New York, the Leibnizian City

Leibniz versus Newton

I have a special fondness for Leibniz, a philosopher hardly anyone talks about these days. You might think he has nothing to say about what agitates people these days, or even what they particularly aspire to, for themselves or for the world in general. It was through Leibniz, however, that I met my husband many years ago.

I won’t belabor it, only a few words, since it’s a charming story. For some reason, but in connection with the dissertation I was writing on Goethe, I was in the stacks of the library studying the section of books on Leibniz. A fellow student approached me and asked if I was interested in Isaac Newton. It turns out that the works of Newton in the library were catalogued in the same section. That’s how it started: two random souls in the universe.

Now, to the title of this post. There’s a lot to dislike about New York: the noise of the train pulling into the subway station, the screeching of the metal wheels as it stops. If you’re not rich it can be an assault on your senses. If you allow yourself to stand back and take a look around, distance yourself, other things occur to you. And not specifically the arts and food and other diversions, the “Sunday-best culture,” as Lionel Trilling put it, of museums and Broadway.

It’s the people who for some reason have come to live in this place, despite all its drawbacks. I can’t put myself in their shoes, but they constantly remind me that we are social animals, despite all the all-to-often unsociability that one is subjected to. I am not speaking of the bureaucratic kind, but, rather, on the most ordinary everyday level: the bike riders traveling in the wrong direction; the person who steps in front of you in a crowded market to grab the shopping basket; the gal who carries on a loud conversation on her phone on the bus or subway or even walking a few paces behind you on the street; the neighbor in your building who doesn’t properly separate the trash (thereby attracting rodents, another feature of the city).

What are the implication effect of Leibniz on our being able to put up with these features of urban life?

Monads (as I understand Leibniz) are the building blocks of reality. Human souls are a special kind of monad, a self-sufficient, indivisible, simple substance, self-sufficient because it depends on nothing for its existence. It was created directly by God. Fulguration by God: “all created or derivative monads are generated, so to speak, by continual fulgurations of the divinity from moment to moment. [G 6:614; AG 219].”

The monad is also indivisible, and this creates a problem, since anything that is touchable, material, or physical is divisible. Think of an apple or a biscuit. Anything with mass, even the smallest piece of an apple, has mass, can be cut and sliced. The only way for the monad to be indivisible is to be immaterial, not to have physical existence. The only way the monad can fulfill the condition of indivisibility; it must not occupy any space. It is not material, touchable, physical.

Got that? Based on this, all the things we interact with in daily life reality are not physical. I.e., not those screeching trains or the obnoxious folks on their phones. And yet we live our lives and interact and touching many things that feel physical.

Imagine yourself sitting  sit in a room on a sofa watching TV, talking to your husband. No room, no husband, no TV, no sofa, no interaction. Monads are windowless. It is impossible for one monad to affect another. They are closed and not affected by each other. What really exists is a spirit monad (your own consciousness, your ability to reason, your ability to make plans for the future, your cognitive ability, your memory). God simulates an interaction between the two of you, one you think you are having with your husband.

You can extrapolate this to the whole world, even to the urban life of New York. It is the best world it is possible to make. The evil we have now  is necessary for experiencing good. War is needed for courage to exist. All in the balance of the universe.

There is beauty in the world, which has been created for us to enjoy. For instance, my darling husband. We must seek our own joy and leave aside all those irritations that can blight the joys.

This is the only world we have.

Image credit: The Partially Examined Life

Contrarities of modern urban life: subway version

 

Upper West Side Virtue Signaling

This is a thrift shop on Columbus Avenue run by volunteers, i.e., they are not being paid. According to the website, it is a "healing community," the mission of which is "to end the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through relentless advocacy ..." Housing Works has been around at least twenty years. I once visited the bookshop in their downtown location. (It was quite an impressive bookshop, and I was attending a literary event there.) I wonder if they have published any success stories, for instance, built a homeless shelter in which their volunteers work. No, it's all about feeling good, showing your virtue. Herewith two photos showing their current virtue signaling.

 

NYC contrarities continued

 Kids don't have to walk on the Upper West Side. Like a junior Royal, his father conveys him in a wagon to the market. A man finds a resting place on a subway platform. As always, click to enlarge.

