A History of Philosophy | 39 Leibinz's "Monads"

all right we all set them today we want to focus on lighting it's monads last time we introduced lime it's rather briefly pointing out that he saw conflicts emerging between the mechanistic science which was shaping the philosophy of the 17th century and the Christian religion both in terms of its materialistic direction in people like Homs and in terms of its determinism in people like Hobbes and Spinoza and he didn't like Spinoza's naturalistic Pentheus interpretation of mechanistic science and so he tries to come to grips with that kind of science and religion conflict by walking out an alternative metaphysical understanding that doesn't ignore the science of the day but shall we say puts it in a limited role more of a phenominal direction the level of appearances rather than in terms of telling us about the underlying reality no the underlying reality then is that everything that exists ultimately consists of moments which are indivisible units of force or energy indestructible yes because not being composites they cannot be disintegrated and destroyed by any natural means that is not to say that they are eternal always were and always will be in as much as their existence is being given to them by God now we noted last time that these monads these units of force are analogous to each other in such a way as to compose this kind of hierarchy of being where the supreme monad has perfect a perception and a petition and monads lower on the hierarchy have lesser degrees of a perception and a petition the term a perception is obviously an adaptation from our term perception because he is willing to grant that some animals with soul monads and they have since perception and even things which have no conscious awareness at the Bear monad level seem to know they are placed within the overall picture music this is the intelligible order manifested in things having their place and function when you come to humans with spirit monads they have not just since consciousness but self consciousness reflexive reflecting of their own consciousness and therefore the capacity to interrelate their own ideas to reason actively reason and to that could be given the name a perception where there is self-consciousness but God has perfect a perception awareness of everything perfect self understand so there are degrees of a perception a petition desire yes directed energy in the sense that there is a natural function that is being exercised actualized in degree here's where the final causation becomes evident in the very nature of all moments with natural Drive appetite desire inclinations disposition those terms which were associated with final causation in the Scholastic's so then we have these indestructible units of force varying by infinitesimal degrees within this hierarchy of being no gaps in the hierarchy every conceivable distinction is represented in this complete chain of being and so line it's speaks of a principle of continuity or plenitude continuity yes there's no gaps no discontinuity in the chain of being plenitude yes it's fear old there's no empty seats principle of plentitude and of course that is simply the conception of the hierarchy of being which the Scholastic set to the whole creation everything in its place you see together comprises the the fullness of things that find their existence in relationship to God so there is a principle of sufficient reason there is reason for everything that exists within the whole hierarchy and for every event that occurs within the whole hierarchy sufficient reason and this is such an into woven choreographed hole that the principle of perfection this kind of being is good now essentially those three principles could have been used to describe the hierarchy of being in Thomas Aquinas music he would essentially agree as I mentioned last time what Leibniz is doing is trying to resurrect the Scholastic conception of being the Scholastic metaphysic closer as we will see to SCOTUS than to Aquinas and to ascribe to it the kind of goodness which as in the middie evils manifests the perfection of God his creation and manifesting his goodness so you have that that carryover and what he's going to have to do is to find place within this arrangement within this overall understanding for mechanistic science this is the nature of ultimate reality yes a and one of its manifestations is the of mechanistic function talking about well we can't really get at that until we get down to talking about the distinction between minds and bodies and how bodies behave and what constitutes pots it's there in the operation of bodies that are composed of many many moments bodies are composites it's in the operation of bodies as composite substances that you get the mechanistic operations of course and effect going on the soul were then these monads Irv's indestructible units of force each one different in degree from every other one so each has its own individual nature its individual essence remember how the many evils struggled to explain in their theory of forms how calm individuals differ from each other as they do until SCOTUS done SCOTUS introduced the conception of high K attests that is to say that in addition to the form of the species and the Signet matter that is compounded with the form of the species there is also a principle of individuality of business Heike at s so that God creates individuals with their own natures now that's what's got us set and that's what lioness is picking up from SCOTUS so that these individual essences are like you see the principle of high K at s in SCOTUS but the individual essences are obviously alike in that they have common attributes but the Scholastic's called the send dental attributes of all being and they are talked of those transcendental attributes you remember as unity the goodness beauty truth well what lightness is doing is doing the equivalent by talking of a perception and a petition a perception and a petition tends to say each has its own nature and therefore knows its place within the whole nose in quotes depending on the degree of consciousness rather and a petition yes in its in its functioning it is acting out acting in accordance with actualizing the potency the potential of its own essence it's only in a resources of nature so then these individual monads are understood by him to be windowless interesting metaphor that he uses you see in a