Leibniz Quotes

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part. New illnesses flood the human race, so that no matter how many experiments you have done on corpses, you have not thereby immposd a limit on the nature of events so that in the future they could not vary.”
― Gottfried Leibniz

“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“Leibniz’s brilliant monadic system naturally gives rise to calculus (the main tool of mathematics and science). But it was not Leibniz who linked the energy of monads to waves – that was done later following the work of the French genius Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier on Fourier series and Fourier transforms. Nevertheless, Leibniz’s idea of energy originating from countless mathematical points and flowing across a plenum is indeed the first glimpse in the modern age of “field theory” that now underpins contemporary physics. Leibniz was centuries ahead of his time. Leibniz’s system is entirely mathematical. It brings mathematics to life. The infinite collection of monads constitutes an evolving cosmic organism, unfolding according to mathematical laws.”
― Mike Hockney, The Last Man Who Knew Everything

“Feynman said, “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied”

Our sentence would be: “The Monadology asserts that the fundamental units of existence are INFINITE, dimensionless, living, thinking points – monads, ZEROS, souls – each of which has INFINITE energy content, all controlled by a single equation – Euler’s Formula – and the collective energy of this universe of mathematical points creates a physical universe of which every objective value is ZERO, but, through a self-solving, self-optimizing, dialectical, evolving process, the universe generates a final, subjective value of INFINITY – divinity, perfection, the ABSOLUTE.”

For ours is the religion of zero and infinity, the two numbers that define the soul and the whole of existence. As above, so below.”
― Mike Hockney, The God Equation

“... for although people can be made worse off by all other gifts, correct reasoning alone can only be for the good.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

“Că însă un patron absolut ticălos precum Hegel, a cărui întreagă pseudofilozofare a fost de fapt o amplificare monstruoasă a argumentului ontologic, a căutat să-I apere pe acesta împotriva criticii lui Kant constituie o alianţă de care însuşi argumentului ontologic i s-ar face ruşine, oricât de puţin are el de-a face cu ruşinea.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

“Gödel, the great mathematical logician, was the champion of rational religion. In many ways, we seek to establish a Leibniz-Gödel hyperrationalist alternative to science. We want to refute the idea that science is just one monolith of materialism and empiricism. You can be a much better scientist by choosing a much better, more rational science, namely that of idealism and rationalism.”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“The subject of 'perennial philosophy' is currently one of the many misleading themes employed in vulgar mysticism. Emanating from enthusiasts of traditional religion, this topic has been appropriated by new age communities and figureheads, to the extent that even Huxley can appear profound by comparison. The Latin phrase is often associated with Leibniz, who may be credited with a more genuine attitude, though it is clear that he did not resolve the issue involved. The term philosophy is currently so confused in application that it can mean anything saleable or novelistic.”
― Kevin R.D. Shepherd, Some Philosophical Critiques and Appraisals: An Investigation of Perennial Philosophy, Cults, Occultism, Psychotherapy, and Postmodernism

“The temporal, contingent world is, as Leibniz said, a “collection of finite things.” It is possible only because it is underpinned by an eternal, necessary world, comprising a collection of zero-infinity things, i.e. monads.”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“Leibniz’s assertion that we live in the best of all possible worlds is, no matter what present appearances suggest, absolutely true – because the issue has to be considered over an entire cosmic Age, not just one snapshot in time. All the horrors of today are necessary for the glories of tomorrow. They provide the dialectical obstacles we must overcome, and we do so by becoming more and more perfect ourselves.”
― Mike Hockney, The Last Man Who Knew Everything

“No one need ever again be embarrassed when they mention religion. It’s not some mad, deluded flight from reality. On the contrary it is ABSOLUTE reality, thanks to mathematics. Had mathematics not had any religious elements, we would be atheists. That’s not how it turned out. The soul is the basis of mathematics – exactly as Leibniz, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, stated. Descartes, Plato and Pythagoras – three other towering mathematicians and philosophers – would have had no difficulty in agreeing with him. Join Team Logos, Team Mathematics. Mathematics is the one, true, divine subject.”
― Mike Hockney, The Last Man Who Knew Everything

