Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
February 7, 2013 16:00
Monadic Vitalism and Aesthetic Harmony: Why Leibniz Still Mattered around 1800
John Smith, John G. Diefenbaker Chair in German Literary Studies, University of Waterloo
Odette Hall 323, 50 St. Joseph Street
Abstract: I will explore the central role that Leibniz played in the major transformations of German thought in the last decades of the 18th and first of the 19th centuries, even if in the eyes of the likes of Goethe, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Friedrich Schlegel his value was not always explicitly recognized, indeed was “disparaged.” My claim is that despite the common critiques of Leibniz at the time (Schleiermacher and F. Schlegel planned to write an “Anti-Leibniz”) he was crucial in many ways. Specifically, if Spinoza’s otherwise mechanistic conception of “deus sive natura” was to be made palatable, it had to be “activated,” “brought to life” (“belebt”); Leibniz’s philosophy offered such a dynamic vision of nature. Hence, even as they openly criticized Leibniz, he was an essential linchpin in a new version of a living God, living nature, living art, and living religion.