Beilage XXII. Intentional Interpenetration and Real [reeles] Mutual Externality of Monads. Monadic Individuality and Causality.

(Second Half of October 1931)

In my transcendental subjectivity, the world is enclosed as a sense- and validity-mode-of-being that has become and continues to become from out of its [my transcendental subjectivity's] constitutive activities and passivities, from out of its originally acquired +capacities and its essentially-belonging conditions of association, persisting in and for it as a habitual unity of a sense which is continually anticipated and continually self-given in relative fashion, in other words, continually as a unity of universal experience (perceptual) with a horizon of possible experience (apperception).

In the world, human beings, I, this human being and other human beings are enclosed. hen I discover my transcendental I and the world as phenomenon through phenomenological reduction, that is, its being as a unity of validity on the basis of my constitution (in which correlation it alone i a phenomenological research-theme), then I now also discover the transcendental Other's a existing on the basis of my self-constitution, who (just as I am a human being) on their part appear mundanified in the experience-world. As has been said, I know the world in my constituted formation with its whole present concrete being-sense as a spatio-temporal real world, I know this world as a universal sense-formation which imposes on me, the transcendental I, a mundane sense so to speak as my role (the role of my corporeal existence in the world) and to every other transcendental I a special and different role, but one that is generally like mine, precisely as a human being who exists among other human beings in the world that exists for them in common, the world to which he himself belongs. However, I thereby know that, just as the object world exists on the basis of my constitution with all human beings, with me and my companions, so also do the transcendental Others only exist for my transcendental I on the basis of its (my, the transcendental I's) constitution, thus as a meaning- and validity-unity enclosed in my transcendental sphere, which comes forward precisely through the transcendental method of the explication of the constitution of the phenomenon world. However, because the transcendental Others exist in my transcendental validity with the sense Others - other I's, they lie therein obviously with the more precise validity-sense "transcendentally coexisting with me," my standing and persisting I with theirs, my transcendental present with theirs, my transcendental past phase for phase with theirs and so on. Just as I am transcendental in a temporal extension existing in changing, my immanent form of temporality filling in with transcendental components, so does the Other coexist with me precisely as an other I in its fulfilled time. However, the two times, as far as coexistence reaches, "correspond," and that means precisely that we exist in the manner of constant coexistents in the present etc. All of the Others who are validly existing for me on the basis of my constitution stand in one transcendental temporality, or what is the same thing, all with their streaming temporality correspond with me in temporality.

Further: in me, in my own primordial being, the Other is constituted with another primordial being, with another personal I of activities, of immanent processes, of experiences with their appearances - with all that by means of which he constitutes "the" world as his in this primordial being as a sense- and validity-unity. Thus the world-constituting of Others and the identity of the world are constituted in a certain mediateness of constitution, which is constituted for me especially as the world which I experience and which he experiences, in the mediateness of the experiencing performed in me of his experiencing and experiencing as such. In me the Other is constituted as himself continuingly constituting in the manner of a corporeal-psychic human being, however also as the same one who experiences me as the one who experiences him, as Other in general, just as I experience him in his world, the same which I have constituted, so do I experience myself as co-enclosed in the same world-constituting, myself constituted as a transcendental Other coexisting validly with him, and so on; everyone who exists for me is my constitutive sense- and validity-formation, and finally also I myself am for myself on the basis of self-constitution. Since I follow what in general has validity as existing for me and what progressively comes to validity as existing, so do I have the universal coexistence, which shows itself as the absolute transcendental intersubjectivity in the transcendental reduction, and from the naive standpoint, that of the absolute as veiled in naturalness, it shows itself as an open universe of all I-subjects, which all coexist at once and live in one world, that which it at the same time has in itself as its world. Thereby the existing absolute "world" then is the universal absolute intersubjectivity, an openly endless multiplicity of separate transcendental subjects, existing in mutual externality, existing in the constitution of one identical world-phenomenon, in which they are objectivated as separate human beings, in which they are spatio-temporally mutually exterior. Only in this spatio-temporal objectivation can the being of the Other be constituted within me in general, or, as is equivalently shown, only insofar as I immediately objectivate myself in my entire primordiality, in an order in accordance with functioning, thus first a primordial world and an incarnated I dwelling in it, can I have constituted other I's and have them present necessarily as incarnated like myself, as human beings the same as me. In the mundanizing process, the I-subjects are "psyches," subordinated moments in the world, concretely real only with their living bodies, which are themselves real moments, natural bodies in the world. If the human persons, the I-subjects enter into personal relationship with one another and are bound together personally, communalized, if they live in the world, are occupied with mere lifeless objects or with human beings and animals, in the latter relation with their bodies or with them as incarnated persons, then all of this is an event in the world, in the universe and in the horizon-form of spatiality and temporality. Transcendentally however we have the transcendental coexistence of transcendental I-subjects, understood here as concrete "monads" with their transcendental life. To each real human psyche in the world, each of which is an abstract-dependent moment of a human being, corresponds a transcendental I, each of which has its monad own-being in its primordiality, and the transcendental division consists in the fact that no moment of a primordiality, that is, no moment in its temporal individuality, can be identical with any other.

