Re-Enchanting the Material in Leibniz

"What Deleuze finds in Leibniz is a certain reenchantment of the material whereby nature is invested with a dynamism and a plentitude. The sensible or material world is no longer a veil of shadows but rather the site of ‘what’s happening,’ no longer a space of detention or exile to be escaped but the ‘theater of matter’ where the real is actualized." (p. 209)

"For Leibniz, doing justice to the worthiness of the Creator demands that one affirm the integrity of creation, in particular; the materiality of creation." (p.212)

"Malebranche’s solution would come to be known as occasionalism, attributing all activity of both body and soul to a direct, supernatural intervention by God. As Leibniz summarizes, according to occasionalism, ‘we are aware of the property of bodies because God produces thoughts in the soul on the occasion of the motions of matter; and when in its turn our soul wishes to move the body, they said that it is God who moves the body for it” (New System, ss12)." (p. 213)

"In contrast to this demand for constant divine intervention for creation to operate, Leibniz offers a theory of preestablished harmony that emphasizes the relative self-sufficiency of nature as ordered by the Creator." (p. 213)

"The occasionalist account of nature or creation provides a deficient creation – an inferior clock, as it were. For Leibniz, such an understanding of the structures of creation as deficient reflects back upon the deficiency of the Creator; just as a poorly made clock reflects the incompetence of its maker: While we may think that the occasionalist emphasis on the dependence of creation on the Creator would prevent an idolization of creation, Leibniz’s analysis points out that occasionalism posits this dependence in such a way that it denigrates the Creator by making creation’s dependence the result of an original deficiency." (p. 214)

"To provide an account of creational, material structures that is worthy of the Creator, Leibniz radically affirms the self-sufficiency of creation as created – what he describes as the “God-given nature of things” (letter ss7). The result, however, is an account of creational structures that, at first sight, seems to construct a plane of immanence without reference to the Creator – an almost deistic account of nature operating autonomously. If we look closely, however, we see that this is not the case." (p. 214)

"Theories of nature that require a perpetual governance by God are, according to Leibniz, denigrations of the Creator; for what would we think of a clock maker who needed to constantly turn the hands of the clock manually?" (p. 216)

"Such an ontology must begin from the integrity of creation as the theater of the Creator’s glory without the Platonic desire to peek behind the curtain, for this Platonic desire assumes that what appears on stage is a farce, a deceptive melodrama distracting us from the real story behind the scenes. But neither should we fall prey to the nihilistic conclusion that the stage is merely a simulacrum – an image without an original or a zone of immanence without reference to transcendence. In contrast to both of these, a creational ontology affirms that “all the world is a stage.” There is no pristine, immediate access behind the scenes; rather, the invisible is seen in the visible, such that seeing the visible is to see more than the visible. This zone of immanence is where transcendence plays itself out, unfolding itself in a way that is staged by the Creator." (p. 222-3)

James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy