GUIDANCE NOTES FOR TALK ON NIETZSCHE AND LEIBNIZ DELIVERED ON X ON 10/09/2025
ONE
1.
Half a century after the heyday of the so-called pensée soixante-huit it has become, at least in certain circles, almost a commonplace to dismiss the scholarship of Michel Foucault as either disingenuously misleading or simply shamingly incompetent. The reader will hardly need to have all the individual cases cited to him yet again. The least and best that can be said, for example, about Foucault’s treatment of the stultifera navis in the opening chapter of his History of Madness is that it has given rise to widespread misunderstanding and unwilful misinformation. Whether Foucault himself knew this or not, his account in his first major publication of “the Ship of Fools” fails to make it clear to the reader that no evidence exists of this latter except as a literary and pictorial trope, so that the extensive Foucauldian posterity of the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of our twenty-first has been plagued by repeated naïve assertions, supposedly backed by the authority of a leading philosophical historian, that the mad were left free to navigate the waterways of Europe prior to “the Great Confinement” of early modernity.
An analogous instance, from Foucault’s third major publication, and the work which brought him international fame, can lead us into our first main topic in a manner which highlights that particular aspect of this topic which will be our prime concern. Right at the start of his famous 1966 study of the characteristic forms of thought of the seventeenth century, Les mots et les choses, Foucault takes a stylistic and rhetorical risk analogous to the risk which (on the most generous and benevolent interpretation) we see him taking, with the reference to the stultifera navis, at the start of L’histoire de la folie. He declares the “place of birth” of this book, which consists principally in the description of the peculiar épistèmè of the Age of Louis XIV, to have been un texte de Borges which, he goes on, cites une certaine encyclopédie chinoise. It was the taxonomy of the animal kingdom proposed by this latter, Foucault implies, that really threw into relief for him the fundamental and essential differences – easy to overlook, since each age tends to falsify in its own image the ages with which it stands in a relation of historical and political succession – between, say, the seventeenth century’s manner of organizing reality and our own.
Here, however, unless we suppose some degree of ignorance on Foucault’s part that does indeed surpass all verisimilitude, this latter is indeed using a reprehensibly misleading language. Borges’s text does not in fact “cite” any Chinese encyclopaedia but rather invents this encyclopaedia ex nihilo. Borges coyly half-confesses this invention toward the end of the piece, referring to the “unknown (or apocryphal) Chinese encyclopaedist” as if he were himself unaware of which of these is the case. But Foucault’s sleight of hand here consists, before it does in his using the term citer in the seventh line of this preface, already in his using the term texte in its very first. To denominate the work referred to as a “text” is to leave it an open question whether we are dealing here with a fiction or with an essay in the history of ideas recording facts (even if they be only disputed ones). Borges’s body of writing includes both and both are rightly designated as “texts”. The matter is further complicated, indeed, by the fact that Borges’s authorial activities in both these genres are combined and confounded in this particular piece of writing. The Analytical Language of John Wilkins consists principally and predominantly in a concise true account of the philosophical and linguistic ideas of a real person, one of the founders of the British Royal Society. That passage, however, evoking the “Chinese encyclopaedia” which occurs toward the end of its four or five pages is an intervention of Borges the master fictionalist in this exercise by Borges the compiler of interesting facts. Again, Franz Kuhn, the scholar to whom the “discovery” of the encyclopaedia is ascribed here, is a real figure, author of a well-respected rendering into German of the Ming novel Dream of the Red Chamber. But no such “discovery” was ever made by Kuhn or anyone else.
Foucault’s option, be it ingenuous or disingenuous, to use the term texte, as opposed to the more specific nouvelle, or conte, or fiction – and a calculating disingenuousness is certainly a possibility to be considered here, since the actual attested historical existence of such a taxonomy of the animal kingdom provides a far stronger support to the arguments Foucault goes on to develop here than does the fact of one brilliant Argentinian fictionalist’s having been able to imagine such a taxonomy – has had the same deleterious consequences as his omitting to clarify the purely fictive status of the “Ship of Fools”. The Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, for example, testifies to how academic proponents of a radical ontological relativism now tend to adduce, in support of their positions, “the Chinese encyclopaedia cited in Foucault’s The Order of Things” as if the French author here had indeed been citing an actual scientific reference work and not a work of fiction. The objection that I want to raise, however, against Foucault’s using this invention of Borges’s to prompt the question “how could anyone ever possibly have thought that?” is a more oblique objection than this.
The anomaly that I want to point up here – an anomaly more vitiating, in its way, of the philosophical acumen widely ascribed to Foucault than would be any misrepresentation of historical fact in which he might be shown to have been culpable – is that consisting in the fact that, in the preface to a study of the forms of thought characteristic of the European seventeenth century, Foucault feels himself bound to remove himself thousands of miles and thousands of years from this latter[1] and indeed from the sphere of the real (to which the rest of his material in Les mots and les choses belongs) altogether, in order to discover a paradigmatic instance of the book’s governing and animating question: “how is it possible that anyone could ever really have thought that?”, when in fact, for any mind of genuinely philosophical sensibility and acuity, there springs precisely out of this European century itself the example of a really enunciated philosophical notion which prompts to this question more compellingly even than does the fictive zoology of Borges. And we have hereby arrived already at our principal topic, because this really enunciated seventeenth-century philosophical notion is the notio completa, or “complete concept”, notion of Leibniz’s, initially advanced, under various forms and from various angles, in the thirty-seven articles of the Discours de métaphysique composed in the winter of 1685-86 and then expanded upon in that (initially highly polemical) correspondence with Arnauld which went on throughout the rest of the latter year and beyond.
Foucault may indeed find himself on safer ground when he generalizes – across all, at least, of his contemporary mid-twentieth-century readers – his own experience on first perusing Borges’s “Chinese” zoology of “feeling all the familiarities of thought being shaken by a burst of astonished laughter” than the ground on which we would find ourselves were we to claim the same to be generally true of anyone encountering, for the first time, Leibniz’s conception of the notio completa. But that one reader at least – and certainly no philosophically inadept or inexperienced one – felt amazement, and even fright, on his first encounter with this latter conception is an established and accredited fact of modern philosophical history. I refer, of course, to Arnauld himself, with whom in mind the Discours de métaphysique was composed but who responded to its theses, at least initially, in the most curt and dismissive manner (namely in his first letter of the 1686-87 correspondence, sent to the younger philosopher via the Landgrave of Hessen-Rheinfels and dated the 13th of March of the former year).
Arnauld did not have before him the entire text of the Discours but only a two- or three-page Sommaire of the content of its thirty-seven articles. But it is not surprising that a mind as acute and as broad of vision as Arnauld’s was able to pick out immediately the most characteristic and representative of all the Discours’s propositions: one which scholarship, indeed, has gradually come to recognize as a proposition more characteristic and representative, perhaps, than any other in the vast corpus of Leibniz’s published and unpublished work of the essential spirit and thrust of the latter’s thought as a whole. What Arnauld picked out as representative here, however, he also found to be shocking and affrighting:
[…] I find in these thoughts so many things which affright me, and that almost everyone, if I am not mistaken, will find so shocking, that I do not see what possible use there could be in a piece of writing which will likely be rejected by the whole world. I will cite here as an example just what he says in Article 13 of this document, namely, that “the individual notion of each person comprises, once and for all, all that will ever happen to this person” etc.
