Abstract
Pauline Phemister raises a number of queries and problems concerning the distinction between living and non-living machines. Leibniz contends that the presence of the dominating monad “in” the mass that comprises the organic body gives rise to the animal or corporeal substance that exists as a living, unified entity. From pre-formed seeds, the organic body of this corporeal substance comes into existence as a living machine that is also a machine in the least of its parts and whose organizational structure and internal complexity sustains and preserves it as a biological entity. However, if, granting pre-formation, physiological functions are explicable solely by appeal to the mechanism of the body, what need is there for the dominating monad? Conversely, how can Leibniz rule out pre-formation in bodies we normally presume to be inanimate and as lacking dominating monads? Examination of common defining characteristics of living machines – self-motion, self-repair, nutrition, reproduction and inner complexity – brings into focus some of the difficulties and limitations attached to the use of such empirical data to distinguish living from non-living machines.
Versions of this paper were presented at the, “Machine de la nature et substance corporelle chez Leibniz” conference in Paris (14–15 March 2008), the “Transformations of Mind” Research Group’s “Workshop on the Philosophy of Leibniz” in Berlin (3–4 June 2008) and at the British Society for the History of Philosophy conference, “Causation 1500–2000” in York (25–27 March 2008). I would like to thank the organisers and participants of each event for their perceptive comments, and especially François Duchesneau, Stephan Schmid, Johannes Haag, Klaus Corcilius and John Rogers. I am indebted also to Roger Woolhouse, Lloyd Strickland and the editors of this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
“Distinguo ergo (1) Entelechiam primitivam seu Animam, (2) Materiam nempe primam seu potentiam passivam primitivam, (3) Monada his duabas completam, (4) Massam seu materiam secundam, sive Machinam organicam, ad quam innumerae concurrunt Monades subordinatae, (5) Animal seu substantiam corpoream, quam Unam facit Monas dominans in Machinam” (GP II. 252). “I therefore distinguish: (1) the primitive entelechy or soul; (2) matter, namely primary matter or primitive passive power; (3) the monad completed by these two things; (4) the mass or secondary matter, or organic machine for which innumerable subordinate monads come together; and (5) the animal, or corporeal substance, which the monad dominating in the machine makes one” (Lodge, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mans1095/25_Lz_2007pdf.pdf).
- 2.
See also to J. Bernoulli, 13/23 January 1699: GM III.656, AG 170; Remarks on the Objections of Mr Foucher: GP IV. 492, AG 147; Monadology, §70: GP VI. 619, AG 222.
- 3.
Specimen Dynamicum, Part II (GM VI. 247, L 445, AG 130). For details, see Phemister (2005), Chap. 4.
- 4.
Ohad Nachtomy suggests these two functions – as law and as force – are kept separate, at least conceptually. I agree. See review of Phemister (2007), 259–60.
- 5.
Published in the Histoire des Ouvrages des Savants in 1705 (GP VI. 539–546).
- 6.
For more detailed discussion on this point, see Justin E.H. Smith and Pauline Phemister (2007).
- 7.
This satisfies Leibniz’s condition that parts are always homogeneous with the wholes they compose.
- 8.
“les Machines de la nature ont un nombre d’organes veritablement infini,… Une machine naturelle demeure encor machine dans ses moindres parties… (Système Nouveau: GP IV. 482 post publication revision). Leibniz here adds that the machine also remains the same machine through its myriad transformations by which it is packed up in different ways; sometimes extended, sometimes contracted and as it were concentrated, when we think that it is destroyed” (ibid., GP IV. 482, WF 16). It is this sense of machine that is in use in the letter to Masham (30 June 1704: GP III. 356) when he denies that the parts of artificial machines are themselves machines (quoted above).
- 9.
See letter to Bernoulli, 18 November 1698 (AG 168, GM III. 551–3). Strictly speaking, in keeping with the homogeneity principle of parts and wholes, the organic bodies of the corporeal substances that are aggregated as the piece of flint should not be called “parts” at all and perhaps too the piece of flint itself should not be called a “whole”.
- 10.
On the differences between the role of the dominating monad “in” the machine and the subordinate monads that “come together for” the machine, see note 29.
- 11.
See Leibniz’s fifth letter to Clarke, § 116 (Alex, 63, GP VII. 418), quoted above.
- 12.
