Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Are Birds Dinosaurs?

How long have dinosaurs been around? There is one obvious sense in which they ceased to exist 66 million years ago. There is another sense in which they began to exist only around the middle of the 19th century, when Richard Owen identified a “distinct tribe... of Saurian Reptiles” in 1842. Most animals have a long history of social salience before science comes along to tell us exactly where they belong in the order of nature. Not so with dinosaurs: they didn't have any place in society at all until science informed us of their past existence, and from that point on their salience has been entirely wrapped up in cultural representations. These representations are anchored in something real, in a way that those of unicorns are not, but the fact that we have fossilised skulls and vertebrae to point to in the case of dinosaurs, while we do not have equine skulls with a horn in the middle to point to in the case of unicorns, only makes it more difficult, not less, to understand what we may expect the folk-categorical term “dinosaur” to do. 

At first glance it may seem surprising that there should be a folk-category filled by representations of a class of beings that we (the “folk”) only know to exist at all thanks to what science tells us. But the folk are particularly adept at taking the austere information science delivers, and filling it in with fantasy. This is why black holes figure so prominently in science-fiction scenarios about cosmic consciousness. Yet in the case of palaeontology the people making the discoveries and fleshing out the dry bones with their imaginations, are often much closer to the folk than is generally the case of, say, black-hole cosmologists. And so the original image we have of dinosaurs as “terrible lizards”, an image that never really fit all the available evidence (even if at least some of them had large teeth), is one that was produced by field scientists who were simultaneously making the discoveries and letting these discoveries fuel their imaginations. And from the starter dough of their early imaginings, cultural representations begin to ferment and grow on their own.

As Claudine Cohen has vividly shown, these representations have been very different in different cultural settings. Nowhere did the dinosaur take on a more iconic status than in the United States, in the early 20th century, and this had to do largely with the political-geographical project of incorporating western frontier territories into the economic life-blood of the country through the extraction of natural resources from them; and from the 1910s or so no natural resource was more important than the stuff that was to fuel automobiles. Of course the vast majority of organic matter that goes into the slow subterranean generation of “fossil fuels” comes from algae, and not from dinosaurs, but this did not prevent the Sinclair Oil Co. from using the image of a diminutive brontosaurus on its corporate logo beginning in 1933, marking out gas stations across the Arizona desert for American families assaying the length of their nation's territory in a station wagon. Keychains and other souvenirs were available for purchase.

In the generations that followed, the cartoon representation of the dinosaur, often with a caveman on its back, would come to be as familiar as the “exotic” megafauna of Africa. By the 1970s there emerged however a pedagogical current, with which I'm very familiar from first-hand experience, that encouraged elementary-school children to uphold a certain standard of correctness in the way they spoke of dinosaurs: to insist on not placing a prosauropod of the Triassic next to a Cretaceous triceratops in a diorama, for example, let alone next to a Neanderthal. This new standard of correctness as a value emerged simultaneously in American history with a countercurrent that deviated radically from more or less everything the accumulating evidence was telling us about the history of life on earth: namely, so-called “creation science”, a movement that appears --though I won't try to argue this today-- to exist not only in tension, but also in dialectical interdependence, with the pretence of science and its volunteers from among the folk to be getting the earth's distant past definitively right.

It is against the background of these parallel developments --both the new premium on correctness as a value among the folk, as well as the rise of a prominent ideological countercurrent that flagrantly rejects this value-- that we must begin to reflect not just on the recent claim that birds are dinosaurs, but also on the implicit normative force of that claim. That is, it is not just that birds are dinosaurs, but also that you, fellow members of the folk, must affirm that they are. 

Now, in phylogenetic terms, a dinosaur is: (i) either a modern bird, or (ii) a triceratops (which went extinct 66 million years ago), or, finally, (iii) any member of any species descended from the last common ancestor of both birds and triceratops. So this excludes crocodiles, because the last common ancestor of birds and crocodiles occurs earlier than the last common ancestor of birds and triceratops, even though crocodiles are the closest living relative of all members of class Aves. This definition has the virtue of being clear, and permitting us to avoid the difficulty of setting up an arbitrary boundary as we move forward in time, between the last dinosaur survivor of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed triceratops and most other dinosaur species, on the one hand, and on the other the first so to speak post-dinosaur, descended from the so-called feathered dinosaurs, but now just too morphologically distinct to be considered a dinosaur itself.

But fear of an arbitrary boundary, at least at the closer end of the temporal range of the dinosaur, seems to force the basic distinction such a boundary would have permitted to make its entrance under a new guise, namely, the distinction within this temporal range between the “avian” and the “non-avian” dinosaurs. It is not hard to find other cases in which the expansion of a classificatory term forces new distinctions within the space opened up by the expansion. For example, from the moment the American census began to distinguish between “racial” groups such as “black” and “white”, on the one hand, and overlapping “non-racial” identity groups such as “Hispanic” on the other (here, emphatically, I am using US census terminology, and not my own), we unsurprisingly began to hear the phrase “non-Hispanic white” with much greater frequency. “Non-avian dinosaur” seems to work the same way: there is a group we often find ourselves wanting to talk about, that is defined more broadly than it was in the past; but in many contexts we still want to talk about the group as it was defined in the past, so we construct a negative phrase that indicates we are subtracting a subset of it.

“White” is a folk category par excellence, and no respectable person today looks to it in the expectation that there is an underlying metaphysics forcing it upon us. The same is not generally thought to be true of “dinosaur”, though, and so the ease with which the folk revert to the phrase “non-avian dinosaur” upon being told that birds are dinosaurs, signals that there is a strong tension between the folk category and the phylogenetic definition. 

What should we make of this? Are the folk simply mistaken? The claim that birds are dinosaurs is a claim among other things that phylogeny trumps morphology, that is to say that to be a dinosaur is to have a dinosaur's lineage, no matter what you look like, or how much you deviate from the most paradigmatic representation of, say, a quadrupedal, somewhat tortoise-like, lumbering sauropod. And here it is curious, and worthy of pause, that we play this trump card in a case where the paradigmatic members of the kind are long extinct.

Compare the case of whales and fish. John Dupré has compellingly shown that “fish” is yet another folk category par excellence; when we try to delimit it precisely, we find that the very task of drawing precise boundaries generates new problems in its wake. One problem is that many species that most folk and most scientists would be willing to call “fish” do not meet the standard definition of “gill-breathing craniate animal”. Consider the tellingly named “lungfish”, class Dipnomorpha, which is both capable of breathing air, and is the currently extant species closest to the ancestor of the first land-dwelling tetrapods, which emerged around 400 million years ago, and from which dinosaurs and mammals, including ourselves, and indeed including whales, would eventually evolve. That is, there is a species of fish, or “fish” in scare quotes if you're not ready to commit, that is more closely related to whales (and to human beings) than it is to ray-finned fishes (class Actinopterygii) such as tuna or cod. In other words there is no meaningful phylogenetic basis for putting lobe-finned fish such as Dipnomorpha or coelacanths together with tuna and not with whales, even though whales have the curious distinction of having evolved from land-dwelling animals that themselves evolved from sea-dwelling animals (they have this in common with numerous species of sea snakes too). 

