Leibniz Quotes

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Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
This is the best of all possible worlds.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
He who hasn't tasted bitter things hasn't earned sweet things.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays)
Nihil est sine ratione. [There is nothing without a reason.]
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)
Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
There is nothing in the understanding which has not come from the senses, except the understanding itself, or the one who understands.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Philosophical Essays)
Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
The present is big with the future.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Philosophical Writings)
…every feeling is the perception of a truth...
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding)
Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays)
If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man’s work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.
Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1))
It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used. (Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.
Hans Reichenbach
...as far as we are capable of knowledge we sin in neglecting to acquire it...
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding)
He who does not act does not exist.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
...it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God...
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students)
The means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest possible order...is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Leibniz was somewhat mean about money. When any young lady at the court of Hanover married, he used to give her what he called a "wedding present," consisting of useful maxims, ending up with the advice not to give up washing now that she had secured a husband. History does not record whether the brides were grateful.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
Perceptions which are at present insensible may grow some day: nothing is useless, and eternity provides great scope for change.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding)
Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part. New illnesses flood the human race, so that no matter how many experiments you have done on corpses, you have not thereby immposd a limit on the nature of events so that in the future they could not vary.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
For all bodies are in perpetual flux like rivers, and parts are passing in and out of them continually.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students)
imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful resource of the divine intellect, almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells –or roughly the same number as there are people in the world– which means that, in himself, each man holds the potential of an entire world. And what would happen, could it happen, is the full range of possibilities: a spawn of idiots and geniuses, of the beautiful and the deformed, of saints, catatonics, thieves, stock brokers, and high-wire artists. Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or, as Leibniz put it: “Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude)
Rien n'est plus troublant que les mouvements incessants de ce qui semble immobile. p214 (Minuit)
Gilles Deleuze (Negotiations 1972-1990)
And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle--all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe--for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.
Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1))
The city seems to be a labyrinth that can be ordered. The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view.
Gilles Deleuze (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque)
Pourquoi y a-t-il quelque chose plutôt que rien ?
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
I have so many ideas that may perhaps be of some use in time if others more penetrating than I go deeply into them someday and join the beauty of their minds to the labour of mine.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.
Nicholas Murray Butler
And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students)
Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You—Rudy—and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us—it’s not that we’re smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he’s a farmer who didn’t get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
We hold these truths to be self-evident. {Franklin's edit to the assertion in Thomas Jefferson's original wording, 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable' in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In what became known as 'Hume's Fork' the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition.}
Benjamin Franklin
For I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Leibniz: Philosophical Essays (Hackett Classics))
Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another. -- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73
Gilles Deleuze
It is true that the more we see some connection in what happens to us, the more we are confirmed in the opinion we have about the reality of our appearances; and it is also true that the more we examine our appearances closely, the more we find them well-sequenced, as microscopes and other aids in making experiments have shown us.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Leibniz: Philosophical Essays (Hackett Classics))
[...] we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students)
The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge…it would not be the source of necessary truths…
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding)
Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.
Shelby D. Hunt (Marketing Theory: Foundations, Controversy, Strategy, and Resource-Advantage Theory)
Can you really believe that a drop of urine is an infinity of monads, and that each of these has ideas, however obscure, of the universe as a whole?
Voltaire (Œuvres complètes - 109 titres et annexes (édition enrichie))
In the century of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton,” one historian wrote, “the most versatile genius of all was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Edward Dolnick (The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World)
Leibniz's machine was designed to automate the dreary task of solving moral problems
Martin Cohen (Philosophical Tales: Being an Alternative History Revealing the Characters, the Plots, and the Hidden Scenes That Make Up the True Story of Philosophy)
Leibniz had a vision of a world in which everything lives not in space but immersed in a network of relationships.
Lee Smolin (Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe)
Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?
Robert G. Ingersoll (Some Mistakes of Moses)
…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding)
But as the late- seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, 'To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.
Eleanor Herman (Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics)
The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding)
Leibniz used to discourse to Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia concerning the infinitely little, and how she would reply that on that subject she needed no instruction—the behaviour of courtiers had made her thoroughly familiar with it.
