Monad (philosophy)

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The term monas (from the Greek μονάς monás “unity”, “simplicity”) or monad refers in natural philosophy to an imaginary unity of both physical and psychological meaning. The doctrine of monads differs from the pre-Socratic doctrine of primordial material in the application of mathematical methods to the questions that arise, especially with regard to the conceptual separation of res extensa and res cogitans, which has been made since René Descartes , and thus appears as a holistic aspect of the mind- body problem . In the history of philosophy different meanings of the term monad have been developed, the basic aspects of which have remained surprisingly constant. They begin with the Pythagoreans and develop in particular in Neoplatonism , Christian mysticism , Jewish Kabbalah and the Hermetic tradition. Later almost all of them are bundled in Leibniz's monadology before they fall apart into special meanings in the 19th century.

The Monas up to Leibniz

A term denoted monas already appeared in ancient Greek mathematics . Euclid's definition of a number is a manifold composed of monads. The Pythagorean idea that the Monas is the metaphysical origin (→ Greek ἀρχή arché) of the numbers is explained in the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus (205–270) to the effect that the Monas is the minimum of the arithmetic quantity, like the point the minimum represents the geometric size; and it is symbolized by Proclus (410–485) through metaphors, according to which the Monas is the source, root or hearth of the number.

This basic meaning of the Monas as the principle of generation, which brings about the transition from the inexpressible and indivisible to the countable and measurable, is explicitly connected with the talk of the Triune God in Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita (5th century AD) . The Monas underlies the three divine Persons and permeates all heavenly and earthly things, so that it is the goal of man to unite with this “holy unity”. This trinitarian process is then compared in the pseudo-hermetic book of the 24 philosophers (around 1200) with the refraction or reflection of light: "God is the unity (Monas) who created or created a (second) unity and (third) has reflected in itself their love or glow. "

In the early modern period, the Monas gained a predominantly natural-philosophical significance. The late Giordano Bruno defines the first monad ( Amphitrite ) as the “substance of every number” and characterizes it as a substantial minimum in a threefold sense, namely as a rational principle in numbers, as an essential principle in beings and as the indivisibility principle of atoms in bodies. The second monad ( Diana ) is the light trail of the first, understandable to man, in the universal all-nature.

Even with natural philosophers shaped by Paracelsus , such as Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1614–1699), “physical monads” are assumed to be vital forces and are separated from both the atoms and the mathematical minima. The Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–1687), on the other hand, understands God as the unmoved monad, which radiates its being into the created monads like the omnipresent center its radii towards the periphery.

Leibniz's monad

Leibniz (1646–1716), who used the term monad for the first time in 1696, interweaves the aforementioned historical threads of meaning into his metaphysical hypothesis of the infinite number of uniform substances (monads). They are found everywhere in matter and are either noticeably active (awakened) when they form the central or ruling monad , which is the center of activity and experience in an organism, or only weakly active (asleep) when they form the belong to countless subordinate monads inside or outside organic bodies. Monads are the sources of spontaneous, i.e. H. mechanically inexplicable action in nature, and they constitute the unity of every single thing or individual.

It is true that all monads are living mirrors of the universe , because all have perception , i.e. H. a - however dark - apprehension of the outside world, and "appetition" , d. H. the striving to get from one perception to the next. But they differ according to the level of clarity with which they perceive the surrounding world, i. H. Perceiving, imagining or even grasping in thought according to the structure of the body belonging to them. The lowest level in the hierarchy of the monads are the entelechies , i. H. original centers of spontaneous activity in inorganic bodies or plants that cannot be traced back to physical forces. If these centers of force are capable of sensation and memory, as in animals and humans, they are called souls . The highest level of the monads is formed by the rational souls or spirits , which, like humans, are capable of mental self-reflection and self-awareness.

Leibniz characterizes the monads as metaphysical, animated points or metaphysical atoms which, in contrast to the physical atoms postulated by atomistics , have no extension and are therefore not bodies. It does not follow from this, however, as Leibniz explains, especially in his correspondence with Burchard de Volder and Bartholomäus des Bosses , that the monads are immaterial. Rather, they consist of two principles, which are in themselves dependent and only form a complete substance or monad when combined : The innermost center of a monad, i.e. H. the mathematical point at which the entelechy, soul or spirit is located, forms the internal form of the monad. However, this form cannot exist as such, but is a physical point , i.e. H. planted or incarnated towards an infinitely small sphere, which, as it were, forms the outer covering of the monad. It consists of a special matter which Leibniz calls first matter ( materia prima , matière primitive).

