Justin E. H. Smith

Divine Machines: An Interview at New APPS

Today is the first in a series of New APPS Interviews, which will run every Wednesday through the end of May, picking up again in September. 

Today's interview is with Justin E. H. Smith, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ from January through June 2011. His new book, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life has just appeared with Princeton University Press (2011). 

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John Protevi: Thanks very much for doing this interview with us, Justin.  Your book is subtitled “Leibniz and the Sciences and Life,” yet in the Introduction you also write that you will look at Leibniz in relation to "what we would now call 'biology'." Why the scare quotes on "biology"?

Justin Smith: I don't take those as scare quotes so much as marks signaling a use-mention distinction. One of my guiding principles in the book was, to the extent possible, to respect actors' categories, to avoid using names for concepts, practices, or entities that would not have been familiar to the people I was writing about; and 'biology', for example, makes its first appearance only in the late 18th century.

JP: fair enough. What is at stake in this use-mention distinction for you in writing in the genre of history of philosophy? (If that is indeed the genre in which you would place your work.)

JS: This is not just terminological quibbling: it is rather a necessary part of working one's way back into the problems that early modern philosophers faced, rather than allowing ourselves to update their problems so that they come out as more familiar to our own world of concerns than they in fact are. I certainly take this task to be a necessary and incontrovertible part of history-of-philosophy scholarship. The branch of philosophy that interests me is what was called at the time 'natural philosophy', which would later be sliced off and partitioned into biology, chemistry and other concrete 'sciences'. If we take actors' categories seriously, then, when we do the history of biology or chemistry we are willy-nilly doing the history of philosophy.

To continue reading, go here.

Footnotes I Had to Cut from my Book in Order to Respect the Word Limit

(but that I hope to develop elsewhere)

1. [F]or many authors in the early modern period, the modalities of nutrition also mark one of the fundamental difference between animals and plants.  An animal is distinguished from a plant in part in that, whereas the plant absorbs its nutriment, ‘earth’, directly through its roots, the animal has a specialized system of the body, a digestive tract, and this can only appropriate other living beings, plants or animals, for the sustenance of the animal body.  This difference hangs with the other fundamental difference between animals and plants that was often emphasized from Aristotle on, namely, the capacity for locomotion in animals, and its absence in plants: the plant’s stationary existence is made possible by its ability to absorb its food directly through its roots, while the animal’s need to ingest organic matter that is scattered throughout its environment necessitates that it be able to move around in order to seek its nutriment out.  Daniel Sennert puts this point as follows: “But Animals (seeing they are more perfect than Plants) they were to have more exquisite diet than such as the Earth affords.  And therefore they had not only tast given them to try their meats, but also members wherewith to receive the same, and turn it into juyce fit to nourish the body, viz. The Mouth and Stomach… Now this Aliment received is in several Animals severally changed into Nutriment properly so called, or an humor which is the immediate aliment of the body, which when either by Nature it self (the heat in the process of time devouring the same) or by violence (as in sickness and other cases) it comes to be consumed, the life is extinguished” (Sennert Thirteen Books of Natural Philosophy, Book 7: “Of Animals or Living Creatures,” Chapter 10: “Of the Differences of Living Creatures,” 389). Perhaps not since Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animal Flesh had the ontological difference between plants and animals been so clearly put.

2. Leibniz’s most famous conflict with a contemporary concerning the issue of perpetual motion was with Joachim Becher, who was so infuriated by Leibniz’s dismissal of his purported invention that he is inspired in his Närrische Weisheit und weise Narrheit [Ignorant Wisdom and Wise Ignorance] of 1680 to ridicule Leibniz’s inventions at great length, including Leibniz’s supposed plan to invent a carriage that could travel from Amsterdam to Hannover in six hours.  See A I iii, 278 / Gerland 119 / MK 69.  In March, 1683 Leibniz gives his own account to the Landgraf Ernst concerning the value of Becher’s supposed invention: “This man is well enough known through his exaggerations, which are mixed with black malice.  One need only read his books in order to be convinced of this... He set upon me because I stood in the way of a certain alchemical swindle he had planned... What he says about the six-hour journey of the wagon from Hannover to Amsterdam belongs to his invention... For one would have to lose one’s reason in order to have ever thought of such a thing” (A I iii, 278).

3. In a 1669 report to Oldenburg from Leiden, Samuel Colepresse worries that “it may be Hollanders have other Testicles than English men.”  In any case, Colepresse will not be the one to settle the matter.  Commenting on De Graaf’s search for an answer to this question, he declares in evident exasperation: “Truelie should De Graaf desire ye experiment on me I should looke but soure on’t” (The Correspondence of Henry OIdenburg, ed. and tr. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965-86), v. VI, 193).