See also postscript to a letter to Basnage de Beauval, 3/13 January 1696, GP IV. 498–9, WF 62–3; “Explanation of the Difficulties which M. Bayle has found in the New System of the Union of the Soul and the Body”, GP IV. 520–522, WF 82–3.
- 13.
See also Leibniz’s letter to Masham, beginning of May 1704 (GP III. 342, WF 207) and a very early intimation of this idea in Leibniz’s “How the soul acts in the body, c.1677-early 1678? (A VI. iv, 1367) where he raises the prospect of books being written and read by soul-less “human machines”, although he there quickly concedes that it would be impossible that “minds might be removed without violating the laws of mechanics”: “… and so if (though it is impossible) minds were removed and the laws of nature remained, the same would happen as if minds existed, and also as if books were being written and read by human machines which understand nothing. But we must realise that this is impossible, that minds might be removed without violating the laws of mechanics.” [“Itaque si per impossibile tollerentur Mentes, et manerent leges naturae, eadem fierent ac si essent mentes, et libri etiam scriberentur legerenturque a machinis humanis nihil intelligentibus. Verum sciendum est hoc esse impossibile, ut tollantur mentes salvis legibus Mechanicis.” (tr. by Strickland)].
- 14.
Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, note L, WF 87–8.
- 15.
AT VII.32. Descartes does not here disclose how we arrive at such a judgment, but presumably the mind judges that human bodies are alive on the ground that they appear to act voluntarily.
- 16.
Similar remarks hold for bodies’ resistance and inertia as indicative of derivative passive forces and ultimately of monadic primitive passive forces.
- 17.
Against this, it might be argued that Leibniz’s God cannot do anything other than endow all aggregates, even those we consider artificial and inanimate, with dominating monads. Having distinguished monads or entelechies according to their respective laws or essences, that is, by their primitive active forces, it follows that no two monads can possess the same degree of active force. Consequently, in any aggregate, animate or inanimate, there will always be one monad that has more active force than any of the others, whose perceptions will be more distinct and its appetitions more effective than those of the others in the aggregate. By Leibniz’s criteria, it will effectively be dominant over them (Monadology, §62: GP VI. 617, AG 221). To avoid this charge, Leibniz might appeal to his account of the way in which the dominating monad perceives or expresses the rest of the world only indirectly, through the filter of its own body (Leibniz to Arnauld, 30 April 1687: GP II. 113, M 145). This does not happen in the case of the monad that has the most distinct perceptions among those in an inanimate aggregate. This monad will have perceptions that are more distinct than those of the others in the aggregate, but the others do not act as the physical means by which an external world is sensed or felt. The substances comprising the clock do not constitute an organic body through which a pre-eminent monad perceives (confusedly or insensibly) the world outside. It is worth notice also that the most distinctly perceiving monad in the clock-aggregate still perceives the rest of the world, just as do all monads, and it does so through its own organic body. However, this organic body is not the aggregate of corporeal substances that comprise the clock itself, but clearly, if it were, the sum total of monads in the universe would not be increased. The only difference would be that the most distinctly perceiving monad in the clock would perceive the world through a different, and larger, organic body (the clock) instead of the one it currently does.
- 18.
Monadology, §§ 66–69: GP VI.618–9, AG 222.
- 19.
See Antonio Nunziante (2004), 205–6.
- 20.
“Nature, in fact, is nothing but a greater art, and we cannot always clearly distinguish the artificial from the natural”[neque enim aliud est natura, quàm ars quaedam magna: nec semper toto genere a nativis factitia distinguuntur] (Protogaea, §9: Dutens II-2, 209). Quoted from Paolo Rossi (1984), 61. See also C. Wilson (1994), 248.
- 21.
Our criteria for demarcating species of living things are also inadequate. “[G]eneration or pedigree” gives us only a “provisional proof” of species membership (New Essays, RB 315) and “our determinations of physical species are provisional, and are adapted to what we know.” (New Essays, RB 317).
- 22.
All motion is relative. It consists in the relative change of spatial relations among bodies. When these relations change, motion is attributed to one body rather than another on the basis of explanatory simplicity. When the spatial relations between a ship or a fish and the shoreline change, the simplest explanation attributes motion and force to the ship or to the fish rather than to the shoreline. However, because it is an inanimate mass, the simplest explanation of the ship’s motion requires only the postulation of primitive active forces in the component corporeal substances. It does not require the postulation of a monad primitive force governing the ship as a whole. Why, then, does the simplest explanation of the movement of a fish, as a living machine, require us to postulate a dominating monad governing the fish as a whole? What is it about the movement of the fish, as opposed to movement of the ship, that encourages us to attribute a dominating monad to the one but not to the other?