windowless robe there is no contact with the outside no cause-effect relationship to anything external everything inside the room is as it were her medically sealed it is self-contained self operated by virtue of the resources stored within the room so these monads then are as it were programmed in their own nature so that the the knowing which goes on by virtue of a perception is all innate innate ideas that come to our awareness to our consciousness if you like I'll recollect it because the monads a windowless there's no external stimuli affecting the mind and not only is the knowing that goes on in each but the de science the a petition is not something Verdes response to external stimuli but it's simply the the expression of the the inner potency the inner need the unit erection in which the spirit monad is set and the sings true of all moments so to say though windowless means that there are no causal connections between moments whether in relationship to thought or in relationship to over activity no causal connections but then you have to go one step further and ask well then how do they exist what's their source of energy and sometimes live Mnet's uses the term creation and says god creates them but in other places he he tries to be more descriptive and uses the term full duration he says they're continuously being full gated by God now I'd bet you've never ran across the term full duration before no I died when I first read likeness took my Webster dictionary back then and I assume it still does says that figuration has to do with generating energy it's used for instance when you strike a match and it catches flame you are fully rating the heat the light so it's the the idea of that the energy that their particular degree of force is constantly being generated and infused by God that God is the power source giving existence but in the act of giving existence to monads he gives them the degree of force which gives them their individual existence of that nature and so rather than the conception of creation which was becoming apparent in the beginnings of deism deism the view that God created and then things become self existent and self operative God is continuously imparting existence if you like this again is the thing that the medieval said Thomas Aquinas which is why when Aquinas argues from the order of cause and effect in the cosmos to the first cause he doesn't simply mean in fact he doesn't particularly mean in that proof the first in the whole series of courses madrazo are medicals that consider that continually empowers the whole cause and series and whatever state it is so God is the one who not only initiates existence but who sustains existence by continuing to impart existence and limits it's simply reiterating that within the conceptual scheme which he's developing figuration by God somebody was asking since last time isn't isn't this Stumpf seems to take it as as if monads are as it were of the very being of God is this another kind of spin ODEs istic peg theism you see and I'll argue no because he doesn't claim that these are eternal he claims that they're their force their energy their existence is given by God yes continuously but not that God is the totality of them it's not a Pentheus so it's his attempt to explain the traditional judeo-christian conception of creation now even though each of these monads is windowless no causal connections its existence is sustained by God its nature is what it is continuously because of God but having that individual nature knowing its place in the whole line it's is able to say that each by virtue of its own essence mirrors the whole each is as it were a microcosm of the whole so if you understand your own individual nature in terms of these attributes of that perception and a petition you having that a gülen's of what the whole is like in terms of a petition and a perception so this this metaphor of each knowing its place he takes rather literally the the the nature of the thing is such the nature of the individual monad is such that its own nature mirrors what it needs to be in order to fill this particular slot in the hole as if it's a distinct unique piece in a jigsaw puzzle there wouldn't fit anywhere else and so in its own nature there are implications for everything else so each mirrors the hole now let me pause there and see if you're digesting it do you get the picture of what he's saying ruse yes yes with this exception that we we caught last time but where Spinoza has a double aspect theory so the thought and extension are two sides of the same thing live Nets has different entities so that that which thinks is spirit mole Ned that which is extended is a composite of bear monads perhaps with soul mole head about that different things yeah so we speak of live knits as a parallelism never meeting but you can't really say of Spinoza since there are really two sides of one thing right but otherwise apart from the conceptual scheme the notion that there's no causal interaction yes sir John no the whole way trying to go back there I think you're probably playing on a conception of this nosov individuality which suggests that every individual is absolutely unique now that modern conception simply is false no it's false for lightness and I think it's false anyway you know we use we throw around the term unique so so loosely you know all snowflakes are unique they say well we imply that uniqueness means it has boundless value because it's unique but you know not every snowflake has boundless value it's not uniqueness that gives things value but in any case for live knits the term unique would be stressing any lack of similarity you see suppose you have an identical twin now you're not completely identical lime Mnet's talks about the identity of indiscernibles if you have two things completely I'm completely indiscernible one from the other then you don't have two things you have one on the same the identity of indiscernibles but an individual is different from another like an identical twin in some infinitesimally and because the differences are infinitesimal you see you you have an immediate understanding of those who are like you in certain ways now the third that you reach out admittedly there are not the Media proximation but there is still some analogy so that in the hierarchy of being if you are here oops I put you as a low-grade spirit wasn't my intention but by virtue of being there