Phylogeny, I mean, seems to be invoked inconsistently, with no clear rule that could explain when paraphyletic classes might be legitimately admitted into our system of carving things up. Now in the case of lungfish, tuna, and whales, we are dealing with species all of which are today extant, even though of course part of our consideration of where they stand (or swim) in relation to one another has to do with other species long extinct. But when we turn our attention to avian and non-avian dinosaurs, by contrast, we are faced with two different classes of beings in very different ontological predicaments: the ones exist, and the others no longer do. 

One might suppose on first consideration that this shouldn't make a difference, that the present has no special status in our taxonomical efforts. This would be true, except that the present happens to be the moment in which we are making these taxonomical efforts. We have no choice but to work outward from it, and we find in this work that we have a different sort of epistemic access, for living species than for extinct species, to the criteria for classification that interest us. This is a problem that has been perceived by palaeontologists at least since Georges Cuvier sought to classify the enormous “saurians” excavated from the gypsum mines at Montmartre in 1798. Having more or less passively adapted the Buffonian conception of species, as that which is held together by the “unity of reproduction”, Cuvier was struck, as one cannot fail to be, by the fact that fossils do not reproduce, and so if the species you are trying to classify only exist in fossil form, you are not ever going to be able to apply the criterion by which they are marked off from one another. It is in part for this reason that Cuvier's program of comparative anatomy veers into a structuralist project of establishing anatomical similarities across species, without any regard, or at least explicit regard, for what these similarities might imply about kinship or shared lineage.

This difficulty would be addressed directly in George Gaylord Simpson's important 1951 article, “The Species Concept”. Simpson is responding here to the so-called “Biological Species Concept” proposed by Ernst Mayr, which defines a species as a group of potentially interfertile individuals: thus a definition showing significant continuity with the Buffonian idea of a species as that which is held together by the “reproductive power”. What Simpson calls “typological definition” of a taxonomic group by contrast is the establishment of the group on the basis of its correspondence “with an abstract or ideal morphological pattern.” He notes that typological classification is “pre-evolutionary and non-evolutionary.” Yet prima facie it would seem that palaeontology leaves us no other choice than to revert to it. 

Simpson is interested in interrogating the notion of species in particular as deployed in palaeontology, whereas both “dinosaur” and “bird” are significantly higher taxa than this. But we may nonetheless learn something from his observations. He maintains that “[t]he palaeontologist... uses the designation 'species' for two sorts of entities which are radically and fundamentally incongruent.” One possible approach to paleontological species classification, for Simpson, is, starting from morphological features, “to recognise central lines as species and to distinguish branches as other species, ... even though their delimitation is genetically arbitrary at the point of branching.” Thus:

“Another possible approach,” Simpson goes on, “is to recognise each evolutionary lineage as a unitary species until it divides and then to consider the descendent branches as species distinct from each other and from the single ancestral line.” Thus:

As for the first possibility, as represented by B (we are leaving some out here), Simpson notes that “the only reasonable criterion of choice would be designation of certain terminal branches as more important, or somehow definitive, than others.” Intriguingly, he mentions a view that he attributes to “a philosopher,” a certain H. Miller (as we learn only from the bibliography), in the long-out-of-print book, The Community of Man, published in 1949. According to an extreme formulation of this view, as Simpson summarises it, one might “take Homo sapiens as the supreme species, and consider its ancestry, from the beginning of life (or even before) as the main line, not specifically separable from H. sapiens... Taxonomists will surely agree that this result and the whole procedure involved are impractical if not absurd.” 

Again with the caveat that Simpson is speaking of species while birds and non-avian dinosaurs are both enormous clades, could it be that the contention that birds are dinosaurs resembles the absurdity Simpson has identified here? Suppose the meteor had not hit the earth, and that triceratops and all of its Cretaceous contemporaries had survived and evolved into new forms, differing at least as much from the ceratopsians as, say, the sparrow differs from the archaeopteryx. Suppose some of these descendants of Cretaceous dinosaurs eventually returned to the sea, like the ancestors of whales did, and, like the whales, evolved an outer morphology similar to that of fish. It seems unlikely that any taxonomist trying to make sense of such a scene of biodiversity would think to insist much on the fact that those ceratopsian-descended sea animals, on the one hand, and the birds on the other (let's stipulate that they evolved in the meteor-free world more or less in the same way as in this one, which is naturally impossible, of course, but not logically impossible), are members of the same category of beings, even if it were known that they have a common ancestor (again, whales and lungfish, or if you prefer, humans and lungfish, also have a common ancestor). 

This thought experiment suggests that perhaps the insistence that birds are dinosaurs is conditioned in part by a conviction among those who promote it that birds are somehow definitive of the branch that reaches back to the common ancestor of birds and triceratops. This would not be in the way that “the philosopher” seems to imagine Homo sapiens to be definitive of the lineage that led to it -- that is, in a way that strongly implies teleologically guided evolution. Rather, birds perhaps present themselves as the suitable end of the lineage in part because there is the appearance of some need at the present moment, some sense-making exigency, to argue that the dinosaurs survived after all, that in spite of what we had previously thought, they are still with us. 

Before we venture any suggestions as to what the source of this felt need might be, it is worth noting that in general efforts to shorten the gap between the folk conception of birds and the folk conception of dinosaurs has involved as it were the avianisation of the latter, rather than the dinosaurisation of the former. From particular discoveries of filament-like layers protecting the outer surface of the bodies of many dinosaur species, the conclusion is quickly reached that these filaments must have been feathers; new artist's renditions are hastily drawn up, and on occasion they have to be retracted when it is learned that they went further in the avian direction than the evidence permitted. Overcorrection from the Godzilla template for the tyrannosaurus rex has on occasion made the tyrant king of the lizards into a sort of chicken. Thus:

There will always be corrections, and overcorrections, and renegotiations of our representations of the past. That is normal, and it is good that over the past several decades T. rex has been made more gracile, less like an upright Gila monster. But again, what is at stake in the particular direction in which our most recent overcorrections are sending us? Even if we are prepared to admit that birds are a branch of dinosaurs, we may still ask: Why must dinosaurs in turn be birds? I am not going to venture an answer to this second question today, except to say that it seems to fit a general pattern of revisionism in science education over the past decades that compels us to revisit whatever had previously been marked as “terrible”, and to discover that it was actually rather gentle or even cultured: the same pattern has been evidenced in cases as seemingly far apart as whales (perhaps the first trailblazer in this transformation), bats, sharks, and Neanderthals.

As to the particular need that I've already identified however, to have the dinosaurs surviving the great extinction event and into the present day, a few tentative remarks may be in order. Contrary to what some people's intuitions here might be, it does not seem to me that these newly discovered (or newly legislated) survivors of the Cretaceous-Paleogene die-off have something to do with the current climate of ecological crisis, in which, after all, the prevailing sentiment is that nobody gets to survive a major extinction event, let alone come out the other side even more gentle and cute than before.

It may have something more to do with the dialectical relationship, to which I've already alluded, in which the public presentation of evolution is constantly formed and deformed by the political forces of evolution denialism. In this context, creationists have for decades weaponised the rather healthy skepticism that philosophers of science have brought to empirical claims about a distant unrepeatable past, and transformed it into a sort of universal denial of the possibility of having a science of the past at all. If dinosaurs were entirely a thing of the past, such skepticism could perhaps be seen as having more of a foothold than in a world in which dinosaurs are in fact well represented in the present. 

