المستخلص: |
Martin Heidegger in his lectures on the Principle of Reason maintains that Leibniz is the first philosopher to introduce the principle nihil est sine ratione. Nevertheless, it’s Leibnitz himself that in his 1676 comment on a letter by Spinoza to Meyer suggests that the principle of reason is already to be found in Spinoza. But is it really the same principle? The apparent similarity hides some differencies, whose highligthing allows us to draw a fundamental dichotomy in the core of modernity. This dichotomy rests upon the different theoretical places that divine intellect has in the two systems: for Leibniz divine intellect precedes creation, while for Spinoza it is nothing more than an effect of the immanent cause, and an immediate and infinite mood. But the dichotomy does not only lie in the dif-ferent ways of thinking the origin of things: starting from this basic difference, the concep-tual frameworks of the two authors turn out to be substantially different, and certainly not reducible to a common pattern of that period, which Heidegger describes as a «fundamen-talen Tendenz der Westlichen Metaphysik».
|