Notes

¹ The role of the idea of philosophical style in Leibniz's thought is carefully delineated in Fenves 13-32.
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² On the origin and historical vicissitudes of Leibniz's theory of unconscious perception (which has no mechanism of repression), see Miller 43.
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³ Walter Benjamin discusses these adaptations of monadological principles in his dissertation, "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" (134-135, 147).
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⁴ The monadological schema of the Trauerspiel book appears in its notoriously difficult "Epistemo-Critical Preface." In 1923, when he was writing the book, Benjamin wrote to his friend Christian Rang describing his regard for "Leibniz's entire way of thinking, his idea of the monad, which I adopt for my definition of ideas" (Selected Writings 1:389). The most explicit contemporaneous account of Benjamin's monadological method appears in Kracauer, "On the Writings of Walter Benjamin." In addition, Benjamin's correlation of riddles and names (the verbal counterpart of the monad) in "Riddle and Mystery," a fragment written in 1921, reveals a distinctive feature of Benjamin's monadology (Selected Writings 1:267-268).
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⁵ The phrase "labyrinth of the continuum" appears in Leibniz, Theodicy 53.
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⁶ Donald Rutherford remarks on Leibniz's use of phrases such as "the thread of Ariadne" or "thread of meditation" to describe his conception of symbolic logic. (Rutherford 258n17). Leibniz's reference to the "Ariadne thread" of etymology appears in a letter to Ludolf (1687)(Samtliche Schriften und Briefe 5:31, cited in Aarsleff 94-95, 100n42.
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⁷ In the seventeenth century the phrase "mechanical philosophy" refers to the new critical philosophy associated with the revival of atomism (and with Descartes in particular), which is to be contrasted with scholasticism, or the "common philosophy." Discussion of Leibniz's phraseology of the characteristique can be found in Rutherford (228-230, 256-257n12).
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⁸ Referring to his "invention" of the "universal characteristic," Leibniz offers a number of analogies for its analytic potency: "My invention includes the whole use of reason, a judge for controversies, an interpretation of notions, a balance of probabilities, a compass which will pilot us through the ocean of experience, an inventory of things, a table of thoughts, a microscope to scrutinize the closest objects, a telescope to individuate those most distant, a general calculus, a guiltless kind of magic, a kind of writing that everybody will read in his own language" (Leibniz, Samtliche Schriften und Briefe 2: 167-169, cited in Rossi 289)
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