Leibniz and the principles of freedom and Enslaveryn :

Leibniz writes somewhere that if it was not or the monad Spinoza would be right. But why? What is it the monad does which saves thought from Spinoza-ism? But likewise what was so pervasive about Spinoza-ism that requires such a desperate root as the Monad to counter it?   OR again what is it in the jump beyond extension and into  the world of pure perceivers ( a move that Leibniz agrees accord with Berekely’s move) that will save us from the necessity of thinking a single substance, which is equal in all attributes? Here I think one needs to turn to turn to the common thread of Aristotlianism that binds up both Spinoza and Leibniz, and conditions their responses to Descartes. Cartesian-ism and Spinoza-ism breach Aristotle’s world view in three critical places.

The collapse of form:  In the Aristotle account of matter and form, form was very much the dominant partner. The reason for this domination goes back to Aristotle’s argument against Zeno. That argument had introduced the distinct of actual and potential.  The argues (counter to Zeno) that an arrow in flight was only potentially infinitely divisible, and was not actually infinitely divided. Building on this division Aristotle will likewise argue that matter was not actually infinitely divisible, but rather formed a locus of potential divisions, which each division then corresponding to some form. Thence he concludes that matter is itself defined by form, rather than the other way around. Cartesiansism, and Spinoza-ism then very effectively critiques this view point, by asserting the rights of an actually infinitely divided substance, ion which individuals inhere as particular modes, whose precise bounds cannot be found.. Forma will therefore slip from being simple things of space and become rather become activities/ perpetual constitutions: It is movement that comes to define matter rather that space or place. It is no wonder that perhaps Spinoza’s earliest writings, included an answer to Zeno, whose paradox he solves by asserting the rights of extension (and time) to be infinitely divisible, so that movement cannot be localized in one particular place (or restricted to one moment) and is rather always a movement through an infinitely indivisible portion of extension. Likewise it is clear that on of Spinoza’s earliest mature definitions is that of an individual, which he argues is comprised not of a form but rather a certain fixed proposition of motion and rest (St part 2 note 10-12). A definition that he subsequently (but still relatively early) develop  (but not compromise) by drawing a distinction between the individuals who communicate their motions to one another is a certain fixed way, from the actual parts of the individual so constituted, which only relate to these other constituting individuals as they are communicating motions to one another and so not as they are in themselves (ep32) – a distinction I will return to below. Spinoza goes on (in ep 32, an also in ethics) to deduce from his definition of the individual in terms of communication of movement (other than form) the presence of a formless infinite individual (in ep 32, he calls this nature ) – whose very being consist is as the endlessly changing face of the universe itself (ep 63) – and therefore then endless challenging of form. Moreover, in ethics an even more profound challenging of Aristoltle is implied *if not formally stated). Spinoza (in 1/15 and elsewhere) argues that extension must be an active dimension. Space cannot therefore be something simply passive – and modelled of rest (ep 81?) but such rather be active and creative (hence a vacuum is impossible). From which Spiniza implies that the existence of bodies and extension  are not simply independent from one another (and both passive i.e. passive bodies in passive space) but rather are both given in some sense together – and in the same action. So that water might be (as a mode of substance) made or destroyed at will, but as it is (and as it is destroyed or created) will always express the nature of ‘corporeal substance’ itself. That is, the relation of motion and rest, which arise as the immediate expression of the attribute of extension (1/21 and ep 63) are nit something accidental to ‘space’ (taken as an abstract entity), but are rather the active means by which the attribute of extension itself is expressed: That is they are the particular means by which each mode is caught up by all the rest, which it essentially differs (2 /L2) and is differed by (2/L3). One might say here then that Spinozaism issues a double headed threat to Aristotlian-ism. On the one hand he rejects forms entirely, and with it suggests that everything must therefore be caught up in a single substance. On the other (and more radically) he keeps the idea that matter (or substance) is not independent from ‘forms (or movements) but then reverse the emphasis of this non-independence. That is, Spinoza sets up the fact that modes express corporeal substance, into the very creative principle of substance itself, whose very nature is then taken to be the middle of these creative expressions.

Leibniz response to Spinoza at this point is as deeply textured and complex as Spinoza’s arguments themselves. Many, if not all notes Leibniz can dismiss, (and do so very quickly), and yet running across even these dismissal is a deep acceptance of Spinoza’s basic critique of Aristotle: Leibniz line of attack is not that Spinoza was simply wrong in attacking substantial form, a move he describes as  judicious in New essay ( N.E. 455), but rather that Spinoza either carries that attack too far, and looses sight too easily of what Aristolte really meant, or naively asserts (at other times) the very Aristoltianism he (Spinoza) seemed to be rejecting . Leibniz will therefore dismiss out of hand many of what he thinks of as the excesses of Spinoza-ism . He will therefore simply rule out the possibility of another infinite creature other than God, on the grounds such an individual is  simply unimagininabe when it comes to extension; and , while in the case of thought would be indiscernible from  God himself  (Ar276).While, on a more general level he suspects the theory of the individual (whether finite or infinite) of failing to distinguish bodies which are mere aggregates of things, and he relate things themselves (ibid 275) . Moreover, in terms of infinite things Leibniz argues that the theory of the individual reduced modes to passivity in two ways. On the one hand, for Leibniz, such a theory implied that each individual; was (and remained) the passive effect of other modes, and therefore never something else in its own right  (???); on the other hand even if one did accept that one could think of the individuality of a thing in terms of communication motion amongst itself parts then such an individual would still merely exist as a passive response to the world in which it is present, and could have no active force beyond this passivity (Ar 165).  From these two points Leibniz’s deduces (agreeing with Blynbergh and Deleuze) that Spinoza’s modes ought to change moment by moment and therefore cannot provide any constancy the mind (which is its idea) at all (Ar. 277). Finally Leibniz will simply deny that Spinoza can mean anything when he simultaneously argues that extension is indivisible and yet contains parts which express it (Ar. 275), and thereby fails to grasp the point of Spinoza’s argument which actually contends that the very indivisibility of substance itself exists through the way its parts are expressing it (and are expressing it as its parts).

Leibniz is equally trenchant in his criticism of the occasions Spinoza appears to blithely re-assert the very Aristotlianism he had done so much to compromise. Hence, when Spinoza argues that the essence of the mind is eternal Leibiz insists that Spinoza is asserting the ‘eternal’ nature of a geometric form (which is perpetually possible) rather that anything real and substantial (Ar 278). Leibniz of course insists this very much in spite of Spinoza own trenchant criticism of God’s intellect containing anything that was merely possible (rather than actual – 1/29), and the fact that Spinoza is very clear that essences of actual things are distinct from formal mathematical essences (which are mere things of reason –Ep. 78?), and so whatever else Spiniza might mean by 5.23 he cannot be simply asserting the rights of formal geometry to exist as a possibility. Indeed such is Leibniz keenness to misrepresent Spinoza at the this point he (Leibniz) will assert that striving (conatus) cannot be the essence itself, as striving will perpetually vary, while the essence (at least as Leibniz has understood it for himself) must be fixed (Ar 279).

In Leibniz hands Spiniz stands both accused of drowning the individual in the middle of substance, and then (at another point) arbitrarily asserting the rights of substance (that is on unity) to exist: That is for Leibniz Spinoza both undermines any possibility of for individuality, and then finds the need to arbitrarily ‘discover’ some new unity , which is then re-asserted in spite of the actual argument made. Or to put it another way, for Leibniz (and following him Deleuze) Spinoza’s error is that he lacks a convincing theory of singularity, and therefore blindly grasps at the only theory he can think of, namely Aristoltianism. It will be clear from what I have said elsewhere in the work that this is not the case, and that Spinoza’s actually argument is very more complex and nuanced that this critique suggests. But that is as it maybe, what matters for now is the fact that is for both  Leibniz and, following him,  Deleuze, (but also Whitehead ) Spinoza-ism founders of this failure to account for singularity. A Corollary then naturally follows on from this last point,: if is differing ways one accepts Spinoza’s basic account of matter, and his rejection of Aristoltianism is correct, than the exact nature of this singularity must be problematic in itself, and some how, at some level not ever simply present in the world. The singularity in itself (the essential) whether it is given in the Monad (or the event or the actual occasion), is then at some level removed from the world in which it is embodied. Or to put it another way,  for Leibniz (although not for either Deleuze or Whitehead) Aristotlianism can be saved (and with it singularity), only if what is singular is moved beyond that which is actually embodied within the world.

The Problem of theTtorn Telos:

Spinoza’s attack of Teleology clearly had a deep influence of Leibniz, who often albeit indirectly) mentions it and does so sometimes with a complement to its auther (Ar 144) and sometimes an insult (Ar 154). But to understand the full affect that Spinoza’s attack on final cause (and with it any idea of God’s purpose) has upon Leibniz it is necessarily very briefly to recap on the reasons for Spinoza’s initial move. Spinoza’s own attack on Teleology comes in under two heads: Firstly he dismisses purpose from God’s essence, and secondly accounts for it in Man’s. For Spinoza, teleology is wrongheaded in that it cannot grasp what is divine in God ( 1/app).  God’s power is his essence (1/34) so that the reason for God to be and to act are one and the same ( 4/preface).  It makes no sense therefore to pull out particular parts of that creation from all the rest, and claim that God (and with it all of natures order) was it was this tings that existed (rather than all the rest –4/4). likewise for Spinoza it makes even less sense for God to decree formally when a thing ended. God always acted (and thought) by posting a things action (3/4) and therefore will not think a think to occlude it: on the contrary if God thinks a thing and that thing is necessarily real as God thinks it (1/35 – and that realty is not a mere possibility 1/29). This in turn then led to the argument I consider elsewhere, that lodged God’s ability to perceive a thing within the chain of causes (and God as he is always affecting another), so that God can only objective see what is in the world after he has formally created it, an as he is being influenced by that creation. Or to put it another way, Spinoza, ironically re-invents Aristotlian formalism within efficient causation.  God might not think in terms of things (or to be more in keeping with the end 2/7 s, he might do so only in terms of essence – things as they are – and not nature’s order), but that does not prevent his objective idea from grasping (from within the special domain of causality) at perception of another, perception that exist for it as things. The problem then with teleology, as it is applied to God, is that it absolutely reverses the true causality of things in that it confuses God’s idea with his actual creative nature, and thereby imposes the restriction native to the former (which can operate only within a unifed creation) to the freedom of the latter (so never faces such restrictions).

The Second Head in Spinoza’s account of teleology concerns Man. He argues ( 4/ pref.) that Telology’s error lies in a sense in the nature f the human essence, and the thought one can have about that essence. It was a very early principle in Spinoza (present from ep 12 onwards( that if one view a thin through its essence alone then that thing can be torn from the flux of eternity in which it adheres, and set up as something in its own right. Human’s will the have a very natural tendency o take their essence (which is after all the only adequate idea they necessarily have – 2/11 c), and set it up as a principle upon its own. Nor Spinoza clearly argues is this by itself wrong. On the contrary at the beginning of book five, Spinoza argues that it is the very ability to separate human essence fro the order of things, and through that separation can an adequate knowledge of affects themselves, which itself comprises the first moves towards human freedom itself (5/3-4). However, he explicitly associates this move with the drive to understand the ones essence at something that cannot be defined to any one occasion or present (5/2), and whose ultimate solace lies in the causal order of this themselves, a order that frees it from any one present, an one simple determination (5/6),  The problem then with teleology is that it fails to appreciate this subtlies necessary in the setting up of the idea of the human essence. It will therefore make no attempt to pull out the idea if can form of a human essence from any particular determinations of that essence (that is from the present in which it finds itself). To Use Spinoza’s own example (4/pref) when a human’s appetite turn to house building, that human as they consider their essence alone knows only the single desire to have a house, and will not naturally question all the complex process of causality (in their own mind, in the mind of others, and in the world itself) by which they came determined to act in such a manner. The refuge of ignorance that the mind uncovers in teleology (1/app) is then a pernicious one, in that it prevents the mind from actively separating out its own essence from the flux of things, and thereby condemns it to be forever confusing its own nature with the nature of others.

Spinoza’s own critique of teleology takes one right to the heart of Spinoza-ism itself. His claim is that final cause are wrong headed because they both mistake the nature of God’s freedom, and humans. God’s freedom is to create to act and exist in one), and the intellect is just another such creation, whose own standing (that is whose own ability to perceive) is  itself created within God. Thence to argue that God is free (as the intellect understands that freedom) is both to mistake the creativity of God idea (which is always in the middle of perceiving) for Gods absolute nature itself , and in doing so fundamentally confuse God as creates a unity (in natures order) with God as he create perceptions of that  order within his idea itself. So that, (and from the perspective of God’s intellect) one inverts the very nature of God himself and attempt to derive the unity of the order of causes from the very creativity of perception that it itself causes. The source of this inversion then lies in human nature itself, which naturally (and to a degree correctly) makes just this move. That is, it is in the nature of humans that one fixed idea can be taken up within the human essence and thereby in itself made to be something creatively (and therefore formally not just objectively present in God). The Error the lies when human attribute this splicing of creativity and ideas in them to God himself, and therefore failing to grasp that god (as far as his absolute nature is concerned) is merely in the creativity of this process and not in the fixing of the idea itself. In conclusion then one might say that Spinoza’s challenge to Telology, is that it forever and absolutely confuses what is fixed (and unitary) for what is creative and complex. Telology then is creation of a forced marriage between the nature of God and the nature of humans. Rather then than leaping to some easy conclusion that God creates and thinks in the same way as humans (1/17s) one should simply accept the difference. Thence one should simply accept that God is unified in the causes which gives perception, and yet free to be creative in the perception themselves; While, in contrast humans are fixed by certain perception, but then able  to create from within that fixing in someway (a creation that is of course still in God).

Leibniz’s response to this  critique is again complex. He clearly has accept much of the premise underpinning the first argument. It is after all simply self evident that if the world has no forms as such it cannot be God’s purpose to create them! What he cannot though accept is the immediate corollary Spinoza then draws that it is then the we have of idea of forms must then be explained (via causation). To accept this move would of curse force Leibniz to accept Spinoza’s claim that telology does not belong to God, and only imperfectly belongs to man.. In order to avoid this conclusion Leibniz suggests that one needs to distinguish between three very different types of form; Firstly there are mathematical forms, by fixed rule (an are necessary to God’s mind itself ???). Secondly there are composite forms (such ad and army or a pile of stones), and thirdly there is the unity of the monad itself (Ar 86-87 et al.) Spinoza’s error then lies in simply equating all these three with one anoter (Ar.277). This move (whatever its actual validity) then has the effect of allow Leibniz to suggest then that form (as it is understood in Maths) simply does ot  exist within the world as such, and that most individual one perceives in that world are not formally within the world, but are rather the creation of the way our own individual monad embodies that world in itself (NE 146). This move then opens out the very complex resonances that Leibniz is establishing here between an individual monad the world it inhabits (and gives to itself as composites), and God himself. It is through these complex moves that Leibniz is able to develop his own highly nuanced answer to Spinoza’s doctrine of creativity and one. As such, the arguments will need to be developed in a little detail before one can understand what consequences to draw. Here (and in contrast with Spinoza) it is perhaps better to define the moves made in terms of individual Monads first, and only then return to God.

In terms of finite things, Spinoza makes a very specific claim: That God  God’s perception of a thing, and the his creation of that things are separate. The Mind then (as I looks to the world beyond it 2/11c) be able to uncover how a form comes to be (which is given in God’s idea alone 2/8c). But rather, each mind will be grasped by the idea of that form, and then as it has that idea discover itself to be within the middle of a desire. There is therefore a distinct priority here: The mind is given an idea, which once given makes it desirous:, and does in accordance with 2 ax 3 which states that an idea is necessary or a desire (but a desire is not necessary for an idea). Thence one might say it is the necessity of forming an idea  in objective thought that lies across the possibility of any teleology, as in order to act purposively God has already committed himself to perception, and therefore, already been determined by some efficient causation to act in some manner.  Perhaps Leibniz is at his most original in the alternative he produces to this apparent paradox. He effectively point out that one cold get to exactly the same position as Spinoza (that is one idea of a thing being associated with one desire), if desire itself was in ones very inception o the thing (that is the aggregate form), so that one only came to see it a certain way because one already desired. His move then of course involves a shift in the perspective of what is seen as real. Spinoza’s argument after all turned on the causal reality of things as they are perceived; Leibniz must the reject that causal externality, and argue that what is real are not formal things, but rather the perception of things themselves ((Mo sect: 6-14).

However of course such a move cannot be affected without also challenging what exactly one think so as real in desire and perception. Here Leibniz introduces the concept of minutest perception. Each such perception in itself is unremarkable. What will be to me a minute perception, which is gone before ever I grasp it, would be to another individual, with another set of organs a distinct impression (NE 219). Hence, it is not the case that the minutest perception itself relates to some privileged  layer of reality, but rather is rooted in the monads’s mind itself. This mind discovers itself quite unable to attend to such perceptions directly, and therefore can only render a clear account of them, as they are combined within other perception, with whom they can be expressed less confusedly, and as a part in a single impression. ( NE 53), Leibniz will therefore argue that the roar of a wave is not a single sound, part the embodiment of very many separate individual perception of water movement, all of which come together to give the sound of the ocean itself (ibid 54). And yet here one needs to be careful not to move too quickly. Leibniz makes it very that such a aggregate sound as the roar of waves is the construct the mind builds up from these impressions (and therefore does not relate to the actual nature of those perception themselves). What then is the exact nature of this impression? Two things are her clearly essential, Each minute perception is in itself of being caught in a difference: As I am caught in seeing yellow I am propelled across all the parts of yellow (NE 219), or as I see a drop of water, I am caught in the gardens and all the ponds that are to me embodied in the single impression (NE 165) ; or finally as I feel pain I am caught up in becoming more or less perfect (NE 194). And yet this being within th middle of a difference is then given as something in a singularity – a perception, which can only be grasped  at after t as gone. Each perception are the not only differential in themselves, but in perceiving them they force our minds elsewhere, and so require it grasps other minute perceptions ( each such perception is the burdend with the past, and laden with the future –N.E 55): Each perception is then both it itself complex (in itself), and yet, as it is given  within the monad’s mind, absolutely singular. The effect of this singularity then being that the mind, mind cannot grasp at the at the impression by itself, but is as it grasps at it (that is at t is located within the very difference of the impression0 endlessly deflected elsewhere and into another impression.

  Here then is in Leibniz the equalivalent relation Spinoza’s conception of the attribute. I argue elsewhere that the attribute  (as it is argued for in 1/19-1/20) involves the expressing in a single perception of (and so as being) that which cannot in itself be located in any one manner of existence itself. That is, God’s in himself is the absolute nature of being in the middle itself (absolutely infinity), and it is the role of the attribute to perceive this middle in one way (rather than any other). Something they can only achieve by being to express God’s very ability to always be in the middle of himself as itself the source of God’s unity. In Leibniz this grasping of diversity as a unity occurs in the minutest perceptions themselves, which require the mind to be both diverse (and located in a worlds full of garden and ponds) and yet to give that diversity singular (and perpetually occluded) present) So far there is still some deep accord between Spinoza and Leibniz, with both of them (although in different ways) making the same equation perceiving and the relationship of creativity and unity. Where Leibniz then breaks with Spinoza is then the next move –that is the sense that one moves beyond singular perceptions and towards the power of thought in which separate perceptions resonate.  I discussed briefly above (and far more fully in other places), for Spinoza this move will involve the relationship of ideas both  with the chain of causality, and there ability of the individual mode (as it actually exists) to express God’s absolute nature (2/45).  Leibniz cannot of course accept the latter set of arguments (which relate to adequate ideas) an more than the former, and the very predication which they are based in the difference between men and god, a difference Leibniz with him faith in the divine mind wants to avoid.

Leibnitz alternative suggestion is that each minutest perception itself provokes an unquiet, a micro desire of itself own (NE 189).  Such Desires are then fixed by the very quiddity (the differential) of the perception itself; so that at pleasure joy is itself good I desire it, and pain bad I flee from it (NE173)..And yet then Desires itself is clearly arranged within temporality in a way that is quite distinct for perceptions, a distinction itself has three distinct dimensions. Firstly, it is the role of such desires to take the very singularity of a micro-perception as a pretext for some endeavour – so striving which impels the mind to move off in one direction rather than another, so that Leibniz calls then with some justification the ‘little springs’ of the  mind (NE 168),. It is thense little triumphs that then explain the nature eof joy (that is the progress to happiness). This progress needs not to be thought of in terms of a single ‘happiness’, hat in itself would leave the mind’ stupefied and insensate’; On the contrary, any one joy is in fact comprised of numerous little triumphs, as endless disquiets (minutest desires) have been posited and then triumphed over, (NE189). From which , Leibniz concludes (contra Spinoza) that there cannot be any joy without there being at some micro level pain and disquiet  (NE 165). Secondly Leibniz also makes it quite clear that such disquiet itself not only impels the mind towards new perceptions but also is creative even when it fails to achieve its goal (Mo 14-15). Hence in impelling the mind forward (either towards some impression, or away from it) disquiet is able split the very singularity minute perceptions: o that as a desire, what could only be perceived by me as a unity, becomes both a goal whose attainment itself is subject to degree ( I can more or less achieve its apparent singularity,) and caught up with other minute perception: That is, perception that although they are not the same as what.is strived for, do at least express some degree of it.  Moreover, the importance of such botched striving comes all the more important   when it is remember that for Leibniz reality is perception. Desire will then, even as it produces a perception which is other that the one it wanted, be quite literally (albeit at a micro level) caught up creating the world in which it finds itself, a world that is then constituted by this perpetual warping of desires purpose.

   Finally it is clear that Desires are more open to other times than are micro perceptions The logic of Leibniz argument will of cours necessitate hi rethinking what tenses are. Any micro perception cannot simply be over and done (as the perception itself still remains caught up in the mondad which perceives it in the first place). Leibniz will therefore argue  rather than simply vanish, it is  absolutely hidden, as the difference of an assymtop and its curve is hidden  (NE202). At such times the desire, which streams of through such a perception will be similarily hidden. And yet, freedom necessitates that such desires are always attendable. Thus is freedom for Leibnitz does no consist of some dispassionate choice of what is right (Ar195) but rather involves the far more dynamic searching in the soul for the new desires, and with them new possibilities (NE 193). Every mind (even Beelezebub himself –Theo 280) could always find other desires in their mind and so be inclined in other ways if only it take the time and makes the effort to do so (NE 196). Hence it is very important that useful desires do not slip way with their perception, but rather they must be gathered up into firm policies in which numerous desire are wrapped up, and which cannot be countered without causing some disquiet (NE 204). What is more, if one takes Leibniz doctrine of freedom seriously it is clear that within ones soul are not just all the desires that one had in th course of ones live, but also all the other micro-desires which might, if only one had attended to them, made the  mind a quiet different person (and sparked new and very different perceptions). Desire will therefore bare testimony to other selves, and other worlds in a way perception never can.

   Disquiet is the very much the obverse of perception. Each perception is differential in its impression (which is comprised only of differences) and yet unites in the mind. Each Desire is the united in the impression and  yet endlessly productive in the mind. The point then being that from a single quiddity (a differential impression) a large number of distinct desires may or may not spring, and yet each such desire will remain separate to all the others, and single in itself, so that the very quality of the perception demands that different desire which spring from it remain (at their minutest level) separate from one another. Likewise each desire runs away from any one impression, and into other impressions. As it does so it differentiates he very unity of perception is two ways. One the one hand it takes what was so singular in the perception (that is was) and breaks it up, into a degree which can be in part attained (or not) in other perceptions. While on the other, as all he desires that spring from a single impression mingle with all other desires (which arise from other impression) they open a single impression to a diversity of different worlds, and differing possibilities. Single volitions complete (and perceivable) volutions will then be constituted by the interaction of perception and desires (NE 192). Moreover, Leibniz is very clear that such combinations are not something that are optional in the mind. Desires, and perception are then always going to hook up with one another (and thereby embody across one another). Or to put it in terms of the first argument in this section, It is certain that each monad must embody itself in someway: That is all its must express its disparate desires within the real world (or perceptin), and so force them to be this or that. The minds then has no freedom to suspend such unions and must then always operate in an indirect manner to influence the outcome (Theo 327). There is a real dilemma here. On the one hand it is critical to Leibniz’s conception of freedom that it is always possible to rummage around in ones soul and find other desires, other ways to think. And yet, on the other, such an action takes time, and the mind itself cannot be relied upon to await the outcome of such a process. On the contrary the mind itself can be relied upon to always be changing the circumstances in which his examination is happening, and thereby will almost invariably act to both prevent any over long self examination, and to preclude the relevance of such examination to the current situation (which has of course changed even as one self-examined!): Such a situation lads Leibniz to remark that the soul is not mistress in her own house (Theo 328)). The Leibniz will is less a lord of its monad and more , and more compared with a   cunning politician, whose power lies in arranging the timing of the various ‘assemblies’ (of the mind) to ensure the desired outcome is reached ( NE 193). The only alternative to such sharp election practises being the very Spinozian principle as preparing within ones mind (through frequent mediation) various strategies for coping with adverse situation (NE 196, 5/10s) and ensuring (again through constant attention) that certain useful affects are kept n the front of the mind, and thereby kept intense and powerful (NE. 204, 5/4s).

