Letters to Jack: Tracing Philosophies of Movement
Letter One: On Leibniz’s Monadology
By Maty Candelaria 11.21.2022
This is a Letter to my friend, Jack F, author of the blog “Notes for Nomads” on Substack. Check out his blog!
Introduction
Jack, my fellow proletarian scientist!
You’ asked me to write about Deleuze and Guattari’s text on Nomadology. What a horrifying task you've obliged me with! What can I, a person living comfortably in middle America know about what it means to be a nomad? Let alone Nomadology, and nomad science?
Of course, the concept of "Nomadology" comes directly from two French philosophers, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in "1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine" from A Thousand Plateaus. Both of these French dudes were not nomads either. However, this notion of Nomadology must be understood as a necessarily pluralist. To be a nomad means no less than its political, social, geographical, anthropological and philosophical implications.
I will get to that… I promise. But I want to make a few detours. I want to follow some strands, make some maps. I want to carve out some smooth space thoughout this striated territory of philosophy.
My goal for this upcoming collection of letters is to engage in a philosophy of movement and how movement squares up with mechanism. Following the lead of the new materialists like Thomas Nail which, I am looking to investigate a theory of movement that can situate matter as indeterminate, non-determinist, and non-essential.
If ‘Nomadology’ is anything, it is a science of movement itself. It is a science which cannot be codified as a set of unchanging discrete qualities, but is instead followed, traced, and mapped. Nomad science, or Nomadology can be roughly understood as a science of ‘naturing-nature’ or the ‘numbering-number’, as opposed to a science that seeks to establish a ‘natured-nature’ or ‘numberered-number’1. On the one hand, we have a study which follows matter and movement, and on the other, we have a study which subordinates movement to matter, and makes matter into a prescriptive law.
There is a similar distinction made in linguistics between ‘prescriptivism’ and ‘descriptivism’. One recognizes the contingency, and change of phenomena, while the other seeks to establish the present state of things as unchanging and universal for all time.
The challenge of establishing a philosophical account of Nomadology, therefore, requires a sort of theoretical nomadism. Or rather, even better, a pluralism.
You cannot account for nomadism nor nomadology within a single universal framework. Positive science nor mechanism cannot account for its movement. Rather, we need a science of movement.
A nomad (as opposed to State) science. A minor (as opposed to Major) science. A proletariat (as opposed to Bourgeois) Science.
My Current Trajectory and Focus
Almost counter intuitively, you may have noticed that I’ve only so far referenced Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau on Nomadology. The reason for this is simple:
I am not ready (at least to publish anything on the subject).
The text is challenging, and I want to do it justice. At the same time, I want to be critical of it. I’ve spent a lot of time and ink appreciating Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and now that I have a better understanding of their project, I would like to engage with them more critically, as well as historically. Making this project into a series will hopefully give me a reason to give the topic the time it deserves.
Beyond that, I want to follow your lead and map out a philosophy of movement. As we both know, to map means to carve out just as much as it means to compose. Something I really appreciate about your work is that you jump around between various points throughout the History of Philosophy, and place them into conversation with contemporary philosophy as well as Ancient Philosophy and science.
On the other hand, at risk of simply replicating your projects, my goal is to jump around to other territories that you have not explicitly covered, such as Marxism (Frankfurt School, Karl Marx, Engels, and perhaps even Bataille).
But first, I am going to write on Leibniz’s short text on Monadology, which you have wrote about before.
Why Monadology? Because it has the same letters as “Nomadology'' except with an M instead of a W. I do not think the similarity of these names is coincidental. Deleuze and Guattari love to find cheeky play on words like “The Geology (playing off of Nietzche’s Geneology) of Morals'.
Additionally, we will see Leibniz attempting to account for movement with his theory of the Monad. You explain this in your essay on Monadology as well. As you mentioned previously, Leibniz was trying to provide an alternative to Decarte’s mind-body dualism, and part of this motivation was to go beyond mechanism:
“Leibniz’s second principled reason against Descartes - every philosophy which is exclusively mechanical denies change (Parmenides) and to hold that everything is changeless and that there are only modifications of position and displacement in space or motion. Leibniz claims that motion itself is a change and should have its reason in the being which moves or which is moved, for even passive motion must correspond to something in the essence of the body moved”2.
