In the early twentieth century, a rare strain of British idealism emerged which took Leibniz's Monadology as its starting point. This paper discusses a variant of that strain, offered by Hilda Oakeley (1867–1950). I set Oakeley's monadology in its philosophical context and discuss a key point of conflict between Oakeley and her fellow monadologists: the unreality of time. Oakeley argues that time is fundamentally real, a thesis arguably denied by Leibniz and subsequent monadologists, and by all other British idealists. This paper discusses Oakeley's argument for the reality of time, and Oakeley's attack on the most famous account of the unreality of time offered in her day: that of J. M. E. McTaggart. I show that Oakeley's critique of McTaggart can be extended to challenge all monadologists, including that of the great monad, Leibniz himself.
In the early twentieth century, the British idealist Hilda Oakeley (1867–1950) argued for a ‘personalist’ kind of Leibnizian monadology, the starting point of which is the individual perceptions of selves. There is very little literature on Oakeley but this paper argues that she plays an important role in the legacy of Leibniz's Monadology. Unlike arguably all of her fellow idealists and monadologists, Oakeley holds that time is fundamentally real. In addition to providing an argument for the reality of time, Oakeley critiques the views of her contemporary J. M. E. McTaggart, that most famous advocate for the unreality of time. This paper argues that Oakeley's critique of McTaggart can be extended beyond the intellectual confines of British idealism to challenge all personalist monadologists.
The paper runs as follows. Section 2 details the intellectual context in which Oakeley is working. Section 2.1 introduces British idealist monadologies, a branch of idealism that has been woefully neglected by the history of philosophy. As Oakeley is a little-known figure, Section 2.2 provides a brief introduction to her work. Section 3 considers Oakeley's views on time. Section 3.1 sets out Oakeley's positive argument for the reality of time, and shows that several of her views are still held today. Section 3.2 discusses Oakeley's critique of McTaggart's thesis that our temporal perceptions are misperceptions of an atemporal series. Oakeley persuasively argues that McTaggart has not wholly eliminated time from his account of reality, and that his metaphysics cannot explain our perception of temporal passage. Section 4 shows that Oakeley's critique of McTaggart can be extended to challenge all personalist monadologists, by applying her critique to Leibniz.
Idealism dominated British philosophy in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, various anti-idealist ‘new realisms’ appeared, and during this period disputes between various kinds of idealism proliferated. One way of distinguishing British idealist monadologies from other kinds of idealism is to consider their conflicting accounts of selves, and this distinction is particularly useful to us as it will help us to contextualize Oakeley's views.
British idealism is best known for ‘Absolute idealism’, the monistic view that the ultimate reality is one Absolute consciousness, held for example by F. H. Bradley. However, idealism came in other flavours too. Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison led the charge for ‘personal idealism’, arguing that Absolute idealism does not leave room for the individuality of selves. Pringle-Pattison (Hegelianism and Personality, 216) argued that reality is pluralist because it comprises many minds; although, ultimately, this plurality forms a unified Absolute, such that selves are ‘parts of the system of things’. Pringle-Pattison's charge was solidified by a 1902 collective volume Personal Idealism, edited by H. G. Sturt. There is a modest body of scholarship on Absolute and personal idealism.2
The first decades of the twentieth century saw another flavour of British idealism emerge: ‘monadologies’. These idealisms exhibit several elements found in Leibniz's Monadology, such as Leibniz's view (AG 214–23)3 that all monads continually perceive the universe from a unique perspective; that all monads are subject to ‘appetition’, a kind of nisus that moves the monad from one perception to the next; and that the highest monads take pleasure in pure love. James Ward's 1911 The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism provides an early example of British idealist monadology. The monadology of H. Wildon Carr followed a few years later, seemingly independently. Oakeley's monadology emerged later still. There is a modest body of scholarship on Ward, there is a little on Oakeley, and there is none on Carr (with the exception of Oakeley's articles).4
As there is reason to believe that Oakeley draws on Carr's monadology, I give a brief overview of it. Carr's ‘Philosophy as Monadology’ argues that philosophy is the study of living experience, and centres of living experience are monads. For Carr (‘Philosophy as Monadology’, 125–30) a monad is anything that is the subject of experience. Carr places heavy emphasis on the unique perspectival experience of monads, as illustrated here by his metaphor of passengers sitting on a train:
Each of my fellow-passengers is, like myself, a mind. Each mind is a universe, a universe reflected into a centre as though into a mirror, and every centre is an individual point of view. Between one mind and another there is absolutely nothing in common … To a mind all reality is experience, and to each mind its own experience.
(Carr, ‘Philosophy as Monadology’, 127)
For Carr (‘Philosophy as Monadology’, 133) monads lack windows in the sense that they cannot ‘directly’ communicate with one another – by which I read Carr as meaning that no monad can inhabit the unique perspective of another – but they can communicate ‘indirectly’ through body language and speech.