The difficulty that monads on the one hand have matter, but on the other should not have any parts or extension, is explained by the special nature of primary matter. In contrast to second matter (materia secunda), i.e. H. the vast bodies that always only phenomena are understood Leibniz under the Erstmaterie a very fine, liquid and elastic matter that he was already in 1671 in his "Hypothesis physica nova" with the etheric or dynamic light matter identified that all flows through the body. Strictly speaking, this light or primary matter consists “not of expansion, but of desire for expansion”, because “the nature of light strives to expand”.

The spiritual center of a monad can never exist without that enveloping fluid of light because monads without matter cannot suffer and thus cannot perceive any impressions from the outside world. “Consequently, even God cannot deprive a created substance of its primary matter, although through his absolute power he can take away its secondary matter; because otherwise he made it pure activity, such as only he himself is. ”Detached from all matter is only God, the creative primordial monad, from which all created monads are generated through constant“ effulgurations ”.

The mystery of the monad or metaphysical point, i.e. H. The dynamic unity of the mathematical center and the enveloping physical point consists in the fact that the liquid, ethereal shell of the monad does have expansion and parts, but not the monad itself. For it, the connection between mental spontaneity and material receptivity is essential, not but the size or shape of its enveloping matter. Because even if its ethereal shell can be shattered and destroyed, the soul, as the mathematical center, always remains in the smallest fluid created. Therefore the monad, and so also the soul incarnated in it, is indestructible or immortal.

Leibniz conceived the monad as an intellectual answer to the mind- body problem radicalized by Descartes (1596–1650) . Because Leibniz also understands the soul as an immaterial center, he rejects direct interaction or physical influence ( influxus physicus ) between body and soul. Instead, he assigns the causal mediation between the two to the monad, since its liquid etheric or light matter forms the substantial bond ( vinculum substantiale ) between body and soul. The circulation of the ether through the visible bodies of the world is thus that “work of art” set up in advance by God, which brings about the exact correspondence and harmony between the perceptions of the soul and the movements of the body. This pre-established harmony therefore not only prevails between body and soul, but also between the monads themselves.

According to Leibniz's famous formula, the monads have “no windows” or doors through which something could come in from the outside or come out of them from the inside, since their spiritual center is always only enveloped by their own primary matter, but it does Monad, due to its punctiform structure of center, angular radii and periphery, the spontaneous achievement of representing the movements of the surrounding world from an individual perspective.

For Leibniz the world does not end in the scientific world; rather, the scientific world and its language correspond to a philosophical world, formed from monads (simple substances) whose symbolic representation is things. The question of the existence of elementary units should be answered by defining conceptual units, designated as (individual substances, substantial forms or) monads. The characterization of the monads takes place via so-called individual concepts, which in turn are constructed as complete concepts, ie as (infinite) conjunction of all predicates assigned to an individual. Behind the world of concepts (and thus again language and science) stands (itself conceptually constructed) the world of monads.

Leibniz puts forward three theses:

  • the thesis of a representation of the universe in every monad (based on the possibility, given the construction of complete concepts, to represent statements about any objects as statements about one and the same object),
  • the thesis of a pre-stabilized harmony (can be understood as the application of such a conceptual possibility to the (problematic) assumption of an infinite overall system that can be represented by a complete concept), and
  • the thesis that monads are constituted by perceptions (defined as the inner property and activity of a substance) (leads back to a theory of complete concepts or to conceptual determinations in the sense of the first two theses).

Everything that happens to a monad is merely the consequence of its idea or its complete concept, since this idea already contains all the predicates or events and expresses the universe as a whole. An external determination is assigned to this inner determination, but from a logical point of view external determinations belong to the complete concept of the predicated object, thus a logical subject takes the place of the empirical subject.

By replacing the empirical with the logical, the project of a logical hermeneutics reveals itself. Leibniz seeks factual truths to be traced back to rational truths ( thesis of the sufficient reason : there is always a sufficient reason why something is the way it is). The connection of (simple) monads and compound substances (bodies) concerns the connection of an object with its linguistic, more precisely: conceptual representation. The world does not say what it is, but one changes to a linguistic / conceptual level; everything can be traced back to conceptual units. The world is only visible on the basis of our constructions, but it cannot be depicted. A direct look (past our distinctions) is not possible (modern skepticism - deals with the thesis of the perspective of the world, which means a subjectivity that is not reduced to the subject).

