Dec 7, 2016 12:11 AM
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-would-leibniz...rope-today
EXCERPT: A nation is either strong or weak. A country is either bravely independent or cravenly beholden. You are either a follower of this school of thought or that one.
Unlike many philosophers and politicians, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz resisted framing problems as stark oppositions. At the deepest level of reality, he claimed, the world is governed by a ‘universal harmony’ that connects everything to everything. This metaphysical unity does not result from the suppression or removal of difference. Rather, it consists ‘in the proportion of identity to diversity’, Leibniz wrote in 1672. That is, the greater the variety of beings that exist together in a unified way, the greater the harmony among them. So difference is not to be feared or denied, but celebrated. ‘Harmony is, in fact, unity in multiplicity,’ Leibniz thought.
This overarching outlook informed Leibniz’s vision for Europe, as fraught a question in Leibniz’s time as it is in ours....
EXCERPT: A nation is either strong or weak. A country is either bravely independent or cravenly beholden. You are either a follower of this school of thought or that one.
Unlike many philosophers and politicians, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz resisted framing problems as stark oppositions. At the deepest level of reality, he claimed, the world is governed by a ‘universal harmony’ that connects everything to everything. This metaphysical unity does not result from the suppression or removal of difference. Rather, it consists ‘in the proportion of identity to diversity’, Leibniz wrote in 1672. That is, the greater the variety of beings that exist together in a unified way, the greater the harmony among them. So difference is not to be feared or denied, but celebrated. ‘Harmony is, in fact, unity in multiplicity,’ Leibniz thought.
This overarching outlook informed Leibniz’s vision for Europe, as fraught a question in Leibniz’s time as it is in ours....