The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Book

Henri Bergson is as widely unknown today as Gottfried Leibniz which is unfortunate since most people are familiar with Bergson's concepts such as lived time, elan vital and creative evolution. Leibniz's contributions today are widely known but the great thinker who created them is often obfuscated by the fog of history. Deleuze does quote from Bergson frequently in this book and the overlap between the two is obvious as it is laid in this book as Deleuze synthesis Leibniz's thoughts into a coherent narrative, and all of Bergson's greatest hits are within Leibniz's life project.

First, many people (probably almost everyone) don't realize the influence that Leibniz still wields today with some of his very original thoughts. Here's just a sampling of what Leibniz wrote and thought about before anyone else. Leibniz coined the word Theodicy (how God allows evil), gets mocked by Voltaire in Candide for thinking this is the best of all possible worlds is the first to get at the unconscious mind as a reservoir of hiddenness using his petites perceptions, created the principal of sufficient reason, and explains his world view with Monads as ultimate substances of the universe that enable a pre-established harmony resolving complementariness between the extended thing and the thinking thing (reconciling Descartes' world of two different substances), and oh yeah, I forget to mention he discovered the calculus and he did that before Newton published his Principia. Yes, Leibniz wrote about all these things but usually due to the fog of history we've lost sight of recognizing the creator of those major accomplishments.

This book, The Fold integrates almost all of Leibniz's great thoughts with concepts to today (1988) and gives Leibniz a grand uniform narrative to his life time project. The focal point for this book is to focus it through a lens of Leibniz's Monadology, an abortion of a book with a truly goofy world view, but as one reads it one gleams out the brilliance from the nuttiness and realizes that it is truly worthy of reading today. Yes, it's goofy but it has within it a foundation that could apply itself on top of quantum physics and resolve the double slit paradox or even open up some avenues for Hugh Everett III's Multi World Universe interpretations, or as I like to believe offer support that we really do live in a simulation created by Bob, the perfect computer of the universe. Regardless, I would say this book, The Fold is vital reading for those of us who love their Leibnitz and their Bergson (it is never a waste of time to read the Nobel Literature prize winning book, Creative Evolution).

The inflection of the exclusion as the tangent of the curve gets determined by approaching a limit of something only slightly more than nothing leading to a fold of space, movement and time dependent on monads. Monads have no windows to the world while they perceive everything in the universe such that their reciprocal will sum to the universe as a whole and give us God since they are ideal abstract thoughts within themselves and for themselves, each individual abstract (monad) is valuable by itself and for itself but it takes the whole in order to understand the individual (John Duns Scotus does a very similar thing with his synchronic contingency). Monads resolve the dichotomy between the two attributes of mind and body by providing a pre-establish harmony between the two attributes. As a quick aside, Kant synthesizes Hume's experiential worldview with Leibnitz's monads and writes Critique of Pure Reason.

Deleuze explains Leibnitz resolving the vertical (infinite, God) and horizontal (finite, human) perspective through the Fold coming together by making existence a predicate since the now determines the subject which leads to the ontological difference (a Heidegger term, but not used in this book, though Heidegger does get mentioned frequently) between the subject and the object.

In this book, Deleuze uses Bergson and some of his concepts from Difference and Repetition, and when he is talking about capitalism connecting it to the Baroque and how they reflect each other and he would point it back to similar thoughts he expressed in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and he has this way of thinking in the same manner as John Duns Scotus that was obvious to this reader, at the heart of this book is an integration of who Leibniz was and how there was a coherence to what he was saying as illustrated by The Fold.