McTaggart's two-volume magnum opus Nature of Existence argues that the universe is comprised exclusively of selves and their perceptions. McTaggart has been understood as a personal idealist and as a monadologist. McTaggart (Nature of Existence I, 50) states that his idealism is that of Berkeley, Leibniz, and Hegel, in that (as McTaggart reads them) nothing exists except for spirit. McTaggart's system displays a number of Leibnizian hallmarks.5 These have been noted in the literature6 and their origins puzzled over. Mander (British Idealism, 372) suggests that the Leibnizian elements in McTaggart may be evidence of the influence of Ward, who tutored McTaggart at Cambridge. However, Ward's correspondence suggests that he was not friendly with McTaggart,7 casting some doubt on this line of influence. McTaggart's work may have taken on Leibnizian elements independently, as he lectured on Leibniz. Another possible line of influence is McTaggart's colleague (and, at one time, friend) the ‘new realist’ Bertrand Russell, who lectured on Leibniz at Cambridge in 1899 in place of McTaggart (while McTaggart was away), and subsequently published a study of Leibniz.
British idealist monadologists disagree with absolute idealists and with personalist idealists over the nature of selves. To illustrate, Pringle-Pattison (Idea of God, 257–9) criticizes the ‘old doctrine of the soul-substance as a kind of metaphysical atom’, and – picking out McTaggart for special attention – argues that it is absurd to talk of selves existing in their own right, as selves exist as an ‘organ’ of the Absolute. Presumably, Pringle-Pattison would subject the systems of Ward, Carr, and Oakeley to the same criticisms. Against the Absolute idealists, monadologists agree with personal idealists of Pringle-Pattison's ilk that selves are real to a significant degree. They are disagreeing over how real selves are: personal idealists conceive selves as somewhat real but ultimately unify them in the Absolute, whereas monadologists conceive selves as absolutely real, with no Absolute in sight. The Leibniz, one might say, is in the details.
Another way of distinguishing monadologies from other kinds of idealism lies in the texts they are drawing from. Tim Crane (‘Philosophy, Logic, Science, History’, 23) has argued that we should understand a philosophical tradition as a collection of interrelated texts, rather than as a body of doctrines or techniques. This thesis can be applied here: Leibnizian idealisms can be distinguished from their fellows in virtue of the fact they are not drawing on (or at least, not only drawing on) Hegel's Encyclopaedia or Spinoza's Ethics; instead, they are drawing on Leibniz's Monadology. This textual context grounds the Leibnizian hallmarks found in British idealist monadologies, such as the independent reality of selves, or the value of love.
British idealism is frequently known as ‘British Hegelianism’ for a good reason: many prominent British idealists – including William Wallace, T. H. Green, Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Pringle-Pattison, and McTaggart – draw frequently and explicitly on Hegel. However, there are reasons to be unhappy with this label. In addition to downplaying the influence of thinkers such as Spinoza and Kant, the monistic connotations of the ‘British Hegelianism’ label excludes the radically pluralist metaphysics of British idealist monadologists, who are drawing partially or exclusively on Leibniz.
As Oakeley is a little-known figure, it will be helpful to give some biographical information. Oakeley came up to Oxford in 1894, studying for her undergraduate degree under the Absolute idealists Wallace, Bosanquet, and Edward Caird. (Whilst Oakeley studied for a degree she was not awarded one, as Oxford did not award degrees to women until 1920.) After teaching philosophy at McGill University and the University of Manchester, Oakeley joined the philosophy department at King's College London in 1907. She stayed at King's for the rest of her career and, by 1940, her status was such that she was elected President of the Aristotelian Society.8 Oakeley was prolific and her writings range from the philosophy of history to politics. We will be focusing on her metaphysics.
Oakeley begins characterizing her system as a monadology from the 1920s.9 Oakeley's work particularly draws on Leibniz's conception of selves but it also bears other Leibnizian hallmarks. For example, Oakeley (‘Symposium’, 309) holds that the highest possible value is the love of selves for other selves. In a way that is reminiscent of Leibnizian appetition, Oakeley (Philosophy of Personality, 16) further argues that selves are continually striving; for Oakeley, this is an effort to overcome the limits of our perspectives. I suggest that the Leibnizian elements in Oakeley's work are at least partly evidence of her collegial relationship with Carr. Oakeley writes of Carr with personal warmth10 and she was extremely familiar with his philosophy: they worked together at King's College London from 1914 to 1925; she wrote on his monadology, see Oakeley (‘Discussion of Dr Wildon Carr’); and she wrote a memorial piece on Carr and his work after his death, see Oakeley (‘In Memoriam’). Additionally, in the context of setting out her own monadology, Oakeley (Philosophy of Personality, 29–30) writes approvingly that, amongst modern Leibnizian philosophies, Carr ‘seems to come nearest’ to Leibniz.
Oakeley's Philosophy of Personality argues that reality is fundamentally temporal. Her argument is not given in premise form but, on my reading, I reconstruct it as follows:
Selves are ‘personalist’ monads
Selves perceive temporal passage
The best explanation for selves’ perception of temporal passage is that reality is fundamentally temporal
Reality is fundamentally temporal
The argument is valid and it would remain so even if (i) were removed, as (ii) and (iii) together are sufficient to establish (iv). Although, logically speaking, (i) is superfluous, I have included it because it will help us to understand the flow of Oakeley's reasoning.
