Biology, though it did not yet exist as a discreet domain of scientific inquiry, was at the very heart of many of the most important debates in 17th-century philosophy. Nowhere does the importance of biology for this period come through more clearly than in the work of G. W. Leibniz.
Leibniz’s frequent claims to the effect that all of nature is to be conceived after the model of animals, it will be argued in this book, are not intended as loose or poetic comparisons. Leibniz means what he says. In the the Monadology of 1714, for example, a text intended as a summary of his basic philosophical principles for a wide audience, Leibniz writes:
"Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquids is also some such garden or pond… Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe" (§§ 67-69).
Leibniz not only means what he says here, but indeed he is compelled to hold that everything in the world is made up out of biological entities as a direct consequence of some of his most central philosophical principles, principles that do not make sense unless claims of this sort are taken seriously.
What we find when we look closely at Leibniz’s natural-scientific writings, particularly the unpublished natural-scientific writings of the forthcoming Series VIII of the Akademie Edition, is that the interpretation of Leibniz as in large part a natural philosopher focused upon the living world --an interpretation common among many of his followers in 18th-century French natural science-- is in large part correct. Leibniz’s fundamental ontology did in fact consist exclusively in living creatures; his fundamental physics was a physics of organic bodies endowed with living force; his deep theological convictions about the immortality of substances were corroborated and --I will argue-- in part shaped by the empirical life sciences of his day. For Leibniz, every body is an organic body, no substance is without its own organic body, and no organically embodied substance is ever generated entirely de novo. In other words, the world consists in infinitely many eternally existing biological entities. There is nothing else. There is nothing, that is, that falls entirely outside of the domain of biology. This is to say that, for Leibniz, everything is organically embodied.
But what exactly is organically embodied? The answer is that there are infinitely many immaterial monads, all of which are constantly accompanied by some organic body or other. Yet insofar as the bodies result from the monads themselves, as Leibniz often asserts, he would appear to believe that it is only the immaterial substances, and not their bodies, that belong to the fundamental ontology of the world. “There is nothing in the world but simple substances,” he writes, “and in them perception and appetite.” Of course, he writes this in the Monadology, the very same text whose fish-pond image enchanted 18th-century naturalists, and as with the fish-pond image, we can find numerous other more recently published, and even not-yet published texts to corroborate it. This interpretive problem --the existence of two sets of texts, and sometimes two sets of passages within the same text, coming from the same author that seem to commit him to two different and conflicting fundamental ontologies-- is known as the ‘corporeal substance problem’, and has produced by now a great deal of not only secondary, but even some tertiary literature.
Ever since the publication in 1986 of Dan Garber’s influential article, “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years,” there has been growing interest among English-language scholars in ‘the other Leibniz’, the Leibniz whose basic ontology is not exhausted by simple substances imbued with perception and appetite, but instead takes seriously the existence of fully real composite or corporeal substances. As Garber insightfully put it in his article, for the Leibniz of the ‘middle period’ (roughly speaking, 1676-1690), biology constitutes the true foundational science, and physics is only fully comprehensible in terms of biology, rather than the other way round, as is generally held today. In the French-language literature, this other Leibniz was also discovered --if not for the first time since Leibniz’s death in 1716-- and exhaustively analyzed by André Robinet in his Architectonique disjonctive, automates systémiques et idéalité transcendentale dans l’oeuvre de G. W. Leibniz (Paris: G. Vrin, 1986). The ‘realist’ Leibniz has subsequently been defended and brought into vivid focus by a number of very skilled commentators, upon whose work the present study relies heavily.
Most of the commentators who have sought to introduce us to this other Leibniz, and to revise --and complicate-- the understanding of the philosopher we came to know as undergraduates, have portrayed Leibniz as possessed of something of a split personality, the idealist Dr. Jekyll giving way in his less guarded moments to Mr. Hyde’s monstrous organisms. Even Glenn Hartz, perhaps the most militant defender in recent years of the realist view of Leibniz believes that the metaphysics of simple monads and that of animals were two systems that Leibniz kept going simultaneously for different purposes, but which were nonetheless incompatible. Michel Fichant believes that the corporeal-substance metaphysics of the late period remains fundamentally at odds with the alternative idealistic metaphysics which Leibniz sought to develop simultaneously. Rejecting this incompatibilist dichotomy, Pauline Phemister’s recent Leibniz and the Natural World: Activity, Passivity, and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz’s Philosophy (Springer, 2005) makes a thoroughgoing case for the compatibility of the monadological and corporeal-substance metaphysics without attempting to explain away the latter or to make it somehow less committal than it really was.
