Reconciling Leibnizian Monadology and Kantian Criticism

Abstract

This paper (written for the ‘300 Year's of Leibniz's Monadology' conference) explores systematic parallels between the criticisms of Kantian cognitive dualism provided by Salomon Maimon within his 'Essay on Transcendental Philosophy' of 1790 and F.W.J. Schelling within his 'General Overview of the Most Recent Philosophical Literature' of 1797. It discusses how both Maimon and Schelling suggest that the difficulties with Kant's cognitive dualism are so severe that they can only be resolved by recourse to a Leibnizian position, in which sensibility and understanding, and matter and form, arise from one and the same cognitive source. It thus shows how Maimon and Schelling – within 1790 and 1797, respectively – sketch systems of transcendental philosophy explicitly modelled on the Leibnizian philosophy, which both of them interpret as claiming that God is immanently contained within the human soul.

Keywords:

• Maimon
• Kant
• Leibniz
• Monadology
• transcendental philosophy
• transcendental deduction
• Schelling
• German idealism
• intellectual intuition
• Hume

Notes

¹Kant's works are cited according to the Akademie Ausgabe (AA) (i.e. Kants, Gesammelte Schriften) pagination with the exception of the Critique of Pure Reason for which the standard A/B pagination is provided. In all cases the Kant, Cambridge Edition translations have been followed.

²This was originally published in instalments in the Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten between February 1797 and November 1798. A slightly abridged and amended version reappeared within Schelling's Philosophische Schriften of 1809 with the title Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. The second version of the text is translated in Pfau, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, 62–138.

³Schelling is here referencing a passage from Leibniz's Recueil de div Pieces par des Maizeaux (see Schelling, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, vol. I, 4, 327).

⁴On occasions Maimon explicitly casts doubt upon the idea that Leibniz himself conceived the human soul as possessing a substantiality separable from God's (e.g. Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 414). Nonetheless, this claim that our understanding is a ‘limitation’ of the divine understanding seems to have closer affinities with Spinoza. Yitzhak Y. Melamed argues that Maimon was primarily a Spinozist ‘cautiously’ masquerading as a Leibnizian. While it cannot be denied that Spinoza also influenced Maimon, it is possible that Melamed somewhat overstates his case. Indeed, it must be observed that, even while making the Spinozistic claim that the human understanding is a part of God's understanding, Maimon nonetheless, unlike Spinoza, remains an idealist, suggesting, like Leibniz, a thorough reduction of all things to thought (Melamed, ‘Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism', 75). Even if, as Melamed demonstrates (‘Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism’, 76–77), idealist misconstruals of Spinoza were prevalent within the eighteenth century, the fact that Maimon does not attribute extension to God may make us question the extent of Spinoza's influence upon him. Furthermore, Melamed admits that ‘Maimon did adopt some important doctrines from Leibniz’ (‘Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism’, 93) and as an example refers to the theory of differentials introduced to resolve the quid juris? problem within the Essay. The truth of the matter is most probably that which is suggested by Maimon's description of the latter as containing a ‘coalition-system’ (Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 557) appropriating the insights of Hume, Kant, Spinoza and Leibniz. The continental rationalist aspect of his thinking is shaped by both Spinoza and Leibniz, and the influence of the latter is at least as great – if not greater – as the influence of the former. Indeed, when describing how the world exists for an understanding of which ours is only a part, Maimon writes that ‘this is … the point at which Leibnizians [and] Spinozans … can be united’ (Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, 208; Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, 110).

⁵See also AA vol. 5, 401–403. For a detailed account of Kant's conception of intellectual intuition see Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 141–152.

⁶In his ‘Concerning the Progress of Philosophy’ Maimon suggests that in mathematical reasoning we can attain some insight into the operation of such a divine understanding – and explicitly equates his views on this matter with the true ‘spirit’ of Leibniz. He writes:

God  … does not think discursively as we do, rather his thoughts are at the same time presentations [Darstellungen]. If one objects that we have no concept of such a manner of thinking then I answer, we do actually have such a concept since we ourselves partially possess it. All concepts of mathematics are thought by it and at the same time presented as real objects through construction a priori. We are therefore in this respect similar to God [ … ]. God … thinks all real objects … (although certainly in a more complete manner) as we think the objects of mathematics, i.e. he brings them about at the same time by his thinking.

(Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 42)

⁷Fichte refers to the immediate intuition that he believes constitutes I-consciousness (i.e. the consciousness that I am) as intellectual intuition within his review of Aenesidemus of 1794 and Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre of 1797/98. He employs this term to capture how, in I-consciousness, there is no distinction between the intuited and intuitant. It seems that a case could be made for claiming that Fichte follows Maimon (for whom he expressed admiration) in claiming that, in regard to I-consciousness, there is – in one sense – no distinction between representation and thing. We must, however, add the caveat that Fichte himself resisted the ascription of ‘thinghood’ or ‘substantiality’ to the ultimate nature of subjectivity. For further information about the relationship between Maimon and Fichte, see Freudenthal, Salomon Maimon, 233–248.

⁸In an insightful discussion of Maimon's conception of space and time, Peter Thielke notes that Maimon's ‘position escapes the obvious objections Kant levels against the Leibnizian explanation of space and time, while retaining the general tenor of the rationalist party line’ (Freudenthal, Salomon Maimon, 90).

⁹That Schelling entered into a study of Leibniz within this period has been suggested by Manfred Duner. See Schelling, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, vol. I, 5, 16–17.

¹⁰Following this passage, the editors of the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe invite comparison with §697 of Ernst Platner's Philosophische Aphorismen nebst einigen Anleitungen zur philosophischen Geschichte of 1793. In this section, which is headed ‘throughgoing separation of the sensibility from the understanding and the intuition from the concept’ (as qtd. in Schelling, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, vol. I, 4, 315), Platner questions the grounds for Kant's cognitive dualism, and within this context refers to Maimon's Essay, writing: ‘Maimon, otherwise a friend of the Kantian system, finds this separation unnatural; Transcendental Philosophy, pp. 63, 183’ (as qtd. in Schelling, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, vol. I, 4, 316).