I will discuss each premise in turn, beginning with (i). As the title of Philosophy of Personality suggests, Oakeley is deeply concerned with ‘persons’. In the preface, Oakeley (Philosophy of Personality, 7) describes personality ‘as that principle which must needs endow experience with individuality’. In this context, she mentions McTaggart's (‘Personality’, 773) view that a ‘self’ is identical with ‘personality’, and there is no indication that Oakeley departs from this. A little later, Oakeley ( Philosophy of Personality, 21–2) explains that ‘personality appears wherever there is consciousness or awareness of reality’. For Oakeley, a personality – a person – is an individual, conscious self.11
Oakeley (Philosophy of Personality, 26–7) states that a philosophy of persons such as hers must go back to Leibniz's Monadology as one of its original sources, and that the Monadology has been interpreted in two ways. The first interpretation emphasizes the relationship between monads and the divine monad from which they proceed: this tends towards monism, encouraging us to conceive monads as ‘fulgurations’ of God. This is a reference to a passage in Leibniz's Monadology which states that all created monads are generated by ‘continual fulgurations of the divinity’ (AG 219).12 In contrast, the second interpretation emphasizes the monads’ ‘exclusive individuality in respect to the perspective theory of knowledge’, the unique epistemic perspective of each monad: this tends towards pluralism, focusing on the plurality of ‘worlds’ which are perceived from the individual point of view of the knower. On the first ‘monistic’ monadology, selves are fulgurations, dependent on something larger; on the second ‘personalist’ monadology, selves are independent individuals.
Oakeley argues that Leibniz's system is not wholly personalist, and as such he did not develop his system to the fullest. However, the thinkers of her period are now in a position to do so:
Perhaps it required the movement of thought from Kant, through Hegel and later Idealism … to bring about the definite and acute insight of modern idealists into the truth, that the individual is integrally bound up with his world, that if his outlook upon reality is unique and incommunicable, so is his world only for himself in its total nature.
It is then in the philosophy of Leibniz … that may be found the starting-point of the development of the personalistic interpretation.
(Oakeley, Philosophy of Personality, 28–9)
Oakeley places Leibniz in the idealist tradition13 and the starting point of her metaphysics is the Leibnizian insight that individuals are ‘bound up’ with their unique worlds. This can be illuminated by a discussion in McTaggart, who considers the view that perception is the awareness of ‘sense-data’, mental objects that minds perceive directly, such as noises or colours. McTaggart (‘Personality’, 774–5) explains that it is commonly held that ‘that which falls wholly within a mind’ – such as sense-data – is not perceptible by any mind except that in which it falls, entailing that each sense-datum can only be perceived by one person.14 Although Oakeley does not put the point in the language of sense-data, the spirit of her view is the same: a self's perspective, or ‘world of knowledge’, is unique to it. Oakeley favours a personalist monadology over a monistic one for many reasons, not least because (in agreement Carr and McTaggart) she thinks it best accords with our experience as conscious selves, and with the value we wish to place on selves.
Although (i) is not logically necessary to establishing (iv), the argument has special force if (i) is included. This is because, if selves are conceived as personalist monads, then the starting point of one's metaphysics is the perception or experience of selves. Any philosophic position that starts from selves’ perception must account for selves’ perception. As Oakeley (‘On the Meaning of Value’, 435) puts it, ‘the nature of the real must be such as to account for the facts of experience’. This does not commit the monadologist to asserting the truth of everything we perceive, but it does commit them to satisfactorily explaining everything we perceive. If the monadologist accepts that we perceive temporal passage but holds that this is a misperception, they must explain that misperception.
Let us move on to (ii). Oakeley (Philosophy of Personality, 47) claims that selves have a particular kind of experience or perception:
the quality of experience as arising from the unknown, emerging as the novel, and thence from firm settlement as actuality, passing to the irrevocable past, or the coming to birth of the object, its growth to ripeness, and old age.
In today's parlance, Oakeley is describing our experience of ‘temporal passage’, the movement of time: our sense of an event arising from the ‘unknown’ future, becoming present ‘actuality’, and passing into the ‘irrevocable’ past. Many philosophers have claimed we experience temporal passage.15 Even D. C. Williams’s (‘Myth of Passage’, 466) impassioned critique of passage claims that it is ‘futile’ to deny our experience of it, for we are ‘immediately and poignantly involved in the jerk and whoosh of process, the felt flow of one moment into the next’.
Oakeley goes on to argue for (iii):
[The doctrine that reality] is non-temporal, must be sacrificed if we are to gain an intelligible view of the character of our actual knowledge. The interpretations of absolute Idealism, of Spinozism, even that of Leibniz, though he allows the time sequence to be a phenomenon bene fundatum are proved to be in some way imperfect as instruments for making this intelligible. For there results from this type of interpretation a conception which … [is] incapable of justifying certain characters of our knowledge experience.
