Monadic Communion

A Rationalist-Mystic synthesis.

Liscence free picture, by Hans

For the footnotes: Leibniz = L; Monadology (book) = M; Danut Manastireanu = DM; The Place of Trinitarian Perichoresis in the Dogmatic Theology of Fr Dumitru Staniloae (book) = TP

Abstract

This paper addresses the long-standing critique, famously articulated by Eastern Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov, that the “windowless” nature of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s monads renders authentic communion impossible. By shifting away from a purely functionalist interpretation of Leibniz, this paper argues that the created monad possesses what will be explained to be haecceity on the one hand but also access to the expressions/energies of every other monad on the other. The author proposes Mutual Interiority as communion between created persons defined as shared expression alongside unshared haecceity. While an individual’s haecceity remains strictly sequestered within a single monad, their energetic expressions are immanently distributed across the entire cosmos. It is argued that communion does not require a breaching of walls inbetween individuals. A Rationalist-Mystic synthesis is sought out.

Keywords:

Leibniz, Bulgakov, Staniloae, Monadology, Sophiology, Communion

Introduction: An overview on the monad

According to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s own formulation, monads are famously “windowless,” they cannot interact with one another.¹ Because they are entirely non-spatial and immaterial, there is no physical medium or mechanical vector through which one monad could impact another.² This necessary isolation is best understood by considering that, operationally speaking, monads are functions. This explanation I find most illuminating in Ernst Cassirer: we ought to conceive of a monad as a mathematical equation or a law of progression, a function like f(x).³ A mathematical formula doesn’t “hit” or “push” another formula; it simply unfolds its own (internal) logic. It is what produces the “hitting and pushing” from its expressed elements, within the world that is painted by it.

Yet, to take the monad as a whole, not only “operationally speaking,” it must be understood as both the function itself and the product of that function when interacting with the divine energy, God’s perfections.⁴ The monad is formula in action. Here, we must break away from Cassirer’s functionalism. Cassirer maintained that substances do not exist in an ontological sense of “stuff” or “whatness,” but as relation and structure, namely, functions.⁵ In contrast, beinghood must be accepted as a gift, a gift that cannot be exhausted by descriptions, any structure in which it relates, or any function or law in which it behaves.⁶

We are each a monad, which is our principle of unity, the source of activity that binds together all that is “ours,” all our distinct moments of becoming.⁷ Furthermore, every infinitesimal point in space (not merely bodies or objects in space) correlates with a monad in its own right.⁸ Crucially, these monads do not compose space in a manner that requires physical interaction, nor do we look upon them from the outside and perceive a connection that is projected by our mind onto unconnected particles, for a windowless monad has no direct view onto others.

The whole of our world is contained within our own monad, and it is such [a world] that every point correlates with a monad that mirrors the cosmos from its own perspective, a distinct point of view from which to draw the rest.⁹ Our own monad stands as the “law of the series,”¹⁰ the overarching function that determines how phenomenal coordinates are plotted onto the graph, so to speak to construct the world around us.

Part I: The Sophiological critique and communion

This lack of real interaction between monads was a major point of contention for the famous Orthodox theologian and priest Sergei Bulgakov. In the vast project he is famous for, Sophiology, something that undoubtedly expands or is able to expand beyond what is contained in philosophy alone,¹¹ Bulgakov argued that the lack of real interaction between monads renders communion impossible.¹²

To evaluate this critique, I want to offer a brief sketch of the concept of communion. It was admittedly difficult to find a common denominator for its definition that satisfies all participants while being more precise than mere intuition, as to allow to work with it in a manner able to be liable to arguments pro and contra.¹³ The most coherent definition with which I seemed to succeed was this concise one:

Communion is the most intimate imaginable connection between hypostatically distinct entities.¹⁴

The term “imaginable” is used here not to denote that one can actually form a mental image of it but that the idea contains no (internal) contradiction. It designates the most bare form of possibility: whilst there may be a form of possibility which is the highest in a respective world, but not the highest in any contradiction-free composition. For instance, two human beings can cultivate a more intimate relationship than a human and a stone - another person can introduce something new to it that a projection of subconsciousness cannot. While the relationship between a human and a stone has its own “most intimate possible” threshold, it falls below the “most intimate imaginable” connection.

