[Juenger-list] DIE SCHERE #58: Note on "Leibniz wird aktuell"

[Rebing Rebing@t-online.de]

Leibniz wird aktuell

The idea of the unity of the organic and the anorganic worlds, of their common 
basis, was at the core of the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 
[1646-1716]. By his theory of "monads" he attempted to bridge the gulf that 
Descartes had created by differentiating so sharply between mind and matter, soul 
and body,. Monads are the basic particles, constituting all reality, spiritual as 
well as material. They have no material extension, rather they are centres of 
energy [forces primitives], the "substance" in the original sense of the basis 
that does not derive from anywhere. 

The explication of the monad theory leads to highly abstract definitions in terms 
of classical metaphysics and therefore seems alien to our modern categories. 
However, there is interesting justification for EJ's insistence on the topicality 
of Leibniz's way of thinking. There are in fact modern tendencies towards a 
holistic understanding of man and nature beyond the dichotomy of mechanism and 
organism. They seem indeed to be foreshadowed in Leibniz's view of "natural 
automatons or divine machines" [Monadology §64] making up both microcosm and 
macrocosm.
 
So EJ, the platonist, would entirely agree to Leibniz's own words about the main 
intentions of his philosophy that he formulated two years before his death:
"I flatter myself to have penetrated into the harmony of the different empires 
[i.e. of nature and of mind] and to have perceived that both parties [i.e. the 
materialists and the metaphysicians] are right, provided that they do not 
infringe upon each other's domains, thus everything in natural phenomena happens 
mechanically and metaphysically at the same time, but that the source of 
mechanics is in metaphysics." [Letter to Remond, 10 January 1714]