Strolling Accidents and Cracks in the Plenum:

Interstices in the Extended World of Leibniz

Caroline Alois Bren

Even if every portion of matter were exactly like the other, there might still be variety in
the material world through differences in patterns of distribution of portions of matter in empty
space. I think there is no empty space – the extended world is entirely full, a plenum.
Leibniz’s Monadology, §8.

At the face of it, it seems we can’t but agree with Leibniz when he posits that the world

of the Monadology is a plenary one. In Leibniz’s model of the physical world, all substances are

composed fundamentally of the same materials – of monads. Such a world could contain

nothing but monads – and within that formulation lurks a possible objection to Leibniz’s

plenum. As Heidegger observed, “it is remarkable that as scientists stake out their own

territory, they speak about something else. They investigate only what-is, and nothing else; just

what-is, and nothing besides; only what-is and nothing more” (Heidegger §1.3). Can there be

nothing, a void, amongst the monads? In this paper, I shall examine the Monadology, attempt to

find the place of nothing within it, and infer whether this entails conclusions differents from

those reached by Leibniz.

At the close of his famous example of the mill, Leibniz posits that, as perception cannot

be resolved as the effect of a process in the physical world, “perception must be sought in

simple substances, not in composite things like machines” (Leibniz §17). These simple

substances are the monads, and all composites, such as matter, consist solely of monads. They

are “the true atoms of nature” (Leibniz §3), but a monad is unlike an atom in the original

sense, meaning a substance that is composed of only one part and as such cannot be separated

into smaller units. A monad is irreducible, but it consists of no parts, and so is dimensionless. If

the world consists of nothing but dimensionless points, it constitutes a fractal object – an

infinitely porous solid, like Leibniz’s baroque fold.

1
 It works against intuition to imagine that the world consists only, in Deleuze’s words,

of “caverns endlessly contained within caverns” (Deleuze 5). Such a conception seems

inconsistent with the physical world we are familiar with, in which we observe that matter has

density and seems as such to be composed, at some level, of something. The monads are not

something, in the sense of being material – their dimensions are merely conceived. Allowing that

the world is material, might there still be interstices within matter? As that emptiness needn’t

be composed of something, could we not conceive it to be composed of monads? This is a

slightly misleading way of putting it: being dimensionless, monads cannot occupy space between

something, and besides, the material world cannot contain a void, insofar as we understand the

term to mean the sum of those materials which are. If we are to consider the monads seriously

without denying our senses’ insistence on the presence of something, we might conceive of them

as existing with matter in a state of superimposition, so that the world at once exists as a

aggregate of discrete, material parts and as a fractal continuum. I say as a continuum because,

though the monads are in theory discrete points, there is no distinguishing them within

anything – as one examines the continuum the range of monads in view will always be

numbered infinite.

So far it seems that there is nothing by which any monad could be distinguished from

another, or from the whole or any part of the continuum. Since there can be nothing but

monads within it, there is nothing which by the idiosyncrasies of its distribution might impose

variety upon the continuum. Indeed, there is not even nothing in this case – because the monads

already are void, bodily, it is absurd to conceive of an additional nothing with which they

coexist. Insofar as a world containing nothing and only nothing can be said to be unitary, we

must agree with Leibniz, for now, that the world of the monads is a plenum. However, this

plenum remains nothing but a pair of empty brackets if the monads have no distinguishable

qualities. Toward resolving this, Leibniz gives each monad inherent and unique characteristics

which he identifies as perception and appetition.

2
 Leibniz defines perception as “the passing state that incorporates and represents a

multitude within a unity” (Leibniz §14). In other words, it is the agent by which a monad

relates to other monads. We have concluded that by its fractal nature each monad contains

every other and so must relate to all of them. Following this reasoning, perception does not

determine whether a monad relates to another, but imposes varying limits on those relations, so

that the monads “all reach confusedly to infinity, to everything; but they are limited and

differentiated by their different levels of distinct perceptions” (Leibniz §60). Appetition is “the

action of the internal force that brings about change – brings the monad from one perception

to another” (Leibniz §15) – or in other words, the agent by which a monad alleviates or

heightens the limitations on its relations. As Leibniz says, these qualities are “all that can be

found in a simple substance – perceptions and changes in perceptions; and those changes are

all that the internal actions of simple substances can consist in” (Leibniz §3). The monads,

bodily, are merely empty placeholders for a set of inherent, internal and non-physical qualities.