Furthermore, it remains to be clarified whether communion constitutes a class with various particulars, or merely a single particular. That is to ask, is there a maximum intimacy in kind that, in its particular realization, falls nonetheless below what other entities experience, even though both relationships belong to the same overarching species of connection? For example, is the communion between two humans in heaven the same as the communion between a human and God, not only in kind (so that both are rightly called communion) but also in measure? If this is the case, then different combinations of “hypostatically distinct entities” would display a difference in maximal degree of intimacy while still being subsumed under the concept of communion. This stands in contrast to the view in which only the most intimate relationship imaginable, across every conceivable combination of hypostatically distinct entities, would qualify as communion (i.e. only the relationship between the divine persons - if working with distinct levels). What is certain is that communion is more than passive participation.¹⁵ But should we allow ourselves to be enticed into using the same term for communion between human persons that denotes communion between divine persons, that is, the quality of the trinitarian relationship: Perichoresis?

Danut Manastireanu, an Anglican Theologian, already described in his treatise The Place of Trinitarian Perichoresis in the Dogmatic Theology of Fr Dumitru Staniloae, that the application of the term Perichoresis to the relationship between a human and God is dubious: it “increases the danger that the divinity will not simply remove fallenness, but overwhelm humanity.”¹⁶ Whether this is true remains to be seen, yet, to apply the identical term to a relationship between two or more humans is even more so (and the very least) an unnecessary risk to end up in illegitimate innovation. Rather, a related term employed by Staniloae is applied: “interpenetration.”¹⁷ A precise definition is necessary to counter this danger and to distinguish these points of reference. Through this the question comes to mind of the extent to which creaturely “interpenetration” runs parallel to the Perichoresis of the divine persons, who are, after all, identical “in the object,” that is, in their nature as divinity itself (and essence), and differ merely hypostatically. If a difference exists between Perichoresis and creaturely interpenetration, then according to the provided definition of communion, it is appropriate to assign a separate term to the Trinitarian relationship, Perichoresis, while allowing to still view our relationship as a kind of communion, yet a different one, namely “interpenetration” or, as I prefer, Mutual Interiority.

To quote Manastireanu: “The perfect equality of the divine Persons makes their interpenetration very different to the interiority of human persons, argues the Romanian theologian. Because each of the divine Persons ‘bears the entire nature in common with the others’, their reciprocal interiority and consubstantiality is ‘neither preserved nor developed’ in the process.”¹⁸ Shortly after he quotes St Staniloae: “The divine hypostases are totally transparent one to another even within the interiority of perfect love. Their consubstantiality is neither preserved nor developed by those fine threads which, on the human analogy, might unite them as bearers of the same being. Rather, each one bears the entire nature in common with the others. They are thereby wholly interior to one another and have no need to leap over even the thinnest of bridges between them so as to achieve a greater unity among themselves by means of such communication. The infinity of each leaves no possi bility for any such attenuation of the divine nature among them.”¹⁹

Yet, as Manastireanu argued in his treatise,²⁰ it is entirely permissible to talk about communion between human beings as Mutual Interiority, distinguished from Perichoresis. In order to preserve this distinction, I too will utilize these two terms for the differing reference points. Consequently, this answers the question of whether communion contains different particulars: the answer is Yes, namely the particular of the most intimate relationship between the divine persons (Perichoresis) and the particular of the most intimate relationship between human persons (Mutual Interiority). All together, the last addition to the definiton of communion is now illuminated: theologically, it refers not only to hypostases, but to rational or symbolic hypostases. Thus:

Communion is the most intimate imaginable connection between persons.

Communion in any kind is strictly distinct from fusion or absorption, the Self of each participant persists as a distinct Self, separate at least in what it means to be oneself.²¹ Nonetheless, it demands an existing in one another, yet not without opening what makes one oneself on the most essential level to the other.²²

This differentiates the self into these two (applied on creatures):

1. ​What is called haecceity: The impartible, unsharable, and absolutely unique identity, the “self-being.”

2. ​What is called expressions: The divisible and shareable aspects of the self, the body but also inner movements: feelings, thoughts, and some say the heart itself.

From this, I derive the simplest comprehention of Mutual Interiority: shared expression, unshared haecceity.

