A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Leibniz (1646-1716): The world-book of the best of all possible worlds

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Leibniz may be the patron saint of twentieth-century modal logic. We live, he argues, in the best possible world and modal logic helps us to conceive of the criteria or laws necessary to build such a world: a world fundamentally different to that conceived of by Spinoza who postulated One infinite Substance, Nature, or God. The world of Leibniz is that of a plurality of independent substances or monads each with its own particular view of the world. Monads are individuals with complex properties, each being a centre of divinity in the City of God and each carrying out a task of living in accordance with the laws of the City of God. Reason or Logic will lead us to these laws, assisted by an imagination that is capable of imagining an infinite number of possible worlds that God chose not to bring into existence. The chosen world manifests its divinity in substances, essences or monads that are not contradictory. Each individual substance, mode or essence is divinely conceived in accordance with what Leibniz calls a complete individual concept in which its essence is manifested without contradiction. The relation of such an individual essence is given in the following:

“if there is reality in essences or possibles, or indeed in eternal truths, this reality must be grounded in something existent and actual, and consequently it must be grounded in the existence of the necessary Being, in whom essence involves existence, that is, in whom possible being is sufficient for actual being.”

In God’s mind, the thought, for example, of Alexander the Great will include everything true of the man, including truths relating to his essence and existence. Many possible world theorists like to characterise this in terms of a world-book that can describe the actual world we live in. The book will be composed of a set of propositions that is a subset of the propositions composing all the possible world books containing representations of all possible worlds. One can wonder, however, whether these propositions will be as proposed, merely descriptive and what we are then to do with propositions that explain why things are the way they are: whether, for example, a world-book could contain the proposition: “Every event has a cause”.

This idea of a divine intellect as a kind of library housing an infinite number of world books is however problematic given the obvious comparative judgments that can arise as a consequence of the curious claim that this world we live in is the best of all possible worlds. Our world-book, by implication, then, must be the best world-book in the library. The judgment “Every event must have a cause” is, of course, a transcendental judgment and brings to light a major Kantian criticism of Leibnizian metaphysics, namely, that it treats this judgment as analytic and thereby fails to recognise the synthetic component of this synthetic a priori judgment. indeed, according to Kant, Leibniz’s system fails to recognise the role of the world of sense which helps to form the appearances of their underlying cause, things-in-themselves. Leibniz also fails to recognise as a consequence the subjective nature of Space and Time. Kant believes that Leibniz’s appeal to divinity is an appeal that becomes necessary in order to explain why a community of substances, essences, monads, existing in space and time can cohere in the divine mind via a law of pre-established harmony. Such a metaphysical position argues Kant, fails to adequately represent the workings of a human mind which requires the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason. We form the world intuitively both via the faculties of sensibility and its experience of objects, events, and states of affairs in reality. Such a mode of representation cannot synthesise all the real properties of the reality encountered. Furthermore, Kant maintains, we could never possibly experience the infinite gradations of this continuum of reality: our sense experience is not capable of detecting such fine distinctions. Leibniz would, of course, disagree with this position. In the realm of perception, he refers to the perception of the noise of the sea being made up of the smaller perceptions and noises of movements of uncountable units of water of which, he claims we are subconsciously or preconsciously aware. For Kant, what he calls experience does not necessarily operate in this way: the “form” of the experience might be a complex of the intuitions of space and time and the sensations of the body caused by individual wants and movements of water as well as the rule or the principle organising these factors into one unified and perhaps unique experience. This principle might include reference to the pull of the moon upon the waters of the earth and perhaps even the processes involved in the creation of the moon and so on ad infinitum to that point in space and time where there are energy and matter that can neither be created nor destroyed and perhaps even further back to the origin of motion of the universe. According to Leibniz the complete concept of the noise of the movement of water at Space S1 and Time T1 is only complete in the world book of the best possible world lodged in the divine library. Kant may well have accepted this as a possible metaphorical account of Nature, given the fact that we cannot in the finitude of our own minds comprehend the infinitude of Nature. An important aspect(for both Kant and Aristotle) involves the way in which we acquire knowledge of the world via the sensible receptive power of our minds in accordance with a transcendental law of causation operating externally in relation to our minds. When we actively organise the manifold of sensible representations, on the other hand, an internal causal principle is operating in accordance with our nature or essence which is striving toward more complete concepts, truth, and rationality. Individual Human Nature, for Leibniz, “expresses the universe after its own manner”. The human being is a complex made up of simple unextended immaterial elements that constitute the windowless monads which mirror the world in accordance with a divine clockwork that God is responsible for. Brett expresses this in terms of his concern for its implications for Psychology:

