Sunday, November 26, 2017

Monism vs. Pluralism, City of God, City of Man

The standard academic classification of Spinoza and Leibniz as each a 'Rationalist', with the former a 'Monist', and the latter a 'Pluralist', is both misleading and uninstructive.  It is misleading, because it does not take into account Spinoza's Intuitionism, and because it does not distinguish between Spinoza's concept of Sense-Experience as incompletely real, and Leibniz' of it as irreal.  It is uninstructive because it abstracts from the Theological ground of the Monist-Pluralist distinction.  That ground is that Spinoza's deity is corporeal, while Leibniz' is not.  Consequently, while they agree that the only real Causality is divine, it is immanent in the corporeal inter-Mode Causality of the former, while there can be no corporeal inter-Monad Causality for the latter.  Hence, because connected, the Modes are part of the same Substance, but because disconnected, the Monads are Plural.  Now, a further distinction between the two is lost in the limbo that separates Philosophy from Political Science in academic.  The immanence of Spinoza's deity entails that the City of God and the City of Man are one and the same, whereas on the basis of the transcendence of Leibniz' deity, only the City of God is real.

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