wanderlust_llc

Yes, yes... i admit to my shame... i have a BLOG and a LJ account...

god, technology is taking over my life....

So, my blog is a place for me to vent about my research, BUT, there are no cuts on my blog page and therefore, it just looks wrong to me. And since I'm going to be dumping a lot of text on some of these essays, the last thing I want to be worrying about is how it looks...

Ergo, I link the big stuff to my LJ account and hide it behind a cut where the unwary can avoid my rather pendantic rants about theory and be saved the horror of having the plow through my take on theory no one but me (and perhaps a few other dusty academics) actually care about...

Bonus, this helps me study and get everything straight before I have to head into class AND gives me notes that I can return to before my field exam.

Score.

So yeah, if you see a tag marked "theory" and have absolutely no interest in cyborg lit/theory, victorian lit/theory, or anything to do with the american renaissance, incest in literature, or cultural theory in general.... please ignore the ranting...

if, on the other hand, you want to poke the grad student with a stick and talk theory, I am TOTALLY there... just ask my ex, there is nothing that makes me happier than talking theory (much to the consternation of said ex).

So yeah... here's the first installation. Notes on Gottfried Leibniz's "The Monadology." Good stuff, if rather trying, it is something like two hundred years old now but has some pretty cool implications for contemporary cyborg theory and ideas of dualism. Dude named Le Metterie takes him on in his book, Man a Machine, Man a Plant, which I am reading for Monday and need to have a grasp on this before I continue.

Anyway.... here is the begining, complete with a vocab list (which is pretty critical to read through if you want to breakdown of what is actually going on) and a list of some things that you need to know before you start (including the basics of Newton, Descartes and Plato).

A vocab list:

Monad: simple substance, a singular indivisible unit, also dubbed an “element” or “atom” (1-2), “products and have their birth, so to speak, through the continual fulgurations of the Divinity from moment to moment, limited by the receptivity of the created being, of whose essence it is to have limits” (47).  

Unit: [unite] or, “that which is simple,” i.e. simple substance (see: Monad) (13).

Perception: “The passing condition, which involves and represents multiplicity in the unit [unite] or in the simple substance” (14)

Appercetion (or Consciousness):

Appetition: “the activity of the internal principle which produces change or passage from one perception to another,” perfect appetition is never possible, but leads to new “perceptions” (15).

Entelechies: or, “Entelechy”: 1. In Aristotle’s use: The realization or complete expression of some function; the condition in which a potentiality has become an actuality. 2. In various applied senses (apparently due to misconceptions of Aristotle’s meaning: a. That which gives perfection to anything; the informing spirit. b. The soul itself, as opposed to the body. 3. The name given by Leibnitz to the monads of his system (Oxford English Dictionary, “Entelechy,” accessed 2.21.2009).

Soul: Monads, or Entelechies, “in which perception is more distinct, and is accompanied by memory” (19). E.g. special monads

Memory: that which provides the soul with “a kind of consecutiveness, which resembles reason, but which is to be distinguished from it,” a perception that strikes a cord to a previous perception (26).

Truths of reasoning: necessary and their opposite is impossible, “found by analysis, resolving it into more simple ideas and truths, until we come to those which are primary” (33).[1]

Truths of facts: contingent and their opposite is possible (33). Also, arbitrary and depending on the will of God (46).

God: The necessary Being… eternal, limitless and therefore containing all creation and being the source of all necessary (eternal) truths which may not be understandable to limited, imperfect perception (the type that humans have) (35-45). The “primary unity or original simple substance, of which al created or derivative Monads are products…” (47).

Also important to know about God: “In God there is Power, which is the source of all, also Knowledge, whose content is the variety of the ideas, and finally Will, which makes changes or products according to the principle of the best. These characteristics correspond to what in the created Monads forms the ground or basis, to the faculty of Perception and to the faculty of Appetition. But in God these attributed are absolutely infinite or perfect; and in the created Monads or the Entlechies there are only imitations of these attributes, according to the degree of perfection of the Monad” (48).[2]

Things one should know about before reading Leibniz:

Newton’s Laws of Motion: Published 1687 in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The three laws are:

            First Law: “A body persists its state of rest or of uniform motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force” (Law of Inertia)

            Second Law: “Force equals mass times acceleration (F=ma),” or, as the great god Wikipedia states, “the net force on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by its acceleration.”

            Third Law: “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Descartes was alive and well in the mind of Leibniz: While it is a goal of mine to go through and break down Descartes (specifically Method on Discourse and Meditations on Philosophy) I don’t have the time now, and if you want an okay introduction, just check out the wiki page and ignore the strange pictures (I have no idea what they were going for there) on the Method of Discourse page… you need to know the breakdown of Descartes method (which Leibniz pulls heavily from) and his theory on the justification of god (and therefore, his reinscription of Dualism, which after him, is call the “rational mind” or Cartesianism).

Plato, though very, very dead, was also a huge influence on both Descartes and Leibniz: from the idea of “perpetual reciprocity” to the dualism of soul/body, and the body as inferior to soul (and even, in some passages, as corrupting the soul) and his basic method (think: dead white guy philosophy, Socratic questioning and powerfully deductive logic, and you have it). Again, I’m aiming to produce a breakdown of the Phaedo and the Pheadrus, but might get swamped by the rest of the work that I’m doing.