The world-outlook that reality is a plurality of self-enclosed spiritual monads, each an inwardly active being; Steiner’s abstract Spiritism, sourced to Leibniz.
Monadism in Anthroposophy is the world-outlook, named the tenth of Rudolf Steiner’s twelve in Human and Cosmic Thought (GA 151, Berlin, 1914), that grants reality to spirit yet pictures it only as a plurality of self-enclosed soul-points called monads, each a being that builds existence within itself. Steiner traces the standpoint to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whose Monadology of 1714 populated the cosmos with monads of every grade of consciousness, from the nearly sleeping to the fully waking. Steiner calls it an abstract Spiritism: it keeps the many spirit-beings but leaves them indefinite, refusing the concrete spiritual Hierarchies that the Spiritist beholds. Each monad is windowless, a unit that mirrors the whole world from one point of view yet receives nothing from outside itself. On Steiner’s thought-zodiac the standpoint stands tenth, between Pneumatism and Dynamism. As a tone for cognition it teaches the soul to feel the world as inwardly active centres of perception rather than dead matter or mere force.
Monadism is the standpoint that the world is a community of countless monads, spiritual unit-beings each shut within itself, perceiving and developing concepts from its own depths. Steiner ranks it between Pneumatism and Dynamism on his thought-zodiac: a thinker reaches it by granting that ideas need bearers, yet stops at calling those bearers “monads” instead of naming the Hierarchies, as the Spiritist does.
In Steiner's Own Words
that is, he conceives of it only as though one were to say: “Yes, there is spirit in the world and there are spirits, but I describe them only by saying, ‘They are entities having varying powers of perception.’ I pick out from them an abstract characteristic. So I form for myself this one-sided world-outlook, on behalf of which as much as can be said has been said by the highly intelligent Leibnitz. In this way I develop Monadism.” Monadism is an abstract Spiritism.
What it Means Today
Read Leibniz directly and Steiner’s placement of him snaps into focus. The Monadology, written in French at Vienna in 1714 and circulated after Leibniz’s death in 1716, opens by defining the monad as “a simple substance” with no parts, no windows through which anything might enter or leave. Each monad mirrors the whole universe from its own point of view, and they range, in sections 19 to 24, from bare monads sunk in a stupor to souls with memory and on to rational spirits. That ladder of dim-to-waking unit-beings is exactly the picture Steiner restates in the 1914 lecture. Where Leibniz wanted a complete metaphysics, Steiner treats the monad as one valid angle among twelve: true as far as it reaches, one-sided when held alone. He marks its limit by a single contrast. The Monadist keeps spirit but lets it stay indefinite, whereas the Pneumatist next door already breathes life into the world as pneuma, and the Spiritist beyond him beholds the concrete Beings of the Hierarchies; step the other way and the monad thins into mere force, which is Dynamism. So a present-day reader can use Monadism as a discipline of attention. Before deciding the meadow is dead chemistry or live spirit, one can first grant that it may be built of inward centres, then ask, with Leibniz, how clearly each one perceives.
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