Bertrand Russell (Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Bertrand Russell Explores the Intersection of Philosophy and Spirituality by Bertrand Russell)
It is true that as the empty voids and the dismal wilderness belong to zero, so the spirit of God and His light belong to the all-powerful One.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
We actually inhabit not a scientific world but a perfect Cartesian arena of pure mathematics. We really are inside a flawless mathematical matrix. Yet this is not a physical matrix. Points in the Singularity do not physically move anywhere or have any physicality. Coordinates are simply how you provide an internal structure for the Singularity; how you arrange points WITHIN the Singularity. There is no material world at all: only a mental plenum of monads, just as Leibniz said three hundred years ago. And the final key point is that the natural mathematics of zero and infinity is nothing other than HOLOGRAPHY. We are individual holograms within a collective hologram. THAT is God’s secret!
Mike Hockney (The God Secret)
For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding)
If we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
From a philosophical point of view, Leibniz's most interesting argument was that absolute space conflicted with what he called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). PII says that if two objects are indiscernible, then they are identical, i.e. they are really one and the same object. What does it mean to call two objects indiscernible? It means that no difference at all can be found between them--they have exactly the same attributes. So if PII is true, then any two genuinely distinct objects must differ in at least one of their attributes--otherwise they would be one, not two. PII is intuitively quite compelling. It certainly is not easy to find an example of two distinct objects that share all their attributes. Even two mass-produced factory goods will normally differ in innumerable ways, even if the differences cannot be detected with the naked eye. Leibniz asks us to imagine two different universes, both containing exactly the same objects. In Universe One, each object occupies a particular location in absolute space.In Universe Two, each object has been shifted to a different location in absolute space, two miles to the east (for example). There would be no way of telling these two universes apart. For we cannot observe the position of an object in absolute space, as Newton himself admitted. All we can observe are the positions of objects relative to each other, and these would remain unchanged--for all objects are shifted by the same amount. No observations or experiments could ever reveal whether we lived in universe One or Two.
Samir Okasha (Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction)
If Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not. The Tartarus into which Bartleby, the new savior, descends is the deepest level of the Palace of Destinies, that whose sight Leibniz cannot tolerate, the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where "nothing exists rather than something.
Giorgio Agamben (Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy)
At the higher realms of rationality, even reason can begin to appear irrational.
Paul Strathern (Leibniz: Philosophy in an Hour)
When the origin of remote peoples goes beyond history, our languages show themselves their oldest monuments
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Now both Berkeley and Leibniz admit that there is a real table, but Berkeley says it is certain ideas in the mind of God, and Leibniz says it is a colony of souls.
Bertrand Russell (The Essential Works of Bertrand Russell)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712: “Music is the occulted arithmetic exercise of a soul that does not know it is counting.
Joseph Farrell (Thrice Great Hermetica and the Janus Age: Hermetic Cosmology, Finance, Politics and Culture in the Middle Ages through the Late Renaissance)
I have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing - by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged background so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum. This is a country, after all, where the grand final of a programme like Mastermind is frequently won by cab drivers and footplatemen. I have never been able to decide whether that is deeply impressive or just appalling - whether this is a country where engine drivers know about Tintoretto and Leibniz or a country where people who know about Tintoretto and Leibniz end up driving engines. All I know is that it exists more here than anywhere else.
Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island)
And as every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, so its present is pregnant with its future. —Gottfried Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Writings
Joshua DuBois (The President's Devotional: The Daily Readings That Inspired President Obama)
G. W. Leibniz, codiscoverer of calculus and a towering intellect of eighteenth-century Europe, wrote: “The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?”[1] In other words, why does anything at all exist? This, for Leibniz, is the most basic question that anyone can ask. Like me, Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of created things, but in God. God
William Lane Craig (On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision)
The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Protogaea' and of Buffon in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of Hutton, in the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the ancient theory of evolution.
