- Length
- 96 pagesRescher, G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students, 1991
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Monadology
A complete metaphysics in twenty pages, by a man who invented the calculus independently of Newton, designed calculating machines, drafted a universal symbolic language and never got round to writing his big book. The Monadology is the nearest thing to it.
- Date
- 1714
- Author
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Region
- Hanover
- Language
- French
- 1720 German, Heinrich Köhler The first printing, ahead of the French original Attested
- 1898 English, Robert Latta Public domain Attested
- 1991 English, Nicholas Rescher Annotated student edition; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Posthumous — Published after the author died
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 37 years
Ridiculed within fifty years of publication for the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds, and taken seriously again once modal logic gave the possible worlds a use.
What the book says
Ninety numbered paragraphs setting out an entire metaphysics in about twenty pages. Leibniz begins from an argument about parts: anything composite is made of simples, so there must be simples, and since anything extended has parts, the simples cannot be extended. They are therefore not material atoms but points of a different kind, which he calls monads - unextended, indestructible, and each one different from every other, because two things exactly alike would be one thing. Monads have no windows: nothing goes in or out, and no monad acts on another. Each unfolds from its own internal principle, and each represents the whole universe from its own point of view, more or less clearly - the difference between a stone, an animal and a mind being degrees of clarity rather than kinds of stuff. Since nothing acts on anything, the appearance of interaction is explained by a harmony established in advance, so that the changes in each correspond to the changes in all the others like clocks set going together. Two principles govern the whole: nothing is true without a sufficient reason, and God, choosing among infinite possible worlds, actualised the one containing the greatest variety produced by the simplest laws.
What it argues
That reality is composed of infinitely many simple centres of activity, none of which affects any other, and whose apparent interaction is a harmony arranged in advance. The route there is a series of principles applied without exception. Nothing happens without a sufficient reason, so the world's being this way rather than another must have an explanation, and the explanation is God's choice among possibilities. Two substances cannot be exactly alike, since there would then be no reason for one to be here and the other there - so every monad differs, and each carries the whole universe within it as a perspective. The best-known consequence is the least well understood: this is the best of all possible worlds not because it contains no suffering but because no possible arrangement produces more richness from simpler laws, which is a claim about the design and not about the comfort.
What it answered
Ethics 1677Baruch Spinoza
Spinoza above all, and Descartes behind him. Leibniz agrees with Spinoza that Cartesian interaction is unworkable and refuses his remedy. If there is only one substance, then individual things are modes of it, nothing is genuinely contingent, and neither human choice nor divine choice means anything. The monads are constructed to give exactly what Spinoza's system removes: real individuals, real alternatives, and a God who selects. He is also answering Locke, at chapter-by-chapter length, in a separate work he withheld.
What answered it
Voltaire, devastatingly and unfairly, in Candide, where the doctrine that all is for the best is put in the mouth of a fool and tested against an earthquake. The Lisbon disaster of 1755 did more damage to Leibnizian optimism than any argument. Kant, who was trained in the Leibnizian school as taught by Wolff, spent his critical philosophy dismantling the claim that reason alone can establish such things. The twentieth century answered differently, by taking the possible worlds seriously as a formal device and leaving the theology aside.
How it argues
By numbered paragraphs, each following from the last, with no examples and almost no argument spelled out - it is a summary of positions established elsewhere, written for a correspondent who already knew the outline. This makes it the most compressed major text in modern philosophy and unreadable without help. The compression is also why it survived: the vast manuscript hoard was inaccessible for centuries, and this twenty-page sketch was for a long time what Leibniz meant.
The moment
Hanover, where Leibniz spent forty years as court historian and librarian to a ducal family, writing an interminable dynastic history, advising on mines, corresponding with hundreds of scholars, and doing philosophy in the margins. The priority dispute with Newton over the calculus embittered his last years; when he died in 1716 the court was in London, where his employer had become King of England, and almost nobody attended the funeral.
How it travelled
In fragments and under a schoolmaster's name. Because Leibniz published so little, the eighteenth century met him mainly through Christian Wolff's systematisation, which was more rigid and became the German university orthodoxy Kant reacted against. The Monadology appeared in German and Latin before its own French. The Academy edition begun in 1923 is still working through the manuscripts, and each generation of scholarship has had a somewhat different Leibniz because each has had more of him.
The strongest objection
That pre-established harmony explains nothing and costs everything. It is introduced because monads cannot interact, and it accounts for the appearance of interaction by making God arrange every state of every substance in advance to match every other - which is not a mechanism but a stipulation that the problem does not arise. Any observation whatever is compatible with it, which is the mark of a hypothesis doing no work. The related complaint is about optimism: a claim that no better world is possible cannot be tested against any amount of evil, since every case is absorbed as a necessary part of the best arrangement, and Voltaire's mockery landed because the doctrine has no way of being wrong.
Why read it
With an edition that annotates every paragraph, which is the only way anyone reads it. Rescher's student edition exists precisely for this. It rewards the effort as a demonstration that a whole metaphysics can be built from two principles applied without exception, and as the source of ideas - possible worlds, indiscernibles, sufficient reason - that turned out to have futures nobody expected.
- First printed
- 1720
- First in English
- 1898
- Digitised
- Yes
Leibniz published almost nothing in book form; the corpus is tens of thousands of manuscript pages and letters, and the critical Academy edition begun in 1923 is still incomplete. The Monadology's short companion, the Principles of Nature and Grace, was written in the same year for a different reader.
The nineteenth-century English versions are public domain. Rescher's and the Ariew-Garber selections are in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived, in a form he would half recognise. Possible worlds are now standard equipment in modal logic and metaphysics, the identity of indiscernibles is a live principle debated in physics as well as philosophy, and the principle of sufficient reason has had a substantial recent revival. The monads themselves have not come back.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain and the older English versions are too, but the technical vocabulary in those renderings is now regarded as misleading. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How the Monadology relates to the enormous unpublished corpus is a permanent question, and the picture has shifted repeatedly as the Academy edition advances. Whether the monads are meant literally as the furniture of the world or as a way of describing appearances at a deeper level of analysis is disputed. Whether pre-established harmony is a serious doctrine or a placeholder Leibniz would have replaced is argued. And the optimism has been defended by modern scholars as a much more technical claim than Voltaire's version, which is fair to Leibniz and does not entirely rescue the doctrine.