Daniel Selcer

This dissertation explores the emergence of repetition as a methodological concept in G. W. Leibniz's philosophical writings and G. W. F. Hegel's Science of Logic. I suggest that a confrontation with Leibniz's explicit reliance on the concept of repetition transforms our understanding of Early Modern philosophical methodology, a grasp of this transformation was an essential element in the formulation of Hegel's method and thus constitutive for the development of central aspects of German Idealism, and this conjunction between Leibnizian metaphysical principles and Hegelian method is a decisive moment for the conceptual history of repetition. In Chapter 1, I argue that Leibniz's articulation of the distinction between organic and aggregational substances defines and depends on a particularly powerful sense of ontological repetition. In seeking to constitute a coherent notion of singularity, I demonstrate, Leibniz explicates individuality in terms of its repetition of totality. In Chapter 2, I defend the position that Leibniz's obsession with the constitution of encyclopedic categorical structures for the totality of human knowledge offers one of the clearest formal developments of repetition as a methodological principle. In Chapter 3, I give an account of the importance of Hegel's reception of Leibniz and of the philosophical role of Leibnizian figures in the Logic. By distinguishing Hegel's theory of philosophical refutation and from Kant's, I demonstrate that Hegel subjects the principles of repetition implicit in Leibniz to a method constituted through systematic return and conceptual circularity. My final chapter uses Leibniz's impact on Hegel to suggest that the latter's notion of an immanent, self-developing method should be understood as more than the progressive unfolding of a series of logical moments and stances. It is also, I argue, the permutation of methodological standpoints in and through a strong form of structural repetition

When Heidegger pursues his destructive interpretation of Leibniz's doctrine of judgment, he identifies a principle of abyssal ground and a concealed metaphysics of truth that undermine the priority of logic with respect to ontology. His reading turns on an account of Leibniz's methodological generation of metaphysical principles and the relation between reason and identity, which, I argue, is at once deeply flawed and extremely productive. This essay pursues the implications of Heidegger's quickly abandoned suggestion that Leibniz's principle of identity is reflexively self-grounding, arguing that this claim makes possible a rigorous interpretation of Leibnizian method as an abyssal logic of repetition. I hold that the identification of such a methodology requires a modified account of the metaphysics of truth operative in Leibniz that reinvigorates Heidegger's reading even while moving beyond his now exhausted trope of a hidden presupposition of subjectivity.

In the preface to his Theodicy, Leibniz describes the whole of his philosophical work as an attempt to follow Ariadne’s thread through “the two famous labyrinths in which our reason goes astray.” The first and best known of these—the labyrinth of freedom—concerns the relation between contingency and necessity in history. The second—and the one I want to discuss—is what Leibniz calls the labyrinth of the composition of the continuum. The problem itself is relatively simple: how can indivisible and distinct elements constitute a continuum? How, that is, can singularity possibly be thought if the real is everywhere continuous, without interruption or break? Leibniz, as is well known, affirms both extremes of these questions: what really exists are simple unities or wholes, and yet the totality of these unities constitutes a single, organically complete world. While one mode of approach would be to turn immediately to Leibniz’s elaboration of monadic expression and intrinsic predication, I want to examine the effects the problem generates for the specifically Leibnizian conception of the real and the ideal, as well as the transition this entails from the metaphorics of the labyrinth to the figure of the infinite library and the problem of repetition.