New Table of Contents

DIVINE MACHINES:
LEIBNIZ’S PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

1.    The Place of Biology in Early Modern Science
2.    Hard Problems, Old and New
3.    The Corporeal Substance Problem: Compatiblism, Incompatibilism, and Beyond
4.    Leibniz’s Towering Predecessors: Aristotle, Descartes, and Hobbes
5.    Leibniz’s Synthesis
6.    A Note on Terminology

PART I: FIRST THINGS

CHAPTER 1: ‘QUE LES PHILOSOPHES MEDICINASSENT’: LEIBNIZ’S ENCOUNTER WITH MEDICINE AND ITS EXPERIMENTAL CONTEXT

1.    Chemistry and Iatrochemistry
2.    The Directiones ad rem medicam pertinentes (1671)
3.    The Paris Notes
4.    The 1690s: Griping Pains and ‘Fables to the Deaf’
5.    The De causis febrium (1704-5)
6.    The Polemic against G. E. Stahl in Relation to Leibniz’s Earlier Works on Medicine
7.    Leibnz and Animal Experimentation

CHAPTER 2: ‘THE HYDRAULICO-PNEUMATICO-PYROTECHNICAL MACHINE OF QUASI-PERPETUAL MOTION’: LEIBNIZ ON ANIMAL ECONOMY

I.    The Idea of Animal Economy
8.    Introducing the Animal-Economical Manuscripts
9.    The Machina animalis (1677)
10.    The Corpus hominis et uniuscujusque animalis est machina quaedam (1682-6)
3.1. Nutrition
3.2. Fermentation
4. The De scribendis novis medicinae elementis (1682-3)
5. The De causis febrium (1704-5)
6. Nerve Fibers and Muscle Contraction: The Influence of Bernoulli, Baglivi, and Hoffmann
7. The Animadversiones in G. E. Stahlii Theoriam medicam veram (1709-10)
    7.1. Soul as Perceiver vs. Soul as Body-Preserver
7.2. Animal Economy, Preestablished Harmony, and the Best of All Possible Worlds
     8. Conclusion

Divine Machines: Rationale and Contents

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. 

Divine Machines: Chapter Outlines

CHAPTER 1. THE ARISTOTELIAN LEGACY: ANIMALS AS FORM-MATTER COMPOUNDS; REPRODUCTION AS TRANSMISSION OF FORM

It will be a central argument of this book that, overall, the place occupied by biology in Leibniz’s philosophy is closer to the one it enjoys in Aristotle than in Descartes: it is a field of application par excellence of general philosophical principles, rather than an obstacle to the viability of these principles.  In this and the following chapter, we will focus on the contrast between Aristotle and Descartes, and then move on to position Leibniz in relation to them.

In this chapter, we will gain a thorough understanding of Aristotle’s approach to both general and developmental physiology, and will then move on to his account of sexual reproduction.  We will conclude with an account of the central Aristotelian doctrine according to which ‘like begets like,’ that is, of his generation-based theory of species membership.  Throughout, we will be concerned to position Aristotle’s account of animal motion, development, and generation in a way that will highlight its sharp differences with Descartes’s later account, in order ultimately to show the brilliant manner in which Leibniz will synthesize elements from both of these systems of biology.   

In the first section, on organic structure and function in Aristotle, we will consider Aristotle’s account of the ontological priority of functions over the bodily organs through which these functions are executed, taking as our example his analysis of vision and the eye.  This analysis will provide us with a first instance of the general principle that also underlies Aristotle’s account of sexual generation: that of the priority of form over matter.  In Aristotle’s theory of reproduction, the father imposes both a formal and final cause, through the vehicle of the semen, upon the material of the mother’s uterus. This brings about what Jim Lennox has called “formal replication,” in which the father ensures his own eternity in kind, as Aristotle puts it, if not in number. While the product of generation is not an exact copy of the father, it is the closest thing possible to this, and the extent to which it falls short of this mark is traceable in large part to the degrading influence of the mother.  The menstrual blood possesses in potentia all of the possible qualities of a human being that may be actualized once the blood is acted upon by the semen; but still the menses are not pure seed, “for it lacks one thing only, the source of the soul” (GA II 3 737a). This soul source is at the same time the source of (to speak anachronistically) the blueprint or program that determines how the fetus will develop.  The semen determines the end toward which the fetus will develop, since, in Aristotle’s view, in natural beings such as animals the formal and final causes are one and the same.  For Aristotle, a woman is a degradation of man,  “a male deformed.”  A female is generated when the movements introduced by the male’s semen prove to be weak, and are consequently overcome by the movements of the menstrual blood.  Monstrosities occur, finally, when the movements of both of these are very weak and lack even the efficacy to render the menstrual blood into a distinct particular human, leaving it instead at the level of development common to all animals in general (GA IV 3). If no degradation were to occur, the male would reproduce itself perfectly.  This can never happen, since particular primary substances are not eternal. The particular mechanism by which perfect self-reproduction is hindered is the mutual interaction of the movements of the semen and the menstrual blood at conception.  Thus there is no need to explain where defective fetuses come from.  They are merely privations of form, which manifest themselves as recapitulations, not of earlier evolutionary stages, as some modern theories would later hold, but of a more general category --animal-- to which particular members of any animal species belong.

Aristotle’s account of species membership, then, is intimately linked with his account of sexual generation: to be a member of a certain biological kind is just to have one’s form originally transmitted by one’s male progenitor, ‘for like begets like’. As we will see, this is a very convenient principle to uphold within the context of a hylomorphic metaphysics, but its truth, and even its comprehensibility, become severely problematic with the rise of mechanistic biology.