“..there are infinite degrees of psychic reality. Again if we pass beyond the apparent separateness of each living unity, we find a deeper principle of continuity: everything not only exists but it coexists, and its relations to other things are at once outer and inner. Confining ourselves to the application of this metaphysics to psychology we find it leads to the assertion that every unit which the materialist would call an atom, is a centre of force, a living reality. Instead of an atomistic doctrine, Leibniz propounds a theory that is only to be called individualistic. The idea of the soul gradually wins its way to the heart of the whole system: psychology becomes the clue to the universe. In this way, Leibniz ultimately builds up a philosophy that is ruled by the idea of conscious forces ceaselessly active. From Aristotle, he takes the idea of potency, from Plato he gets the idea of an individual spiritual essence. The two are combined in the new idea of the monad, which is pure energy known and interpreted through our own self-consciousness. the doctrine is novel because it is neither realism nor idealism, neither materialism nor spiritualism. Its affinities can only be indicated by calling it naturalism spiritualised. The ultimate elements are endowed with life and motion. The unconscious, what we call dead matter, is, therefore, only relatively unconscious:* it has the least possible degree of consciousness.”

Reference is made to Aristotle but Brett appears to be unaware of the extent to which Aristotle would object to the use of his tool of Logic in this way: to establish a conclusion that there are soul-like elements which are extensionless immaterial points of activity. Aristotle would maintain, as would Kant, that a concept of activity without something moving is an empty concept of Pure Reason. Kant’s criticism would resemble Aristotle’s in this respect. Pure reason postulating concepts independent of the objects they are concepts of, is one of the targets of his work “Critique of Pure Reason”. According to Kant, the kind of concepts Leibniz postulated are “empty” he demonstrated this in his reference to mathematical judgments such as 7+5=12. In such a judgment Leibniz postulates an implicit identity of 12 with 7+5 in virtue of the possibility of reducing each element to its numerical base, e.g. 7 is reduced to 1+1+1+1+1+1+1, 5 is reduced to 1+1+1+1+1, and 12 is reduced to 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1. Kant argues cogently that this reductive process is not valid because the result 12 is not in fact thought in the operation of adding the units 5 and 7. This Kant further argues is evident especially in the case of the addition of large numbers that would require a complex operation of calculation in order to arrive at the result. This is Kant’s argument that arithmetical judgments involve synthetic activity connected to acts of counting and cannot, therefore, be conceived in terms of an analytic reduction to identity statements. This kind of activity is not analytical and logical but rather what he terms synthetic a priori activity. This interpretation of mathematical activity is also to be found in both Plato and Aristotle in their judgments that mathematical knowledge is not proceeding from a principle(e.g. of non-contradiction) but rather towards a principle which because of its relation to the synthetic activity involved is a hypothetical judgment. Such knowledge needs to be distinguished from the knowledge that proceeds from a principle toward reality: giving rise to such categorical and transcendental forms of judgment as “Every event has a cause”.

Leibniz, however, as we know, is a modern mathematical/logical rationalist whose concept of Nature lacks the kind of content we find in the theories of the classical rationalists such as Aristotle and Kant. The Kantian view of “Nature” is outlined in great detail in the work entitled “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science”. In this work, Kant points out, in an Aristotelian fashion that the concept of “Nature” has both a formal and a material signification. he characterizes this formal significance thus in his Preface to the work:

“if the word “nature” is taken merely in its formal signification(inasmuch as the word “nature” signifies the primal internal principle of everything that belongs to the existence of a thing) then there can be as many natural sciences ad there are specifically different things, and each of these things must contain its specific internal principle of the determinations belonging to its existence.”

He continues then to characterise the material signification:

“On the other hand, “nature” is also taken in a material signification to be not only a quality but the sum total of all things insofar as they can be objects of our senses and hence also objects of experience under which is, therefore, to be understood the whole of all appearances, i.e. the sense-world with the exclusion of all objects that are not sensible. Nature taken in this signification of the word has two main parts according to the main distinction of our senses: the one contains the objects of the external senses, the other the objects of the internal sense. Therefore a twofold doctrine of nature is possible: a doctrine of body and a doctrine of the soul. The first considers extended nature and the second, thinking nature.”