Thomas Henry Huxley (Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The)
Galileo essentially started out from where Archimedes left off, proceeding in the same direction as defined by his Greek predecessor. This is true not only of Galileo but also of the other great figures of the so-called “scientific revolution,” such as Leibniz, Huygens, Fermat, Descartes, and Newton. All of them were Archimedes’ children. With Newton, the science of the scientific revolution reached its perfection in a perfectly Archimedean form. Based on pure, elegant first principles and applying pure geometry, Newton deduced the rules governing the universe. All of later science is a consequence of the desire to generalize Newtonian, that is, Archimedean methods.
Reviel Netz (The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist)
[On Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz] The answer is unknowable, but it may not be unreasonable to see him, at least in theological terms, as essentially a deist. He is a determinist: there are no miracles (the events so called being merely instances of infrequently occurring natural laws); Christ has no real role in the system; we live forever, and hence we carry on after our deaths, but then everything — every individual substance — carries on forever.
Peter Loptson
You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. The mood of fin de siècle is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other. And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them. For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. 'When I was writing A Vision,' he said, 'I had constantly the word "terror" impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally.' Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war. At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. 'The danger is that there will be no war.... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.' He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: 'thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal. In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: “Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?
Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
Leibniz’s brilliant monadic system naturally gives rise to calculus (the main tool of mathematics and science). But it was not Leibniz who linked the energy of monads to waves – that was done later following the work of the French genius Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier on Fourier series and Fourier transforms. Nevertheless, Leibniz’s idea of energy originating from countless mathematical points and flowing across a plenum is indeed the first glimpse in the modern age of “field theory” that now underpins contemporary physics. Leibniz was centuries ahead of his time. Leibniz’s system is entirely mathematical. It brings mathematics to life. The infinite collection of monads constitutes an evolving cosmic organism, unfolding according to mathematical laws.
Mike Hockney (The Last Man Who Knew Everything)
Espíritus como Abelardo, Leibniz y Hegel conocieron, sin duda, el sueño de apresar el universo espiritual en sistemas concéntricos y de fundir la belleza viviente de lo espiritual y del arte en la hechicera fuerza formuladora de las disciplinas exactas.
Hermann Hesse (El juego de los abalorios: Español)
Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it—which must have been a great spiritual struggle—and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.
Neal Stephenson (The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World)
I don't really eliminate body, but reduce it to what it is. For I show that corporeal mass, which is thought to have something over and above simple substances, is not a substance, but a phenomenon resulting from simple substances, which alone have unity and absolute reality.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays)
We assert now that Being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy. This is not our own invention; it is a way of putting the theme which comes to life at the beginning of philosophy in antiquity, and it assumes its most grandiose form in Hegel's logic. At present we are merely asserting that Being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy. Negatively, this means that philosophy is not a science of beings but of Being or, as the Greek expression goes, ontology. We take this expression in the widest possible sense and not in the narrower one it has, say, in Scholasticism or in modern philosophy in Descartes and Leibniz. A discussion of the basic problems of phenomenology then is tantamount to providing fundamental substantiation for this assertion that philosophy is the science of Being and establishing how it is such. The discussion should show the possibility and necessity of the absolute science of Being and demonstrate its character in the very process of the inquiry. Philosophy is the theoretical conceptual interpretation of Being, of Being's structure and its possibilities. Philosophy is ontological." ―from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_
Martin Heidegger
Our work is rejected because we are actually interested in the truth. Not a good look! People are “ashamed and embarrassed” by our work because, like Nietzsche’s work, it’s full of “difficult” material. Nietzsche was totally ignored during his sane life. Even today, the common herd don’t have a clue who he is. Leibniz, humanity’s greatest genius, is more or less unknown. That’s the way it goes. Our work is suffering the same fate. Well, it’s no surprise. We refused to play the Mandarin game. We refused to comply with the herd. Like true philosophers, we prefer to be Sages and Gadflies. The masses killed Socrates. Everyone that refuses to share our work is passing us the hemlock. So be it! We have total contempt for people that claim to like our work, but wouldn’t be seen dead sharing it on social media. You must be able to stand with those making difficult arguments that the herd don’t like. We disagree with Nietzsche on all manner of things, but we would certainly stand shoulder to shoulder with him against the herd. It’s essential for Gadflies to exist to shake the masses out of their complacency. Yet the Gadflies are always hated and, in the end, they are always handed the hemlock. They are the true heroes of our world, the ones that never get any credit.