The world of monads is a world of flux, wherein the only actualities are forces that describe

and induce change within the limited sphere of a monad’s experiences.

A monad consists only of internal states. It has no outside. Leibniz definitively states

that the internal state of a monad belongs to that monad and God alone – it is inaccessible to

any other monad (Leibniz §7, 11). If this is all so, how could a monad possibly relate to

another monad? What is there to be related to? The error from which this apparent

contradiction arises is to consider only actual things. Besides whatever state a monad is

experiencing at the moment there must also exist other possible states for it to be in or else

there would be nothing varied for the monad to experience. We might say that a monad’s

appetition is the force that induces one of these possible states to become actual, that is, to

become the monad’s present state, and after that another, and another, at each step the

previous state vanishing again into mere possibility, all this only within the subjective

experience of which the monad and its world consist.

3
 A possibility that becomes actual does not evaporate – the possibility remains a

possibility, and the actuality merely borrows something of it. Since the possible states of a

monad are discrete and coherent, as “every momentary state of a simple substance is a natural

consequence of its immediately preceding one” (Leibniz §22), the possible states of the world

must exist as a fixed range, as an array of values for the variable perception, and we should not

conceive of any change being made to that range any more than we should imagine an

alteration being made to the set of natural numbers. The possibilities are fixed, so the only

thing that can be altered or brought into being is an occurrence – a correspondence between

the monad at a specific moment and the unalterable set of its possible states. These

correspondences are all that a monad’s perceptions can consist of. We might refer to such

correspondences as accidents, in the sense of Leibniz’s definition as “an instant of a property as

distinct from the thing that has the property” (Leibniz §7). This distinction is clearest when we

consider redundancy within a monad’s experiences. It is conceivable that the monad might be

in a certain state and then, after passing through several other states, again perceive the same

state. From without this monad’s subjective experiences, the occurrence of the monad being in

this particular state could not be said to exist in duplicate; it is merely a possibility, and to say

it exists once, twice, or infinitely are meaningless statements. Yet to the monad, the two

experiences are distinct; this is by virtue of its capacity for perception which captures a

possibility in an accident, and for appetition which arranges such accidents in a series.

From this conception might naturally follow the question of whether a monad’s

perceptions necessarily correspond to the state it is actually in, or indeed to any state at all. A

monad’s state comprises what it perceives, and as there is not a world outside of the monad for

its perceptions to be faithful or unfaithful to, it’s not meaningful to say that a monad perceives

one state and is in another. Might a monad have a perception which corresponds to no possible

state? It might seem that this would entail a monad’s experiencing nothing, and as Leibniz

notes, “a monad can’t go out of existence, but to stay in existence it has to be in some state or

4
other, and its states are all perceptions” (Leibniz §21). Yet to say that a monad’s perception

corresponds to nothing is not the same as to say it is of nothing: A monad’s perceptions, its

states, are accidents, and an accident that does not correspond to anything possible is still an

accident. We might conceive of such an accident as occurring when a monad simultaneously

perceives its world as being in two mutually contradictory states. The monad could not

possibly be in both states, so it must be in no state whatsoever. As logicians, we must reject this

conception forthwith, as this would entail the monad being in an impossible state.