(Oakeley, Philosophy of Personality, 46–7)
Oakeley is arguing that those who hold reality to be non-temporal – such as the absolute idealists; Leibniz; and Spinoza – cannot account for our actual knowledge, our perception of temporal passage. Oakeley seems to have held this view from her earliest work.16
In defending the doctrine that reality is temporal, I take Oakeley to mean that temporal passage is fundamentally real. (My addition of the qualifier ‘fundamental’ merely implies that time passes on the rock-bottom level of reality, as opposed to say having some degree of reality as a well-founded appearance.) In holding that temporal passage is real, and events really change their temporal properties from future to present to past, Oakeley is an ‘A theorist’. This terminology has its roots in McTaggart, who distinguishes two ways of ordering events. On the ‘A series’, events are ordered in virtue of possessing temporal properties, such as being ‘past’. In contrast, on the ‘B series’, events are ordered by being ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ than other events. Arguments from our experience of temporal passage to A theory can still be found in metaphysics today, and – whilst controversial – they are generally acknowledged to have force.17
Oakeley concludes (iv) that reality is temporal. In the British idealist context, this position is nothing less than radical. As far as I am aware, every single British idealist except Oakeley holds that in some sense time is unreal.18
Carr and McTaggart accept the theses expressed by (i) and (ii) but not (iii). In her later work, Oakeley critiques McTaggart's rejection of (iii), and that is the subject of this section.
Oakeley really begins to engage with McTaggart's work from the late 1920s, and she expresses high praise it. For example, Oakeley (‘Symposium’, 309) praises McTaggart's Leibnizian view that the supreme value of experience is love of selves for other selves; Oakeley (History and the Self, 256–7) applauds McTaggart's advocacy of the importance of persons; and Oakeley (History and the Self, 20–21) writes that McTaggart's ‘genius’ philosophy of selves has been of great value to her work, even though she finds his timeless universe ‘untenable’. Just how untenable will become apparent shortly.
McTaggart is best known for his 1908 argument for the unreality of time. As this argument is not our focus, I will recount it very briefly.19 McTaggart (‘Unreality of Time’, 467–70) argues that there is no time without the A series, because only the A series provides change in temporal properties. However, McTaggart argues that the A series is contradictory – if an event is present it cannot also be past and future – and so the A series cannot be true of reality. As there is no time without the A series, time is an unreal appearance.
Taking himself to have established the unreality of time, McTaggart goes on to argue – most fully in Nature of Existence – that our temporal ‘perceptions’ are misperceptions of an atemporal reality. Like Oakeley, McTaggart agrees that the nature of the real must account for the facts of experience. McTaggart (Nature of Existence I, 50–1) explains that his methodology is specifically concerned with relating the characteristics of our experience to the general nature of the existent. With this in mind, McTaggart (Nature of Existence II, 194) sets out to reconcile appearances with the real nature of the universe, and one of these appearances is time.
McTaggart holds that our misperceptions of things as being in the A series – as being present, future, or past – provide clues to the underlying nature of reality:
[T]he misperception which gives us the A series clearly implies that the terms which are misperceived as forming it, do really form a series … though not a time-series. The fact that the terms are in such a series involves that each term has a definite position on one side or the other of any given term, and is either nearer to it or further from it than any other term on the same side of it.
(Nature of Existence II, 213)
McTaggart labels this real series the ‘C series’.
McTaggart (Nature of Existence II, 213) argues that the relation which connects terms in the C series must share various characteristics of the relation ‘earlier than’, such as being transitive and asymmetric.20 McTaggart concludes that this relation is the ‘inclusion’ relation:
Of any two terms in the B series, one is earlier than the other, which is later than the first, and by means of these relations all the terms can be arranged in one definite order. And of any two terms in the C series, one is included in the other, which includes the first, and by means of these relations all the terms can be arranged in one definite order … it is the relations of “included in” and “inclusive of” which appear as the relations of “earlier than” and “later than”.
(Nature of Existence II, 240)
There is a precise parallelism between this ‘inclusion series’ and the things we misperceive as the time series, and for this reason – echoing Leibniz's remarks on extension and motion (see below) – McTaggart (Nature of Existence II, 273) describes time as a ‘phenomenon bene fundatum’. The idea is that we are perceiving ‘through a glass, darkly’: the murky nature of the lens leads us to perceive reality as temporal when it is not, but our misperceptions are founded in reality. McTaggart (Nature of Existence II, 365) further argues that the C series possesses one stage that the time series does not: a ‘final stage’ that will include all the contents of the preceeding stages. When selves reach the final stage, they will perceive the whole series which sub specie temporis is their life throughout time, although they will ‘correctly’ perceive these stages as not really being in time (McTaggart, Nature of Existence II, 389). McTaggart's work provides one way of rejecting (iii): by arguing that our temporal perceptions are misperceptions of the C series, McTaggart provides an alternative explanation for our experience of time.
