Personal Identity, Moral Quality and Conscientia in Leibniz

Abstract

In this work, three constitutive levels of personal identity in Leibniz are distinguished —the logical-ontological, the organic-functional, and the personal— in order to clarify both its fundamentally practical nature and the role that conscientia plays in its constitution. While the first level concerns the monads’ individual nature and their completeness, the second refers us to the organic-functional unity that the soul makes possible in living beings in relation to the type of perceptions and appetites it possesses and the possibility of having a phenomenal consciousness of the world: the organic unity of the living being, in effect, depends on the existence of a dominant monad or soul that subordinates the specific function of each of the organs that make up its machine. Finally, in the case of spirits, Leibniz maintains that they possess a type of conscientia of a reflective nature which allows them to account for their most prominent perceptions and as well as for their being and their actions.