Within
Leibnizian optimalism, God chooses between conflicting possibles vying for their competing claims to existence, such that there can be something better according to values of orderliness (ordo), the most contentual richness (varietas), and the most well-being (felicitas).
As Matei Calinescu clarifies, such a double reading allows the first reading of a text to adopt 'a retrospective logic of rereading': 'This double (first) reading is one in which two radically different kinds of attention and interest are involved (one diachronic, the other synchronic), and in which the "normal" linear reading is already "shadowed" by a sort of tentative rereading.'(40)" Such a double reading allows for a
Leibnizian understanding of harmony in which, as Paul Hazard poetically summarises, '[d]iversities which seemed irreconcilable end by merging together at last in one harmonious whole, where each component has the place designed for it by a divinely constituted order'.
849-874; Bassler, Otto Bradley, <<The
Leibnizian Continuum in 1671>>, en Studia Leibnitiana, 30, 1, 1998, pp.
These ideas subtend Murry's theories at the time he and Mansfield were writing for Rhythm, although there they are subjected to the concept of Nietzschean 'rebarbarization', partly because, for them, it is no longer the state, but the personality, that grounds the mastery or command required to perfect and realize experience, although this is a personality which is not to be considered a collection of character traits as much as a Bradleyean 'centre' or
Leibnizian 'monad'.
As such, he is parallel to the
Leibnizian God (5) as the constituting creator of the monadic world, organizing the relations between them.
This is where
Leibnizian heterodoxy enters the Hobbesian picture resulting in 'a kind of Hobbesian mechanical philosophy to which Leibniz has added mind, not to replace body but to supplement it.' (37) So the main lesson for Garber here is that Leibniz's amendments to the Hobbesian picture do not gesture towards monadology; bodies are not reduced to minds.
The synthesis between episteme and techne, the systemic application of the
Leibnizian project of mathesis universalis as calculation, and the modern development of productive forces, determined not only the progressive technicization of knowledge--perceived here as a continuous dialectic between prometheia and epimetheia (2)--but also a systemic arithmetization of life in the enframing of biological functions by computational, homogeneous, and productive systems of algebraic laws.
Leaving aside that that this concern is epistemological, not with an ontology of social relations, it remains the case that if money were a
Leibnizian monad, those other 'meanings' would have been supplied by God and could not be the outcome of the 'massiness' of human action over the past 250 years, as an historical materialist must maintain.
Harmony cannot be envisioned on the
Leibnizian image of a preconceived unity of opposing concepts:
It is destruction turned into construction, fear into courage, obscurity into light, horror into beauty, the irrational into creative fantasy, the incontrollable anarchy of nature into premeditated,
Leibnizian anarchy of the Enlightenment.
117) but came together as a significant part of Cournot's
Leibnizian inheritance.
Some aspects of this essay, in particular its hostility to her attempt to fuse
Leibnizian metaphysics with Newtonian mechanics, have been called into question elsewhere since, but it represents none the less an early sustained attempt to take Du Chatelet's work seriously and so has its place here.
