Beilage XL: Reflections (= Representations) in Leibniz

1) Each monad "reflects" (represents) the "universe" U = the phenomenal world. Each "contains" in itself the system of "appearances," of sensations, of subjective thing-presentations (apperceptions), which in its lawful regulation (the regulation of the subjective course of apperceptions) makes possible for thought the knowledge of the one nature. To each monad appears the unitary spatio-temporal-causal nature in sensuous experience; in science it is known according to its "true being," as mathematical nature standing under natural laws: "natural-lawful regulation of true things."

In each monad the subjective course of sensations and apperceptions and perhaps acts of thought is different, but in each exists that first presentation- (consciousness-) regulation, so that for all monads mathematical nature and natural lawfulness is the same. It is "reflected" in each (Leibniz' example of a city and its various aspects).

2) Each psychic monad S has its living body, its material body B. This material body indeed belongs to the common U, which is "reflected" in all monads (in the sense of 1), but B only belongs to monad S, so that its conscious processes are "reflected" in all its materially corporeal processes and reciprocally: in the sense of parallelism. In the living bodily [medium] the psychic "expresses" itself.

Therefore we have a very different "representation" in each monad.

Not however a new concept of reflection.

3) Each outer perception of the thing D, which actually comes to perception precisely in this monad, and indeed to one which is not illusory, "represents" the true thing. Of the momentary "total perception" of total nature, through which I say, I now perceive nature, I see into the world etc., I could say, it represents nature (if I am not dreaming): the true physical nature. Here we have a new concept of reflection: in the waking and normally experiencing monad exists a continuing mirror image of the world (a continuity of reflection = experiential presentation).

Not only a perception and otherwise legitimate thing-experience, but each of my experiences has its parallel in some of my bodily processes, is "representation" of this physical-organic [factor] of mathematical nature in my monad. Of course that is something totally different. While one says, each sensuous representation (thing-experience) is experience of nature, represents it (although scientific knowledge first reveals the consciousness in which the true thing in its true determinateness comes to consciousness), no one will say that a conscious process represents its psychophysical parallel. However neither will anyone say: the regularity of my representations represents nature.

4) Now it also means that there is reflected in each monad not only the universe of nature, but the absolute universe of monads.

One could nevertheless also say: nature reflects the monadic universe, just as the monadic universe reflects nature.

But still a reflection plays a role.

5) Every body reflects the whole corporeal universe; whoever then concretely apprehends it in however small a span of time, would completely know, could read off the entire universe from it.

Leibniz includes the following among the presuppositions of his monadic interpretation: if the material living body concerned is a soul, then it is its exact parallel, its mirror image in accordance with all processes etc.

The entire physical universe however is reflected in the organic processes, and thereby there is thus also reflected in the soul implicite the entire physical universe. If it is now further the case, as Leibniz assumes, that the physical world is organized through and through, i.e. is composed in infinitum from living corporealities and accordingly everywhere has its psychic parallels, and each monad exists in relation to the soul of someone's organism, then each monad at once reflects its own body, and on the other hand the construction of the body corresponding to this according to its partial-organisms is parallel to the lower souls. (Thus not everything pertaining to my organic-corporeal existence corresponds directly to a parallel in my soul, but only the general functional form, which determines the living corporeality as my living corporeality, or even more exactly, as expression of my psychic life. The partial organisms of my body, the metabolically changing corporeal elements, are also unities of the organic function, but not for me; they have their true metaphysical being in other monads.) Since that is true of the whole of physical nature, and since the whole is "reflected" in my living body, is implicitly enclosed within it in accordance with its physical being, it follows that all souls, all monads are reciprocally "mirrored." Each, in that it is a parallel of its living body, has in itself a phenomenon, which has its "reality" etc. The reflection of all monads in all does not mean that each consists of perceptions, which would be the perceptions of other monads (intentional).

In a monad, other individual monads are reflected "directly," through empathy. In a typical concrete thing persisting in empirical intuition, persisting as "living organism" in harmonious experience, another psychic life and I are indicated, and that has its way of activating itself "empathetically." The thing is existing unity of experience, and the other I is given coexistently as connected to it. Thus the other I and its psychic "life" manifests itself in me, and I manifest myself in him: we are consciously related to one another and know of one another: and by the fact that each of us has experience of the foreign body and apperceives this as living body analogically in accordance with his own body.

Problem: is it necessary that the living body belongs to a mathematical nature, belongs according to its physical condition, to a region of unequivocal determinateness? Is the same a necessity for the regularity of empathy?