       However and in spite of the above contrast there are very real difference between Spinoza and Leibniz on this point. But here, to assess the nature of this difference one needs to bare in mind what I have argued elsewhere,, namely that for Spinoza the individuals essence is an Extra-Ordinary union of the twin power of perceiving and acting: Such a union is the peculiarly property of an individuals mind (and not something simply found in the finite universe itself. Spinoza’s starting position is therefore very similar to Leibniz’s. And yet the positions then immediately diverge about the nature of perception itself. For Spinoza perceptions (as they relate to the external world) are (by their very singularity) suspect and inadequate. That is they are in God as he contains an idea of very many things (2/11c). Now this move does not of course itself preclude the possibility that adequate knowledge can occur, But such knowledge (as it relates to the actual world) will not either not pertain to what is singular in that world at all, but rather what is common (and yet creative) between differing elements within it (2/38-39). Alternatively such knowledge (as it relates to essence) could not itself be said to be singular, as each essence can only be grasped with others (5/39) and ultimately only in terms of the infinite chain of causes itself (5/40s), a chain that effectively precludes the giving of a simple singularity (5/39s). It is therefore the case, that for Spinoza adequate idea always involve something other than singuality. The power the mind has over its affects is less election official, and more blacksmith, who can endless forge and re0forge new affects, as the occasion requires Human freedom then both Spinioza lies not in uncovering over options in the backwaters of the soul, but rather in being able to perpetually re-negociate exactly what ones body is, and what it can do, and to be able to do, and to do so through utilising the power of thought itself (which must of necessity lead to changes in the body -5/1). The external world, and the common notions are then vital to us as without them we could not form the common notion (2/38-39) what allow us to reword own being (4/31): The free man then delights in the company of his fellow humans (4/37), and knows that in association with them his own freedom is enriched (4/72)): One might say therefore, for Spinoza to be free is always to be with another.

   Behind this stark contrast of mind as election official (or may voyager into different lands) and the mind as forger (or chemist) lies the basic difference in what is singular in Spinoza and Leibniz. After al lit is certainly not the case that Spinoza simply lacks the concept of singularity, but rather that he argues that what makes an individual is singular, the body itself, does not itself pertain to the essence mind (2/19). The mind is the free (as far as its nature allows 3/7) to alter what that singularity actually is, and to re-posit it in someway, and thereby to increase the number of things that the mind  (and its body) can do). Spinoza’s freedom is then pitched where it is because the body the singularity in which it is housed is cited beyond its own nature (this is a point I return to below). In contrast Leibniz wants to argue that the singularity of the soul is a natural feature of it. But then needs to immediately (through desire) qualify that statement. Each monad is a singular viewpoint of the universe (N&G 3: Thus far each monad has a proper name, that it is Adam, Sextus or Caesar. And yet streaming away from each such viewpoint (in the form of desire) run numerous desires each which could open out of numerous other world, in which there was merely an Adam, a Caesar or a Sextus amongst all the other possible given in the viewpoint. It is then the necessities of embodiment that resolve all these multiple desires. That is, the monad in order to be (and to act) will need to embody its desires across other perception (that is embody them) and thereby catch then up in one world (one combination of desire and perception) rather than another. The world I actually inhabit is the direct product of the way I apperceive to my desires, and their perception, and attend to some (rather than others), with all the consequence that then follow.

To Conclude this first part on the Monad and teleology, one could perhaps indulge in one last contrast with Spinoza. For Spinoza (as I argue elsewhere) as well as above  the attribute was creative when perception was singular , while in contrast (in the idea of God) the perception of itself endlessly being created while what happened (the attribute) was singular: Causality then being critical as the it gave the sole sense by which  the attribute itself was ever singular. In arguing this way (and making the union of powers on the level of the infinite and not necessarily the finite 2/7c) Spinoza maintains the freest of accords between thought and action, where each power of able to spark of the together, and by pulling it otherwise, rework the very nature if what it (5/1). Leibnity in contrast wants to hold down this accord, by arranging it within a very neat little sequence. The Multiplicity of the perceived becomes gathered in the unity of the perception, which is itself a diversity of being undertaken actions, which in turn, become unified in the face of the diversity of subsequent perceptions (that is resolves into this volition, and not that). Freedom is then is real time subject to degrees. In the moment all possible desires are given in together, and are available for the mind’s use. And yet exactly which of these desired are followed (and which remain forever mere aborted possibles) is the immediately starts to be resolves by the interactions between these desires and other perception, and the subsequent new perception, and new desires that then follow. Hence one might say, that the mind, as  it arranges the neat series of perception-desire-perception, set itself with a downward spiral of freedom which spins off each desire. At the moment (through a event I am free), and yet that freedom then immediately lessens, and continue to lesson across life, as it is taken up into other perception, and made to resolve itself into certain desire rather than others. Leibniz might then in answer to Spinoza, uncover a way by which the mind the mind can both resolve the world into forms and be free, as the very idea of forms itself involves desires and therefore opens on freedom. And yet, he can only do so by capturing the mind in a law of dismissing returns for that freedom – as the freedom an event gives (the number of desires it has sparked off) becomes across time progressively hard to obtained, and as it is more and more determined within other impression. Faced with such freedom, Spinoza would no doubt remark that he preferred his own free necessity (which at least always held open I might change what I was) than this convergent series of freedoms. He would no doubt also note that ultimately whether a Monad freedom was really worth anything at all (given that it world have to decay into towards certain fixed assymtops ) would ultimately turn upon God, that is upon the force which determined which in the end of it all should be followed, and which left fallow.

Leibniz God in real sense mirrors, in that it booth reflects and yet inverts what is creative merely unified in the monad.God will not therefore exist in the world of the formal perception. God faced with the diversity of world in a single drop of water sees each world in turn as it actually is, and has no need then top locate  himself within a differentiating perception (Mo 65).  God’s infinite power of thinking will therefore preclude his forming of an idea of nature taken as something it itself. Nature is for him always composed of an absolutely (and actually) infinite number of world, and cannot then be gathered (as I do in perception) into one intense thought (Theo 195).  What is differential and creative in humans, is then in God endlessly definable and separate. Likewise God does not see the Monad does. I argued above for the monad both desire and perceptions are only possible as they are formally defined at some point. The minutest disquiet is defined by the quiddity of the perceptions themselves, while the differential I grasp can only be perceived as it is gathered in a single impression (which is opposed to all the rest). However it is clear enough that God’s mind will not operate in this manner. God will first create the essence of monad say Sextus, and then ills that essence its accidents and operation (Theo 390). But in the creation of these accidents, Gid will not see (as we might) a mind populated by endless separable desires, but taherwill pitch himself in the middle of all the desire of soul, taking in one glance both the perceptible and imperceptible parts. To read the book of fates of any one of the possible combination of desire in Sextus in to read an infinite book, where set of desires are given first in broad outline, and outline which itself rest upon an infinite of different moves of desire (Theo 415). Similarly, in any one Sextus God will know all the present desires both seen and unseen., and all the possible combination of them: God therefore knoew that Sexus could not go to Rome and be happy, but rather must choose between Rome and happiness (Theo. 413).

So far, in a sense God’s mind could perhaps been seen as merely inifinte human mind. However is clear and profound difference opens up between the two, when it is remembered that God does not just see one Sextus, but all possible Sexti in all possible worlds (414). And here of course, there is a potential problem. Leibniz will simultaneously argue that an individuals are free to choose any option but merely inclines us to certain options ( Ar 193-194); but also will of course simulatenously argue that every soul contains within itself both every that ha happened, but also everything that will happen ((mo 22 et al). And yet of course this second point would appear to problematize the first. After all what price freedom in there are already imperceptible desires in the soul which pertain the future, and incline one  way rather than another? Moreover Leibniz appears to imply this is the case, when he uses it as  a pretext to argue that all the Sexti in all the world are in fact different from one another  (Theo 415). At this point Spinoza might well ask, if all the desires of the mind present and unpresent incline the soul one way rather than another, how does Leibinz mind have any other freedom then the free necessity? However, would probably reply that the future itself is hidden from us, as the difference between an assymtop and a curve is hidden (NE 204), If then different futures are indiscernible when enfolded in the soul, freedom, and therefore leave to soul to choose between the alternatives. Nor strictly speaking do future possible desires need to be enfolded to the same degree in the soul, after all Leibniz will talk of the mind being inclined towards a certain choice (Ar195). All then that is needed is that in the folds of the soul certain futures feel possible (to different degress), and that the desires folded up in those futures does not unduly determine the future itself. The Freedom of the monad is then based upon the twin fact that it is able to re-gig desires within it, to produce differing outcomes, and that as it is fininte the exact identity of which future will be (and which will not be) is absolutely hidden from it:. Hence the division Leibniz draws between ways that the different Sexti’s lives can be read (416) . if one read of a life of Sextu in braod outlione, then that outline might cover very many differing Sextii,a difference which would then be registered only when one went to read the lives in more detail. That is, each plot line itself must (although leibniz does nt say this) actually have enfolded an infinity of differing Sexti within it, whose difference fro, one another is impercepible at other level.

This last point will then create a deep divide between the way God understands monads, as he creates then, and the way monads understand themselves.  For God every choice made by a monad is necessarily a bifurication of potential monads from one another: Sextus, as he stands at the gate of the temple, chooses one Sextus out of all the possible Sexti he could be. Each choice then involves a lessening of the number of different  Sextus’ that could be present (and that God will hol in his mind as he thinks a Sextus). Moreover, the past will be for God a place of restriction and limitation: Already something is Sextus’s past meant he cannot be a good man, and return to Rome. And yet the opposite is clearly the case for the monads themselves. Monads are free because as finite individuals there cannot know there own future (and so be caught in free necessity):, they must then genuinely choose. In that choice the past, with its rich source of other desires, is what enables them to be free./ That Freedom then consisting of the ability to run back to the past, and uncover other desires within it, desires that then allow then to unfold other futures than might have been. The Body will then have special organs for retain pasts (and past desires) in memory (Mo 26) – and will is those pasts to create for itself a world ( Mo 280). God, and finites monads exist very differently with respect to future and past. For God the future, is he space in which he can create differing possibilities for the same individual, and the past that which determines those possibilities; while in direct contrast, the future for the monad is where many possibilities are caught up and hidden within each other (and so always indiscernible), while the past is where these separate affects are drawn out, and usable as they are.

  In a sense one might say that the very premises on which God’s freedom is, is opposed to the monad. God’s freedom after all consisted on thinking before time (and as time runs - Theo 414) of all the possible Monads – a possibility which then of course is utterly unthinkable for each individual Monad (who becomes a mere number in the great book of fates –Theo 415). In This God’s understanding of Sexti, clearly operates in a way that I highly reminiscent of Spinoza’s God. I argue elsewhere that Spinoza’s God (and the essence he create) exist as an absolute middle. That is there power  lies in the fact that they are always in the middle of a creatively changing what they are. The Human essence wil lthen liwe in Desire, whose essence lies in increasing the power relations of the body (3/9), and with that changing the sense that the God himself understands that body, and the amount of existence it involves (4/38-39). Leibniz (following  Blynburgh – Theo 373), fails to understand this is an integral feature of Spinoza-ism, and mocks Spinoza for arguing in effect that the soul must change every moment (and yet is also strangely fixed – Ar 277). The Vision of God’s act of choosing before time is then no doubt Leibniz’s answer to Spinoza. It is only God as he exists beyond time, who can create a formal essence of a thing, and then have the idea of that formal essence differ from itself moment to moment.  The Essence of Sextus (or the Sextii) exists in God’s mind then, if not in reality as no fixed things, but rather are a locus of difference, or perhaps better, a name that typifies being in the middle of differing one own nature, and to be so as ones nature (the essence of Sextus himself) is thought.

The Similarity is no trivial one. I have again argued elsewhere that it is key to Spinoza’s conception of the absolute middle that such middle are  always with another. God cannot therefore be by himself, but is always with his attributes, his idea, and the essence he creates. The peculiarly power of God then lies in the fact that he alone in the universe can be always with another (what ever that other is). God’s power therefore lies in the fact that he creates infinite things in infinite ways ( 1/34, 1/16), that is in that he alone must be in the middle with everything else. Likewise, individuals modes for Spinpza can only form adequate ideas as they are with another (be that another God, and all other essences –5/40s, or common notions 2/38-39). Leibniz concurs. Firstly God simply has o options not to think all possible combination. As he exists (that is as he is a necessary being) he simply must both express his power with others, and give it in making every substance (monad) exist with another: That is it is the peculiarly power of God to break up individuality,. And make it resonates with other individuals – (the choir of other Sextii). But even more intrstingly, when god turns to the matte of creating difference within the monads, the tools at his disposal revert to a 'with’. Monads can endlessly differ from themselves, as they contain both desires and perceptions. That is As I desire, I create new perceptions, perceptions that then both modify my current desires, and yet also create new ones: God can then only be in the middle of all the Sextii possible, as the essence of Sextus himself always involves others (that is perceptions) over which it has no absolute control, but and is rather caught up in an exchange with.. For God to be in the middle of Sextus, is then for him also to be in the middle of others. These others then may not exist, as far as Sextus ‘himself’ is concerned (and cannot)m and yet are critical to the way that God creates in the first place. This ‘with’ of course pitches God aginst his creation in one last way. God, unlike finite matter, is pitched in the middle of perception itself. That is he need not see this or that finite thing (minutest perception) but rather is free to pose for himself a middle of perception itself (that is at each and every point all conceivable perceptions, of all conceivable Sexti sharing in that moment): Goid is therefore to pitch a middle with another between perception and desire, that no Monad which is perforce a denizen of time, could muster. It is the this with, that Leads Leibniz in a very Spinoza-ian phrase to talk of God’s mind containing an infinity of infinite possibilities, in which he considers all the ways substance can be with another  (Theo 22()5

     The contrast then lies between God’s being in he middle with another, and the Monad’s existence within a certain set of perceptions. The Monad’s freedom will then lie not in the ‘with’ relationship God forms with the essence of Monads, but rather, in  being able to create multiple connections (middle for another)  between existing sets of perceptions/ desires, connection that impel onwards into the future. In this process the role of a desire is critical. The desire of the Monad gives a sense that that each perceptions the monad has will resonate in a domain beyond itself (that is in other perceptions), catching them up as it were in the endlessly unfolding implication of having that perception (rather that another). Or to put it another way, for a monad the desire/perception combination, is not a matter of being with another, so such as for another. A mind’s freedom then exists in maintaining and also  harnessing these ‘for’ relations,. This is then done so that the mind (as a good master of electioneering) can remain as flexible of possible, and able to determine the situations of its life as best it can. That yet, for God, from his absolutest position, this very process involves a determination, in that God will always be able to perceive the eventual outcome of such combination (in a way the Monad simply cannot. Hence the sense of the parallel Leibniz draws between freedom and irrational numbers. (Ar117). The Soul at exactly what it is is, and how it will be determined canto (from within the essence of the soul itself) be fully determined. And yet, that does not prevent God, from his quite different perspective knowing what the Soul will do, and what it will be.. God and then offer Sextus the choice to choose differently, and have fate itself respun, and  so apparently risk the very perfection of the universe itself (Theo 416), and yet can do so in the foreknowledge that Sextus will not make this choice: Sextus then will hear of the choice, and wonder whether to follow it, and yet ultimately choose not to. And yet, here again one needs to be careful that one fuly appreciate the relationship between God and the monad.  Agued above that the freedom of god lay in defying the Monad. That is, is creating before time an impossible essence, in which an infinity of possibilities could be contained. It is now however clear that the Monad’s freedom imposes a similar ‘impossible’ thought upon God’s conception of the world. God’ mind itself (as the product of an absolute middle always grasps at world, taken as a whole (Theo 415). God cannot conceive then directly the freedom of then monads (taken in itself) in the world, and can then only express it to himself with a locus of all possible worlds (Theo 414), which taken together can locate all possible freedom of the monads as they actually exist, If the freedom of being in the ‘middle With another ‘ (the freedom of God) necessitated God acting in a way that could not be expressed in any one monad; the Monads own freedom to make each perception ‘middle for another’,  similarly challenges the way that God thinks, and requires him not to have one idea of one world, but rather the form a locus of all possible worlds. There is of course a difference here, in that God, as an absolute middle, can epand his being (that is his mind) in a way that Monads cannot. God can then include within his idea all world (albeit taken separately). But this factor should not of itself be allowed to occlude the fact that it is the freedom of the monad which necessitates this new thinking in God. God left to himself would no doubt from the idea of the one world he has created (with the one set of monads that were real in it), it is the monad then which force God to think this diversity. It is no wonder that Jupiter faced with the diversity of worlds Monad’s freedom creates) needs to return from time to time to the hall where he made his choices, and reaffirm their correctness (Theo 414).

At this point then arises one last asymmetry between god and man. Leibniz makes that argument that there is in all things (whether possible or real) have a certain urgency to exist. From which it follows for Liebniz that  that manner of being (world) which can express with it the greatest number of Monads will have a greater right to exist than any other less expressive world. It is then this world, which God must create  (Loe 791-793). To appreciate then the importance of this argument, one needs to remember the difference open out above between the sense the monad’s being and God’s. Each moand, as exists as a middle for another, will naturally straddle numerous worlds, all of which will have a certain clamour for being. Nor can the individual moand tell within all this clamour which world is more perfect and which it less. At best all it will do is judge from its own viewpoint what is best for it as it is (Loem 795). And yet, of course it is far more frequently the case that it will simply judge what is best the immediately present (and as it is enmeshed within minutest perceptions NE189). Monad’s own action use of final cause might depend them (in their own particular circumstance) one way or another, and yet will not provide any justification beyond that immediate determination for why it must make this choice (and so enter into this world) rather than another. Indeed one might go further, and say that the very freedom of the Monad to be in the middle form another lies in the lack of such criteria. Pilate is free to sin (or not to) because he does not know God’s full mind (and cannot), and must rather act according to what he can attend to, at any one tie ( Loe 226). However the situation cannot be more different for God. God’s freedom to create one world rather than another, lies not is straddles world, but rather in the reckoning up of all the world possible. Moreover, as God reckons up the world, his own nature as an absolute middle is revealed. God, will not then value either monads (or their worlds) in their own rights, but rather always asses them as they are caught in everything else. That is his criteria for assessing the diverse possible ‘middles for’ another, is very much that of the absolute middle itself. He will select what exists because it is participates in the creates amount of reality (that is it is caught in in the middle of the richest world possible – Theo 416). What is more, there is no Good beyond this richness  (Loe 227), that is, beyond this power to express the greatest number of things (Loe 791). God’s in choosing a world will not be concerned with the individual fate of monads with it,; hence Judas, Pilate, and Beelezbub himself rot in hell,  as far as God is concerned, if through their suffering the greatest amount of richness is included within creation (Loe 795).

Again at this point that one ends care to respect both sides of this asymmetry. On God’s side lies necessary existence as an absolute middle (that is that being which can contain all perfection - Loe 259-260), an existence that then grounds why something (rather than nothing) exists (Loe 994). This absolute middle will then express, in terms of its own nature the reason why the world with the most being must exist. It is then the role of the monad to give a reason why there is only one such world (and not many). That is, without the middle for, (that is the restriction imposed upon god by the ‘rules of the game of creation – Loe 792), there would be no reason in God alone to create one world rather that all the rest (Theo 416). In essence then this best world acts for Leibniz as the unifier of god – that is the unifier of the absolute itself. God let to himself merely perceives a multitude of possible world, and has no reason to make one rather than the other. It is then only the fact that there is a ‘best world’, that s a world which entraps within it the most reality, and therefore best express God’s own infinite power, which then force God’s creative hand, and requires him to make a certain world (rather than merely indulge himself in the luxury of thinking the possible). That is, it is the role of best world to act upon Leibniz’s God as the attribute does upon Spinoza’s God, but requiring that God locate itself in one existence, and not merely remain within that infinite infinity, that would otherwise be so natural to as he is in himself. Or to put the argument in terms of the jargon I use elsewhere it is the role of the best of all worlds in Leibniz, is  to entrap God in the middle in another (a world), just as it is in Spinoza the role of the attribute to express God’s in one fixed manner, and thereby as a power  (1/34 an 2/45).

Thus section started with the deep problem Spinoza-ism poses to the Aristotlian tie in between forms and final cause. Spinoza’s argument then amount to the claim that the reason why a formal cause and a final cause appears to imply one another, is not (as Aristotle would claim) due to any essential link between the two, but rather has its roots in the way efficient causation created both form and desire. Spinoza therefore argues that the idea of a thing will itself create a desire for it (3/28). This desire that can then only be torn from the causes that created that idea in the first place (and set up as a thing in itself), by abstracting it, from the very conditions through which it was, and act of abstraction which Spinoza argues taken one very far from the substance as it is in itself (Ep 12). Leibniz answer this critique be effectively splitting it in two. Firstly, he argues that for humans is perfectly possible to reconcile forms and final causes, if those final causes were themselves germane in the creation of the form itself. He can thereby annex to his own thought Spinoza’s deep claim that thought and desire are intertwined; this is true Liebniz will claim, but not because form somehow ‘sets’ desire, but rather because a form cannot manifest itself without accompanying desire. Secondly he argue that contra Spinoza that although the very existence of form might in finite being imply a certain delimiting of possibility, This is not the case for God. What is then delimited in us, as we draw ourselves together in apperception and have one thought (rather than another), is for God a manifestation of his very freedom to choose this world (rather than all the others possible). That is the very law of limiting returns I which we are caught in relation to events, and what they produce for us, is in God the testimony to his freedom to choose this world, and on other.

In the above moves perception must have a key role. This much was follow from the fact that it is the relative status of perception that lies at the philosophical core of the difference between Spinoza and Liebniz. The logic of Spinoza’s position famously makes him view most perception with very jaundice eyes. My perception of the world of experience he argues tells me little either about the nature of the world, or my own nature, as all that is communicated in such perceptions is the how the body, as it actually exists,  is caught up in changing it certain ways ( 2/25 and 27). And it is only by forming common notion, and thereby sharing in part the eyes of reason (2.38-39 sive God 2/11c) that man can move empasse.. For Leibniz such defeatism ceases to be necessary once one confesses that perception are themselves the very expression of substance itself (Mo 11-14). A move then has the advantage for the Christian Leibniz of allowing one to think the conditions of pain is useful in itself and not something simply to be excluded by the reasoning (and so free) man  Spinoza wants 4/64, and NE  165). However, as I argue elsewhere, perception is a far from a simple phenomena. In other essays I have characterized perception as involving a sense of being in the middle of another, and suggested that middle was itself ambiguous, in that it implied botha being caught up by others, and a sense that as I perceive, I am always changing into another (running trough and holding together). Liebniz’s understands that his response to this duality needs to be different for god (middle with another) and Man. Starting from God. It is God peculiarly being (as a creature of pure intellect) to start be perpetual inhabit the Middle of the middle of another. God will then perceive not one monad, and one set of perceptions – but will be rather pitched within thinking all the differing perceptions possible, and all the ‘anothers’, which might arise from these different perceptions; that is, all the ways these differing perception of another, might create, and re-create the mind that grasps at them. The individual monad, in contrast at this point exists firmly within the ‘another’ of this middle, in that it only perceives this another or that, and can have no idea of a middle in which all were possible.

   The monad’s own freedom then commences from the other branch of the middle of another; that is, from the fact that as it desires it is always caught up in making new perceptions. The freedom then of the monad is from the drive away from certain perception (and towards others,, it will come to define exactly what perception are given t it (and therefore to a degree at least what it can perceive or feel. In this Leibniz is very close to Bergson (as Deleuze notes) in arguing that the freedom of the monad lies in this ability, through desire to keep prevent the freedom of its desires (and the minutest perception the arrange themselves across) from defining ay to fixed and easy form – that is any too easy of anothers nature. Pilate’s (but also Adam’s and Judas) is the that they rush to form desires (and idea)  the mind, and so do not consider alternative possibilities with due care and intention. And yet (as mentioned above) the scope of this freedom is highly problematic. The soul does not have an absolute time of its won, in which it is free to rummage round in its soul to find alternative things that it can also be. On the contrary, it will, even in the process of rummaging be endlessly caught by new dilemmas (some causes by the rummage itself – other by new circumstances). The soul is hereby both perpetually forced towards new rummaging, but also suddenly trapped in embodying certain forms rather than others (hence the metaphor of the election agent). The monad then effectively installs itself in a gap it itself opens up between two differing senses it is caught up by others, that is between another as perception, and another as a thing. Or to put it another way, the monad inhabits as a desire (that is a drive towards a perception of another) a gap it itself opens up between the perception of god, as they are given in man, and the perception of man, as they are taken up in God (as a world). The monad the monad’s freedom, and its status to be as a God  is its own domain, the lies in being within this gap.