Joe Dixon (The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning)
[...] Et celui de la raison suffisante, en vertu duquel nous considérons qu’aucun fait ne saurait se trouver vrai, ou existant, aucune énonciation véritable, sans qu’il y ait une raison suffisante pourquoi il en soit ainsi et non pas autrement. Quoique ces raisons le plus souvent ne puissent point nous être connues. [sect. 32]
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students)
The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Anlamını kavrayamadığın bir söz olmaz mı? -Olmaz! Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, August Comte… Daha sayayım mı? Kısacası dünyada ne kadar gerçeğe benzer pozitif bir şey meydana koymuş bilgin, filozof varsa niçin hepsi matematikçidir? Çünkü fikirler soyuttur. Dünyada hiçbir fikir yoktur ki matematiğin soyutlama çerçevesinin dışında kalsın.
Ömer Seyfettin (Yalnız Efe)
Milovať znamená radovať sa z cudzieho šťastia.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
Rene Descartes. (THE RATIONALISTS Descartes: Discourse on method/meditations Spinoza: Ethics Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics the Monadology)
The present state of a single substance is the natural result of its precedent state, so much so that the present is pregnant with the future.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays)
What separates us from Kant just as from Plato and Leibniz: we believe only in becoming, also in matters of spirit, we are historical through and through. This is the great reversal. Lamarck and Hegel - Darwin is only an aftereffect. The manner of thinking of Heraclitus and Empedocles has risen again. Even Kant did not overcome the contradictio in adjecto "pure spirit": but we did.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885-Spring 1886))
Toland was the first modern pantheist to combine a religious reverence for the Universe, with respect for science, and a belief that everything is made of matter. A pantheist, he wrote to the German philosopher Leibniz, was one of those persons "who believe in no other eternal being but the universe." When asked for a brief statement of his credo, Toland replied, "The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family.
Paul Harrison (Elements of Pantheism; A Spirituality of Nature and the Universe)
Leibniz wrote letters as we write e-mails. Over his life he sent fifteen thousand letters to eleven hundred people. To this day, they have yet to be fully cataloged. And these weren’t tossed-off one-liners; many were extended essays that broke open whole new areas of science and mathematics. Like today’s frazzled e-mailers, Leibniz complained about information overload. “I cannot tell you how extraordinarily distracted and spread out I am,” he wrote to a friend.
George Musser (Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time--and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything)
So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, which will be better polished than earlier ones, but, peremptorily and seizing it by the lapels, "what is truth as such," and with regard to reality, not what things are or what and how is that which is, but for what reason that X which we call Being is in the Universe, and with regard to knowledge we must not ask for its bases and limits—as Plato, Aristotle Descartes, Kant did—but for something which comes before all this: for what reason we concern ourselves with trying to know.
José Ortega y Gasset (La Idea De Principio En Leibniz Y La Evolución De La Teoría Deductiva)
Du reste, la majorité des orientalistes ne sont et ne veulent être que des érudits ; tant qu’ils se bornent à des travaux historiques ou philologiques, cela n’a pas grande importance ; il est évident que des ouvrages de ce genre ne peuvent servir de rien pour atteindre le but que nous envisageons ici, mais leur seul danger, en somme, est celui qui est commun à tous les abus de l’érudition, nous voulons dire la propagation de cette « myopie intellectuelle » qui borne tout savoir à des recherches de détail, et le gaspillage d’efforts qui pourraient être mieux employés dans bien des cas. Mais ce qui est beaucoup plus grave à nos yeux, c’est l’action exercée par ceux des orientalistes qui ont la prétention de comprendre et d’interpréter les doctrines, et qui les travestissent de la façon la plus incroyable, tout en assurant parfois qu’ils les comprennent mieux que les Orientaux eux-mêmes (comme Leibnitz s’imaginait avoir retrouvé le vrai sens des caractères de Fo-hi), et sans jamais songer à prendre l’avis des représentants autorisés des civilisations qu’ils veulent étudier, ce qui serait pourtant la première chose à faire, au lieu de se comporter comme s’il s’agirait de reconstituer des civilisations disparues.