That's all I'll say about that for now, in order by way of conclusion to return to our guiding question: are birds dinosaurs, or aren't they? Even if we agree with Dupré, as I think I do, that whales were fish until the mid-19th century, and then ceased to be so as a result of new taxonomical legislation (which, as D. Graham Burnett has nicely shown, was itself influenced by actual legislation concerning the importation of whale blubber into the early United States: should it be taxed as fish oil? Or is there perhaps a way to get around that?): even if we agree with Dupré about this mid-19th-century adjustment, I was saying, it is not at all clear that a similar adjustment has yet been successfully carried out in the early 21st century as concerns the status of birds. Folk categories are not determined by fiat, but by actual usage among the folk. In certain scientific matters (say, geocentrism), the folk can be shown to be wrong over time, and gradually correct themselves. But in taxonomy it's generally the case that the folk do no worse than the scientists: how can they, when any classificatory scheme is relative to the initial concerns of the classifier? Whales became non-fish, and then they became gentle wise ones of the sea, not just because of science, but because of a pervasive trust in scientific authority to reveal to us the true natures of things, and a fairly active post-whaling propaganda campaign on the part of scientific and political bodies to convince people to revise their conception of whales.

The political landscape is very different today, and not surprisingly what we see in response to the question whether birds are dinosaurs, as we see almost everywhere else, is a rift and a stalemate. Some people adopt the new ordering with pride and with a supercilious commitment to the correction of their peers who are still getting it wrong, while others hold back, somewhat suspicious but often unable to articulate the nature of this suspicion, and if you show them a sparrow they'll say: “That just doesn't look like a dinosaur to me.”

Whether in the end these people cross over, and the 21st century proves to be the one in which the status of birds as dinosaurs is consolidated, depends much more on the calibration between scientific authority, the propagandistic aims of science education, and popular sentiment, than on working out any further finer points of phylogenetics. There are lessons here for many other debates about social kinds that are currently on people's minds, some of which touch on questions of biology too, but I'll leave those for another day. 

Postscript on Denoting

I received some criticism of my post yesterday on the value of studying indigenous languages, to the effect that I was confusing denotation and connotation in my discussion of the difficulty of translating paradigm sentences used in Anglophone philosophy of language. 

I assure you, I know the difference. It is my argument however that what we pick out as capable of being denoted --cats, mats, floors, vixens-- is determined entirely by what is of interest to us in a connotative way. If this is true, it of course means that there is no hope of ever finding any settled analytic truths (at least as concerns the natural world). “Gold ist ein gelbes Metall,” to take Kant’s classic example, can’t even be translated from German into English in a way that is satisfying to anyone: gold isn’t ‘yellow’. It’s golden! Setting that problem aside, Kant’s definition also entails that a blind --or even just a colourblind-- person could never really know gold. Nor did Kant know about atomic numbers, which I think it is fair to say have rightly displaced superficial features of chemical elements such as colour (in a certain light, to a certain optical system) in getting at the true and proper definition of, for example, gold. 

Such questions have been beaten to death by now, and I’m not here to revive them, exactly. But I do think that Williamson's shift from ‘gold’ to ‘vixen’ as a paradigmatic example of an analytic truth is peculiar in that it moves us onto less solid ground, whereas one would think that in the weakening of antiquated examples of analytic truths drawn from chemistry that comes with the improvement of chemical knowledge, we would do well to not go looking for new examples in a far less stable domain of human knowledge such as zoology. With gold as with vixens, what is going to strike a given person as analytic depends on what they already know (e.g., again, if you do not know post-Mendeleevian chemistry, ‘Gold is atomic number 79’ is not going to strike you as a statement with full equivalency between subject and predicate). But still, gold is something I think we all think we know about. Not so with vixens, which are rather far from our current urban reality (unless perhaps you are in London). Most of us today do not pay attention to the breeding habits of vulpines, and in large part for this reason, I suspect, the majority of occurrences of the word ‘vixen’ in recent English are metaphorical, describing some perceived feature of a human female; and probably not just metaphorical, but also ironic, signalling that while one knows the metaphorical meaning of the term, one is not actually the sort of person who would use it in that way. 

Many words are like this: the use of them has become detached from the thing they were supposed to denote, and is now largely use by extension. Many such words, moreover, are what we may call ‘precious’, and their use is not just metaphorical, but also a sort of display of mastery on the part of the user. ‘Vixen’ is a borderline case, but consider, for example, the (purported) term for a group of crows. I strongly suspect that at least 95% of occurrences of the phrase ‘a murder of crows’ are found in sentences like, “Did you know that a group of crows is called a ‘murder of crows’?” With this in mind, it can’t really be correct to say that a group of crows is a murder; the preponderance of occurrences of the term in sentences of the sort I just gave means that, in the other 5%, the ones where English-speakers say things like, “Look at that murder of crows,” what is in fact happening is that the speaker is drawing attention to the fact that he or she has mastered this precious bit of vocabulary. The focus of the proposition, in other words, is the speaker, and not the crows. 

The more attentive you are to questions of style in language, the more you become attuned to the fact that a great deal of it works in this way. As far as I can tell no one actually uses the word ‘temblor’; it is a hack synonym for journalists to throw in when they have already used the word ‘earthquake’ too many times, and need to show a capacity for variety. I’ve long suspected that people almost never use certain anatomical orthophemisms in a way that faithfully focuses the listener’s attention on the denotation of the term, but instead that whenever we hear ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’, what we’re actually hearing is a sort of performance of the speaker’s maturity. (As I’ve pointed out before, both of these, as well as ‘anus’, have their origins in Latin euphemisms: 'tail', 'sheath', and 'ring', respectively). I never use these words anyway, but always talk around them, aware that they pose an objective and irresolvable problem to anyone who cares about language, and understands that real mastery of language is not just about getting things right, but calibrating one’s expression of what is right so as to allow its performative aspect to be evident only as much as one wishes. A hack by contrast is someone who uses words like ‘temblor’ or ‘penis’, or phrases like ‘to tamp down’, and thinks they’re getting away with it.

In the end I fear there is no clear boundary between these words that seem performative and therefore 'fake’ to me — ‘vixen’, ‘temblor’, ‘murder’ ‘penis’— on the one hand, and the nouns we take to be most solid and certain and uncontroversial on the other — ‘cat’, ‘mat’, ‘gold’, and so on. It is not just that the analytic/synthetic distinction is untenable, as I think Quine decisively showed in the middle of the last century; it is not just that any sentence will potentially contain different information in the predicate than what was contained in the subject in a way that depends on what you already knew; but that before we even get to the predicate, the subjects of our propositions are all, inescapably, charged up with so much strange energy, so much power of implicit revelation about the speaker or writer, as to doom from the start the search for a neutral sample sentence that focuses our minds only upon the clearly and unambiguously denoted objects. “Vixens are female foxes,” or “The cat is on the mat”, anyhow, are not going to serve the purpose monolingual Anglophone philosophers want them to serve, and this becomes painfully clear the minute we try to translate them into other languages, particularly indigenous languages, noticing as we do so all the approximations and half-measures we are compelled to make and take. What might serve then as an example of a sentence whose meaning is uncontroversial? There is no such thing. 

Why Philosophers Should Study Indigenous Languages

For a postscript to this post, go here.

