and speaking of the Monadology

I continue to see critiques of OOO that call it a form of warmed-over Leibniz, or something of the sort. This is a rather stupid critique, I must say, despite my great admiration for Leibniz. For the following reasons:

*OOO, for me, arises from an attempt to come to grips with Heidegger. That’s where the isolated substances part comes in. The fact that it occurs among all different kinds of entities came for me from Whitehead, not from Leibniz.

*Leibniz draws a rigid distinction between substance and aggregate. OOO rejects this distinction completely. We have objects of all different sizes.

*The Leibnizian monads last forever. OOO’s objects do not.

*Though the monads are substances, these substances are defined by their qualities, which for Leibniz means by their relations. The monads are thus bundles of qualities or bundles of relations. No such thing is possible in (my version of) OOO, where the object is never just a bundle of anything.

*Leibniz’s philosophy features God and the best of all possible worlds. OOO does not. There’s nothing to exclude God from OOO a priori, but it works exactly as it is even in a rampantly atheistic version.

Other people, by contrast, call OOO a “Latourian spin-off,” which is quite a different claim from calling it a Leibnizian spin-off.

So, which philosophy are we slavishly copying? Why all this insistence on the unoriginality and fruitlessness of OOO? And if it’s so fruitless, then why am I getting so much email every day from artists, medievalists, architects, archaeologists, literary scholars, etc., telling me how useful OOO is for their work? It seems to be emerging as the interdisciplinary philosophy par excellence in continental circles.

One reason is pretty obvious– OOO doesn’t begin by telling people that the objects of their discipline don’t exist, or that they are mere “folk” images that need to be eliminated in favor of some more fundamental science (generally physics or mathematics). And that, I’m afraid, is precisely what some people dislike so much about OOO. For them, it ain’t philosophy unless you can smash something with it.