But, as we have just suggested, the question of greatest philosophical interest here is really that of generalization: that is to say, the question of whether – and, if so, of just how – we are justified in generalizing Arnauld’s sense of shock and affrightedness in the face of the Leibnizian notio completa and in believing that we have discovered something meaningfully analogous to this sense in, say, our own reactions to this same idea three, or three and a half, centuries later.
2.
One of the boldest – and thereby very possibly rashest and most mistaken – generalizers here is the self-styled “greatest living expert” on Leibniz of the early to middle years of the last century, Bertrand Russell.[2] Russell, we might say, is closely comparable to Foucault here in that his theses – although they display, in terms of their actual substance and content, as good as no affinity at all with those of this latter – have also for their part frequently been picked out as especially apt for debunking by representatives of philosophical currents intellectually and politically antagonistic to Russell’s own. This is quite especially true of many of the theses which Russell advances in the work of confessedly vulgarizing intent in which he raises the claim just referred to: his 1945 History of Western Philosophy. Russell’s account, indeed, of Leibniz’s philosophy in the chapter devoted to him in this book is, in large part, precise and fair. His exposition of the notio completa idea consists largely just in the citation of some of the most decisive passages from the correspondence with Arnauld:
In consulting the notion which I have of every true proposition, I find that every predicate,
necessary or contingent, past, present, or future, is comprised in the notion of the subject, and I ask no more . . . The proposition in question is of great importance, and deserves to be well established, for it follows that every soul is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God; that it is not only immortal and so to speak impassible, but that it keeps in its substance traces of all that happens to it.
Even where Russell passes over to summary and paraphrase one finds, initially, nothing in what he says that invites any challenge or objection:
(Leibniz) goes on to explain that substances do not act on each other, but agree through all mirroring the universe, each from its own point of view. There can be no interaction, because all that happens to each substance is part of its own notion, and eternally determined if that substance exists.
The case is altered, however, once we arrive at the second paragraph of summary and paraphrase following the long quotation from the Correspondence:
This system is evidently just as deterministic as that of Spinoza. Arnauld expresses his horror of the statement (which Leibniz had made): "That the individual notion of each person involves once for all everything that will ever happen to him." Such a view is evidently incompatible with the Christian doctrine of sin and free will. Finding it ill received by Arnauld, Leibniz carefully refrained from making it public.
Here, Russell relinquishes all the exegetical restraint that he has exercised up to this point and allows a great dam of interpretation and speculative cultural-historical contextualization to burst over his account of the substance of Leibniz’s thought. But one does not need to be oneself an expert on the philosophy of the seventeenth century in order to recognize that all of these interpretations and creative contextualizations are profoundly challengeable, if not patently and indefensibly wrong.
For all that, though, acquiring an adequate understanding of the wrongness here in question is, it must be conceded, a more arduous task than it might at first appear. One might almost fancy that Russell constructed his account of this core component of Leibniz’s philosophy with that instinctive cunning that is displayed by certain animals in the construction of their burrows and that is consciously imitated from these latter by certain generals in fortifying and defending their military positions. The last passage of Russell’s cited is easily exposed, as we shall see in a moment, as giving the wrong answer, in light of the actual text of the correspondence, to the question: “Did Arnauld feel ‘horror’ at the Leibnizian notio completa, and ‘ill receive’ it, because it is ‘evidently incompatible with the Christian doctrine of sin and free will?’” The ease, however, with which scholars have exposed this – and the scholarly consensus in our present twenty-first century is indeed that Russell was plainly wrong in contending that Arnauld’s “affrightedness” was an affrightedness at the notio’s contravention of the specific articles of Christian faith which Russell here adduces – is an ease which has served to protect all the better – to help, indeed, to escape notice altogether – another, deeper level of wrongness in Russell’s misinterpretation of the notio completa, as if some kind of hidden redoubt had been worked into some strategy on Russell’s part to promote a false comprehension of what is really at issue in the notio completa understanding of the human individual.[3]
Let us first consider the initial, more superficial level of wrongness which comes to expression in the last lines we have quoted from Russell: i.e. that level of wrongness which has something of the air of an act of cunning about it since, once the Leibniz scholar has identified and exposed it, he may consider the “problem with Russell’s interpretation” to be settled and done with, so that a deeper and more decisive level of wrongness, lying as it were just beneath the first, goes unaddressed and even unperceived by this scholar. One may indeed say that this most frequently expressed dissension with regard to the notio completa between the present generation of Leibniz scholars and the generation of Russell and Couturat turns on what presents itself – in the light of the deeper, more rarely addressed, and indeed only very rarely noted, difference to which we will turn below – as a mere nuance. That is to say, contemporary Leibniz scholarship might allow, at a pinch, Russell’s statement that Arnauld’s “affrightedness" at the notio completa was an affrightedness at an idea which clashed with “the Christian doctrine of free will” to stand as a faithful account of the content of (the early stages of) the Leibniz-Arnauld correspondence. This contemporary scholarship, however, introduces one small but important clarification and correction here. The “Christian doctrine of free will” with which, on the evidence of the 1686-87 correspondence, the notio completa conception was understood by Arnauld to be “evidently incompatible” is not, today’s Leibniz scholars feel conscience-bound to point out, the specific “Christian doctrine of free will” that Russell refers to in this passage. Since Russell speaks of “the Christian doctrine of sin and free will” there can be no doubt but that the freedom of the will that he is thinking of here is the freedom of the will of Man. This inasmuch as is only to Man, not to God, that the former notion, linked inextricably here to the latter, can find any application. But the issue of the freedom of Man, it will be pointed out by the contemporary Leibniz scholar, who has learned to take a much more historically self-conscious, and philologically punctilious approach to a text like the Correspondance than was generally practiced in Russell’s day, is an issue almost entirely absent from the debate between Leibniz and Arnauld and even from that text of Leibniz’s own which prompted it. Both in the Discours de métaphysique and in those letters passing between Arnauld and Leibniz in the spring and summer of 1686, in which the former’s objections to the cited dictum from the thirteenth article of the Discours (or rather, of the Sommaire) were examined and replied to from a number of different angles, the issue at the centre of discussion is, very decidedly, indeed the freedom of the will of God.
