Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

quintessence.) It took a few centuries before aether was discarded again, but now there is ‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’, which currently fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of the cosmos. Meanwhile, it was a long and not necessarily steady route before soul became abstracted from the world of substance.

For Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (thought to be the first person to ask, why there is something rather than nothing) there has to be a ‘sufficient’ cause for the universe to be as it is. Otherwise, God could have created things differently — the universe would then be ‘contingent’ rather than ‘necessary’. It was Leibniz who famously declared that we live in the best of all possible worlds. For Leibniz, although God foresees contingent truths, their denial does not involve a contradiction. Therefore, according to him, there is still a measure of free will — foreknowledge does not imply predestination. Leibniz’ belief in at least one necessary truth (the existence of God) has however been called into question — along with the idea that if you can get to one necessary truth you can derive other necessary truths from it.

Like some of the ancient Greeks, and also like Spinoza before him, Leibniz believed that the universe could only be made of a single substance, and this he described as ‘monads’. The monad is a unit of consciousness, but Leibniz still seemed to accept that there is a ‘physical’ world of sorts — a projection. Faced with the problem (like Descartes) of how the monads influence the apparent physical world, he came up with a theory similar to ‘parallelism’, (see Chapter 8) which said that it is harmony

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