The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a par excellence rational thinker, i.e., one who accomplished his intellectual pursuits primarily by means of logically rigorous argumentation rather than by intuition. (It could be argued that both Descartes and Spinoza allowed themselves to be moved by feeling more than Leibniz ever did, in fact, Spinoza himself conceptualized this very tendency and named it the "third kind of knowledge" or the "intuitive knowledge of God" - cognitio Dei intuitiva). The outcome of this ruthlessly logical conception of the world is Leibniz's "Monadology". I believe it will serve best to focus on the main metaphysical thesis of this great work, by referring to the views, not of a professional philosopher but of a 20th century eminent man of science, the physicist Erwin Schroedinger (1887-1961, Nobel Prize for Physics, 1933). Schroedinger, in his book: "Mind and Matter" (Cambridge University Press, 1958) writes (Chapter 4: "The arithmtical paradox: the oneness of mind): "The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as part of it. But of course here we knock agaist the arithmetical paradox; there appears to be a great multitude of these conscious egos, the world however is only one. ... There are two ways out of the number paradox, both appearing rather lunatic from the point of view of present scientific thought (based on ancient Greek thought and thus thoroughly "Western"). One way out is the multiplication of the world in Leibniz's fearful doctrine of monads: every monad to be a world in itself, no communication between them; the monad "has no windows", it is "incommunicado". That none the less they all agree with each other is called "pre-established harmony". I think there are few to whom this suggestion appeals, nay who would consider it as a mitigation alone of the numerical antinomy. There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of the minds or consciousness. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind". We observe that, both Leibniz and Schroedinger, in this juxtaposition of views, help us towards an awareness of the ultimate limits of the knowable.