The Disharmony of Monads with Windows: The Human Lifeworld

This paper explains the commonalities and differences between the way Leibniz writes of the human subject as a monad and the way Husserl does. The central focus is to examine the idea that we as monads are “windowless,” as Leibniz claims. First some of Aron Gurwitsch’s insights into Leibniz’s theory of monads as “complete individual substances” are presented, and then the idea of windowlessness is explained in the case of Leibniz and then in the case of Husserl with his concept of the sphere of ownness as a part of our being. Then the main point of the paper will be the development of some ideas that Husserl has written that indicate we are monads with windows, in the sense that others can experience aspects of us that we ourselves cannot experience and vice versa. The claim is that we are actually “interface objects,” creations of the perspectives of our own and that of others.