Philosophers no longer talk about God and if they do nobody listens. At the time of Leibniz and the Enlightenment the reverse was the case – philosophers always talked about God and if they didn’t then nobody listened. This, no doubt, was a hangover from the impregnation of Christianity that occurred in the middle ages, during which time the bastard child of philosophy and Christian apologetics is produced, what Heidegger would later call ‘onto-theology’. Being (the ontos) is spoken of within the framework of God. This is the butchery of philosophy by Augustine and Aquinas, the butchery of pagan thought by monotheistic madness. A language and framework that is in effect absent from the initial movements of Socrates and Plato comes to dominate any attempt to think. To think without God becomes, by the time of the Leibniz, almost impossible. At the same time, to think with God also becomes almost impossible. Thought is threatened by God since metaphysical abstractions now implicate God. The situation is analogous to artists under Stalin’s regime. To speak is to speak of God – or Stalin – and so to speak is to invoke danger and attention, not always a good idea.
At the heart of Leibniz is a peculiar pairing of two seemingly opposed ideas that produces a problem. On the one hand there is the idea that the world – Being – must have a necessity to the way it is. On the other hand there is the idea that God – the supreme Being – must be free and ultimately unconstrained by anything, including any necessities of mere matter. We can encounter this problem in the following way. Let us assume that God exists and has created the world, indeed all of Being. Let us also assume, following Leibniz for a while, that the world which exists is ‘the best possible world’. Now Leibniz wants to argue that the world is the best possible world because it must be the best possible world – it is not the best by accident but because only the best possible world could exist. Thus, if God created the world and it is the best possible world is it the best possible world because God created it or did God create it because it is the best possible world.
The problem is right here – was God forced by ‘some sort of necessity’ to create the world as it is because it is the best possible world that there could be? Did God have no choice over how the world is – or even that the world is? If this is the case, then God is powerless in the face of this necessity – nothing more than an empty origin.
The situation gets worse, however, if we try and say that the world is the best possible world because God created it. If God is free to create any world and the world that is created is the best possible world then we can ask why is this world better than any other? It must be because God chose between more than one option the best – but for it to be the best there must be some reason that can be given, it must be more than a more whim of God. God, then, becomes again subject to the reason behind the choice of one world over another and couldn’t have acted freely if he acted rationally since he would have had no choice. Alternatively the world is a mere whim and in that case it cannot be said to be in any real sense the best. Either the world has a necessity – in which case God is subject to that necessity – or it is a mere whim, in which case it might very well have been different, indeed it might still now be very different from the way we experience it. If the world is a whim of God we are left with the same problem of the Caliph’s vision1.
It’s not just Leibniz who works with this difficulty. In Descartes too we find the problem of why and how God relates to Being. If God is given complete freedom then what’s to stop him from having a huge joke at our expense? What prevents God from making the false seem true and the true seem false, from making the appearance radically different from the reality? If we respond, because God is good, then surely if God is good he would have created the best of all possible worlds and then we are back to the lack of freedom on the part of God. God is free and the world is possibly a joke or the world is necessarily the way it must be – the best – and thus God is no more and no less free in his creativity than the mathematician is in the production of a solution to a given problem.
1 Nicholas Rescher, following Bertrand Russell, poses the problem as a formal dilemma and as follows – ‘According to the Principle of Perfection [what I have been referring to here as 'the best of all possible worlds] God acts in the most perfect way possible with regard to the creation of the world, and he does so either necessarily or freely. If he does so necessarily his freedom is destroyed, and all that follows as a result of his perfection – i.e., everything that happens in the world – is necessary. If he does so freely, in accord with Leibniz’s principle, a sufficient reason must be adduced for this free act, and this in turn must be either free or necessitated. Thus an infinite regress is initiated.’ (Rescher, 1967: 43-44) Rescher’s formulation of the formal problem (that of an infinite regress) avoids the problem of the powers or forces at play in the inter-relation between the concepts of God and Necessity.
Robert Vallier reviews what looks like a fascinating book, Brett Buchanans’, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. During the course of the review the following struck me:
The animal has an Umwelt, surrounding and enclosing it, much like a soap bubble. Each animal has its own Umwelt, and one soap bubble may enclose many others within it or be enclosed in other, larger bubbles. Unlike Leibniz’s monads, these bubbles have windows, or at least intersect and interact with each other in concrete ways. The Umwelt is not merely given, but rather produced by the animal through the functioning of its body, its sensory and instinctual apparatus, and the objects it encounters. Uexküll devotes years of his productive life to the study of the Umwelt, its formation, and how it constitutes a ground for understanding animal being. From this research, several astonishing examples emerge, most famously the behavior of the tick; but more than that, two major theoretical constructs also come to the fore. First, the plan of nature constitutes a kind of melody. An extensive musical metaphor or "theory of the music of life" runs throughout Uexküll’s work, and later becomes important to Merleau-Ponty later on. Buchanan neatly summarizes and translates the metaphors, but misses an opportunity to return to and evaluate another philosophical source for Uexküll, namely, Leibniz. The soap bubbles may not be monads, but they exist in a kind of pre-established harmony in the composition of nature. It is this harmonious composition that constitutes the plan of nature, or better, the plan is a kind of musical score. Deleuze later characterized Uexküll as a "Spinozist of affects." Given this, it seems that the background of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant would be a particularly fecund area to mine in order to understand better the rise of modern biology. Buchanan can’t be faulted for not developing this background, for to do so would have doubled the manuscript. While some mention of it could have been helpful, the absence of it stands as an invitation to his readers to engage in further research in this direction.
The reading group on The Fold progresses well, with a core of 6 people attending and a rhythm to the sessions as we work through various moments in each chapter before trying to establish something like a broader ‘shape’. Yesterday’s session focused on Chapter 5, ‘Incompossibility, Individuality, Liberty’, where the text moves onto a different terrain from the ‘ontological’ pure and simple. The famous example of ‘Adam the sinner’ and the world in which he sins being the best possible world is what the chapter opens with and the dynamic is to work from the concept of incompossibility through to the ‘moral’ problem addressed by the Theodicy. The chapter title, naming these three peculiar concepts, tracks this trajectory.
As usual we retired to the Amersham Arms after the session for a pint or two and a decompression, finding ourselves drinking in the outside garden, a kind of side alley to the pub strewn with a vibrant graffiti art exhibition. Towards the end of the reading session I had increasingly questioned the viability of the account of morality that Deleuze draws and we had encountered one of the perennial questions of Deleuze scholarship and discussion – does a Deleuzian ontology exhibit a kind of moral injunction to radical lifestyle? There is a reading of Deleuze, that is now frowned upon perhaps, which used to take the work of Deleuze and use it to justify ‘extremities’ of lifestyle – wine and strange drugs as a means to ontological intellectual intuition. It’s doubtful that it much matters whether this is an ‘accurate’ reading of Deleuze since it is no doubt possible to draw upon his work to either justify or berate such a lifestyle, such means of knowledge. It is clear, even from just this chapter of F, that there is some sort of injunction that can be drawn from Deleuze, an injunction that is found here in the form of ‘increase the clear region of your monad’. Take the following for example:
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