The “Science” of those empiricists referring only to the principle of induction is not, according to Kant, genuine science, because this principle carries with it no consciousness of necessity as is the case with the rational doctrine of nature. Natural science on this view presupposes a metaphysics of nature or what Heidegger in his “Kant-Book” called “Metaphysica Generalis” and is the transcendental part of a metaphysics of nature. “Metaphysica Specialis”, on the other hand, can take the form of physics or psychology depending upon whether its object of concern is an empirical concept of matter or a thinking being. These “special sciences” are, however, only genuine science to the extent that mathematics is involved. This appears to eliminate the possibility of psychology being a special science because it appears to be impossible to apply mathematics to the phenomena of the internal flux of consciousness. It might, of course, be possible to apply mathematics to some kind of law of continuity of our internal activity if it could be shown that the latter was a form of quantitative change rather than qualitative or substantial change. This may have been what Leibniz was envisaging with his logic of the monads. A law of continuity without something substantial enduring to ensure the continuity is, however, problematic. Leibniz’s solution may to some extent have influenced Kant in relation to the concept of the unity of apperception that we find in Kant’s first Critique. Leibniz claimed the following in his essay entitles “Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on reason”:

“Thus it is well to mark the distinction between the perception, which is the inner state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which is consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this inner state: the latter not being given to all souls, nor at all times to the same soul”(Published in Leibniz selections, ed Philip Wiener(New York 1951) (P. 525)

Kant, both in his “Critique of Pure Reason” and in his “Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view” analyses this concept of what he calls the “transcendental unity of apperception” and refers to the very Cartesian notion of an “I think” that accompanies all representations of intuition and thought. Self-Consciousness is associated with apperception that is characterized again in Cartesian terms of clarity and distinctness. Kant claims that the program of Psychology in the future may well focus upon this activity of reflecting consciously upon one’s representations in relation to the more formal form of consciousness, i.e. the “I think” which is a manifestation of the unity of a mind that ensures the continuity and relatedness of a manifold of representations in one mind. If such unity did not exist the thought “There is snow in the woods” and “There are tracks in the snow”(both uniting a multitude of representations in one mind) could well be occurring in two distinct and separate minds. Some commentators believe that the term apperception means “consciousness”. if this is the case, the above distinction between formal or transcendental conditions and a more phenomenal reflective inner process must be acknowledged. This latter arm of the distinction Kant appears to attribute to Descartes. For Kant, on the other hand, the “I think” is a transcendental condition of the possibility of self-consciousness and is a matter of logic. He points out in his work on Anthropology that Psychologists of his time were confusing these levels of analysis:

“the cause of these errors is that the terms inner sense and apperception are naturally taken by psychologists to be synonymous, despite the fact that the first alone should indicate a psychological (applied) consciousness and the second merely a logical(pure) consciousness.”(P. 33)

Kant’s criticism of Leibniz centred around the fact that the mathematician thought that consciousness was steered wholly by innate ideas and that there was, therefore, no clear and distinct sensible contribution to the cognitive activity of the mind. Kant may well have been thinking of Leibniz specifically when he wrote the above words in his work on Anthropology. The logical unity of apperception for Leibniz may provide the “I” with a necessary unity but fails to provide the representations of the mind with any content which for Kant is provided through the reception of the sensible forms of the objects of our representations. When I think, I must surely think something, Kant argues. This sensible content must then be organized by the categories of the understanding if the goal is to make a judgment which ought also to be regulated by the ideas of Reason.

Brett criticizes Leibniz’s monadology in more Psychological terms(echoing Kant):

“According to Leibniz, every monad is impenetrable. It follows that nothing enters into or goes out of this metaphysical entity. Applying this principle to the problems of sensation(for the psychology of Leibniz is throughout applied metaphysics), we arrive at the conclusion that there can be nothing but changes in the states of the monads: passivity and receptivity is thus eliminated, and in their place nothing is left but the power of representing, the fact of presentation”.

Brett then extends this analysis into the realm of the Will:

“As merely knowing we reflect the known, but as living souls, we are thereby affected, have feelings, struggle to maintain or reject, and so exhibit a “tendency to pass from one presentation to another”.

This looks to be an all too epistemological account of our practical activity but Brett wishes to point out what he considers to be a resemblance to the Aristotelian theory of practical deliberation. For Aristotle practical reasoning is a form of reasoning which carries with it the modal logical notion of necessity as applied to the realm of conduct and action. It is difficult, however, to see as Brett claims, the Aristotelian apparatus present in the Leibnizian metaphysical framework. We can, however, see the seeds of the Kantian absolute of goodwill, but for Leibniz, the only absolute is located outside of the human will, in the will of God. Kant’s ethical emphasis on humanism and the autonomy of the will, free from the authoritarian ethics of religion would not be unconditional truths for Leibniz who regards God as the only ultimate measure or standard by which to gauge the goodness of the human will.