you have some sense of affinity for animals yeah you find yourself sympathizing with dogs especially your pet dog that you know yes and some people write papers and books about animal rights you see animal rights interesting how far the analogy will take us yes he and similarly by virtue of spirit beings humans have some understanding of what God must be like when we think of God as a person in whose image we are made so simply by virtue of the analogy you can say that that I I mirror in my nature something of the nature of animals of God of living things generally of physical things and add to that as a notion that since some nothing else can fill the slot in the overall picture that I'm filling is he by virtue of the principle of plenitude since nothing else can fill the slot then that there is in my nature an echo of the whole so as far as perception perception and language and all those things are concerned you can you can interrelate analogy no wait a minute perception if they're you mean since perception where we get external stimuli no if you mean conception and incidentally I notice those words are appearing mixed up in the outlines Descartes as well Hobbes as well perception is usually used to refer to sense perception since perception whether it be the inner sense or the outer sense sense perception okay that is to say awareness of particulars and of particular qualities Concepcion Concepcion is used to refer to concepts general concepts perhaps abstract ideas so keep the two distinct incidentally the term sensation is different again sensation is used to refer to the the particular synthesis and what they deliver a sensation of light a sensation of heat a sensation of bitterness a sensation of a minty smell I have to say Mindy at Christmas rather than rosin so we have particular sensations which are the ingredients for our perceptions of particular things both of which are distinct from concepts in the more general or abstract sense so yes we have according to lighten its concepts which are innate innate in the sense that they got a lot out of our mental activity perceptions but they emerge out of our mental activity we have sensations feelings but they to emerge out of the inner mental activity and amazingly they correlate with what's going on elsewhere that's the parallel where Descartes would say that you have a particular sensation because of some stimulus to the sense organs which is transmitted through the the brain and the animal fluids to produce a change of conscious State he has a cause-effect theory of sense perception but not so aliveness there are no cause effect processes producing sensations or perceptions that is to say in terms of external causes the synchronisation of the idea with what's going on that synchronization is God's doing in this perfectly harmonized system one other phrase that he uses the whole system operates as a pre-established harmony a pre-established harmony now that's what leads him and we'll see this next time as we get into the problem of evil that's what leads him to say this is the best of all possible moves the best of all possible worlds yeah that's what individuate s' distinguishes individuals okay does this pull together what you're getting from the reading I reread all the lighten it stuff this morning and it it seems to me that the both the Mona dolla G and even more the principles of nature and grace are really very very clear you have to read them carefully but that they're pretty explicit and pretty clear in these regards now whatever else we we do in connection with lightness we've got to have this Mona dolla G straight now isn't that the case with all of these figures that if you want to know why they think as they do about epistemology about ethics about God about the problem of evil you have to get to the underlying metaphysical scheme the metaphysical assumptions are just foundational to the whole thing in fact you can pretty well take that as a rule of thumb for whatever subject you are discussing you think not just philosophical topics but if you are discussing what Buchanan's candidacy for the presidency yes and why his particular kinds of America first values all right start asking yourself about what are the underlying metaphysical assumptions in that sort of a thing and how do you get at that well certain kinds of values have certain assumptions about the nature of the reality that he regards and that as a value but had always go back to those assumptions well we we've seen that all the way through from I suppose played along words that all of the various pieces of Plato's philosophy come together once you get that divided line straight with the distinction between forms and particulars you remember in the diagram we drew that was the hub of the wheel divided line from which along the spokes you can work out to talking about art and education and ethics and history and so on and so on and so forth same with people like Lightman's okay now let's then move on to this number six mind and body this after all is one of the major issues which divides these three continental metaphysical systems of the 17th century Descartes Spinoza likeness the mind-body problem now I I've already indicated some of the basics that are involved in this one is that monads are causally disconnected one from the other okay the window was causally disconnected another is that body's physical body's material bodies are composites of monads and if it's a living thing then there is a unifying monad the soul moment and notice that he's using soul in much the same sense as the Greeks where the soul is the source of life that's what gives life it's related to form what gives us a particular nature it's related to entelechy the particular function of the thing so the the body of an animal is unified by living soul a living soul which makes that hunk of matter a living animal which otherwise it wouldn't be with appropriate life functions involving degrees of a petition and a perception and now if we're talking of bodies then there are cause-effect relationships between bodies between these composites because when you get myriads of monads and he says millions when you get myriads of monads organized and unified they begin to take on spatial extension now monads themselves don't have spatial extension to begin with they're not substantive in any solid sense they're infinitesimal they don't take up space so they don't have