Fighting the good Leibniz fight
The great seventeenth century philosopher Leibniz has two claims to ‘modern’ fame. On the one hand there is the ‘Panglos’ Philosopher, who was so committed to reason, that he asserted the dogma of the ‘best of all possible worlds’. That is, the argument appears to run that because God is supremely reasonable, he would not have created the world without a good reason to do so, nor would he have created a less than ‘best world’; therefore, given that a world exists (as it clearly does) it must be the best possible… On the other hand, everyone knows that he called the soul a monad, even if this is then thought to be something rude… What everyone forgets, is that his most original work lies in meditations upon the nature of desire, and freedom. Here Leibniz attempts to steer a middle course between two rather different alternatives. He accepts ‘the determinist line’, that freedom is the freedom to follow a desire, and is therefore far from abstract. I am free when I do what I want. The question will then turn upon - what is the nature of that desire? Why do I desire what I want? Here Leibniz’s originality is soul splitting. Where Spinoza or Hobbes might be said to tie a connection between desiring to a relatively simple (and ultimately biological) construction, Leibniz links it into an act of genuine composition. ‘What if’, Leibniz asks, desires can be composed from lesser desires, or even from those strange polyglot half feelings, those flickers of emotion, which shift, moment by moment, making the mind think this rather than that. The relatively large scale desire for a new car or a new pair of silver earrings, or a boy or a girl or whatever, is the product of a complex and constantly shifting nexus of other ‘lesser desires’, which are caught up within it. The world of subliminal advertising is thereby articulated. Our minds are created while we are caught up in something else, in other series of thoughts and feelings, of which we are no more aware than we are of the sound of each individual wave in the roaring of the ocean itself.
Or to give very modern example. The West is preoccupied with sex. Sex is everywhere - on TV, radio, billboards, classrooms, innuendo, boy’s magazines, girl’s magazines, college campuses… And yet in all these places it is not simply present, on the contrary, it is almost always the case that the point about that sexuality is not it in itself, but what is being also communicated in the desires which it arouses. Sex sells… anything; sex sells everything. However there is an unpleasant flipside here. If one simply draws out all these hidden agendas of sex, and takes them at face value, as something meaningful in themselves, one is immediately in the very darkest of head spaces. For, from such a position it is not sex that is everywhere, so much as pornography. The world appears constructed for one’s own very personal sexual pleasures (and one is free to take pleasure in it as one will). The world where sex is the norm – be it with the drunk, or drugged or the child…. It is no coincidence that our world is haunted by the image of the sexual monster. A monster that our very way of being clearly implies.
However for Leibniz this position is further complicated by the issue of memory. Memory for Leibniz is at once given in an immediate grasp, for without a memory, the mind could not fix all its myriad flickerings into stable passions. And yet this process is always interlaced with other pasts remote from this one – and the myriad desires and shifting thoughts which those other memories bring with them. The present becomes unthinkable without also the past at each and every point of it, being also visible, and vibrant. Desires might be constituted within a present, and yet that present is always drawn in the colours of the desires (and memories) of the past. It becomes impossible to either walk down a high street, or remember to assess a political scandal, without memory also being there, warping one’s viewpoint in this way or that.
This is, of course, to give a modern example, very much the problem for Gordon Brown this autumn. What has rocked his administration is not the ‘quality’ of the scandals. Indeed those scandals which were serious (Northern Rock or losing 26 million sets of facts and figures), the government had little or no power to prevent, while those he is directly implicated in (the funding scandal) are themselves a very minor concern. The problem is that these two rather different types of scandal, have become absolutely blended in one another as the roar of the ocean blends the sounds of the waves. All we hear is scandal, and that is enough.
However at this point, something else needs to be noticed about this past. This is no temporal determinism. The mere passage of time is not enough to change everything, and so it is not the past which is in the driving seat; therefore one is never simply the product of one’s memories. On the contrary, Leibniz suggests the colours of the past, are to be plundered in the interests of the future. That is, in desiring, one needs to remember not only what is now, and what was, but also all the other ‘selves’ which this desire and even more, the ones which might follow on from it, might produce. Now for Leibniz, there is a real urgency within this appeal to the future. His Monad is also caught up in the trap of predestination. It knows that at the creation of the world, God pre-saw what its fate must be, and chose to create the world that he did (the best of all possible) based upon the net results of all the actions of all the individuals in all possible universes. Each individual therefore knows that it inhabits this world, which is the best of all possible worlds, by which Leibniz means the richest and most diverse. However it does not know its position in this world. It does not know whether it is one of the elect or the damned. All it can do is put its faith in the idea that a good God will reward virtue. This virtue is moreover clearly defined by the formula ‘the best of possible (richest of) worlds.’ To be virtuous is to ensure that all one’s actions have the richest and most diverse of effects. In choosing to act now, one needs to allow not only for the fact that the act chosen should be worthy of inhabiting the richest of all worlds: But also, in living one’s life one must ensure that one’s desires are similarly open, and rich. Reworking memory becomes the very stuff of morality.