Oakeley is impressed by McTaggart's attempted parallelism between appearance and reality21 but she firmly rejects it. Oakeley argues that McTaggart's account of reality does not account for our experiences, and thus McTaggart's system fails on its own terms. In a series of articles, Oakeley presents a battery of arguments against McTaggart's views on time.22 I will discuss an argument presented in Oakeley's 1930 paper ‘Time and the Self in McTaggart's System’. This argument poses an objection to McTaggart's inclusion relation, and I read it as having two prongs: our notion of ‘inclusion’ depends on the prior notion of time, and ‘inclusion’ does not account for our perception of temporal passage. I will discuss them in turn.
The first prong runs as follows. An anti-realist about time must provide a satisfactory explanation of reality that is wholly free of time: it would be contradictory to deny the fundamental reality of time and employ temporal notions at the fundamental level of ontology. Oakeley argues that McTaggart is guilty of this contradiction, because ‘inclusion’ is an inherently temporal notion:
There would be no meaning in a statement that A is included in B unless behind the statement there lay the experience, actual or possible, of the occurrence of one after the other. How otherwise is the difference between the first and the second to be given its value, how otherwise is identity between the two to be avoided? The notion of inclusion is the one selected by McTaggart as the type of the real series, of which the temporal is phenomenal … But how are we to conceive the relation of the included to the including unless we can think of the terms or events as now separated from each other and then coming together? Without the temporal form they become identical in inclusion and the series is no longer a series.
(Oakeley ‘Time and the Self in McTaggart's System’, 183)
To understand Oakeley's argument, it will be helpful to elaborate on it.
As McTaggart would accept, the ‘included in’ relation holds between non-identical terms. Identity is a symmetric relation, and ‘included in’ is an asymmetric relation. Given this, if A and B are identical, then one cannot be included in the other. In arguing that the statement ‘A is included in B’ is meaningless unless the occurrence of one after the other were possible, I read Oakeley as arguing that there are no necessary connections between distinct (i.e. non-identical) existences: if A is really non-identical to B, then A can exist independently or separately of B. For Oakeley, the statement ‘A is included in B’ entails at time t1 conceiving A, and then at t2 conceiving A included in B. It is this move – from considering A, to A included in B – that leads Oakeley to object that inclusion involves a ‘temporal form’.23
Oakeley's objection pushes the burden of proof back onto McTaggart, challenging him to explain how this series is not temporal. Several years later, the ‘new realist’ C. D. Broad – McTaggart's friend and former pupil – published a lengthy study of McTaggart's system. Although there is no indication that Broad read Oakeley, Broad makes an objection that appears to run on similar lines. Broad (Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy II, 522–3) asks us to consider a series of propositions on which the preceding propositions logically and asymmetrically entail the next, such that p1 entails p2, p1 and p2 together entail p3, and so on. For McTaggart, the terms and relations of this series would be timeless. Against McTaggart, Broad argues that a reference to time ‘is essential’ because one must know p1 and p2 before one can know p3, and one can know p3 only after knowing p2 and p1. These arguments from Oakeley and Broad share a common thrust: in conceiving a series, we consider things before and after one another, and thus a series involves time.
On the second prong, Oakeley objects that the inclusion relation (whether or not it is temporal) cannot account for our perception of temporal passage:
The difficulty which McTaggart seems to experience in determining what type of real series it is of which the time-series is a misperception, may suggest doubts whether the notion of a series is the true logical equivalent of the process of time. To some thinkers, the nature of time has appeared to be better indicated by the idea of a continuous passage which is discrete in its moments only in relation to our mode of conceiving it, stages in the passage being distinguished primarily on account of their importance whether in view of practice or in view of the systematic and intelligible conception of the world.
(Oakeley, ‘Time and the Self in McTaggart's System’, 186)
Oakeley is arguing here that the notion of a series is not the logical equivalent of the process of time, and a better characterization of time is ‘continuous passage’. I will discuss each element of this characterization in turn.
For McTaggart, time is well founded in the C series, which comprises discrete perceptions. Oakeley is arguing that time is better characterized as continuous; as I read her, this is because our perception of temporal passage is continuous. Elsewhere, Oakeley (‘Status of the Past’, 243–4) places great emphasis on the ‘continuity of self-consciousness’. As our perception of passage is continuous, a discrete C series cannot account for it. Additionally, McTaggart's C series does not contain passage, and so it is hard to see how it can explain our perception of passage. Broad (Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy II, 546) also make this objection: ‘But where, in all this timeless co-existence of non-temporal series, can the appearance of the passage of A-characteristics from one term to another arise?’24 For Oakeley, McTaggart's C series is not parallel to our experience of time because it lacks continuity and passage.