René Guénon (East and West)
La tranquillité est un degré pour avancer vers la stupidité. . . Il faut toujours trouver quelque chose à faire, penser, projeter, s'intéresser, pour le public et pour le particulier, mais cela d'une manière qui nous réjouisse, si nos souhaits sont accomplis et ne nous chagrine point en cas qu'ils manquent.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. As long as people had only the haziest concept of what a mind was or how it might work, the metaphor of a blank slate inscribed by the environment did not seem too outrageous. But as soon as one starts to think seriously about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and plan, the problem with blank slates becomes all too obvious: they don’t do anything. The inscriptions will sit there forever unless something notices patterns in them, combines them with patterns learned at other times, uses the combinations to scribble new thoughts onto the slate, and reads the results to guide behavior toward goals. Locke recognized this problem and alluded to something called “the understanding,” which looked at the inscriptions on the white paper and carried out the recognizing, reflecting, and associating. But of course explaining how the mind understands by invoking something called “the understanding” is circular. This argument against the Blank Slate was stated pithily by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in a reply to Locke. Leibniz repeated the empiricist motto “There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses,” then added, “except the intellect itself.”8
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Aristotle departs from Plato, then, not by denying that universal qualities exist, but by questioning both their nature and the means by which we come to know them (the latter being the fundamental question of “epistemology”, or the theory of knowledge). And it was this difference of opinion on how we arrive at universal truths that later divided philosophers into two separate camps: the rationalists (including René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Gottfried Leibniz), who believe in a priori, or innate, knowledge; and the empiricists (including John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume), who claim that all knowledge comes from experience.
Will Buckingham (The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (DK Big Ideas))
It is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some 200 years earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated episode in the history of relations between science and theology. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. Some historians wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime. The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement. This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France. Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Leibniz, Gilbert, Boyle and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completely rational, ordered, harmonic creation.
Arthur Koestler (The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe)
Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements. Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run. These virtuals vary in kind as well as in their degree of proximity from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and absorbed. They are called virtual in so far as their emission and absorption, creation and destruction, occur in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable; it is this very brevity that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. The virtuals, encircling the actual, perpetually renew themselves by emitting yet others, with which they are in turn surrounded and which go on in turn to react upon the actual: ‘in the heart of the cloud of the virtual there is a virtual of a yet higher order ... every virtual particle surrounds itself with a virtual cosmos and each in its turn does likewise indefinitely.’ It is the dramatic identity of their dynamics that makes a perception resemble a particle: an actual perception surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images, distributed on increasingly remote, increasingly large, moving circuits, which both make and unmake each other. These are memories of different sorts, but they are still called virtual images in that their speed or brevity subjects them too to a principle of the unconsciousness. It is by virtue of their mutual inextricability that virtual images are able to react upon actual objects. From this perspective, the virtual images delimit a continuum, whether one takes all of the circles together or each individually, a spatium determined in each case by the maximum of time imaginable. The varyingly dense layers of the actual object correspond to these, more or less extensive, circles of virtual images. These layers, whilst themselves virtual, and upon which the actual object becomes itself virtual, constitute the total impetus of the object. The plane of immanence, upon which the dissolution of the actual object itself occurs, is itself constituted when both object and image are virtual. But the process of actualization undergone by the actual is one which has as great an effect on the image as it does on the object. The continuum of virtual images is fragmented and the spatium cut up according to whether the temporal decompositions are regular or irregular. The total impetus of the virtual object splits into forces corresponding to the partial continuum, and the speeds traversing the cut-up spatium. The virtual is never independent of the singularities which cut it up and divide it out on the plane of immanence. As Leibniz has shown, force is as much a virtual in the process of being actualized as the space through which it travels. The plane is therefore divided into a multiplicity of planes according to the cuts in the continuum, and to the divisions of force which mark the actualization of the virtual. But all the planes merge into one following the path which leads to the actual. The plane of immanence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without there being any assignable limit between the two. The actual is the complement or the product, the object of actualization, which has nothing but virtual as its subject. Actualization belongs to the virtual. The actualization of the virtual is singularity whereas the actual itself is individuality constituted. The actual falls from the plane like a fruit, whist the actualization relates it back to the plane as if to that which turns the object back into a subject.
