Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical ExpositionDewey, John
Philosophy
Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition
Dewey, John
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716
We may with advantage connect this discussion with the fundamental
doctrine of Locke and Leibniz regarding intelligence and reality. To
Locke, as we have seen, knowledge is essentially a matter of relations
or connections; but relations are "superinduced" and "extraneous" as
regards the facts. Every act of knowledge constitutes, therefore, in
some way a departure from the reality to be known. Knowledge and fact
are, by their very definition, opposed to one another. But in Leibniz's
view intelligence, or reason, enters into the constitution of reality;
indeed, it is reality. The relations which are the "creatures of the
understanding" are, therefore, not foreign to the material to be known,
but are organic to it, forming its content. The process, then, in which
the mind perceives the connections or relations of ideas or objects,
is simply the process by which the mind comes to the consciousness
of the real nature of these objects, not a process of "superinducing"
unreal ideas upon them. The difficulty of Locke is the difficulty of
every theory of knowledge that does not admit an organic unity of the
knowing mind and the known universe. The theory is obliged to admit
that all knowledge is in the form of relations which have their source
in intelligence. But being tied to the view that reality is distinct
from intelligence, it is obliged to draw the conclusion that these
relations are not to be found in actual existence, and hence that all
knowledge, whatever else it may be, is unreal in the sense that it does
not and cannot conform to actual fact. But, in the theory of Leibniz,
the process of relating which is the essence of knowledge is only the
realization on the part of the individual mind of the relations or
reasons that eternally constitute reality. Since reality is, and is
what it is, through intelligence, whatever relations intelligence
rightly perceives are not "extraneous" to reality, but are its
"essence." As Leibniz says, "Truth consists in the relations between
the objects of our ideas. This does not depend upon language, but is
common to us with God, so that when God manifests a truth to us, _we
acquire what is already in his understanding_. For although there is an
infinite difference between his ideas and ours as to their perfection
and extent, yet it is always true that as to the same relation they are
identical. And it is in this relation that truth exists." To this may
be added another statement, which throws still further light on this
point: "Ideas are eternally in God, and are in us before we perceive
them."
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