As much is evident already from the text of this opening letter of the Correspondance dated 13th of March 1686. Arnauld passes over here directly from his citing of the “affrighting” proposition to a series of considerations which all relate principally – indeed, in the last analysis, essentially and exclusively – to God: “If this is so, then God was free to create or not to create Adam…”; “There is, then, no more liberty in God with regard to all that…” etc. Further proof, indeed, if any more were needed, of the centrality of God, and of the practical negligibility of Man, in the debates that take their point of departure from this letter is the fact that Arnauld deploys the proper name Adam here where another, later philosopher might have deployed the generic denomination “Man”. The word l’homme, in fact, employed generically or even otherwise, occurs barely at all in the Correspondance. In a manner which contrasts sharply with the linguistic practice of philosophers in Russell’s day and still in our own – whereby proper names of scriptural origin, such as “Peter” and “Paul”, are used in a manner functionally identical to algebraic a’s and b’s, that is to say, isolated from and emptied of the stories and circumstances associated with them in Holy Scripture – references to human beings in the Leibniz-Arnauld correspondence are almost without exception references to specific created human individuals under those specific names which invariably comprise some allusion to the particular circumstances, or purposes, of their creation.[4] “Man”, then, since he enjoys whatever presence he does enjoy in these exchanges between Arnauld and Leibniz invariably and emphatically in his quality as a creature, cannot, with any good philological conscience, be presented as the theme or topic of the debate that is played out here. Everything plainly refers back ultimately here – and not, indeed, even “ultimately” but already in the moment of the enunciation of each human-creature-related proposition – to the Creator. Even to call this seventeenth-century debate “theocentric” is an understatement; rather, it is theological through and through.[5]
3.
There is a peculiar irony, indeed, and an unexpected complexity, in Russell’s having introduced the factor of “Man” into this seventeenth-century debate from which it was, in fact, largely or entirely absent. One very strong implication, at least, of Russell’s claim that Arnauld, a seventeenth-century Roman Catholic churchman, apprehended and feared, in the notio completa idea as he encountered it in Leibniz’s Discours de métaphysique, a threat specifically to the freedom of the will of Man is that the Christian religiosity of the seventeenth century constituted an anticipation or prefiguration of, perhaps even an indispensable matrix for, the ethical humanism of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. This may seem, prima facie, to be an odd position to be advanced by Russell, perhaps the most prominent anti-Christian polemicist of his day. But, on consideration, it can be seen that there is nothing odd or anomalous about Russell’s having adopted it. It is the substance of the deeply polemical account of the condition of culture in the late nineteenth century proposed, for example, by Nietzsche in the concluding section of the Free Spirit chapter of Beyond Good and Evil (which we have engaged with already, at some length, above, in the preface to the present study) and in the New Struggles aphorism of the third book of The Gay Science (with which we shall engage, in an equal measure of detail, below). The story told by Nietzsche, however, need not necessarily be construed as a damning one, even by those he cast it at to (what was, from his perspective) their damnation. It is hardly historically deniable that moral and political discourses which tend today to go, apparently axiomatically, hand in hand with an indifference, and even hostility, to religion – such as opposition to slavery and the historical consequences of slavery, for example – were nurtured in a cradle of religious piety and obedience to the dictates of scripture and some, at least, among practitioners of such discourses have been willing to avow, without shame, a filial debt to Christianity in this regard.
One cannot imagine Russell, for all his very public anti-Christianity, repudiating more than briefly and perfunctorily this Nietzschean account of “free thinkers” like himself as the debtors and inheritors of the decidedly “bound” thinking of the theological and theocentric ages of human development. He accepts and embraces, be it knowingly or unknowingly, Nietzsche’s characterization of the “free thinker” as crypto-Christian (“what they strive for with all their strength is the collective happiness of the herd in one green meadow, with safety, security, comfort and ease of life for all; the refrain and doctrine most frequently and copiously reeled off by them is the old song of ‘equal rights’ and ‘pity for all that suffers’”) when he declares in his Autobiography that “three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind”. It is, we may say, within this millennial tradition of a protective concern for “the human factor”, which spans and unites, to use Comte’s terminology, both “theological” and “scientific” orientations toward the world, that the atheist Russell situates the theist Arnauld by suggesting that the latter’s “horror” at Leibniz’s notio completa was a horror at its reduction of the freedom of the human will – expressed, for example, in Man’s ability to choose between sinning and not sinning – to a mere flatus vocis. Russell projects, we may say, his own deep-lying antipathy toward the outright mechanistic behaviourism and unapologetic, unconditional anti-humanism of such philosophical contemporaries of his as B. F. Skinner back into the “affrightedness” and “shock” expressed by Arnauld on his first, and doubtless only cursory, reading of the Sommaire of the Discours de métaphysique. This is, of course, philologically indefensible and betrays that lack of any true sense for historical specificity and of all that historical specificity actually implies which has often been noted as a failing of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and indeed of the pre-WW2 analytical philosophy in general from which this book emerged. But as we have also noted, there is nothing inherently self-contradictory, incoherent or even at all incredible in the notion that Christianity provided the matrix of secular humanism and that the former was “pregnant” with the latter, its own eventual executioner, from its very inception even if this notion, implicitly defended by Russell in the passage cited from his History, happens not, as a matter of fact, to connect successfully with the real and very particular historical mentalité from which the Leibniz-Arnauld debate arose.
4.
We have also said one thing more, however: namely, that to have discovered all this about Russell’s synopsis of the debate about the notio completa, and about the context in which this debate needs to be placed, leaves the circumspect reader not with the sense that he has really penetrated some well-guarded secret but rather that he has been lured or diverted away from one. It is the justified pride of the present generation of Leibniz scholars that they have acquired a much fuller and deeper historical perspective on a corpus of texts like that formed by the Discours de métaphysique and by the pages of correspondence that it prompted than the generation of Russell and Couturat enjoyed. There lie, for example, as we have already indicated, between this “generation of 1900” and the present generation of scholars such philological and historiographical watersheds as the development, in works like Febvre’s 1942 Problème de l’incroyance au XVIème siècle, of the category of mentalité, which renders visible the problem, and posable the question, of whether Arnauld could possibly have entertained the notion of a “freedom of the human will” (in any sense that we can really relate to) and thus of whether Arnauld could have been “affrighted”(in any sense that we can really relate to) by a notion, such as Leibniz’s notio completa, which puts the former notion into question. This present generation of Leibniz scholars, in other words, is able to see that the proposition that “Leibniz’s idea of the notio completa is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of free will” could, if it were true for Arnauld at all, only have been true for him in a sense – namely, the sense of an incompatibility with the doctrine of the absolute freedom of the will of God – quite different from the sense in which more recent generations would tend to take it, from which it follows that Russell’s implicit binding of Arnauld’s horror at the notio completa into a long, continuous story of the horror inspired in certain minds by a vision of the world “determinist” in a sense more or less coincident with “mechano-reductionist” amounts to a, so to speak, retrofitting of the history of the mentalités of the three centuries preceding him from the sole perspective of the mentalité of his own.
Such, I say, is the (justified) pride of the current generation of scholars of the philosophy of the seventeenth century. But pride, as the saying goes, comes before a fall. And the threatening fall to which I want to draw attention here is the fall into the error that, just by rejecting Russell’s idea – namely, that the “freedom of will” for which Arnauld, in his “affrightedness” of March 1686, was afraid was a freedom of the human will – and replacing this false idea with the true(r) idea that the “freedom of will” that Arnauld was afraid for was the freedom of the will of God, one has thereby arrived at a full and correct idea of what it is that Arnauld found “affrighting” and “shocking” in Leibniz’s notio completa conception of the individual human person.