Covid rant

 

Yes, I wrote that I would limit myself to photographs and the contrarities they reveal about our current way of life. I've been housebound for days now, and one of my kind neighbors has been delivering food to the top of my steps, including yesterday a delicious fruit salad with the most creamy, silky yogurt, along with a copy of the recent New York Times Book Review. So, here I sit this morning with my tea, hoping that this may be the day that I trust myself to walk down the steps and outside for some fresh air. I look at the front page of the Book Review on the table before me, and as always with this publication, I take umbrage. Which is my way of saying that I am offended by almost everything I read in it, starting with the headlines. Indeed, the headlines in the NYT are a signal for you to assume the opinion stated therein.

What offends me? Its assumptions, which are those that the loyal New York Times reader is to assume as their own. Let me start with the headline on the front page of this May 15, 2022, issue, which pictures a group of stewardesses -- oh, oh: make that flight attendants.:

TWO NEW BOOKS SHOW HOW FED-UP FLIGHT ATTENDANTS SPARKED A MASS LABOR MOVEMENT

There are two books under review concerning flight attendants. One is a nostalgic memoir of a woman who became a stewardess in the late 1970s when in her twenties. For the reviewer, Fly Girl: A Memoir "leaves out a lot" and reads "like watching a vintage Doris Day movie in which the clueless heroine mistakenly wanders out of the 1950s and into the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that followed ..." The other (The Great Stewardess Rebellion) is a takedown of such nostalgia. The reviewer stakes out her position in the opening sentences: stewardesses served as "sexual bait to lure the nation's burgeoning corps of male business travelers." The writer of The Great Stewardess Rebellion), Neil Wulfhart, is not identified in the review as having been a stewardess, but is, according to her website, a "decision coach." (Go see for yourself.) So, this expert in life coaching has done the investigation and can tell you "the real story": the stewardesses who get fired from gaining weight, the amp dependencies, "the vicious misogyny of all the sexist men ..." who countered the attempts to improve working conditions.

I'm not saying that the Doris Day account is the one to live by, but my objection is to the  assumption that "sparking a mass labor movement" was a good thing. That may or may not be the case, but destroying illusions is a given in the world of the New York Times. Is there some reason why the reviewer could not have given a more measured picture? Being a stewardess in the 1970s was not like chattel slavery. A lot of people, men and women, were trapped in jobs that were oppressive. But there is something very evil about the way that the NYT focuses on people's discontent, and clearly the reviewer here (Leslie Bennetts, author of articles on, among others, Jennifer Anniston) is committed to the arena of femal discontent. Almost every novel reviewed in the NYTBR concerns a topic like "toxic mother-daughter relationships." A headline to such a review reads: "The author suggests that the body is sickened by secrets; everything must come out." Oh, really? Why?

Thus, my disgust with this newspaper. The NYT obviously has an outsized influence on the kinds of books that are published, tales of blame and hurt and self-pity. And one wonders where the great writers have gone.  I feel for my kind neighbor, who reads this NYT trash every day and whose view of society is contaminated by it.

Corporate suck-ups, 1

 I am sure there will be more. Stay tuned.

It makes me think of people who find a gun pointed at their head and begin to whimper in fear.

Mesopotamia? Or New York?

 

Contrarities of modern urban life, 2

 

No. 1 Subway

Madison Avenue

Contrarities of urban modern life 1

It's been ages since I posted, and in fact the blog was closed to readers for a long time. I have decided to reopen it. The lockdown, the pandemic, the virus -- however you want to call what has happened in the past two years -- has made me look at the world around me more intently. I have been carrying my iTouch with me: I need my vax ID to get into a restaurant, right? and the proof is right there in my Photos file. I have loved taking pictures the past two years. There are many things about the life that grab my attention and that I would like to document. But why hide them away in the Pictures file of my Mac? For the next while, until I have a new inspiration, I want to post images occasionally. I choose the above title for today's post, and there will be other contradictions I would like to document: thus, we start with number 1. But there will be other subjects. For the most part, I will only post the pictures. I could probably write essays about them but I will allow them to speak for themselves. As always, click to enlarge.

 

Macy's Cosmetics Dept.

No. 1 Subway Line