Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.
Joined Dec 2022
"Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is in itself likewise a similar garden or pond." ~ Leibniz, Monadology 67
Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ
boosted
duodecipaginal (adj)
having twelve pages
"My wound existed before me: I was born to embody it." ~ D, *Logic of Sense*
"... while the System itself is up above, turning about itself, ceding absolutely nothing to the compromises, down below, whose secret he keeps, taking, on the contrary, ‘the best of all sides’ in order to deepen or to make another
fold in the room with closed doors and with sealed windows, the room in which Leibniz is confined when he states, ‘Everything is always the same, with degrees of perfection excepted’" ~ Deleuze, *The Fold* 32-33
"It is an almost schizophrenic tension. Leibniz comes forward in baroque strokes. […] The courtly wig is a façade, an entry, like the vow to hurt no one’s established feelings, and the art of presenting his system from one point of view or another, in such and such a mirror, following the apparent intelligence of a correspondent or of an opponent knocking on his door, ..."
The oughts can bear the is-es but the is-es can't render an ought.
Falling like a knife because a falling knife has no handle.
Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ
boosted
@cosmiccitizen on a slightly shorter timeline you will become your enemies' worst strawman
By the by, from this it's pretty plausible to believe in a "world soul," or to describe Nature itself as this vast and comprehensive process of development which comes from itself and moves into itself infinitely. Its potentiality is apparently infinite, as it gives rise to all of the potentialities of every mineral, vegetable, animal, and rational being.
This world-soul was also what the stoics, especially Chrysippus, identified as the supreme rational principle of all reality.
Thus Aristotle dispensed with all of the naysaying sophists, pyrrhonists, and metaphysicians for a millennium and a half... until the Democritan metaphysicians were proven right and efficient causation became the exclusive paradigm sufficient to describe the sum total of the natural world.
You have a four-level natural world with four kinds of causation at each level:
- a mineral world governed by material causation
- a vegetable world governed by teleological causation
- an animal world governed by efficient causation
- a world of ideas governed by formal causation
- As for these human animals, the properly rational ones (like Aristotle) are such-and-so as they are because they are busy thinking rationally about triangles and stuff. Slaves, women, foreigner, disabled people need not apply.
- The animal stuff is so because it is influenced. Dogs, horses, pigeons are all trainable, and all that training indicates that animals probably obey patterns of stimulus and reward. Of course they'll also strive after their own maturation, but if you really want to understand why an animal keeps doing such-and-such behavior you should really look at what has facilitated or incentivized the animal to do it.
Now with this handy distinction at hand, we might ask "what makes the world so?" and Aristotle would answer,
- The mineral stuff is so because of its material substance. It merely exists, and so if there's going to be any change or development concerning it, that should follow simply from the tendency of EG clay to take an impression.
- The vegetable stuff is so because it is striving after its telos. The plants want to achieve their mature organization, and they'll reshape themselves for it.
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.
Joined Dec 2022