 

I believe there is much to be learned philosophically from the study of languages that are spoken by only a small number of people, who lack a high degree of political self-determination and are relatively powerless to impose their conception of history, society, and nature on their neighbours; and who also lack much in the way of a textual literary tradition or formal and recognisably modern institutions of knowledge transmission: which for present purposes we may call “indigenous” languages.

 

This is of course going to be a hard sell, given that the great majority of Anglophone philosophers do not even recognize the value of learning German, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese, and believe that they can penetrate as deeply as one might possibly go into fundamental philosophical questions from a standpoint of monolingualism. German, Latin, and the others are cosmopolitan languages, and historically all cosmopolitan languages, rightly or wrongly, have functioned as vehicles of what most discerning people are prepared to recognise as philosophy. But there is a significant difference even among the five cosmopolitan languages I’ve listed, which can begin to point us towards the even greater difference between all five of these, on the one hand, and, say, Yanomami, Ainu, Ket, or Sámi on the other: the first three cosmopolitan languages may be grouped together, as having a long legacy of shared and standardised terminology such that problems of translation between them are relatively small; by contrast, while there is to some extent a legacy of translation from Sanskrit towards Chinese, often via Tibetan, for the most part philosophical terminology has developed in these languages independently and without any felt need to establish cross-linguistic equivalencies.

 

Now, Yanomami, Ainu, Ket, and Sámi are generally held to be non-philosophical languages, languages from which one must depart if one wishes to start doing philosophy, and one of my contentions is that this judgment of them goes together with their status as non-cosmopolitan languages: that is, philosophy, throughout its long history and very much still today, is presumed to be an activity that may be pursued only in languages that may pretend to universality. 

 

What is it like to speak a language that may not pretend to universality? Most philosophers in the English-speaking world have never considered this question. There are of course degrees of cosmopolitanness and indigeneity, and if over the past, say, two centuries, Arabic and Chinese speakers have been compelled to think somewhat more about the relative non-universality of their languages compared to English (as illustrated for example by the fact that if you want to operate at the highest institutional levels in global academia, you must do so in English), they nonetheless have a foundation and an orientation in native languages that in the past have been, and perhaps in the future will be, deemed adequate for expression of any philosophical idea whatsoever.

 

The same is not true of Yanomami, Ainu, Ket, and Sámi. From the very first moment of these languages’ contact with the cosmopolitan or imperial languages of the dominant cultures that engulf or abut them (Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and Scandinavian respectively), there is an immediate and total separation between the sort of things that can and should be expressed in the indigenous language, and the sort that can and should be expressed in the cosmopolitan language. 

 

I myself have been studying Sakha, a Turkic language of Northeast Asia, for the past two years, and have occasionally written about my progress here. Before starting to learn Sakha, I had studied, with varying degrees of success: French, German, Russian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Church Slavonic, and Turkish (as well as dabbling in many other languages while making no real progress). All of these languages are paradigmatically cosmopolitan (and all but one are Indo-European). Never, before beginning to study Sakha, did I have much insight into the way contingent features of the natural languages we are using condition the manner in which we enter into and seek to resolve philosophical questions.

 

Sakha presents a complicated case, and much could be said, and disputed, as to its indigenous, non-cosmopolitan status. I would call it ‘relatively non-cosmopolitan’: if you are a native Yukaghir speaker in the Sakha Republic, you will likely have to learn both Russian and Sakha in order to make your way through the world, and in this respect from a certain linguistic starting point Sakha has the quality of a lingua franca. Unlike a paleo-Siberian isolate such as Yukaghir moreover, Sakha is a geographically remote fragment of a major world language family that also includes the lingue franche of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Turkish Republic. And it is a language that was significantly conditioned by past interactions with the Mongol Empire, and, since the 16th century, with the Russian Empire (and this latter is an empire in its Asian extension, even if few people today think to question the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Russian Federation: this is the virtue of pursuing your colonial expansion without an ocean separating the metropole from the colonies). 

 

I mean to say that there are other languages that are much more local and non-cosmopolitan than Sakha; I chose Sakha in part because the majority of the world’s languages lack resources for self-directed learning; if I wanted to learn Yukaghir, in contrast with Sakha I wouldn’t have the option of learning from news reports or ingenious music videos such as this on YouTube. But still, the relative non-cosmopolitanness of Sakha is sufficient to reveal to me an enormous epistemic inequality between the languages in which philosophy is by default conducted, on the one hand, and the great majority of the world’s languages on the other. This inequality, I believe, generates a bias so enormous that all other concerns about the lack of diversity in philosophy seem trivial by comparison. The deepest failure to incorporate diverse philosophical viewpoints is the failure to notice the existence of indigenous life-worlds, and to pay attention to what distinguishes them epistemically from the cosmopolitan ones. 

 

Let me try to work my way into why this is so important with a few examples that might appear mundane. It was recently pointed out that Timothy Williamson --whom I take, perhaps unfairly, to be an example of an Anglophone philosopher who does not even recognise that you would do well to know German and Latin, let alone Sanskrit and Chinese, let alone, in turn, Yanomami and Ainu, in order to do philosophy better-- considers the sentence ‘Vixens are female foxes’ to be a paradigmatic analytic truth. In part prompted by examples such as these, I recently wrote a short post explaining why gendered animal terms in fact require complicated knowledge of the social saliency of domestic breeding, which is something that only pertains to a limited number of animal species, and to different species in different human cultures. Given this social dimension to such terms, it is by no means a simple fact of the world outside us, I argued, that ‘vixen’ denotes the female of the various members of the Vulpes genus. 

 

So let us try to find a truly non-controversial example of a truth-claim, expressed in English, about the world. We may as well turn, as a first stab, to that old staple of analytic philosophy: The cat is on the mat. I’m not sure who first used this example, though I’m sure this would be easy to find out, but I know I saw it written on countless chalkboards throughout my time in graduate school. It is not an analytic proposition, like ‘Vixens are female foxes’, but is rather deployed in discussions of denoting: “The cat is on the mat” is a claim that seems to involve at a minimum existential commitment to a particular cat and a particular mat. But let’s leave aside though the problem of the definite articles, which not every language has (Sakha does not have them, and neither does Latin or Russian: I once saw a funny translation of Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” into the latter language, in which his nuanced philosophical analysis of the definite article simply left the English word ‘the’ untranslated. What other choice did the translator have?). 

 

Leaving aside the ‘the’ problem, this sentence, chosen as paradigmatic in view of its supposedly non-controversial character, in fact becomes laden with problems the further we stray from the language in which it was first deployed as an example, most likely by a monolingual Anglophone philosopher. In order for this sentence to begin to make sense, for one thing, presuming that by ‘mat’ we mean ‘doormat’ (as I’ve always understood it), we must suppose that its speaker or hearer is someone who lives in a culture whose members wear their shoes when they enter into a house, and must therefore wipe the soil off of them as they enter. But a comparative anthropological perspective reveals to us that this is in fact a very strange and deviant thing to do, not quite as rare as, say, communal defecation, but up there in the general neighbourhood. Now we might translate with the English word ‘mat’ a given word in another language for something that has the bare form of a Euro-American ‘doormat’, but we will almost certainly find that its range of functions in the culture from which the word comes would strongly compel us to simply retain the native word, if we did not wish to allow our understanding of the object in question to be distorted by all the connotations we allow to attach to the English word in question. 