Personally, I do not think he is successful in this respect. Leibniz comes close to outlining a theory of intensive movment involving perception, but ultimately subordinates motion to a spiritual mechanism by introducing trancendence (God) into an already immanent system.
Leibniz’s Monadology
In 1714, Gottfried Leibniz wrote a short essay called Monadology. It’s surprisingly short, only 90 axioms3. It’s sort of a similar style to Spinoza’s Ethics, except much shorter. For Leibeniz, Monads are base constituents of life which are immaterial.
Monads are simple substances, which do not have parts and cannot be divided. Unlike atoms, they are not material and therefore cannot be reduced to an equivalence of exchange4. All Monad’s are unique Haecceities or Singularities, which cannot be idenical with another. Since Monad’s cannot be divided we can also assume that they are not composed of other parts. The fact that they are not composed of other parts is what makes them singularies5. Additionally, every material body (plants, animals, humans, but also water and air) has a Monad which runs parallel to is, but does not affect, nor is affected by each other
Consequently, Leibniz says that Monads cannot be changed from an outside force, but rather that “the natural changes of the monad come from an internal principle”.6 The Monad is internally moving and changing, as opposed to being static7. This means that they cannot be changed from the outside, and only have an internal movement. Monads are not windows, but mirrors which reflect the infinity of God's attributes8. Leibnez calls these reflctions perceptions. When a Monad is self-percepting, we call this apperception, or self-consiounsess.
I really like how you explain the windowlessness of Monads in your essay on the text:
“The monads have no windows through which to receive anything from outside. They do not undergo any external action and consequently are never passive. All that can take place inside a monad is the process of spontaneous activity through development of their own essence (flower blooming)”9.
In our recent conversation, you really helped me understand the importance of the Monad being composed of only internal movements. For one, Monads must be active and not passive, otherwise, they would be nothing at all10. The Monad must have activity, but that does not mean (at least for Leibniz) that Monads are able to affect or be affected by each other. Rather, because Monads must be an absolutely simple substance, we must also grant that these simple substances cannot be divided (because they are not made of parts), or even created (uness by God). If Monads could interact with each other, they surely would not be simple substances, as that would mean they have shape and size (which would make them divisible).
As John Brady explains, this is what leads Lebinez to evoke God as the Grand Mover of all things :
“The assumption here is that all natural creation and destruction is a putting together, or a falling apart, of parts and pieces. As monads have no parts, they can’t ‘fall apart’ or be ‘put together’. Thus their creation and destruction can only happen ‘super-naturally’, that is, beyond the purview of the natural order. This is a novel phrasing of the cosmological argument for the existence of god, but is not necessarily theological in character. It’s the same argument for why our modern physics can’t backwards infer earlier than the big bang — the entire natural order (space, time, matter, energy, cause and effect) break down, thus to speak of ‘super-natural’ causation can be read as similar”11.
Yet, despite being simple substances, the introduction of infintesimle intensive movement does explain why Deleuze loves Leibniz so much. The figuration of Monadology quite literally embodies the Deleuze-Guattarian principle ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’12. Monads are tiny intensive substances that have perception which is “inexplicable by mechanical causes”.13 They are composed of intensive speeds and internal movements14. Each Monad is a unique field of intensity. Furthermore, there are an infinity of heterogeneous Monad’s which parallel the physical realm of extension:
“Down and down, forever and ever. So, in some system or local situation, we can count there being one monad if there is a person there, but that person’s body contain infinities within it, microcosms within microcosms within microcosms within microcosms, populated by ever simpler creatures, each with their own monad, existing in a milieu, and these microcosms are unending. We can subdivide the matter infinitely and keep finding them at ever smaller levels of description. And each and every one of these creatures in these microcosms is perfectly unique — that is, bearing at every moment a unique collection of qualities, or perceptions”15.