  Finally then God will then naturally take up the forms created by the monad into a world, a world that will then, in this very process of being formalised will confirm god’s own choice of this world, rather than all the others. If then a monad’s freedom is to inhabit the space between two different sense an idea of a thing can be given, god’s own freedom lies  in a gap god himself (through crating his monads) open out between all the things that could be happen (all the ways that God could pull and re-pull the world the world) and the world selected. It is then God’s peculiar power freedom to be able to turn an ability to form every world, into the desire to form one and no other  ( Loe 227).

  In conclusion that it is the peculiar virtue of Leibniz to take very seriously the question ‘what actually is perception? And more particularly, how can one  understand the shere number of things that perception does? How can percepton apparently give us own minds, while giving us an outside world, while defining what it I to act in that world, while defining the consequences of those action, while defining memory… Leibniz’s starting point is  that (unlike Spinoza) he does not think that there is a physical world that is, from a perception itself, dictating what must be seen (or not). On the contrary both young and old Leibniz are at on in thinking the physical world a mere world of appearance ( Loe 222).  Leibniz originality then lies in what he does and does not do with this fact. To consider what he does not do first. Reading Leibniz letters is to read the account of a thinker who tirelessly any conclusion that is all too easy. He rejects then all contemporary account of the mind, be they idealism, occassionalism or empiricism, that attempt to more too quickly from the world of perception to the real world. In all these moves, Leibniz’s refrain is always that things are never as easy as they seem; for example where locke argues the understanding is like a closet in which are  reflected certain images of the world, Leibniz insists that the reflection in this closet were upon a screen that was ‘diversified’ into folds, which could both unwind and enfold themselves, and thereby produce new image upon the surface of the ‘screen’  itself (NE.147).

  Moreover Leibniz’s own philosophy then rests of a realisation that the question ‘what is perception perception of’ is not one question so much as two distinct sets of question (and answers). First question being, the very Kantian problem, how doe I run through experience so that I can form stable images of the world, when all I have are perceptions of it ?  That is , in terms of Kant how does perception yield concepts? And yet, in his answering this question Leibniz, unlike Kant argues that one cannot demand that the knowledge created by this process is objective, as to argue thus would simply be to re-assert the ‘truth’ of he objective world one was attempting to explain. Forms cannot then be separated from the micro-desires through which they are made; To this degree then. All forms are provision. That is, there is always the possibility that one might get to rethink ones desires, and what seemed to tangible to he mind at on time, might merely appear from another angle to have the no more reality that does a rainbow. Of course Leibniz is more than aware there are limits on this freedom, and moreover will argue that these limits are themselves peculiarly tied up to what it is to perceive. As perception then is a window on other beyond a single Monad,  is not able to simply pull those perception any way it likes, if those perception are themselves being pulled by (and explained through) another Monad. So that, in perceiving one it caught up as part of the expression (the embodiment) of another nature, and therefore unable to easily pthink anything other than that nature ( Park 71-74). The second endemic limit of the minds freedom to rethink form lies in the body itself. body in themselves are expressive of a peculiar domain of the universe where the monad itself it always the dominating (expressive) cause (Park 72). It is then the role of the body to take up confused perception, which by itself gives te soul no more reality that one has in the deep sleep (Mo 20), and by concentrating certain perceptions (and thereby blending them over time – Mo 63-64) ensure that the mind moves beyond this stupor, and can grasp the world beyond it. A individual monad must then always operate according to the specific concentrations, and intensities its body gives it. A third even more problematic limit to this freedom lies in the fact that the mind is not simply free to rethink itself without form (as a common notion);, and so simply cannot suspend the embodiment of a form. All it can do is mitigate that embodiment, and challenge in some way even as it has being given (or once it has been given).. the mind then is never simply free to reforge what it can be, and o in the world.  However, even non-withstanding these three limitations, it remain the case, that for Leibniz to create a forms is to set a desire, and therefore the minds very freedom itself, is linked to its ability to re-thin any one form, and express it in new and diverse ways.

   The second question implicit in the of what perception is the perception of, asks whether the perceived has a reality of itself won. Leibniz’s answer is then very subtle. As that perception is a perception he claims the answer is no. it would be perfectly conceivable that god made one and only one monad, and filled it with perception of others. And yet, to answer the question in such a manner is to simply ignore the fact that no monad can of itself explain it own existence (Loe 792). Ad beyond is perhaps the more enduring point that this very question slips one out of the world of perception, and into examining the world as it is in the middle of itself. Leibniz’s point then is that middle – the world in itself can be thought of as real, but only if one understands it in turn as the juncture where God’s essence monads. Leibniz argument is then that questions about the reality (or not) of perceptions simply cannot,  be treated in the same way as questions about perceptions. The power the of God is expresses in the pre-established harmony of monads. In a very real sense this harmony is not itself expressive of a realty beyond it, but rather must be the actual active constituent element in giving that reality – a catches up perception in ‘real world’ which would otherwise be alien to the perception in itself’s nature . that is it, the harmony is in a sense the reality, as it s what is actively expressing (in terms of perceptions ) the very power of God, through which everything actually is in the first place. Perception is the jarred into the real (that is the divine) and made to express a reality that although it is other than the nature of the perception itself, acts to convey a degree of reality onto the perceived itself.

In conclusion then Leibniz’s answer to Spinoza’s deep problem of how one can perceive form and yet avoid determination, takes Leibniz very far down a path that demands he rethink both the  nature of what is real, and how that reality itself related back top perception (and to cause). In the course of which discussion, Leibniz substantially challenges exactly what is felt to be real, and what is felt to be an illusion. The point then being though out, to think up ways final causes can exist in the world, and to define the kind of beings that could be said t own such causes (and the kind of universe that owning itself involves). In making such a move Leibniz clearly responding to the deep challenge Spinoza-ism issue to Aristoltianism – a challenge which puts into question right and of  the finite to be thought before the infinite (1/33s). Leibniz the responds to this challenge by attempting to show how the infinite itself cannot be thought without the finite without singularity, and how such singularity (contra Spinoza) itself can only be thought (and justified) in terms of final causes. However before I pass on to the final problem Spinoza poses for Aristoltianism, it needs to be noted that Leibniz’ account is only possible by divorcing the reality of the world from the reality of perceptions. Here again the contrast is with Spinoza. For Spinoza the individual only existed as the existed in the attribute

( in the middle in another); each mind was then free to negociate the sense it was being given within that attribute, and therefore (via common and intuitive knowledge) rethink what it was to be at all. Leibniz monads have no such luxury. They might if hey were luck enough) rework what it was they were desiring, but could never rework desire itself, and certainly could never use he world (which is either before or after their being) to do this. Leibniz’s monads then remain trapped  within embodying the world in a certain way, a way that can be mitigates, and yet never avoided.

Where is the form of the Soul?

The third objection that Spinoza raises against Aristotlianism centres on the exact role of formal causes in the human essence. Spinoza uses the phrase ‘from of man’ twice is Ethics. In 2/10 , he argues that the form of man is separate from the being of God, as the latter is unique and infinite, whole the former is multiple and finite. Bu then what exactly is this form? In 4/39, Spinoza argues that ‘what constitutes the form of the human body …(is) that its parts communicates their motions to one another in a certain fixed proportion’. The form is then the very fixing of human shape, by others individuals, who are communicating their movement to one another ( 13/s def indiv).  Form is then , what delimits the essence itself – that is what sets it up as being a Thing’ – and defines in it a formal nature. So far, perhaps Spinoza is reconcilable to Aristotle.  But, then he argue 2/19 that the mind itself  (and by implication 2-2/12 – the sense essence of the body as it is in God) can have no idea of this form itself, (the body)  as it is being constituted by others, but rather, only grasps at the way that form (the body) itself is affected, as it actually exists. Spinoza thereby distinguishes the form of man from his nature. The form of man is the fact that others come together to create a fixed shape. This shape then being endlessly constituted within the Middle of God’s idea, through the interaction of others, who have come together to form a fixed ‘thing’ within the attribute. In contrast, y own nature relates to the fat that as I exist I am always in the middle of a certain set of changes (way of being a change), changes then I can only in part control (2/11 c – notice the shift between essence sive nature, and merely nature alone). To actually exist is the then to have a nature, and to be in the middle of a certain preset set of changes, and yet one is do without ones essence itself being comprised of that presetting. The essence is then not itself fixed (hence the fact that is can endlessly vary, and alter itself), but the body, which is so necessary to defining what its finite nature is, is. Hence Spinoza argues that the parts that compose the human body, only ‘pertain’ to its essence as they are caught up in communicating their motions to one another, a communication that defines both form and nature (note lack of sive) in one move (2/24). 

    This distinction between form and actual existence ( a distinction is perhaps is the heart of Spinoza-ism) directly challenges both the Christian and Aristotlian concepts of the soul. It challenges the former by effectively undermining the demand that unity is itself a product of the soul, and that therefore the soul has its own identity that can be redeemed. On the contrary Spinoza argues, such a rendition of unity absolutely confuses two very different unities. On the one hand there is the unity of the body. This is a unity that, as I argue above is prior to the individual as they actually are in themselves, and its genesis is both materialistic, and bound up in the infinite chain of causes. One the other there is the unity that the being of God himself confers of things as they are in the middle of actually existing. In that existence, each essence is perpetually caught up (and define as) in re-forging its nature (that is in re-working what it can do, and so be).  Considered in itself therefore, each essence could not be said to be have a being (1/24 or even strictly speaking a unity 1/25). It is only God, whose essence and existence (via the attribute) are given in a single expression, which then effectively confers the status of ‘being’ upon essence, and only does so, as that essence actually exists (within the body – 2/8c+s). The idea of an individual immortal soul is effectively a confusion of two distinctive (and yet linked) unities: The unity of the body itself, which opens the way for essence, and yet remains distinct from it; and the unity of the essence itself, which as it actually exists (that is has a body) is a mode in which God’s attribute, (that is the sense his essence and being are constituted as one) is expressed in some definite and defined way (that is God is expressed as being in the middle of being/ doing something - 1/25c ).

  Spinoza-ism’s challenge to Aristotlianism is just as profound. In De-anima Aristotle suggests are very neat connection between the function of a thing, and its form. The Soul of the eye, he famously claims is sight. ( De Anima…). Such an argument clearly has two distinctive argument caught up within it.  The first argument is very much the Cri de Coeur of natural religion (and it Darwinian would be successors), and amount to the claim that order itself requires explaining in some way, and therefore has the parallel assumption that chaos would be the norm without such an explanation. The second subsidiary argument is that this explanation can only be provided by a final cause, a which, once known (be that knowledge God or Genes) is in itself enough to explain the apparent paradox of order. Spinoza will then of course challenge both of these assumptions. To the first contention, he replies that on the contrary order is a naturally occurring feature of any part on the universe whose elements have been bought into an enduring contact with one another. Once such a contact is established (by whatever reasons) he argues feedback systems will be set up between the differing parts, and that form naturally arises as the result of these complex interaction ( 13/s def. Ind). At the risk of being both facieous and anachronistic, one might say that Spinoza is making very much the same argument against the Aristotlians of his day, ad modern complexity theory does against those who insists that order demands a reason which is distinct from itself ( See Godwin Kauffman Kellner et al versus Dawkinns and Dennnet). Order therefore Spinoza argues is simply the natural consequence of the fact that the body is highly composite, and therefore needs no explianation in itself.

  Nor (moving on to the second argument) would be think that teleology itself could explain this order anyway. The Corollary of 2/19 is that the human essence, that is desire operates on is own level which although is caught up with the form of the body nonetheless distinct from it (3/7). It is the role of the essence, then to rework, within the limits impose upon it by the bodies own nature, exactly what that body can do or be. Desire (that is as it is commonly understood teleology) is then not important because to confirms a form, but rather because it challenges it is someway or manner. Desire will therefore occupy a strange space that is Spiniza’s own between two facets of being a body. on the one hand there is the formal fat of bodidom, that is the formal fact that a certain relation of motion and rest has been established between diuffering individuals. On the other hand (and for Spiniza quite distinct from this) are the particular movements that are being expressed within this relationship. The argument then being ( 3/13 Lemma 4-7 +s) that exactly what  these motions are can, and will constantly change, without the form itself changing. Moreover as the body gains new motions, it gains new ways that this form is expressed, and enriched, and thereby opens out the body if the capacity to do more things (4/38). It is then the role of desire to be inhabit this space between the body as it formally exists, and what that existence can do (3/9s), and thereby to endlessly extend what the body itself is.To again given a biological (and therefore suspect) example, it is very easy to argue that individual animals action are critical in h way they define exactly what parts of their bodies matter, and what do not. If then fish had not, for whatever reason, attempted to survive of dry land then they would never have been ‘selected for’ the pre-requisites aid such a survival (Bourget?). The claim then that the essence of the eye lies in sight, is to stifle the essential difference between what a body can do from what it is, by making the former turn of the latter, and thereby loose all sight of exactly what it is in a body that is re-creative and challenging.

Liebniz’s response to this critique is then (as ever) complex. He certainly cannot reject it out of hand, as before he has ever read Ethics (Lo146), the young Leibniz made a very similar claim, He argues in a letter to Thomasius, that while  figure has an abstract reality of its own (a circle whatever its size is always a circle Lo 151), form itself (that is the precise form a thing has) is not something essential it itself, but rather merely an expression of the power of matter to move (Lo. 150). Ironically then perhaps, the Young Leibniz (very much like the young Spinoza) starts from the precise that it is matter than explains from, and not form matter ( No wonder then Leibniz has the young Theophilus say that as a youth he strayed into Spinoza-ism – NE 73). Once, of course, Leibniz became fully aware of Spinoza’s mature position, he simply cannot accept either the degrees of freedom that Spinoza attributes to matter, or to the account of the ‘soul’ that arises from those degrees. And yet, to go back to the Aristotlian position, is equally impossible, as Leibniz simply cannot accept the all too easy connection between a form and soul, but rather (albeit in his own manner) fully accepts that life must be understood as both from constituting and challenging. In his response to Spinoza, Leibniz must therefore both destroy the pretensions of extension to be active and order making in its own right, while providing his own principles through which the actual existence itself can be explained, and its link to a body elucidated. At the core of such an argument then lies the insistence that that the duality of mind and matter is absolute. He therefore has to ignore (or to mock) Spinoza very complex series of moves which are designed to distinguish formal thinking for objective ideas, and thereby open out a whole series of different manners of expressing the relationship between thinking and being (these are the four forms of parallelism, which I consider elsewhere). For Leibniz then, unlike Spinoza, parallelism is not a complex (and problematic) issue which requires much thought, and many diverse solutions, but rather can be simply and adequately defined through one single (albeit complex) argument.

  Leibniz’s argument against the reality of extension comes down a simple rejection of Spinoza’s contention (argued for in 1/15s) that one can understand the essence of extension in terms of a creative middle. As I mention elsewhere in this work, Spinoza argues in 1/15 that extension needs to be understood not in terms of the specific difference that are established within it be certain modes, but rather as the very power that allows corporeal substance to exist as that which differs others (but also via essence that which can differ itself). Leibniz’s claim here is complex. On the one hand he will reject that such one can ever adequately define the essence of extension as anything other than division. On the contrary he contends, it is very which of the essence of extension to be divisible infinitely, and therefore any particular part of extension is merely composed of a specific set of relations between distinct individuals and is therefore never a formal substance it itself (Ar 103).  This argument by itself would not of course worry Spinoza too much (who would no doubt merely not that is was based upon an assumption of the division of matter, which he denied anyway). On the other, Leibniz suggests that motion itself is always imaginary, as it is always relative, and that it is force which actually defined which of two bodies it is that have moved, and which remained constant ( Ar 87). Thus force then, is not a creature of time (as local motion must be) but rather is that quality which operates within the moment of time itself, to produce a certain quantity of motion ( Ar 120). Any particular motion is then merely the summation (that is integration) of these individual momentary strivings across time. Extension is then very far from being a principle of difference in itself, but is merely a unity that has been constituted from the sum of all those difference ( Ar 118). It is then on wonder that Leibniz thinks that Spinoza-ism flounders on its failure to account for what is momentary ( Ar 277). In making this claim Leibniz’s charge is of course not that Spinoza was to be condemned for attempting to wrap up numerous difference into a single being but rather that (is his desire to keep reality immanent,) he integrates too early, and therefore fails appreciate how reality itself depends upon the momentary( and therefore can only be integrated to form a transcendental).

In defence of Spinoza it might be pointed out that is it is not clear that  he actually makes this mistake. In the final letters the confident of both Spinoza and Leibniz, Tschirnhaus, centres on what exactly could and what could not be deduced from Descartes passive account of extension (Ep 81). With Spinoza remarking (in what turned out to be their final letter) that Descartes conception of extension was effectively useless, and that one needed to understood through ‘an attribute which expresses eternal and infinite essence’. To which he then adds ‘ but perhaps, if I live long enough, I shall at some time discuss this you more clearly; for I have as yet I have not had the opportunity to arrange in due order anything on this subject’ (Ep 83).  It then certainly the case that Spinoza, just as much as Leibniz rejected Descartes reading of extension (which Leibniz critiques) but of course (given Spinoza dies six months after writing the above letter) of course not clear exactly what Spinoza’s alternative was, let alone whether it was cogent or not.

All that can then said on this matter is there derivable from the Ethics. In this work it is clear (as I write elsewhere) that the concept of the simply body is by no means straight forwards. The word Spinoza uses to define simple bodies is ‘invicem’, which means reciporical or mutual (and first comes into he Spinoza lexicon in EP 32). Simple bodies are not then merely local motion, but are rather ‘mutually/reciporically distinguished by relations of motion  (2/ L1). Simple bodies are not then like individuals which simply ‘there’ : Nor are they merely a ‘local motion’ defined in relation to two different bodies (which was a theory Spinoza clearly knows well , and is deliberately avoiding see PPC)). It is rather the case that such bodies (which are the key element in the infinite immediate mode of extension Ep 56) are be distinguished from one another through the way they are caught up in changing each other : That is, they are given is altering others (which are also themselves given in altering yet others). Each simple body then function as the ‘middle’ to all other motions in that it is the sense that every other motion, even as it is giving itself can suddenly find itself otherwise than it was ( 2/13 A1”). Spinoza then draws the difference between simple bodies as the as reciporically distinguished, and as they actually exist. As they actually are said to be (so as I actually label one piece of extension as moving in some way), they are determined to that movement by another simple body, that must similarly be determined by yet another as infinitum. So that as one considers simple bodies are they actually are, they are bound up within natures order. So ( to carry on this hideously free reading of Spinoza) one might say that simple bodies have two distinct ‘states’. As they are in themselves, the exist (via the infinite immediate mode) as a way of changing motions: The fundamental element in the universe then a certain catching up of others is change. Ad these motion are then said to actually exist, they are localized in a certain time and place, and as they are, are caught up in the middle of absolutely everything else, through which this localization is effected.

   Whether one accepts or not my somewhat free reading given above (and elsewhere), what is certainly clear in reading Spinoza is that simple bodies, lack in themselves a specificity of time and place. A simple body is then never an event, which can be located within a moment (that is an action that occurs before time itself has begun, and are not therefore differential (and certainly therefore defied any quantification in terms of seventeenth century maths or physics). The contrast with Leibniz on this point is clear enough. Leibniz (unlike Spinoza) is arguing that force demands one think of  a single point of time in which  a force is given.

The Necessity then to think such a point leads to Leibniz’s complex fourfold account of the nature of matter and force (Ar 119-120, and  252). Matter is then defined as a passive force which is itself characterized as the ability of regions of extension to resist the motions of others. In contrast then active force is the force which  of itself produces motion. Passive forces themselves are then of two kinds. Firstly there is the force by which an extended body can be thought to resist the motion of other bodies which would otherwise encroach itself space (as a whole). It is then a natural element of this force that it is extended. It is this demand to be extended on the behalf of bodies, which Leibniz suggests actually explains extension itself, which is merely the reckon up of specific bodily diffusions ( Ar 251) . Secondly, each Body has a certain ability to resist the motion of other bodies. This force for resistance is then not a passive tendency of bodies to stay in one place, until moved by another ( as Spinoza appears to argue in 3/4) , but rather an active opposition to the movement another would give it (Ar 172-3 – such a force will then take on the role of rest in the Spinoza system). Matter is therefore comprised of a primary force in which a figure is defined as a resistance that is naturally diffuse across a regions of extension; and by a derivative passive forces, which resist the specific motions of others to a certain extent.

Active forces are similarly divided into two kinds. One the one hand there are primitive active forces, which Leibniz argues correspond to the soul or substantai form of a thing (Ar 119), whose nature is then to be certain given force, (Lo 741). That is,  as it is given in the  soul (substantial from), a primitive force naturally expresses within it, all its possible individual determinations, all given in a simple unity (Ar 252). On the other hand there are the individual manifestations themselves, which Leibniz called derivative forces. These Derivative active forces are then specific strivings of the monads to take up and modify those motion that it has, in a certain manner ( Ar 253) . Each such force, then represents the a certain delimination of forces as it is determined by the action of others (through, for example collision – Ar 119) to so something. Each derivative forces will represent a particular mode the underlying primitive force ( Ar 169)

  Now one needs caution here. On the face of it Leibniz appears to be accepting Aristotle’s division between from (the primitive active force) and matter (primitive passive force). Indeed, he will go so far as to claim that the soul is not a substance but rather ‘a substantial form, or primitive form existing in substances, the first act, the active faculty’ ( Ar 105). At such a point then Leibniz appears of the face of it very close to the Aristotlian conception of the soul as a final cause expressed within a substantial form.. And yet Leibniz himself is very clear that his theory is distinct from that of Aristoltoe’s.. In particular he argues that not only are soul and extension utterly different things, but also that the latter has so substantial reality of its own (Ar 78). The world of matter then remains bound up in the world of efficient cause, and must be explained through it alone, and therefore kept in a realm distinct from both final cause and form (Ar 54-55): Additionally, motion in itself (that is the world of efficent causation) operates against figures/ forms, and never requires them ( Lo 821). Forms will have therefore no role in explaining the specific problem in the natural world, and nor will the soul itself explain the structure and function of any one organ ( Lo 741). The ‘substantial form or soul’ is not the a shape, so much as a force acts upon the world to constitute a shape ( Lo 818): If is not then form itself, but rather the perpetual form maker, a maker that is then necessarily external to the form itself.

   Hence, in terms of Spinoza one must say that the role of the monad is not to explain physical form (and attribute to it a quite specious reason); On the contrary, the Monad the form of actual existence itself. As such, for Spinoza-ism the monad is the product of an illicit union between the different unities of God’s power (as it is expressed in an actually existing essence) and the unity of the body itself (which is defined as something external essence of the mind itself). Spinoza would no doubt argue that two further curious features of Leibnizianism arise from this failure to allows for a duality in the unity of the soul. On the one hand Leibniz will find it very difficult to think of any other reality than these very specific ‘actual’ existences. Anything then that cannot be characterised in terms on something’s actual existence is then simply dismissed as some well-founded phenomena that itself expressed some aggregate reality. The problem here is then an insidious one. It is not that one cannot create other ways of thinking unities beyond substance (on the contrary Leibniz never tires of defining different species of unity, such as passive power or substantial chains) ; but rather that one faces the perpetual restriction that every unity that one finds must at some level conform to the rigours of something which is already in actual existence, whether that restriction is useful or no. Moreover (as a corollary of this last point), it is essential to Leibniz’s move, that actual existence itself ceases to be able to be explained. On the other hand, for Spinoza, Leibniz’s rush to unity around actual existence simply ignores the very peculiar nature of that existence itself (in which an objective and formal idea cohere, see 2/ 12 and discussion elsewhere).. This in turn drowns any hope of moving beyond this peculiar circumstance that found the parallelism of powers in the mind. As a result then Leibniz loses sight of the very rich domain of parallelisms which Spinoza careful uncovers, and in there stead imposes one and only one accord of body and mind.

   However, Leibniz might well have echoed Bergson , and  replied when faced with these criticisms, that at least his method allows one to theories something that is admittedly odd in being a body. Namely the disjunction between the complexity of procedure that make up the body, and the simplicity of initial causes itself ( Ar 54-55). Moreover, Leibniz could have continued, that his explanation has the advantage over Spinoza’s in that it to nay appeal to a communication of motions, which might make sense (to a degree) for simple individuals such as Spinoza directly considers (2/ L 4-7), and yet clearly become more problematic when one considers turns to such a complex individual as the human body itself, whose myriad connections must (by Spinoza’s own admission (2./27) must elude human thought itself. Ultimately therefore the assertion of necessary communication remains an abstraction, which flies in the face of reality as it is perceived. Far better, then Leibniz might have added, to face up to the disjunction between body and soul, and allow for a theory that could think this disjunction as it is given, rather than impose a specious unity upon it. A remark that do doubt would a silence Spinoza, as he noted the profound difference between his doctrine of creative middles (and the unties which express them) , and Leibniz doctrine of unity (and the middle in which it is expressed).