 

Now it might sound like I’m being facetious with this example, but the only way I know to defend against that accusation is to double down, and to continue to draw out this paradigm sentence’s further problems. We’ve already problematised mats, so what about cats? A first thing to note is that the Sakha word for ‘cat’, куоска / kuoska, is not like the Sakha word for ‘horse’ (ат / at) (of Turkic origin), ‘dog’ (ыт / yt) (Turkic), or ‘deer’ (таба / taba) (Tungusic). Куоска is rather a Yakutized form of the Russian кошка / koshka, which is cognate to countless other Indo-European words for felines, such as chat, gato, Katze, and cat. While horses, dogs, and deer constitute central features of Sakha social reality from the very beginning of their existence as a culture, quasi-domestic felines only arrived in Northeastern Asia with the arrival of Russian colonists, and so the word for ‘cat’ marks in Sakha a moment in the history of this culture’s political subjugation. 

 

The Sakha translation of this paradigm sentence, then, is (perhaps):

 

Куоска муоста тэлгэҕигэр баар.

Kuoska muosta telgeğiger baar. 

Cat      floor['s] mat(on)    is. 

 

Not bad, for a start. We have, here, a quasi-domestic mammalian species spatially located on top of a human-made artefact, much like what is meant by the English sentence, “The cat is on the mat.” This quasi-domestic species however is an invasive one, and goes by a foreign name; it has not traditionally been subject to spaying and neutering, and so (unlike dogs, horses, and domestic reindeer), reproduces as it pleases, and often to the detriment of human food supplies. And it is sitting on top of something, a ‘mat’ as we have attempted to render it, the name of which implies woven grass, and thus something far closer to the natural world than a ‘mat’ made out of, say, petroleum by-products. Муоста тэлгэҕигэр is a compound phrase in the possessive dative (which is how we get the cat onto it); if we change this back into a nominative possessive, we have муоста тэлгэҕэ, ‘mat of the floor’ or, as we would say in English, ‘floor’s mat’, or, more usually, ‘floor-mat’ or ‘floor mat’ or even ‘floormat’.  

 

Муоста by itself also means ‘bridge’, and in this meaning it is also a borrowing from Russian, namely the word мост. I am not sure --and my authoritative Sakha-Russian dictionary, by the great Russian linguist E K. Pekarskiï, does not say-- whether in its meaning as ‘floor’ the word муоста is a simple homonym of муоста as ‘bridge’ (like ‘bark’ and ‘bark’ in English), or whether in its meaning as ‘floor’ муоста also comes from the Russian мост. If Sakha had to borrow a word for ‘bridge’, it is possible that it also had to borrow a word for ‘floor’ in the special sense that this conveys in the broader Slavic and Indo-European world. Even something so apparently basic as a floor is not a pre-given feature of external reality; it is something that takes shape as a result of the way we live, and of the way we conceptualise our habitations and what lies beyond them. 

 

The Sakha ‘equivalent’ of “The cat is on the mat,” then, involves at least one, maybe two, entities that are imported from another linguistic reality, while a third entity, the ‘mat’ without any special reference to the floor, bears a much closer relationship to nature than the pure artefact denoted by the English ‘mat’. There is, again, no way to reproduce the occurrences of the English ‘the’, and so in the end it is only context in Sakha that will tell us whether the speaker does not in fact mean that a cat is on a mat (but, again this is a problem we also have in Russian and Latin). And there is no preposition ‘on’, either, so instead we deal with that by means of nominal case endings. And as for ‘is’ being captured by the Sakha баар (cognate with the Turkish var, which is often described as functioning more as an existential quantifier than as a verb), well, that’s another enormous question I am not even going to touch. 

 

Instead I want to dwell on the difficulties inherent in the search only for cross-linguistic equivalences in nouns. Of course, many words in many languages, even in cosmopolitan ones, have a similar legacy, and it is obviously no mark of the subaltern status of the United States relative to Italy that we refer to its form of government as ‘republican’, even though res publica may be traced back to the Italian peninsula. But in Sakha the lexical dependency on the language of a still-existing external political hegemon for any dimension of language dealing with politics, science, technology, economics, business, extraterritorial zoology and botany, global popular culture, and so on, and so on, makes the situation very different from one such as that of English, which shows the historical marks of past domination (by, e.g., Romans, and then Normans), without there being any pervasive awareness in the use of modern American English that we are relying on words derived from other empires. 

 

My point here is not a simple reheating of Sapir and Whorff. It is not, or not just, that different social realities will make different features of the world salient enough to be captured in words, and thus that one culture will have a thousand words for different qualities of snow, and so on. Sapir and Whorff (not to mention Quine) were not particularly interested in the political dimensions of untranslatability, and did not spend much time reflecting on the vast difference between the political orders served by English and Inuktitut respectively, nor on the way this service shapes the sense of what may be said in these languages. 

 

It is well known that a core feature of modern nationalisms, beginning in Europe in the 18th century and radiating out through the 19th and 20th centuries, was to raise up national languages, by means of dictionaries, academies, and the often artificial elevation of revered national poets, into the vehicles of expression of any thought a human being is capable of having, that is, into languages that may pretend to universality. Thus in the 14th century one could not describe military strategy or the immortality of the soul in Lithuanian, but by the 19th century, one could. Yet this has mostly been a failed project, as today, notice, again, that one cannot really enter the global discussion of, say, genetic engineering or the sovereign debt crisis, in Lithuanian. In the case of Sakha, there was a brief efflorescence of top-down, imported Soviet linguistic modernisation, in which attempts were made to create a Sakha-language version of the Homo sovieticus complete with daily newspapers and dull socialist-realist novels and plays. But returned mostly to the forces of global market ideology and official indifference to matters of culture, the future vitality of sub-state, nominally “autonomous” national languages such as Sakha within the former Soviet Union is very much in doubt. 

 

And Lithuanian and Sakha are doing pretty well, relatively speaking. The vast majority of languages in the world are such that their native speakers must switch to another language in order to talk about any of the things that interest the sort of people who pass through airports, have credit cards, or go to philosophy conferences. And this is the default form of linguistic competency in the world, and has been ever since ancient empires arose and put some people's cultures under the political domination of others. To have to reach outside of your native linguistic resources in order to engage with ideas that are supposed to be accessible in a linguistically neutral way is an effort that English speakers par excellence, and speakers of any cosmopolitan language to a somewhat lesser degree, do not have to make. And the lack of any need to do so makes them systematically unaware of the cost of having to do so.

 

Language is not neutral, and “The cat is on the mat” is not a claim whose meaning is by any means obvious. This is one, and only one, of the lessons that the study of indigenous languages affords: to expose the unconsciously provincial character of philosophy done in languages that have the luxury of taking themselves for universal. 

Anne Conway and Monadology

I should perhaps begin with a clarificatory point about the title of this paper. I am not concerned here with Anne Conway and 'the' Monadology, referring to a particular well-known work of 1714 by G. W. Leibniz. Nor am I concerned, exactly, with Conway's monadology. Rather, I am concerned with the position she occupies, as a transmitter and developer of the idea that unity and being are identical, that to be is to be one, and that anything that is composite must therefore be metaphysically grounded in unities.

