Under the Sign of Leibniz: The Growth of Aesthetic Power

Abstract

supple and mature, aesthetics may conceivably be habilitated for the role of a guiding intellectual discipline in a way unimaginable in the past. Before trying to suggest some possible implications of (or even retorts to?) what I shall call the bid for power, it is worth looking more closely at some of the changes or rather accumulations of the last decades. They provided the aesthetic framework with alternative philosophical foundations which strengthened, and to some extent altered it. The first and most important event that changed the climate and broadened the support for neo-aestheticism was the revaluation of Leibniz by the leading Western philosophical trend of our age, analytical philosophy. There is only little exaggeration in saying that currently Leibniz has superseded in philosophical debate such figures as Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, and is regarded as more relevant than they are by some key specialized philosophers. The original reasons for Leibniz's rediscovery had to do with the German philosopher's insights as to the common territory of logical and mathematical truth, which need not detain us here, although they are in themselves of some weight. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the most fruitful effect of the Leibnizian revival was the exhilarating game of world plurality which opened some new philosophical avenues; we have reached the point when leading figures of the younger generation in the Westa pure philosopher such as Saul Kripke, a political thinker such as Robert Nozick, a theoretical critic such as Michel Serres-can no longer be fully understood without some awareness of Leibnizian ideas, and particularly, I believe, The Letters to de Voider (1699-1706) and the Monadology (1712). It is even more interesting that when one of the leading mature American philosophers wants to react against the proliferation of worlds in contemporary philosophy, he is actually quite moderate and merely seeks to eliminate gnoseological rhapsodizing, while consolidating and ordering the actual multi-