The two prongs of Oakeley's critique come together to show that McTaggart's account of temporal ‘misperception’ is unsatisfactory: McTaggart has not eliminated time from the C series, and the C series cannot account for our perception of continuous passage. This entails there is some flaw in McTaggart's logical argument for the unreality of time. As Oakeley (‘Philosophy of Time and the Timeless’, 116) puts it, ‘That the contradiction which McTaggart finds in the nature of time is less than that which results from the postulate of its unreality seems suggested by his own work.’ As McTaggart passed away in 1925, prior to Oakeley's critiques, we do not know what he might have made of them. At the conclusion of the last of her critiques, Oakeley writes:
Finally, I would venture to express a surmise – mainly the result of reflection on McTaggart's philosophy of time – that an a priori proof of the reality of time is not inconceivable. The line it would follow would proceed from the assumption that the ‘error’ must be attributed to the subject … we may accept the view that time is in the self without holding consciousness of time to be error. Must there not be postulated sufficient harmony between the self and its experienced object, to assure that so universal and inescapable a form must be in things, and events, as well as in the mind?
(Oakeley ‘Philosophy of Time and the Timeless’, 126–7)
McTaggart and Oakeley agree that selves can be understood as Leibnizian monads but, against McTaggart, Oakeley holds that temporal passage – that ‘universal and inescapable’ form – is not an error generated by selves but a feature of reality.
This section argues that Oakeley's critique of McTaggart can be extended to challenge all monadologists who deny the reality of time. The challenge is this: If time is merely a well-founded phenomenon, then the grounds of the phenomenon must be purely non-temporal and such as to account for our perception of temporal passage. The latter part of this challenge renders it especially applicable to personalist monadologists because, for these theorists, the starting point of metaphysics is the perception or experience of individual selves. Given the importance monadologists place on perception, they should satisfactorily account for a perception as all-pervasive as time. To demonstrate the force of Oakeley's challenge, I show how it can be applied to the work of the great monadologist, Leibniz himself.
A full discussion of Leibniz's account of time would reach into his wider metaphysics and intellectual context, and there is not space to attempt that here. Instead, I confine myself to sketching Leibniz's pertinent views. Leibniz's Primary Texts (c. 1686) states, ‘Extension and motion, as well as bodies themselves … are not substances, but true phenomena, like rainbows’ (AG 34). A rainbow is a phenomenon that is ‘well founded’ in real beings, its water droplets; similarly, material bodies, spatial extension and movement through time are well-founded phenomena grounded in monads. Oakeley (‘Time and the Self in McTaggart's System’, 175) briefly states that she perceives ‘important affinities’ between the views of Leibniz and McTaggart on time, and one of these affinities is likely their use of well-founded phenomena.
In his later work, Leibniz describes time as ‘ideal’. For example, in a 1705 letter, Leibniz writes:
[Time] is nothing but a principle of relations, a foundation of the order of things, in so far as one conceives their successive existence, or without which they would exist together. It must be the same in the case of space … Both of these foundations are true, although they are ideal.
(trans. Hartz and Cover, ‘ Space and Time in the Leibnizian Metaphysic’, 501)
In a 1716 letter, Leibniz writes that the certain order that is time is analogous to genealogical relations, which express real truths yet are ‘ideal things’ (AG 339). Leibniz is arguing that genealogical relations hold between brothers, sisters, and mothers and yet they are merely ideal things, entia rationis, or objects of the mind; similarly, temporal relations hold between bodies and yet are merely ideal.
Scholars are deeply divided over how to understand Leibniz's account of time.25 One dispute is over whether time is directly founded in monads. For example, drawing on Leibniz's thesis that monads continually perceive, Rescher (Leibniz – An Introduction to his Philosophy, 90–1) argues that time is grounded in the succession of monads’ changes of state, from one perception to another. On Rescher's reading, Leibniz holds a two-tier ontology: monads lie on the bottom tier of reality, and time lies on the tier above. In contrast, Hartz and Cover (‘Space and Time in the Leibnizian Metaphysic’, 512) have argued against Rescher that, in his mature writings, Leibniz conceives matter as a well-founded phenomenon and time is a mere ‘ideal order’, abstracted away from what is well founded. On this reading, Leibniz's mature writings posit a three-tier ontology: monads lie at the foundational level; well-founded phenomena grounded in monads, such as material bodies, lie one tier up; and ideal things, such as time, lie two tiers up.
Another scholarly dispute is over whether monads are in time. On one line of interpretation, monads (directly or indirectly) ground time but they are not in time. As we saw above, Oakeley reads Leibniz in this way. More recently, McDonough (‘Leibniz's Philosophy of Physics’, §5.2) writes of Leibniz's mature metaphysics that whilst Leibnizian bodies – understood here as well-founded phenomena – stand in temporal relations to one another, monads do not. On another line of interpretation, monads ground time and they are themselves related in time. Arthur (Leibniz, 159–65) provides a recent defence of this reading, specifically rejecting the view that Leibniz anticipates McTaggart, and arguing that monads really succeed one another in time.
The first prong of Oakeley's challenge holds that, if time is merely a well-founded phenomenon, its ground must be purely non-temporal. If Leibniz conceives monads to be in time, there is no work for this prong to do (as Leibniz would agree with Oakeley that fundamental reality is temporal). However, if Leibniz conceives monads to be outside of time, then there is ample work for this prong of Oakeley's challenge. I will enter deeper into this latter reading of Leibniz, and show how Oakeley's challenge would apply to it.
