• Streetlight
    9.1k
    It's well known that Leibniz was among the first philosophers to explore the digital world. Not only did he help invent the binary system - on which all our computers are based on - and invent some of the earliest calculating machines that we know of, but he was also a well known proponent of the ars combinatoria: the art of 'combinatorics', or combining simple things to yield complex things. For Leibniz, this 'art of combinatorics' would, if done well, provide us with nothing less that 'the truths of reason', which would simply be 'reduced to a kind of calculus'. Calculus, incidentally, being another one of Leibniz's inventions (developed in parallel with Newton).

    30599219720_a4e7fcd6ea_b.jpg (Drawing of one of Leibniz's early calculating machines)

    All this is fairly standard story telling (read this it's great!), and is one of the reasons Leibniz is frequently cited as one of the fathers of the modern world. However, one aspect of Leibniz's thought that struck me pretty hard was his theorization of subjectivity, which as it turns out, almost exactly parallels the kind of subjectivity involved in surfing the internet. Basically, Leibniz's theory of subjectivity is this (I'm playing a bit fast and loose here): subjectivity is a point of view upon the infinite, where things which are 'closer' to us are 'clear and distinct', and things that are 'further way' are 'obscure and confused'.

    Importantly, for the Leibinizian subject, the totalility of the world is always 'in view', even if, at the farthest reaches, things end up being obscure (the Leibinizian world is 'flat': there is strictly speaking no 'horizon' beyond which things fall out of view; only objects further and closer away - more obscure or more clear - from a point of view). The seeming existence of time and space, for instance, are merely artefacts of the fact every subject occupies a point of view, and does not see the whole of the world in a clear and distinct manner (he refers to them as 'well-founded phenomena' that are, at the end of the day, illusions). Crucially, for Leibniz, the point of view constitutes the subject and not the other way around. For Leibniz, it's not that the world is 'relative' the to subject: the subject itself would not exist without the point of view provided by the world itself. Leibnizian subjectivity in this sense is almost entirely 'passive'.

    What's striking about this is that the subjectivity of the internet surfer is basically exactly this. If one imagines the net as a vast, interconnected web (as it kinda is), surfing the web is basically having a 'point of view on the infinite': every point or page on the web is, in principle, accessible from every other point and page, and to move through the web is to occupy a certain position within the web. And just as with Leibnizian subjectivity, it's not that the web is 'relative' to one's point of view, but that one's point of view upon the web is constituted by the particular page one is looking at at any point in time (each page is like a window upon the whole). And surfing too also has a similar passivity to the Leibinizian subject.

    The Leibnizian strictures on space and time apply here too: the fact that it takes time to move through the web, and the fact that we cannot explore all of it 'at once', is a function of our being confined to viewing only a limited number of pages at a time. The web itself is, in some sense, timeless and spaceless (everything is 'there', ready and waiting to be stumbled upon), and the experience of temporality and spatiality is a function of the limitation of our (internet) subjectivity, and not of the web. And space and time of the web are also 'well founded phenomena', even if, at the end, they remain, illusory. Anyway, just some fascinating parallels I was thinking about, given that there's been alot of focus on Leibniz's contribution to computing, and not a great deal of attention paid to how his theory of subjectivity is bound up with those same interests.
  • Shawn
    12.6k
    Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch; but, given his theory of monads and logical space which they occupy, there's no reason to say otherwise. I not sure about all the internet stuff though...

    But, then the question is, was Leibniz a Platonist?
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    I not sure about all the internet stuff though...Posty McPostface

    It's not entirely unmotivated. I've been reading Aden Even's book on the digital, and although he doesn't mention Leibniz at all, I'm almost entirely certain he's drawing on him when he speaks of the subjectivity involved in surfing the web, constituted wholly by the click of the mouse:

    "The diminutive single click... sustains the user as a (unique) subject and so also the web as a medium. A minimal resistance, the quantum unit (one bit) of information, the single click (or rather, the option to withhold that click) holds at bay the entirety of the World Wide Web, placing just this page before the user and not the others. Absent the click ... the user would no longer be separate from the data and would drown in those data, user and data dissolving into the formless digital that makes no distinction without a subject. Choosing not to click, or choosing to click here and not there, the user defines her unique perspective on the WWW, establishes her own experience as limited and tied to a place and time. Choosing not to click, the subject staves off the collapse of the Web into itself and the collapse of the subject into the Web.

    The single click, therefore, defines the subject as a subject; it represents her sole power not only to choose which pages appears before her, but also to separate herself from the mass of data that is the Web. Maintaining her subjectivity [via the option of the click], the single click renders the Web a medium, for only as what stands between the subject and the data is the Web medial... As the clickable passage from page to page, the hyperlink represents the immediate proximity of every linked page, the tie that binds. ... But inasmuch as each page contains only certain links and not others, the reality of the hyperlink (as opposed to its fantasy) is to render only a tiny subset of the Web immediately available. the logical space of the WWW consists of numerous organizations or perspectives, wherein each page brings near some part of the web and places more distant the rest.

    Just as the resistance of the single click makes the user a subject and the Web a medium, so each page constitutes a unique perspective on the Web, an organizational overview of the information space (literally) underlining some pages and leaving most of the space of the web to hover implicitly in the background" (Evens, The Logic of the Digital). This analysis struck me as Leibnizian through and through.
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