“Science should have been about reason, but, instead, it chose to be a crude reaction and retort to religion, and that drove it down a catastrophic atheistic path. Had it not been for religion, science would have become what Leibniz always thought it should be: a union of the empirical and rational, of the physical and metaphysical, with the rational and metaphysical being the dominant partners.”
― Mike Hockney, Richard Dawkins: The Pope of Unreason

“Leibniz’s system is compatible with infinite divisibility,
culminating – at infinity – with the indivisible monadic singularity. Materialism has no compatibility with singularities. The laws of physics are explicitly said to break down at singularities. That’s because singularities are mental frequency domains and science religiously believes only in spacetime and matter. Singularities are beyond science’s Meta Paradigm and ideology.”
― Mike Hockney, The Forbidden History of Science

“Earthquakes, I point out, have always made men eager to placate the gods. After the great Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755—that catastrophe which Voltaire saw as an irrefutable argument for the tragic view of life and against Leibnizian optimism—the locals decided on a propitiatory auto-da-fé.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” was the supremely profound question posed by Leibniz. The answer is that there is something and nothing – they are two sides of the same coin, two perspectives of the same thing. Zero, ontologically, is also infinity. It contains infinite elements that all balance each other out (they sum to zero). Zero and infinity cannot be found separately. Where you get “nothing” you always get “everything too”. They are inseparable twins. So, Leibniz answered his own question with the most consummate skill. A new question replaced it: “Why are something and nothing the same?” And the answer is that it’s because zero and infinity are the same: two sides of one coin.”
― Mark Romel, Strange World: Why People Are Getting Weirder

“According to one Egyptian account, the formation of the world was the realization of a concept first developed within the mind of the Creator. Leibniz had a similar idea. He imagined God as a kind of super computer, calculating every possible world and scoring them all according to some divine scale or metric. Once the Creator had analyzed all possible worlds in his mind (all potentialities), he made actual the world that had scored highest and was thus the best of all possible worlds. If you think this world is bad, you should see the alternatives!”
― Steve Madison, Think Like an Egyptian: How the Ancient Mind Worked

“Even if you magnified a human brain to the size of a house and walked through it and inspected every part of it and all of the different ways in which it functions, you would never empirically encounter mind, thought, the unconscious, consciousness, subjectivity, free will. Empiricism doesn’t prove shit. It’s total anti-knowledge. It relies on induction and inference, but, as Hume showed, induction doesn’t prove anything (a black swan can pop up at any time), and inference has no place in empiricism: if you can’t perceive it, you have no right, in empiricism, to refer to it”
― David Sinclair

“Leibniz rejected the idea that fundamental reality was made up of material atoms; he posited instead that mind, particularly the Divine Mind, was the ground of reality manifest in all the infinite monads. In this theory, Leibniz actually presages many twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, including the theories of Wolfgang Pauli and psychiatrist Carl Jung regarding the continuity of the inner concepts of the psyche and the outer archetypes encountered in the world of physics. For Jung, psyche—or mind—bridged that gap, and Leibniz would agree, arguing that reality is, at base, conscious. I also see similarity between Maximus the Confessor and his logoi. For all these thinkers, reality was grounded in the mind of God, though they differ quite a bit in what that entails and how that is.”
― Jay Dyer, Meta-Narratives: Essays on Philosophy and Symbolism

“If there is one thing common to the great modern speculative philosophers, Leibniz, Hegel and Deleuze, it is the risk that re-animating the universe with a non organic life might make it altogether uninhabitable for sane human beings.”
― Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious

“The Discourse on Metaphysics is divided into three main parts. In the first part (§§1–16) Leibniz states and begins to develop two leading principles: that God has chosen to create the most perfect world, and the inesse principle—that it is in the nature of an individual substance to have such a complete concept that from it can be derived everything that is true of that substance. The second part (§§17–22) is concerned with physics and in particular with Cartesian physics, to which Leibniz objects on the ground that its laws of motion are inadequate and because of its exclusion of final causes. The third part (§§23–31) is concerned with the controversy about ideas and with spirits and their relation to God. Leibniz concludes by claiming that the Discourse offers a good account of the relation of the soul to the body, of immortality, and of the special excellence of spirits and their membership of the City of God, their freedom, and their independence of everything except God himself. Finally he commends his principles on the basis of their “utility” in supporting the Christian religion.”
― Stuart C. Brown, Historical Dictionary of Leibniz's Philosophy