    Returning then to Leibniz. It is then in this context that word Monad first starts to appear in Leibniz writings. In a letter to Bernoulli,( in 1698, two years after first use in 1696) Leibniz here remarks that ‘ what I call a complete monad or individual substance is not so much the soul, as it is the animal itself, or something analogous to it, endowed with a soul or form and an organic body (Ar 168 – Sentiments that themselves echo essay  on Nature itself also 1698, section 11 – Lo 818)). That is Monad’s exist in their first inception at the juncture of substantial-form/force and matter. For monad, the body (matter and form) are not something accidental to it, but rather is the very means by which the actual existence of that monad is itself expressed. So to put it another way, each monad needs a body, in the sense that it needs a specific region of extension,  that is peculiarly caught up in expressing its nature, that is (the terms of Spinoza) its actual existence ( Park 64 and 72). Once the Monad gives the necessary synthesis of form-maker and matter, the exact role f the form maker itself, the entelechy shifts somewhatFours years latter (writing to De Volder) Leibniz argues that  one needs to understand Monads not as the junction point of form\force and body, but rather as the union of a certain point of view (which is now the entelechy itself) and a certain degree of  passive power( Lo 863).  There are two quite distinct moves in the above argument. On the on hand, once the monad itself is what is at the juncture  union of matter and for/m/ce, then any appeal to externality in the name of form is lost. The form itself is itself a product in the monad upon the world, and so the entelechy (which is still conceived to involve a link to something beyond the monad) must accommodate itself to this fact (and therefore not relate to something external to the monad itself – the form). On the other (and arising out of the last point) the externality of the entelechy has clearly shrunk to being merely the externality of a single (and quite placeless) point of view. And yet, one needs considerable care here. The point of view is not in itself simply ‘passively there. On the contrary an entelechy implies a set of activities in the world, of which it is the perfect and most complete expression (even if it never acts to produce – Lo 863): To view is therefore not a passive thing, no does to the world, but rather an activity which in the very viewing acts to define (express) the world in some certain manner: Indeed it is only this activity which can confer upon the viewer the status of being somewhere in the universe in the first place, and therefore open up a point of view at all ( Lo 983).  The shift here is considerable (and would merit many a formal study in itself), however all that matters for my current argument, is how the argument allows Leibniz to further clarify his exact position against both Aristotle and Spinoza, a clarification which I will now consider.

  Once the Monad has taken on the role of expressing actual existence in terms of being an ‘emergent body,’, two corollaries immediately arise follow. On the one hand, any insipid   connection between form as it is habitually understood and the body is of course lost. The form the monad constitutes is never simply located within the world as such, but rather is the perpetual construction, of the monad, as it expresses itself in a certain region of extension. Each Monad will then, naturally take up an infinity of other monads into its body, and by taking up their action into themselves, builds for itself its on body (or machine) by which it express its own specific outlook on the world (Lo 864). It form is then very much at one with the kind of whole which Deleuze attribute to Bergson. That is, it is a whole ,whose  ‘wholeness’ , does not lie  in being a complete form which it the set against the universe, but rather is given by its very way of being open to the universe itself (Del 1987?).

   On the other hand Leibniz is clearly further developing an account of the body that, unlike Spinoza, is not rooted in any harmony (or commication) of parts, On the contrary he suggests that here is a very real sense in  which the monad is set against the body. Leibniz suggests that the material body is like a curve which has been constructed out of tangents (Lo 865). As such each material process in the body, will neither give any clue to its nature nor of itself be natural to the body in which it is housed. Indeed left to itself, each individual process would (as a tangent) leave the body altogether. However Leibniz adds this is not the say that one only perceives these processes, and therefore have no impression of the curving of the body itself. On the contrary, he suggests that such an impression will arise , as each process is caught up in the other parts of the body which it both expresses, and will in turn be expressed by. This expression is not ‘communication’ as Spinoza understands it, as it has no formal cause within extension itself. Thence the Body itself, as it is given in extension alone, remains paradoxical On the one hand there are all the cacophony of disperate process in which it is given; While on the other the relatively stable form of the body itself which emerges apparently without a cause from all these processes. It is then role of the monad to be, by adding micro-purposes, to be transforming one from one domain to the other.

  It is again worth very briefly contrast Leibniz with Spinoza at thing point. For Spinoza the actually communication of the parts of the body is not directly knowable by the mind itself ( 2/24, and 27). And yet this does not means that the mind had no access to this communication amongst itself parts. On the contrary, when the mind comes to form common notion with others who ressemble ones own body (2/39) these communication come to the fore. But in this case they are not formally making the body, so much as allowing one to have new ways to rework it exact nature (that is what it can do and be). So that knowledge itself is necessarily transform natures, and does so even as it understands those natures as such. Therefore for Spinoza the actual process of the body remain hidden. What one then analyses are individual process, as they appear within one own perception (2/27). These process are then analysed with the aim of establishing common notions with both other local process bodily (that is general common notions –2/38) and with the body as a whole (2/39) – with the aim of increasing what an individual body can do (or at least stopping it being decreased). For the Spinoza-ian, one isolates individual physical process not because such process represent a fundamental level of truth  (either in the body itself, or aka Leibniz beyond it), but rather for the far more prosaic reason that it is easier to uncover specific common notions if the number of variable are decreased. The Good Spinoza-ain doctor, will not therefore make the error of mistaking the methodlogy by which common notions are formed, for the fundamental ‘truth’ itself.  Indeed such a doctor knows there is no fundamental truth in the process they mange beyond the fact that these process are always caught up the curve of the body and that it is the pecualiarly power of common notion to be able to redraw that curve.

   In Contrast the Leibnizian doctor has a both a greater faith in the importance of the process uncovered, which are ‘real’ in themselves, and yet far greater doubt about the provenance of that reality itself  that for such a doctor is merely a phenomena). Such a doctor will then be far more worried about essentialism, and what could be said to be the purpose of a thing than their Spinozian colleague. This worry has two distinct expressions. On the one hand, each such doctor might endlessly worry about the rights and status of a specified (and unproblematized) thing (or monad), and demand that all research must reflect that monads needs (be it a person or a planet). On the other for such a doctor, integrative realities are given by teleologies, no matter at what level such purposes are found. Hence one can find the fundamental ‘element’ of anything, if once can find a region of extension (be it man, animal or Gene), whose strvinngs could be thought to provide a ‘purpose’ for action elsewhere in extension. This move to final causes can then cut two ways. On the one hand it can very easily slip into blinkered essentialism, Such an essentialism will invariably argue that the very complexity of reality demands a simple solution beyond all its fuss, and will then proceed to warp reality into expressing such a simplicity. On the other hand the Liebnizian methodology does give one the conceptual tools to defend specific causes (which are wrapped up in teleology) from incursion by others. Spinoza-ism of course in contrast offers no such comfort, as cannot have knowledge without changing ones own (and anothers) nature (hence the importance of Spinoza’s claim that understanding is the very essence of a human 4/26). In effect in most great political/moral debates, even to most ardent Spinoza-ist will be forced to be a Leibnizian, in order to prevent worse thing happening, and will have to do so even as they (at another level) work to undermine the final causes circumstance has forced upon them.

   However is there s a problem in Leibniz’s position as it emerges after 1698.  The advantage of the dividing the world into matter and substantive form lay in the fact that such a distinction, kept Aristotle’s clear divide between the simplicity of the soul and bewildering tumult. Hence the sense it encaspulated both a clear difference between soul and body, and gave a sense that the soul itself was distinct from its derivative perceptions. And yet once that support has been swept way by the Monad, whose physicality is defined solely in being a blind-viewpoint of the world, the exact difference between the soul and its perception becomes far more problematic. Moreover this dilemma is then intensified by the fact that Leibniz needs to include freedom in the human soul – and can only do so , by stressing the role of perceptions in this freedom. Adam might have been so very different if only he paused longer than he did before eating the apple...Moreover he argues that this freedom represents the possibility that there are  between different Adams or different Sexti. So that each perception represent simultaneously a parting of the ways where one set of Adam are lost for ever, while those that remain possible have their respective likelihoods further refined; And yet at the same time (and indeed as part of the same process) each perception creates new ways of desiring, new striving of the soul, which potentially endlessly echo across the mind, and thereby catch it up in yet other perceptions. The danger then it that the monad might have escapes Spinoza-ism, and restored final causes, and done o at the cost of losing itself with (for Leibniz) the more pernicious and worrying world of Deleuzianism, where the monad ceases to belong to an individual (an Adam) but will rather affirm the very difference between Adams, and between worlds, as something positive (and creative) in itself. Leibniz then faces, as he writes the Theodicy, the deep problem of how he can both allow the monad to be what defines the world, and yet free, without losing the individuality of that monad within all the specific difference across which it is constituted. That is, what is so very peculiar about the Monad’s integration that means it necessarily defines the differentials over which it is arranged, in a way that the body which has its own differentials) cannot? 

   The latter Leibniz will suggest three main alternatives to this potential destructive difference. Firstly he attempts, an a priori argument, to minimise the power of difference by denying that derivative forces have any   independence from primitive substance. Derivative forces are  therefore simply relegated to phenomena of primitive force ( Ar 181). Derivative forces are therefore necessarily contained within the monad, and so not free to undermine it in many ways. And yet such a move is utterly unconvincing, as it simply begs the question what is the nature of this containing? Does the Monad all possible options (jn some way)? But then how are all the different Adams differentiated amongst themsevles? Or Does each Monad merely contain the things that happen to it, but then what makes it freedom different from Spinoza’s free-necessity? Secondly, Leibniz puts forward what amounts to an a posteri argument, which runs, from the fact we live in a single actual universe (rather than the infinity possible), that cannot appear to either account for itself own existence, or nor its singularity, one can infer a reason for both. This reason, of course is then God ( Lo 790-797, Mo 45). Moreover, the apparently contradictory facets of God nature (absolute power to create, and the actual creation of one universe), are then come together elements within God’s infinite perfection. Additionally, it needs to be remembered that Leibniz’s proof of the possibility of God’s existence depends upon perfection. The Young Leibniz having argued to Spinoza that the proof of God’s existence depended upon being able to demonstrate that a being which contained all perfections was possible, (Lo259-260), the peculiarly virtue then of such a being was that is such a union was possible it must then exist (Mo 45). It is then God’s perfection itself that guarantees both grounds the existence of the world, and guarantees its singularity, and therefore prevents the monad from slipping into chaos. This second argument avoids the pitfalls of the first, by removing the reason for the unity of the world (and the monad) from the world itself. God’s mind will therefore work at a very different rhythm to that of the monads. It contains both eminently and directly, what individual minds can only know through the perception of actual existence, and therefore is free to ground their identity. This is no doubt then an advance of the first argument, and yet that advance can only be made of abandoning any real hope of accounting for the unity of the world from within the world as such. Indeed the entire argument turns of the fact that such a move is actually impossible, so that the very fact of this unity is itself a proof for God’s being. An explication, which while it might be logically valid, must surely fail in that it must make a jump to an eminently God, just at the moment when one might have expected some sort of physical account of bodies, and there apparent unity and not merely a moral exegesis. That is, as an argument it fails to tackle the very basic question of why God needed to create a unified physical order, and then how that order itself relates to the fact that the Monad is free essential to open on an infinity worlds, and yet actually (as it exists) confined to one alone. Or to put it another way, although such an argument give an account for why there must (logically) be one world, is then fails to understand how God, as he actually creates the world both ensures that singularity (of he world, and of the monad), and does so even as he is allowing those very monads their freedom. The Dual freedoms (of God and Man) are therefore simply abstractly asserted as something that must be, and their positions in relation to each other (which is of course the freedom that actually matter) is left unproblematised.

    The two argument then represent both aprori and an aposteri attempt account for the fact that the monad and the world experience themselves as having an identity which itself emerges across time. That is both are attempting to explain why it is that however we change in time, we still experience ourselves as a unit . The First argument then simply asserted the right of that unity, but then could not sustain these rights in the face of the way that unity must differ from itself in order to be free. The second then asserted the right of God to ground unity, but thereby simply ducked the question. However, Leibniz has one last explication of identity. This explication that is found in the De Bosses correspondence alone, and worked out ostensively in the context of definition a theoretical pretext for (appropriately enough) transubstantiation, attempt to rethink the nature of physicality itself, and its relation to God. The key argument in these correspondance centres around what reality could be attributed to the physical world itself,.  In the course of the letters Leibniz oscillates between arguing that one can (and possibly should) think about a physicality beyond the perception world of the monad ( L0 975-976), and then subsequently question to value of doing so ( Lo 1001).

  Despite this vacillation it is clear a very deep shift is going on in Leibniz’s concept of the physical world. Before this correspondence Leibniz perhaps peculiarly conformed to the very standard Plotinian-Chistian account of matter as somehow passive and suspect. He writes to Arnauld  that matter taken as mass is merely a well grounded phenomenon, and lacks therefore any reality beyond that of an aggregate (Lo582-529). Matter world therefore appear to be the very uninteresting by-product of what was real, and therefore no direct expression of God’s creation. This is then a position that in the De Bose letters Leibniz more or less explicitly renounces. He makes the face of it startling claim that (following Theodicy) one must understand physical necessity as itself a ,product of the moral order (and therefore not to be pitched against it – Lo 983). The Argument then being that God chose with universe rather than all the others, no because of any one monad, but rather because of the way that the relation between monads in this world were richer and more complex than any other relations in any other world (Theo 416?). These relation at then expressed in the way that one monad effect another (and effect which in given in God alone – Lo 991), and therefore a peculiarly expressed within the world of relations between things (that is matter). God therefore not only has clear ideas of the relations between things, as something separate from things themselves (Ag 199), but also uses that idea in deciding which world (of all possible) to create (Ag 202).

Hence, the basic claim  of the second argument above, that God’s morality implied an unity in the world, has been transformed from an abstract argument into a very principle for the unity of matter itself. Matter in being unified expresses the morality of God – that is the fact that he chose this universe, with these monads, and one other. The question then is of course exactly how this identity, through matter relates the world of monads themselves:  question which itself might be usefully broken into three parts; Firstly there is the simple question of the exact mechanisms through which matter can be thought to be operating as something apart from the monads themselves; secondly why such a disparate thing of a monad must always be characterized in terms of having an identity, which its itself somehow tied up in being a body; finally there is the opposite move of exactly what it is about the monad itself that grounds the world as this world rather than all the others. Each of these question must be tackled in turn, before one can fully appreciate the full subtlety of  Leibniz’s answer to Spinoza deep challenge to the essentiality of form.

What Substance then could as being apart from the monads, and which its itself comprises of relations and effects alone ? First it is clear that such a substance (Leibniz calls it a substantial form or a substantial chain) will require three things of the monads. Firstly it will need actual monads to exist at all, and yet as it must be composed of merely relation (that is the effect of one monad upon another) it will remain something very distinct from the monads themselves ( Ag 202).The phrase Leibniz uses here is ‘superadded’. The Monads by themselves exist only in terms of perception (Ag 202).It  is then God whom adds something to these monads other – a substantial chain, in which certain relation can be fixed (Lo983). For this reason, Leibniz will resist De Bosses suggestion that these chains could be thought of as an accident. Accidents argues imply some substance, whose accident they are, and therefore relate to monads alone. Substantial chains, in contrast, can only be thought to exist is they are thought to stand as something apart from the monads themselves   (Lo 980. Ag 204).  Each chain, comprising as it does of merely relations, could be associated with a variety of different monads, likewise he same monad of even (and Leibniz makes this argument in the context of the transformation of Bread and Wine in transubstantiation), the same set of monads could come together to make widely different chains ( Lo 985, 986 and 988).

  Secondly, each chain implies a union of the relations of monads (Lo 975), which are, as they are which a chain, constantly responding to one another (lo 976).  Each chain is therefore naturally diffusion of ‘parts beyond parts’ across extension ( Lo 977), where each part is a part in the chain as it is caught up in composing a perpetually changing relation. Moreover Leibniz will argue that one should invert one customary understanding of part diffuse in extension. It is not the part that extension itself is a whole, in which parts inhere, but rather than, by being naturally diffuse, that parts themselves give an extension which expression that diffuse ( (Ag 204-205). The chain itself is then something quite distinct from the aggregate, as all its parts need to be thought of as occurring together (or not at all –Lo 985-6). Flux is will not therefore  something accidental to such chains. On the contrary, the very essential nature of chains themselves is to be in a flux (Lo. 975), as the parts endlessly express themselves shifting relations, relations that of themselves produce the every extension in which they can be abstractly located. From which it also follows that whether a particular chain exists or not will depend upon the continuing desire of its parts to create certain relations. Unlike Monads therefore substantial chains are ephermal and subject to creation and destruction (Lo 976), and it will only be entelechies and the individual monads that will be able to explain why such chains come and go as they do.

  Thirdly, Leibniz makes it repeatedly clear that such chains are not the result of a random composition of parts of the universe, as they interact with one another, but are themselves always and in every case associated with some dominant monad ( Lo 992 and 995). Ach chain is the caught up in being within the body of this monad (Lo 990), whose nature its dynamic yet singular chain echoes (Lo 994). Now one needs caution here, so that one is clear of the nature of Leibniz’s full position about the status of domination. One the one hand Leibniz is very clear that within a single chain there will be one  dominant ( and possibly reasonable) monad, and a variety of  dominated (animal monads). Each one of these animal monads will however themselves dominate other lesser animals (and so on ad infinituum -  Lo 984). It would then be very easy to here attribute to Leibniz some kind of ‘top’ down approach of Monadic government, (and contrast that with Spinoza’s faith in the self organising capacities of matter). And yet this argument would actually essentially Distort the nature of Leibniz’s argument. Even the most dominant of Monads does not directly influence other monad, and therefore does not itself cause the movements of others the relations of other which it itself expressed ( Lo 984). Apparently paradoxically therefore the dominant Monad does not itself creates the order which it itself expresses, and does not do so even though the order itself is unformable with the very act of expression itself without the monad itself. The move is then absolutely not one of tyrant and subject. But is rather a far subtler claim, that the very fact that one is able to open out a viewpoint upon the universe of itself implies a change in the ordering relation of that universe, that must itself allow itself to be viewed. Each exteriority of the entelechy is then not merely that of a viewpoint , but also involves a ‘primary active force’, And yet, the force is as it is caught with others merely a constitutive part of the composite substance itself (Ag 205). To be a viewpoint of the universe is then to express the reality of the universe itself (which differentiates the entelechy of a composite substance from a monad itself). Moreover this expression, as it involves the real, does not pitch itself as itself beyond that reality, but rather constitutes itself (and its order active primary force) as itself a part of that which it is ordering. The viewpoint itself will therefore be caught up in the ordering the universe its views.  This ordering is all the more important as substance itself (naked monads) lack any position in space and therefore  cannot themselves define a viewpoint ( Lo 983), but which it can be distinguished as different from tall other viewpoints (864). The Body (an the entelechy that views through it) is therefore not merely a passive opening on the preformed world o monads, but rather involves an act of constitution in which both where it is one views, and what is to be viewing, are defined in a single active construction

It is then this last point that lead one naturally the second main question raises about. The question of how the physical world itself, comes together to bare witness the monad itself.  One has at this point to remember the distinction between the entelechy (the viewpoint or substantial form) and the Monad itself, with only the former implying a being caught up in things. The Monad itself as it deals with it only every deals with itself alone, remains in its own personalized world of perception (and therefore does not formally dominate anything at all), and can remain in the world of phenomena. At thus point, an apparent oddity arises in Leibniz’s position. He had of course argue to De Volder, and elsewhere that the monad itself necessarily involved having a form, and the entelechy a viewpoint , and yet now in the letters De Bosses appears to have reverse the position. However such a reading looses sight of the subtlies involves here. The Monad by itself necessarily has a body, but has as it merely as yet another phenomena (Ag 205). Having a body therefore for the monad is merely part of the way it expresses its own being in the universe. So that is does not formally separate the externality of the body from its own sense of being, or from the sense that that being itself involves the perceptions of others. Hence Leibniz will make the apparently paradoxical claim that the substantial chain will be taken within the monad in whose body it is (Lo 990). What appears to constitute the body of the monad itself (as it is in extension) is then itself merely a part of that body, when it is taken within the Monad.  The Monad will therefore take up into itself all the shifts and difficulties that (in extension hook up body and viewpoint), and naturally inhabiting them, as its way of expressing the universe. The Viewpoint itself (the entelechy) has no such natural inheritance. On the contrary the point of the substantial chain is that it is operating as some great machine, by which what it is to be a view point itself upon extension becomes formally defined, that giveble. The Entelechy therefore, unlike the Monad involves the reality of others – which it views, as an act of creation/activity, in which the nature of it as viewpoint, is given as one with an activity in what it is viewing (the substantial chain of the body itself).  That is to say, for the Monad extension is something it naturally inhabits as it expresses its own reality (that therefore knows is but a phenomena), while for the point of view, extension is something to be created by ones very being pitched with a body.

    At this point one needs care that the complex terminology (and slightly different) terminology that Leibniz develops within Monadology does not distort the picture. In Monadology Leibniz starts with the monad itself, and the kind of difference (perception and appetites) which are native to it.  It is then only once he has clarified perception, he then turns to the external world itself, and introduces the entelechy, which he differentiations from the Monad as something that necessarily involves being created ( he calls it therefore a simple substance or a created monad – Mo 18 ). The Entelechy is therefore not a merely abstracted (and potentially naked) monad, but is rather caught in being a certain activity, with which perception is expressed: The Entelechy/created Monad is therefore introduced in the context of the impossibly of a machine for perceiving: Hence it is the entelechy, which takes up all the moves the machine (and beyond it the universe) as expressive of its own point of view. The Soul (from this perspective), then drops any pretension of having a form, and is firmly taken into the Monad (Leibniz therefore says the soul either implies simple monads – that is the world of  perceptions-appetetites, or, and more preferable, only complex monads, who were able to have sensation, as opposed to simple inchoate perceptions- Mo 19). Created Monads then becomes synomous with entelechy (that is being a certain viewpoint by having a body) in the case of simple living creatures (Mo 62-63), but differentiated as it necessarily includes both sensation and memory in the case of animals (Mo 63). The distinction between the monad and the point of view (the entelechy) is therefore only lost in the case of the simplest of living being, where there is no more reality to being a body, than its ability to express a certain point of view (that is have certain perception of the universe). In the case of animals, a more complex relationship as being a body catches one up ion first sensations, and then memories, which take the created monad beyond the mere necessity of giving a viewpoint. The simple substance or created monads or living beings or Entelechies of Monadology would therefore be bodies that would lack substantial chains.  Such a body must be akin Spinoza’s to the simple individuals of 2/ 13 L4-L7,  which lack any internal diversity in themselves, and merely constitute the communication of external motions between homogenous parts. Likewise living bodies, which lack any sensation, must lack the differentiation between the parts of their body across which a perception would be naturally modified into a sensation (Mo 25). The Body then of the entelechy of Monadology serves only to give it a location in extension – that is a certain angle on all other monads. To have a body, is then to be caught up in participating within the constitution, by monads, of extension itself. Living bodies will then not just have an angle on all other monads, but also will naturally be able to divide up their perceptions into a temporal order. It is therefore for simple substances (or created monads-entelchies) form whom the present is pregnant with the future, and laden by the past, while the bare Monad itself would be lost in endless dreamless confusion ( Mo 22, and 24).

  The Monadology doe not so much break with the very basic triad of viewpoint, body and monad, so much (and by starting from the monad itself) enriches it, by investigating in depth what it is that makes the monad in itself distinct from the entelechy (the abstract naked monad), what it is that makes it indiscernible from it, and what it is that then allows it to be more than (and yet include) the entelechy  (the animal). In terms of the problem raised above (the problem of exactly now an individual could be thought to be singular, An Adam, A Sextus amongst all the rest), the divide has clearly opened between living bodies and animals. Living bodies are merely living mirrors of universe: There singularity is therefore not different from the world they are passively reflecting: They have therefore no ability to stand on the cusp of worlds. One might then say that such mirrors represent the living embodiment of the relations of extension itself, whose construction itself forms the very being of these mirrors (Mo 56-58). Animals, by contrast have a far more complex relationship with extension, which they cannot express to themselves without both modifying it is one way (that is forming a sensation, and memories Mo 18-20) but also without being open to other possibilities: That is the difference between animals and living being, is that animals are able (is a way living being are not) to articulate the past, to form the present, so that is one changes the past of an animal, one gets a different beast ( Mo 14): Animals will therefore articulate in themselves the vagaries of chance (that is of a differing universe), with the result that each animals stands on the cusps of numerous possible incarnation (in a way that living beings cannot. Humans are then differentiated again ( and Leibniz attributes them minds) because unlike animals, they can (at times) cease control of the process by which the universe stands of the cups of different possibilities, and so choose their own particular path ( Mo 82-83). To be composite therefore (that is to have a body which itself is a substantive chain, is therefore to be able to be other that one was, and to require the universe to accommodate to that fact (AG 205).