In a renewed attempt to logically introduce nothing into Leibniz’s plenum, we shall turn

from the accident without possibility to what we might call, after Aristotle, the accident without

substance. An objection to what this term entails was the grounds by which Aristotle and his

antecedents denied that a void could exist in nature (Duhem 411-413), and in disputing that

one monad could affect another by an accident, Leibniz himself states that “accidents can’t

detach themselves and stroll about outside of substances!” (Leibniz §7). In the sense that we

have used it here – very differently from Aristotle’s use of the term – an accident is merely a

figment produced by perception. Leibniz writes that “without God’s understanding there

would be no reality among possibilities” (Leibniz §43), and we might similarly think it

ludicrous that an accident could exist without a substance, namely a monad, to give it being by

perceiving it. Yet Cantor’s diagonalization argument can be applied to the universe of the

monads as constructed here to show that this concept is coherent. Appetition and its time-like

function of ordering possible states into sets is based on the assumption that these states are

discrete from each other. As such, it is possible to represent each by a natural number, and so a

subjective experience constructed by appetition is an infinite set comprising the natural

numbers in one of the infinite possible arrangements. As by Cantor’s diagonalization, the set of

all such sets cannot be put in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, which in

this context means that the possible experiences that a monad might have cannot be put in

correspondence with the possible states of the world from within which the monad would have

5
the experiences. A monad, as we understand it, is a state of the world, and so there must be a

temporal experience of the world which cannot be experienced by a real monad, that is to say a

monad that is in a possible state. The only possible resolutions to this contradiction are to allow

that a monad can enter an impossible state or to allow the category of the impossible,

borrowing Kierkegaard’s term to refer to a temporal experience which by its nature cannot be

experienced. Either resolution entails a paradox which opens Leibniz’s alleged plenum onto a

void. The first conclusion requires a monad which is in no state, and so is a substance that has

qualities but is nothing, and the other, a series of accidents in which the substance that

perceives them can only be nothing. In either case, nothing is included in the set of what-is. This

paradox follows inevitably from the capacity of monads to perceive, a capacity given to them

by Leibniz to allow the differentiation of one monad from another without any interstices.

It seems the case that contradiction and nothingness are the fundamental criteria by

the inclusion of which the world containing conscious experience can be discerned from the

world which does not. Heidegger defined nothing as that which relegates openness to what-is

(Heidegger §3.2), and we might understand perception to be the agent by which this openness

is effected. It is by its capacity for negation that perception accomplishes this, and as

Heidegger reasoned, the presence of this capacity implies that the nothing exists originally

(Heidegger §2.2). We might say that the origin of perception can be found in nothing. This

propounds a view very different from Leibniz’s, who defined his preeminent reason for being,

namely God, by the dictum “if he is possible then he must exist”, describing a being which, having

no limits, involves no negation (Leibniz §45). This being encompasses all of what-is and only

what-is, by its nature excluding negation and nothingness. Yet all this describes the world of

composites in which Leibniz stated no reason for perception could be found! We must

conclude, based on this extension of Leibniz’s reasoning, that the only origin from which

perception could emerge must not be exhausted merely by what-is. The origin is to be found

within the category of the impossible: it must be what it is not.

6
 Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. 1993, University of
Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis.

Dolan, Richard P. “Inflaton Spacetime: A Discrete Quantum Spacetime Model

Underlying the Standard Models of Particle Physics and Cosmology.” 2005.
http://home.earthlink.net/~dolascetta/rpdolan.pdf.

Duhem, Pierre. Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality
of Worlds. Edited and translated by Roger Ariew. 1989, The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.

Heidegger, Martin. “Martin Heidegger’s Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg University: A

Reading of ‘What is Metaphysics?’ first edition (1929).” Translated by Thomas Sheehan, 2001,
The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, I.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/ faculty/sheehan/pdf/01-hd-wm.pdf.

Leibniz, G.W. Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld and Monadology.

Translation by Dr. George R. Montgomery. 1950, The Open Court Publishing Company, La
Calle, IL.

Leibniz, G. W. “Monadology.” Translated by Jonathan Bennett. 2004.

http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/leibmon.pdf.

Leibniz, G.W. “The Ultimate Origin of Things.” Translation by Jonathan Bennett.

2004. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/leibuo.pdf.