monad

n.

1. Philosophy. An indivisible, impenetrable unit of substance viewed as the basic constituent element of physical reality in the metaphysics of Leibniz.
2. Biology. A single-celled microorganism, especially a flagellate protozoan of the genus Monas.
3. Chemistry. An atom or a radical with valence 1.

[Latin monas, monad-, unit, from Greek, from monos, single.]

monadic mo·nad'ic (mə-năd'ĭk) or mo·nad'i·cal adj.
monadically mo·nad'i·cal·ly adv.
monadism mo'nad·ism n.

One. A single item or operation. An instruction with one operand.

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Concept developed by Leibniz, in whose philosophy monads are the true unities and hence the only true substances. Monads are extensionless, mental entities, capable of perceptions and appetitive states, but each of them self-sufficient and developing without relation to any other (see pre-established harmony). Their self-sufficiency is often registered by calling them ‘windowless’ monads. The foundation of the doctrine is that relations must ultimately be explained by the categorical, non-relational nature of things. See also Conway.

Theosophical term that literally means a unit (Greek monas). The Monad is frequently described as a "divine spark," which is an appropriate expression, for it is a part of the logos, the divine fire. The Logos has three aspects—will, wisdom, and activity, and since the Monad is part of the logos, it also has these three aspects. It abides continually in its appropriate world, the monadic, but in order that the divine evolutionary purposes may be carried out, its ray is borne downward through the various spheres of matter when the outpouring of the third of the three life waves takes place.

It first passes into the spiritual sphere by clothing itself with an atom of spiritual matter and thus manifests itself in an atomic body, as a spirit possessing three aspects. When it passes into the next sphere, the intuitional, it leaves its aspect of will behind, and in the intuitional sphere appears in an intuitional body as a spirit possessing the aspects of wisdom and activity. On passing in turn from this sphere to the next, the higher mental, it leaves the aspect of wisdom behind and appears in a casual body as a spirit possessing the aspect of activity.

To put this somewhat abstruse doctrine in another form, the monad has, at this stage, manifested itself in three spheres. In the spiritual it has transfused spirit with will; in the intuitional it has transfused spirit with wisdom; and in the higher mental it has transfused spirit with activity or intellect; and it is now a human ego, corresponding approximately to the common term "soul," an ego which, despite all changes, remains the same until eventually the evolutionary purpose is fulfilled and it is received back again into the logos.

From the higher mental sphere, the monad descends to the lower mental sphere and appears in a mental body as possessing mind; then betakes itself to the astral sphere and appears in the astral body as possessing emotions; and finally to the physical sphere and appears in a physical body as possessing vitality. These three lower bodies—the mental, the astral, and the physical— constitute the human personality, which dies at death and is renewed when the monad in fulfillment of the process of reincarnation, again manifests itself in these bodies.

Although he never published it in complete form, Leibniz's philosophy is a closely knit system of speculative metaphysics, with a neatness and story-book attractiveness which led Kant to say that Leibniz had built 'a kind of enchanted world'. Subsequent philosophers have generally found the system as a whole too strange to be taken seriously, but some of the individual ideas have been extremely influential.

It could all be described as philosophy of mind, for it is Leibniz's opinion that only minds exist. There are endlessly many of them, all different, and what we take to be inert matter is made up of nothing but minds of a rather stupid variety. There is no difference of kind between them and ourselves, only a difference of degree. They can be thought of as coming low on a scale of gradually increasing intelligence, with microbes and insects and animals and men above them. Above men come angels, and right at the top, God. God is rather a special case, being infinite and the creator of everything else; all other minds are finite minds, of more or less intelligence. Leibniz calls them 'monads'.

Monads have perceptions and desires; according to Leibniz, when mental states are analysed it turns out that fundamentally they all come down to these two kinds. Each monad continually seeks its own improvement, which consists in coming to perceive things more clearly and distinctly. The awareness that one's perceptions have become more clear and distinct is called pleasure, while the awareness that the opposite has occurred is called pain. This leads to so implausibly intellectual a view of the feelings and emotions that only a philosopher could have adopted it. Leibniz probably derived it largely from Spinoza, and does not work it out in much detail, but he does provide a few analyses — love, for example, is pleasure at the pleasure of another, pleasure itself being defined as above.

Perceptions may be more, or less, clear and distinct; it is in respect of the clarity and distinctness of their perceptions that minds differ. What makes one mind more intelligent than another is just that it can perceive things better. Leibniz includes as perceptions both thoughts and sense experiences, for he sees no essential difference between them; sense experiences are one variety of clear but not very distinct perception. A perception is clear when one understands what one is perceiving, but distinct only to the extent that one can analyse the concepts involved. Many of our thoughts are obscure and confused perceptions, but a few are clear and distinct: the thought that 27+2=4, for example, and our apprehension of the two principles Leibniz thinks fundamental to all reasoning: the principle of contradiction ('No proposition can be both true and false at once') and the principle of sufficient reason ('Nothing occurs without adequate reason'). These things are not learned from sense experience, as Locke and the empiricists maintain; our knowledge of them is innate, though experience is required to bring them to consciousness. Leibniz also rejects Locke's claim that all our concepts are acquired from experience by abstraction. No experience could give us concepts like those of God or of mathematical equality, and these must be inborn in us in the same way. Recently the defence of innate knowledge has been taken up by Noam Chomsky (see language: Chomsky's theory), but it is one of the things that mark Leibniz off as a rationalist, and it leaves him with the perennial problem of rationalist philosophers: why should an inborn propensity to believe certain things be any guarantee of their truth?