Let us assume that Leibnizian monads are not in time. On this position, monads would still undergo a succession of states. In response to such a position, the challenge's first prong would object that the fundamental level of reality is not pure from time. Just as Oakeley objected that McTaggart's notion of inclusion depended on the prior notion of time, so it could be objected that Leibniz's notion of succession depends on the prior notion of time. There is a case to be made that the Leibnizian process whereby a monad changes its state, from having perception A to perception B, is inherently temporal: at time t1 the monad has perception A, and at t2 it has perception B.
Confirmation of the force of this worry is that it has already been raised independently in the Leibniz scholarship. For example, Russell (Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, 51–3) reads Leibniz as attempting to eliminate time from monads or substances, but argues that this elimination cannot be effected because a substance has a state at one moment, and not at the next. Russell concludes that time is necessarily presupposed in Leibniz's treatment of substance, and the fact it is denied in the conclusion ‘is not a triumph, but a contradiction’. More recent scholars agree that succession commits Leibniz to temporality.26 It is hard to see how Leibniz could deny that succession involves time, as succession seems to involve monads being now in one state, and then at another. One possible strategy is found in Arthur (‘Leibniz's Theory of Time’, 276), who argues that we need not consider a monad as having different states at different moments of time, instead the states of a monads can be distinguished by their compatibility with other states. Even if this strategy could be made to work, at the very least Oakeley's challenge puts pressure on the thesis that succession does not depend on time.
The second prong of Oakeley's challenge argues that the grounds of the phenomenon of time must account for our perception of temporal passage. This prong has force against Leibniz even if Leibnizian monads are in time because there are compelling (though not irrefutable) reasons to read Leibniz as holding that the perceptual lives of monads are discrete: they ground matter, which is certainly discrete;27 and Leibniz speaks of perceptions following one another in a seemingly discrete way.28 Assuming that Leibniz holds perception to be discrete, Oakeley could argue that because our perception of passage is continuous, successive change in discrete monads’ states cannot ground time.
Additionally, it could be argued that succession alone cannot account for our perception of temporal passage. Whilst critiquing McTaggart, Broad (Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy II, 187) writes that temporal passage, or ‘becoming’, poses a general objection to all attempts to ‘get rid’ of time. Writing on Leibniz, Arthur (‘Leibniz's Theory of Time’, 276–7) argues that although a mere series of monadic states need not be temporal, by itself this supposition cannot account for the way that monads pass from one state to another. One way of arriving at passage – suggested in Arthur (‘Leibniz's Theory of Time’, 276–7) – would be to connect Leibnizian appetition with becoming, a principle of temporal change. Of course, this strategy would only be available on the assumption that monads are in time; to hold that monads are subject to appetition conceived as temporal change, and yet deny that monads are in time, would be difficult in the extreme.
Oakeley's advocacy of the reality of time provides her with a unique position amongst British idealists, and her critique of McTaggart offers a challenge to monadologists that extends far beyond her historical milieu. By extending Oakeley's critique of McTaggart to Leibniz, this discussion has demonstrated the force of Oakeley's challenge. Any monadologist who takes the perception of monads as their starting point, and denies the reality of time, must explain how the monadic level of reality is pure from time and account for our perception of temporal passage.
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1 I would like to thank Jeremy Dunham, Pauline Phemister, Bill Mander, and Kris McDaniel for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.
2 This includes Cunningham (Idealistic Argument), Passmore (Hundred Years of Philosophy), Mander (British Idealism), and Dunham, Grant, and Watson (Idealism).
3 ‘AG’ references G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays.
4 On Ward, see Cunningham (Idealistic Argument, 169–201), Murray (Philosophy of James Ward), Basile (Metaphysics of Causation, 32–62) and Dunham, Grant, and Watson (Idealism, 175–89). On Oakeley, see Thomas (‘Oakeley on Idealism’). Our monadologists also make very brief appearances elsewhere: Passmore (Hundred Years of Philosophy, 301) mentions Carr; and Mander (British Idealism, 368, 533) mentions Carr and Oakeley.
5 Some examples. McTaggart holds that every part of the universe reflects every other part (Nature of Existence I, 299); he emphasizes the importance of love (Nature of Existence II, 147); and – controversially – he reads Leibniz as holding that substances are infinitely divisible and advocates the same view (Nature of Existence I, 189).
6 See Broad (Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy I, 7) and Geach (Truth, Love and Immortality, 17). Basile (‘Idealist Hydra’, 996) goes farther than others in arguing that McTaggart's ‘Leibnizian’ philosophy defends a system of ‘interconnected monads’.
7 In a 1907 letter to G. H. Howison, Ward writes, ‘I do not see much of McTaggart, he regards me as a hopeless old fossil: I regard him as a wild a priori dreamer, too quaint and too heedless of facts’ (BANC MSS C-B 1037, George Holmes Howison Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley). Thanks to Jeremy Dunham for pointing me to this.
8 For more on her career, see Oakeley's (My Adventures in Education) autobiography and Howarth (‘Oakeley, Hilda Diana (1867–1950)’).
