anarchist miracle

[bandwraith at aol.com]

The lives of Spinoza and Leibniz, like Plato and Aristotle, overlapped by about 30-40 years. I guess the similarities between the two pairs are probably numerous and enlightening, all things being equal, but what interests me is whether there could have been an "Aristotle" before a "Plato," or for that matter, a "Leibniz" before a "Spinoza," in a philosophical sense. Maybe the answer depends on whether one is Platonic or Aristotelian.


-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, Feb 8, 2013 8:38 pm
Subject: anarchist miracle


>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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