Gilles Deleuze (Dialogues II)
Base two especially impressed the seventeenth-century religious philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He observed that in this base all numbers were written in terms of the symbols 0 and 1 only. Thus eleven, which equals 1 · 23 + 0 · 22 + 1 · 2 + 1, would be written 1011 in base two. Leibniz saw in this binary arithmetic the image and proof of creation. Unity was God and zero was the void. God drew all objects from the void just as the unity applied to the zero creates all numbers. This conception, over which the reader would do well not to ponder too long, delighted Leibniz so much that he sent it to Grimaldi, the Jesuit president of the Chinese tribunal for mathematics, to be used as an argument for the conversion of the Chinese emperor to Christianity.
Morris Kline (Mathematics and the Physical World (Dover Books on Mathematics))
The primary method of mathematics is deduction; the primary method of philosophy is descrip- [16] tive generalization. Under the influence of mathematics, deduction has been foisted onto philosophy as its standard method, instead of taking its true place as an essential auxiliary mode of verification whereby to test the scope of generalities. This misapprehension of philosophic method has veiled the very considerable success of philosophy in providing generic notions which add lucidity to our apprehension of the facts of experience. The depositions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,† Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptations, and inversions, either unknown to them, or even explicitly repudiated by them. A new idea introduces a new alternative; and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.
Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality)
Feynman said, “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied” Our sentence would be: “The Monadology asserts that the fundamental units of existence are INFINITE, dimensionless, living, thinking points – monads, ZEROS, souls – each of which has INFINITE energy content, all controlled by a single equation – Euler’s Formula – and the collective energy of this universe of mathematical points creates a physical universe of which every objective value is ZERO, but, through a self-solving, self-optimizing, dialectical, evolving process, the universe generates a final, subjective value of INFINITY – divinity, perfection, the ABSOLUTE.” For ours is the religion of zero and infinity, the two numbers that define the soul and the whole of existence. As above, so below.
Mike Hockney (The God Equation)
To elaborate these points in a Western philosophical context, first, the “basic stuff” of the scientific West came to be seen as substances (noun phrases), in which attributes inhere (auxiliary verbs) or which are active (transitive and intransitive verbs). Thus Heraclitus could ask how it was possible to step into the same river twice when all of its substance (water) was different. In attempting to get to the bottom of things, Descartes argued for two substances which share no predicates because they are absolutely distinct: body (that which is extended) and mind (that which thinks). But Cartesian efforts to account for how the two substances could interact were not persuasive to Descartes’ successors. Like Spinoza, Leibniz believed that substances could not, in fact, interact, but while the former concluded there could therefore only be a single substance (with many modes and attributes), the latter instead argued for an indefinitely large number of them. These individual substances, “monads,” could not causally affect each other, but could all dance to the same tune played in a preestablished harmony composed by God.
Confucius (The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation)
Starting from Descartes’ commitment to a few absolutely certain innate ideas and reason’s ability to determine some facts about reality a priori, Leibniz ended up making all ideas innate and deducing how God must have set up the universe. On the other side, Hume continued Locke’s emptying out of the mind until there was no longer a there there, that is, not even a substantial mind to be emptied. Far from being rationally justifiable, Hume demonstrated that most of our beliefs are determined by an arational reflex, a process that has roughly the epistemological status of digestion. Perhaps Kant’s greatest accomplishment was reconciling these deeply heterogeneous schools, weaving a seamless system out of ideas taken from both sides. The linchpin of this synthesis was what he called his Copernican Revolution: the epoch-making claim that the mind actively processes or organizes experience in constructing knowledge, rather than passively reflecting an independent reality. To speak metaphorically, the mind is more like a factory than a mirror or soft wax. It is this idea that enabled Kant to incorporate the empiricist dependence on experience into the rationalist ideal of universal and necessary knowledge.