It might be somewhat non-traditional to include this final point about composition in a list of the typical aims of monadology. But monadology does not deny composite entities. Rather it explains them in terms of unity, or, to use Leibniz's well-known phrase, in terms of "diversity compensated by identity."[1] There are multiple currents flowing into this idea, perhaps the most influential among them being certain interpretations of the Neoplatonic tradition. Another important current is what is often called Christianized kabbalism, and more generally the Hebraizing tendency in 17th-century philosophy, particularly in Germany. The influence of this tradition on Leibniz has been studied in detail in a series of important works by Allison Coudert, and most notably her 1995 book, Leibniz and the Kabbalah.[2] Coudert positions her own view against that of Carolyn Merchant, who in a 1979 article[3] argued that Anne Conway was the principal transmitter of the concept of monad to Leibniz, while for her part Coudert considers that the most important source of the concept, and of the ensemble of kabbalistic ideas that go along with it, was the man Matthew Arnold would immortalize as 'the Scholar Gipsy' in an 1853 poem of that name: the alchemist, occultist, and all-around man of mystery, Francis Mercury van Helmont.

The hunt for the sources of Leibniz's core ideas, and the debate over whether they can be traced to Conway or not, has somewhat overshadowed the study of the development of Conway's own thought. It would be an understatement to observe that the kabbalist background to Conway has not been given adequate attention. In fact, in some instances it has been positively suppressed. In his abridged edition of Conway's posthumously published 1690 work, the Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,[4] for example, Jonathan Bennett simply edits out all the references to kabbalah, or at least all that he believes he can edit out without obviously distorting or destroying Conway's arguments. But this is in truth an impossible task, for the Principles, taken at face value, could rightly be described as a commentary on Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata, a massive pastiche of a work published in two separate volumes, the first in 1677 in Sulzbach, and the second in Frankfurt in 1684.[5] But if serious scholarship has preferred to ignore Knorr von Rosenroth's contributions to the history of philosophy, the principal consequence of this negligence has been to embolden unserious scholars, spirit-seers as Kant would have called them, to consider it as their own text. To this day the most common English edition of The Kabbalah Unveiled is published by the Theosophical Society in an English translation by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the founder in 1891 of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[6] He was preceded in his enthusiasm for Knorr von Rosenroth by the prominent 19th-century French adept of black magic, Éliphas Lévi.[7]

I am not proposing to take it back today, not exactly, though I am proposing that Conway was, herself, taken in by it, like it or not, just as Lévi and the theosophists were, and through Conway some of the core features of what we know as 'monadology' found their way to Leibniz. In this paper I would in particular like to consider why it is that Conway adopts certain views that will later be associated with Leibniz's theory of monads. I will take it for granted that this theory holds not only that being is unity, but also that there is unity in diversity. The former aspect of monadology is generally emphasized in what is anachronistically called the 'idealist' interpretation of Leibniz, while the latter aspect has pride of place in 'realist' renderings of his philosophy. To say that Leibniz is a 'realist' in this sense is to say that he is committed to a 'metaphysics of corporeal substance'. I have said as much in several other places, and have also provided arguments in those places that I will not repeat here.[8] What I will argue here is that, while the doctrine of the equivalence of being and unity has a plainly Platonic-Pythagorean pedigree, the theory of corporeal substance --which is again, not an alternative to the monadology, but rather a dimension of it-- may be traced in large part to authors associated with both Jewish and Christian kabbalism. It is this dimension of monadology that seems more plainly present in Conway, who may in turn have served as one of the sources for Leibniz's mature model of corporeal substance.

But what, to begin, is kabbalah? The short answer to this difficult question is that it is the tradition based on a supposed esoteric revelation that accompanied the exoteric revelation given by God to Moses.[9] The tradition has its roots as early as late antiquity, with the Sefir Yezirah or Book of Formation written sometime between the third and the sixth centuries. The Zohar or Book of Splendor would be composed in the 13th century, but would be commonly attributed to ancient authors. Kabbalism as a tradition entered its modern phase in the 16th century, with the work of Isaac Luria, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Jerusalem in 1534. The Lurianic Kabbalah, principally an interpretation of the Zohar, offered a philosophical, if cryptic, account of the creation of the world, of the personae of God, of the nature of man, of the reincarnation and immortality of the soul, among other, often heretical doctrines. It was via Luria that kabbalah made its entry into Christian thought in the following century. Luria incorporated elements of Gnosticism, particularly the view that each soul is a sort of spark or flame and that its embodiment is the result of imprisonment or exile. He was also, as Coudert emphasises, what might be called an 'animist'. "There was nothing dead and devoid of soul in the Lurianic universe," she explains, "Souls were in everything, including stones."[10]

The Christian appropriation of kabbalah has a history as intricate and multifaceted as kabbalah's Jewish origins. In part it resulted from a rise in millenarianism in both Judaism and Christianity in the century that saw tremendous sectarian violence in Western Europe as well as a shifting role, in Southeastern Europe and in the Levant, for Ottoman power. Thus the self-proclaimed messiah from Smyrna, Sabbatai Zevi both learned kabbalah from Lurianic sources, and took an interest in radical Protestant millenarian movements as far away as England.[11] And in fact this hybridism worked in both directions, with radical Protestant sects, most notably the Quakers (soon to be joined by both Conway and van Helmont) seeing Hebrew learning and Jewish theology as properly among the core concerns of a new, distinctly modern and consciously philosophical articulation of Christian faith.[12] Kabbalism was but one element of a broader Hebraizing tendency in 17th-century erudite circles, which variously saw Hebrew as the ideal language in its proximity to the original Adamic one (now lost), or saw it as the basis of an emerging discipline of Orientalist philology that would ground scriptural study in rigorous historical fact.

Christian Hebraizers were not necessarily philo-Semites. Many took a broadly typological approach to Jewish textual traditions, interpreting events of the Hebrew Bible as prefigurations of the Gospels. The prophetic powers of Old Testament personages also offered a way of incorporating pagan philosophers into the widened circle of Christianity. Thus in his Conjectura cabbalistica of 1653 Henry More declares that "it is generally acknowledged by Christians, that [Pythagoras and Plato] both had their philosophy from Moses.[13] More is fairly uninterested in Hebrew learning; he wrote his 'Cabbala' precisely as a conjecture, and seems to have done so mostly under pressure from Conway. For him kabbalah is nothing other than an interpretation given to 'the first chapters of Genesis'. More thus has his own kabbalah simply as a result of the application of his hermeneutic abilities to the text, but this is acknowledged to be something different from 'the Jewish Cabbala', which is "conceived to be a Traditional Doctrine or Exposition of the Pentateuch which Moses received from the mouth of God."

