Question

With God’s help,
Leibniz held that two things cannot be completely identical. And the Rabbi argued against this that he is conflating 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. My question is: that may be true of 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 some abstract essence that exists without their properties? Maybe an object’s entire existence is only through its properties?
Let me explain more clearly: 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 all existence is only properties (that is, matter changes and is replaced in accordance with the properties acting upon it, but it is not an entity that exists in itself). More deeply: matter in itself is a uniform hyle with no separateness at all, and only through the “form,” that is, the properties, do we perceive it as divided into separate parts (meaning that even “duality” is itself just a property and nothing more, and therefore spatial location is in principle part of the definition of the existence of matter)? 2) The Rabbi brought Borges, who described a world in which reality is perceived only through its occurrences, and by this showed the absurdity of idealism. My question is: perhaps idealism is in fact correct, and we merely call “substance” whatever is perceived in our consciousness as stable? 3) By the way, Borges elsewhere (in The Garden of Forking Paths) describes a person who perceives every detail in reality as separate from its context (for example, every moment appears to him essentially different from the next 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 beside it and at another moment without it, and so on). In this way he shows that we must perceive some ideal essence. My question is: perhaps there is no ideal essence at all, and whatever a person perceives as an essence is only because he organizes the picture according to its use for him, but in truth there is no connection at all between one thing and another (in effect this is Aristotle’s claim 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. To this I would argue: perhaps all that exists is only properties, distinct from one another, and only our consciousness organizes them? 5) By the way, according to the analysis in these questions, one could seemingly 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, except that because it is a completely formless hyle, it has no intrinsic properties at all and not even separateness (rather, it is entirely uniform and lacking concrete reality). And only our consciousness organizes it as separate and gives it particular form? Thank you very much!