African Relational Ontology and Leibniz’s Monadology: From Metaphysical Correspondence to the Co-Constitution of Beings
Abstract
Leibniz offers a metaphysics of universal correspondence; relational ontology goes further by making relation the field in which beings are constituted.
African philosophy and metaphysics · Full reading edition
Leibniz and a world of correspondences
Leibniz’s monadology appears close to relational ontology because it refuses a world made of unrelated fragments. Every monad expresses the entire universe from its own point of view, and the real forms an intelligible order of perspectives, echoes and interdependence.
A monad is a simple and indivisible substance, a centre of perception and appetite. Its singularity does not isolate it from the whole: each part of reality carries the trace of totality.
The windowless monad
The resemblance reaches its limit when Leibniz states that monads have no windows. Nothing enters or leaves them, and their inner states do not result from effective interaction with other created beings.
Monads correspond because God has established a harmony among their separate developments. They agree without touching, and they express one another without being constituted by one another.
From correspondence to co-constitution
Relational ontology does not begin with completed substances that later enter relationships. A person comes into being through a name, filiation, language, memory, territory, institutions, inherited narratives, historical wounds and forms of recognition.
The human being is therefore not only a viewpoint upon the universe but a living knot of relations. Being means being with, through, from and towards others; singularity is produced rather than abolished by this relational fabric.
Harmony and wounded relations
Leibniz’s pre-established harmony places apparent disorder within the best possible world. Relational ontology cannot assume that harmony is already guaranteed, especially when it confronts colonial violence, imposed conversion, economic domination and the erasure of names and languages.
Saying that everything is connected is insufficient. One must ask how, through which history and authority, for whose benefit and with what possibility of repair. A relationship may nourish or capture, recognise or assign, transmit or erase.
Ethical and political consequences
Institutions, borders, schools and languages do not merely regulate beings who already exist; they shape subjectivities, distribute rights and vulnerabilities, organise memory and determine visibility. Colonisation reconfigures an entire relational field.
Relational ontology consequently makes harmony a task rather than a given. Its political responsibility is to distinguish relations that allow beings and peoples to flourish from those that diminish them, and to reconstruct damaged bonds without dissolving singularity.
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