It may in part have been More's casual kabbalism that drove his closest intellectual peer, Anne Conway, to seek a deeper knowledge of it through a deepened association with van Helmont the younger, who would be invited to live in her home at Ragley Hall from 1671 until her death in 1679.[14] In a 1667 text entitled Short Sketch of the True Natural Alphabet of the Sacred Language,[15] the Flemish author acknowledges Henry More's 'philosophical and moral Cabbala' based on an interpretation of the first three books of Moses. One could stop with such an approach, he observes, if "the entire nature of all things did not at once signal to me and desire of for me her own sake to make it known that no other language in the world agrees with it so exactly as this one [biblical Hebrew]." Nothing shows this better, van Helmont adds, "than the example of our first father Adam, in giving the names to all the animals."[16]

More's interest in kabbalah is eclectic and fleeting, a bit sloppy, while van Helmont's is that of a passionate adept. Leibniz for his part would later synthesise the two of these, by bringing to bear the same rigorous eclecticism we are familiar with from so many of his areas of interest. Leibniz meets van Helmont for the first time in 1671, who in turn introduces him to Knorr von Rosenroth. A quarter century later and many years after Conway's death, Leibniz will spend significant time with van Helmont, in March and April, 1696, when the latter visits Hanover and discusses philosophy "with Leibniz and the Electress every morning at nine o'clock."[17] On Coudert's view, van Helmont had come to Hanover enthused by an idea he was calling by the name of 'monads', which were something like the primordial seeds of things. But, she claims, "Helmont's monadology remained little more than a 'metaphysical poem'; and it was Leibnitz's ambition to solve its many inherent contradictions."[18]

The general perception among Leibniz scholars has been that the philosopher took over the concept of monad --perhaps from a reading of Conway's work, perhaps from conversation with van Helmont-- without much regard for the more obscure or mystical dimensions of the cocncept's origins. Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil expresses this view clearly when he writes that kabbalah "was only an object of curiosity for [Leibniz], like many other imaginary curiosities of his time or of past centuries... This energetic thinker reduced all these doctrines to his own system, he only took what agreed with his own thought."[19] Coudert, as we have seen, argues that the influence of kabbalah on Leibniz is in fact significant, coming principally from his consultations with van Helmont at Hanover. Merchant, by contrast, "sees van Helmont's friend and patroness, Lady Anne Conway, as the real source of inspiration... [S]he argues that Leibniz derived the term monad not from van Helmont but from reading Anne Conway's one published book, The Principles."[20] The excluded possibility that Coudert does not seem to recognise here is that she and Merchant may both be partially correct: Leibniz may have been influenced by kabbalah, but may have got all he needed of it from Conway's book. After all, again, the Principles, unabridged, might well be described as a commentary on Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata.

Leibniz describes both Conway and van Helmont in a telling fashion in the New Essays concerning Human Understanding of 1704. He is not speaking explicitly of kabbalah, but rather of the doctrine of pananimism, which he supports but would like to see transformed into a rational and rigorous doctrine, and which, as we have seen and will see again, has at least partially a kabbalist pedigree. It is necessary, Leibniz writes, "to explain rationally those who have lodged life and perception in all things, as Cardan, Campanella, and better than they, the late Countess of Connaway, a Platonist, and our friend, the late Francis Mercury van Helmont (although elsewhere bristling with unintelligible paradoxes), with his friend the late Mr. Henry More."[21] Thus Conway gets pride of place among Leibniz's contemporaries as a defender of the pananimist doctrine; van Helmont deserves mention too, but also a slight reproach; Henry More, meanwhile, tags along. Elsewhere, in a letter to Thomas Burnett of 1697, Leibniz miantains that his own philosophical views "approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess of Conway," in view of the fact that they "hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes-- all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the Atomists."[22] Leibniz does not explicitly address kabbalah in either of these passages. But could his invocation of the view that there is life and perception in all things itself be an implicit acknowledgement of a broad debt to dimensions of kabbalistic thought as propounded by Conway?

The Kabbala denudata is referenced in seven of the nine chapters of Conway's treatise. It is cited as the authoritative source for the first sentence of the first chapter, that "God is a spirit, Light, and Life, infinitely Wise, Good, Just, Mighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Creator and Maker of all things, visible and invisible."[23] After this opening claim, Conway's reliance on Knorr von Rosenroth, as the principal source of authority for her own claims, does not let up. One thing worth noting here is that Conway did not need to cite a kabbalist source for a very general claim such as this one, which is something we might just as easily find in the Divine Names tradition, or in any number of other Christian authors. This gratuitous invocation of the Kabbala denudata strongly suggests that Conway's straightforward purpose in the Principles is to signal her affiliation with Christian kabbalism, not as an eclectic borrower from this tradition among others (as, say, Leibniz would be), but as a partisan.

Many other of Conway's references to the Kabbala denudata in fact concern features of that work that are distinct and specific to kabbalistic thought. These are often flagged by a contrast between what is generally held, and what 'the Hebrews' by contrast think, usually with at least an implicit affirmation of the latter. Thus in the Eighth Annotation to Chapter 1 she introduces the special 'Hebrew' understanding of 'person', which she holds does "not mean a singular Suppositum, but a Conception only, or kind of Representation, or Method of Consideration."[24] This philosophical understanding of 'person' reflects the broad view, whose genealogy Carlos Fraenkel has recently traced from the time of the Church Fathers through Spinoza, that Jesus Christ may be thought of as a person without necessarily being a human person, and may be assimilated to the all-pervading logos or reason of the perceptible world.[25] Conway for her part adopts the Christianized kabbalist view that the Adam Kadmon or 'primordial man' of the Hebrews is identical to Christ. "This Son of God," she writes in Chapter 2,

“the First Begotten of all Creatures, to wit, this Heavenly Adam, and Great Priest, as the    Jewish Doctors call him, is properly a Medium between God and the Creatures. And   that there is such a Middle Being, is as demonstrable as that there is a God; where is meant such a Being, which in its own Nature is indeed less than God, and yet greater and more excellent than all other Creatures; whence also for his Excellency he is properly called the Son of God. ... [T]his Son of God... is called by the Jews, Adam Kadmon.”[26]

It is this rationalisation of Christ, and the supposed basis of this move in Jewish tradition, that undergirds Conway's commitment to toleration, her view that 'Jews and Turks' have access to the same divine truths as do Christians, even if it is Christianity that gives these truths their clearest articulation.

It would not be mistaken to discern here a common spirit with Leibniz, who seems to have believed that there are no real disagreements, but only different manners of formulating commitment to the same truths: resolution of conflicts is really only ever disambiguation of terms. Yet it would be difficult to account in this way for the difference between Leibniz and Conway in their respective accounts of the concept of monad. Conway mentions monads only once in her treatise, and, when she does, what she has in mind are 'Physical Monades', which is to say what results from the physical division of things into their least parts.[27] Yet nothing can be more certain than that, for Leibniz, there are no least parts of things. There are only primordial elements from which things result, not in the way that houses result from bricks, but somewhat more in the way that illumination results from a flame. This difference speaks strongly in favor of Coudert's view, then, against Merchant, that Leibniz does not borrow the term directly from Conway, but presumably instead from his 9:00 AM philosophical dialogues with van Helmont at Hanover. If Leibniz had first encountered the term 'monad' in Conway's rendering of it, he would have rejected it outright.

Yet, again, we might do better to look for the roots of Conway's monadology not in her use of the term 'monad', but rather in that other dimension of the theory as we have come to know it in Leibniz's philosophy: the manner in which unity grounds diversity. In Chapter 7 of the Principles Conway writes that "the Body, sc. of a Man or Beast, is nothing else but an innumerable multitude of Bodies, compacted together in to one, and disposed into a certain order." This composite nature of the body is in turn reflected at the level of spirit: “the Spirit of a Man, or Beast,” she writes, “is a certain innumerable multitude of Spirits     united together in the said Body, which have their Order and Government so, that there is one Captain, or Chief Governor, another a Lieutenant, and another hath a certain kind of Government under him, and so through the whole, as it is wont to be in  an Army of Soldiers.”

