過程と選択―存在の基底としてのモナド過程について―

Abstract

The metaphysics of Leibniz contains two directions. In one of them, he tries to describe the structure of the field of conceptions. This field consists of so-called individual concepts and possible worlds. In terms of these conceptions, the existence, that is, the actual world can be deduced logically from God's original calculation. The other direction of investigation leads him to seize the base of the existence. The notion of monade plays the crucial role in this field. Its function is to relate our experience to the whole universe. The most important point of this analysis is to regard all events as a part of the process of the universe. We think that this monade process as the universe process is so fundamental that it preceeds the field of conceptions or essences. It means that the field of conceptions and the two headed schema "existence and essence" caused by it is not such a thing as exists by its own right, but one that the monade assumes to himself. In this paper, we call this process of monade's taking this schema "selection" . This "selection" will make "cognition" enigmatic process, that is, a mysterious travel of monades from the field of the existence to that of conceptions. Standing on such a view, we think, we can unfold the complex character of Leibniz' metaphysical texts. They could be regarded as the traces of two headed schema pushed onto a monade. We think the thing Leibniz is doing in his texts is not to explicate the relationship between the existence and the essence, but to follow these traces cyclically. To be sure, this is not done consciously at all and doubtlessly he would have regarded himself doing the former. This view on his texts would produce some more interesting results.