Heidegger on the Being of Monads: Lessons in Leibniz and in the Practice of Reading the History of Philosophy

1 Thanks to the following people for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper: Mike Beaney, Jeremy Dunham, Mogens Laerke, David Leopold, Stephen Mulhall, Pauline Phemister, Lloyd Strickland, John Whipple, and an anonymous referee for the journal.

Abstract

This paper is a discussion of the treatment of Leibniz's conception of substance in Heidegger's The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. I explain Heidegger's account, consider its relation to recent interpretations of Leibniz in the Anglophone secondary literature, and reflect on the ways in which Heidegger's methodology may illuminate what it is to read Leibniz and other figures in the history of philosophy.

Keywords:

• Leibniz
• Heidegger
• substance
• monad
• methodology
• force

Notes

1 Thanks to the following people for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper: Mike Beaney, Jeremy Dunham, Mogens Laerke, David Leopold, Stephen Mulhall, Pauline Phemister, Lloyd Strickland, John Whipple, and an anonymous referee for the journal.

²The version in Pathmarks is entitled ‘From the Last Marburg Course’. The differences are mainly due to Heidegger's omissions from MFL in P. However, there are some additions and I shall draw on both versions below.

³It should be noted I will be concerned here only with the ways in which a reading of Heidegger's lectures might be brought into dialogue with the reception of Leibniz in recent Anglophone literature. Furthermore, the discussion is aimed primarily at those who are unfamiliar with Heidegger's lectures. There would be much more to be said were considerations of the reception of Heidegger's account of Leibniz in non-Anglophone secondary literature included.

⁴Sleigh puts his own work in the first of his two categories and a paradigmatic example of the latter for him is Jonathan Bennett. Bennett provides an interesting discussion of this method in the introduction to Bennett, Learning from Six Philosophers, 1–9. Something like this distinction can be found in Russell (Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, xii), in Rorty's (‘Historiography of Philosophy’) discussion of ‘historical’ and ‘rational’ approaches, and Laerke, Smith, and Schliesser's discussion of ‘appropriationist’ and ‘contextualist’ approaches (Philosophy and Its History, 1–3).

⁵My ‘dialogical history’ is essentially the unnamed third approach discussed in Laerke, Smith, and Schliesser (Philosophy and Its History, 3–4).

⁶See Strawson, Individuals, Chap. 4.

⁷In fact, I see nothing in Heidegger's discussion of monads in MFL that should be regarded as creative history rather than dialogical history. However, Heidegger's 1951 lecture course on Leibniz, The Principle of Reason (GA 10), does appropriate Leibniz's texts in a much more radical way.

⁸See GA26 87/MFL 70–1.

⁹A VI, 4 2027-30/L 296–8.

¹⁰See Lodge, ‘Force and the Nature of Body in Discourse on Metaphysics §§17–18’.

¹¹In emphasizing this Heidegger's focus automatically moves away from many texts in which Leibniz himself starts by considering the material world and the role of force in the production of motion. For a survey of the ways in which Leibniz conceives of the relationship between the forces of bodies and his substance metaphysic, see Garber (Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, 2009, 287–301, 305–9).

¹²GP IV, 468–70/L 432–4.

¹³Loemker uses the term ‘conatus’ here (L 433), which is commonly found in other translations of Leibniz.

¹⁴See SZ 26–7.

¹⁵I follow the translation from P which differs slightly from the version in MFL, but not in ways that are material to the present discussion.

¹⁶See note 19 below.

¹⁷This is Heim's rendition of Leibniz. It includes Heidegger's interpolation of the term ‘drive’, but is not otherwise particularly idiosyncratic (see LDV 307).

¹⁸I deviate here slightly from the translation at MFL 89 and the slightly revised translation at P 73.

¹⁹The translation follows P here.

²⁰Whilst ‘Vorstellen’ is more naturally translated as ‘to imagine’, Heim's introduction of the term ‘prehension’ (which means roughly the same as ‘apprehension’) is an effort to retain some of what he, plausibly, takes to be Heidegger's intention – namely, to indicate the fact that that which is unified is a temporal sequence of perceptual states.

²¹I have in mind AG and Leibniz: Philosophical Writings (Everyman's University Library, 1973) edited by G. H. R. Parkinson and translated by Mary Morris.

²²For a summary of some of the main positions, see Lodge, ‘Garber's Interpretations of Leibniz on Corporeal Substance in the ‘Middle Years’’. Other significant contributions include Baxter, ‘Corporeal Substances and True Unities’; Phemister, ‘Leibniz and Elements of Compound Bodies’; Hartz, Leibniz's Final System; Rutherford, ‘Leibniz as Idealist’; Garber, Leibniz: Body Substance, Monad. This is not to say that the consideration of this idea is especially novel (see e.g. Cassirer, Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen).

²³See Garber (2009).

²⁴Also see On Body and Force Against the Cartesians from 1702 (GP IV, 395/AG 252).

²⁵See Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist, 327–8, 338, 347–9.

²⁶See Garber (2009, 166–72).

²⁷Also, see Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World, 177–82 for discussion of the first- and third-person perspective in Leibniz.

²⁸This strategy is common in the correspondence with Arnauld and other documents from the 1680s (see Garber, ‘Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics’ and 2009 chapter 2). But Leibniz also argues for the existence of monads in something like the same way in his correspondence with De Volder in the early 1700s (see LDV 275; 285–7; 301–3) and as late 1714 in the Monadology (GP VI, 607/AG 213).

²⁹See Sleigh, ‘Leibniz on the Simplicity of Substance’, 120.

³⁰See Whipple, ‘Continual Creation and Finite Substance in Leibniz's Metaphysics’.

³¹For example, see LDV 289.

³²See http://philosophy.princeton.edu/about/eighties-snapshot.

³³In saying this I do not, of course, mean to imply there are no other reasons to value the study of the history of philosophy. Furthermore, as Sarah Hutton has emphasised recently (Hutton,‘Blue-Eyed Philosophers Born on Wednesdays’), there are important connections to be explored between engaging in careful exegetical history of philosophy and the recovery of the writings of women philosophers and other neglected figures. However, even in this case, my inclination is to think that the greatest value of this kind of project lies in the role that it can play in shaping philosophy itself.