar crossed the Rubicon.” When discussing the problem with such contingent truths, as concerns PSR, Leibniz explains that these truths do not resolve into identity but unfold into an infinity of other truths — which, by implication, are within the subject. In the monadology, we can see more precisely what Leibniz means and why he believes this.1
To begin, we must grasp that Leibniz is, in a certain sense, an idealist.2 What I mean is this. During Modernity, a cadre of philosophers toyed with the notion that the material world is nothing more than ideas within the mind. George Berkeley is perhaps the best known for the theory.3 Berkeley argued that reality consists of two things, minds and ideas. God is the original Mind, and his act of creation produces finite minds. As for the world, Berkeley rejects as absurd the notion that mind-independent material objects cause our ideas. Minds only interact with ideas. Granting, for a moment, that there were mind-independent objects, they would have no bearing on our experience, since we would still only interact with our ideas about the world. — Add to this that skepticism is rooted in a question of correspondence: Do the objects outside of my mind correspond to the ideas about such objects inside my mind? — So, in an Ockham’s-razor-like move, Berkeley dispenses with the chimerical notion of mind-independent material. The world God creates is a world of ideas within created minds, nothing more. Much like a computer-generated virtual reality, which is mere data that produces the sensation of a world, so Berkeley thinks it is with the real world. But rather than a computer generated reality, created minds interact with a God generated reality — one composed of his ideas.
Although Leibniz is not a Berkeleyan, he is an idealist of a certain type. For Berkeley, creation consists of minds — or to use the more classical term, spirits — and the ideas within them. Leibniz is not entirely aligned with this view, but he comes close. For Leibniz, the world is composed, not of spirits, but of souls. — I am here using the ancient distinction between “spirit” (πνεῦμα) and “soul” (ψυχή), wherein the former indicates something rational while the latter does not necessarily indicate reason, since a “soul,” in the generic sense, is merely the life-force of a body. Some souls are sentient and rational (human); others are sentient but not rational (animal); still others are alive but neither sentient nor rational (plant). Yet, all souls are the life of a body.4 — Rather than the building blocks of reality being lifeless bits of matter, as imagined by the Mechanical Philosophy, Leibniz understands the building blocks of reality (monads) to be spiritual or, better, psychic in nature. This is not to say that every monad is rational or sentient — these being traits of things higher in the Chain of Being. But every monad is alive.
Leibniz also insists that every monad is unique, lest there be no basis for differentiating one from another.5 But the question that naturally arises is how true simples, like monads, could possibly have differentiating qualities if they do not have extension, mass, or shape? Here, the psychic nature of monads is critical. Leibniz’s answer is that monads, being creatures who are alive, have affections and perceptions, while also undergoing a steady flow of inner change. Thus, while monads are structurally simple, they have internal psychic qualities that differentiate them one from another.6
Leibniz breaks down the internal life of a monad along lines of “perception,” “appetition,” and “spontaneity.” Perception is a momentary state — the “now,” if you will, in the life of monad, which is here and then gone (Mon. §14/E 706). Appetition is an internal power to move from one psychic state to the next (Mon. §15/E 706). And that power to change is enacted or “takes place in substance spontaneously and from its own depths” (NE II, xxi, 72, RB 218-9, emphasis added).
Now, Leibniz links the spontaneity of monads with final causality or teleology — the purpose or end of a thing. A fair bit of controversy surrounds the meaning of this connection.7 For my part, I understand this to be another of Leibniz’s attempts to revitalize a more classical perspective. Within classical realism, the nature of a thing entails the purpose (τέλος) of that thing — the formal cause (what it is) entailing a final cause (why it is) — such as the eye for seeing or the ear for hearing.8 On this view, each nature has an innate appetite that strains toward its proper end — the eye toward light, the ear toward sound, etc.9 The movement from potential to actual is thus the natural inclination of a being’s nature. Perception intersects with the desire for good in the passions, where the being perceives something as good or evil (not necessarily in the moral sense but in the sense of in keeping with its good or contrary to it) and thus inclines toward or recoils from that which it perceives. In irrational animals, passions are efficacious, leading to action. But in rational beings, the passions mark the intersection between the pre-volitional (passions) and the volitional (reason). Rational beings pre-volitionally incline toward or recoil from perceived goods and evils.10 But the job of reason is to assess whether this pre-volitional response is in accord with the good or contrary to it.
We find something similar in Leibniz. He identifies the primitive active power of a monad toward good as its “entelechy” (here, using Aristotle’s term for “actuality”), but he acknowledges there is also primitive passivity in a monad, which is the potential for recoiling from a good by misperception, and he labels this passivity “prime matter” (here, using Aristotle’s term for bare potentiality). When a monad changes in keeping with its nature, moving toward greater perfection, this is action, but where it retreats, whether by confused perception or choice, this is passion.11
Important to notice is that Leibniz understands perceptions to arise spontaneously from the monad itself. Rather than perception being some type of reception of external realities, Leibniz understands monads to be “windowless” — closed systems that experience only their own perceptions that arise from their own nature. These inner perceptions present to the monad its place within the cosmos, offering a glimpse of the world from its unique vantage point. Despite being windowless, monads nonetheless exist in a common world precisely because their perceptions harmonize with one another, each monad seeing a common world from its own unique perspective.12 Such harmony is not due to mechanism, nor could it be since monads are closed systems. Rather, this harmony is “pre-established” by God, who “gives to each substance in the beginning a nature or internal force that enables it to produce in regular order … everything that is to happen to it” (L 457). In short, God gives to each monad a nature that unfolds into a series of perceptions that perfectly harmonize with every other monad in the world.
Lest we float off completely into the metaphysical ether, let us now come up for air and ask, What does this mean? To help make the monadology more tangible, let’s return to our virtual reality analogy for Berkeley’s idealism. Let us say that you and I both enter a virtual reality simulation. Each of us represents one monad. As I enter the simulation, I observe a set of colors, presenting to my mind an impression of depth, objects, relationships between objects, and my placement amongst them. Let’s call this immediate impression “perception.” As I decide to move about in this virtual world, that perception changes — shifting colors, shifting geometry, shifting relationships between objects, including my position amongst those objects — all of which gives the impression of movement. Let’s call these shifts “appetition,” and let’s call my choices “spontaneity.”
Within your simulation, you (our second monad) have the same experience. You, too, have perceptions of depth, of objects, of relations between objects, and your place amongst those objects. You, too, are able to spontaneously move about, and that spontaneity gives way to appetition, or shifts, in perception, moving from one representation to the next, giving a sense of movement.
Although our virtual experiences are the same in kind, our experiences are not identical. For you and I are different monads occupying different places doing different things within this virtual world. To illustrate, let’s say that you and I enter the same (virtual) room, me from the South and you from the North. We both see the geography of the room represented; we see the same objects within the room and the same relationships between those objects. However, because I entered from the South and you from the North, our perceptions are not identical. The geometry I perceive reflects my vantage point, and the geometry you perceive reflects yours. As for the relationships between the objects in the room, we could describe these relationships in objective mathematical terms, which would be the same for both of us. But how I perceive those relationships, again, reflects my vantage point, which is different from yours.