Leibniz was the first to introduce the idea of the unconscious. He points out that one can often recall having perceived something — some detail of a familiar scene, perhaps — although one did not notice it at the time: clearly one must have perceived it without being aware of doing so. And in listening to the sea breaking, one is conscious only of the sea and not of each individual drop of water; yet the sound of the sea is made up of the sounds of the drops, so that one must in some way be perceiving each of them. Such unconscious perceptions he calls 'little perceptions'; they differ from conscious perceptions only in degree — degree of clarity and distinctness. Unconscious perceptions are highly obscure and confused, and Leibniz thinks we have far more of them than we might ever suspect; for each monad continually perceives the entire universe, though we are never conscious of more than a small part. Those monads which come very low on the scale, so low that we normally fail to recognize them as minds at all, have only unconscious perceptions, and there are times when we are in this state ourselves — in sleep, for example, and in death. For when someone dies his mind loses its clearer and more distinct perceptions, but does not cease to exist or lose its identity; it sinks down, temporarily at least, to a lower position on the scale.

No monad wants its perceptions to become less clear and distinct; on the contrary, all its actions are directed towards moving further up the scale. Leibniz regards an action as an event directly caused by the will of a monad, and this is much too crude an account of action. But it is over freedom that Leibniz gets into particular difficulties; he is anxious to defend free will against the determinism of Spinoza, yet it is hard to see how he can. Since every monad must will its own improvement, it can exercise choice only over how to achieve this. But it is bound to choose whatever means seem the best available — the principle of sufficient reason guarantees that no choice can be made without adequate grounds. So the choice is completely determined by the monad's beliefs about what the best means are. Leibniz ties himself up in knots over this, and attempts various solutions, but he usually says that its beliefs incline it, without necessitating it, to make the choice it does. Since they incline it quite irresistibly this constitutes a memorable attempt to have your cake and eat it.

The difficulty is made even more acute by a further part of his theory, for he holds that God programmed into every monad at the creation the whole course of its future development, including every action and every thought. We would hardly describe as free a robot all of whose behaviour had been determined in advance by its designer.

Leibniz actually holds that created monads never produce effects in one another. They only appear to. They are like different clocks which strike the hours together. God has so designed them that whenever an event we regard as a cause occurs in the career of one monad, the events we think of as its effects will occur in the histories of the others. So the monads keep time with one another, and appear to act on one another, but really do not: there is a 'pre-established harmony' between them. In virtue of the harmony there is a correspondence between each monad's perceptual states and how things are outside it, so that it can be said to 'mirror' the universe even though its perceptions are not caused by the things outside.

Leibniz's reason for this remarkable theory is that if monads could act on one another he thinks they would not be genuinely independent things, substances. Indeed, he goes so far as to maintain that monads cannot really stand in any relations to one another at all. This leads him to deny the reality of space, for he thinks that space can only be a system of relations between things. Things do appear to be spatially related, but really there are no relations between them and therefore no space. Nevertheless, the appearance is 'well founded' in the perceptual states of the individual monads, for they each differ in the clarity with which they mirror different parts of the universe, and our idea that they have positions in space is a confused awareness of these differences. Roughly speaking, I appear closest to those things I most clearly perceive. But one cannot do other than speak roughly here, for the theory is not properly worked out, and could not be. I can perceive the Pleiades, after all, more clearly than the back of my head.

Clarity and distinctness are being given too much work to do. They cannot provide the reality behind our awareness of spatial relationships, nor is it really our sole aim in life to get more of them. Leibniz's overvaluation of them is characteristic of an age intoxicated with the recent successes of rational thought and its apparent capacity to solve every problem; it does not detract from the brilliance and originality of many of his ideas.

(Published 1987)

— Ralph C. S. Walker

Bibliography
• Broad, C. D. (1975). Leibniz: An Introduction.
• Joseph, H. W. B. (1949). Lectures on the Philosophy of Leibniz (repr. 1974).
• Leibniz, G. W. (1965). Logical Papers. Trans. and ed. G. H. R. Parkinson.
• Morris, M., and Parkinson, G. H. R. (eds.) (1973). Leibniz: Philosophical Writings.

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1. a protozoon or coccus.
2. a univalent radical or element.
3. in meiosis, one member of a tetrad.

A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce

n.

The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. (See Molecule.) According to Leibnitz, as nearly as he seems willing to be understood, the monad has body without bulk, and mind without manifestation -- Leibnitz knows him by the innate power of considering. He has founded upon him a theory of the universe, which the creature bears without resentment, for the monad is a gentlmean. Small as he is, the monad contains all the powers and possibilities needful to his evolution into a German philosopher of the first class -- altogether a very capable little fellow. He is not to be confounded with the microbe, or bacillus; by its inability to discern him, a good microscope shows him to be of an entirely distinct species.

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