“Leibniz always asserted the contingency of created substances. That they do not necessarily follow from the concept of the divine substance—as the properties of a triangle follow from its concept— and thus cannot be mere modes of God, is why Leibniz is not a Spinozist or a pantheist. God is transcendent to the world insofar as he is without any limitations—he is infinite with respect to his power, his reason, and his will—hence the created monad is always limited in these respects, “for God could not give the creature everything with-out making of it a God” (Theodicy, §31). On the other hand, monads emanate from God, in that he is their originating causal substance, and they exist in his mind as complete concepts that additionally have been instantiated by his will into actual substances.
In this sense, Leibniz conceives of God as being immanent in every created monad, for each is derived of his substance, reflects his omniscient comprehension of all things in terms of its place in the preestablished harmony, and reflects his will with regard to its very creation: “For one clearly sees that all other substances depend on God, . . . that God is all in all, and that he is intimately united with all creatures” (Discourse on Metaphysics, §32). This immanent aspect of the God–world relationship has led to pantheistic interpretations of Leibniz. However, since he also conceives God to be transcendent to the world, his position is essentially theistic.”
― Stuart C. Brown, Historical Dictionary of Leibniz's Philosophy

“.A concepção leibniziana de substância, tal como foi definida nos artigos 8 e 9, reintroduz a noção escolástica de forma substancial. Segundo a tradição aristotélico-tomista, os seres são compostos de matéria e forma: a forma, princípio ativo do composto substancial, é uma natureza comum aos indivíduos de uma mesma espécie (é a matéria que distingue os indivíduos de mesma forma). Para Leibniz, diferentemente, a forma substancial é em si mesma individual. Com a noção de forma substancial, Leibniz pode pensar a substância não apenas como unidade (§ 8), mas também como unidade de ação.
Ao retomar as formas substanciais "tão desacreditadas", Leibniz sublinha seu respeito pela tradição ("pessoas hábeis", "recomendáveis pela sua santidade") e, ao mesmo tempo, marca a diferença entre sua própria filosofia e a tradição ("não se afastam tanto da verdade").”
― Tessa Moura Lacerda, Discurso de metafísica e outros textos

“Os dois exemplos utilizados por Leibniz se referem aos dois labirintos da razão humana: o labirinto da composição do contínuo, no plano matemático, e o labirinto da liberdade e da necessidade, no plano moral. O primeiro (a dificuldade de se conceber a divisibilidade ao infinito de uma grandeza finita), diz Leibniz, interessa apenas aos filósofos; o segundo (a dificuldade de conciliar a liberdade humana com a presciência e a providência divinas), a todo o gênero humano, mas ambos se referem ao problema do infinito e são resolvidos através da idéia de infinito atual.
De qualquer modo, os exemplos são evocados para mostrar que mesmo as questões cujo fundamento se encontra na metafísica podem ser resolvidas na prática ou através da experiência sem o recurso a esse fundamento. Daí a necessidade de dissociar os planos da prática e da ciência (que lidam com fenômenos) do plano metafísico (embora este dê a razão daqueles).”
― Tessa Moura Lacerda, Discurso de metafísica e outros textos

