some paradoxes of Tarde

I just reread Monadology and Sociology, this time in the re.press English version, HERE. The book is even weirder than I remembered.

Here’s one paradox about Tarde. On the one hand, he’s known as the guy who thinks that there are societies everywhere– societies of atoms, chemicals, and stars. And not just metaphorically, since he thinks there is mind in everything.

But on the other hand, this “everything” isn’t as wide as it might sound because in the end, Tarde is the ultimate undermining reducer. All that really exists are infinitesimally tiny monads, just as in Leibniz. Tarde doesn’t like “aggregates” any more than Leibniz does. He is too faithful to his great model in this respect.

So, there really isn’t any concept of emergence in Tarde. There’s no table, just countless infinitesimals forming a society that acts as a table– kind of like a panpsychist version of Peter van Inwagen.

Yet at the same time Tarde doesn’t think that the infinitesimals can immediately jump up and form complex unities. There has to be a slow evolutionary process of societies, with one leading to another.

This is a problem. Without emergent entities at a series of lower levels, it’s not clear to me why the infinitesimal monads couldn’t jump from the Stone Age to Manhattan in an instant. Why the langorous process of evolution in between? After all, for Tarde Manhattan is not made of buildings, because buildings do not strictly speaking exist. For Tarde Manhattan is not made of a historical legacy of smaller preceding cities, because for Tarde smaller cities don’t really exist any more than Manhattan itself exists. Manhattan is nothing but a society of infinitesimals, the only reality there is.

Even in the case of humans, he doesn’t think we are an emergent reality formed of evolutionary or physical elements. He thinks that we too are a society of infinitesimals, but dominated by one central monad (but even the sun has a dominant central monad, he says) that functions as a kind of “soul” and is then happy after personal death to go back to independent life and not have the responsibility of governing the subordinate monads in any person anymore. This part is like Leibniz but more secular, since there is no talk in this work at least of judgment for the dominant monad after death.

The other main paradox of Tarde is the one faced by all relational ontologies. In one sense he proclaims a world made of individual units, which he finds to be on the rise everywhere in the science of the 1890’s– a resurgence of the atomic theory in chemistry, and the rise of cellular theory in biology.

But in another sense, he ends the “windowless” concept of monads found in Leibniz, and turns everything into a relational Blend-o-Rama. He claims that these relations can shift over time and become stronger or weaker, yet it is not at all clear how this can happen when he says that there is always already action at a distance of all things on all things. Despite the repeated citations of Newton as an authority, Tarde never really explains how everything can be related to everything else yet some things are more related than others. This is a common problem found in relationist ontologies, and many find such ontologies so appealing that they tend to act like this isn’t a real problem. But it’s a bigger problem than Tarde realizes.

That said, he’s a wonderful writer, and this book will get your imagination all fired up. I find personally that the book becomes better as it goes along, so stay patient and you’ll really enjoy the last 30 pages or so.

I’m in the midst of writing a brief 3,000-word piece on Monadology and Sociology for an anthology.