The Hermetics to Leibniz. II
Akhenaten, offering libations the disc of Amun-Ra (Aten). The Dynastic Egypt
Solar Worship secrecy was supreme doctrinal axis monadic
In a brief statement is only possible to identify some general features that allow us to glimpse the way Leibniz takes this tradition. I suggested at the beginning, and this is essentially your project was to enter new channels of modern science the four axes that define the secrecy. Let's look a little more closely.
Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, Newton, all natural science understood as the set of abstract formal laws that govern how things work. The empirical experience of daily life is stripped of its uniqueness to be understood abstractly from the experiment mathematical reason. All of them, according to Galileo, world identified with mathematical physical world, with real world. Leibniz, however, against all odds and based on an anti-Cartesian concept of substance , seeks nothing less than a natural science that does not leave the ontology of singular .
What is unique singular, the singular is indefinable by finite abstract concepts, the singular is the only reality. Therefore, any science of nature which does not contain the technical structure vis insita rebus, the internal activity everything in abstract theorizing concepts will never be a strict science sensu. This outrageous statement, but ourselves now disturbs us is the transverse axis of the entire scientific edifice of Leibniz, the epistemological and ontological essential precondition of natural science.
When, following the kinematics of Galileo and Huygens, Descartes tries to prove that it is against the momentum, but the living force which is conserved in the collision of bodies, Leibniz oversized these equations by introducing into them previously force or internal power the body, to be revealed after the crash, so that in the resulting equation from the external action body hit is only condition to display the true cause the effect produced, which are the respective internal forces of both bodies. This statement leads us to understand the concept of conatus infinitesimal elemental or tendency of the body, which is also not against what they intended to Aristotle and the Scholastics, a mere provision of needed outside agent but the embryo itself activity body. Therefore, not only is not enough Cartesian extension and impenetrability to explain the laws of the crash, nor a simple kinematic consideration is sufficient, you have to think there are more bodies. This more is conatus or dead force to be deployed in live force (Brevis Demonstratio, GM VI 117-123, and letter to Bayle, GP III 48; Specimen Dynamicum I, VI GM 241S) .
In light of this guiding idea, Leibniz has to disrupt all items received, starting with the inertia . No body is indifferent to the state of rest or uniform rectilinear motion (as claimed by Descartes). Leibniz tells him to de Volder this:
"Two things that I always support the results of experience and reason for the order, made me recognize that the matter has been created by God endowed internally a reluctance to move or to speak with one word, endowed with resistance that a body which opposes the movement itself, so that if you are at rest, resists all movement, and, if in motion , all further movement even in the same direction, thus breaking force which impels him. "
body resists because it is self-limiting shock occasion to preserve the internal balance between the entelechy and raw or anti-business of any substance, of which it activity of the body. This new statement is no less strange and outrageous than the last. In a very summarized version is this. According to Leibniz, as the measure of the extent , the same as time, space, number or amount, is subject to the homogeneous ideal phenomenal continuity of our imagination mathematical result that none of these parameters can direct proportion to the change, diversification and heterogeneity infinite currently the world's activity, unless it enters our phenomenal measures (measurable derivative forces on the bodies) and the ontological structure of he calls to dynamikón "(primitive forces: the entelechy and primary matter or resistance, which are the simple substance) can be established some connection, some structural analogy, which is more than just a semantic processing of concepts and allow legitimate traffic epistemic level of the substance, which is simple and unextended, the epistemic level of external shocks as that is something composed and extensive.
This analogy between the inner and outer, between simple and compound, between the internal activity of the substances and the external activity of the bodies, is necessary because, otherwise, nothing that would have said so far, your system would be a pure fantasy and, ultimately, we would be doomed to dead-end of Plato, " Jorismós " split between formal and material, and we would escape from their hands the unity of the universe, which we party. (Remember, in passing, that this was the difficulty that Leibniz wanted to resolve the Platonism and its heir, the secrecy, so it can be reduced to system.) So what is the relationship between ideas, formal and sensible things, what material?).
Leibniz's manuscripts and drawings.
naturwissenschaftliche-technisch-medizinische Schriften . Ritterkatalog .
To establish this relationship and defend his new notion of natural inertia bodies, Leibniz has to rework also four other fundamental concepts for him, that inevitably we have to expose sequentially, but whose content is circulates, that is, we can start or finish any of them because they all contain at all; such concepts are infinity, the expression, continuity, analogy .
