Digimonadological Investigations

[digimonadology]

So you may speculate as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it. You may get something more complex, but not something higher nor even something different. You must take things by storm: you must thrust intelligence outside itself by an act of will.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

[digimonadology]

[A]n intellect bent upon the act to be performed and the reaction to follow, feeling its object so as to get its mobile impression at every instant, is an intellect that touches something of the absolute.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

[digimonadology]

To understand why this universe was created requires an infinite analysis of the concepts which God alone can carry out. Leibniz believes that God can do this, not because He sees the end of the analysis, there being no such end, but because He knows the principle which combines the concepts to be analyzed (i.e., the principle of perfection). It is like our using mathematical induction to give a finite proof of a truth concerning an infinite totality.

Hidé Ishiguro, Leibniz’s Philosophy of Logic and Language

[jamofalifetime]

But this possibility, impossibility or necessity … is not a chimera which we create. Since all that we do consists in recognising them, in spite of ourselves and in a constant manner. So of all the things that actually are, the possibility or impossibility of being is itself the first. But this possibility and necessity form or compose what are called the essences or nature.

Leibniz in a letter to Foucher, c. 1676 (via jamofalifetime)

[digimonadology]

For with Leibniz the question surges forth in philosophy that will continue to haunt Whitehead and Bergson: not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation? The best of all worlds had no other meaning: it was neither the least abominable nor the least ugly, but the one whose All granted a production of novelty, a liberation of true quanta of 'private' subjectivity, even at the cost of the removal of the damned. The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity: a teleological conversion of philosophy.

— Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (Ch. II - 6. What is an event?)

[digimonadology]

“But – and here is the whole problem – what happens with bodies, from the time of Adam's seed that envelops them, that are destined to become humans? Juridically, one might say that they carry in a nutshell 'a sort of sealed act' that marks their fate. And when the hour comes for them to unfold their parts, to attain a degree of organic development proper to man, or to form cerebral folds, at the same time their animal soul becomes reasonable by gaining a greater degree of unity (mind): “The organized body would receive at the same time the disposition of the human body, and its soul would be raised to the stage of a reasonable soul, but I cannot decide here if it occurs through an ordinary process or an extraordinary work of God.” Then in every event this becoming is an elevation, an exaltation: a change of theater, of rule, of level or of floors. The theater of matter gives way to that of spirits or of God. In the Baroque the soul entertains a complex relation with the body. Forever in dissociable from the body, it discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up, and that will make it ascend over all other folds.”

— Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (Ch. 1: The Fold – 1. The pleats of matter)

[digimonadology]

Now in strict metaphysical truth God is the only external cause that acts on us, and he alone affects us directly in virtue of our continual dependence. Therefore no other external object touches our soul and directly triggers our perceptions. So it is the continual action of God upon us that enables us to have in our souls ideas of all things. Here is how that happens. All effects express their causes, and so the essence [= ‘intrinsic nature’] of our soul is a particular expression, imitation or likeness of God’s essence, thought and will, and of all the ideas contained in it. So we can say that God alone is our immediate external object, and that we see all things through him. When we see the sun and the stars, for example, it is God who gave us the relevant ideas and who conserves them in us; and who by his ordinary concurrence, following the laws he has established, brings it about that we actually think of them when our senses are suitably disposed. God is the sun and the light of souls, ‘the light which lighteth every man that cometh into this world’[John1:9]

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (Section 28)

[digimonadology]

