Some Remarks on Leibniz

Everyone who reads philosophic literature at some point comes the the writings of G.W. v. Leibniz. Leibniz's writings not only seem to come from another time, they also seem to come from another planet. There is something bizarre about the writings of Leibniz. To address the strangeness of writings of Leibniz's writings we must look back to Plotinus and the neoplatonics. Leibniz disguised his dept to Plotinus and the neoplatonists in order to stay free from the taint of heresy. He did this in two ways; he used tthe terminology of the new mechanistic science and left out key elements of the neoplatonic system. So let us compare Leibniz and Plotinus, to see what we can learn. Let us begin at the beginning. Leibniz asserts that each monad was fulgrated or flashed off from God or the Supreme Monad. (monad of course means one) Plotinus taught that everything is an emanation frome the One; Plotinus's God. There is no mystery why Leibniz did not use the term "emanation." He did not want to be accused of pantheism. It is interesting to note what Leibniz left out of his creation monads. (feel free to think of monads as souls; Leibniz did) Plotinus taught that in the emanation process there is procession and reversion. Procession is the act of going away from the One, reversion is the looking back at the One; where an individual monad gets its Form from the reflection of the One. This leads to Leibniz's law or "the identity of indescribables" that is that every monad is unique. To understand this law we must go back to the substratum of Plotinus's philosophy in Plato. In the dialogue the "Sophist" Plato argues that we know something by what it is not. In other words we know the color blue, because it is not yellow, green, pink, etc. This is why when Plato describes the Forms he says such things as: the good is the good, or the beautiful is the beautiful. Plotinus would say it is by otherness that we know and distinguish things from each other. This is why Plotinus says the Forms are limited. A way to think of this is Picture the One as an infinite computer program that can do anything. The Forms are limited reflections of the master program. In other words, the Forms are limited to one operation. this of course brings in anoter of Leibniz's laws: Of prestablished harmony. There should be no question as to why there is a prestablished harmony. If everything that exists is a reflection of God (the One, Super Monad) how can there be disharmony. This brings up the problem of freewill, since everything is determined by God. Here Leibniz does a lot of equivocation, since he cannot use Plotinus's answer. Plotinus teaches that every cause leaves a trace of itself in the effect. The example Plotinus users is when a man walks on the beach, he leaves the trace of himself by the footprints in the sand. So Plotinus asserts that the higher part of the soul is always contemplating the One. The only choice humans have is whether we identify with the higher part of the soul (contemplating the One), or we fall into the illusion by identifying with the material world (the lower part of our soul). There are two reasons Plotinus cannot use this teaching: first is exemplarism, and second is Leibniz denied the existence of the material world. Exemplarism is the Christian teaching that our souls are descended, that we can only reach God through an intermediary (Jesus Christ). For Leibniz the material world does not exist what exists is the prearranged harmony between monads, which we shall now explore, using modern computer games as an analogy. Think of a modern multi-player computer game each player at his own computer, this represents the monads. There is no material world separating the player, instead it is the computer progaam that generates the world the game is played ; this is the prearranged harmony. We only perceive the computer generated world as being material, when in reality it is generated through logical rules, this is Leibniz's view of the cosmos. This is one of Leibniz's main contributions to German philosophy, I shall include here a note on Kant and German philosophy. Students of philosophy tend to see the development in the British empiricists, but not in German Idealism, this is a mistake. Let us examine how Leibniz's prestablished harmony influences Kant, and some of German idealism. Back to our analogy of the multi-player computer game. Each player has the program of the game in her computer. This is an analogy for Kant's categories of perception; perception is governed by rules in the subject. The reason the material world seems the same to everyone is that the rules are universal to all subjects. We can now move deeper into the Kantian philosophy. Many students of philosophy are troubled by Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, and the noumenal I. The transcendental unity of apperception (t.u.a. for short) is the phenomenal I or is a creation. In our analogy the the t.u.a. would be the character in the game, not the player. The player is the real or noumenal I. The game character in the game is determined by the logical rules of the game, in other words by causality. This gives Kant like Leibniz the problem of how to save freewill. Kant saves freewill by asserting tow I's. One I the t.u.a. is active in the phenomenal world; the noumenal I exists in a different realm that is not subject to causality, this is the player. Kant has given humans a metaphysical thickness of existing in two realms at the same time. To show how good this analogy is lets look at what Kant said about the relationship between the t.u.a. and the Noumenal I. Kant said that we cannot know if more than one noumenal I is behind any individual t.u.a. This of course fits our analogy, many different player can play the character in the game by using the same computer with the game program. Although Kant says this is unlikely. Leibniz seems to have been moving towards Kant's view that the rules governing perception were in the monads. This gives both Leibniz and Kant's philosophy the flavor of subjectivism. So how does Schelling and Hegel's objective Idealism differ from Leibniz and Kant. Again let us use the analogy of a game this time chess. The pieces in chess are created by the rules there are no intrinsic categories in the pieces; the pieces are just counters. It is the outside rules that govern how they move and act. This comes close to Schelling and Hegel's view, although there are a lot of nuances. All the logic and rules of dialectic are of course a development of Leibniz's prearranged harmony.