Let's start with the notion of infinite , its always promised and never completed Infiniti Scientia. Is the crucial distinction between ideal infinite and actual infinity , "we are not going to happen," says Leibniz, that Ideally confused with real substance, pretend today to find parts in order unspecified parts possible and in the aggregate of the current, and we rush and continued through the maze of falling into unexplained contradictions. "
said more specifically in two words: secondary matter, or what we commonly call matter or corporeal mass of bodies, is currently divided diversified to infinity without any term (no physical atoms indivisible) as expression is always the diverse and varied activity of substances of that it is on the contrary, the extension , as well as space, time, number or quantity, are ideal product abstract continuous, indefinite and always endless imagination mathematics. Note that neither the physical nor reality in mathematics ideality last minimum is, in this reality and the ideal match, but different, and radically, that the ideal is a subjective product of our imagination, while it is there real, concrete, actual.
However, following Leibniz points in this most extreme position of secrecy, if there were actual units or "first constituents" (simple substances, which the Hermetic Tradition calls "flares of Divinity") have no real pluralities (matter large or "extensive" ), but not from the pluralities math (which are ideal) or from physical pluralities (which are currently diversified without end) is possible to achieve real units (or the One), which are of another order no physical or mathematical. But then, we still trapped in the same problem as before: how can this ontological leap from one to multiple, on the one hand, and the ideal to actual, on the other? The principle of solving this problem is the theory of expression .
La Machina Trituratoria, complex mechanical leaflet German scholar.
naturwissenschaftliche-technisch-medizinische Schriften . Ritterkatalog .
The notion of expression, that is, the conviction that the essence of each thing is represent all others from their particular "situs" in the universe , was an idea commonly accepted and practiced in the Hermetic tradition from ancient times and had been formulated under the simile of "mercury balloons" or "living mirrors" that spread throughout the wide world, represent and are represented each by all others.
The "Monas Monadum " or one does not cause innumerable physical beings but the Prototype or Reference Concentration Universal or any possible representation. Thus, the expression pen takes on cosmic significance Leibniz a holistic, not only so that each substance represents and is represented by all others in infinitum, but ontological levels say others and are said by others each from his own technical language or, in other words, all these levels contain principles that are each different but equipotent . That is, to cite just one example here, be permissible to argue from the infinitesimal approximation of the variables in the geometric construction of a curve, the approximation always inexhaustible between the perceptions of two substances: the mathematical rules of calculation are different laws metaphysical substances, belonging different ontological orders, but some others are equipotent, ie, expressing each in its field same cosmic universe infinite recursion, although in the first case of an infinite ideal, and the second an actual infinity, that is, the unrepeatable uniqueness of each person in the world.
This means, while justified, what Leibniz calls "the law of continuity 'in the soil of our phenomenal representations everything is continuous, although in the field of substances and bodies real everything is discrete, discontinuous . Continuity, which always has to be repeated, occurs only in the extent of the phenomena, it is not originally a principle of deductive reason nor is originally a mathematical concept, but a truth of fact derived from the principle of perfection: God could have done a phenomenal world discontinuous, and there is no theoretical reason for the continuity in the degree of movement that may be in the degree of perfection of the creatures, this is no theoretical reason, the continuity is only one source: law enforcement. It's not just the absence of jumps.
The continuity is in the hands of Leibniz, the following: When the experience and discover why insensitive approaches among variables of a given system, it is permissible to seek approximations to another system "as long as it retains a certain analogy " between the two systems but there is no similarity, so that what produced is a mirror or representative relationship between different ontological orders or levels. "The law of continuity," he says Leibniz to Johann Bernoulli, was raped by mathematicians especially in the field outside the Geometry. "
This continuity is that the mechanism becomes an epistemic or architectural principle allows us to operate in our research precisely because of the cosmic expression . The nature of things seen an activity approach by insensible degrees, typical of each of these levels, which can be attributed as something common analogy them all, so that mutually expressed in the unit. "I would say, suggests in the Nouveaux Essais Leibniz, there is a way of resemblance or non-integer, so to speak, in terms, but expressive relationship or order."
note, so that the procedure analog in reasoning about natural phenomena threatening to fall at any arbitrary whim, as is often happening to so many tight, and alquimistas.Pero Kabbalists also see analogical reasoning is enormous heuristic power, rooted precisely an organismic worldview, we would now call complexity, which then stood at the antipodes of mechanistic deductive reasoning. Leibniz called Ars inveniendi this analogical reasoning.
So, to avoid deflection fanciful, these four concepts, infinity , expression, continuity , analogy, or use new and cosmic Leibniz makes them, now requires two things: a superior foundation that unifies and then valid, and criterion for its application. The criterion can not be other than experience and reason, says Leibniz. But not an experience purely inductive Baconian accounting of facts nor is it just a mathematical reason, but what Leibniz repeats countless times to de Volder, the reason for the order, which the logic of our reasoning is vicarious. And the foundation of unification and operational validation of these architectural mechanisms is what the philosopher called my great principle of natural things, the principle of uniformity / variety of nature , allow me to call hermetic principle that Leibniz makes the "last of the tight 'or if you will, in a "tight illustrated."
Leibniz and the Hermetic Tradition ,
Bernardino Orio de Miguel
