Four: A Reflection on the Wholeness of Nature, Part III

Abstract

In this third part of my reflection on the wholeness of nature I return to the period of the Enlightenment and provide some of the main steps that led to the disappearance of the Aristotelian concept of the soul. The mechanical paradigm rapidly dethroned the ancient wisdom based on the principle of life. For Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, the reform had been carried too far and lacked great ideas on the majesty of nature. In particular, the new science lacked an ontological principle upon which to ground reality, which he found in the principle of harmony. I illustrate Leibniz's conception of the monad, or soul, with personal dreams that helped me understand it, and show that the soul is intimately related to harmony and the dimension of time. This illustration further refines the idea of a physoid nature, introduced in this series of articles. Finally, I interpret a third dream in the series on the symbol of the number four, which is at the basis of this reflection, in the light of the physoid nature of the soul.