  The Substantive chain is then a serious attempt to think through the complexities involved in this expression of a single viewpoint, which itself could, even as it views open out on different universes. Each chain will therefore refies the phenomena outside the soul (983): That is it express in a  ‘space’ between other monads (in diffuse parts beyond parts)  the viewpoint of a certain soul., and thereby expresses in terms of other monads, the perception of a single dominant monad. Such a realization will therefore defy precise location, within extension, which will rather echo the soul by the sense it creates a unity which at every point is in flux and  diverse. It is then the role of this diversity, this always necessarily being caught elsewhere, to echo the soul.. Such  echoing is no faithful mimicking or vulgar parallelism, of the kind that Leibniz frequently indulges himself with. There is then no direct expression of the soul within the movement of the body – but rather an indirect (and of itself active) echo – which is not the same as mere mimicry but rather it implies an action of its own (Lo 1000), as it composes its own relations ( Ag205). Extension at this point ceases to be the concern of individual monads (living beings or animals) and created to express the relations of other, and rather becomes itself the very construct of others, as they are caught up in a single (and yet intangible) being. At this point then the relation between extension and unity is flipped over. In the monad itself, extension expresses the diversity of others (from the perspective of its own unity), while in the chain extension (that is diversity) is itself caught up in the unity of another, whose nature it can only defined through perpetual change and effluxion. Hence Leibniz repeated assertions that the chain exists in a sphere that is distinct from that of the monads (Lo 988 et al), a distinction that is in a sense absolute, as even the extension they inhabit appears different.

  Perhaps instead of echoing, Leibniz could of said that the chain mirrors the monad – in that not only echoes it, but inverses it as well. What was so simple in the monad, expressing a body, is in the chain complex and involved (and takes one forever elsewhere and into another); while contrariwise what was so simple in the chain – the fact that it is caught in giving one thing, is in the monad so incredibly complex (the very possibility of being in numerous worlds). What was complex in the one becomes so simple for the other. Moreover at this point Leibniz remark mentioned above, that morality and physicality are (through God) one and the same (Lo 983 and Ag 199), come into its own. The Body of the monad (that is its substantial chain) does not straddle many universes, but rather is always the denizen of a certain  universe, whose nature it endlessly explains to comprehend. The Monad itself might free therefore to choose as it might, and yet as that choice is bound up in the universe beyond the monad (a beyond it is already at part of), all choice remain on another (a physical) level necessarily caught up in one option, an option that itself must have its reason elsewhere (in God’s moral choice – a point I will again return to below).. However, one needs to be cautious here. The inversion is in a sense absolute, and yet in the very sentence in which Leibniz asserts the completeness of this difference, he also argues that the chain itself it ‘taken within the monad in whose body its body is’ (Lo 990).  Each chain will therefore be its own creature in extension (and can therefore be miraculously taken up and made to serve other monads), and yet as it normally can easily be taken up within the body of the monad itself  and as a part of its own expression. The status of this movement into the monad is then perplexing. How is it taken up into something so very different from it, something that essentially inverts it?  Or to put the question another way, what exactly in the monad getting from this unity which is so different from its own unity, and yet which is must take inside itself?  Here what needs born in mind is the difference between monad, as it stands upon the cusp of universes, and the substantial chain that expresses that body (and is taken within it). For the Monad such a cusp is the opening of possibility, while for the chain such possibilities in a sense do not matter, as every choice once made will be what one then becomes. To have a chain within the body is therefore to have a sense that however (as long as one is in that body) one changes, one will still be oneself – that is it s to have.

  Such is then precisely the argument made in New Essay. Here Leibniz that real identity itself consists in an immediate temporal transition ‘accompanied by reflection’ (NE 236), which is itself involves necessarily having a physical identity (a body – ibid, and is not therefore the construction memory (NE. 237). Memory therefore, although it might be ‘ indicate a persons physical identity (it could be wrong), can never  ‘run counter’ to it or be wholly divorced from it (NE 247). To have an identity is therefore an expression of having in being a certain singular body, which it itself enduring across diverse experiences and times. Moral identity, is then the special provenance of humans who alone are always responsible for there own choices. Here again the body is critical. A Human will be held responsible for the action as they are a single individual, and irrespectively of their memory for the specific incidence involved (NE 237). Humans are therefore always held responsible their ability very to inhabit different universes – and are judged according to the way the way that those choices have come together to produce the physical world (including its body that it enjoys. To take up the substantive chain into ones monad (as a part within ones own body) is to express oneself as necessarily a single thing, which in turn implies that ones choices must be moral, as one takes a responsibility that that which one becomes.

Before I proceed to the final point, which turns again to the monads themselves, and the sense that they are caught in a single world (while being multiple), it is necessary to clarify the status of the way chains found unities in various ways., in the De Bosse letter, Leibniz is very free in his conception of the relationship between chains and monads. He argues this freedom comes in many forms, and appears to run counter to the above argument, which sought to connect up being a body with identity.. Firstly, Monads could be without chains (in which the world was just a phenomena); Secondly, that many composite substance (substantial chains) can contain many different aggregates (or substantita) (Ag 200); Thirdly that any one chains could be moved from monad to monad (so long as they remained under the perview of some dominant monad. Fourthly, any one monad, which is caught up in a certain chain, can very easily let slip that chain, and enter into another set of relations, in which it might very well have quite a different set of relations (Lo 985). Fifthly, that Leibniz appears to argue that chains are mortal: How then could one ground the eternity of the soul of such a mortality? Sixthly, that all the monads in a chain might well remain the same, and yet, might well (by some miracle or chance) come to combine with one another quite otherwise, and so create a different chain (which would come under the domain/ express the view of quite a different monad – Lo 988-990):.Seventhly, that the chain is mortal, might suddenly cease, (976), and leave the Monad to look around for others ways to embody itself ( NE 233). And finally a single dominant monad will be perpetually evolving the nature of itself own body ( either slowly or quickly), and therefore altering the nature of the chains across which it is given (Mo 72-75).

Given all this hubbub of shifts and changes, it would be very tempting to conclude that physically does not offer the monad any resources upon which it can base its identity, and must therefore be though of as being something apart.  And yet such a conclusion misses the mark because it fails to understand the necessarily disjunction is the relationship between the body and its monad. The Body (the chain) will therefore always remains utterly distinct from the  monad and the aggregate (that is phenomena within extension). In the latter case, Leibniz argues ‘unity’ exists merely ‘per accidens’, as a heap on monads, ad a heap of stone lie together ( Lo 985), such unities are then the accident of a place and time, in which things occur together. Aggregates are therefore naturally infinitely divisible into parts. (Ag 203). In Contrast the substantative chain (the having parts beyond parts), is, as it gives a unity within extension, both indivisible ( AG 203) as it is naturally, and actively diffuse (Lo 977). And yet this very unlocatability the (again as it is a chain) caught one up in doing something, a catching up that of itself creates extension (Ag 203). Chains will the catch one up in strange unties which are of themselves composing extension. Moreover it can easily be argued (although Leibniz does not make this case explicitly) that such unities might be of two kind. On the one hand there is the unity  that composes some fixed body in the universe (which itself expresses single dominant monad, be it horse or worm or whatever (Lo 982). But on the other and unlike Spinoza_ there is nothing that demands the chain gives some fixed body. That is, what demarks the chain is not the form (which so course is what the chain itself demarks within extension) so much as the way the chain itself is operating to produce extension itself (and thereby give whatever fills it): Hence substantial form and composite matter are both in the chain as it acts as a chain (although the precise reason for it being a chain is contained elsewhere – Ag 202). It matters little for the chain as such therefore whether it is producing a fixed thing (a horse) or a maggots transformation into  a fly. Sure, in the latter case both the monads involved and the relationship between them is changing, which is the former apparently only the monads change, while the form remains the same (Mo 71, but as to the permanency even the form of a horse see 72). However, the chain was never an aggregate, and could never be thought of in terms of an aggregate relation, which demarked one set or relation over and against tall the rest, on the contrary its unity was substantial, and naturally crates by it, and as it was caught up in composing the relations themselves: This is why of course Leibniz, in his inception of the chain itself, linked it the creation of new relation, and new substances ( Ag 199). What therefore both typifies the horse and the maggot-fly, is that the is a necessary unity running across their shifting relations, which sees all parts, and all relation hooked up with each with one another as they give.

Which leads one naturally onto the deep difference between monads and their chains. A Monad is of course a substance, and can therefore always stand alone: Hence for Leibniz my perception of my body is, insofar as I have perception at all, merely another perception to have. And yet, of course, as I argued above, it is not quite so simple. The essence of perception might not be the body, and yet without the presence of a body I would lack both viewpoint (and so singularity in the universe), and sensation (that is ability to resolve perceptions into form). Monads must therefore have bodies (and therefore chains), to hold down an identity at all. And yet, it should be clear from the argument above, this identity is never simply given, either in extension or the monad, but rather is the creature to the echo chamber itself. From this last point it follows that there is be no definitive physical expression of a single monad, so that not only will the monad be able to change the sense that a body it given  (as I argues above). Likewise, in death, the precise nature of the substantive chain will of course shift, and yet the requirement for some kind of unity will not. On death therefore the monad does not simply shuffle off one mortal coil, and favour of another, by some transmigration of the soul. Quite to the contrary (and Leibniz never seems to tire of making this point), the soul, on dying simply looses the ability to be express itself within macro-extension, and becomes located again within the spermatic world from which (as a seed) it originally came (NE 240 et al), Hence the tension within the concept of substantial chains. Leibniz appears both at times to argue that such chain are durable and mortal, and yet equally argue that ‘true composite substances do not come into being except with respect to sense’ ( Ag 202). Each chain, if understood as a giver of a certain form will certainly be mortal and durable – caught in any one manifestation: And yet in each manifestation there always exists possibilities which would see what is currently merely a part in the unity in extension in which a monad is echoed, becomes itself the formal (and only) possible of the expression of the monad itself. On dying what was a part of the body, a part of a greater chain, suddenly therefore spring to life (as perhaps a cutting springs to life), and itself embodies the entire monad itself, and includes within it a sense that something else, something  other has been lost ( NE 139). Each chain will therefore both give one specific expression of its single dominant monad, and yet will contain within it and as a part of the unity it is expressing the possibility that it could change and give the same unity in another way.  

      The unity that is created by the chain is therefore not a specific unity, of being substantial form, so much as the unity of that allows relation to be at all, and can therefore just as easily gives forms, as chains. Such chains are then arranges across monads (that is across substance), so that while they themselves are  never aggregates, they are easily involve many and (therefore aggregate parts), which are swept up into their extension. And yet the status of these aggregates is itself highly complex. As they are caught up in the chain the sense they are given within extension is itself defined by the chain (and therefore by the participation in a certain set of relations. And yet, as the chin itself could not exist without monad even though it is distinct from them, the exact nature on the monads involved in these relations should not be overlooked. Hence within my body there are myriad other monads, across which the chain that constitutes my body is formed, and that will each have their own body (and therefore there own associated chain – Lo 984): The presence of aggregate, far from compromising the chain is actually (from another level) essential to its very inception. From which it arises that any one set of Monads might easily give rise to a diverse variety of forms and one form could equally easily arise from any number of separate monads, as all the chain requires from the monads across which it exists is that they are diverse enough to support itself constantly shifting complexities. At which point of course Leibniz comes again to echo Spinoza, who summed up the same point, by suggesting that God created forms as he had an idea of many things (and not just one).

The apparent disjunctions between matter and monad, far from compromising the sense the identity that matter gives monads actively constitute it.  So as Leibniz puts it ‘ ‘ Since being and one are convertible, a thing is made one through the very thing by which it is made to exist, and so, since the whole animal has existence by virtue of an existent being which emanates from the soul, the body of the animal is constitutes as a unity through this existence’ (Lo 982). That is, the unity of the body arises from the sense that it is expressing something utterly other than it (the Monad), whose complex and shifting being it can only give as a unity. Leibniz, in making such a claim both finds a level of deep agreement in Spinoza, and yet as deep a discord. On the level of the agreement, as I argues above, Spinoza also argues that creative middles create unities, and yet Spinoza then argues that it these together that make being : God by himself might necessarily exist therefore (1/7), and yet it is the attributes that come to express that being in a certain singular expression (1/20). For Spinoza therefore this move founds God’s being itself. For Leibniz ostenstively, being already exists, and the move founds unity alone; however it is clear that things are not quite so simple, as without this unity it is equally true that being itself cannot be given. Leibniz’s argument will therefore take him here very close to Spinoza’s own position . Where the thinkers clearly differ is the importance each give to the unity of the body. For Spinoza this unity was critical in defining the essence, and yet both utterly separate both from the essence and from all the constituent parts which themselves gave the body: it belonged therefore in God’s idea alone, as it was able to naturally embrace the idea of many things. What makes the unity can therefore be found (the communication of its parts), and aspects of that unity can be exploited (via common notions), and yet the precise giving of the unified itself remains within the unthinkable domain of God’s idea: It will therefore only be givien in reality in terms of the formal and actual existence of a thing across a certain pan of duration.. In Contrast, for Leibniz the unity of the body is itself the direct product of the monad as it expresses its actual existence, and therefore even if it cannot ever be located in extension itself can be adequately expressed (by the dominant monad): Each part (that is each move) in this unity is then a thinks apart, and the unity itself only emerges as something utterly distinct from all it many movements. The difference then is between the Spinoza model where that parts, as they are in the body are even as they are being themselves caught up in the differentiation of another, which cannot be formally collected in a single thought at all. Such a body therefore only known by modes as it exists thing as a thing which dwells within duration for a while. The unity of such a body (it objective thing-hood) as it is perceived by others will be distinct both from the bodies essence or the process that made it, and is rather the creation of perception had by others, which find themselves (via causation and the sequence of objective ideas) caught up in perceiving the actual existence of a thing. In contrast then the unity of the Liebnizan body is not constructed with the parts of the body, but emerging from elsewhere requires the parts of extension to conform to a unity they would never otherwise enjoy. The Advantage then of Spinozaian system is that the oddity of the unity of the body is kept throughout, and all pretenders (such as perception or even essence) that might be thought to explain that oddity are swept aside. But then, of course pays the price that the individual themselves can only be, and be thought in terms of an individual, that is a having some kind of body ( I return to this elsewhere ad nauseam). In contrast by din of arguing that perception of a thing (in the monad) is both different from that thing, and yet itself at another level implies something other about that things nature, Leibniz, opens up the possibility thinking rethinking the precise relationship between body of what inhabits and thereby it opening up a far freer relationship between the two,. A relationship which  even as it posits a theory of identity, does so in terms of a disjunction, and allows therefore the monad within the body the remain what which is being expressed as an identity in expression, is able to transform that which is expressing it, and so able to recreate the sense of its being a body in myriad different ways.

The Identity that  the body bequeaths its monad is of a strange type. In terms of extension what in unified is itself utterly flexible – and yet there remains a hard demand running across all these changes that that which is being expressed by them is in itself (and whatever the myriad possible difference it might contain within it) unified, and simple. The very diversity of the extension – its very plasticality will itself therefore express a unity of a monad that is for it quite unconditionally and pre-given. The Monad might the stand always of the cusp of many options, many possibilities, and endlessly be caught up in differing itself, and yet its body remain one and the same, and insistent that whatever choice it makes, it will be that one it is and must remain.

If extension, by its very diversity, demands unity in the monad (whatever it is doing), does reverse also hold? That is does the very freedom of the Monads to apparently straddle different potential worlds, itself imply that there can only be one world that actually exists? If this last question can be answered in the affirmative, then the deep problem raised above as to the apparent independence of derivative forces is mitigated. The problem here being (as I argued above) that such forces appeared to open up the monad to a difference that was neither of itself nor of any other monad, but the contrary appeared rooted in mere relations themselves (Lo 714),  Initially (as I argued above) Leibniz’s response to these forces was to simply, deny they could be real at all – arguing to Volder in 1703 that they related to the world of phenomena alone ( Lo 862). And yet by 1715 the position appears to have changed. In a supplement to his 16th letter to Be Bosse, Leibniz attached a table in which he schematised the relationships between unity that are ‘per se’, which are of Monads and substantial chains, and those that are ‘accidental’, and belong to the world of phenomena. Derivate forces in this schema are found both on the side of phenomenon but also on the side of per se unity, as the modification that are natural to a compote substance as it is caught up modifying and being modified in the world.  In the context of the De Bosse letters, derivative forces (or at least some of them) are thereby to a degree naturalized into the body itself.  The body (as well as it Monad) thereby gain the right to expresses, in terms of itself alone, the very way others are differing it.  The question then becomes exactly this inclusion of anothers -  difference within its own body (and therefore within the domain it should be adequately expressing)  effects how one should understand the monad itself? That is, how is the Monad caught up in the expression of a force which is ‘inherent’ within its own body and merely ‘determined’ by the action of something else ( Lo1001)? And how does that expression then link to the way that the monad itself understands both the universe, and its own freedoms? Or to put it another way how does the force apparently spontaneously generated in the monad itself as it is affect by another, relate to that other freedom of animal monad (animals or ‘other organic beings’ are specifically mentioned in the schemata),to use memory (and reason) to problematise the immediate world of perception?

  Perhaps typically enough Leibniz never formally addressed the problem in these terms. However it is easy enough to sketch out a Leibnizian answer by turning to his other writings (in particular to the Theodicy).  My starting point here is Leibniz argument about the nature of freedom. Here Leibniz argues that one must distinguish between ‘absolute necessity, which depends of efficient cause alone, moral necessity, which comes from the free choice of wisdom  in relation to final cause’ and thirdly’  something absolutely arbitrary depending upon indifference of equipoise ‘ ( Theo 349) . The former case, Leibniz argues is the one Spinoza adopts, and effectively deprives the mind of any real freedom and ere in that it fails to grasp the actual nature of the soul and its freedoms ( Theo 372). The Opposing position  (which in Theodicy is represent be Bayle), is dismissed for , amongst other things,  being no advance of Epicurus’s argument that freedom the special provenance of the clinamen ( Theo 321-323); as well as a lack of realism as the mind can never be perfectly poised between two identical options, (Theo 305). The former option then fails for Leibniz fails because it looses sight of men within nature; while, in contrast the latter theory fails because it attempts to argue freedom pulls one out of all nature . Preferable to each Liebniz contends is a theory that allows for humans to be a part (even as they are striving) of the world, and yet still gives then a degree of freedom in spite of this fact. So that the mind is free because its course of action is never logically necessary, even if it finds itself inclined one way or another. The Mind is then neither formally caused to do a certain thing by external causes, or either formally free to do what it will. It is rather the case that the mind, finding itself in the middle of a certain set of events, finds itself to inclined to respond in a certain way.  And yet this inclination it its own alone, and so both exists in terms of final not efficient causes (and therefore is not formally determined by the world itself), and could be challenged/changed through the action of the mind itself (Theo 371). There is therefore no reason in logic why Adam must sin, but rather, he merely finds himself caught in being inclined towards a certain action, and does not have the presence of mind to uncover other possibilities in his soul (Theo 369. The correct image of the mind as it considers differing options, is not that of a balance that weighs up pros and cons, but rather a glass vessel full of air which is slowly being compressed. In the end such a vessel will shatter as the air inside of it ‘put forth effort to every part, but finally flings itself upon the weakest’; and likewise the ‘inclination of the soul extend over all the goods that  present themselves: That are antecedent acts of will; but the consequent will, which is their result, is determined in the direction of that which touches it most closely ( Theo 325 ). Hence each choice, will involve both an antecedent will, in which all the ramifications (the echoes) of perceptions past and present (and to a degree to come) can be felt – and rethought (as the pressure in a flask is felt across all that flask): Until a choice is made, and a consequential will defined, a will that then serves as the conatus of a succeeding action. In this example while both antecedent and consequential will, clearly involve a sense in which the monad (and the universe it perceives), must be the some sense unified, and yet it is not yet clear whether this unity is of the same kind. In the former case of the antecedent will, the unity envisaged arises within the structure of perception/desire itself, in which (as in the physical universe itself) there are always degree of difference between any two perceptions/ point no matter how near they appear to be ( Ne 56). This is a unity of limitless possibilities, all awaiting to be unfurled within a single change. In the latter case (the consequential will) the unity appear the far simple unity apperception gives the world as it acts in some certain manner.

   Here then is a very raw form the problem raised above – that the monads appears to create for itself two different sense of unity, one in which it acts, and one in which it is free – and have little gurantee that the unity (and the self accompanying that unity) is the same in either action (beyond an act of faith that asserts that similarity). However, it is also clear that this apparent empasse might be surmountable if it could be shown that the universe involved in both facets of the monads will was itself one and the same universe, in which a monad can be held however it struggles both to alter itself and its world. Moreover, the very structure of a monad perception, in which no perception can be separated from the burden of the past or the pregnancy of the future, lends itself to any account that seeks to take seriously the continuity of the universe. But it is as well to be clear what I am not arguing here. It is not that this unified universe itself functions as God’s blue print for the monad to which, and in spite of  all their furious activity, each Monad must conform. On the contrary, the causality runs in the opposite direction. It is not then God that demands the monad be in one universe, but rather that the monads which ‘reasonably’ request that the almighty, only creates the one universe ( Mo 51). What is more, it is then the existence of these unified different worlds in God’s idea which gives him a pretext/ reason to create at all (as without a best world, God would lack  any reason to create anything at all – Mo 53-55).  The unity of the universe is then no some artificial construct foistured on the Monad by some fussy God/ supreme architect, intent of keeping creation nice and tidy, but rather the shrill demand of the monads themselves, which require of the universe a unity in order that they are at all. How then is this unity arranged? That is what is it the structure of perception itself that allow the monad to call ‘the universe’, what appears to be, on the face of it, a disjunctive union between distinct types of unity? This question necessary comes in two parts: Firstly I will consider the temporal structure of the inclination – and indicate how that structure in ‘at one’ with the universe itself.; secondly I will look at where such a unity comes from, and how it can be looked up (courtesy of the burden of the past and the pregnancy of the future) to the wider unity implied in the freedom of the monad itself.

In the case of inclination (the consequent force), Leibniz has been very careful to define it in such a way that  neither drowns the incliner within the universe nor pulls them away from it, Perhaps one could say that the role of such inclinations is to define in the monad a clear and distinct expression of the universe, an expression which then necessarily involves the mind in being acting in someway ( Mo 49 et al). And yet, as I mentioned above ( and Leibniz repeatedly mentioned), the monad cannot express a universe adequately without integrating all its myriad perceptions/ feelings. One cannot express the idea of each wave in the oceans raw separately, but rather must gather their confusion into the one sound ( Ne 54): Likewise one cannot adequately give sense of ones myriad feelings, and constitute in oneself an inclination, without running in some manner myriad minute feelings ( NE 192).  Each inclination will therefore create a conception of unity within the universe, and do so in the context of an action. Hence one might well say that the ability of the universe to act is some manner itself involves the universe in being Unified.

  Expression will then have a critical role in the setting up of this unity. Each expression will established a ‘certain precise and natural relationship between projected and the projection made by it, with each point on the one corresponding to  a certain relation with a point of the other’ ( Ne 131).  However, such an orderly expression is then only possible if the mind expresses as a single quality the many and confused motion of another. The Mind can then only adequately express the many motions of a fire in terms of light and heat ; Likewise it can only express the many movement involved in a pin entering the body, in terms of a single impression – a pain (ibid).  The expression of equality in monad is different through the quality expressed in three key aspects. Firstly there is a clear difference in kind between the perception and the process itself. The relation between the  two is merely expressive, and therefore has no formal truth beyond that expression. Secondly the perception itself is tied to having a body. Leibniz considers in detail how ones perception of a thing changes as ones body changes (Ne 132-133), and yet argues that this does not stop the general point that whatever movements there are in the body, these movements will resemble the movements in another in a certain manner (Ne 133). Finally (and developing further the first point),  what is perceived itself remains in constant flux (the fire is therefore defined by itself movement)m the unity I attribute to the fire’s light and heat (or the pins movement) is therefore firmly the creation of my soul alone, as it seeks to express in someway to itself, the moments of another.  Each expression itself will always involve a ‘running together’ of confused perceptions (Ne 132), and therefore imposes upon the diverse and shifting movements, a single experience in which these movements can be for the soul. Apperception will therefore in the name of expression impose a unity upon what is diverse, a unity which while is not arbitrary in itself (Ne 131) and yet is not in the this itself, any more than pain is in the pin of a fire’s motion are themselves light. The Unity that the monad attributes to the universe is therefore a highly nuances affair. The unity itself s not of the universe as it might be for itself, and is therefore the product of the Monad’s apperception alone. And yet this expression is no illusion or yet a mere appearance, but rather represents for the monad some real process in the universe by which it is being affected, and which it can then only express to itself in terms of simple impression.