How then, it might be asked, could it possibly be an error to think this? How else, in other words, could the proposition
the notio completa as expounded by Leibniz in such passages as Article 13 of the Summary of the Discourse on Metaphysics was perceived by Arnauld to deny human free will
be an erroneous proposition except in regard to this last specification of the “freedom of the will” which Arnauld perceived to be denied here as being the “freedom of the will” of Man?
Let us fall back, in order to examine this question, to the most fundamental level of the syntactic structure of this proposition, once all its inessential accretions have been stripped away. The stripped-down proposition
the notio completa denies human free will
might (it must be conceded at least in principle), as a simple subject-verb-object formulation, potentially err in either the second or the third of its three component parts. That is to say, the proposition in question might be wrong (as we have seen post-Russellian Leibniz scholarship convincingly demonstrate it to be wrong) as regards its claim that
the notio completa denies human free will
or, alternatively, it might be wrong as regards its claim that
the notio completa denies human free will
in which latter case it would then matter little whether the “free will” denied here were Man’s or God’s, since the decisive error would consist in holding that the notio completa actually tends to deny or negate any act of will, be this human or divine, at all.
Prima facie, and doubtless under the inertial force of many decades of interpretation of the notio completa as a “deterministic” notion, the idea that the proposition
the individual notion of each person involves once for all everything that will ever happen to him
could be anything other than a proposition which takes something away from the human individual and from the powers of the human individual appears to be the most counter-intuitive of ideas. But it requires only a little reflection in order to recognize that nothing blends better with the natural flow of intuition than the insight into the fact that this proposition gives to the individual human person rather than takes away from him, that it empowers rather than disempowers this latter.
To the philosophical layman, coming to a passage like Russell’s with a mind unburdened by centuries of already accepted and sedimented exegeses, will it not be immediately obvious that the proposition drawn by Arnauld from the thirteenth article of the Summary of the Discourse on Metaphysics
que la notion individuelle de chaque personne enferme une fois pour toutes ce qui lui arrivera à jamais
has no direct bearing upon the will of the individual person at all? Astonishingly, it is as if the entire tradition of Leibniz commentary up to Russell (and indeed, as it would appear, well beyond him) has unaccountably consistently misperceived this dictum of Leibniz’s to read rather
que la notion individuelle de chaque personne enferme une fois pour toutes ce qu’elle fera à jamais
A proposition so formulated would indeed bear upon the individual will and on its (un)freedom and would indeed, just as Russell contends, recognizably form part of “a system just as deterministic as that of Spinoza”. But this proposition is not – as it appears, quite astonishingly, to fall to us, this late in the day of a centuries-long tradition of Leibniz scholarship, to note and to point up – the proposition which shocked and affrighted Arnauld in the thirteenth article of the Summary of the Discourse on Metaphysics.
What is it that the actual proposition – the proposition advancing the idea that the notio completa of each individual person contains all that will ever happen to this person – really bears on? Clearly, it bears on the realm from which all such “happening to” human subjects necessarily arises and advenes, namely: the realm of the extra-subjective world, or of Nature (including, indeed, the “second Nature” of other human beings confronting the individual person as factors, initially at least, outside of this person’s power and control). Far, then, from evoking any sort of “determinism”, Spinozan or otherwise, the phrase from the thirteenth article of the Discours de métaphysique evokes a vision of Man and the universe which is the very contrary of all determinism. Determinism, from Democritus, through Laplace, right up to the behaviourism of such contemporaries of Russell’s as Skinner and the mind-brain identity theorists of today, is characterized by the cession of a very large part, indeed of the entirety, of what appears prima facie to lie within the purview and power of Man rather into the power and purview of Nature. The dictum picked out by Arnauld from the thirteenth article of the Discours de métaphysique, however, strikes anyone who reads it naively and without prejudice, taking the words to mean what they mean in ordinary speech, as a sudden interruption and contradiction, or even as a violent reversal, of this long tradition of determinism in the Democritian or Laplacean sense. Here plainly, whatever power had hitherto been taken to reside in Nature is taken back from this latter and dominion over that sphere from which all natural “befalling” arises and emerges is assigned rather to the hitherto “befallen”.
Or rather, more strictly speaking, it is given to something – la notion individuelle – which resides, as it were, in that (on the determinist interpretation) “befallen” entity, Man. We run up here, of course, against a vast and ramified problem in itself, which we shall find re-emerges also in other iterations of the notio completa idea besides and beyond Leibniz’s own.[6] Our present discussion circumvents and supersedes, indeed, the arguments advanced earlier in the present chapter to the effect that the issue for both Arnaud and Leibniz in the 1686 Correspondance was rather that of the limitation placed, by the notio completa conception, on God’s than the limitation placed on Man’s will, since we have now reached a point at which this notio is seen as a delimiting, empowering factor rather than as a limiting, disempowering one. Even so considered, however, the “theocentric” question still lingers on of whether, even if the notio completa “indwelling within the individual” is read (as a naïve, unencumbered “layman’s literacy” surely demands it be) as an empowering notion, it is not, in the end, still God who is empowered through this, Man’s “indwelling” empowerment. The question, in short, is whether “the idea of Man” which is developed, on the basis of the notio completa conception, by Leibniz in the Discours de métaphysique and in the ensuing Correspondance is a genitivus subjectivus or a genitivus objectivus: that is to say, whether it is an “idea of Man” which might potentially form at least the base or core of an autonomous “philosophical anthropology”, or an “idea of Man” only in the sense of an “idea of Man of God’s” which is much better grasped and analyzed, therefore, from the point of view of theology.[7]
For the present, however, we may set this question of the genitivus objectivus or genitivus subjectivus status of the notio completa qua “notion of Man” aside – being mindful that we shall need to take it up again later in the study – and focus our attention on the basic and essential meaning conveyed (in the light of all that we have just said) by the notion itself, regardless of what relations and proportions between theology and philosophical anthropology may happen to obtain within it. It is, needless to say, the possibility of recognizing and experiencing the proposition quoted by Arnauld from the thirteenth article of the Discours as a proposition conveying this meaning – and not at all the recognition and experience of it as a proposition evoking one or another deterministic or mechanistic-naturalistic scenario – that I was alluding to early on in this chapter when I spoke of the European seventeenth century’s itself providing, without there being any need to go searching for this in the exotic climes of Chinese antiquity or Latin American post-modernity, an idea more than sufficient to provoke the astonished exclamation: “how could anyone ever possibly have thought that?”
