Beilage XLVI: Monadology <Beginning of the 1930's>

Waking consciousness, constitution of the world in waking communicating subjectivity. The world is accomplished in accomplishing temporality, continually constituted, but in various stages - brought to completion by scientifically wakeful researching human beings, which has as its closest underlying stage, prescientific humans with their already open life- and world-horizon.

However now the pauses in authentic being, that is to say, in what is experienceable in its self-hood, what is authentically constituted and constituting. Is the universe, the all of possible experience - everything? The unconscious, the sedimented underground of consciousness, dreamless sleep, the form of birth of subjectivity, in other words, the problematic being of birth, death, and what lies "after death."

Patent being in relation to the possibility of univocal experience, to waking constitution - latent being as an "intentional modification" of patent being, of what therefore has meaning and true being for us. Under the title of latent being, then, we do not have something hidden, something covered that can be uncovered, which has a being-in-itself which is experienceable as such and is explicable according to its characteristics in special experience. Rather we call it that precisely because it is nothing "ordinary," nothing unmodifiable, nothing in the primal modus of constituted being; as the unthinkable, it is what it is as an intentional modification, and only as such. It is and as such has "properties," it determines itself in truth, and the truth proves itself through evidence, in which the intentional modification is self-given as such and never otherwise. This entire sphere of being is one of reconstruction - namely of the patent going back to the latent, of inquiring into its modification. But there is reconstruction of such as is consciousness, as in a certain way experienceable, of an experiencing subjectivity, which in a way is not experiencing actively, which makes possible an actual communication and proof of being, and which is fundamental. This is the case with the psychic life of early childhood. However it is and is evidently reconstructable (in a merely "vague" determinateness) and is actual with its being-sense, as reconstruction demonstrates it. It is being-for-itself only as an intersubjectively accessible consciousness. But how far does such reconstruction reach with regard to birth (or eventually before <the> birth) and death (after death)? It is a question of reconstruction which must follow the analogy with sedimented being (the "unconscious" in our sphere of consciousness), and are we not then driven back from humans to animals, to plants, to the lowest life-forms, to the atomic constitution of modern physics - to a total observation of the wakingly constituted world and a transcendental-subjective observation that proceeds from it, which reconstructively goes back to subject-beings of various degrees of order with an instinct-consciousness and instinctive communication, monadological communication in monad-alteration?

Do we not end therefore in a Leibnizian reconstruction, only scientifically founded through a systematic, intentional phenomenology?

If we can relinquish all claim to the actual infinity of the world, of the patently constituted, and indeed with regard to the course of time as necessary form of "historicity," while we take coexistence to be finite, thus the multiplicity of monads to be a finite "quantity," then we have the following picture and following application of the Idea of sedimentation.

1) The totality of monads in original instinctive communication, each continually living in its individual life, and consequently each with a sedimented life, with a concealed history, which equally implies the "universal" history; sleeping monads.

2) Development of monadic history as world-constituting; awakening monads, monads and development in wakefulness with a background of sleeping monads as constant foundation.

3) Development of human monads as world-constituting, as that wherein the universe of monads in oriented form pushes through to self-objectification, monads come to rational self- and human-consciousness and to world-understanding etc.

And death? Monads cannot begin and end. The transcendental totality of monads is identical with itself. The temporal-worldly process is transcendentally a life-process of communicating monads, in which monads are functioning communicatively in various ways. The entire process to which phylogenetic development corresponds is sedimented in each germ-cell that comes to be born. Each monad that functions in this connection has in its place its sedimentation as developmental inheritance. When a monad, for example a human one, dies, it does not lose its inheritance, but it sinks into absolute sleep. Thus it also somehow functions in the totality of monads; but this sleep cannot come to wakefulness like periodic sleep in human existence. It can only become if this monad has appeared in functional connection with human corporeality and if it has given its special inheritance of its special monadic development to this worldly humanity.

However, perhaps we can reconstructively understand that precisely through this concealed sedimentation, each monad is charged with rich possibilities, and that the entire ascending developmental process is only possible through this persisting intensification, within the monad itself, of its original force. The totality of monads, a monadic total unity, is in the process of an intensification in infinitum, and this process is necessarily a constant one of the development of sleeping monads to patent monads, and the development in the monads themselves of an always newly constituted world, wherein these world-constituting monads as patently constituting are not all [of the monads]; however, this entire all always participates as functioning. And this world-constitution is a constitution of an always higher humanity and supra-humanity, in which the all becomes conscious of its own true being and constitutively receives the form of something that of itself freely comes to reason or the form of perfection.

God is not itself the totality of monads but the entelechy that lies in it, as the Idea of an infinite development-telos, that of a "humanity" of absolute reason, as necessarily ruling monadic being, and ruling from its own free decision. As intersubjective, this is a necessarily expanding process, without which - despite the process of deterioration that necessarily belongs to it - universal being simply cannot be, etc.

No one can be awakened from death, in all mundane eternity, which is the objectification of monadic temporal eternity; that is to say, not in its human being, perhaps as a new human being which would have the recollection of old and new practical possibilities - and not otherwise, as if it had slept for years and then awakened in another present, discovered another environing world. Thus immortality in the ordinary sense is impossible. However the human being, like any monad, is immortal by playing a part in the self-realization process of divinity; it is immortal in its bringing-forth of everything authentic and good. It is also immortal insofar as the entire "inheritance," which it shelters in itself, of all psychic acquisitions, especially the functions that it uses, remains contained latently in its monad, although not in full wakefulness, which makes self-identification possible with earlier living human beings, in the harmony of the divine world.