We said: individuality. Individuality means the one-time happening of existence. Thus the concept of individuality is a time-related concept; what is individual is what can exist as a temporal entity only in one temporal position (one-time, not reiterated). The noematic sense "individual" then is not individual (or indeed entirely determinate as this individual, this house, this human being) except insofar as I (and then anyone) in his subjective (immanent) temporality is thinking it, can think it as the same individual in what are for their part many individual acts of thought.

Individuality can exist in a double form: 1) in its time individuality can repeat itself in the form of similarity. Than an identical nonindividual What lies in similarity, of which it can be said that it individualizes itself through its temporal position. We mean by this that it can be given as the same individual in the objective sense, in spatio-temporality, and given equally according to its form, its color, its form of movement and so on; 2) absolute individuality under which we understand the individual that cannot be thought of itself as something repeated in its time, or better said, that cannot have the same existence in its time.

The expression "can be thought" once again has two meanings. "It cannot be thought" can mean it cannot be thought as existing - without which already beings pass into conflict and thereby will be superseded. This implies: it cannot be grounded as existing, which is again equivalent to: it cannot exist insofar as it conflicts with being. On the other hand, not-being can very probably be thought and eventually thought as a possibility. As something thought it can be, as often as one likes, repeatedly thought as this self, while it in truth nevertheless is not.

Now the absolute individual has the characteristic that it indeed, like everything thinkable, is repeatedly thinkable, and consequently in thinking, and indeed in its immanent time, temporalizes itself, and as often as one likes temporalizes meaning; on the other hand, that it cannot have the same being, that thus a general essence does not correspond to its time, that it can individualize itself in any temporal position, that, as one might also say then, it has the contingent temporal position now and not then.

Now it appears that one can say further: in each universal time-field there is a relative and absolute individual, and the distinction coincides with that between abstraction and concreteness. But both stand in closer relation in the following fashion: in the abstract sphere, there is in every temporal universe something the same, not however in the concrete, namely if we do not relativize the concrete, but understood as strict opposite of th absolute. As in spatio-temporality, so in the world: a thing, taken in its contemporary causal set of states, cannot be present a second time, it cannot exist several times as the same, not simultaneously and not successively; in abstracto, sameness can therefore give inner determinations and relations, combinatory forms, and so on. Meanwhile, one must distinguish the own essence of the real as the essence extending itself through time, as the authentic temporal filling, and the real (real-causal) relation; thus real sameness in temporality, sameness of the real in its concrete own essence is conceivable. In nature we have the possibility of a properly essential sameness obtaining with regard to natural bodies, all changes being related to the limit case of nonchange (rest, qualitative nonalteration). That also then determines the concept of the persistence of bodies in their changes which now moreover are determined through causal historicity.

The world itself would then be absolutely individual, in each moment of its time, insofar as there was no generally similar second [world] in this moment, and each world-phase would occur only once in the succession of time because it could not be repeated several times in similarity (supposing that is to be shown). On the other hand, the world does not have temporality like a thing, which exists in time, in world-time, one thing among a multiplicity, while the world in its concretion and its all-temporality can coexist with nothing, as if it could exist precisely in a more encompassing world with other worlds.

