on the laziness of comparing object-oriented philosophy with Leibniz

Tarde, who is really very Leibnizian, reminded me of some of the reasons why the comparison is not an especially good one.

For Tarde as for Leibniz, what’s real is the very tiny. “Aggregates” are nothing real. This is the polar opposite of object-oriented philosophy, for which objects can be equally real at all levels of scale.

Another difference is that, despite the shared conception of windowless substances, Leibniz’s monads gain their specificity from their relations with other things, even though these relations are put there by God. Tarde handles this point by simply denying the lack of windows and claiming that all monads are in direct relation with all others. Object-oriented philosophy, by contrast, has a completely non-relational conception of objects: windowless monads whose reality is not determined by any sort of mirroring.

There is also the more obvious point that object-oriented philosophy has no commitment to this being the “best of all possible worlds.” And furthermore, there is no special ontological role accorded to God in this philosophy. If God exists, then it’s just as one extremely powerful entity among others, not as one that is able to circumvent ontological limitations that pertain to all other entities. For instance, in any object-oriented theology, God would have to relate to objects indirectly just like everything else.