size shape density other spatial occupancy characteristics what we've learned to call primary qualities they don't have but bodies which are composites do occupy space they do have primary qualities and now you can begin to see how he's gonna make room for mechanistic science it's the science of the relationships between bars that doesn't tell us anything about Mona's yeah yeah courtesy of Zeno's paradoxes you remember Zeno's paradoxes of wait for instance if one millet seed weighs nothing and you have in a sack a hundred thousand millet seeds each weighing nothing how come it makes a thud the only clue that I see in live Nets is in his use of the term infinitesimal yes a by infinitesimal he doesn't mean it has no size it means it has no measurable size so infinitely small so that when you get a very large number then you begin to get size I don't see any other explanation within now you see if Adam means a little pellet of matter no it's not atomistic and he rejects the term Adam for precisely that reason Democritus atoms were little solid pellets a monad is not a little solid pellet yes a now if on the other hand you mean is this animistic like more contemporary conception of atoms as composed of subatomic particles which particles may just be functions of energy yes all right yeah but for that you've got to get an energetic physics going in which matter is derivative from energy rather than the other way around now I think the the problem that Kristen has is how matter is derivative from energy at that stage of understanding and really he doesn't have a good explanation apart from what I suggest about the term infinitesimal so you'd have to say well wait until we understand and logistic physics okay so there are causal relationships then between bodies but not between monads now the the soul the the sole mode or in the case of humans the spirit monad is the unifying organizing principle as well as the life-giving thought giving direction giving principle for the whole otherwise you wouldn't have the ordered whole so it is as if the soul does for a body what God does for the universe apart from the order rows of things and he explicitly says that the things that God does impose regards we do in a much lesser degree at a much smaller level we make things much smaller than what God has made but we make unified individual organized things of a bodily sort now let me point up a couple of things about that if you will turn in the Moana dalla ji to let's see to page 212 213 214 first of all paragraph 74 philosophers have been have greatly puzzled over the origin of forms or souls but today we know my examination of plants insects and animals - the organic bodies of nature are not products of chaos or putrefy putrefaction spontaneous generation but always come from seeds in which seeds there was some preformed Asian ok it's been thought that not only the organic body was there before conception but also the soul in this body in a word the living animal itself and that by means of conception this animal has merely been prepared for a great transformation to become an animal of another kind something similar is seen outside of birth as when worms caterpillars worms become flies and caterpillars become butterflies the transformation to a different kind of being now what he's dealing with here and he names it later on is the aunty Malkiel ism of the day the view that the offspring in miniature body and soul is contained in the father seat complete so that in that sense the soul monad is in out growth of the soul monad of the father which was the outgrowth okay and you recall that we made mention of this back when we were talking about the Stoics because this was the basis for the stoic traducción theory of the transmission of the soul and the origin of the individual soul now here's Leibniz then adopting this kind of any Malkiel ISM dot this is your field can you tell us there was a renewal of this kind of approach wasn't there in this juncture in history can you give us the rough picture okay little animalcules there you go yeah yeah this is part of the philosophical view known as vitalism which views life as something distinct from simply physical chemical things okay and vitalism continued to flourish really until about the mid 20th century great spin ODEs as lenses in other words okay this this is his view then of the origin of souls including human souls spirits and the body provides a nice warm place for it to grow now say that again no I'm I'm roughly identifying these two views in biology talking about genetics okay any Malkiel ism is the name that's used for this view in theology talking about the transmission or the origin of the individual soul traducción ISM the viewer that it is transmitted is the name that's used but traducción ism introduced into Christian thought by Tertullian UC was really an adoption of the stoic view which was a kind of any molecule ISM okay and widen it seems to be pointing in that same direction and obviously the development of modern genetics changes the picture significantly biological vitalism is a rarity now in the 1940s it was quite popular in some circles particularly in France 50 years makes quite a difference okay paragraphs 75 this comes out again the animals some of which are raised by conception to the grade of larger animals may be called spermatic these among them which remain in their class that is the most part of born multiplyin are destroyed like large animals it's only a small number of chosen ones that pass to a larger theatre and so forth this is only half the truth I've therefore held that if the animal never commences by natural means neither does it end by natural means that not only will there be no birth that would be no utter destruction or death strictly speaking and so forth let's see then in paragraph 80 he begins to criticize Descartes and notice the difference Descartes recognizes that Sol's count in part any force two bodies because there's always the same quantity of force in matter yeah nevertheless he believed the soul could change the direction of bodies external calls only nevertheless he believed that the soul could change the direction of bodies this was because in his day the law of nature which affirms the conservation of the same total direction in matter wasn't known if he had known this he would have lighted upon my system of pre-established harmony rather than causal indirect yeah according