**additional readings in white box**

Section 7. We are further told that the monads lack windows.

•   L thinks that there is only one thing other than a substance, and this is an accident.  Accidents are modifications of substances: they are ways that that substance is.  If I am a substance, then my blueeyedness is an accident, as is my being a philosopher and so on.  Considered in this way, an accident is tightly bound to its substance.  One cannot take my blueeyedness and give it to someone else.  Even if my eyes were stolen and implanted somewhere else, then it would be that person who is blue-eyed, not I, and so it would become his blueeyedness, not mine.   It wouldn’t be my blueeyedness--the accident--that would be doing the traveling, but the eyes--the part.  Thus, Leibniz says picturesquely, an accident of mine cannot somehow leave me and go into you in such a way that by means of this accident something happens in you.  So, I can only cause effects in myself and you can only cause effects in yourself.

•   Presumably the person who claims we just directly act on someone else will think this to be question-begging.  Perhaps the argument is to be understood along the lines of the intuitions grounding a contact physics, supplemented with the idea that there can’t really be contact between monads.  First of all, the monads don’t have parts, and so they can’t touch.  Could we maybe have two monads at the same place at the same time?  But I think L doesn’t want to say that monads are literally spatial beings.  Or maybe we should think of the mutual independence of the monads.

•   There is an exception here: God.  If one exception, why not more?  But God’s causality is different.  It’s not that God affects monads once they’re created.  Rather, he just creates them at the start to act like He wants them to.

2. So what are monads like?  They are supposed to be like souls.  This may seem crazy at first, but the idea is that we are supposed to understand the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.  We know what we ourselves are like: now the challenge is to find out what the rest of the world is like, and we do so on the model of ourselves.  This is a panpsychism of sorts.  A second justification for it is theoretical simplicity.  If we can give a philosophical account of the world using fewer entities, this is a good thing, as long as by doing so we do not give up something important.  Solipsism won’t do, for instance, because it forces us to give up on the objectivity of most of our perceptions.  Even if we do not in the end agree with Leibniz, it is an important thought experiment to see what we would have if we only had soulish things in the universe—we can then think about what this account leaves out.

• Anyway, on L’s view souls have two sorts of things: perceptions and appetitions.  The perceptions are the changing things that the soul sees—these include emotions, perceptions of things that exist as well as thoughts more generally.  But in addition to perceptions, there are appetitions which causally connect the perceptions.  Hume marveled at the wondrous way our thoughts are strung together.  I think the thought “What is 2+2?” and this leads me to think the thought “It is 4.”  I think of saddles—I have a certain kind of perception, a self-conscious perception of myself as thinking of saddles—and then am immediately led to think of horses.  I see smoke and am led to think of fire.  I feel a desire for a drink, and am led to thinking about the various methods for obtaining drinks, and even led to perceive myself as acting for the sake of obtaining a drink.
• Thus, if we look at ourselves, we see that our perceptions are interconnected.  What are the connections?  Let us call them appetitions.  Appetition is what strives within my mind, what pulls me from one mental state to another.  We should think of it as a kind of active desire when in state A to get to state B.  An appetition is something that acts in the order of final causation because it is an end-directed cause, a cause that seeks to produce a certain state.  Appetitions may conflict, may fail to attain the end they seek.  For instance, we all have an appetition for a happier state of mind—in other words, we want happiness—but we do not always achieve it.  When we’re hungry, we’ve an appetition for a sated state of mind, L. thinks.
• The perceptions are by no means always conscious.  Leibniz argues for this in various ways that recall the calculus.  The roar of a crowd is made up of individual people’s shouts, though we are not conscious of each individual person’s shout.  Often we have perceived something, but only notice that we have perceived it when it has been called to our attention.  “Did you notice that his left shoe was untied?”  “Well, at the time I didn’t notice it, but now that you mention it, it was!”  Memory calls before consciousness something that was unconscious, and yet something that was indeed perceived.
• There are three kinds of beings according to L.:
• bare monads, with mere perceptions—these perceptions are unconscious
• souls, with memory and hence with conscious perceptions
• spirits, with apperception which is my perception of myself having a conscious perception—self-consciousness
• This mirrors the Aristotelian/medieval schema: vegetable soul, animal soul, rational soul.
• Higher level beings often function at lower levels.  Much of the time we are conscious but not self-conscious, and we do spend some time unconscious.
• L. thinks that there is a continuity between all of these.  This is by no means obvious.
• It’s worth recalling Leibniz’s account of clear and distinct ideas.  An idea is distinct if it is sufficient for distinguishing instances from non-instances.  It is further clear if it can be further defined.  Anyway, the unconscious perceptions are indistinct.
• The continuity lets L. get out of the more implausible consequences of Cartesianism. 
• Descartes identified soul with consciousness.  This means that when a soul ceases to be conscious, it ceases to exist: the person in a coma is dead.  This is absurd, and L. thinks it is false: the unconscious person has unconscious perceptions—little perceptions as L. calls them.
• Descartes also was sceptical of whether animals are conscious, because he thought that the soul was the distinguishing criterion between man and beast.  But we do not need to be thus sceptical: we can see a continuity between man and beast, on Leibniz’s view.
• Presumably when an animal dies, its central monad goes down to a lower level.
• Anyway, why think of this?  Well, here is another philosophical mystery.  Clearly in the universe there are things.  But the things are distinguished from one another in various ways.  One way—L. thinks the only way—is by having different qualities.  Perhaps qualities like color, shape, electric charge, etc.  But what does it mean to have a quality?  Does that mean the quality exists, as a Platonic form, and the thing is somehow (how?) related to it?  This is most puzzling.  And how can many qualities be united at one thing?  But we have a very good handle on what it is to have a perception: we have them all the time, and because we have apperception, we not only have them but perceive ourselves as having them. 
• Moreover, qualities like electric charge or mass would be problematic. They are exhibited in action. But the monads are not physical objects. They do not have places. How could they exhibit these qualities?
• If the monads aren’t going to be all the same and all static, they’re going to have to have some internal complexity.  L’s model for this is the complexity of perceptions: we can at a single glance see a complex phenomenon—the complex phenomenon is virtually present in our perception.
• So we can model the having of a quality on the having of a perception.
• Moreover, the qualities things have are causally interconnected.  First, for instance, something might have the quality of being hot, and later of being on fire, and later of being charred.  These interconnections shouldn’t be too mysterious too us because they are just the appetitions we are familiar with.
• Appetitions are never passive: They always move a thing, perhaps imperceptibly, in the direction of their end state.