In the history of Leibniz scholarship this vertiginous quality of the notion that something inherent in the individual person exerts a sway or a mastery over all that can ever happen to or befall said person (inasmuch as all that makes up “the befalling” is always already comprised in “the befallen”) is a quality which has been allowed to come to expression (perhaps precisely due to this its dismaying vertiginousness) mostly only in the somewhat abstract and anaemic form of propositions belonging to the realm of formal logic. In the trained professor of this academic discipline, indeed, one may well imagine there being prompted that same bark of astonished laughter, that same liberating discombobulation of ingrained modes of knowing, as were prompted in Foucault by the zootaxonomy of the “Chinese encyclopaedia” by, in this case, such propositions – all translations into a post-Leibnizian language of the gist and import of the Leibnizian notio completa – as that “every judgment is an analytic judgment in the Kantian sense” or “the relational predicates of a subject are no less directly and exhaustively derivable from this subject’s definition or ‘notion’ than are said subject’s non-relational predicates”. This notion, however, I would contend – and can, indeed, personally testify – is apt also to engender in the philosophical layman barely or not at all conversant with such post-Kantian distinctions as that between syntheticity and analyticity or post-Fregean distinctions as that between non-relational and relational predicates, should he ever happen to encounter it, this very same sense of cognitive vertigo. In contrast (prima facie, at least) to the case of the trained logician, the cognitive synapses, so to speak, which are activated in the educated layman by the notio completa’s suggestion that all potential “befallings” of the individual person might already be foreseen, and thus already foremastered, in this individual person’s inherent “concept” tend to be the cognitive synapses of myth and magic. The associations awoken here, that is to say, are associations with such denizens of a still-enchanted world as der unverwundbare Siegfried: i.e. beings somehow superhumanly forearmed against all those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” which go to shape the experience and the philosophy of Shakespeare’s already disenchanted and all-too-humanized Hamlet.
5.
The task of clarifying just what usefully may, and what may not, be understood to be signified by this undeniably volatile term and concept “magic” which we have just now introduced into the discussion of the notio completa is, as we have said, a task for the study as a whole and will doubtless not be completed even with the completion of this latter. We may begin on this task, however, by considering a concrete exemplification of the notio completa problematic which lies far outside the ambit of the biblical and ancient-historical examples and counter-examples proposed by Leibniz himself and by Arnauld and lies close therefore, it may be assumed, to the lived experience of the readers of the present study. Being, indeed, an artifact of so-called “popular culture”, it may be that the example in question – a comic strip in the classic four-panel “gag” format drawn from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts series which enjoyed an almost universally pervasive presence in the public consciousness above all of the English-speaking world throughout the latter half of the last century – lies too close to this immediate lived experience and is rendered thereby inapt to illustrate a set of philosophical and metaphysical points. For what it is worth, however, the Encyclopaedia Britannica accords to Schulz’s Peanuts, in its entry on The Comic Strip, both priority and primacy within the sub-class of “the literate strip with philosophical, psychological and sociological overtones” which emerged to join various other already-existing sub-classes of the form in the course of the 1950s. The four-panel “gag” runs as follows:
It is a testimony to the depth and acuity of Charles Schulz’s comedic art that the text of these four panels, which runs to barely fifty words and to even less if one sets aside panel three’s near-repetition of panel one, can bear a philosophical commentary many times its length. It is to be hoped, however, that the first of the four panels (and thereby, as just stated, also the third) will require little elucidation or interpretation. It will, that is to say, hopefully be immediately evident to the reader how closely Lucy’s question – a flagrantly rhetorical one, and thereby in reality an assertion – mirrors that thesis to the effect that there inheres in every individual a comprehensive notio completa which had caused such consternation to Arnauld some three centuries before. Lucy proceeds here much like Leibniz in the Discours de métaphysique in that she does not propose that the quality “unheroic" should be predicated of the subject “Charlie Brown” but rather asserts that this predicate is always already present in, indeed always already one and the same with, this subject.
The real crux, however, of the philosophical relevance of this four-panel “gag strip” from 1968 lies firmly in its second panel, in which Charlie Brown raises objections to Lucy’s arrogant imputation. Again, the reader must be forgiven for being initially sceptical as to whether the dozen or so words
I may save a life or report a fire or do almost anything
could possibly contain anything of substance or interest for the serious philosopher. The reader’s initial impression will likely be that the specificity, and consequently the possible significance, of the first two objections is immediately subsumed and drowned in the unsignifying vagueness of the last four words. I would submit, however, that it might be philosophically fruitful to take philosophically seriously the distinctness from one another of the two counter-claims which are actually discretely articulated by Charlie Brown here and to consider this distinctness in the light of the logical-ontological distinction to which we have drawn attention above: namely, that between the claim that the notio of an individual being comprises all his or her non-relational properties or predicates – in advancing which one remains safely within the limits of an ordinary analytical logic – and the claim that this notio comprises also, besides the non-relational, also all the relational properties or predicates of the individual being in question – in advancing which one shatters the framework of ordinary, intuitive logic altogether and enters, or so we have suggested, the realm of something like a “magical thinking”.
This distinction is of especial importance inasmuch as the Leibnizian Lucy, once she has heard these two counter-claims, simply reiterates, in slightly embroidered and emphasized form, her initial claim, thus implying that no counter-counter-claim is called for here from her side because the answer to these objections is already comprised within the Leibnizian notio completa conception. With this implication, though, I shall further argue, the “Russellian” Leibnizian that Lucy is takes much more up into this notio than actually suits or supports her reductivist, schadenfreudige argument and intent: namely, once again, the “magical” moment of Leibniz’s discourse on the notio completa which transcends, and indeed runs counter to, the deterministic or “Spinozan” moment with which Russell tends to confound it in its entirety.
There can be no doubt, indeed, that Lucy here – at least insofar as we consider the matter from the psychological viewpoint of the subjective intentions that can be plausibly ascribed to her, as opposed to that of the objective logic of her speech – is being “Leibnizian” precisely and exclusively in the sense envisaged by Russell in the passage cited above from the History of Western Philosophy. Psychologically, motivationally speaking, Lucy is attempting to induce in Charlie Brown an “affrightedness” of the type which Russell – entirely historically inaccurately, as we have seen – considered the claim encountered by Arnauld in the thirteenth article of Leibniz’s Discours de métaphysique to have induced in Arnauld: namely, an affrightedness at the idea that he, as a human being, might not have in him that unpredictable, ultimately indomitable “human factor” whereby Man is capable both of virtue and of sin or, in other words, an affrightedness at the idea that he might be no more than, to borrow a phrase of Nietzsche’s,
an animal that has been taught to dance by blows and little treats.
The argument here is clearly one conducted on the terrain of the question of just what “non-relational properties” – that is to say, what inherent or intrinsic personal characteristics and resources – Charlie Brown possesses and can draw on (or rather is “made up by” already before any talk of “possessing” or “drawing on” can even begin to make sense).