- 23.
On the now obsolete sense of “physiology” as synonymous with “physiks or the science of natural bodies” (J. Harris, Lexicon Technicum, 2nd edition (1708)), geological formation and animal digestive systems would both count as physiological processes.
- 24.
This aspect is taken up for discussion by C. Wilson (1994).
- 25.
See Leibniz’s letter to Lady Masham, 30 June 1704, WF 214, quoted above, 8.
- 26.
See also, “The reason why children do not form the thoughts of grown men is that the parallel between their thoughts and external phenomena is proportional to their bodies. This is a consequence of the harmony” (to Isaac Jacquelot, 9 February 1704, WF 176, GP III. 465).
- 27.
“Leibniz vs. Stahl on the Way Machines of Nature Operate”.
- 28.
Leibniz considers the dominating monad is “in” the organic machine, and it is presumably “in” the machine in the same way as the subordinate monads that “come together” for the machine are “in” their own subordinate organic bodies. But we should not assume that the dominating monad plays the same role in the organic machine as do the subordinate monads when the latter “come together” for the organic machine. Rather, Leibniz claims that when the subordinate monads come together with the dominant monad, they do so, not for the organic machine, but rather for the corporeal substance: “Indeed, the remaining subordinate monads placed in the organs do not make up a part of the organic body, although they are immediately required for it, and they come together with the primary monad for the organic corporeal substance, that is, the animal or plant” (to De Volder, 20 June 1703: tr. by Lodge, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mans1095/25_Lz_2007pdf.pdf).
- 29.
“It is thus my belief that those souls which one day shall be human souls, like those of other species, have been in the seed, and in the progenitors as far back as Adam, and have consequently existed since the beginning of things, always in a kind of organic body” (Theodicy, Part 1, §91, H 172, GP VI. 152). The passage does not prove conclusively that human seeds are always in human bodies because the reference to Adam may be a mere rhetorical allusion to the beginning of the world.
- 30.
Theodicy, GP VI. 42, H 66. Quoted in full above.
- 31.
Duchesneau, op. cit.
- 32.
“Interim concedimus, magnum esse discrimen inter machinas et aggregata massasque, quod machinae fines et effectus habent vi suae structurae, at aggregatorum fines et effectus oriuntur ex serie rerum concurrentium, atque adeo ex diversarun machinarum occursu, qui etsi etiam sequatur divinam destinationem, plus tamen minusque manifestae coordinationis habet; ita bombycis finis opusque initium est, ut sericum producat; sed ut alium bombycem gignat, opus est congressu maris et foeminae, atque adeo combinatione unius animalis cum alia re externa; sed haec tamen combinatio plus habet coordinationis manifestae [… ] quam ea, quae facit, ut sericum transeat in vestem hominis [… ]. Interim nec opus maxime intimum, velut serici productio, obtineretur, nisi externa accederent, velut calor solis, nutritio ex foliis mori, aliaque id genus” (Dutens II-2, 144).
- 33.
Ultimately, Leibniz’s pre-established harmony dictates that all changes to bodies are initiated internally. However, Leibniz’s distinction between matter in a body that is its own and matter that is extraneous may be relevant here. See Leibniz’s fifth letter to Clarke, 18 August 1716, § 35: Alex 66, GP VII. 397.
- 34.
Locke’s remarks also suggest a degree of artificiality in the inner-outer distinctions we employ.
- 35.
The evident circularity should not go unnoticed when Leibniz declares that “In organic bodies we ordinarily take generation or pedigree as a provisional indication of sameness of species” (New Essays, III. vi, RB 325).
- 36.
Crystals provide a puzzling case in this regard.
- 37.
Operae pretium autem facturum arbitror, qui naturae effecta ex subterraneis eruta diligentiùs conseret cum foetibus laboratoriorum, (sic enim Chemicorum officinas vocamus,) quando mira persaepe in natis et factis similitudo apparet’ (Dutens II-2, 209).
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Phemister, P. (2011). Monads and Machines. In: Smith, J., Nachtomy, O. (eds) Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 67. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0041-3_4
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