“Para mostrar a necessidade de se manterem as formas substanciais, Leibniz faz uma crítica à noção cartesiana de extensão, insuficiente para explicar a natureza do corpo. Certamente a extensão faz parte da natureza do corpo, mas, em primeiro lugar, não pode constituir a essência do corpo: Leibniz não desenvolve aqui, mas considera que a extensão não explica a inércia, nem o movimento dos corpos, e não pode constituir a unidade que define a realidade dos seres. Em segundo lugar, a extensão não pode ser considerada uma substância, já que não é uma noção distinta que possa ser conhecida através de seus elementos e, graças ao quê, se poderia atribuir uma independência a ela; daí Leibniz des-prezar a diferença que Descartes estabelecia entre qualidades tais como cor, calor etc. e a extensão. Todas essas qualidades são, para Leibniz, qualidades sensíveis e, portanto, relacionadas ao momentâneo que caracteriza a percepção; ao passo que a substância é da ordem do inteligível e deve garantir a unidade e a identidade através do tempo. Eis por que, para explicar a natureza dos corpos, é preciso reconhecer "algo relacionado com as almas e que vulgarmente se denomina forma substancial".”
― Tessa Moura Lacerda, Discurso de metafísica e outros textos

“SUBSTANCE (SUBSTANTIA/SUBSTANCE). A term deriving from Aristotle to refer to the subjects of predication and the objects of scientific inquiry. It became a key term of metaphysics because substances are the fundamental entities of which the universe is constituted. In René Descartes’s philosophy, there are three distinct kinds of substance: God, matter, and minds. In the pantheistic system of Spinoza, on the other hand, there is only one substance, which he refers to as “God-or-Nature.”
Leibniz’s considered view is that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substance: God, who is a pure spirit, and created substances, all of which have bodies. All substances must, according to Leibniz, be capable of action. Only God is pure activity, that is, lacking entirely in passivity; all creatures have some activity and are in varying degrees passive. There is, for Leibniz, a hierarchy of created substances, ranging from creatures close to God, such as angels, to animals that have senses but lack reason, to even more basic corpo-real substances. Humans—capable of reason and therefore made in the image of God—are above animals but lower than angels.
A substance must, according to Leibniz, be a real unity. At one time he seems to have held the view that the unity of corporeal substances was underwritten by their substantial forms. But his later view seems to have been that every substance must be some kind of living thing, with something like perception and something like appetition. He later referred to his simple substances as monads. However, Leibniz seemed also to want to admit complex substances as more than an aggregate of simple substances. He did this by saying that, although there is nothing more to a complex substance than its constituent monads, its unity arises because one of these is the dominant monad.
Leibniz’s theory of substance is the linchpin of his metaphysics.
Each substance, according to Leibniz, is quite unique. He thought that the complete concept of each individual substance contained within itself everything that is true of it. Correspondingly, the nature or essence of each substance was such as to give rise spontaneously to all its phenomena. No substance except God can act on any other substance, nor can it be acted upon by any other substance. The appearance of interaction between substances is to be explained in terms of a preestablished harmony that God has foreordained from the beginning of time.”
― Stuart C. Brown, Historical Dictionary of Leibniz's Philosophy

“MONAD. The term monad is a Greek word for “one.” It is prominent in the writings of Plotinus and occurs in the works of various Neo-platonists such as Giordano Bruno and in kabbalistic writers such as Francis Mercury van Helmont. It has been claimed that Leibniz derived the term from one or the other of these, or from another Platonist such as Henry More or Ralph Cudworth. Leibniz, however, had some tendency to concoct Greek-derived neologisms (“theodicy” is the most famous example) and to use existing Greek words for his own purposes. His own use of the word monad seems to have been mostly derived from its use in Greek philosophy, particularly by Pythagoras. Though he must have been aware of its use by other philosophers, he presents it as if it were new to his system, explaining simply that the term meant “one” and never connecting his use of the term with anyone else’s.
Leibniz had long required that substances be genuine unities, in principle indivisible. He began, around 1690, to use the word monad as an alternative for substance or true unity. Monads are conceived in Leibniz’s writings as souls or forms and, in some cases, minds. But they are always united to a body of some kind, even in the case of angels, who need bodies to communicate with one another. Only God, according to Leibniz, is wholly without a body of any kind.
God, angels, and humans are, as rational souls, at the top end of Leibniz’s hierarchy of monads. At the lower end are the souls of the infinitely small creatures that constitute the physical universe.
In Leibniz’s monadology, the higher monads rule over the lower ones. The relation between mind and body is the same as that between a unified center and the collection of monads it brings together and governs. A composite substance such as a human being or an animal consists of a dominant monad and what would, if not for their connection to the dominant monad, be a mere aggregate of monads.
The connection is a causal one and needs to be understood in terms of Leibniz’s theory of causality, that is, the dominant monad will have more clear and distinct perceptions when it produces some “effect” on the others than do those others.”
― Stuart C. Brown, Historical Dictionary of Leibniz's Philosophy