Monad in the time after Leibniz

In German school metaphysics, which was coined by Christian Wolff (1679–1754), Leibniz's theory of monads was usually only adopted in modified form. Wolff himself speaks of "first elements", which, however, lack metaphysical quality. In the famous "Monad Dispute" of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1747, a prize was awarded that, based on geometrical considerations, rejected the monad theory. The extensive journalistic debate about this judgment in contemporary scholarly journals points to a split between the Leibnizian-Wolffian-influenced university Enlightenment in Germany and the French and English-influenced Frederician Academy in Berlin (named after Frederick the Great).

The criticism that Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) exercises in the amphibolism chapter of the “Critique of Pure Reason” of the doctrine of monads is actually based on its watered-down, Leibnizian form. The early Kant no longer conceived the monads as metaphysical, but only as physical and thus soulless points, namely as space-filling spheres with attractive and repulsive power. In the “Critique of Pure Reason” Kant says that Leibniz thinks of the monads as Noumena [Greek. νοούμενον noúmenon or plural νοούμενα noúmena = what is thought] (KrV B 321 f. - amphibolism of reflection concepts ).

The few theories of the 19th and 20th centuries that still claim the concept of the monad are characterized by very different contexts. In Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), “monad” refers to a “simple real being” of whatever kind the soul is. In his work on the Jewish question of 1844, Karl Marx describes freedom in civil society as freedom of the human being as an isolated, withdrawn monad. The physician Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) even calls the cells of the body monads, since each is an individual. In particular for the designation of unicellular organisms, the term "monad" has been used as the suffix -monas. In contrast, some 20th century philosophers use Leibniz's central concept in a more Kant or Descartes inspired sense; so Richard Hönigswald (1875-1947) and Wolfgang Cramer (1901-1974) for the principle of subjectivity, Edmund Husserl concrete for the ego (1859-1938). In the case of the criminologist and sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), on the other hand, monads are part of a philosophy of having, not of being, which explains how in a society that is as homogeneous as it is discontinuous, these elements exist separately as monads by possessing each other.

In natural philosophy, the term 'monad' is also used as the epitome of a space concept that is diametrically opposed to Newton's conception of space: space and the ponderable bodies do not exist side by side like two independent subsystems of the cosmos, but each body has its own, infinitely extended space surround. In this sense, Sẗjepan Mohorovičić's physical interpretation of the Lorentz transformation, known as the special theory of relativity , has been referred to as “monadology”.

swell

  1. ↑ Georgi Schischkoff (Ed.): Philosophical dictionary. 14th edition. Alfred-Kröner, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-520-01321-5 , p. 462 on Lemma “Monad” and p. 439 f. to lemma "matter".
  2. ↑ Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason . B 319, 329, 326ff. (Critique of Leibniz) cf. a. 316f. (Amphibolia).
  3. ^ Karl Marx: On the Jewish question . In: MEW. Volume 1, 1844, p. 364.
  4. ↑ Gabriel Tarde: Monadologie et sociologie, Revue Internationale de Sociologie 1893, German monadology and sociology. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008.
  5. ↑ See e.g. B. Wilfred Krause: Inertial Reference Frame System. In: Journal for General Philosophy of Science. Volume 23, No. 1, 1992, pp. 61-83.
  6. ↑ Stjepan Mohorovičić: The Einstein's theory of relativity and its mathematical, physical and philosophical character, de Gruyter, Berlin 1923rd

literature

  • Hubertus Busche: Leibniz 'Path into Perspective Universe. A harmony in the age of calculation. Meiner, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-7873-1342-7 .
  • Heinz Heimsoeth: atom, soul, monad. Historical background and background to Kant's antinomy of division. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1960.
  • Hans Poser: On the concept of the monad in Leibniz and Wolff. In: Albert Heinekamp et al. (Ed.): Metaphysics, Ethics, Aesthetics, Monads Theory . (= Studia Leibnitiana / Supplement. 14). Steiner, Wiesbaden 1975, ISBN 3-515-01924-3 .
  • Claus J. Rohde: Spiritual Body. An interpretation of Leibniz's doctrine of monads. Edition The Other Book, Osnabrück 2002, ISBN 3-89959-002-3 .
  • Karl Vogel: Kant and the paradoxes of multiplicity. The doctrine of monads in Kant's philosophical development up to the antinomies chapter of the "Critique of Pure Reason". Edition Hain, Meisenheim / Glan 1975, ISBN 3-7873-1342-7 .