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
It is, however, with regard to the doctrine of pre-established harmony
that Kant's large measure of indebtedness to Leibniz is most apt to
be overlooked. Kant's claim that Leibniz himself meant the doctrine
in a subjective sense (that is, of a harmony between powers in our
own intelligence) rather than objective (or between things out of
relation to intelligence) seems, at first sight, to go far beyond the
mark. However, when we recall that to Leibniz the sense world is only
the confused side of rational thought, there is more truth in Kant's
saying than appears at this first sight. The harmony is between sense
and reason. But it may at least be said without qualification that
Kant only translated into subjective terms, terms of intelligence,
what appears in Leibniz as objective. This is not the place to go into
the details of Kant's conception of the relation of the material to
the psychical, of the body and the soul. We may state, however, in his
own words, that "the question is no longer as to the possibility of the
association of the soul with other known and foreign substances outside
it, but as to the connection of the presentations of inner sense with
the modifications of our external sensibility." It is a question, in
short, of the harmony of two modes of our own presentation, not of the
harmony of two independent things. And Kant not only thus deals with
the fact of harmony, but he admits, as its _possible_ source, just what
Leibniz claims to be its _actual_ source; namely, some one underlying
reality, which Leibniz calls the monad, but to which Kant gives no
name. "I can well suppose," says Kant, "that the substance to which
through external sense extension is attributed, is also the subject
of the presentations given to us by its inner sense: _thus that which
in one respect is called material being would be in another respect
thinking being_."
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