“Leibniz considera que Descartes identifica falsamente força e quantidade de movimento e, assim, opõe sua tese sobre a conservação da força à tese cartesiana. A força é de uma natureza diferente da quantidade de movimento, ela é uma noção metafísica. Leibniz não pode abdicar, porém, da aquisição da ciência moderna, o mecanicismo garante a expressão matemática dos fenômenos. A força viva, aquela que supõe o movimento, pode ser exprimida matematicamente como o produto da massa do corpo pelo quadrado da velocidade (mv2), de acordo com o efeito que ela pode produzir, tal como fica claro no fim deste artigo.
Leibniz oferece aqui duas razões que justificam o princípio de conservação da força, e não da quantidade de movimento, no mundo. Em primeiro lugar, "é razoável", ou seja, não é matematicamente necessário, mas é conforme à necessidade moral da ordem do melhor. Em segundo lugar, "quando se presta atenção nos fenômenos" se constata pelos fatos e a posteriori oerro de Descartes, porque a experiência mostra que não há movimento perpétuo, tal como supunha o princípio cartesiano, enquanto, de sua parte, a força é conservada quando um corpo a transmite a outros corpos contíguos ou a suas partes móveis. Assim, Leibniz entende que a força, e não o movimento, se conserva e, por isso, corresponde a algo de real.”
― Tessa Moura Lacerda, Discurso de metafísica e outros textos

“Leibniz não se atém ao conteúdo da prova, mas a sua forma lógica: a prova da existência de Deus é um exemplo da dificuldade de se reconhecer uma idéia verdadeira e um exemplo de evidência não fundada em uma análise. Trata-se, pois, de uma demonstração incompleta, é preciso antes demonstrar a possibilidade do ser perfeito ou de Deus. Se Leibniz estivesse interessado no conteúdo da prova ontológica, afirmaria que todas as perfeições são qualidades simples, logo compatíveis entre si, logo a idéia de um ser com todas as perfeições e, entre elas, a existência, é possível, logo esse ser existe. Mas aqui, como no § 1, em que par-tiudessa mesma definição de Deus (mas como um postulado, não como uma prova), Leibniz não considera a prova nela mes-ma: está interessado em mostrar que a argumentação de Santo Anselmo(Proslogion,II-IV) e Descartes(Discursodo método, IV;Meditações, V; Princípios,I, 14) é válida, mas é insuficiente, porque freqüentemente pensamos em quimeras, como o último grau de velocidade, o maior de todos os números etc. Eis o segundo exemplo de dificuldade de reconhecimento de uma idéia: "idéias" matemáticas admitidas pelo vulgo e aparentemente claras que encerram uma contradição. Os exemplos matemáticos são considerados aqui no interior do exemplo da idéia de Deus para mostrar a necessidade da análise no reconhecimento de idéias falsas, enquanto essa última, a idéia de Deus mostra a necessidade do estabelecimento rigoroso, pela via da análise, de uma idéia verdadeira, e a importância, mesmo em metafísica, da análise lógica.”
― Tessa Moura Lacerda, Discurso de metafísica e outros textos

“Belli bir manada filozof şarkı söyleyen biri değil, bağıran, çığlık atan biridir. Çığlık atma ihtiyacı duyduğunuz her defasında felsefenin bir tür çağrısına uzak olmadığınızı sanıyorum. Kavramın bir tür çığlık ya da çığlık atmanın bir biçimi olması ne anlama geliyor? İşte bu, kavrama ihtiyaç duymak: yani haykıracak bir şeyi olmak! Bu çığlığın kavramını bulmak gerekir… Binlerce şey haykırılabilir. Şöyle haykıran birini hayal edin: “Yine de bütün bunların bir nedeni olması lazım.” Bu çok basit bir çığlıktır. Tanımına dönelim: kavram çığlığın biçimidir; o zaman hemen “evet! evet!” diyecek bir sürü filozof bulursunuz. Bunlar tutkunun filozoflarıdır, coşkunun, pathos’un filozoflarıdır ve logos’un, sözün filozoflarından ayrılırlar. Mesela Kierkegaard – bütün felsefesini derinden gelen çığlıklar halinde haykırır ve temellendirir.