Yet in relation to shared expression, the ownership or source of the expression must remain known, so as not to merge on the phenomenal level and remain separated only in an unknown, hidden level, which would result in becoming existentially one and the same without distinction, even while remaining ontologically two. The distinction, therefore, must not exist merely ‘in secret,’ ‘hidden behind the empirical level’ but even the shared reality must contain reference to the distinct haecceities.

How the expressions are shared is then explained differently, depending on the system in use. Famously, Bulgakov’s explanation was Sophia: a shared reality that reaches into the deepest interiority and provides the substratum to make shareable what is found within oneself (without, as I hope, being applied to the haecceity itself²³). Because the same (creaturely) Sophia underlies all of humanity and nature, we are already ontologically linked before a single word is uttered. Through this all-unity²⁴, entering into communion with another person is not an external act anymore, it occurs internally via a dropping beneath the surface of one’s own ego (the term “Selfish I” was used) into the shared substratum of Sophia. In it, you discover that the other person is already a part of your own “cosmic identity.”²⁵

Let us now return to the case of monads. First of all, I address communion with God. Since God constantly acts upon us²⁶, no new problems come from this front. Working under the parameters of classical theism, it is the same as with all the systems avoiding heresy: God acts on us, but we cannot act on God. God is absolutely simple, whether one affirms logical or formal distinctions between His perfections.²⁷ In alignment with Orthodox theology, we partake directly in His actuality²⁸, the perfections also called energy, but never in His essence. Thus, there is no gulf to bridge between our own being and the being of God because the monad unfolds its entire world infused directly by God’s energy. The monad serves as interpreter and product thereof. Because that is the only realm in which we can come in contact with God, every notion of communion [with God] is “energetic.” Whether this presents a third kind of communion, alongside the kind between the divine persons and the kind between human persons, namely, a kind between a human person and God, shall not be included within the scope of this discussion.²⁹ It is this direct relation to God to which I trace the ontological necessity that with an increase in our relationship with Him, our relationship with and to one another also increases, a directly [or eventually] proportional trajectory Manastireanu noted likewise, referring to Staniloae.³⁰

The distinctiveness of the monad lies not in our relationship to God, but in our relationship to one another. It must be borne in mind that, under any orthodox system, we never interact with what constitutes the haecceity of the other, that is, the unique self-being of another. This remains absolutely sequestered. Our haecceity is just in our own reach, provided directly by God³¹. And the haecceity is located, in the case of the Monadology, well, at the monad itself.³² At first I have thought it is the monad, but why I overcame this opinion shall be seen in short.

That what we interact with, and that which is not the haecceity, is called the energies or accents (accidents) of others: meaning everything they express and are in a “natural sense,” but just not essentially, not in their haecceity. It is this domain to which Mutual Interiority promises direct access, in joy and love.³³ Wherein I would like to question whether this access is total in every conceivable way; after all, there lies something wonderful in things that exist solely between oneself and God, and furthermore, solely between oneself and a single other human being. This is a type of the personal, a depth in the relationship that, conceptually, can always be thought of as a further deepening of any kind of connection, even Mutual Interiority.

I think it is for this reason that one reads even in the Bible, in Revelation 2:17, there is a white stone promised to the victor, with a unique name inscribed upon it (a new name given to oneself) known only to God and oneself. It is by no means the case that one can say that, per Communion or Mutual Interiority, we no longer require this, or can extract all that is good from it and generalize it. “All that is good” in it is precisely the exclusivity.

Intimacy alone can be surpassed by intimacy plus exclusivity, just as intimacy alone can be surpassed by intimacy plus general openness. Both modes of intimacy are wonderful. The perfect economy of relationships consists of both modes in harmony, which means by boundaries to them that are natural (in the sense of coherent) and not deleting each other, or one of them. And bounderies there must be, since exclusivity and openness are opposing pulls: you cannot coherently claim an exclusivity if everything is equally shared, received and understood. I imagine there will be a lot of things we perfectly share and are open about, and then, there is an exclusive aspect we have to and with just this one person: but with everyone we have something special. Perhaps this exclusive aspect is not by us limiting what we share, but everyone being different in what they understand or make out of it, and thus, everyone radiates themselves fully, but everyone will have a unique understanding of everyone else. A lot of this understanding being given with everyone, but a part is special because of the uniqueness of each person. Therefore, Mutual Interiority must be understood as an instrument designed to bring forth intimacy while being expressed in both modes: general openness on the one hand, and exclusivity on the other.

