Leibniz

Summary

Dominique Pagani often returns to two lessons from Leibniz. The first: no two identical leaves can be found in a park, so equality is a construction of the mind and does not exist in nature1. The second: "there is no concrete except through the abstract," meaning that one must go through mathematics to know the world2. He presents him as a jurist, a linguist and co-inventor of the infinitesimal calculus with Newton, and he also mentions the universal characteristic, binary and the motto "Calculemus." He borrows from him the image of the magnetic needle which, if it were conscious, would believe it wanted to go north, an illusion of consciousness exposed before Marx and Freud3. He also takes up the double meaning of Unruhe, restlessness and the balance wheel of a clock4, the small perceptions, the term "conspire" for the parts of an organism, and the monad, in which each individual is an absolute. He places him among the classical metaphysicians who think within God, whose totality remains spatial, unlike Hegel's, and he refuses to set him against Spinoza.

1. 1#9.11 How can sciences of history be real?7 Jan 2021 · 37:10
2. 2On Marx6 Oct 2018 · 19:33
3. 3Clouscard: The metamorphoses of class struggle2 Sept 2024 · 1:17:02
4. 4I am not who you think I am: the elusive identity4 Jan 2024 · 1:10:43

Summary produced automatically from 95 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.