Now as regards a monad, it has its temporally extended being on th basis of its standing and continuing temporalization, which it itself is in the first and most authentic sense. As temporalized for itself and through itself it is nothing less than an analogon of the world of things. These are persisting unities in change and nonchange, while the world itself persists in a another way precisely as universe of temporal persisting. But the monad is absolutely in itself and for itself. Indeed it is therein similar to a thing since it exists in its temporality persisting in its changes. But here we cannot also say, [in] its nonchange, for there cannot in principle be two temporal phases which have the same monadic content, just as here we also cannot distribute the total changes of the monad among changes in the unity of a single kind of thing, which on its side persistingly persists. The monad is one, and indeed one I, which is identical in monadic time in its necessarily changing acts, in its changing affections, in its changing modes of consciousness, among which are the specific experiential modes of appearance, in the passive (not originating in the I) associations, mergings etc. As I, it has, inseparable from it, its hyle as constantly changing core of its apprehensions, its feelings, drives. Here we have hyletically simultaneous coexistence and succession, in which there is sameness; and nevertheless, exactly regarded, no hyle is concrete, and none has associative and egoic modi, which can be analyzed in a fashion like real relation (causality), as if this were not itself a moment of temporal filling and as if the emphasized hyletic unities were something like things. So there is here only a relative, in its own sense abstract, similarity and sameness. Add to this the indivisibility of the monad as non-breakability into parts; that is, it is in a literal sense an individual, while every concrete reality is divisible.

A form of individuation is thus no doubt given through monadic immanent temporality, but so that this monad is indecomposable into concrete individuals and its concrete time is filled phase by phase with concrete, indivisible, inseparable phases, which occur only once since these concrete phases are "incomparable" in all components; only in moments can they have a similarity, but not a repetition in concrete sameness.

What is the case now with monadic intersubjectivity? The totality of monadic subjects is a "world" in which the single subjects are "things," and indeed in the time of this world as the form of its universal coexistence, the simultaneous and the successive. In this time, everyone persists in its changes (to which no nonchange corresponds - despite dreamless sleep and death etc. as limit-case of the possibility of such apprehension). They stand also with one another in "real" relations, in "real" causality. Each personal relationship in the world corresponds in the absoluteness of monads to a monadic causality, but also every conscious relationship of the kind, for example, of every human experience and knowledge and praxis in its surrounding world, also the purely physical, corresponds obviously to an absolute causality. But the entire distinction in principle between the essence-form of the inauthentic, mere one time occurrence of existence in spatio-temporality of the mentioned individuality of mundane realities and that of the properly authentic individuality of the monads also conditions the fundamentally essential distinction between the causality of mundane realities and the causality of monads, and further between the universal causality which gives all realities the unity of rule-governed order, stated more exactly, which gives all realities in relation to universal spatio-temporality a fillingly concrete authentically essential fullness of a rule of possible existence, and the universal causality which unifies all monads.

To begin with, it is clear that the fundamental kind of causality which pertains to the world, that of division (partition in the ordinary sense) and coalescence (binding into extensive wholes) has no meaning for monads. Pieces cannot be broken off from one monad and stuck into another monad. In this sense no monad has windows from which monadic "material" could fly in or out. That pertains to all moments that belong to the individuality of a monad; they are absolutely bound in a uniquely occurring way in their monad (although the linguistic similarity of binding carries the appearance of counter-apprehension in itself, as if it were only a law that the detachment, in itself conceivable, were forbidden). In the self-objectification of the monads as psyches that also concerns these taken purely in themselves: inversely everything purely psychic leads back to the monadic in the phenomenological reduction. Communication [Mitteilung] from person to person is not seriously a transposition of part [Teils] of one (a real moment belonging to the immanently temporal authentic being) to the other. Communication consists in the fact that perhaps in the thought of one, something ideal, a judgment, a thought awakens and, as a consequence thereof, makes possible the reciprocal causality in which a purely developing second thought develops in the other psyche or monad, in which the same thought, the same judgment awakens, and moreover, the one is conscious of the fact that the other is communicating, and reciprocally: a consciousness that develops again in the one and in the other.

But one feels that there is a difficulty in the understanding of the causality of monads. It is not a causality of the same sort as the causality of nature, which plays its universal role in the spatio-temporal world as something founded in nature.

The existence of each monad is implicated in each. Each has constituted the same world in its "consciousness," "implicite" all entities, and transcendentally the totality of monads, and everything which is constituted in the individual and the community, are enclosed in each. On the other hand, the monads are absolutely divided, they have no moments, nothing real [reeles] in common; they coexist in the monadic all-temporality.

That is not so strange, one might say: real [reeles] mutual externality is of course compatible with intentional interpenetration. The same thing already appeared to us in the world in relation to psyches. The psyches are mutually exterior, here spatially exterior, as psychically-real additions to living bodies which have an external existence in space. But every psyche knows what is not itself, as an ideal possibility, everything external to it. Knowledge rings within its limits, and is understood according to rule. We say, consciousness: each psyche has consciousness of its world, of course horizonally; what it is conscious of explicitly is paltry, but it has its open indeterminate, dark horizon.