.A Matter of Non-Contradiction .And a tribute to Leibniz In these postmodern times Leibniz looms large as one who could save rationality from Newton’s deadly embrace. You do not want to leave home without his sufficient reasons, monads and indiscernibles. To these armamenta, I can think of one addition that may have been over-looked for being too obvious. Let us consider non-contradiction.
The first non-contradictory thing to come to mind is the null set. The skeptic might suppose that 0 is the only thing that is not self-contradictory. ‘Au contraire,’ says I contemplating non-existence. Non-existence is the most impossible of all possibilities. The lowly square circle has a kind of existence, even if it only be one of notoriety.
The only thing that could be more mysterious than existence would be its total absence. Certainly no one could vouch for its absence. The only place for non-existence is nowhere. Existence is everywhere else, especially here now.
If non-existence were something logical you would have a contradiction by appealing to the existence of logic. It would then have to be alogical, and that would be its minimal yet perfectly extant attribute. Even if non-existence were possible, how could we rule out the possibility of existence without invoking a rule? If possibilities were not real, you and I would not be here.
Our dilemma is that both existence and non-existence are contradictory. The evident result is us with all our potent contradictions. This is the dialectic of existence, or just existentialism. The dialectic view gives too much credence to the contradictions of time, and so we suppose there is a be-all and end-all. That is the logical end of contradiction with just that unavoidable suspicion of terminality.
Non-existence and partial existence are both illogical. The be-all and end-all is the closest we get to non-contradiction. This is the inescapable monad.
Logic should now appear less passive and abstract. It may even be identified with or indiscernible from the life force. The irresistible life force meets the immovable logic and they turn out to be one from the perspective of the one non-contradictory monad.
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rev. 4/5/00