Such an apperception will necessarily blend together, not only ‘pure’ sensations, but also the diverse burdens of the past, and pregnancies of the future, which characterise the perception itself. Such a blend is therefore not the product of memory (as it might be for Kant), but rather the naturally consequence of perceptions itself, which relates as much to the past and future of the monad as it does the present: The Past is therefore always to hand, even if it can only be grasped at as such through the specialized processes of memory ( Ne 115). Perception is therefore perfectly possible without memory (although of course its domain would be severely delimited – and would correspond to the living being’s of the monadology). All that is necessary to perception is that the organs of one body, by collecting up differing physical sensations, and focusing them in some manner (Mo 25 – a process that itself of course runs across many succeeding moments), necessarily articulates the various past of futures a set of perceptions involves, causing them in resonate across one another, and thereby to form a stabilized sensation. The perception of the entelechy will therefore create for that viewpoint a temporal order which theoretically exists without memory. The role of memory, when it enters into the process with animals, is to articulate more formally the burden of the past, and to do so it terms of a sequence of impressions or a habit ( Mo 26-27).

In the case of a single volition, the complex minutes perceptions and inclination are constantly bought into conflict with one another; in the course of which conflict three quite clear temporalities/ types of inclinations will  emerge. Firstly some inclinations while remaining imperceptible in themselves, will bequeath the mind a certain disquiet, that impels the in someway without us understanding why; Secondly Some join forces to carry one towards or away from some object; Thirdly there are some impulses which are accompanied by actual pleasure or suffering, ( Ne 192). These three different species of inclination  clearly articulate the single volition with regards past, future and present (although Leibniz does Not formally make this move). The first type of volition, which impels the mind in some way, although the reason for that implusion is lost, corresponds to a species of  ‘having been’. Such a feeling therefore expresses ones being   ‘past’, not as past present, but rather as a necessary ‘being caught up’ by something, that, has always already pre-set the parameters within which one is. The second species of inclination will in contrast very clearly demark a species of being towards the future. One cannot desire without being caught up in changing oneself (and the world) in some manner. The final types of volition will then involve a present, in which one come to feel actual pleasures and pains.

Moreover this picture is made more complex by the fact that there is nothing requiring that the perception involved in this process are exclusively of the present. Indeed, as I argued above the very logic of sensation connection with the body implies the continued ability of past sensations to directly still be affecting the mind (and to do so without necessarily involving memory  (ibid). Each single volition will there take into its orbit, both  past images (and their inclination) and as well as new sensations, in order that the whole might be resolved into a single consequential volition. This second facet of apperception can  then be taken to throw light upon a very important aspect of facet. Leibniz is very clear about the relative importance of past and future inclination. It is the past, that is the having been, of the disquiet soul, which defines desire (and so the being caught towards a certain future), and not the other way around (Ne 193). Ones very ability to desire a future is therefore defined through an opening out of the ‘burden of the past’ (through the organs of the body),  which divorced from a specific sensation (that is a memory), becomes addititive with itself, as all the burdens come together to form a specific disquiet in which the mind finds itself caught for no apparent reason. Past sensations can very readily become a part in this process, where a ‘formal’ present mattered far less than a lingering of effect.

Leibniz’s overall argument is therefore both highly complex, and somewhat dualistic. On the one hand there is the single volition, in which is riveted together aspects of past, future and present, in a single a single grasp of the will (a conatus). On the other hand, this riveting of tense together is only possible because at the same time all these apparently distinct parts in time are in fact caught up in expressing the burden of the past.   Nor is this disquiet something hidden and removed from the process itself. On the contrary it (and knowledge of it) remains firmly a part in the process. The reasoning Monad, is therefore one that understands that its very ability to express the universe in a certain manner, is rooted in the very unity it is itself expressing. Hence, through apperception, the monad both expresses a unity that is for it in the universe itself, and understanding that that expression is itself a product of the very unity it expresses. In being inclined to act in a certain way, the Monad can no doubt, very easily feel in the grip of fate – and feel itself unable to make any other choices that they ones that it does. And yet to do so is for course. For Leibniz a mistake, as history is contigent and therefore allows freedom, in a way that the necessity never does ( Theo 173) . Indeed, to make this mistake is to think like the damned, who become one state of mind, which they would rather be than anything else, and unable to open themselves up to the power of God to allow them to be different from what they are (Theo 270). The mistake of the damned is confuse the unity, in which the inclination express the universe for something absolute and unchanging, and to thereby loose sight of the fact that the same ‘unity’ (that is the universe) could given more time, or slightly different history, have produced quite different feelings. Adam’s sin lies, not in the fact he followed his inclination (and forgot God’s decree), but rather than he failed to appreciate the nature of the freedom given him in that decree itself, the freedom to remake his own inclinations, and therefore forgetting what God was, felt himself bound in fate (that is a certain inclination) and sinned (Theo 369)   

The unity, which is expressed in apperception, necessarily turns upon a upwelling of the burden of the past, which cannot necessarily be located in the images of the past itself (as a past present) but rather is given in the very disquiet of the soul, which finds itself inclined toward one thing rather than another. Consequently, freedom never lies in the choice itself ( Theo 365 et al), In which the mind will always be determined to act by the greater of its inclinations, so much so that in the present one simply cannot alter ones will at all. (AG 195). The Mind’s power then lies not is its freedom in the inclination itself, but rather in its ability to influence future inclinations (ibid, and Ne 193 also see above). The Mind is therefore free in the sense that it can arrange for itself much of the burden of the past by which it is then bound in the present. Thence, such freedom will be both indirect and constitutive. The power to influence ones will is a perpetual construction of ones mind, as it looks to what is currently is, and what it wants to be,, and attempt to move  its soul in the desired direction across its own history, and thereby recreates its own nature (Theo 326).

What was apparently so incontravertible in the past, for inclination, becomes through reason (and habit) a source of its freedom. This is because, that freedom itself is not absolute, but is rather a work arranged across time itself – that is across the ‘destiny’ of the past. The unity in wbich the monad in any one present expresses its universe, becomes itself the principle for he possibility of freedom in that very Monad. If God simply changed the rules, and let the monad slip from one world into another (which it utterly within God’s power), then any hope the monad had to be free would be lost. This in turn explains, the ‘reasonable request’ that monads even in their ‘logical’ form within the idea of God (and therefore before they have being at all) make of God himself, the request that if he is going to create substances other than himself, he will have to allow them to be within a single universe – as otherwise they could never be free.  Consequently one might argue, the unity that the monad initially attributed to the universe, as it expressed it, has become not only the very principle across which the freedom of that monad is arrange, but also forms the very case that the monad makes before God, that he really must only create one universe, and so allow their freedom to be real.  The unity by which the monad express its place in the universe is both also the agency  in which the monad becomes free in itself, and the pretext upon which the demand was made (by the monad) that there only be one universe.

  The mind’s  actual freedom lies therefore, in the very ‘fate’, the very unity, which appeared so inconvertible to the consequential will. And yet the extent of this freedom is clearly far from absolute, - and evolves across time.. Sextus, when he stood before the alter of Jove could still have been a good a man, but only on the condition he did not return to Rome. He is then already caught up within this past, and his freedom precluded, and yet not absolutely so, as be could therefore still be a good man if only he did not return to Rome. His choice to return to Rome and follow his fate then represent an inability in his mind move beyond the fate in which it felt itself inclined, (and therefore represented a rejection of the very freedom Jove had allowed him  -Theo 413).  In being restricted in this manner the past is clearly bound up in he possibilities – the pregnancies of the future. This is seen quite clearly in Jove’s answer to Sextus, in which he rules out the possibility that Sextus could be in Rome and be Good: This is then a future that is already lost to Sextus – a pregnant possibility the burden of his past already lacks. From which it follows that it is not the burden of the past that is allowing the monad its freedom, so much as it is through that burden that the past can help to foster the very pregnancy of the future, and therefore it continuing ability to be free.

  Moreover it will already be clear from the above quote the status of this future is is problematic in that it clearly re-open the disjunction between God and man, which the reasonable request for one world appeared to reconcile. For God,  the demand that his monads inhabit the one universe, leads directly to creation of the best of possible worlds, as anything else would diminish God’s own wisdom ( Theo 414). For God therefore the question of  creating the one world comes a matter of choosing between different worlds, all of which lie before his gaze complete as something complete and whole ( Theo 360). God is therefore painfully aware in each and every possible world exactly what future still remain possible, and what an longer possible. It was then already too late for that Sextus who stood before the Altar of Jove to be a good king in Rome, is not to be a good man In a sense then the unity which the Monad so reasonably requests of its creator in order that it (the monad) might be free restricts God’s creative power: As he follows this request he must move out of expressing himself in terms of himself alone (and is in terms of his absolute creative power), and must rather  restrict his activities to ensuring that he creates the best of all possible worlds (that is the one best able to express his absolute nature). And yet (as will be now quite clear) the monad does not see it this way. For Adam or Sextus or the Devil freedom is never about rival possible universe, but rather involves attempting to uncover different aspects of what it, within the universe in which they find themselves already within. Or to put it another way the creative power of the monad (that is its freedom) consists not in challenging the world itself (only God could do that), but rather, lies in a certain expressive ability to re-arrange the connections between events. That is, a monad’s creativity lies in unfurling the burden of the past, and the pregnancy of the future implicit in perception, to recreate its own minds ability to think and act ( Ne 145), and thereby to re-work what the initial perception (and the event it perceived) were. 

  From which it follows that the creativity of the monad is very finely pitched. It is very clearly not the creativity of the ego (identity is grounded elsewhere – in being a body), while in any one present the monad is always determined in someway or other by the very unity in which it is free. Perhaps then one might say that the monad’s freedom lies in its ability to take up multiple events, which it then arranges as the creative middle for another event. Each single event, with its specific inclining of the soul, stands alone, as a specific endeavour of the soul. But why that event is as it is – is itself both the product of the specific past by which it is burden but also (and going the other way) by the very pregnancies of past futures, which have come to fruition in its giving. The wise monad is therefore one that is able to understand what happens to it not simply an event in which it acts; but one that is able to understands that its current actions with resonate within other possibilities in which it is caught.

Critical to this process is the status of the monad, as substance, and perception as its method of differentiation. The Monad can (unlike Deleuze’s nomad), understands the endlessly pregnancy of the future in terms of itself alone, a move from which two further consequences follow. On the one hand, the Monad itself, as it consists in that which arranges many events as the middle for another event, is not troubled by the question of identity as such. Its ‘identity’, is the sense that it is a single thing is of course given elsewhere (in its having a body), which leaves it to differ as it will , and do so in the security on another level it must remain itself. On the other hand, the same disjunction between monad and the universe, frees the ‘universe’ from the problem that the endlessly latency of the monad’s potential pregnancies seems to set the very possibility of the universe itself. The Unity of the universe is then not confined (as Bergson would have the rationalists say) no merely a formal statement of that something has happened. Nor can it simply be seen in terms of the difference between formal and objective truth (- as it is for Spinoza -or virtual and actual for that matter), as the unity of the universe is not something else added  (or something external to or different from) the pregnancy of the monads perception themselves. It is rather the case that the very unity of the universe is how the monads themselves are expressing their own sense of  freedom to both themselves, and all other monads.

This is then why Leibniz arguments against the unity of nature is nuanced as it is. Leibniz rejects the idea that there is some universal spirit which animates all of nature for two main reasons. On the one hand, such an explanation fails to get to he bottom of thought, which Leibniz says is never empty or abstract, but is also inclusive of some image or material trace without which it cannot be at all  ( Lo 903). Hence to makes no sense to postulate some abstract universal spirit which to contain (in an empty and abstract way) all thought, and all feelings.  On the other, the doctrine of a single intense spirit imposes of Leibniz a false dualism between body and Soul. Soul’s simply cannot be separated from bodies in which they occur ( Lo 903-904), through which of course (as agues above) they again their identity, so that a world soul (which is pitched beyond being any one body) could have no more identity that an ocean, whose unity is composed of all the separate drops of water within it (Lo906-907). Any notional world soul would therefore finds it very difficult to explain how it relates to individual forms understood in terms of mind or matter.. In the former case, if one asserted that the world soul simply included all diverse (and contrary) thoughts with itself, then it very obviously lack any cogency or individuality of its own (as it would constantly think conflicting things), Likewise its relationship with matter is far from clear. If Matter is seen as active, then it cease to have an role to play at all, and if passive then the great problem of how one understands the active soul to animate matter still remains unsolved (and unsolvable – Lo 908). It is therefore altogether more reasonable Leibniz argues to deny the existence world soul, and assert the reality of infinite individual souls..

  Such a  move is then the critical as it allows Leibniz to make a distinction between the contrasting univocality of the world of matter, and that of the universe . The first case concerns case, the relationship is between the purely passive, and aggregate being of matter (Lo 908, Lo 1003) which is none the less, as it resists a single active entelechy is capable of producing some effect, and therefore is not mere ‘nothingless, and so originates in God (909). Matter in the always said to have the same ‘being’, and yet that being (as far as the monad itself is concerned) is multiple, and the product of a mere aggregation of other effects: It is only in the special case the substantial chain that matter can move beyond aggregation, and be thought of as a unity in its own right.. In the latter case the universe is what the monad mirrors in its own way, but also (and as a apart of this mirroring) that which the monad itself  ‘multiplies’ as often as possible and ‘in such a way that they approach divinity as far as they can in their differing degrees, and give the universe all the perfections of which it is capable’ (ibid). The Universe, then in contrast o matter is singular , and yet that singularity is of a curious kind, as it will, in the name of its own perfection, require what the monad reflects it through endless change and increase. The Substance of the monad (that is its perception, and appetite) splits the universe in to: On the one hand there is matter – which although is have principle of itself (and perhaps ironically founds identity), and yet lacks no cogency of its own beyond the monad. On the other lies the universe, whose unity the very multiplicity of the monad expresses. No wonder Leibniz wrote that is it was not for the monad Spinoza would be right. It is the monad, which in the name of its perceptions, claims the right to split up the potentially corroding effects of ‘difference-for-itself’, into either matter or the universe, each of which can then be comprehended separately.

    The last point then very deeply infuses Leibniz’s understanding of events (the middle for another). In particular it allows him to resist any move for a primacy of the middle for – and an immanence based upon that primacy. For Leibniz no such move is necessary (or even possible), as the Monad’s middle for remains caught in its own being as it is gathered within a single universe, and is not therefore something that is real in its own right. ‘Middle-Fors’ are then arranged within the universe, in three distinct voices, as they are caught up within middles in, for and with respectively. In the case of middle for/in.- it is very clear the premise that its action are bounded by the perception it has of the universe itself, delimits what that Monad can do and be, and does so through time. Thence, Sextus is told at the temple it is already to late for him to be good and King in Rome – and he just choose between the two. The Monads capacity to be ‘Middle-for-another’ ,itself exists within the demand (which was of course initially made of God by the monad themselves) that there only be the one universe. In a sense the Middle-for, could be understood to resonate between two senses of the Middle In. On the one hand, the Middle ‘for, follows the fact that whatever it does (or can be) must conform to the single universe: It is then this necessity of all middle for’s to remain in the single universe which condemns Sextus and the Devil to hell, and that presents the characters of romance from ever beings at all. ; on the other hand, its endless ability to unfurl what is already in the soul,, and thereby to multiple in the universe in which it uncovers itself to be. It is then the peculiar provenance of the perceptions that they give this reflection of the universe as itself something creative is itself, and do so by turning the property of world and perception around. The monad, of course must perceive a universe (as it is in perception – a middle for that is gives its being), and yet that perception remains the peculiar property of that being. The pregnancy of the perception through which it can endlessly resonate elsewhere, and therefore holds within it multiple possible reflection of the universe, remains the monads own special freedom, as it knows itself to be that which was creating in itself the perception. The setting up of the ‘Middle-for’ within a Middle in, both ensures that the monad can only be free from within perceptions which assume a universe to reflect, and yet at the same time in this reflection, are able to recreate that unity itself.

The Middle for likewise sets its self up with the twin aspects of the middle of.. As I discussed elsewhere there is a clear ambivalence in the phrase middle of another’: It gives in one both a sense I am caught up in giving others as I perceive; and yet also implies, at the same moment a sense by which that giving of another makes the perception itself different – so one is caught always within another perception.

The Monad’s perceptions are of course directly pitched to allow for this fact: Every perception might be of another, and yet that of another is always (courtesy of desires) going elsewhere. The Middle for as the giver of the monad’s freedom, sets itself up within the ambiguity of ‘the middle of,’, in, as above, two ways. On the one hand, is is very clear that the ‘Middle For, takes up the tension between a perception an its pregnancy, which it then arranges it as the very principle for the  freedom of the monad itself: The Middle for the ensures that what either another the ‘middle of’ is moving towards in its pregnancy, that other need notb e of itself complete and finished: The pregnancy of a perceptions becomes essential without limit, as it endlessly get caught up within our perceptions and thereby helps to pattern other events. Each middle of, will, then be a source on unlimited possible freedom – as different resonances are set up between a single perception, and all the thoughts it can be caught up in. On the other hand , any one perception is caught up in a specific other event (a souls incline), as past perceptions which somehow burdens the present.  In the inclining therefore one is caught up by disquiets whose nature one cannot quite ever fix or think, and yet catch one up in other things one has been. Thence, in the context of the formation any other (singular) inclination, the twin aspects of the middle of, operate, to determine rather than to enfree, as a mind in thinking a certain perception always already finds itself caught up in certain other desires and thoughts.  From which one might say that the middle for is both the source of freedom for any one perceptions, and it opens out the sense it leads to future, and yet , as it introduces a past perception into a new context, is a source of determination, in which a thought is determined in a certain way, through its previous perceptions.: 

Finally the Middle for finds a double sense of resonating within the ‘Middle with another’ (which I argue elsewhere is tied to God and the absolute middle itself. God, as Leibniz understands him I essential that force which inhabits, what is for any individual and impossible position – the position of being with another itself, the necessity of which is enough to prove God very existence. To this end, Leibniz argues that one can see the need to hypothesize the existence of a God from he simple fact that and chain of finite causes must lack either beginning or end: There can therefore be no explanation from within the universe which is capable of explaining why it is. The reason for the universe must therefore involve something that is not only external to it, but also must be essential different to it, in that it can encompass within its own singularity, what is necessarily multiple in the universe itself  (Ag 150). Furthermore, as it is essential that such a being encompasses within its own being the very interconnection of things, one may deduce that from the very singularity of that interconnection that only one such individual exists ( Ag 152) . Or to put it another way, given that the universe cannot explain itself internally, Leibniz argues it must be possible to define some other singular force in which the very plurality of the universe itself something positive and valued: A force that then derives its being (and therefore its unity) from the very plurality of the universe itself, in which it expresses it own infinite capacity to be with others. Two further consequence immediately arise from the last point. On the one hand, there is nothing necessarily within God’s being which makes God create one universe rather than another (or any at all – Ibid): God in himself is merely an infinite capacity to be, in the intellect alone with others. There is then is God’s nature itself neither a compulsion to create something (Leibniz’s God could unlike Spinoza’s create nothing): Nor is there any reason to ensure the events in any one world are compatible with one another (although it is of course the case that once the idea of the monads. as they exist in God’s thought alone, have put in the reasonable request for compatibility of world, the God must follow it). On the other hand, once God has granted the request of the monads to only think in terms of singular universes, then it must follow that each monad (and its middle for) will exist as necessarily something which is singular for all other substance in the universe, and be so irrespective of whether they are part in their body or not. Each Monad will therefore (as I argued elsewhere) constitute something identical for the rest of the universe, and must do so independently necessarily (and therefore irrespectively of exactly what Adam, what Sextus, it is that is in that world.  Thus the role of the ‘Middle with  Another’ is to give to perceptions what they world otherwise lack, a grounding. And yet this grounding is of a curious kind, in that its is divorced from any associations (beyond bare unity) with  ‘things’ (and so is nothing link a thing-in-itself), and takes its very being to be the very accord between perceptions of different monads.

  Each Middle for will then give the sense of ‘middle with’ within itself in terms of a capacity for being affected ( Ag 60 et al). The concept of capacity of affection perhaps originates in Spinoza,, and yet thee are very important difference between Spinoza’ use, and Leibniz’s. In Spinoza, the phrase capacity for affection is extremely complicatedly nuances.. It defines a facet of any actually existing essence All such essence, as they express in differing ways an absolute middle, will be capable of being affected in very many ways. And yet it does not follow that all ways my capacity for affection is itself affected are of equal merit.. On the contrary, there is a profound difference between the respective values of joy or pain. Joy involves a positive change, through which an essence can expresses itself as a creative middle, whose very power lies in being to rework the way that it is ( 4/59). The same is of course not true, which sees one capacity for affection itself affected by something that restricts its own ability to be affected at all ( 4/38). Here, though one of the subtlities of Spinoza analysis come to the for. Capacity for affection might be positive in its own right, and essence might well embody that positivity (and to that extent, one can always form an idea of some affect 5/10), and yet that does not mean that all capacities for affection within the human body  necessarily include the existence of  human themselves (4/4): On the contrary it is both perfectly possible for myriad other affection grip the human mind, and prevent it from remaining in the middle of itself (as the baby no longer is part of the adults life 4/39s), and it is equally possible that any one joy, while positive in itself, might restrict other things the spirit could be, and so in fact be indirectly bad (4/41-43). In this process pain (or even joy) is never something ‘real’ in  itself. Even in the worse pain everything that is real in the pain, that is the bodily movements which post it, or the desire in which struggles against it, are positive in themselves (and could be a source in another context of a joy – 4/58 wet al), while the pain (the losing of an ability to be in the middle). And yet (on another level the capacity for affection itself – always represents God (as he expresses himself in the attributes) is always positive is itself. God is always constituting another mode  through our worse pains or even joys, as the butterfly kills the catepillar or the adult  the baby ( 4/pref). The Concept of the capacity for affection, maps out a complex territory, in which is defined both a sense that any individual actual existing essence ‘belong’ to itself world (that is the sense it is in middle of its world as it ), but also locates that belonging within an axis that need not include the essence itself. The essence is therefore in the capacity for affection, as is so as it expresses the attribute. And yet at this point a further distinction needs to be make. Any capacity for affect (like any attribute itself) does not exist as something separate to its expression within modes (1/16 and 1/34). Hence capacity in itself is no abstract entity which could be attributed to God apart from his Modes, but rather refers to a process within the modes themselves as they are caught up within an absolute creative middle, in existing. Negativity (pain) will not then exist within God at all – as God only knows the composing middles (that is positive changes), and therefore will view  pain only as it involves the composition of something (or somthings) else. Capacities for affection will then effectively break up existence even as existence is being posited, into areas of which exist in particular modes, and between modes, and yet which cannot be gather within a single experience (hence Spinoza’s failure to define an intellectual infinite mediate mode –ep 56). Existence is then curiously disruptive, an d is so even as it expresses a sense in which all particulars modes are gathered within the same attribute. For each mode to express an attribute is for it always to express a sense that is it with others, which are also expressing that attribute, and which together give a sense of a capacity for affection: Hence Spinoza in part five of ethics, moving beyond the attribute itself (middle in) and investigating the very real sense that a mode can be given within the middle with others (God and other Modes 5/40s). Hence one might say that the complexities of the capacity for affection within the Spinoza system, necessarily move one of from the exclusive consideration of thins as they actually are, and make one turn ones mind to eternal essence itself.

   In terms of the jargon uses above, the capacity for affection in Spinoza, involves a sense in which in being in the middle in another (the attribute) I am caught up in expressing a with another (God Himself, understood as a absolute middle). However such an expression is naturally selective, with negative changes never in themselves express God, as so lack any reality. The effect then of this move is that looses both the right to talk of negative capacities for affection (that is pain), and consequently, one looses the right to think of a God who is univocially within every change. Moreover Spinoza can only make this move because he is able to posit the existence of eternal essences, which are included within God as absolute middles, over and against actual existence itself: The indivisibility of extension turns then in Spinoza turns on the relation of essence within corporeal substance itself, and does not express any formal unity of the attribute itself beyond that expression (1/15).  For Leibniz such a move commits a double error. One the one hand it is only possible is at some level, God is thought to be immanent to corporeal substance; On the other hand, if one accepts that only positive change, any hope of setting up a simply parallelinity between affects and extension is lost, and with it the simple primacy of actual existence itself (which is why Leibniz so vermently reject Spinoza at this point – Ag  279). Far better, then Leibniz argues to keep actual existence, and jettisoning essence to rethink a capacity for affection as something in itself own right,  and can be set against essence (as Spinoza understands it).

