A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (12 page)

The active principle enables us to individuate monads, even though we do not possess their complete notions. I can identify the individual substance that is Caesar in terms of the living force that propels him, without already predicating of him that he will cross the Rubicon. The active principle binds Caesar’s predicates together, and inclines him from the outset towards the decision that he will one day make, to cross the Rubicon—inclines, but does not necessitate.

Leibniz also refers to the activity of monads in another sense, familiar from Spinoza: a monad is active to the extent that its ideas are ‘distinct’, passive to the extent that they are ‘confused’. To understand this aspect of Leibniz we must turn to the theory of aggregates.

Aggregates of monads

In speaking of organic things we are not, as a rule, talking of individual monads. Every living organism is an aggregate of many monads. What binds them together, and what enables us to speak of
one
organism, when we have a plurality of simple individuals? It seems that the original problem that motivated Leibniz—the problem of accounting for the actual individuals in our world—remains with him.

Leibniz has recourse to the theory of ideas, which he inherited from Descartes. Each monad has perceptions or knowledge, which may be more or less clear and distinct, and more or less adequate.

When I can recognise a thing from among others without being able to say what its differences or properties consist in, the knowledge is
confused.
It is in this way that we sometimes know something
clearly,
without being in any doubt whether a poem or a picture is done well or badly, simply because it has a certain something, I know not what, that satisfies or offends us. But when I can explain the marks which I have, the knowledge is called
distinct.
And such is the knowledge of the assayer, who discerns the true from the false by means of certain tests or marks which make up the definition of gold.

Distinctness, so defined, admits of degrees, since the notions that enter into the definition of something themselves stand in need of definition. Only when everything that enters into the definition of a thing is known distinctly, can the knowledge of the thing be called
adequate.

What then is the relation between an idea and its object? For example, what happens when I perceive something? Nothing is passed to me from the thing perceived; yet there is a sense in which all my perceptions represent the world around me. They do this because the predicates of other monads unfold in harmony with mine: each of my perceptions corresponds to perceptions in surrounding monads and enables me to infer, with a greater or less amount of confusion, what is going on in them. This is guaranteed by another Leibnizian principle:

6. The Principle of Pre-established Harmony. Each monad has a ‘point of view’ on the world, defined by the totality of its perceptions; and because our perceptions evolve in harmony with each other, my perceptions can be treated as representations of the objective order.

Another way of putting this is to say that each monad ‘mirrors’ the universe from its own point of view. As Leibniz writes in the
Monadology:
‘the interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.’

How then are monads related? Such influence as there is between monads is only ‘ideal’, an effect of God’s ceaseless intervention. Nevertheless, monads can have a more or less clear idea of each other and of their situation—as I have a clear idea of my body, even though I do not know how it is composed, and therefore even though my idea of my body is not distinct. The varying clarity and distinctness of our perceptions can be understood as defining the ‘distance’ between us and surrounding things. And we can speak of being ‘affected’ by those things, to the extent that our perceptions give us a clear idea of them.

In each organism there is a ‘dominant monad’, distinguished by the clarity of its perceptions of all the others; and this dominant monad is the source of the organism’s unity. Leibniz, following Aristotle, describes this dominant monad as the form or ‘entelechy’ of the body; it is the animating principle or soul. In some way that Leibniz does not succeed in explaining, it binds the aggregate of monads into a quasi-substantial unity: it provides a
vinculum substantiale
—a ‘substantial chain’—making a new quasi-individual from the simple individuals of the human body.

The appearance of monads

That is confusing enough. But matters are made worse by Leibniz’s growing conviction that the appearance of the world is organised and understood in ways that do not represent the underlying reality. The familiar world around us appears ordered in space and time; it contains extended and durable things, which interact and obey causal laws. Yet monads are not extended—perhaps they are not ‘in time’ in the way that physical objects are. Moreover, they do not interact in the way that physical objects appear to interact, according to causal laws which are established
a posteriori,
by observation of the physical world. Such laws do not describe the activities of monads, but only the regular connections in the world of appearance, which are the by-product of transformations most of which we do not observe.

Thus, if I see a car passing my window my perception constitutes a state of this monad; this state mirrors the states of the monads which collectively constitute the car, as they are then disposed, in such a way that, to my confused perception, a car is represented in a state of motion. The perceptions of individual monads harmonise, and the phenomenal world which they ‘perceive’ obtains coherence because of the preestablished harmony, according to which the histories of individual monads proceed according to successive ‘mirrorings’ of the whole of things. God established this harmony at the creation, monads then proceeding according to their own individual inner momentum, yet in such a way as to share the collective illusion of a common physical world, in which they participate and of which they have experiential knowledge. Once established, the harmony proceeds forever: it no more needs the intervention of God to see that the laws of the universe appear to be obeyed from any particular point of view, than it needs the intervention of the watchmaker to ensure that two perfectly made watches, once wound up, will go on keeping time.

Leibniz also argued against Newton (through Newton’s representative Samuel Clarke), in favour of a relative as opposed to an absolute view of space. If space is absolute, and possessed of reality over and above the spatial relations between individuals, then the whole universe might be moved through space without discernible change. But then consider the position of the universe as a whole. Why should it be situated in one area rather than another? This question can have no answer. By the postulated nature of space, there will be no discernible difference between the two arrangements. Hence there is no explanation of the actuality of either; which violates the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Hence space must consist in the totality of spatial relations between objects. And if one asks for a definition of a point in space, Leibniz says, he can provide it by showing what it is for two objects to occupy the same point. Two objects occupy the same point in space if they stand in the same spatial relation to all other things.