Charlie Brown’s retort and self-defence is also, in its first moment, situated entirely on this terrain. If Lucy asserts that Charlie Brown is not “of the stuff that heroes are made of”, Charlie Brown’s initial counter-assertion
I may save a life…
is one to the effect that he is of this “stuff”, or at least that there is nothing that definitively proves that he is not. It is worth noting here that, in terms of actually lived and handed-down experience, “saving a life” (or proving unable to save one) has tended to be a privileged phenomenological criterion of whether a particular human individual has or has not, so to speak, “the right stuff”. There testify to this, for example, certain of the extremely phenomenologically detailed portraits of human psychology offered by Joyce’s Ulysses, wherein the action of “saving a man from drowning” is repeatedly evoked as the marker of something amounting almost to a species-difference between the virile, neo-pagan Buck Mulligan and the still quasi-Christian Stephen Dedalus. Stephen’s overt, vocalized allusion to a locally famous feat of Mulligan’s in the opening Telemachus chapter appears casual, almost flippant:
You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however.
But his inner “stream of consciousness” monologue in the subsequent Proteus chapter reveals how vastly and how consequentially this one critical difference between himself and his false friend and rival ramifies through all Stephen’s notion of himself.[8] In adducing the image of his “saving a life”, Charlie Brown adduces what is arguably the key objective correlate of the logical-ontological notion of an “intrinsic property”, of an essential and non-relational predicate on which the individual might draw to prove himself to “be what he is”.
This initial adduction, of course, affords Charlie Brown little headway against the Leibnizian Lucy, precisely because it is an adduction effected on her terms and on her chosen terrain. Lucy’s simple aggravated repetition in the third panel of her initial imputation in the first, being unaltered in any essential regard, implies an absorption of Charlie Brown’s retort into Lucy’s own notio completa argument, or rather constitutes a tacit declaration that this retort was anticipated and comprised within this argument all along: one only affirms, Lucy is hereby saying, the notio completa proposition that “Charlie Brown will never be a hero” by appealing to some intrinsic nature which affords to Charlie Brown, as it arguably does to all human beings, the potential to do the unexpected, since it is precisely Charlie Brown’s intrinsic nature – i.e. that by virtue of which he is Charlie Brown, so that, were he to deviate from it, the topic of debate would thereby turn out not to have been Charlie Brown at all[9] – that dictates that he will never do the unexpected, that his supposed human potential to surprise will, in his case, always remain an unactualized potential.
But what of the second part of Charlie Brown’s retort? This too, we must understand, is tacitly declared to have always already been contained and comprised within the initial notio completa proposition when Lucy in panel three, after having heard Charlie Brown’s counter-claim, merely repeats her own Leibnizian claim in embroidered and aggravated form. But the consequences of this tacit absorption into the notio completa concept of this second element of Charlie Brown’s self-defensive enunciation – or rather of this tacit declaration that the fact that Charlie Brown would never do such a thing as “report a fire” was always already part of the notio completa of Charlie Brown which Lucy here enunciates – are much more far-reaching, I would submit, than are the consequences of absorbing, or acknowledging the always-already-containedness of the first. How is this, exactly?
If we adopt once again the quasi-“phenomenological” viewpoint of concrete lived experience which we have adopted above, we must recognize immediately that the claim “I might report a fire” is very different in nature and structure from the claim “I might save a life”. The nigh-inseparable association with a testing of inward mettle which we have noted to obtain in the case of the “heroic” act of “saving a life” (wherever, at least, this latter is envisaged in the “hands-on” and “face-to-face” sense in which it is envisaged in the passages from Joyce that we have cited) does not obtain, or obtains only marginally and accidentally, in the case of “reporting a fire”. This latter case, indeed, is of a nature such to be very much more a matter of outward circumstance than of any inward character or substance. Little or no intrinsic virtue or ability needs to be drawn up here out of the notio completa inwardness of the individual. On the subjective side, a certain minimal presence of mind suffices. Really decisive as regards whether someone is or is not fêted as a “hero” in this second type and sense of “heroism” is rather a set of objective, and thereby contingent, circumstances. The man who becomes "great” in this latter manner of “surprising the world” and of attaining after all to the status of a “hero” is, in other words, very much an instance of that third type of greatness evoked by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night with the famous lines:
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
Now, as we have said, Lucy’s merely reiterating in panel three, after having heard all that Charlie Brown has to say in his defence, her initial notio completa imputation of panel one, implies an absorption of Charlie Brown’s retort into this imputation, or rather a signalling that this retort was anticipated and comprised within this notio completa imputation all along. Were Schulz’s creation not bound by the extreme pithiness of the “four-panel gag format” – and had, indeed, Schulz endowed his character Lucy from the start of the Peanuts series with an entirely different relationship to culture than the one with which he did endow her – one might imagine Lucy citing, at this point, the passage from Shakespeare and adding:
But you, Charlie Brown, will never even have greatness thrust upon you… You are so much a ‘little man’ by nature, so much a ‘little man’ by your inherent substance and ‘concept’, that greatness befalling you by circumstances that lie outside of you is as impossible a possibility as is your drawing greatness up from within you as an undiscovered inward human resourcefulness.
It would, of course, be folly to imagine the character of Lucy as Schulz created and developed her being circumspect enough to realize the wider implications of this foray yet deeper still into contemptuous Schadenfreude which she permits herself here. To the philosophical mind, however, it should be clear that Lucy, the “Russellian Leibnizian”, has hereby admitted a kind of Trojan Horse into the citadel of that specifically mechano-reductivist, deterministic deployment of the Leibnizian notio completa which has been her whole concern. By extending her notio completa conception of Charlie Brown to subsume also that region of extrinsic contingency to which Charlie Brown appeals in suggesting that greatness might simply befall him – or rather, by suggesting that the region of extrinsic contingency appealed to here was always already subsumed and comprised within her notio completa imputation – Lucy augments, indeed, in the first instance that Schadenfreude which is afforded her by anything that appears to take away still more power from the already pitifully impotent Charlie Brown. A veritable acme of pleasure in Charlie Brown’s wretched powerlessness is surely attained with this claim – implicitly but nonetheless recognizably endorsed by Lucy – that Charlie Brown’s wretchedness is so substantial, so deeply rooted in his very “notion” or “concept”, that he is secured by it against the very fortuity of becoming something else than wretched, of having “greatness thrust upon him” by the extrinsic contingencies of the natural and objective world.
But herein lies the “Trojan Horse” aspect of this reasoning. Must we not recognize a “powerlessness” which proves apt in this way to secure and to insulate itself against any and every extrinsic contingency that looks likely to bring to its bearer any form of joy or success as a “powerlessness” that is itself a form of power, and indeed as an especially potent and daunting form of this latter? Is it not the case that precisely through being the “eternal loser” – the irredeemable wretch whose very notion dictates not only that will he never find greatness within himself but that greatness will never be “thrust upon him” from outside either – Charlie Brown exerts the power of a magus, i.e. the magical power of a control over the prima facie uncontrollable contingencies of Nature and natural reality? The answer to both these questions must clearly be “yes”. But that “Lucy the Leibnizian” (or let us say rather “Lucy the Russellian”, since the understanding of the notio completa vision which we have construed Lucy to be prosecuting across the four panels of the comic strip is, as we have said, a Russellian understanding whereby the “complete concept” vision of Leibniz is a vision equivalent in its effects to the necessitarian-determinist vision of Spinoza) that “Lucy the Russellian” here ends up “sawing off the branch she is sitting on” proves, on examination, to be just one – and, it might be argued, far from the most significant and consequential – of the corollaries of the position we have arrived at.