  The setting up of such a capacity will of itself have four prime aspects (all of which arise from/ reply to Spinoza). Firstly such a capacity must clearly be pitched beyond and individuality, understood in terms of Modes (and therefore essences). Only by inhabiting such a beyond, can the capacity itself straddle differing modes: The Monad is then that substance whose domain it is to be within this beyond (Mo1-7)). Secondly, there can be no difference between positive affects within a single, all are in the soul in the same voice, and can potentially be used by it ( Ne 165). Thirdly, the capacity for affection, that is for change, as it represent a univocal means to locate change becomes the sole way one can understand temporality. Leibniz never tires of praising Blynebrgh criticism of Spinoza (AG 279 or Theo 373), that his theory should imply that the essence is constantly in a state of flux (ep 24 – a criticism that Deleuze of course makes central to his understanding of Spinoza). From Spinoza’s perspective such criticism is unjust, as it fails to successfully engage with the difference he is establishing between positive and negative creativities. And yet in the context of the Leibnizia (and Deleuzian) system, such an assertion is vital in order to insulate ones thought against the worrying effect that Spinoza’s thought would otherwise have for  the unity of actual existence (or the univocality of time). Finally, as the capacity for affection includes within it pain as well as joy, is cannot be of itself be what is actively constituting the soul (or monad) itself.

   To be a substance if therefore, in the Leibniz system to have a certain capability for (self) affection ( N+G 1-2) , an affection which can only then be expressed as it involves a single monad in perception, which necessarily take it beyond itself, and gives it as being with others ( be they the ‘dominated’ monads of its body, or the others it sees through that body – N+G 3): Hence the claim that the predicate of every substance must necessarily involve it in belong connection with other substances (Ag 174). The Being (or its unity –Ag 84) of a monad then lies in expressing itself as  the ‘middle for ’  these connections, which it constantly unfolds and develops as a force for change ( Ag 144). Leibniz thereby hopes to reverse the Spinozian schema: The ‘Middle With’ is no longer something (potentially) external to the attribute, and potentially defying simple characterization as capacity to act; But rather is merely relates to the fact that every ’middle for’ requires relations with others to take up and change in someway. Indeed such is Leibniz desire to castrate the potential worrying effects of the middle with, that he infamously argues that force itself cannot be exchange between bodies (that is between thing in the middle with each other), and must therefore always be contained with the substance moving ( Ag 253).

And yet, one needs caution here. As has already been mentioned it is clear that Leibniz constantly developed his exact position with regard the relative status of  derivative forces, arguing to De Volder that they were mere phenomena, while (later) arguing to Be Bosse that they could be included with the unity of the body. The reason for such a shift is now quite apparent. Such forces in Vodler are mere phenomena, as at the point Leibniz lacks the ability to understand the body as a thing apart from perceptions: So that, te middle with has no reality beyond that given is in the middle for (that is that which the middle for itself assumes). All ‘ Withs’ are therefore necessarily aggregate phenomena and nothing more. However, of course this situation is modified immediately it become possible to define (in the chain) a sense a unity that is composed of being with another. Once this definition is given, the individual concerned will necessarily contain within it as and as it expresses that unity, all the changes native to I, and yet do so in a way that does not determined what those changes themselves are. Perception (and the Monad that demands it) ensure that the bodies unity itself cannot be abstracted from its perception (as they are in Spinoza). On the contrary, the unity of the body itself necessary includes within it the fact it can only be expressed as something which is always already expressing something of the world beyond it, and doing so as the very condition for its unity.  The body will  as it express its dominant Monad be constantly caught up in changes which it did not forcast – and yet which as they are given in the world of efficient causes, seem absolute and unnegoicatable. Here (if no where else) Leibniz runs close the Bergson, and his contentions that the new involves a split which before its occasion appeared impossible to predict, but which after it was appeared necessary. It is then is expressing something which is always in the middle for – through establishing relation with others, the ‘with’ itself takes up into its means of differing an ability to be said to contain the very differentiations that arise in the ‘for’ itself. But of course the distinction between the two are absolutely maintained, in the monad, the ‘For’ exists as a creative principle, through which its perception are constantly modified, and made to resonate in one another,: the monad is therefore the direct inhabitant of the of difference and change. The Body in contrast (and its derivative forces) can only express this difference indirectly, and as the monad itself is body making a difference to everything else 

  One might there say, that far from being a slightly bizarre twist in the history of the mathematicalisation of energy. Leibniz theory is a finely honed account of perception and its relationship to the body. Each body (as it demands to express a unity) must potentially contain all within anything that unity (an Adam) can be or do: And yet as that  Adam is, and defines himself, exactly what the body does (that is what forces are actualized, and what are not)  is for the body itself (as it given in extension) a perpetual surprise which catches it up suddenly in being other than it was., even if this other appears utterly naturally to it (and part of what it was always already expressing). might then say, that each perception exists at a limit point, to two sets of physical realities-  those perceived, and those that enable the perception be clear and distinct, and to do so such that the first series is taken up in the second, someway, and made to resonate through it. A resonance that might either form an action in itself own right, or might as easily, by reflecting back on perception, allow the monad to develop yet new possibilities within itself.

  From which it follows that perhaps it is the peculiar provenance of the animal Monad to create within its word new senses in which it is ‘with another. On the level of extension, this with exists as a necessary and yet strangely unaccountable accord between bodies, whose very unity includes within it each such body is with another. But also in the monad itself, as the ‘fors’ very freedom lies in the ability to articulate resonances between the different perceptions it is already with, and that are therefore already given within its body. From perspective it is possible to cast further light on the hierarchy of Monads in the Monadology. A Naked Monad (as argues above) would lack any viewpoint of their own, and therefore any real singularity distinct from the universe itself  (Mo 8). For such a monad individual perception or even temporalities would effectively cease (as it contains both past and future within it – (Mo 22,). The confusion then such a monad feels (Mo 24) is not something ‘accidental’ to its nature. On the contrary this perpetual confusion is itself expressive of the essential resonance of the universe itself, in which every perception always is constantly being differed by others, even as it itself is making a difference (Mo 23) . So it might be said the naked monad is that which only exists  as it expresses a ‘middle for another ‘;  or the sense that the universe itself necessarily involves all its parts being caught up in differing one another, in a riot of perpetual confusion and change. What distinguishes the entelechy is the fact that it has a certain viewpoint, and associated simple body (Mo18). The expression of each entelechy is therefore necessarily pitched within the very universe it itself expresses in two sense. On the one hand, to be at a viewpoint, is to express a sense that one is with something else sense  - and is with the universe itself, upon which one opens (even if one lacks windows). On the other hand, one is only able to have this view point as one has a body with itself is necessarily caught up with the universe that on is expressing through it. What then differentiates the living being from the naked monad is the fact that unlike such a monad, it must exists within the universe whose resonances it constitutes within itself.  The resonances then cease to be simply of the universe itself, but rather become its own peculiar property alone  (Mo 8). However this sense of being ‘with another’, for a living being remains external to that being, as merely expressed within a simple (an therefore undifferentiated) body (Mo 17).

It is then the role of animals to take up, through their composite bodies, the middle with another, which becomes directly part of the way they are articulating a middle for another. Thence the very being with of the universe (that is relations) becomes internal to their very own expression. The sense that I am with the universe is then bought into the very way I am constantly establishing resonances through out it. It is the role of the bodies organs to  articulate a middle with another, which is internal to the body itself, and thereby to allow perception to open the sense that each of its perceptions are resonating within one another (Mo 25). From this view point, the resonance that the monad establishes between its body and the external world, becomes itself a matter of different ways the ‘with another’ of extension is expressive the ‘for’ of the monad itself. Within the body, every movement, that is every of middle with another is  caught up as  the expression of a single if muliplex unity. Chains are therefore only unified with another, and they are caught up in expressing some dominant monad. However, beyond the body itself, the animals looses any ability to unify the middle ‘with another’ of extension – and the universe is composed of mere aggregation and well founded phenomena, in which diverse relations between things endlessly interact middle with another). And yet,  of course there is nothing to prevent these aggregate relations when under the gaze of the monad itself, they are taken up within a body, from constituting a single unified albeit it derivative force. The importance of the argument that all derivative force is contained within the body expressing it, lies in the fact that it is only this element of containment that allows the body to constitute the reality of the unity of aggregate forces within extension. Such forces might then be aggregate in themselves, and therefore on the side of mere phenomena, and yet still, when taken into the body, be expressed, in a single reaction, in terms of that bodies unity alone. The individual stuff of the world by it heaps of stone, armies or lumps of chalk or bone, might lack individuality in themselves, and yet when be still necessarily be composed in terms of a unified force in terms of the body alone. 

The Monads ability to express the resonances that is native to its perceptions within a body (and from a viewpoint), allow it to forge across these resonances a world of singular derivative forces (that is a world of things) from what are essentially mere relations. Thence ‘the body itself (courtesy of its dominant monad) becomes a finite axis within which highly complex ‘middles within another’ can be located and expressed. The last two points then serve to elucidate the argument made through this section. The uncreated monad, whether naked or in God’s idea alone, s certainly free to endlessly differ from itself – and so God in God’s mind many Adams could thrive. Likewise, extension of itself lacks are fixed realities of is own, and is a mere world of shifting fluxes. And yet from the moment God determines to actually create anything at all, these twin world of perfect difference are lost. Each body (that is middle with another), will express the resonating for another as a single identity, in which are both held both all possible differences but also which when it does change can only do so as those changes (and n other) were the ones contained within its soul. Similarly the ‘middle for another’ cannot inhabit the ‘middle with’, without presenting it as a source of both particular forces (r incitements) and  preganicies (that is particular was it is caught up is establishing resonance across its perceptions). Each difference will then cease to be an openend multiplicity, and come rather, through is echoing relationship with the other, to  contain multiple  difference within itself, trough an attribution of its unity to another.

So far, I have shown very much a ‘negative’ explication of the respective unities of monad and universe. One the one hand the Monad is defined as being necessarily ‘this particular created Adam’, through is body: It is as if through the domain of the body, materiality is able to insists, that if there is only one universe, there must only be the one monad that is actual. On the other, Monads insists that if they are going to be created at all, then they will only inhabit the one universe. The effect of these two taken together is to   qualify exactly where freedom exists in the universe. The necessary (that is the world of efficent causation) is necessarily posteri to freedom ( AG 124 et al). Thence, on might say, that  the split between two differing possible universes occurs before materiality, and the identity it produces, occurs (ibid). From which it s follows that there simply cannot be myriad universes streaming of from a single material point within the universe, as,by the time that one is within the universe itself, one is already bound up by its singularity; that is, by its being this one world and no other. And yet, for Leibniz, one cannot simply locate oneself upon the naked monad one also is, in the hope that that would make one free. It of course would do noting of the sort, and would, if such a point was reached simply pitch one into the echoing difference of the middle for itself. Hence the argument made above, that the actual; freedom of the monad itself, that is the sense in which the monad can of itself influence what it is, and what it will become. The Freedom of the monad itself then lies in the pregnancies of the future, by which it is, of course, expressing the very unity of the universe itself, and by defining that unity, is also necessarily defining its own necessary identity within that universe. Apperception, will therefore define in one move, both the unity of the universe itself, and the unity of myself within that universe ( NG.4, Mo 9 et al), as to unify the one is necessarily to give the other.  The Monad is therefore caught up in a slightly uncomfortable position, which see it only free as it assumes that it has an identity through time (that is the possibilities of pregnancies), and yet this very same possibility is also the one that firmly threatens to capture it within specific inclinings..

  Monads occupy a strangely paradoxically position: In themselves they are free of matter (which exists merely as their creation), and yet they are firmly bound by that creation, and only able to be what they are through giving it in a certain determined way. Likewise the freedom of the Monad, as it could be thought in its rawest form, is in effect no freedom that is could of itself be said to own. The Freedom the naked Monad lies in very indescerniblity from within the world of matter of it diverse forms: One can no more simply determine which Sexti one is (out of all the possible), that one express rationally the exact value of a rational number (AG29). To be a monad which cannot apperceive, is therefore to be caught up in endless sequence of changes, by which something which appears utterly determined after the event, comes suddenly into being. Memory and apperception, will of course modify this situation, by allowing one to navigate the likely differences inscribed within the naked monad, either in terms of the burden of the past, or the pregnancy of the future. Through forming an idea of how the Monad ha been hooked up into the universe already, or is hooking up the universe itself, is becomes therefore possible to directly influence of understand the very apparent indescriblity of the naked Monad itself. One can therefore share, to a degree in God’s creation, And yet, one always makes this move blindly, as one can never know exactly what it is that God intends for one, and must rather trust to the goodness of this nature ( AG 37-38)

  It is therefore the role of God within the Liebnizian system to inhabit this paradox. In God, the complex problematic of monad-identity-universe-and-matter becomes given as a directly and simply identity, which is expressive in itself of God’s own necessary perfection God therefore both justifies, and explains why only one world, and therefore one set of essence (out of the myriad possible ones) should be real. Moreover in doing this God respects the difference between the series of possible universe, and possible essences, and does not dissolve the latter into the former: Events within the world are then thought to be certain (given God’s nature), and yet not logically necessary (Ag 21), and to be so distinguished even if it is certain (given God’s own nature) that he must create these things and no other ( Ag 20 –a point I  return to below). In order to maintain this difference Leibniz has to of course maintain that God’s nature is of a very different kind to that of the monads. Monads are therefore said to emanate from God in whose nature necessarily involves their constant production (Ag 46)  while God himself alone has no body, and so is free to view the universe from all possible angles ( Ag 320), and so alone in the universe Is not present by situation but essence (Ag 326).  God might therefore pre-know, from his own nature, the fate of a an Alexander or a Judas, or a Caesar, and yet that knowledge, as it relates to God alone (Ag41 and 45) does not effect the freedom of the individual as such to act as they themselves are (Ag38). God therefore always judges from a position which is quite other to any one monad, and according to needs that reflect the whole universe itself, rather than any one in it: A Judas’ evil can then be readily justified by the good it might (albeit unwittingly) come by it  (Ag 61 – and see below).

   God operates in a domain whose essence lies in its ability to give as one the worlds of perception and being (Ag 322). God will not therefore merely consists in bare production of things (through efficient causation – as Leibniz thinks a Spinoza-ist God would), but also understands these production in terms of the perceptions which follow on from them. God ceases then not jus the world of flows of matter, but also the events that are occasioning these flows. Indeed it is events themselves that occasion the pretext for their being a best of all possible worlds, and therefore give God a reason for creating a universe in the first place ( Ag 323). In God’s mind, uniquely is  both free to wander itself across all perspectives, all viewpoints, and in doing so, naturally give the sense that reality itself is being created across this being absolutely in the middle of all these perceptions. It is then no wonder that Leibniz rejects so vehemently Newton/Clarkes argument the idea that God either perceives the world (and that space is his organ for perception -  Ag 320); or that God  could operate through events within the universe (and therefore re-wind the universe as some kind of watch-maker - Ag 323): And insists that both these two argument fail to understand the scope of God’s power, in which perception (and so space) and action are given as one ( Ag 330). Nor, should it be lost that Leibniz first conception of God was one which Spinoza (and in spite of his initially protests) can agree with ( Lo 260). Both are at one in the contention that God must be thought of an absolute middle, where of course they differ is the sense that this middle contains within it everything else. For Spinoza, this containment only involved absolute middles themselves, so that things were in God as they were able to express such a middle. For Leibniz it was necessary to think another type of middle entirely for individual finite thing, and then work out the relationship between this middle and that of God.

And yet, one needs care here,  on need extreme caution as one attempts to sort through the intracies of these moves. It is perhaps noteworthy that Leibniz first develops his doctrine of the most perfect being, as he prepares his mind to meet Spinoza ( Nov 1676). He produces (for the first time) a version the same proof he will latter use much latter in the Monadology ( 45), and which argues that the most perfect being,  (that is one which contains all perfection) must be possible, and therefore must exist. The source of this possibility lies within the nature of perfection itself, which Leibniz argues must involve a  ‘simple quality which is positive and absolute’ ( Lo 259). Additionally such qualities must of themselves be  unanalyzable, as if they were that would either necessarly involve then in being either compound (and so not simple) or having ,limits (and so not being purely positive – Ibid). From which it follows Leibniz adds that it must be possible that a most perfect being could contain all these perfections. This is because any incompatibility between differing perfections would itself require an explanation, which in turn, would itself necessarily involve one in supposing each such perfection was delimitable in some way, and so able in some way to exclude the other; and yet such a finitude has been ruled out by ones very definition of perfect itself. One simply cannot therefore define perfection is such a way that they cannot, from their own essence alone, be within the same subject, from which it of course follows that a subject in which all perfections are contained must be possible ( Lo 260). Leibniz goes into his discussion with Spinoza with a very formal abstract proof of the possibility of God’s being. Indeed such is the highly abstract nature of this proof, that it can equally apply to perfections as Leibniz understand them  (which involve both power but also understanding and therefore morality as well – AG 35), quite as much as Spinoza (the attribute – 1/10s): Although (followung Leibniz account) it is probable that Spinoza wanted the proof in writing to check as much….

However this agreement (as it is logical annd abstract) is of secondary importance the subsequent discussion, which clearly then takes a turn which Leibniz does not quite forsee. The day after his meeting with Spinoza (2 Dec) he wrights another long note, which is clearly some kind of response to the discussion he has just had with Spinoza. This note concerns the problem of whether there can be more than one world (or not). Leibniz is keen to demonstrate that this conjecture is not at all possible. What is then so odd though, in this note is the fact that the argument which Leibniz appears to be countering, is not an idea which is found is Spinoza at all. For Spinoza the question of whether or not there are infinite worlds, rests upon the fact that God’s absolute essence (the absolute middle itself)  cannot be contained within any one expression of it. God will therefore naturally express his absolute being, only in having an infinity of attributes, each of which express that being (the middle-for-itself) in a certain fixed way ( 1/14). The Infinity of possible worlds is then never a question of there being a different parallel universe, in which nature the natural order was itself different, but rather a question of the fact that there is no definitive way for the intellect to express substance nature, save as something that contains an infinity of things in an infinity of ways (1/16). For Spinoza (at least in Ethics) is appears then there was never a question that the order of nature would be different in these worlds . And yet it is exactly this possibility that Leibniz is so worried about in the notes following the discussion. Leibniz’s particular concern being that if all possible did in fact exist, then not only would in some world (perhaps this one?) would the wicked by rewarded for their sin, and the Good punished; but also   God, understood as a perfect mind replete with intellect and will would cease to exist, and God would be a little more than a cipher within is were expressed infinite possible difference ( Lo 262). Hence, Leibniz , in his discussion with Spinoza and in spite of what Spinoza actually argued) right up comes up against the problem I have been tracing throughout this section, that his argument ought to lead not to the God he belief in, but rather  to Deleuzaianism (certainly that is what Deleuze himself argues…)

But to return to Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s actual discussion, as witnessed in his note of it. Even if the account of Spinoza’s doctrine of infinite worlds, as Leibniz presents it,  appears very  difficult to reconcile with Spinoza’s own writings, two things still ring true in Leibniz account. On the one hand what appears to rile Leibniz most about Spinoza’s argument for many world is that it appears to fly in the face of existence was we normally understand it. Existence Leibniz insists is always said of things are they are thought to be (or not) in some definite moment of time, and therefore one simply cannot say of other worlds (whose existence cannot be known to us) that they exist or no ( Lo 261-262). Existence therefore for Leibniz is tied up to our perception of that thing’s actual existence, and without that perception can mean nothing. Spinoza, in contrast, denies the essentiality of this connection. As I argue else where for Spinoza Formal being, and formal perceiving, involve distinct existences of their own, which only cone together (and therefore express the same ting) either on the level of God’s infinite nature ( 2/7c) or in the case of the actual existence of an individual being (2/13). Actual existence is then important because it is only as a thing actually exists is this union guaranteed (2/8c). Additionally, this gurantee is itself only possible as objective ideas of some finite mode exists within a mind in a way that perfectly accords with the formal expression of Natures Order as it  (the order) determines  within itself that that mode should exist  (for a while), and be affecting other by that existence (2/9),  The actual existence of a particular perception is therefore, in Spinoza not itself indicative of a truth as to the nature of the world as it is expressed in the perception itself. On the contrary, perception itself (that is God’s idea of creation) is caught up with creation itself (the attribute of though 2/1s), is such a way that the changes in the latter, create impact in the former, and give us the perception that we have/ Spinoza thereby undermines any ‘reality’ to perception itself, viewed as ‘objective {non Classical usage} truth. Actual existence then ceases to be itself the touchtone for ‘existence’, and becomes merely itself an expression of an accord of existent realities who essence lies elsewhere, and whose accord could therefore be expressed in a different way.

  What Leibniz is  responding to quite so vehemently in Spinoza is the fact that his definition of God (as Absolute infinity) undermines any pretension perception might have the express events within the actual world itself . His problem then rests on the fact that Spinoza argument for many worlds  (however these world are themselves conjectured), changes totally the definition of what is real in reality (and in a way that abused, for Leibniz existence itself). What is real ceases to be events, and the substance in which the are expressed, but rather the absolute middle itself, a middle which is thereby emancipated  from (and even worse inexpressible by) particular events. Hence Leibniz’s argument made at the start of second  note, to the effect that there is ‘no need of many worlds to increase the multitude of things, for there is no number which is not contained in this one world, and indeed any of its parts’ ( Lo 261) . That is – there is no reason to posit an absolute middle beyond the world, when one can find just such a middle within the very matter of the world itself. Or to put it another way, what Leibniz is objecting to in Spinoza is his readiness to step beyond the reality of actual existence (and its attendant perceptions), to postulate ‘beings’ (attribute of God and Idea of God) whose conflicting relationship constitutes actual perceptions (as such), but only  do so as they are expressing with the other, their own individual existence ( 1/20 and 2/ 3)  that is itself distinct the perceptions so created (the being of substance does not therefore relate to the essence of Man 2/10). Again caution must be excerised here. Leibniz not more than Spinoza beliefs in the independence of a reality which can be thought as something apart from God’s absolute middle, and the monads perception. The argument is not then whether there is a reality not beyond God and his monad’s but whether or not God values the individual perception of the monads, in composing the absolute reality of the world, or whether those perception (and the reality they create) are in fact  by product of the absolute middle itself.

On the other hand, Leibniz rejects both  Spinoza’s very strict Monism. With regard causation, but equally is polyvocality with regard to freedom. I have argued very extensively elsewhere that for Spinoza. perception (objective thought) is only creative from within causality itself. One cannot therefore seek to set up perception before natures order, or to think a freedom based upon other ways that order could have created the universe. This is not to say in the special case of individuals it is not possible to think beyond natures order, on the contrary Spinoza plainly thinks one can (common notions and intuition), but still maintains that such thought involve ones understanding one being in a very different way from that being as it is given within perception itself. Or, to put this another way, freedom is possible because  God is clearly able to have as many different ways of  beings, as there are different ways act (and to be) within an absolute middle  (1/35). Or to put it another way, freedom is only possible being is in itself  polyvocal, with God’s special power (his immanence) being that he alone is capable of articulating all these different voices (1/18).  I.e. as God’s power to be and to act (3/6) depends upon his very  essence (1/34), that is upon the sense that he is constituting the middle of something, and on nothing else: Hence, as that middle itself necessary be expressed in infinite things and in infinite ways, (1/16), God will be both constituting myriad different ways of being but also (and at the same time) consisting myriad other ways these being are articulate against one another. Common notions and causality represent therefore two distinct ways the difference between things can be articulated, and therefore constitute two distinct (if related in yet other complex ways) manners of being. Perception – taken as the formal grasp of others within the Spinoza system is  irreducibly caught within a certain manner of being (causes) and therefore one can find no freedom within it (other than the acceptance of fate argued for in 5/ 6). Spinoza’s God then commits a double sin for Leibniz. Not only does such a God condemn the kind of perception reality that Leibniz has put all his faith within, to mere Nature Order. But also Spinoza appears to want a God who far from having one divine mind, and with it one univocal being, appears by his very essence to be arranged across infinite separate thoughts and beings (2/11c).

