Question

With God’s help,
Leibniz held that two things cannot be completely identical. In response, the Rabbi argued that he is confusing properties with the substance itself, which is a different object that exists in its own right and merely has identical properties (and even location in space is only a physical constraint, not a logical one).
So I have several objections:
1. The Rabbi assumes that objects have a separate essence that exists independently of their properties. About that I ask:
This is all true for a human being, who has an experiencing soul, and therefore his properties do not define the subject that he is. But who says that objects, too,
have an abstract essence that exists without their properties? Perhaps the whole existence of an object is only through its properties?
Let me explain further: I do not mean to advance an idealist claim that reality has no independent existence and exists only insofar as it is perceived
in my consciousness. Rather, I mean to argue that although there is an external existence, still that whole existence consists only of properties (that is, matter changes and is replaced
according to the properties that affect it, but is not an entity that exists in and of itself). More deeply: matter as such is a uniform “hyle” that has no separateness at all,
and only by means of “form,” that is, the properties, do we perceive it as divided into separate parts (meaning that even “twoness” is just a property and nothing more,
and consequently spatial location is in principle part of the definition of the existence of matter)?
2. The Rabbi cited Borges, who described a world in which reality is grasped only through its occurrences, and by this showed the absurdity
of idealism. But I ask: perhaps there really is idealism, and we simply call “substance” whatever appears in our consciousness as stable?
3. By the way, Borges elsewhere (in The Garden of Forking Paths) presents a description of a person who perceives every detail in reality as separate from its context (for example,
every moment appears to him essentially different from the moment after it because it exists at a different time, or every object such as a dog appears completely different
in the next moment because one hair moved, or it has a different facial expression, or here the dog appears with sunlight next to it and at another moment without it, and so on),
and by this he shows that we must posit an ideal essence. But I ask: perhaps there is no ideal essence at all, and whatever a person grasps as an essence is only because he organizes the picture according to his own use of it, while in truth there is no connection at all between one thing and another (in essence, this is Aristotle’s argument against Plato)?
4. If so, it seems that the Rabbi is assuming a Platonic worldview, namely that there are essences (that is, “ideas”) even for inanimate things. But I claim that perhaps all there is
is only properties separate from one another, and only our consciousness organizes them?
5. By the way, according to the analysis in these questions, it would seem possible to say that the concept of “idealism” does not assume that there is no external world at all (as in Borges and the Rabbi),
but rather that the world exists, only since it is “hyle,” completely without form, therefore it has no intrinsic properties at all and not even separateness (rather it is wholly
uniform and lacking any concreteness). And only our consciousness organizes it as separate and gives it particular form?
Thank you very much!