The reader will not have failed to notice, for example, that this figure of “powerlessness as a mode of power” on which Lucy’s schadenfreudige Leibnizianism finally comes to grief recalls not just a trope of political rhetoric current in the brief period when it was hoped that the collapse of Soviet-style totalitarianism would open a space for genuinely non-totalitarian forms of political co-existence[10] but, on a far deeper level than this, also the fundamental Christian theologoumenon of the
eauton ekenwsen morfhn doulou labwn
from which the just-mentioned trope of “post-totalitarian” political rhetoric surely drew, in the last analysis, whatever intellectual and moral strength it enjoyed. It has been pointed out by a number of philosophical historians of culture that the Christ figure too is a form of magus. The Critical Theorists Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, make this point very clearly in the fourth of their theses on The Elements of Antisemitism in The Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Christus, der fleischgewordene Geist, ist der vergotterte Magier. Die menschliche Selbtreflexion im Absoluten, die Vermenschlichung Gottes durch Christus, ist das proton pseudon. Der Fortschritt über das Judentum ist mit der Behauptung erkauft, der Mensch Jesus sei Gott gewesen. Gerade das reflective Moment des Christentums, die Vergeistigung der Magie, ist schuld am Unheil.
Critical Theory, however, tends to rest content with this undialectical view of the Christian soter as the “deified magician”. It places little or no emphasis on the fact that “Christ magus”, much like Charlie Brown in the comic strip, exerts his “magical” power not, as would seem natural, in order to render himself “Christ magnus” but rather to the opposite end: namely, to master and bend Nature in such a way that he is rendered by it “Christ parvus”, “Christ parvissimus”. Perhaps this is because the “anti-magical magic” which is practiced by the Christian soter – a magic that sunders magus from its natural association with magnus – remained as much of a “stumbling block to the Jews” in the mid-twentieth century, at the tail end of the Christian era, as it did at its beginning, and because the philosophy of the Critical Theorists remains, for all the multiplicity of its sources and influences, at bottom a philosophy of Jewish orientation.[11] In any case, it is with such a self-subverting, such a (so to speak) “self-cancelling”, magic that we have to do wherever we have to do with Christianity’s absorption and transformation of the “magical” idea. And everything we have said in the course of the last few paragraphs points to the fact that the Leibnizian notio completa, if it leads in the direction of “magic”, leads inter alia also in the direction of this “magic”. This, however, is by no means a simple or univocal destination, as I shall devote the following chapter to explaining.
[1] When Borges, in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, writes of las remotas paginas of the Chinese encyclopaedia we may take him to mean “remote” in both these senses.
[2] Russell lays, effectively, the claim to being such at the end of the preface to his 1945 History of Western Philosophy: “It is obviously impossible to know as much about every philosopher as can be known about him by a man whose field is less wide; I have no doubt that every single philosopher whom I have mentioned, with the exception of Leibniz, is better known to many men than to me.”
[3] The suggestion that I vaguely sketch out here of a kind of ultra-Machiavellian chess-master’s move on Russell’s part – namely, the conscious and deliberate misinterpretation of Leibniz’s notio completa conception on one (relatively superficial and trivial) level with the subtle aim of distracting even the attentive and critical reader’s attention (indeed, just this critical reader’s attention) away from a second misinterpretation carried out at a much deeper and more historically consequential level – is not so whimsical, extraneous, or superfluous to the main thrust of the argument of the present study as it may at first appear to be. As is plainly stated below, the task which I suggest in – and indeed through – this present monograph, to be incumbent on the philosopher at the present historical juncture is that of drawing and absorbing into the ambit of philosophical thought proper those (in most respects) embarrassingly “sub-philosophical” insights – which, as I strongly insist here, are indeed insights for all their being “embarrassing” and “sub-philosophical” – which can be excavated from those interventions and agitations by so-called “conspiracy theorists” which – for reasons which ( a fact significant in itself) are seldom very deeply inquired after – have proliferated over the past couple of decades to become an influential sub- or counter-culture against which the dominant culture is deploying massive counter-propagandistic efforts and resources. It is, moreover, overtly also a key part of the argument of the present study that massively weighty consequences can follow for human civilization and political co-existence from the interpretation of the notio completa idea and that these consequences will be radically different from one another, often indeed fundamentally countervailing to one another, depending on the different interpretations imposed upon, or elicited from, this latter. (It will be a large part of the argument of Chapter Four that the last two or three years have formed the arena of just such a massively historically consequential “clash of interpretations”).
There would appear, then, to be at hand here ample motivation for an “organic intellectual” acting and intervening in the service of one or another contending force in an ongoing struggle for cultural hegemony to deploy all his resources of ingenuity and intellectual cunning – even up to the point of such a thing as the ultra-Machiavellian “double-feint”, hypothesized above, of the committing of one, easily discoverable, misexegesis in order for this latter to act as a decoy, or as a shield, for another misexegesis of greater historical and political import – so as to ensure that the principally culturally resonant interpretation of the Leibnizian notio completa be one of one type rather than another. And once the historical-philosophical gambit has been tentatively entered into of according a certain provisional heuristic credence to the narrative of decades- and centuries-spanning “conspiracies” as a key to the decipherment of modernity, few figures seem to slip more smoothly into this role of an “organic intellectual” operating in this highly Machiavellian way in the service, in this case, of a world-governmental, or “globalist”, cause than precisely Bertrand Russell, whose multifarious political activities stretching from the final years of the nineteenth century on into the third quarter of the twentieth did indeed indisputably significantly contribute to laying the foundations of the new, international “left-liberal” hegemony which is taking on, year by year, more nakedly totalitarian forms.
[4] In the first letter of Arnauld’s in which, repenting of the curt and dismissive tone of the letter of the 13th of March, Arnauld attempts seriously to engage with Leibniz’s arguments (I refer to the letter dated 13th of May 1686) the elder philosopher opens, for example, a whole list of “men who have come into the world through very free decrees of God” with Isaac, perhaps the paradigmatic case in this regard. Isaac’s name, famously, means “he will laugh”. The laughter alluded to is initially that of Isaac’s parents, whom Genesis informs us laughed at the news imparted to them that, many years beyond the natural age for siring and bearing a child, they were to become father and mother to another son. It is also, however, a laughter at the natural order of things, which is mockingly and effortlessly thrown down and pushed aside when a son is indeed born to Sarah when she is close to a hundred years old. The emphatic negation of Nature here is the obverse and the corollary of an emphatic affirmation of the power of Will – of God’s will, of course, which “extremely freely” called Isaac into being in a manner radically and ostentatiously “against Nature”, that is to say, as a creature in the strongest and most exclusive sense of this term.