Lee Braver (A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Topics In Historical Philosophy))
In this essential point Ibn rArabi declares concisely: "Those to whom God remains veiled pray the God who in their belief is their Lord to have compassion with them. But the intuitive mystics [Ahl al-Kashf] ask that divine Compassion be fulfilled [come into being, exist] through them."28 In other words, the Gnostic's prayer does not tend to provoke a change in a being outside him who would subsequently take pity on him. No, his prayer tends to actualize this divine Being as He aspires to be through and for him who is praying and who "in his very prayer" is the organ of His passion. The Gnostic's prayer means: Make of us, let us be, Compassionate ones, that is to say, "become through us what thou hast eternally desired to be. " For the mystic has come to know that the very substance of his being is a breath (spiritus) of that infinjte Compassion; he is himself the epiphanic form of a divine N arne. Accordingly his prayer does not consist in a request ( the �Ofis have always stood in horror of that kind of prayer )27 but in his actual mode of being ( like the prayer of the heliotrope turning toward its heavenly Lord); it has the value of clarifying the degree of spiritual aptitude he has attained, that is, the measure in which he has become "capable of God. " But this measure is itself determined by his own eternal condition, his archetypal in- dividuality. "As thou wert in pre-eternity, that is to say, in thine eternal virtuality, so wert thou manifested in thy present condition. Everything that is present in the manifest being is the form of what he was in his state of eternal virtuality. "28 It would be a mistake to find here the source of a causal deter- minism of the current variety; more appropriately we might liken this conception to Leibniz' "pre-established harmony.
Henry Corbin (Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi)
Definiţia durerii poate fi sistematizată astfel: 1. Prin ea se exteriorizează o judecată, în care s-a acumulat experienţa; 2. specificul ei este un şoc în sistemul nervos, care provoacă un dezechilibru; 3. este ea însăşi o reacţie, nu este cauza unei alte reacţii. 1. «În sine nu există durere. Nu rana este cea care doare; experienţa cu privire la consecinţele nefaste pe care le poate avea o rană» provoacă durerea. Cu alte cuvinte, obişnuinţa, prin care am învăţat să percepem durerea, este cea care judecă. Rana este secundară, exerciţiul durerii este cel care îşi spune cuvântul. Analiza lui Nietzsche este inventivă: mai degrabă comportamentul nostru (prin habitudini, dezvoltate din experienţă) transmite senzaţia de durere (nu rana efectivă). Ar fi interesant de investigat cum am reacţiona efectiv la durere, dacă obişnuinţa şi comportamentul nu ne-ar dicta că trebuie să plângem, să ne contorsionăm, să tremurăm atunci când ne-am lovit. 2. «Specificul autentic al durerii este întotdeauna îndelunga cutremurare, vibraţia ulterioară – determinată de un şoc înspăimântător. [...] De fapt nu suferim datorită cauzei durerii (a unei leziuni oarecare, de pildă), ci datorită dezechilibrului îndelungat ce apare ca urmare a acelui şoc.» Din acest fragment, putem izola elementul ştiinţific de cel biografic, deşi ele sunt complementare. «Cutremurarea» şi «vibraţia» (angoasa este subliniată auditiv), pe scurt «dezechilibrul» este consecinţa unui «şoc». Nici acum rana nu impune durerea, ci dezechilibrul provocat de şoc induce suferinţa. 