Topics Philosophers

Question Hi. I was reading Leibniz's work <i>Monadology</i> and he mentions "monads" and how they make up everything and how they have no extension and do not interact with one another. My question is: if monads cannot interact with one another and if humans are monads and so is food, for example, how do we get nutrition from food? Thanks. Roniel Chand San Francisco

Accepted:
October 18, 2005

Comments

According to Leibniz, mere material things--like food--are not monads. So Leibniz doesn't believe that human bodies are monads, either. But this doesn't dissolve your question. For the fact remains that human beings have experiences as of eating food, and experiences of their bodies, and experiences of their bodies as being nourished by eating food, and so you might well wonder how Leibniz would explain that experience, or any phenomenal experience, for that matter.

In order to answer this question, one has to draw a distinction between the phenomenal and metaphysical levels of analysis. At the metaphysical level, according to Leibniz, all there are are monads, which consist of perception and appetition (perception and desires). Leibniz's metaphysics explains all our experience in terms of these perceptions and desires. So, according to Leibniz, alll our ordinary experiences--as of eating food--have their metaphysical basis in the nature of the monad.

However, this metaphysical claim does not undercut the fact that food is necesary for the nourishment of the body. The way in which food nourishes a body is to be explained, according to Leibniz, in terms of the way that food interacts with the bodily mechanism responsible for nourishment. Such an explanation is not part of metaphysics, since it deals with phenomena, which, strictly or metaphysically speaking for Leibniz, do not exist. Nevertheless, this does not affect scientific explanation, which would proceed for Leibniz as it does for us, independently of Leibniz's metaphysics.

So Leibniz would explain why food nourishes human beings in much the way that we do today; at the metaphysical, or monadological level of analysis, however, the question does not even arise.