Hence the complexity of thinking about one’s past, and its effect upon one’s present. A delinquent might be the product of a ‘bad upbringing’, and yet that does not mean that a ‘bad upbringing’ is ever of itself enough to produce delinquent or violent or abusive behaviour. But likewise it is not simply good enough to wield the heavy stick of rightwing moral indignation, and shout ‘if some can reform then all could, and so must’. Nor at this point is it at all useful to invoke statistics. All that statistics give one, are ‘macro-social facts’, they tell one nothing about how redemption and change might also occur. (Even or particularly, those statistics about ‘what helps’ different individuals; For one might be able to see that help has happened, and yet be quite unable to say exactly what it was that helped, a fact which statistics are necessarily blind to…)
Leibniz makes such claims obvious. Using all the resources of differentiation (which he developed) he suggests that the power of the past (and its ability to conjure a future) in always indirect, and complex, involving the different differences of very many, sometime rather conflicting passions. A bad childhood, or a society’s constant reference to sex, does not create a nutter - and yet without those elements the nutter would not be as they are. Likewise a sexual desire does not necessarily lead to ‘four legs in a bed’, but can be caught up in all other kinds of other creative dimensions, be they artistic (think of D.H.Lawrence), political (‘most young politicians are “handsome” ’), or social (friendship with an extra dimension).
From which it follows, it is clear that we have radically increased the number of stimulations open for us (and to us); we have radically changed everything we can do or be. A change that is never simple, and never direct, but rather works in constantly constructing shifting syntheses. Indeed, perhaps this lies at the base of western government’s desire to regulate identity and invent new types of criminality. The old world, where people were rivetted by their experiences into a certain mind set has clearly slipped gently away. New ways are needed to tie people down in order that government can remain possible at all. Identity becomes criminalized (without being criminal); while crimes likewise become personalized (without being personal). A hybrid position is being formed between the two, as identity itself becomes ‘subject’ to theft. To splice identity and criminality is to make an attempt to enfold and delimit the new found creativity of the Monads to be otherwise.
However, in looking at our society, Leibniz’s fine sense of the moral would become troubled. Leibniz suggests in a very carefully nuanced argument that the identity of an individual is not fixed. On the contrary, what I am, and what I was and what I might be, I subject to considerable change. Desires come, desires go. The game of running a mind is therefore not simply to stolidly demand ‘I AM’ (that was the Devil’s mistake). Nor yet is it to run with the first desire, and do whatever that demands. Nor yet is it even to run with the strongest desire at any one given moment. But rather, to run a mind effectively is to be an active politician, and passive time keeper. I will deal with the second point first.
It is paradigmatic for Leibniz that the mind could always be otherwise. But this otherwise has two rather distinct dimensions. On the one hand, any decision is never clear cut. Other desires, leading to other decisions are always possible. They could be attended to, if only the mind were capable of listening. Adam’s sin, Leibniz suggests, lay in an over hasty following of a certain desire, and not some deeper moral failing. To Decide becomes a matter of giving oneself time to make the decision (even though one is aware that one cannot have time enough). It is at this point that Leibniz would frown, in thinking of that current tag ’our modern and busy lives’. Busyness as it is used in this context – be it working, travelling, viewing, he would suggest, is tantamount to the worst kind of oppression, as no decision can be allowed its full import, in a mind dragged from choice to apparent choice. From such a position, it is of course is one of the delicious ironies of our time that to the modern political dictum of ‘people like choice’, needs to be added the rider, ’because excessive choice actually stops the necessity of facing the sheer difficulty of making any decision - the world become bewitchingly simple’. On the other hand Leibniz adds an extra dimension here. One can make the decision for many different motives, and at many different times. The choice is never simply enough, one also has then to ensure that the desires animating that choice are the most useful ones. To give a very modern example; On the one hand the act of overthrowing a bloody and murderous tyrant such as Saddam Hussein, was clearly on a very basic level justified in itself. And yet when and why the act was carried out warps its net result, in many terrible ways. To do the right thing for the wrong motivation is therefore usually worse than doing nothing…
The other point raised by Leibniz is however even deeper. The mind, he says needs to understand itself like a democracy, within which shifting alliances of emotions are constantly formed and reformed. On the one hand, one needs to create large and stable ‘parties’. That is, one needs a complex conjunction of passions, which influence one’s action beneficially, and are strong enough to counter those vibrant and destructive desires, which always plague a mind. On the other hand, Leibniz suggests one needs to listen so very carefully to one’s desires. For in their very complexity they are redemptive. A mind might always be open to being pulled in a sudden unexpected direction – if only one can find the right emotion to do so. Other lives, other ‘selves’, other things which one might be (some better, some worse) lie contained within even the stalest of passions… Here Leibniz would look, with no doubt stern horror at modernity. To live in a world of adverts, which appeal to desire in the name of products, is, he might scream, effectively to lose control of one’s very soul. That is, it is to lose control of the shifting alliances that allow one the very freedom to stand out against the rest of reality, and to, in that freedom, define and redefine what it is to be oneself at all. One’s being, and the products, run the risk of becoming utterly synonymous. In effect, advertising, for Leibniz ‘sins against the spirit’ of redemption itself – a sin that it is always tricky to simply forgive.
Leibniz’s great achievement is surely to understand that the mind need not be riveted in either stodgy identity or yet the tyranny of passion. He charts a middle course, where freedom (that is the ability to think and be otherwise) is always possible, and yet always highly problematic. A course where freedom needs to be earned within the hotbed of one’s passions. A course, which clearly has much to say to modernity.