to this system bodies act as if which is impossible there were no souls souls act as if there were no bodies and both act as if each influenced the other poor old Descartes as the spirits of rational souls although I find that the same thing that I've stated namely that they begin and end only with the world holds good at bottom with regard to early already and rational animals that they are spermatic animalcules as your bird as long as they remain such have only ordinary or sensitive Souls okay that low degree of a perception but as soon as those which are so to speak elected yeah he is a Protestant Calvinists those which are elected obtained by actual conception to human nature God does the selection they're sensitive souls are elevated to the rank of reason and to the program enough of spirits among other differences which exists between ordinary souls and minds or spirits is this also souls in general are living mirrors or images of the universe of creatures their nature is the mirror but minds or spirits in addition are images of the divinity itself were in the image of God able to know the system of the universe and imitate something of it by architectonic samples each mind being like a little divinity in its own Department spirits are capable of capable therefore of entering into a sort of society with God so that he yields and a father to its children and so the idea of the City of God a universal mana okay a moral world within the natural world the most divine of the works of God and so forth so the role of mind or spirit comes through pretty plainly now one hopefully two further things what about epistemology this is part of the mind-body question and I've already said that with windowless modes the conscious awareness is arise from within rather than from without yeah and he's pretty plain that solo nads at most can have sense perception and lingering memories animals can have sense perception and lingering memories they're for recognition and conditioned behaviors and so forth but when you come to spirit monads there we get more there we get reasoning and what he does is to distinguish two kinds of reasoning that that we have there are first of all truths of fact that we could know and there are truths of reasons that we can know truths of fact are contingent that is to say they're about what happens successively and our awareness of them accordingly depends on these successive events of which we have this inner awareness so truths affect a contingent whereas truths of logically necessary truths logically necessary truths that have the logical form of the laws of thought a equals a equals nan a thank you okay now Truths effect depend on the law of sufficient reason whereas truths of reason depend on the law of non-contradiction that distinction the distinction between truths of fact and truths of reason is I think pretty clear we make some factual assertions yeah right nits was a German who wrote in French and Latin German was not very a literary language scholarly language truth of fact dependent on the contingency of certain events of a historical sort truths of reason well anything for instance of the nature of a definition which simply unpacks what is already logically contained within the concept like de cartes the three angles of a triangle add up to two right angles you cannot have a mountain without a valley and because these are logically necessary given the concepts not the perception of things existing but the concept the general concept of a triangle or amount so there's a distinction between truths of fact nothing new there nothing new about saying one is contingent the other is necessary and nothing new about saying one depends on the law of sufficient reason the other on the law of non-contradiction is the Aristotle could have said the same what is distinctive is that both kinds of truths are innate inasmuch as were dealing with windowless moments now even Descartes seems to allow that sense perceptions are physically caused by virtue of sense stimuli and the mind-body causal interactions but not lightness even since perceptions are innate even the sense perceptions of animals are innate the pre-established harmony works that way now what then does this say about freedom human freedom will that cluster of questions well here you you have to you have to be very careful because the discussions of freedom and will and intellect that occurred in Descartes and Hobbes and Spinoza were discussions entirely in the context of the notion of efficient and material causation just that on the other hand line Mnet's tells us that monads are both material cause efficient cause formal cause and final cause he's back to the four Aristotelian causes so he's going to have a conception of the will not in terms of caused or uncaused efficient cause ancient style determinism or in determinism so that it looks as it does in Descartes II since as if a free will chooses in a causal vacuum on simply in the light of how much he knows no free will is rather a matter of a perception and a petition that is to say there is an inner directedness there is an inner drive there is final causation and you have to define what it is to be free not just in terms of efficient causation but in terms of final causation there's no vacuum of final and formal causes in this Mona dalla ji and I think he's right at least in this that much modern contemporary discussion of freedom and determinism is premise taun the notion that a free will is one where there are no efficient causes determining the outcome that is to say equating freedom with in determinism he won't buy that I think he's right but if were purpose if beings if there is a teleology running through human behavior and human existence that you've got to get a teleological conception of freedom now the question is whether his teleological conception of freedom will do it so tune in same time in the same station and we'll pick that up and then work into the problem of evil

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Keywords: wheaton, college, illinois, Wheaton College (College/University), Monad, Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz (Academic), A History Of Philosophy, History (TV Genre), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Arthur Holmes

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Length: 61min 26sec (3686 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2015