Afterword

3.Tarde and Leibniz

Pansocial ontology builds upon the work of previous thinkers within the philosophical tradition. Space precludes an extensive attempt to situate Tarde with respect to that tradition (or to construct a monadological counter-tradition), and I will restrict myself here to his most obvious predecessor, Leibniz. While MS does not set out the connection at any great length, there is obviously a substantial debt, and the several continuities between the two systems are of assistance in interpreting the theory of MS. There are three primary points of contact: the essentially composite nature of reality; the idea that substances must be souls, with the concomitant sharp distinction between real substances and aggregates; and the idea that every substance is affected by every other.

There are clearly also some points of divergence: Leibniz' tendency to reduce external relations to internal ones—famously expressed as 'the monads have no windows' (Monadology §7)—seems uncongenital to Tarde, given that, as we have seen, he sees relation as the fundamental reality. (This said, Leibniz did take himself to be elucidating the ordinary concept of relation, rather than explaining it away.) Leibniz' strong emphasis on the in-variability of the laws of nature, and his conviction that the age of miracles is over, is also a point of disagreement. Finally, we might observe that Leibniz is strongly committed to the principle of sufficient reason, and to the idea that the concept of each substance embodies its whole history, while Tarde's theory emphasizes the role of unpredictable collisions in explaining the nature of reality; however, as we will see, they may not be as far apart on this point as they initially seem.

The first point which Tarde takes from Leibniz, then, is that the principles of reality are plural in nature: the most basic feature of the universe is its consisting of a multiplicity of distinct substances or elements. In other words, reality is not a continuum divided into parts, but a bringing together of entities which can in principle be understood independently of the situations they thus constitute (subject, for Leibniz, to their common dependence on God). The treatment of space and time in monadological theories is an example. Leibniz, in his debate with the Newtonian Samuel Clarke, argues that space and time are not absolute nor prior to the substances which occupy them, but relative to the relations among substances. That is, it is the relations between the monads which are basic; we then apprehend these as taking spatiotemporal form, and finally abstract the concepts of space and time in general. Along similar lines, Tarde argues against Kant that space and time are not pure forms of intuition, or a kind of matrix of experience, but are rather experienced directly as 'primitive concepts or continuous and original quasi-sensations' (p. 17).¹⁴ A corollary of the insight that reality is composite is that the individuals which compose it must be really, and not only numerically, different: they are not only plural and distinct, but heterogeneous, such that each is in principle distinguishable from all others.

The second point in common is that substances are souls, which was examined in its Tardean form in the previous section. The desire to 'spiritualize the universe' (p. 16) which both systems manifest is perhaps the most obvious point of commonality in terms of traditional ontology, but there is more tension in this aspect of the relationship than might appear at first sight. For one thing, Tarde is not committed, as Leibniz is, to denying the reality of the material as such. More deeply, Leibniz' argument for this conclusion places a heavy weight on the idea of unity and its co-priority with being. That is, substance, or real entity, must be a unity: 'what is not truly one entity is not truly one entity either' (letter to Arnauld, 30 April 1687). A material thing cannot be said to be truly one, since it is divisible; only an entity with a substantial form or entelechy akin to a human soul or self can be said to be a substance. The Leibnizian ontology is therefore akin to the Tardean in resting on a sharp distinction between substances and mere aggregates, and in its insistence on tracing back the reality of the composite to the elements of which it is composed;¹⁵ and for both thinkers, this is closely linked to the panpsychist ascription of mind-like qualities to all elementary substances. However, the path which Leibniz traces—the plurality and distinctness of the elementary substances implies their independent reality, which implies their unity and coherence, which implies their kinship with mind—is oblique to the Tardean argument, which rather rests on the basic relational complexity of the embodied mind.

Regardless of this divergence, many of the corollaries which Leibniz draws from this argument are also taken up by Tarde. Three points are particularly relevant. First, the mind-or self-like qualities of the elementary substances admit of degree. Unlike the Cartesian world, in which subjects endowed with mind are sharply separated from material reality (including non-human animals), the Leibnizian is composed of monads of various levels of perfection, from human souls through animal souls to the lesser monads of the inorganic world. Second, a complex being such as a living organism should be thought of as a complex arrangement of monads within which there is a single directing monad (the organism's soul) and a large number of subordinate monads which correspond to the various bodily parts, a hierarchical arrangement which is also of value in explicating Tardean monadology. Third, these mind-like qualities are not exhausted by conscious states: below the threshold of consciousness, there exist percepts (for Leibniz) or beliefs and desires (for Tarde) which are different only in degree from those which actually form part of experience.

The final point is that, for Leibniz, every monad is related to every other and contains a representation of any other, such that they mutually reflect each other to the greatest possible extent, and each one contains the whole universe in nuce. However, in line with the preceding point, some relations are much closer, and some representations much clearer and more adequate, than others. To borrow a formula from an earlier monadologist: 'everything is in everything, but appropriately' (Proclus, Elements of Theology §53). Tarde makes his commitment to this general principle clear in MS ch. III, and as I will argue, it plays a key role in the structure of his system, albeit in a very different form.

Notes

14. Tarde’s formulation of this theory links space and time to belief and desire, respectively, such that physical or geometric space is one type of logical or thetic space (as for Leibniz), while the direction of time derives from the goal-orientedness of desire (see Universal Opposition (L’Opposition universelle), ch. VI, sec 4).↩
15. Tarde relates this point to Leibniz’ invention of the differential calculus. The question of the relation between Leibniz’ metaphysics and the calculus is an issue we cannot here address, although it clearly has implications for the Tardean system. Part of the difficulty in establishing these implications is that, while Leibniz appears to have been committed to the reality of infinitesimals, the only viable interpretation of the calculus in Tarde’s time was the theory of limits, which preserves the mathematical utility of the method while not requiring the analyst to work with real infinitesimal quantities (and which still stands as the foundation of standard analysis, but now co-exists with the non-standard analysis introduced by Abraham Robinson in the 1960s, which treats infinitesimal quantities as perfectly valid entities).↩