If you look at the brain as a complex machine with energy that flows through it, Leibniz would argue that we couldn’t locate perception in a particular mechanical movement that the brain makes, nor the brain as a whole. But rather, Monad’s (which run parallel to Matter) are themselves perceptive, reflective as opposed to affective. Some Monads are souls, and the Soul is what gives us the capacity for reason. Each Monad, no matter how imperceptible, has a quality of perception, and some higher Monads (human beings) have the capacity for self-perception.
For Leibniz, although there is a necessary hierarchy of Monads, that does not mean plants, animals, and objects are non-perceptive. Instead, everything has the capacity of perception. The question is not “does this thing have perception?”, but rather “what kind?” and “how much?”. Each Monad reflects the entire universe (infinitly), yet how ‘fuzzy’ or ‘clear’ a particular monad is to another may depend on its scale and relationality.
Memory, for Leibniz, is a function of perception “furnish[ing] a sort of consecutiveness16” which gives way to empirism. Only higher Monads-- reasonable souls -- are seen as being capable of a higher form of empirical functioning that are imbued by God. God, the grand orchestrator of the Monads, is viewed as something necessary and a priori because only God is capable of establishing an absolute harmony of infinity.
One of the more grand conclusions that Leibniz reaches is that because we must take as an a priori principle that a grand architect who creates laws of the universe and orchestrates a symphony of Monads must exist, this orchestration must be the most perfect, and most good of all other possible universes.
The body and the soul might be seen as different, and follow different laws, but nonetheless, “they are fitted to each other in virtue of the preestablished harmony between all substances since they are all representations of one and the same universe”17. This presestablished harmony is what situates Lebinez as both a compatabilist and a monist. Leibniz saw no contradiction between the mechanism of the operation of material things, and the parallel non-mechanism of souls and minds.
As you have noted to me before, this is not much different from how Spinoza saw God -- as the infinite expression of Mind and Extenstion. Or for Bergson, as two qualitative tendencies of contraction and expansion, mechanism and vitalism.
Which is to say, what is at stake for philosophers like Leibniz, Spinoza and Bergson is how to account for not just mechanical physical laws, but metaphysics and movement. Part of the novelty of the parrellists and compatabilists is how they attempt to solve the problem of free will and mechanism. Despite attempting to account for a phenomenology of mind, it should be noted that Leibniz is never disputing the mechanistic science of his era, but is rather using philosophy to theorize how an absolutely simple substance would work.
In fact, there is a great contraversy of who invented intergral and differential calculus first, Leibniz or Issac Newton18. Which is to say, Leibniz is indebted to a mechanical view of nature which sets the stage for departure. Additionally, Leibniz’s methodology is not so much a refutation of mechanism, but is rather a metaphysics used to compliment the Enlightenment tradition he was situated within.
Conclusion
In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari argue that many figures throughout the history of philosophy fail to create a truly immanent system, because they always (seemingly at the last possible moment) make the Plane of Immanance subordinate to something else.
Often, this “something else” is God, but that does not mean that God is what makes the immanent system transcendent. For example, Deleuze and Guattari say Spinoza is the prince as well as the “Christ of philosophers” because he was “the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates”19. Which is to say, Spinoza was one of the first to theorize a form of empirism which projected nature as articulating two multiplcites.
On the other hand, Leibniz’s system of substance pluralism does follow a similar logic to Spinoza’s plural-monism. Monadology, like Ethics, argues that God is an infinity. Additionally, both theorists agree that there is a parallel relationship (but not one of causality) between physical things, and non-corporeal psychic phenomena. You explained this well to me the other day when you said that they were both, in their own way, trying to respond to Decartes, and took seriously the problems of mind and body.
However, unlike Spinoza’s Ethics, Monadology misses a crucial piece which is present in Spinoza’s philosophy: bodies' capacity to affect and be affected. By positioning Monads as having no affectual capacity, Leibniz puts himself in the tricky position of trying to explain how windowless non-affectual substances can even have an internal movement. The classic mind-body problem becomes even more complicated for Leibniz, as now what must be explained is how Monads and Matter move in a parallel motion.