[5] The case for a thoroughgoing, more or less all-exclusive “theologicism” of this seventeenth-century debate may well, it should perhaps be conceded, be somewhat overstated here in the cause of a necessary gainsaying of Russell’s lazy and ahistorical “anthropologicism”. We do find ourselves, indeed, here in the seventeenth century, and indeed very close to its end, and not, for example, in that sixteenth century of Rabelais and of Luther with regard to which, in a work alluded to below, Lucien Febvre could plausibly raise the question of whether a non-God-centred thinking was even possible for those who lived in it. Notwithstanding all that we have said above, it is doubtless possible after all to pick out the rudiments of an incipient philosophical anthropology – one at least relatively autonomous of all theology – at least on the younger philosopher’s side of this debate. The “ultra-theological” may, indeed, have remained so feeble and incipient in this debate of the 1680s as to have to continue to wear the form or mask of the “intra-theological”. That is to say, we may find no discernible expression of an incipient “philosophical anthropology” on Leibniz’s part than his predilection here, when adducing biblical figures to oppose to the biblical figures adduced by Arnauld, to choose figures from the New Testament whereas Arnauld almost invariably chooses figures from the Old. It is a point made most famously, perhaps, by Hegel that Christianity – a religion which, although it incorporates within its Holy Scripture the Jewish Bible, ascribes meaning to this latter only by orientation to and from the Gospels and their associated texts – is, by reason of these latter’s central defining theme of Incarnation (in Hegel’s own terms: the appearance of the Idea in finite form), itself the overcoming of the diremption between theology and anthropology and indeed, put more emphatically, itself already God’s cession of His place to Man.
[6] See the remarks in Chapter Three on the term and notion of darstellen in the exposition of the first of the Four Great Errors in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols.
[7] It can’t be denied that Leibniz opts explicitly, precisely in those of the thirty-seven articles of the Discours de métaphysique which are most expansive upon, and decisive for, the concept of the notio completa, for a genitivus objectivus formulation which gives “Man’s” complete concept entirely over into the lap of God. Article 30, for example – one of the richest and most revealing of the articles of the Discours as regards both the core logical structure and the manifold moral and ontological implications and ramifications of the notio completa idea and one which carries this latter specifically into the vicinity of theological and soteriological problems of a dialectical complexity and existential pathos with which no one would associate the name of Leibniz who had acquired, as have so many, their idea of “Leibnizian theology” from Hume or from Voltaire – involves an unequivocal characterization of that “complete idea” of a person which so comprehensively includes all their actions and decisions that “one must not ask why Judas sins but rather why the sinner Judas was admitted into existence” as “an idea that God has of him”: Car Dieu voit de tout temps qu’il y aura un certain Judas don’t la notion ou idée que Dieu en a contient cette action future libre.
[8] “We don’t want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. Natürlich, put there for you. Would you or would you not?... The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can’t see! Who’s behind me? Out quickly, quickly!... If I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death…”
[9] Precisely this, in fact, is the form which Leibniz explicitly gives to the notio completa argument in, for example, the long and crucial thirtieth article of the Discours de métaphysique, where he writes: Mais, dira quelque autre, d’où vient que cet homme fera assurément ce péché? La réponse est aisée, c’est qu’autrement ce ne serait pas cet homme. We shall enter, in considerable detail, into the literary-historical, the as it were “retroactive” philosophical-historical, and above all the theological-soteriological implications of this particular formulation of the notio completa argument in Chapter Two below.
[10] Members of the present author’s generation will associate the phrase first of all with that 1978 essay Power of the Powerless, authored by the Czech playwright and first President of the post-1993 Czech Republic Vaclav Havel, which became one of the key literary/philosophical reference points for the “civil society theory” which experienced, as we have noted in the preface to the present study, a brief floraison in the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of our present twenty-first before yielding to the emergence of new, more vital political forces in the course of the last decade or so.
[11] What is imputed to Critical Theory here is, it must be allowed, very possibly falsely so imputed. The charge of an insensibility to, or incomprehension of, the kenotic logic characteristic of Christian soteriology can, for example, hardly fairly be laid against Adorno’s later work. The latter’s overriding concern, in the Negative Dialectics and other late publications, with that Nicht-Identische which eludes the grasp of der Begriff is unmistakably closely affined with that ir-re-presentable haecceity toward which, as we shall see in the following chapter, at least one strain in the Christian soteriological tradition – and at least one of the several impulses susceptible of being extrapolated out of the Leibnizian notio completa – tirelessly aspires.
Herein, indeed, consists all that is problematical in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory from the viewpoint of the present study. The possibility is by no means to be excluded that the most fundamental of the various dichotomies pervading and structuring human historical experience that any philosophical approach to this experience needs to address is precisely that between, on the one hand, the development of the notio completa idea in the direction of an undialectical, non-self-subverting “magic” and, on the other, this same idea’s development in the direction of a dialectical, self-subverting deployment of the individual’s “magical” power. Through the exploration of the former path – we might say, speaking very generally – there tends to arise a philosophy of activity and human autocracy; through that of the latter a philosophy of reactivity, recrimination and ressentiment. For all, then, that the contemporary conservative intelligentsia’s characterization of Frankfurt School theory is often crude and risibly mistaken in its concrete details (one of the most damning testimonies against a certain New Right’s even possessing an “intelligentsia” worthy of the name is a 2009 interview given by the eminence grise of this latter, Andrew Breitbart, in which Breitbart speaks of “Antonio Gramsci and other members of the Frankfurt Institute” migrating to the USA “in the middle of the Second World War”) the “Alt Right”’s categorization of Frankfurt School theory as part of “the culture of ressentiment” is nonetheless a well-founded one to the extent that it is indeed down the latter of these two paths that Critical Theory – not just in Adorno’s later negative-dialectical development of it but from the very beginning – tends to proceed. Since, then, it is exclusively the former of these paths that the present study – at least after the lengthy excursus of its second chapter – will be exploring, the input of Critical Theory into its argument will necessarily be minimal.
Undeniable, however, is a significant degree of convergence between the theses advanced by the Frankfurt School theorists and those advanced in the present study regarding the tendency of “the magical” to re-emerge and re-assert itself under other forms precisely where the attempt is made to withdraw it, under its hitherto persistent guises, from the repertory of human self-experience (see, in particular, the remarks in Chapter 4.10 below). Again, of course, in the last analysis, there is a fundamental point of difference between Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the theory very tentatively developed here. The former remains governed, right up to its end in the 1960s (and even in the form of the Habermasian “discourse ethics” which nominally takes up its legacy from that point on) by Benjamin’s declared goal of clearing the ground of human experience of the mythical and the magical altogether. The present study remains agnostic as to whether this is possible or even desirable and contents itself with noting, mainly on the basis of facts adduced in the final section of Chapter Four, that everything points to the existence of an unalteringly demanding appetite among human communities for “the magical”: one which, if it is not sated in one way, must be sated in another.