If one wishes to discuss the idea of there being a single human “special person” to one in heaven, it must be argued for on this ground.

Part II: The road to monadic communion

To advance into my thesis, a few clarifications suffice to illuminate the path through the difficulties presented with the monads.

1. The energy or accents of a monad is not the preservation of its haecceity, instead, it is the resulting aspirations, forms, or the fanning out of the monad.³⁴ The accents are the actual “points plotted on the graph,” the painted world, and not the logic behind this world, i.e., the function. The energy of the monad is strictlty speaking not its own energy, but the energy of God, and the perfections of the monad are the perfections of God, refracted through the monad’s idiosyncratic³⁵ logic to construct a world around its point of view, true to itself.³⁶

To illustrate this matter using the example of the body: the body corresponds to an infinity of monads.³⁷ Each individual monad represents the entire universe from its own perspective, with its own activity.³⁸ This “own activity” is nothing other than its haecceity, the function itself out of which, through the divine provision of perfections or energy, a distinct world fans out.³⁹ It is the single world we all inhabit, realized from one unique point of view.⁴⁰

2. Our body, heart, and perhaps also our soul are the instruments through which we represent, express, and realize ourselves. The fulfillment of our self-being consists in having this expression occur in complete accordance with our impulse, by which, however, I do not mean an impulse of flesh or heart, but that impulse to which they accord to begin with: the primitive activity from the function of our monad.⁴¹ That said, it is saying too much to claim that self-being presupposes a bond between the outgoing impulse to express oneself and the effect of that expression, beyond the fact that the effect corresponds to the impulse. Alternatively, the outgoing impulse is entirely self-determined through its own activity, meaning we determine ourselves, each individually, and the exact same can be said of our expressions. God has placed both in harmony so that the effect corresponds to the impulse.

3. To be exact, our monad is not synonymous with our self-being; the self-being is merely the central part of the monad.⁴² For it is only with the instantiation of a soul within the cosmos that we exist as a self (or, for inanimate objects, with the manifestation of a materiality at the perspectival center). Every monad is assigned, true to its perspectival center, to exactly one individual soul or materiality when that entity comes into cosmic time (and being). Consequently, during our empirical existence, as well as before our conception, our monad consists largely of other things and other expressions. Our self-being, the haecceity, is merely one part of the formula, of the function of the monad, though undoubtedly the central part, while the remainder of the function governs the environment that brings forth the soul and unfolds around it, acting on it or being acted on by it.

Conclusion: Energizing the windowless world

Taken together, I derive this picture: We have a body, a heart, and a soul. I was at times uncertain whether I should take the soul to be an expression, or rather the central part of the function of the monad that is the haecceity. In which case, we are a soul and have a body and a heart. Given that this center of the monadic function is not only the haecceity, but also the principle of our unity and thus, according to a certain conception, the life force itself,⁴³ and also our freedom and our will, I have resolved to regard it as the soul. Either way, there is now a layer inbetween the impulse (which is our haecceity, the central part of the function) and the expressions in heart and body, namely, the expressions in the entire sum of all monads. The myriad monads of the cosmos are expressions of you, just as they are expressions of everyone else. They are ordered to express you alongside the rest of reality. It is not that only one single monad is really the one of your own expression, and the others are merely mirroring or simulating it, but all monads are likewise your own expression.

Your essence or haecceity is present in only one monad, but your energy/accents are immanently present within all monads. We have one monad containing our haecceity, phenomenally expressing itself with a unique point of view, but infinitely many as intermediate expressions, and then a body, which itself consists of an infinitude of monads, each having only themselves as haecceity but all others as intermediate expressions, but we also have a heart. That is to say, your haecceity is contained in only one monad, but your energy consists as all monads: the aspects of them that are ordered around a unique soul but that are not that unique soul themselves, as to bring forth the instruments of our self-being in every monad. Likewise, the aspects of our own monad that are ordered around our own soul but that are not our own soul are the energies of everyone else, and our own.