3. We also get some arguments for the immateriality of the soul.  The first argument invokes the image of a mill.  Suppose that we could think without souls.  Well, we’d be thinking machines.  Imagine blowing us up so that our parts would be as big as the parts of a mill.  Where would perception be?

• A more powerful argument is the mechanism argument: “If in that which is organic there is nothing but mechanism, that is, bare matter, having differences of place, magnitude and figure, nothing can be deduced and explained from it, except mechanism, that is except such differences as I have just mentioned.” (p. 86)

4. How are soul and body related?  This was a puzzle for the Cartesians.  Well, my soul is my central monad.  This is surrounded by other monads in a hierarchical way.  In fact, each monad is a central monad of something—perhaps something very small.  A given monad has perceptions of the things most closely surrounding it, and the echoing is mutual.  Monads have no windows so the way my mind “controls” the world is as follows.  I think something like: “Raise my arm!”  At the same time, my arm rises.  My thought came deterministically from previous thoughts because of appetitions.  My arm’s rising came deterministically from the previous physical states of my body.  God set up a pre-established harmony between the mind and the body that ensured this would work.

• Descartes supposed animals to be something we can suppose to be machines.  Leibniz thinks this is right in a way, but it doesn’t go far enough.  Our bodies are self-sufficient machines, too: but in harmony with our souls.

• This is preferable to the occasionalist solution because it doesn’t involve continual miracles and doesn’t make God produce evil.
• What makes something one thing is the interrelation of monads, and their hierarchical relation to the central monad.
• The interrelation consists in nothing other than mutual representation.
• One can scientifically study the body while ignoring the soul and vice versa.

5. What makes something one thing is the interrelation of monads, and their hierarchical relation to the central monad.

• The interrelation consists in nothing other than mutual representation.
• One can scientifically study the body while ignoring the soul and vice versa.

6. A different story is given in the letter to Des Bosses.  Leibniz’s ecumenical scheme was that Catholics and Protestants would see that they could both accept Leibniz’s system, and hence would see that their disagreements aren’t so great.

• Transubstantiation: Bread and wine change into the body of Jesus at Mass.  Leibniz did not believe in transubstantiation, but he wants to show how he could accommodate it in his system if he had to.
• He gives more than one account.  The first is the troublesome one.  He says that in addition to the interrelations of monads there is a substantial bond or chain.  This is what makes an aggregate be a genuine unified substance.  Here, L abandons the idea that the central monad is what unifies an organism, and supposes there is a substantial bond that does this.  This lets one say that the body is a genuine unity, over and beyond just a bunch of interrelated monads, but at the cost of introducing a new item into his system.
• Once one has the item, the transubstantiation is accounted for as follows.  The bread, if it has a substantial bond of its own, loses its substantial bond, though its monads remain.  The monads then become united to the substantial bond that constitutes the body of Jesus.
• Theologically unacceptable to Catholics because it means that the bread and wine become a part of the body of Christ rather than that the whole body of Christ becomes present instead of bread and wine.
• Although L. argues to the contrary, it seems that idea of the monads of bread and wine remaining is a theologically dubious one that pushes one in the direction of Luther’s doctrine of consubstantiation rather than the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.
• Possible that L. is simply being diplomatic.  Or he may be thinking: Philosophy can’t tell us if there is a substantial bond or not.  If faith requires us to accept one, then this is not contrary to reason but merely above reason—an important distinction for Leibniz.  It’s possible he might need a substantial bond or something like it to explain the Incarnation.
• Leibniz’s official philosophical story doesn’t include substantial bonds.  In fact, the official story claims that substances other than monads are nothing but well-founded phenomena, i.e., appearances.  Since it is a part of the doctrine of the transubstantiation that the appearances remain the same, it at first seems like he can’t have any story to tell.  If the appearances don’t change and appearances constitute bodies, then nothing has changed.  But actually the imperceptible appearance has changed.  The microscopic constitution has changed to be that of Jesus’s body and blood, and we perceive this, but only by means of the little perceptions.  The gross perceptions are not like this. 
• This wouldn’t really satisfy a Catholic theologian because it makes the presence of Jesus be primarily a matter of appearance.
• Why doesn’t L. just say that the monads of bread and wine cease to exist and the monads of Christ’s body and blood come to exist in their place, existing in two places at once?  He doesn’t say this because what makes them be the monads of Jesus’s body is that they appear interconnected, and they wouldn’t thus appear interconnected if they were not seen as such.  But he could insist that what makes them be the monads of Jesus’s body is not that they appear interconnected to us, but that they do so to Jesus’s central monad.