To get a good grip on what ideas are, be warned of an ambiguity. Some people take an idea to be a form or differentia [= ‘aspect or property’] of our thought; so that we have the idea in our mind only when we are thinking of it, and whenever we think of it again, we have different but similar ideas of the same thing. Others, however, seem to take an idea to be the immediate object of a thought, or to be some kind of permanent form, which continues to exist even when we are not contemplating it. I side with the latter group, and here is why. Our soul always possesses the ability to represent to itself any nature or form when the occasion for thinking of it arises. This ability is permanent, even though the individual thoughts in which it is exercised come and go. And I believe that this ability of our soul, when it expresses some nature, form, or essence, is properly called an idea of the thing; and it is in us—always in us—whether or not we are thinking of the thing. For our soul always expresses God and the universe, and all essences as well as all existences. That requires our soul to have ideas of all those things at all times, which it can do only if ideas are abilities rather than individual mental or events or aspects or properties of such events·. This fits in with my principles, for nothing naturally enters our mind from outside; and it is a bad habit of ours to think of our soul as receiving messenger species, or as if it had doors and windows. We have all these forms in our mind and indeed always have had; because the mind always expresses all its future thoughts, and is already thinking confusedly of everything it will ever think clearly. We couldn’t be taught something unless we already had the idea of it in our mind, the idea being like the matter out of which the thought is formed. Plato understood this very well, when he put forward his doctrine of reminiscence. The latter is very sound, provided we take it in the right way—cleansing it of the error about pre-existence, and not imagining that if a soul takes in and thinks about something now it must at some earlier time have clearly known and thought about it. He also confirmed his opinion by a beautiful experiment. He introduces a small boy whom he gradually leads to an acceptance of very difficult geometrical truths about incommensurables, without teaching him anything, only asking him an orderly sequence of suitable questions. This shows that our souls have virtual knowledge of all these things; that to grasp truths they need only to have their attention drawn to them; and thus that our souls at leas thave the ideas on which those truths depend. They might even be said to possess these truths, if we consider the truths as relations between ideas.

— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (Section 26)

[digimonadology]

We often think of impossible absurdities—for example of the highest speed, or of the largest number, or of [a certain geometrical impossibility]—and the ideas involved in such thinking are in a certain sense ‘false’, in contrast with ‘true’ ideas of things that are possible. So we can boast of having an idea—that is, a ‘true’ idea—of a thing only when we are assured of its possibility. So the above argument falls short. Still, it does at least prove that God necessarily exists if he is possible. That is a significant result, because it attributes to God something that is not true of other things. It is indeed an excellent privilege of the divine nature to need only its possibility or essence in order actually to exist.

— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (Section 23)

[digimonadology]

So when a change occurs that affects several substances (and actually all changes touch them all), I believe we can properly say that one that immediately passes to a higher level of perfection or to a more perfect expression exercises its power and acts; and one that passes to a lower level shows its weakness and is acted on. I hold also that every action of a substance that has perception signifies some pleasure, whereas every passivity [= ‘every instance of being-acted-on’] involves some sadness, and vice versa. It can easily happen, though, that a present advantage is destroyed by a greater evil later on; which is why we can sin when we are active or exerting our power and enjoying doing so.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (Section 15)

[digimonadology]

Well, firstly, it is very evident that created substances depend on God, who conserves them and indeed produces them continuously by a kind of emanation, just as we produce our thoughts. For God considers from every angle the general system of particular events that he has thought fit to produce in order to manifest his glory, turning it on all sides, so to speak. And as he considers all the faces of the world in all possible ways—for no aspect escapes his omniscience—each view of the universe, as though looked at from a certain viewpoint, results in a substance that expresses the universe in just that way, if God sees fit to actualize his thoughts by producing such a substance. And as God’s view is always correct, so too are our perceptions; where we go wrong is in our judgments, which are our own.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (Section 14)

[digimonadology]

[A] substance cannot begin except by creation, nor come to an end except by annihilation; and because one substance can’t be destroyed by being split up, or brought into existence by the assembling of parts, in the natural course of events the number of substances remains the same, although substances are often transformed. Moreover, each substance is like a whole world, and like a mirror of God, or indeed of the whole universe, which each substance expresses in its own fashion—rather as the same town looks different according to the position from which it is viewed. In a way, then, the universe is multiplied as many times as there are substances, and in the same way the glory of God is magnified by so many quite different representations of his work. It can even be said that each substance carries within it, in a certain way, the imprint of God’s infinite wisdom and omnipotence, and imitates him as far as it can. For it expresses (though confusedly) everything that happens in the universe—past, present, and future—and this is a little like infinite perception or knowledge. And as all the other substances express this one in their turn, and adapt themselves to it—that is, they are as they are because it is as it is—it can be said to have power over all the others, imitating the creator’s omnipotence.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (Section 9)

[digimonadology]

[I]f we bear in mind the interconnectedness of things, we can say that Alexander’s soul contains for all time traces of everything that did and signs of everything that will happen to him—and even marks of everything that happens in the universe, although it is only God who can recognise them all.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (Section 8)

[digimonadology]

[digimonadology]

kind of ironic how leibniz rewrote and reexamined his thoughts on monadological perspectivism in countless journals, letter correspondences and manuscripts according to his audience

[jamofalifetime]

More and more the world resembles an entomologist’s dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (via jamofalifetime)

[digimonadology]

You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49