God then becomes the Grand Mover which orchestrates this harmony of movement, but this becomes a false movement.
Imagine a beautiful mosiac. Each point in the mosaic has an infintesimal movement which can only be tracked with a powerful microscope. From a distance, we might not see any movement, but if we look close enough, the movement and speed of the individual points becomes painfully obvious. This is ostensibly how Leibniz’s God works -- pure intensities.
However, what makes Leibniz’s system subordinate immanence to transcendence isn’t just that he evokes God, it's that he evokes God as the prime mover. Spinoza’s God is Pure Immanence whereas Leibniz’s God transcends the plane only to come back and constitute movement on behalf of the plane. Even if God is the plane, the movement on the plane becomes subordinate to God. Which is to say, we are back and determanacy and mechanism. However, the difference is that now we have a spiritual mechanism. We have a mechanism where movement isn’t for itself, but moved by a greater something else.
Additionally, this movement is entirely restricted to the holding cell of the Monad. The Monad becomes a tight little box where ‘bouncy balls’ collide with its wall, changing speeds, and transforming. The zone of indetermanation within the Monad is so restricted to itself, that it becomes a recluse -- incapable of going outside. It's reduced to merely reflecting life instead of embodying it, and experiencing it. God is okay with Monads moving, but only insofar they stay in their place.
Still, we cannot help but marvel at Leibniz’s theory, as well as its novelty. We should appreciate Leibniz’s courage to theorize a philosophy of intensive movement, and to link the physical with the metaphysical. Leibniz’s theory also beautifully quilts together a theory of harmony with infinity. Since Monad’s can never be created nor destroyed, only transformed intensively, we also have a theory that reincarnation is non-anthropocentric. Despite its trouble, Monadology is a beautiful text which deserves our attention.
References, Further Reading and Viewing
Jack F, “On Leibniz's Monadology, Leibniz's Monadology (Process Theology)”.
Gottfried Leibnitz (1714), Monadology.
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy.
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine".
Epoche Magazine, Leibniz’s “The Monadology”, Video.
Teacher of Philosophy, “Leibniz: Monadology”, youtube.
Partially Examined Life podcast - Leibniz - Monadology, youtube.
“Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy”, Wikipedia.
I am pulling this formulation directly from “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine" from A Thousand Plateaus.
Gottfried Leibnitz (1714), Monadology.
Ibid, axiom 9: “Each monad, indeed, must be different from every other monad. For there are never in nature two beings which are exactly alike, and in which it is not possible to find a difference either internal or based on an intrinsic property”
Ibid, axiom 5-6.
Ibid, axiom 11.
Ibid, axiom 10: “I assume it as admitted that every created being, and consequently the created monad, is subject to change, and indeed that this change is continuous in each.
Ibid, axiom 63.
Axiom 8: “Still monads need to have some qualities, otherwise they would not even be existences…”.
This quote is found in A Thousand Plateus. However, I want to draw attention to the axiom 16 from Monadology: “We, ourselves, experience a multiplicity in a simple substance, when we find that the most trifling thought of which we are conscious involves a variety in the object. Therefore all those who acknowledge that the soul is a simple substance ought to grant this multiplicity in the monad, and Monsieur Bayle should have found no difficulty in it, as he has done in his Dictionary, article Rorarius”. It’s actually quite striking to me how much this prefigures Deluze’s Plural-Monism.
Ibid, Axiom 17: “ It must be confessed, however, that perception, and that which depends upon it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception. It is accordingly in the simple substance, and not in the compound nor in a machine that the perception is to be sought. Furthermore, there is nothing besides perceptions and their changes to be found in the simple substance. And it is in these alone that all the internal activities of the simple substance can consist”.
From the above text by Brady: “...monads are absolutely simple substances that nonetheless possess a unique combination, or multiplicity, and sequence of qualities that are constantly shifting”.
Gottfried Leibnitz (1714), Monadology., Axiom 26.
Ibid, Axion 78.
Wikipedia, Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy.
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy.
Love it so much!!! 🔥🔥🔥