another point re: Shaviro

I just remembered the other point I wanted to make in response to Shaviro’s REMARKS HERE:

“God makes the eternal objects available, but he doesn’t have any influence over what selection is made — and this is why I don’t think Harman is entirely right to lump Whitehead with Leibniz as a theological occasionalist. Whitehead’s occasionalism — if that is what it is — may not be as fully secular as Latour’s, but the peculiar marginality of his concept of God is explicitly presented as a critique of Leibniz’s God; it moves precisely in the direction of ‘secularizing God,’ instead of in the much more familiar direction of altogether abolishing him.”

But I wasn’t “lumping” Whitehead with Leibniz in the sense of saying that they agree on all points (there is obviously a lot more room for freedom in Whitehead’s system than in Leibniz’s, for example.) But more central than the difference to which Shaviro refers above is what Whitehead and Leibniz share: the fact that relations always somehow involve God as a mediator. No two things interact directly.