3. «Dacă se observă corect, reacţia apare în mod vădit anterior senzaţiei de durere. [...] Mai degrabă eu disting cât se poate de clar că întâi apare reacţia piciorului spre a evita căderea, iar apoi, la un interval de timp apreciabil, devine subit perceptibilă un fel de undă dureroasă în regiunea frontală.» Nietzsche demontează o veche prejudecată, prin care se afirma că durerea este cauza unei reacţii. Analizând retardul dintre o reacţie de autoconservare şi senzaţia de durere, filosoful respinge o interpretare de tip cauză/efect. Mai degrabă durerea este o «reacţie», mişcarea contrară constând într-o altă reacţie (cele două avându-şi «sursa în două locuri diferite.»). În concluzie, «diminuarea sentimentului de putere» nu ţine de «esenţa durerii». Se ajunge la distincţia dintre plăcere şi durere, de la care s-a început. Rezumând, durerea este o «maladie» (plăcerea – nu), cele două stări nu sunt dialectice, durerea este un obstacol care asigură prin contrast creşterea puterii (la fel cum plăcerea însoţeşte sentimentul predominant al puterii). Înţeleg necesitatea respingerii durerii ca epifenomen în contextul unei teorii a voinţei de putere, dar nu ştiu dacă ea este justificată. Schopenhauer, atunci când îl parodiază pe Leibniz, spunând că trăim în cea mai rea din lumile posibile, chiar dacă este agresiv şi excesiv, are dreptatea de partea lui. Din punctul de vedere al lui Schopenhauer, durerea este de netrecut: nu poate fi negată şi nu poate fi transcesă. Nietzsche demonstrează că există stări în care durerea, dacă nu dispare, poate fi amânată. Cu alte cuvinte, semnalul indus de şoc – întârzie. Cazul durerii predormale îi dă dreptate. În cazul unei răni sau în cazul unei altercaţii violente excesul de adrenalină mută conştiinţa pe o altă frecvenţă. Durerea este diluată, este înşelată, doar pentru a reveni în forţă, atunci când este momentul ei. Ceva asemănător voinţei de putere, dacă putem folosi această metonimie pentru un proces neurologic se exprimă în locul durerii. Durerea este astfel transgresată, temporar. Cu toate acestea, durerea efectivă (în tortură, de exemplu) are imediatul ei. Nu este necesar să-l citim pe Cioran să actualizăm ramificaţiile culturale ale unei teorii ale durerii – judecata empirică poate să suplinească cunoştinţa durerii, care este universală.
Ştefan Bolea (Introducere in nihilismul nietzschean)
In this short philosophical novel he completely undermined the kind of optimism about humanity and the universe that Pope and Leibniz had expressed, and he did it in such an entertaining way that the book became an instant bestseller. Wisely Voltaire left his name off the title page, otherwise its publication would have landed him in prison again for making fun of religious beliefs. Candide is the central character. His name suggests innocence and purity. At the start of the book, he is a young servant who falls hopelessly in love with his master's daughter, Cunégonde, but is chased out of her father's castle when he is caught in a compromising position with her. From then on, in a fast-moving and often fantastical tale, he travels through real and imaginary countries with his philosophy tutor Dr Pangloss, until he finally meets up with his lost love Cunégonde again, though by now she is old and ugly. In a series of comical episodes Candide and Pangloss witness terrible events and encounter a range of characters along the way, all of whom have themselves suffered terrible misfortunes. Voltaire uses the philosophy tutor, Pangloss, to spout a caricatured version of Leibniz's philosophy, which the writer then pokes fun at. Whatever happens, whether it is a natural disaster, torture, war, rape, religious persecution or slavery, Pangloss treats it as further confirmation that they live in the best of all possible worlds. Rather than causing him to rethink his beliefs, each disaster just increases his confidence that everything is for the best and this is how things had to be to produce the most perfect situation. Voltaire takes great delight in revealing Pangloss' refusal to see what is in front of him, and this is meant to mock Leibniz's optimism. But to be fair to Leibniz, his point wasn't that evil doesn't occur, but rather that the evil that does exist was needed to bring about the best possible world. It does, however, suggest that there is so much evil in the world that it is hardly likely that Leibniz was right – this can't be the minimum needed to achieve a good result. There is just too much pain and suffering in the world for that to be true. In
Nigel Warburton (A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories))