Herbart's Monadology

Abstract

This article is an introduction to Herbart's monadology. It discusses the fundamental concepts of his monadology and its similarity to Leibniz's monadology. A final section discusses the vexed question of Herbart's realism. It is argued that Herbart is more a transcendental idealist than a realist.

Keywords:

• monadology
• realism
• idealism

Notes

¹All references to Herbart will be to Sämtliche Werke. References to this edition will be to volume (Roman numeral) and page number (Arabic numeral). References to the Allgemeine Metaphysik will be first to the paragraph number (§) and then the volume and page number. ‘Anm.’ designates ‘Anmerkung’, a remark appended to a paragraph. This work consists in two volumes, volumes 7 and 8 of Sämtliche Werke. Volume 7 consists in paragraphs §§1–160 and volume 8 in paragraphs §§161–444. All translations from the German are my own.

²See the ‘Vorrede’ to Allgemeine Metaphysik, VII, 13. See also Herbart's academic lecture Oratio ad capessendam in academia georgia augusta professionem philosophiae ordinariam habita, SW X, 53–64, where he states (63): ‘Kantianum ipse me professus sum, atque etiam nunc profiteor … ’.

³A computer search through the WorldCat for all publications on Herbart from 1950 until 2014 yielded 1462 items, though almost all of them were new printings or editions of his works or studies of his theory of education. Only a handful, which for reasons of space we cannot mention here, were on his philosophy proper. For a bibliography of works on Herbart before this period, which were more numerous, see Schmitz, Herbart Bibliographie. The best treatment of Herbart's metaphysics is still that of Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie, III, 378–410.

⁴Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, volumes 18–20 of Werke. The third section of volume 20, 314–462, ‘Neueste deutsche Philosophie’, treats what we would now call the post-Kantian systems.

⁵Herbart knew Hegel well enough. He made some passing remarks about his philosophy in the preface to the second volume of his Allgemeine Metaphysik (VIII, 6). He wrote a highly critical review of Hegel's Philosophie des Rechts for the Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung in 1822 (Nr. 45–47), Sämtliche Werke XII, 140–54. Herbart saw Hegel as part of the Schellingian school and saw that as the chief problem with his philosophy.

⁶A second edition appeared in 1808 in Göttingen with Justus Friedrich Danckwerts. Both editions are reproduced in Sämtliche Werke, II, 175–226.

⁷The romantics (Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin) did not accept the idealist methodology of first principles; they were in their early years severe critics of Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie. Herbart's first criticism of the idealists’ methodology would therefore not apply to them. The romantics did, however, accept teleology and intellectual intuition, so the second and third criticisms would hold also for them.

⁸See Herbart's definition of philosophy in Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie, Sämtliche Werke IV, 38–9. The reference to work or ‘Arbeit’ in ‘Bearbeitung’ is deliberate. Famously, Kant had spoken of the need for ‘Arbeit’ in philosophy, which he understood as the labour involved in the analysis of concepts. He contrasted such work with a more lazy philosophy that would appeal to feelings and intuitions. See his ‘Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie’. Herbart was siding with Kant against Schelling and the romantics.

⁹In his admirable summary of Herbart's philosophy, Röd maintains that Herbart's monads have no windows. See volume IX/1 of Geschichte der Philosophie, 188. However, Röd does not note the important distinction between real and apparent causality. He is also forced to recognize (188) that Herbart does need to postulate some form of interaction between his monads.

¹⁰Herbart's emphasis. This maxim seems difficult to understand in view of Herbart's critique of causal interaction in his Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie. See §106; IV, 164–6. But Herbart's arguments against the reality of interaction here should be understood as a critique of the influx theory.

¹¹This is the point Herbart would make against Cassirer's criticism, Das Erkenntnisproblem, III, 401, that his real beings are propertlyless and therefore ‘the caput mortuum of abstraction’. His reals have characteristics or properties; it is just that they are dissolved in a unity, and that we have to grasp them separately and therefore not as they are in themselves.