"I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general"
About this Quote
Leibniz insists that what makes a thing what it is cannot be separated from an inner principle of doing. Substance is not a bare support for properties, not an inert block upon which motions are imposed from outside. Whether the substance is material or immaterial, its essence includes a native power, a tendency to act, to change, to express. He calls this vis activa, an active force that grounds all phenomena. Even bodies are not mere extension, as the Cartesians thought, but centers of force whose apparent motions and interactions manifest deeper activities. Souls reveal this most clearly: their activity appears as perception and appetition, the ceaseless drive to move from one state of awareness to another.
This stance opposes any picture of nature as a theater of purely external pushes and pulls applied to passive stuff. For Leibniz, genuine change must arise from within a thing according to intelligible principles; otherwise there would be no reason why a state follows another. His principles of sufficient reason and continuity require that what happens is explicable by an internal law of development. Hence the metaphysical role of monads, simple substances whose essence is activity: they unfold their states according to their own programs, prefigured and coordinated by God through a pre-established harmony. Because their activity is intrinsic, monads do not exchange causal influence; what looks like interaction is a synchronized expression of their inner dynamics.
The view has consequences for science and mind. In physics, it elevates force over geometric extension, anticipating the shift from kinematics to dynamics and Leibnizs defense of vis viva as more fundamental than mere momentum. In psychology, it frames consciousness not as a passive mirror but as an active, gradated expression already at work in the dimmest perceptions. To speak of substance without activity would be to posit a shadow with no light: a conceptual remainder that cannot explain change, order, or knowledge.
This stance opposes any picture of nature as a theater of purely external pushes and pulls applied to passive stuff. For Leibniz, genuine change must arise from within a thing according to intelligible principles; otherwise there would be no reason why a state follows another. His principles of sufficient reason and continuity require that what happens is explicable by an internal law of development. Hence the metaphysical role of monads, simple substances whose essence is activity: they unfold their states according to their own programs, prefigured and coordinated by God through a pre-established harmony. Because their activity is intrinsic, monads do not exchange causal influence; what looks like interaction is a synchronized expression of their inner dynamics.
The view has consequences for science and mind. In physics, it elevates force over geometric extension, anticipating the shift from kinematics to dynamics and Leibnizs defense of vis viva as more fundamental than mere momentum. In psychology, it frames consciousness not as a passive mirror but as an active, gradated expression already at work in the dimmest perceptions. To speak of substance without activity would be to posit a shadow with no light: a conceptual remainder that cannot explain change, order, or knowledge.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by Gottfried
Add to List
