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Philosophy and Culture"Club Monad"Daniel Tiffany, University of Southern California |
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Notes1 The role of
the idea of philosophical style in Leibniz's
thought is carefully delineated in Fenves 13-32. 2 On the
origin and historical vicissitudes of Leibniz's theory of
unconscious perception (which has no mechanism of
repression), see Miller 43. 3
Walter Benjamin discusses these adaptations of
monadological principles in his dissertation, "The Concept
of Criticism in German Romanticism" (134-135, 147). 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). 5 The
phrase "labyrinth of the continuum" appears in Leibniz,
Theodicy 53. 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. 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). 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) |