9 On how Oakeley's monadology fits into her wider idealist views, see Thomas (‘Oakeley on Idealism’).
10 For example, Oakeley (‘In Memoriam’, 258) describes Carr's ‘undimmed intellectual energy’ and his ‘urbanity in debate’.
11 For Oakeley, all monads are selves. In contrast, Leibniz (AG 214-5) allows for living monads that do not possess the full consciousness of minds.
12 A ‘fulguration’ is literally a lightning flash. This statement could be read to mean (as Oakeley implies) that monads are parts or emanations of the divine; or merely that monads are sustained by the divine. Blank (‘Substance Monism and Substance Pluralism’) provides a recent discussion on whether Leibniz is best read as a monist or pluralist.
13 This is controversial. For reasons to reject idealist readings of Leibniz, see Loptson (‘Was Leibniz an Idealist?’), Phemister (Leibniz and the Natural World), Garber (Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad), and Arthur (‘Leibniz's Theory of Time’).
14 Although McTaggart considers sense-data, he ultimately denies their reality; see McTaggart (Nature of Existence II, 57).
15 Recent examples include Craig (Tensed Theory of Time, 138) and van Inwagen (Metaphysics, 64).
16 Oakeley's (‘Reality and Value’, 99) states that, given the capacity of the mind to apprehend things as they really are, time cannot be an illusion. Frustratingly, the paper does not elaborate.
17 For recent discussion, see Callender (‘Common Now’) and Skow (‘Experience and the Passage of Time’).
18 For example, Bradley (Appearance and Reality, 205–22) argues that time is mere appearance. In a symposium, Bosanquet and – perhaps surprisingly – the soon-to-be ‘new realist’ G. E. Moore agree that time is ultimately unreal (Bosanquet, Hodgson, and Moore, In What Sense, If Any, Do Past). Pringle-Pattison (Idea of God, 343–66) argues that time is entirely dependent on the succession of our experienced content, such that without minds, there would be no time; ultimate reality transcends time.
19 The ample literature on this argument includes Mander (‘McTaggart on Error and Time’) and Dainton (Time and Space, 13–26). On McTaggart's work more generally, see Broad (Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy I; Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy II), Geach (Truth, Love and Immortality), Mander (British Idealism, 369–76) and McDaniel (‘John M. E. McTaggart’).
20 Relation R is ‘transitive’ iff, if a is related by R to b, and b is related by R to c, then a is related by R to c. Relation R is ‘asymmetric’ iff, if a is related by R to b, then b is not related by R to a.
21 Oakeley (‘Philosophy of Time and the Timeless’, 105) describes McTaggart's parallelism as ‘unique’ and ‘daring’. Broad (Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy II, 787) agrees that philosophers who deny time must account for its appearance, and adds: ‘But how completely most of them have shirked this job, and how well has McTaggart done it!’ Interestingly, Mander (‘McTaggart on Error and Time’, 162) argues that McTaggart's parallelism poses a ‘direct challenge’ to the dominant British idealist position that time is an appearance of the Absolute. Absolute idealism offers no parallelism; it is hard to see how a monistic Absolute could admit a series of any kind.
22 Some examples. Oakeley (‘Symposium’, 314–5) argues that McTaggart's thesis that the final stage will not contain evil can only be interpreted in two ways – either, evil is included in the final stage and ‘is not the evil that it appeared’; or, that which is evil now is ‘somehow’ the appearance of a real good – both of which are untenable. Oakeley (History and the Self, 195–6) argues that an atemporal system of ethics is problematic: ‘the irreversibility of the past is a main source of moral experience, involving that in certain respects what has been done is irremediable … [hence] the ethical emotion of remorse … need not trouble the unhistoric ethic’. Oakeley (‘Philosophy of Time and the Timeless’, 127) argues that even if time is an illusion generated by the timeless self, McTaggart has not explained how selves would shake that illusion in the final stage.
23 Against McTaggart's thesis that selves progress through the stages of their lives, Oakeley (‘Philosophy of Time and the Timeless’, 119–20) makes the related objection that progress is an ‘essentially temporal’ notion, and involving such notions in the C series ‘threatens a grave distortion’ of McTaggart's philosophic framework.
24 Broad adds a sentiment that Oakeley would certainly accept: ‘I cannot help thinking that there could be no appearance of becoming anywhere unless there were real becoming somewhere.’
25 Recent overviews of the scholarship are Lloyd (‘Situating Time in the Leibnizian Hierarchy’) and McDonough (‘Leibniz's Philosophy of Physics’).
26 For example, McGuire (‘“Labyrinthus Continui”’, 315) writes, ‘Since states exist at one moment and not at the next, activity is irredeemably temporal.’ Frankel (Leibniz on the Foundations of Space and Time, 93) agrees.
27 For example, Leibniz writes, ‘Matter appears to us to be a continuum, but it only appears so’ (trans. Hartz and Cover, ‘Space and Time’, 501).
28 On this, see Anapolitanos (Representation, Continuity and the Spatiotemporal, 134–52) and Phemister (Leibniz and the Natural World, 142–9).