[lit-ideas] Re: Must the Word be Literate?
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2007 21:38:32 +0900
On 10/6/07, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> 1) Why assume there is no looseness in the world i.e. assume determinism?
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> Why, indeed? But here you stand on the side of Voltaire, who, following
the Great Lisbon Earthquake, satirized Leibniz's view that this is the best
of all possible worlds in Candide. Leibniz's answer, as I understand it is
that nothing in the world happens unless God wills it and God knows what God
is doing. Thus, everything follows with perfect, implacable logic from God's
premises. Our failure to recognize the logic is due to our being monads
further down the Great Chain of Being, with our knowledge obscured in
proportion to our distance from God.
To us of little faith and modern confusions, this view of things may appear
absurd. It is, however, a straightforward extrapolation of Predestination, a
world view still widely embraced at the time Leibniz was writing, when
Calvinism was, in more than one sense, the rage.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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