But now what of spatial relations? What we perceive as a relation between
A
and
B
consists in fact of particular modifications of
A
and of
B.
To take an example: John’s being taller than Henry consists in two facts; first that John measures six feet, secondly that Henry measures five. Thus what we perceive as spatial relations are really certain modifications of monads. These could be called their ‘space-generating’ properties; Leibniz referred to them as their individual ‘points of view’. The familiar world that surrounds us appears spatial, even though monads have no extension and indeed, strictly speaking, no spatial properties at all. Space, as a system of relations, can only be an
appearance;
however, is not just any kind of appearance. Although when we perceive things as spatially organised, we do not perceive them as they really are, space is still to be distinguished from a mere hallucination. This is what Leibniz meant by describing space as a ‘well-founded phenomenon’.

With this phrase Leibniz introduced one of the crucial concepts underlying the philosophy of Kant. The physical world was described as ‘systematic appearance’. On the Leibnizian system, the whole physical world turns out to be a well-founded phenomenon. Which is to say that the dynamic and static properties of matter, its spatial and even its temporal organisation, and finally the causal laws which govern its behaviour, are assigned by Leibniz to the world of appearance.

The interesting result of this is that, having tried to reconcile the rationalist concept of substance with the common-sense concept of an individual, Leibniz ends by saying that the apparent individuals in our world are for the most part not individuals at all. Moreover, he is unable to give a coherent account of the fact that they nevertheless appear to be individuals. No example of a monad presents itself, save the individual soul. And yet the soul is as much outside the natural order (the order of well-founded phenomena) as every other substantial thing.

It cannot be said that philosophical empiricism is either peculiar to Britain or predominant there. Nevertheless, it is a fact worth remarking that, since the Middle Ages, there has been a succession of gifted British writers who have defended a version of the empiricist outlook, so that ‘British empiricism’ is now the name of a recognised strand of philosophical history.

Empiricism sees human understanding as confined within the limits of human experience, straying outside those limits only to fall victim to scepticism or to lose itself in nonsense. In the Middle Ages William of Ockham had already put forward empiricist theories about causality, about the mind and about the nature and limits of science; these were later to find wide acceptance. In the late Renaissance too, Francis Bacon had expressed, in a manner more fulsome than systematic, a theory of knowledge in which the habit of empirical investigation was given precedence over metaphysics.

Hobbes and the philosophy of language

Empiricism only began to come of age as a philosophy, however, when it was able to align itself with a comprehensive theory of language. It was then, when it felt able to determine what can and what cannot be
said,
that empiricism was able to challenge rationalism in what proved to be its weakest spot. Rationalism must assume that humans possess ideas the significance of which outstrips the limit of any experience which might provide their content. Among such ideas were those of ‘God’, ‘substance’, ‘cause’, and ‘self’, upon which the rationalist worldview had raised its foundations. It is this assumption that the new philosophy of language was to deny.

The empiricist theory of language finds expression in the works of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who, while he is now best known for his political writings, gave considerable thought to questions of metaphysics and epistemology. Hobbes wrote extensively, with the ambition of expounding a complete philosophy of man. He had encountered the influence of Descartes, and had been among those invited by Mersenne to submit their objections to
The Meditations.
His objections, crude though they sometimes were, show already the workings of a powerful and enquiring mind, and a dissatisfaction with the rationalism that Hobbes discerned in Descartes. Hobbes sought for a theory which would tell him how words acquire meaning, in order to demonstrate that certain metaphysical theories are, quite literally, meaningless. Like later empiricists, he was tempted to reject not just this or that metaphysical notion, but the
whole
of metaphysics, as a science forced to use words in a manner that transcends the limitations which determine their sense: ‘if a man should talk to me of a
round quadrangle...or immaterial substances
.or of a
free subject
. I should not say he were in error, but that his words were without meaning’
(Leviathan,
1651).

In common with many other empiricists, Hobbes gave a genetic account of the origins of meaning: words acquire meaning through representing ‘thoughts’, and the origin of all thought is sense-experience, ‘for there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense.’ In order to discover the meaning of any utterance, we must trace it back to the observations which gave rise to it. Moreover, because sensory experience gives us knowledge of particulars, then the words (names) which express our thoughts must ultimately have reference to particulars. Thus a general term could not denote a ‘universal’; rather it denotes indeterminately the particular members of a class. In this way Hobbes expressed a thought already familiar in the works of Ockham. He perceived a connection between empiricism and nominalism (see chapter 2, p. 17). One of the principal preoccupations of succeeding empiricist philosophy was to determine just what this obligatory nominalism amounts to, and how far it is tenable without the simultaneous denial of scientific thinking.

Hobbes foreshadowed Locke and Berkeley in many other ways. In a confused but determined manner, he tried to reject the rationalist concept of causation, although he was unclear as to what to put in its place. His unclarity was shared by every other thinker with whom he might be compared, being overcome only when Berkeley made the first steps towards the radical theory of causality that is found in Hume. Hobbes inherited from Descartes and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) the distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities, as Robert Boyle was to call them. In his theory of these, he presaged a fundamental advance normally attributed to Locke. He also attempted to give a general theory of the passions and of human nature based on empiricist assumptions alone. He combined this theory with an account of good and evil which represents moral judgements as entirely subjective.