anarchist miracle

[Ian Livingston]

>From Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives:

"The famous concept of 'pre-established harmony' was invented by Leibniz as
deus ex machina to bring it about that the principle of self-development
activating each of the monadic substances does not interfere with the
self-development of its fellows. That is, God so adjusted the monads to one
another that their development would have the same effect as if they were
all mutually constraining or influencing one another. By this
pre-established harmony, says Leibniz, it is as though the world were
composed of infinite voices, each singing its own particular song, unaware
of any other, yet if you could hear them all you would hear the song of a
choir singing in perfect time with all parts in perfect polyphonic relation
to one another. Leibniz thus stressed the plurality side of the
plurality-unity pair as strongly as Spinoza had stressed the unity side."
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