Enlightenment
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646–1716
“The present is big with the future; the future could be read in the past; the distant is expressed in the near.”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher, mathematician, and diplomat who developed the calculus independently of Newton and spent much of his career in the service of German courts. The and the describe reality as a plurality of simple, windowless substances, each mirroring the universe from its own point of view and harmonized by God without real causal interaction among them. Each monad is a living mirror. He formulates the Principle of Sufficient Reason and asks why there is something rather than nothing. Kant later places the monads beyond the reach of possible experience. Rationalist metaphysics after Descartes has to pass through Leibniz.
In the Conversation
12 of the Great Ideas
Theology & Metaphysics
Metaphysics
Form
Substantial forms return as monads: simple active substances, each a living mirror of the universe.
Necessity and Contingency
Truths of reason are necessary; truths of fact are contingent. God chose this world as the best among infinite possibles.
One and Many
The true unities are monads: simple substances without parts, and the world is their infinite plurality.
Space
Space is not a substance but an order of coexistences, the system of relations among bodies.
Opposition
Not all possible things can coexist: opposition appears as the logical incompatibility among perfections that constrains God's choice of the best world.
Relation
Relations are ideal, not real: they supervene on the intrinsic properties of monads, and no genuine link runs between one substance and another.
Same and Other
No two substances can be exactly alike; if there is no internal difference, there is no real distinction.
Quantity
Extension is not the essence of substance; force is. Spatial quantity is ideal, a well-founded phenomenon, not what is ultimately real.
Eternity & Infinity
Angel
The universe is a continuum of monads rising without gaps toward God; angels are simply the spirits higher than us in perfection.
Eternity
God's eternity is the timeless vantage from which He chose this world among infinite possibles, and saw it all at once as best.
Infinity
The infinite is actual, not merely potential: the world contains infinitely many monads, and every drop of matter is a world teeming with further worlds.