A Few Thoughts On Leibniz and Newton

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
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One reason Leibniz took off, while Newton kind of stagnated, is that Newton was too concerned with the superstition, with reading God’s mind, with having it all direct now. The metaphysics of the fluxions.

Now, mathematically, fluxions and differential calculus are basically the same thing. But Leibniz had a different, less laberynthian view on God. For him, God both holds all the cards, and gave us the tools to find whatever we want that is good through his Divine Grace.

There is no metaphysical claim behind differential calculus. It is simply “this is accurate and God has the rest.”

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Also, he was so wise that when he said “good,” he meant it in the sense Nietzche meant it in Beyond Good and Evil. Actually good. There is no difference in the best of all possible worlds.

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What throws people off the scent of Leibniz’s philosophical writings (or religious, they were the same to him, as they were to the presocratics) is the simplicity of them. Reading Leibniz is like passing a silk ribon through your hand. People tend to look for the spider’s web of your Kant or your Hegel.

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The interesting thing is that there is a kind of constant Newtonian pressure. People over and over seek to “Newtonize” their terms and their paradigms. They totally resent the Leibnizian dryness and unweildy smoothness.

What keeps the Leibnizian paradigm supreme is that, when push comes to shove and you need cold hard math (which, in theoretical math or sciences, and engineering, is often), you reach for the gun that shoots best.

Also because any given Newtonian paradigm will have a tendency to decay with time, because it just doesn’t offer elasticity.

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It’s been a long time since I looked at the classics but seems to me that L had god and spiritual metaphysical ideas behind everything including his calculus why does it work using infinitesimally small points on a line because God made the universe a continuous and logical harmonious whole you can see that it’s metaphysics also because for quite a while there they thought his metaphysics was purely wrong once quantum mechanics came in and we found that the Universe does jump and it does jump at the physical level the scientists had to rush around and leave behind the continuity model of ontology here but it’s kind of a mixed Victory/Loss there for L because on the mathematical level it still works you can have continuity when you’re doing the math, but he had God there and you’ve also got metaphysical or more specifically ontological claims about the nature of reality

and then I really don’t see the beyond good and evil in L, he was a rational Christian and believed in love and charity Justice and Universal moral truths and he was big on altruism I can’t really see them as it all brothers in their view of morality and of course God’s there the whole time I think he’s pretty much part of the pantheon that Nietschze wanted to knock down.

I had to look around:

“Twice, when an honest, unequivocal, perfectly scientific way of thinking had been attained with tremendous fortitude and self-overcoming, the Germans managed to find devious paths back to the old ‘ideal’—at bottom, formulas for a right to repudiate science, a right to lie. Leibniz and Kant—these two greatest brake shoes of intellectual integrity in Europe!” — Ecce Homo, “The Case of Wagner”, §3

“Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it—the only satisfactory theodicy!” — The Birth of Tragedy, §3

And he hated that book of L’s Theodicy and this is considered a mocking of it.

“The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity, but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.” — The Gay Science, §109

On one side L with the completely rational universe and the other side N with chaos and instead of morals aesthetics, given how much suffering and disorder there is. In any case N thought L was not like him at all. In fact, he loved Voltaire and his mocking of the best of all possible worlds philosophies that L was definitely a part of.the right to lie crowd, one of his own German fellows who came in to explain away the nastiness of life to protect Christianity. So, either on the ground with individual morals or the goodness of the universe N rejected L and I can’t see how he would have considered him beyond good and evil. Nor can I see L thinking that of himself.

I can’t really see how we could say Newton stagnated he was the king of physics for 200 years until a completely different Paradigm came in with Einstein. He built on the metaphysics of his time and he’s still used in practical terms all over the place really the only thing that’s superseded him from L was the notation in calculus: Newton’s was less clear than L’s. But the two of them had God and spiritual metaphysics all over the place in their work.

God durned speech to text hilarities take too much time to remove them all. Sigh. Type or speak, there’s the rub.

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If you want to look at it as metaphysics, but it isn’t really, because there is no direct metaphysics. That is, Newton says "the point is there because it is this." Leibniz says “the point is there because God.”

No. His math is logically harmonious, not because the universe is logically harmonious, but because he was able to reason it out that way and it was God, through His Divine Grace, that gave him reasoning.

Leibniz didn’t assume and never said that the universe is logically harmonious. What he said was that God, by definition, through His Divine Grace, made it infinitely human intelligible. I put the infinite there because we will never know the full picture, which is infinite, but, no matter how deep we go into infinity, we will find it intelligible.

Newton, on the other hand, felt he could and was finding the Final Recipe of It All ™.

That is simply because they misunderstood him. At the end of the day, though, 90% of the math of any quantic analysis paper is Leibniz.

In 2026, with 300 years of very hard working intervening mathematical theoreticians.

Just write it for God’s sake. I was wondering at the drop in quality of your diction.

Well, because Leibniz did not write any physics. And Newton wrote his as an exposition of his mathematical innovations, basically for dummies. Neither of them really took it seriously because both understood that what was important, and where they were making their true ontological claims, was mathematics.

And they did it that way basically because that is the paradigm Descartes established. His whole pure philosophy was basically just a preamble to his math, which were shocking. Probably a bigger step than Galileo was, though Galileo is what sparked Descartes.

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Descartes was probably a little more on the side of Newton than of Leibniz. That is, he felt the lines he was drawing were literal expressions of God.

Perhaps why Descartian mathematics are not widely used today.

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“Statistical jumps instead of continuous lines.”

“Yes, but expressed in continuous lines!”

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You can’t really do that with Newtonian mathematics. They assume an underlying substance.

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In what sense is Leibniz supreme?

He is at the basis of today’s two leading, powerful, epoch changing, cutting edge scientific and engineering paradigm shifts: quantic analysis and autogenerated software.

He ruled the last paradigm, and he rules this one.

Because “because God” turns out to be a pretty fucking powerful formulation.

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Such a subtle difference. Both he and Newton saw pretty much the same denouement of Descartes’ liberation of the line.

Almost the exact same thing.

Yet that subtlety was the difference between one being known for a physics paradigm that he himself felt was a secondary achievement that is already deprecated, and the other being talked about by the most highly trained experts of then and now as if he were some baked-in starting point of reality.

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Fuck it, I’m just going to post this here:

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There is an unwritten rule in this forum: thou shalt not speak about Nietzsche. Now and then I still break it by dropping a bit here and there, but, on the whole, I observe it. It is a good rule.

But consider this: just how much difference, really, is there between the best of all possible worlds and amor fati?

Ok, no more rule breaking.

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Actually, in the case of SC AS (Statistical Computing Autogenerated Software), one could say that the paradigm has become intensely more Leibnizian.

Because of the chaos of a statistical process and the entropy, it creates a kind of “noise” ideal substance that perfectly constitutes Leibnizian lines.

And it works because God.

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I think the egoic disconnect between Nietzsche and Leibniz has a lot by the way of answer to the riddle of why Nietzsche wasn’t able to write the Will to Power.

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I want to add something here about Relativity.

Relativity and quantic analysis weren’t exactly sequencial. They were born in parallel. Einstein proposed Relativity, and it was almost instantly overtaken by quantic analysis (though the overtaking wasn’t fully complete until a few years ago when gravity was finally quantized, and the last vestige of relativity disappeared).

Einstein proposed his theory and, mere years later, Openheimer and co developped the atom bomb using mostly quantic analysis.