What does this mean for communion? When I turn to you in love, nothing “wanders” from me to you in a mechanical sense.⁴⁴ You participate directly in my energy. The statement “You discover that the other person is already an essential part of your own ‘cosmic identity’” applies here just as it would with Sophia.

For every monad operates alongside its haecceity, generally to be this monad and specifically so that you are its centre, but also as one among many intermediate expressions of every self, which are part of the haecceity of the monad, but not of the haecceity of yourself, that central part of the monad. Every monad is pre-established harmonized with each other without [causal] interaction⁴⁵, but likewise, every monad is the genuine intermediate expression of everyone, the energy/accents of everyone. Thus, I find myself - with my haecceity - existing in a cosmos that is surrounded by, and woven out of, the expressions of everyone else and mine. Mutual Interiority, then, is an opening up to these expressions, willed, I suppose, to the energy of the other, without, however, our haecceities ever uniting.

What I propose and is special about monads is thus that the energy or accents of others truly lie within ourselves by our own nature, not because of Sophia, coming to the fore within us, within our monad, when we interact with others in the phenomenal world, the one constructed within our monad. And it is the true energy, the true accents of the other. Everyone has already placed their energy into every other monad from the very beginning. My energy is located in every single monad. Mutual Interiority is thus the bringing forth of these accents within another.

My energy in my monad is as far removed from my haecceity as is my energy in every other monad. Would two monads be identical, they would be the same monad, since there is no time or space external to them that would differentiate them: only their content.⁴⁶ It is difference in the content itself that is the difference between monads.⁴⁷ My energy is the infinitude of itself in all monads. Either because there is only one energy itself, infinitely applied, or because there are infinite energies of mine, equally distributed. What makes them mine is the harmony between intend and expression. The distinction between monads is not in the energies, these are all equally present in every monads, yet distinctly “from” particular individuals through the harmony in them, but in the soul, the centre around which the accents connect.

The “harmony in them,” referring to the individual energies present in every monad, means that your specific “tone” or “functional direction” activates across every single formula on the grid. For, as mentioned, mere presence is not enough. In order to identify any part belonging to a specific person⁴⁸, and so that the identity of someone is not removed into a hidden area behind reality, there needs to be something unique in the expressions of someone, in their body and heart, and in the intermediate expressions, the accents present in all monads, to bring these into reality. That is the tone, a tone that produces what is unmistakably me, and what is unmistakably you: my part in you and in myself, and your part in me and in yourself.

When God feeds His energy into the function of my monad, it produces a specific vibration (a phenomenal state). Here, a part of this vibration is the expression of my haecceity into a unique center of perspective, another part is my energy, and yet another part is the rest of the world, but every part of the world is the energy of at least one individual: whether of my own or of another. Just as the part of the function that represents the world around me is not, properly speaking, myself or representing myself, at least in this most central part, it can absolutely represent myself in a less central part: my actuality - my energy. It is precisely this which is given in every monad, equally real and equally distinguished from my haecceity, which is not myself in the most central part but rather my energy, since it is found in a specific “tone,” a functional direction, a part of the formula: of every formula.

f(x) is a single law, but it plots a specific vertex (the soul) while simultaneously calculating the rest of the grid (the world). The monad expresses the same in phenomena: the empirical self, and the whole cosmos around it. The monad is an infinite folding of content, it contains an internal multiplicity. As Leibniz writes in Monadology §13: “This mixture must involve a multiplicity of expressions or relations, though it has no parts.”

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☆ By Dogmatographia▪︎patroeffectus▪︎logica

☆ Also Christ-centered Orthodoxy

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First version, April 27, 2026

Second version, June 14, 2026

1. L, M, §7

2. Ibid. §1, 3

3. Cassirer, Substance and Function, Chapter V;

Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6

4. L, M §47

5. Cassirer, Substance and Function, Chapter V

6. DM, TP, 164;

and from my own article, in short: “The Law of Identity does not ground the existence of a thing in self-relation. It does not ground the existence in any relation. It is not about existence. To cut the conceptual difference between relations and existence is not entailed by any law of logics. You can accept the existence as something that cannot be defined, but as a fact of reality, you can take A [as a gift, if you want] and then define the relations A has: to itself and to other things. Only now the Law of Identity plays a role, not as something grounding existence. Justice, Mercy, Love, Joy, Materiality, etc., these things are not [exhaustively] defined by their relations, that is not what they are, their relations are something different than their existence.”

