Leibniz and the Monad
March 7th, 2010
Leibniz and the Monad
This is my take on Leibniz’s monad. Existence consists of points and each point is a monad and is entirely self sufficient being and without interaction with any other. Each monad undertakes changes in its state due to its own make up and reflects all the other monad in its states. These moments of the diverse state of the monad are called moments of time.
Now let me walk across the room. As I walk a whole series of monads take on the state of my consciousness of myself in succession. So there is no actual movement of my body or my soul in space, but merely a monad expressing air and then in another moment a point of my flesh and then in another moment a point of air again. Movement does not actually take place but rather merely each monad expresses this and then that and according to a particular perspective.
Space is then merely the relationships between the monads and cannot exist on its own at all, but merely as a function of the monads. Time is simply the moments of the internal states of each monad. God unifies the whole thing by a pre-established harmony. He has synchronized all the monads.
To illustrate this Leibniz notes that if God were to annihilate some person, it would take a second annihilation to remove his shadow.
In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant rejects Leibniz’s assertion by showing that it is easy enough to imagine a space devoid of anything (that’s the way we represent the absence of something), but we cannot imagine the absence of space. But if Leibniz were correct that space were the relationship of actual things, then it would be impossible to imagine an empty space.
Space and time, according to Kant, are nothing other than the way that we happen to look at things, and we not see space in things, but rather things in space. Likewise we do not see time in things but rather we see things
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