The purpose of this study is not simply to add to the now rather enormous list of literature on this ultimately quite hermetic and recondite debate, even if it is ultimately with the compatibilist and realist interpretation --that is, the view that there are bodies and that their existence does not present any real problems, but only apparent ones, for Leibniz’s claim that the world consists in simple substances-- that the deepest sympathies of this study lie. Rather, what I hope to do is to help to change the terms of the debate, and thereby to gain a clearer picture of the actual range of Leibniz’s own theoretical concerns, by taking seriously his own repeated claims that the world is to be understood in fundamentally biological terms. On such an approach, the incompatibilist perspective on Leibniz’s realist texts loses much of its force. Much like Aristotle, Leibniz now appears not so much to be looking to accommodate living creatures within a world that is ultimately to be explained in terms of some more fundamental entities operating according to more fundamental principles. Rather, he is hoping to explain the world in terms of the fundamental principles he takes to hold paradigmatically of living creatures. In this respect, Leibniz’s natural philosophy is much more akin to that of Aristotle than of his immediate predecessor Descartes. Leibniz looks to the living world for answers to deep metaphysical problems, and explains the entire world in terms that we today think of as holding only for that subdomain of the world populated by biological entities. As had been the case with Aristotle, it is not that Leibniz was principally a metaphysician who then developed a side interest in living phenomena, as a string-theorist today might take up butterfly-collecting as a hobby to help her get her mind off of work for a spell.
When we take living phenomena as the central focus of the study of Leibniz’s thought, we find a thinker both deeply interested in the empirical science of his day, as well as a thinker ready to apply the discoveries of interest to his contemporaries to novel and creative ends within his systematic natural philosophy. In this book, I aim to give a comprehensive account of Leibniz’s interest in physiology, medicine, and embryology, as well as to show precisely why these areas of scientific inquiry were of central interest to his philosophy. By offering a rigorous contextualist analysis of the overlap between empirical life science and the ‘deeper’ concerns about the nature of substance familiar to many readers, I hope to portray Leibniz’s philosophy in a new light, and to contribute to the growing body of contextualist scholarship in philosophy that has been providing us with an increasingly clear picture of the range of concerns of early modern philosophers by analyzing their engagement with the scientific problems of their era.
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DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE AND ORGANISM IN THE LIGHT OF THE LIFE SCIENCES
CHAPTER 1. THE ARISTOTELIAN LEGACY: ANIMALS AS FORM-MATTER COMPOUNDS; REPRODUCTION AS TRANSMISSION OF FORM
I. Aristotle on Organic Structure and Function
1. Natural Beings vs. Artefacts
2. Vision and the Eye: A Case Study in Ontological Priority
II. Aristotle on Generation
1. The Material Cause, or, The Female
2. The Formal Cause, or, The Male
3. Reproduction as Self-Reproduction
4. Monstrosity as steresis
III. ‘For Like Begets Like’: Aristotle on Species Reproduction
1. ‘2000 Years of Stasis’? Hull’s Thesis Reexamined
2. Aristotle on Environmental Pressure and Morphological Regularity
CHAPTER 2. THE CARTESIAN LEGACY: ANIMALS AS MACHINES; REPRODUCTION AS A THERMOMECHANICAL PROCESS
I. Descartes on Organic Structure
1. Functions and Dispositions in the Bête-Machine
2. Descartes on Health, Sickness, and Death
II. Descartes on Generation
1. The ‘Minor Laws’ of Fetal Development
2. The Problem of Trait Acquisition
III. The Absence of a Cartesian Account of Biological Species
EXCURSUS 1: Leibniz and Animal Experimentation
CHAPTER 3. ‘THE HYDRAULICO-PNEUMATICO-PYROTECHNICAL MACHINE OF QUASI-PERPETUAL MOTION’: LEIBNIZ ON ANIMAL ECONOMY
I. Introduction: The Scope and Limits of Animal Economy
II. Introducing the LH III Manuscripts
III. The Major Treatises
1. The Directiones ad rem medicam pertinentes (1671)
2. The Machina animalis (1677)
3. The Corpus hominis et uniuscujusque animalis est machina quaedam (1680-2)
3.1. Nutrition
3.2. Fermentation
4 The De scribendis novis medicinae elementis (1682)
5 The De causis et curatione febrium (1704-5)
6 The Animadversiones in G. E. Stahlii theoriam medicam veram (1709-10)
6.1. The Polemic against Stahl in Relation to Leibniz’s Earlier Works on Animal Economy
6.2. Soul as Perceiver vs. Soul as Body-Preserver
6.3. Animal Economy, Preestablished Harmony, and the Best of All Possible Worlds
IV Conclusion
EXCURSUS 2: Leibniz and the Case of the Talking Dog
CHAPTER 4. ORGANIC BODY AND CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE
I. Introduction
II. ‘A More Exquisite Mechanism’: Leibniz’s Model of Organic Bodies
1. Organism
2. Organic body / machine of nature
3. Corporeal Substance
3.1. Animal
4. The Machine of Nature in Comparison
III. Corporeal Substance and the Problem of Unity
1. Simplicity, Divisibility and Component-wise Deconstructiblity
2. Panorganicism
3. The Extinction of Corporeal Substance?
4. Derivative Force
IV Leibniz’s ‘Material Plastic Natures’
1. Cudworth on Plastic Natures
2. Leibniz’s Reaction to Cudworth’s Theory
3. Material Plastic Natures and Derivative Forces
V Conclusion: Leibniz’s ‘corporalism’
EXCURSUS 3: Leibniz and the Unicorn
CHAPTER 5. LEIBNIZ’S MODEL OF THE ORGANIC BODY IN THE LIGHT OF EMPIRICAL LIFE SCIENCE
I. Introduction: “Rendre compte du réel”. Leibniz’s Motivation for Studying the Natural World
II. Nested Individuality
1. From ‘One Body, One Substance’ to Worlds-within-Worlds
2. Worlds-within-Worlds and Worms-within-Worms
3. Worlds-within-Worlds and the Labyrinth of the Continuum
III. Leibniz’s Exposure to Empirical Microscopy
1. Athanasius Kircher
2. Hooke’s Micrographia
3. Leeuwenhoek
4. Animalcula and Monads
IV. Nested Individuality and Parthenogenesis: Leibniz’s Legacy in 18th-Century Life Science
1. Trembley, Bonnet, and the Freshwater Polyp
2. C. G. Ehrenberg and the Monad as Infusionsthierchen
3. Diderot and the Prospects of a Universal Parthenogenesis
V. Conclusion
EXCURSUS 4: Leibniz and Fossils
CHAPTER 6. SPERMATOZOA, PREESTABLISHED HARMONY, AND THE IMMORTALITY OF CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE
I. Mechanism and the Problem of Animal Generation
1. The ‘Higher Principles’ of Leibniz’s Generation Theory
2. Enhanced Perception and the Search for Primordia
3. Microscopy, Heterogenesis and Spontaneous Generation in the Young Leibniz
4. Leeuwenhoek Revisited
5. Leibniz, Swammerdam, and Monadic Metamorphosis
6. Metamorphosis versus Metempsychosis
II. Preformation and Preestablished Harmony
1. Preformation and Occasionalism
2. Leibniz and Leeuwenhoek against Miracles
3. Preformation and the Doctrine of Marks and Traces
III. Conclusion
EXCURSUS 5: Leibniz and the Problem of Human Origins
CHAPTER 7. ORGANIC DESIGN, ORGANIC CHANGE, AND THE ONTOLOGY OF BIOLOGICAL SPECIES
I. The Emergence of Modern Species Fixism
1. Martin Luther and the Scriptural Basis of Modern Species Fixism
2. Nominalism and the Problem of Species Reproduction in Mechanist Natural Philosophy
II. Transformism, Gradationism, and the Question of Leibniz’s Nominalism
III. The Problem of Design and the Spectre of Evolution
1. Adaptation and Degeneration in the 17th Century
2. Morphological Variety and the Importance of Ethology in Leibniz’s Theory of Biological Species
3. Locke and Leibniz on Monsters
4. Locke and Leibniz on Apes: The Impact of Edward Tyson’s Orang-Outang
IV. Conclusion
APPENDICES (LATIN-ENGLISH):
1. Directiones ad rem medicam pertinentes (1671)
2. Machina animalis (1677)
3. Corpus hominis et uniuscuiusque animalis est machina quaedam (1680-82)
4. De scribendis novis medicinae elementis (1680-82)
5. De causis et curatione febrium (1704-05)
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