7. L, Letter to Arnauld (November 28, 1686)

8. L, Principles of Nature and Grace, §3

9. L, M, §56, 62

10. L, Letter to De Volder (January 21, 1704)

11. Natalia Anatolyevna Vaganova, Sophiology of Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov, indie trans. WooDeeWoo/Davion, Conclusion section

12. Bulgakov, The Divine Sophia: The Wisdom of God, ed. Rowan Williams (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 32–34.

13. With these participants I mean first and foremost Bulgakov and Staniloae, then, a group of young Orthodox Christians named "Telosbound" under Treydon Lunot who wrote Apheses, Impossibility of Subjectivity, and lastly, Orthodox Christians without affiliation with any of these.

14. The validity of this braod definition will be underlined with the following considerations about Perichoresis and Mutual Interiority.

15. For the divine persons: DM, TP, 157

For human persons: Staniloae, The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Volume 2: The World: Creation and Deification, chapter II

16. Page 152, recalling a private argument from Professor Colin Gunton

17. DM, TP, 153

18. DM, TP, 155

19. Staniloae, Experience, vol. 1, 255

20. DM, TP, Section 4, 159-166

21. DM, TP, 160;

Staniloae, The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 2: The World: Creation and Deification, trans. Ioan Ioniță and Robert Barringer (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998), p.24–27.

22. Florovsky, Creation and Creaturehood, in The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol. III: Creation and Redemption (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976), 45

23. Sergei Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 189–192.

24. Vseedinstvo, as the Russians say.

25. For the ontological link, see Philosophy of Economy, trans. Catherine Evtuhov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 114–116;

On the “dropping beneath” the empirical ego, see Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations, trans. Thomas Allan Smith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 202;

For the discovery of the other within one’s own “cosmic identity,” see The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 105–108.

26. L, Discourse on Metaphysics, Section 28.

27. Scholastic or Scotish.

28. I didn’t use the term nature for energy, as in physis, still distinct from essence, as in ousia. The reason being, I suspect that physis refers to both source and expression, thus, essence and energy, and not solely to energy. The very least I am cautious about it. Gennadius Scholarios, Discourse on Being and Essence, Section II. But the use of actuality is justified: Gennadius Scholarios, On the Distinction Between the Divine Essence and Its Energies, Chapter 3.

29. As well as the question of another kind of communion yet again between the cosmos as a whole and God.

30. DM, TP, Section 4, 159

31. L, M, §47. I think creation ex nihilo is important here to be distinguished from God, while He provided our haecceity.

32. Ibid. §1, 18

33. It is never superimposed, always willed, always wanted.

34. L, M, §§14–15

35. A somewhat unique word for “unique.”

36. Ibid. §48

37. Ibid. §§62–65

38. Ibid. §57

39. L, Discourse on Metaphysics, §14 wheras the figure of speech “fanning out” comes from me.

40. L, M, §§57–58

41. Ibid. §§11, 18, 49–51

42. Ibid. §§62–63, 70. Whereas it is an observation on my part that the Christian notion of soul is not identical to the monad, but a subsection of it. The term soul in philosophy is broader than in orthodox Christianity.

43. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, In Chapter XV, “Since, then, the body is composite, and the elements thereof are naturally contrary to one another, and are always in conflict... it is necessary that there should be some unifying power which holds together things so diverse and preserves them in a state of mutual harmony. This power we call the soul, which, by its presence, gives life to the whole, and, when it departs, leaves the body to the dissolution of its component parts.”

44. In the term “mechanism” I see the domain of form and movement, not an inherent or ad hoc negation of life: since these two domains may coexist in one and the same object of reference. Thus, it may still be mechanical, but “inwards-mechanized,” not outwards.

45. L, M, §7

46. L, M, §9

47. L, Fifth Letter to Clarke, §§21–25

48. To be identifyable in general, and not necessarily, but preferable, identified in praxis: at least by yourself, hopefully by everone.