Ama Leibniz büyük rasyonalist (akılcı) gelenektendir. Leibniz’i hayal edin: ürkütücü bir şey vardır onda. O, düzenin filozofudur; hatta düzenin ve polisin, polis kelimesinin tüm anlamlarıyla… Özellikle de polis kelimesinin ilk anlamında – yani kentin, devletin kurallı örgütlenmesi… Düzen terimlerinin dışında asla düşünmeye yanaşmaz. Bu bakımdan aşırı tutucudur, düzenin dostudur. Ama çok tuhaftır – bu düzen zevkine kapılmış haldeyken ve bu düzeni temellendirmekle, kurmakla uğraşırken, felsefede korkunç denilebilecek bir çılgın kavramlar yaratma uğraşına koyulur. Dizginsiz, gemi azıya almış kavramlar; en taşkın, en düzensiz olanı biteni teyit etmek adına en karmaşık kavramlar. Her şeyin bir nedeni olması lazımdır.

Aslında iki tür filozof vardır – eğer tanımımızı kabul ettiyseniz – eğer felsefe kavramlar yaratan faaliyetse – ama sanki iki kutup var gibidir: çok ayık kavramlar yaratmaya koyulmuş filozoflar vardır; ötekilerden çok iyi ayırt edilmiş şu ya da bu tekillik düzeyinde yaratırlar kavramlarını – ve sonuçta şöyle bir şey düşünebiliyorum: filozofları saymak, nicelendirmek, yarattıkları veya imzaladıkları kavramların sayısı bakımından nicelendirmek… Mesela Descartes… Onunki ayık kavram yaratma tipidir. Cogito’nun, “düşünüyorum”un tarihi – tarihsel olarak burada her zaman bir gelenek, önceller ve ardıllar bulunabilir, ama bu cogito kavramında Descartes imzasını taşıyan bir şeyin bulunmasını engellemez – yani şöyle bir önermenin (bir önerme bir kavram ifade edebilir): “Düşünüyorum, o halde varım”; bu tam anlamıyla yepyeni bir kavramdır. Bu özneliliğin, düşünen öznelliğin keşfidir. Altında Descartes’ın imzası vardır. Elbette bütün bunlar Aziz Augustinus’ta da aramaya girişebilirsiniz – önceden hazırlanmış olup olmadığını araştırabilirsiniz – kavramların tarihi elbette vardır, ama bu Descartes’ın imzasını taşır. Descartes… çok hızlı geçmedik mi? Ona atfedebileceğimiz beş altı kavram vardır. Altı kavram yaratmış olmak muazzam bir şeydir. Ama bu ayık bir yaratıştır.

İkinci olarak azgın, öfkeli filozoflar vardır. Onlarda her kavram bir tekillikler kümesini kapsar – ve onlara sürekli olarak başka kavramlar, yeni kavramlar gerekir. O zaman çılgın bir kavramlar yaratımına tanık olursunuz. Tipik örnek Leibniz’dir; yeniden ve yeniden bir şeyler yaratmayı asla bırakmaz. Açıklamak istediğim şey işte buydu.

O Alman dilinin kavram bakımından kudreti üzerine düşünün ilk filozoftur – Almanca hangi bakımdan kavramsal bir üstünlüğe sahiptir? Ve bunun aynı zamanda büyük bir haykırma, çığlık dili olması da tesadüfi değildir. Leibniz bir sürü şeyle uğraşır – neredeyse her şeyle, çok büyük bir matematikçi, çok büyük bir fizikçi, çok iyi bir hukukçu, siyasi faaliyetin her türü, hep düzenin hizmetinde… Dur durak bilmez, çok karanlık, şüpheli bir heriftir.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Leibniz Üzerine Beş Ders