  Leibniz response is of course very complex and rich. His first move (already present in that second note of his discussion with Spinoza) is to insist that God’s Being must be of a different order that of his Monads. He therefore argues that a God who exists in the same way as the monad as a mere possibility if all possibilities were necessarily real  would not be the kind of God the pious would desire. (Lo 262).  The need to establish this difference, then establishes the first paper’s deep importance for Leibniz (an importance which perhaps with the passing of the years ). In that first paper Leibniz demonstrated not only that all perfection could occur within a singular being , but also that the ownership of these perfections itself conferred upon that being a very different being (it its singualarity) to that which the monads enjoyed: God’s being is therefore integrally different from that of finite being, because his existence alone follows on from its own possibility. (Lo 262, but also Mo 45).  The very absoluteness of God’s being lies not in absolute infinity (that is, being compose of infinite attributes each of which express expressing infinite essence- 1 def 6 -or the absolute middle in itself), but rather is comprised of an ‘absolute perfection’, in which are necessarily contained all natures which are capable of being thought of it the highest degree (Ag35). God’s being is therefore fundamentally different to the being of monads in that it must contain infinity those perfection that are necessary finite for the Monad. The immediate implication (which is one that Leibniz explicitly states) is that God’s and Human perfection enjoy the same basic being (only one finitely, and one infinitely); Moreover Leibniz is very careful in drawing up this implication to critique Spinoza, and the relativism he accords to perfections, at this point ( Ag 36).  Hence Leibniz argument effectively (yet again) seeks to invert Spinoza. Where for Spinoza there was a God that was immanent to creation, and yet spoke (as it expressed that very immanence) of itself in different voices, Leibniz argues  God’s being is very different from that of his Monads, and yet that difference itself defines a singular set of  being in which is firmly located both God and Man.

  Moreover there is considerable play within Leibniz in the notion of perfection itself. In the ‘Discourse’ cited above perfection is very much understood along conventional scholastic lines, as a property such as power or understanding that can be thought of as being infinite without any integral contradiction. But this by no means the usually understanding Leibniz has of perfection. Writing nine years before the discourse (and six Months after his encounter with Spinoza) Leibniz suggest that perfection involves a degree of reality which is synonymous with the way an intensity continued a certain degree of some quality or a force expressed an action (Lo 272,): A definition that he clearly sticks with, more or less citing it forty years latter (and in correspondence with Wollf –Ag 230) . Moreover, such a move to perfection is not itself the  property of the singular  finite soul (or its event). Leibniz might have originality formulated it this way, arguing in 1680 in terms of the relative perfection of two contrast possibilities ( Ag 20), and it is certainly true in the ultimate origination of Things he will talk of individual essence striving (even as it exists a s a possibility in God’s mind) to exist (Ag 150). And yet, it is clear that the sense he means perfection, and essence, necessarily involves others. In the Ultimate Origin he might argue that every possible contains within it a certain conatus to be, but then argues that the relative strength of this striving is itself directly dependent upon the way that such a possibility is able to involve the reality of others within its expression ( A 151). Each possibility such possibility is therefore firmly an event (and has a striving) in these sense that is gives a sense that others are caught up within necessary existence. Each Event therefore could said to be being evaluated not for any integral merit of its own ( The Good ‘Judas’, or ‘Sextus’ or ‘Satan’) but rather it itself constitutes a ‘middle for another’ – with those events that are able be caught necessary involving the greatest number of over events being those that will necessary come into existence ( ibid, but Leibniz prefigures this point in the second Note Lo 262).

    Perfection, as it is defined within the Ultimate Orgination (and elsewhere), matters in that it defines a sense in the ‘Middle for another’ of Monads and their events, can be expressed within the single striving towards existence of different world – that is within a single world in which were contained an absolute infinite number of things (Lo 261). Four distinct aspects/ implications can be derived from this move. Firstly, Leibniz is clearly (and a way that us utterly unthinkable in Spinoza) defined an axis in which the same event naturally straddles multiple possible worlds. The reality of an event ceases then to be given neither as an object or absolute middle, and becomes rather a way (through the agency of perceptions) a sense that one is caught up by others, with perception and desire giving the sense of that catching. Secondly, the unity of the striving itself, as it battles to be is in a very real sense fictional. Every  possible ‘universe’ strives and does so even as it is included within the idea of God. So that one is utterly unable to talk of ‘God sive Nature’ as Spinoza can (even if only at a certain point 4/pref.and 4/4), as nature not only includes principle of existence of its  own (Ag 321 –identity would not give existence –Ag 321 ); but also the very principle by which the degree of reality of the universe is expressed (its perfection) would include within it multiple other possible universes. The fact that the universe is, then becomes itself something requires an explication beyond the universe itself ( Ag  150). Thirdly Leibniz language allows him to develop a subtle way of thinking about the link between the world (the striving of the universe to be) and the perceptions across which that world is given.. Perception are something utterly distinct from the world they create (and can therefore re-create it), and yet the very running ahead of perception (the pregnancies of their futures) in re-forging itself, is also being a part in the very strive within which the perfection of the universe, that is (by Ag 272) its degree of reality is itself expressed. Perceptions are therefore intimately caught up within the very reality that they are echoing, and which echos them in turn., Fourthly, by situating the reason for the universe, and its particular degree of reality to a position within is beyond any possible given monad or even any possible event, Leibniz very gently challenges what exactly it is that has being. What gives reality (beyond God) is not ‘Being’ as such (as what gives  has no being of its own), but rather a way of thinking of reality in terms of an open end differences, understanding then understanding the inclusion of events (and Monad) within this difference in terms of their ability to engage in this difference.

   The relationship between perfection ( or degrees of reality) and the monad, effectively reverse the sense one understands both being, and beyond being the absolute middle itself. If being turns of difference (rather than the other way around), a thought becomes meaningful (in a way it simply is not in Spinoza) to think about events within the context of infinite reality itself. This move is of course not without cost (one of the strengths of common notions lies in their ability to re-forge reality through the lack of accord between events and relations of motion and rest -5/4). And yet, it does have two very considerable advantages. On the one hand, it allows monads (that is Humans) to explore as real (that is as creative) a domain that directly includes perceptions (and their immediate grasp of the world) within it, and can encompass within both negative and positive change (in a way that Spinoza Affects certainly do not). On the other hand, once what defines reality involves a univocal inclusion within a reality whose nature itself is created by difference alone, it become very possible to re-think what change is, and include within the soul changes that would necessitate that soul taking on quite another existence. For Spinoza, such a move is impossible as if ones individual nature was changed all too  drastically, so that one stops being able to think certain past experiences/actions as part of ones new nature, then that previous reality (that is expressed essence) is simply no more, and will remain no more for as long as this change remains. It is worth noting that such a shift in nature (for Spinoza) need not of itself be permanent. It certainly can be (as is the case with adult and baby – or perpetual memory lose ( which are the example Spinoza gives – 4/39s); but it s equally possible that memories (and natures) could be lost and then re-found or even merged with other subsequent ‘indentities’. Spinoza is however although he is certainly immune from the criticism Leibniz (et al) levelled at him, that is theory ought to involve perptual differentiation of an essence moment by moment, is only so immune because this theory does not involve understanding this differenation in terms of something other difference (time or reality), Within the Spinoza system time cannt be thought of as something for itself in which differences occur, and will rather be seen as the deliberate construct of the essence itself, as it acts to establish a complex sense in is still caught up in the middle of things, even thought those things are themselves no longer present for it (2/44s and 3/18 makes this move see elsewhere…). Spinoza cannot then think the difference in terms a single ‘time’ (that is a single axis of becoming), and therefore develops a highly complex algebra of tense relations (one I develop elsewhere). Leibniz has then the advantage that he can (even while denying the importance of time itself – which he understands formally) understand now events themselves involve a necessary temporality as they compose their effects through both a burden and pregnancy. Leibniz therefore offers in a way that Spinoza cannot an adequate construct of ‘Time’, and one that can therefore be readily taken into he Post-Kantain world (although of course that it itself need not devalue Spinoza’s own account…)

However, one needs to take care at this point not to loose Leibniz in a welter of Post-Katian thought. Leibniz certainly (and in direct contrast with Spinoza) is creating a single axis of difference, in which he is arranging the differing beings of God and Man, And yet, by actually  insisting upon this difference in being, Leibniz manages resists another move that blights the Post-Kantian (but also Post-Newtonian) world, through a perpetual insistence that reality is only given as one is caught in being in another (call it the attribute or time or difference itself). Leibniz (quite unintentional originality at this point is marked. Taking his distance from Spinoza (who on this point is perhaps the more conventional of the two) be agues that reality is not a concept whose ‘being’ exists as something separate either for God, or in a very different sense Man. God is therefore that being whose existence itself is proofed by its infinite capacity to hold the diverse; While whether or a substance (or an event) actually exists or not, is a product of the sense it is with others – and the product of it alone.  The ‘For’ of the event (the middle for another) resonates therefore not is a reality composed of an ‘ In’ (that is, a condition in which one exists) but rather is or is not as that ‘for’ is able to given a sense that other events are ‘with another’, and are through with being with all the more prefect sive real.

     What then of God’s Being? It is clear that this being of itself must be very different to either the being of matter or the being of Monads, as in God these twin realms are yet to be differentiated from one another. God (in his own being at least) is free to arrange worlds, swapping events and matter around, and generally behaving pretty much as he would like: Go is therefore of himself the simple affirmation of difference-  a difference which not only straddles all possible worlds, but also has no need within itself to create just the one world or even keep the one world, when created singular: God of himself then expresses a purity of the creative power of difference which is not restricted by existence (as we understand it). God is eminent to his creation as ‘Be’s’ differently, because in him alone can difference be expressed in its pure uncontainability. The God of the pious is a God whose being itself contains expresses all difference, and which as it itself is can encompass (and so perceive) all possible sets of changes, even the most incompatible ones, and so as it is pitch in it always remains in the absolute middle is its won being. The Absolute middle in then torn asunder from actuality as we might understand it – and as something ideal (and pure mind) given a being in which all difference s affirmed, as absolutely all perfection are expressed. God’s mind, then represent an absolute capacity to be with another, viewed as something absolutely positive and real in itself, Hence for God (as he exists in himself) whether or not the another he is with is real or even compatible within one another, matters not at all, so long as it in having these ideas, he can express a sense by which is  the middle of himself (his mind) by being with others (his thoughts).

       It is then both matter and Monads that require than God behave reasonably ( a request God necessary follow, and do so with the same necessity as he agrees that one plus one is two). This request, effectively split the sense that God is able to express his difference in two. On the one  hand there is substance in which difference is expressed for itself (and as it is contained within a single being) and yet  can only do so difference beyond that substance are one (a universe). On the other hand, there is matter, in which individual difference from others is taken up and endlessly echoed across a series of diverse relations, and yet can only be so echoed, as these relations are gathered within a unity beyond them. God is then bound by the hard logic of the principle of identities. He cannot simply create willy-nilly, and faced the alternatives of either creating noting at all, or finding another way to express his own power. The problem with the former option is that although possible for a Leibniz God (in a way that it simply is not for a Spinoza deity), it would compromise God’s power both by restricting what he can do in a way that is not logical (there is no reason why God could not create any one universe – it is merely indecision on the behalf of God or petulance…) and by restricting God’s ability to include all perfection of power (which include both only the power of a force, but also the power of a King). Moreover the choice not to choose a world is in a Leibniz system not a default setting. It is not easier for such a God not to create anything as to create it, and he requires a principle just as much for the former as he does the latter: Indeed, given God is natively given as a ‘middle with another’, and so his beings imply (thought does not necessitate) others beings, the assumption for a Leibnizian God is that he will create something rather than nothing, unless there is a good reason to do otherwise…

   At this point Leibniz system engages  in perhaps its most profound conflict with Spinoza-sm (or perhaps to be more truthful its many and varied derivatives) The conflict centres of the effect of thinking events. As mentioned above events are a thought which Spinoza very much could not have. For him not only is the middle is simply defined elsewhere (and remains absolute); but also the very idea of an event (if it was at all) must exist in terms of the middle in another (that is the attribute), in whose being various capacities to be affected could be understood ( 4/39s). Central to Leibniz (and the doctrine of the Best of all possible worlds), are both, the idea that events are not only possible, but actually what god thinks; And that the reality co,posed by such events defines any easy dissolution into a middle in another. Perhaps (as I argues above) the conflict is less this Spinoza, and more with the Kantianism to come (and all synthesis that followed n from it).  Central t the transcendental synthesis is the idea that there must be axis of difference (space and time) within which specific individual diversities can be expressed. It is therefore the mantra of apprehension that the manifold might offer a multitude of experiences, but not one that could be experienced unless it is made apriori to conform to a unified experience (A99). While, for Kant, all that needs be done to refute the Ontological (and Comsological) proof of God’s existence is to assert that reality and concepts are things apart, and therefore the Real of itself does not add apriori add to ones concept of what is real. To actually exists is not therefore to be a concept, but rather it is to confront to a certain condition (time and space) within which individual experience can be differed. This is not the time or place to critique this argument – all I will not is that Leibniz would certainly agree with Neitzsche as this point, that the ‘In’ involves within this unity, amounted not to proof but a blind assertion and unity, and it was just his unity itself that Leibniz was using concept to question… Likewise Leibniz would probably note (along with Deleuze) that Kant’s methodology distance his from events, and not with a smile that Kant felt it I the end necessary both to thinks about different kinds of events (and the natural religion they were caught up with), as well as the continuity of the physical world…

  Modern Spinoza-ists ( I mean Deleuze) have tried a more direct synthesis of ‘Int’ and ‘For’ (events and attribute). Events within such thought are pretty much as Leibniz left them: That is ideal events (defined in God’s possibility), whose nature is to compose a middle for everything else.. Where Deluze then very sharply differs from Leibniz is the nature of the reality that events themselves involve. For Deleuze an events is what it is  as it is expressing the empty, abstract and endessly falsifying nature of time itself, An event then has a peculiar status because the sense that is  as it comprises a middle for another, it is expressing, through itself endlessly diversity and change , the actual  condition for being in time itself. One might say therefore, the diverse matter for Deleuze, as it is very multiplicity it communicates what it is to be bound up in time itself. Or to put it another way for Deleuze the diverse does not create reality of itself as it does for Leibniz) but rather directly expresses in its very complexity that difference through which reality itself it being constituted: It expresses then the very condition of being ‘In’, in the first place.

     It is then this conception o being ‘In’ which Leibniz denies is necessary. Diversity is not the expression of another principle, but rather an active force of being ‘with another’ itself. seen as something utterly positive (as it is to God). Reality is not then the condition within which the diverse needs to arrange itself, but rather reality will of itself express the maxim possible number of ‘with anothers’ and do so as the very condition of their being anything real at all. What then sounds so odd, so restrictive to Post-Kantian ears. In the phrase of the best of ‘all possible worlds’, is in fact what is most positive and creative within Leibniz’s thought itself. That is, the idea that the unity of the world does not involve us in a confrontation with some irreconcillable ‘other’, but rather involves the active (and necessary) construct of diversity itself as it always involves expresses the diverse in terms of its being with another. What matters then about events is not their ability to express a notion (and ideal) difference, so much  as the fact that by hooking up others, and making each resonate across all the rest, then are giving sense in which a middle with another, it itself necessarily expressing a unity within its expression. That is, to be in the middle with others, is effective to constitutes oneself as a capacity to affect and be affected these others, a capacity that is the embodied across events, across which realty (middle with) is composed.

  Hence the absolute difference in kind between the nature of God and Man. The Being with’ is the natural expression of God’s own nature. God therefore naturally, and as he is within himself inhabits reality. God therefore always acts as is expression a within he expresses his own very being. The decision to create one world (rather than all the rest) was arrived at by God, because that world expressed best this middle with another – and so by being alongside it (and viewing it regularly) God was able to further enrich the sense he was with another. The option of other (less perfect) worlds are then closed down to God not only because of the nature of matter (which demands one being alone – I will return to this demand for with), but also because such worlds, even if they were possible would reduce the sense that God as ‘with’ creation, be setting up within creation itself separate domains (that is universes) which would be essentially opposed to any Middle with Another. Likewise, if God created anarchy within the one universe (and failed to listen to the Monad’s request that there is the one universe), he would be paradoxically creating vacuums within being itself. Moreover such a vacuum would not just be a lack of physical content, but rather a break down in reality itself (which is itself composed of the middle with.

   In contrast with God, the fate of individual monad is far more precaurious. Each Monad in itself, can offer absolutely no reason why it should be at all: It only handle upon reality being a series of perception that appear to catch it up with others, and that are inexplicable in themselves. Nor would the precarious if this being be mitigated (as it is for Spinoza) by a meditation upon the nature of other Monads, all of which are in  the  same plight. The Key for the monad’s existence lies not within others so much as with God – that is the principle in which is given as itself the ‘being with another’. Monad’s redemption lies in the first place in God himself (the principle of middle with another), and the meditation by the reasoning mind of what it would be alike if only itself, and such a principle (god) were real. That is, in the thought – who should I confront the middle ogf another. The Best of all possible worlds, then becomes a principle for Moral action it itself. A principle that argues that to be real in itself is to be usefully/ creatively with others. Leibniz therefore recommends each individual Monad always acts morally, that should always act with regard to others and to their assistance. Such acts then being themselves undertaken in the knowledge that God as the supreme principle of Middle with another ( sive reality) will reward such behaviour with ever greater reality. Leibniz therefore expresses not patients for Quietisim or fatalism in the future, even though it has use in the past. That is, the sense one must be with the past, and so must reconcile oneself to it, need not imply anything about how one must look the ‘withs’ that one can hook oneself up in the future.  What is then so special about minds (and differentiates them from animals) is that they alone (through reason) have the ability to grasp at what it is to be with God in existence. An understanding that will then able to share to a degree in the act of creation (that is able to be with others through God), and view the divinity (the middle with) not as some removed designer to creation, but rather a king (or father), in who they exist with.

  In such a schema the status of matter itself is critical (which is why Leibniz is so tireless in arguing that the moral and the physical are one. Matter essentially (even as it expresses Being) resolves the apparent paradox with the concept of reality as Middle With. Of key importance here is the fact that no part of matter contains within it a principle that can justify its own existence (it lacks therefore any meaningful Middle In another).  Matter is therefore that which could even as it is be so very different if things were only with one another differently, while allowing that this difference would not itself create ‘other’ matter as such. Matter (that is composing relations) naturally inhabit the space of With, and hold always open the possible other ‘withs’ could be even as it expresses what currently it. Additionally matter will only compose its relation dynamically, so that each relation even as it is given moves of to be with others. And yet critical a this point Leibniz resist the Kantian leap into the Shadow of Play of time– and rejects the idea that matter itself implies some ‘In’ , in which this perpetually differentiation is enshrined. Better by far he thinks to allow the status of the With of relation itself to stand, and to provide, in God a sufficient reason for that status, and simply accept as a penalty worth paying the fact the individual themselves cannot directly aspire to express this ‘With’.

 

I started this section with the problem Spinoza set to thought – the problems of actual existence. What if – Spinoza asks in Ethics ones actual existence is necessary for one essence to be defined as a thing apart form God or anything else (2/8s). How then are we going to understand how the essence is being within that actual existence? And how are we going to reflect upon the nature of the essence (the absolute middle) that lies beyond our simple being? And how does our own actual existence reflect back into existence itself It the actual existence the individual mode expresses the same existence as that of Go? And if so how? In Ethics, however these questions involve a limit. Actual existence (or rather our necessary giving of it) is then something to explain for Spinoza, - and he endlessly invents concepts capable of its explanation (be it attribute, power, conatus), a move, that of course Leibniz, in the name of the God of the pious, rejects his alternative is the intuitively more immediate argument that actual existence (Being) requires no explanation beyond itself. But, initially simple as this idea is, it immediately sets him n a stormy sea of troubles, as such an existence clearly (as Spinoza knew so very well) pitched him into have to investigate to simplicity of actual existence within all the chaos of existence itself. Moreover Leibniz jump into actual existence, coupled with his argument  for Freedom and for the tribe of Sexti, further compounded his problems, as it forced him up against an apparent abyss of beings (al the unmade Sexti). In this section I have pursued the complex strategy by which answer this problems by forging endless new ways in which the simply unity (that is individuality) of substance can be established, and therefore the singularity of actual existence assured.  Firstly the internal flock of Sexti is anchored by the demand of matter that demands a singularity in the monad that ‘dominate’ it. Secondly, the Monads themselves demand of God that the universe is singular if they are to exist all (that is if they are themselves to be differentiated from God).

   And yet this simple explanation of unity is not itself enough unless some kind of connection can then be made between these two aspects of Being. Leibniz argument (which brings him sharply back towards Spinoza) is that the two are unites by God (whose being is different), and through the agency of perfection. It is through God’s being that perception slips loose from its anchoring within the monad (as a perception of a viewpoint) and becomes the constitutive force of the universe itself (that is the giver of reality itself) . This act of constitution is the peculiar work of God himself as he expressive his being in the Middle with Another. Hence actual existence develops a second sense in which it matters. By expressing its own actual existence in terms of  perception and desire, a monad not only expresses what it is (that is substance) but also by virtue of its very capacity to affect and be affected, the very principle of reality itself (that is degree of perfection). However, critical, this expression while to explain whether a monad is or is not, is actually distinct from its own actual being per se. Each monad actual existence in itself can exist in God’s mind as a logical possibility (in a way it could not for Spinoza). The actual existence of the monad remains its own alone within God’s thought . But then that the logical possibility of that thought cannot be thought without God also understanding how each such Monad only is in itself as it effects everything else, and therefore as it is caught up within various possible degrees of perfection sive reality. The Actual existence of the world  tears away from the monad itself (which cannot not itself provide a principle for why it should itself exist), while never of itself dissolving that monad into pure existing (which is what Leibniz accuses of Spinoza of going), 

What is more, it is then the difference of being of Monad and God which grounds the true freedom of  each. For God the necessity of thinking the flock of Sexti (that is the possible actual existences of a monad) allows his freedom to understand different senses that different parts of the universe come to be with one another. It gives then Him, in his act of creation, elements to work with, and across, as the reality of the most perfect (that is the most real, the most ‘with’) is established. Running the opposite way, the freedom of the monads themselves lies in uncovering (through reason) the way that God is real (the being with), and thereby entering into some kind of rapport (middle with) with the creator himself. The Being of the Monad is not only distinct from necessary reality (perfect); But also that difference is what itself grounds the freedom of God and man; while also defining what degree of reality follows from the sense that although distinct beings, each involve the other in their expression. It is then this reality that, in the form of a necessarily moral physicality, that comes to directly express (albeit to a certain degree) the very sense that God himself is real. The very different Beings of Monads and God, then come, as there is none universe that actually is (and that the best), to be given together – and given in one voice, with that voice coming from God.

Perhaps the problem of reading rationalist philosophy is that we are all too easily blinded by Kant’s brilliant (and yet bias) rendering of it. What are in Leibniz and Spinoza a series distinction between different ways to understand what being involves, become merely a series of vaccous rationalizations, lacking both form or merit. What is lost then in the name of the Cartesian cognito (the I think) are all the nuances of thought that open up once attempt to move beyond Aristotle. Each in their own way, then explore different ways one should replace the moribund 4 fold distinction of cause and associated theory of the soul, with new ways to understand not only what reality as, but also (just as critically) what I was to perceive that reality. Each at this point are then so easy to misread because of the complexities look for in this account. Complexities (which just to take the example of Leibniz above) see deep distinction not only between logical possibility and reality, but also (and a s a part in that distinction) a re-classification of the nature of reality itself-  and one explain the actual existence of Monad (which is so critical to their essence) in terms of  the effect that actual existence itself had. The Perceive and to exist loose their be simply independent from one another, and yet do so in a way that ones not simply dissolve the monad into existence (or existence into perception); But rather, works by setting up within existence complex multiple axis across which different sense of being can be thought.

    The Critical difference between Spinoza and Leibniz being how they think upon the nature of that Being. For Spinoza Being itself, as it is real is no univocal (although it is always one way or other in God): The attribute can therefore contain diversities which do not accord with one another in part (or even at all). His theory of substance, essence and perception, is designed to account for the conditions for one both understand and enjoy these different voices to being. Leibniz in contrast insists in creation that everything God does and says is done in one voice – and that voice is God’s. One might therefore say it is Leibniz, and not Spinoza who actually runs the risk   of loosing sight of individuality within the morass of God. It is then the Monad which (and Leibniz candidly confesses) saves individuality from such a fate. This is because each Monad, will by the very fact that it perceives at all, demand that God thinks also of it, and its perceptive faculty: It therefore demands that God create a world (a middle with) which includes events within it . Perception (and is events) then become a principle within God’s reality, and God finds himself having to allow also for Maonds (his choice is then always merely which to create).

However beyond these very profound difference, their remains for both Spinoza and Leibniz (and here they reveal the post- Aristotlain heritage), that one simply loose sight of reality in a welter of perception and cognito. That is, the fact hat I am within the world I perceive, and must be, even as I perceive it, remains for both of them a critical concern. It is they both shout not enough to simply understand how I perceive, in the categories which allow one to think that perception themselves loose sight of being itself. Far better they say to start not with the cognito, but with actual existence itself (in which I am necessarily included amongst things that are: Only from such a starting point, then each argue is it possible to understand a weave both of the world and the mind..