Leibniz's Garden-- Camera Phones, Kandinskian Tidal Pools, and Figures Isolated from the Figurative
Monadology65. And the Author of nature has been able to employ this divine and infinitely wonderful power of art, because each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. (Theod. Prelim., Disc. de la Conform. 70, and 195.)
66. Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls.
67. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond.
68. And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the garden, or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to be imperceptible to us.
69. Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves. (Theod. Pref. [E. 475 b; 477 b; G. vi. 40, 44].)
posted by Sinthome at 6:27 AM
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"Why is the infinite multiplicity of the multiple like the image of a dream? Why this nocturne, this sleep of thought, to glimpse the dissemination of all supposed atoms? Simply because the inconsistent multiple is actually unthinkable as such. All thought supposes a situation of the thinkable, which is to say a structure, a count-as-one, in which the presented multiple is consistent and numerable. Consequently, the inconsistent multiple is solely--before the one-effect in which it is structured--an ungraspable horizon of being."
--Badiou, _Being and Event_
From Badiou's perspective, of course, the problem with Leibniz is going to be that he wishes to treat being qua being according to the axiom that there is no such thing as a being that isn't *a* being (i.e., a unity, one, identity, substance, etc). Hence Leibniz will round out his remarks by claiming that, "Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves." For Badiou, by contrast, it is precisely appearances that lack confusion and inconsistent multiplicities from which appearance results that is a buzzing chaos. I side with Deleuze, Badiou, and Luhmann here--identity, unity, wholes, ones, etc., are results of an operation. There are no ontologically irreducible/indivisible unities. Nonetheless, it's still a beatiful passage.
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