The figure of the army (or, alternatively, the flock) is of course Leibniz's preferred metaphor for describing the true nature of the animal body. But Conway supplements this fairly obvious comparison by a significant biblical reference, in this case to the New Testament: a man or beast is multiple, just as "the Devil which possessed the Man was called Legion, because there were many of them; so that every Man; yea, every Creature, consists of many Spirits and Bodies." This is a reference to Christ's exorcism of the demons, most familiar from Mark 5:1-13, where he sends them out of the body of a Gerasene man and into a flock of pigs, which then rush away, jump in a lake, and drown.

Much could be said about the demonological and anthropological significance of the composite devil's response to Christ's question, "Who are you?" To reply, "Legion, for we are many," is at once to play with grammar, to move jauntily from the first-person singular to the plural, and is also, perhaps, to suggest that in ancient Near Eastern cultures the internal experience of multiplicity was seen as pathological and experienced as a form of demonic possession. But it was also a way of expressing the demon's (or demons') power: Legio was a common term for a Roman military formation. One way of understanding the metaphysics of composite substance, as eventually adopted by Leibniz, is that being 'legion' is simply the normal condition of beings, and that it is in virtue of this condition that beings derive their active power.  

Conway, as is her habit, supplements the reference to the Gospels with mention of a term used 'by the Hebrews', namely, 'Nizzuzoth, or Sparks'. Just as the legion of beings constituting a composite may be thought of as soldiers in an army, they may also be thought of as a multitude of sparks all scintillating out of a common flame. Here Conway cites a component treatise of the Kabbala denudata entitled "Tractatus de revolutionibus animarum" ["Treatise on the Revolutions of Souls"], attributed by Knorr von Rosenroth to 'Jitzchak Lorjensis Germanus', i.e., Isaac Luria, but in fact written by the Syrian kabbalist Hayyim ben Joseph Vital (1542-1620). The author begins by describing the fates of various 'soul sparks' as a result of different sorts of transgression. "If indeed [the spark] revolves on account of some crime and misdeed," he writes,

“then it is necessary that it should revolve with a certain other concurrent spark and that it should be restituted by that spark. If indeed the first spark has sinned in doing those things on account of which bodies are wasted and pass away in death, so that no resurrection comes to pass out of death, then this spark, seeing that its body has perished, revolves on its own in a certain second body, which rises again in the resurrection of the dead with all the parts of the spark of the first body: indeed the first body perishes.”

Next the author goes on to explain that sparks that are in some sort of active relation with one another must arise from a common root [radix]:

“As moreover was explained above, many souls cannot revolve in one body unless they are from a single root. Now indeed you should know that although all the sparks from this root are able to revolve as one, nevertheless this revolution does not happen at once, but rather the nearer and more similar sparks come together with one another by turns... In the species moreover, if this perfect spark is within, it can arise that in it revolve the souls of its root: and according to the proportion of its perfection... There are moreover some sparks that are very close to the human, others that are more remote from it; others surround it from far off; and others surround the human more closely and clothe it. And all these things occur according to the works of this human.”[28]

A human being is 'clothed' by scintillating souls, and these are both the reflection of that human being's action and the phenomenal manifestation of his or her body. This, again, is the passage of the Kabbala denudata that Conway finds most useful in elucidating her own conception of the nature of composite substance.

Without wishing to hand out laurels or withhold them, it seems that while Conway and Leibniz both find inspiration in the image of nodes of spiritual activity coming together to form a single being, the English philosopher did little to remove this image from the realm of metaphor, while the German made it the central task of his philosophical project to systematically spell out how it is that composite substances are grounded in simple ones, in nodes of perception: which is to say in monads. Conway draws on kabbalism to imagine multiple souls as coming together in one, but she does little more to ground this view than to make observations on entities and processes given in sensory experience that seem to provide a model for how the metaphysics of composition might work: fire, water, alcohol, and so on. Nor does she see such composition, like Leibniz soon will, as grounded in monads, since what she thinks of as monads are not really monadic at all: they are, to use Leibniz's distinction, not really the atoms of substance or metaphysical atoms, but only the least parts of matter, and thus physical atoms in the traditional sense.

The composition of unified composite beings from subordinate individuals beings was at the center of a number of philosophical discussions in the 17th century. It shows up in political philosophy, for example, in the frontispiece to Hobbes's Leviathan. We see it imagined in the proto-science fiction of the era, as in Cyrano de Bergerac's vision of a composite creature that lives on the surface of the sun, coming together from the swarming of countless small birds, in his Les états et empires du Soleil of 1665. In debates about the metaphysics of individual substances, rather than of states or of fantastical creatures, there was considerable resistance to the possibility of several beings yielding up a single one. Thus in his True Intellectual System of the Universe of 1678, Ralph Cudworth complains that “to make every man and animal to be a multitude or commonwealth of percipients, and persons, as it were, clubbing together, is a thing so absurd and ridiculous, that one would wonder the hylozoists should not rather choose to recant that their fundamental error of the life of matter, than endeavour to seek shelter and sanctuary for the same, under such a pretence.”[29]

The intense disdain Cudworth expresses here testifies to the endurance of a much stronger default theory throughout the history of philosophy, associated perhaps most commonly, rightly or wrongly, with Aristotle, according to which one body should normally be expected to host no more than one substance. This might be a deep-seated folk-belief in Western thought, which would explain for example why colony organisms such as siphonophores are so commonly perceived even today to violate some unspoken rule of how nature is supposed to work.

In the 17th century the alternative view seems to have run as a sort of undercurrent, charged with some degree of danger and associated most closely with the tradition of chemical philosophy, as well as with mystical movements such as kabbalah. Paracelsus imagined that every organ has its own subordinate soul: the heart its cardianax, the stomach its gastrianax, and so on.[30] As William R. Newman has shown, a subterranean tradition of 'pluralism' existed alongside classical 'unitism', extending back to Arabic chemical sources, which appealed to subordinate and dominant forms as a way of accounting for the possibility of chemical processes such as the solution and reextraction of silver.[31] In these and sundry other cases, things aren't, or aren't only,what they appear to be: they contain multitudes, to speak with the self-contradicting poet, and both are and are not what they are.

In this paper I have attempted to isolate and focus on a particular chapter in the long history of thinking about nested individuals that extends, so to speak, from the Gospel of Mark to Walt Whitman. In the Bible this condition is represented as the very paradigm of abnormality: demonic possession; in the poet, it is our shared and universal condition. Conway and Leibniz stand at a pivotal moment in this history. Conway, emboldened by her reading of Christianized kabbalistic texts, embraced this pluralism and in so doing rejected a core commitment of mainstream philosophy. Leibniz, in turn, embraced the same view, and applied his rigor as best he could to make it mainstream. We still find siphonophores strange, but in the end we know there is no more well-founded metaphysical model of substance to tell us why such creatures should not exist. Natural beings, as a rule, contain multitudes. The recognition of this basic fact about the world is something that Conway helped to open up, mediating between the allusive mysticism of the kabbalah and the more systematic philosophical model of composite substance developed by Leibniz. It is here, in the study of the diversity within unity, that Leibniz's debt to Conway may be the greatest, rather than in his reception of the idea of the bare monad as an absolutely simple node of perception. This is a conception of the monad Conway did not have, and so could not share. 

Works cited

Stuart Brown, "Leibniz and More's Cabbalistic Circle," in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 77-96.

Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Amsterdam and London: M. Brown, 1692 [1690].

Allison Coudert, "A Quaker-Kabbalist Controversy: George Fox's Reaction to Francis Mercury Van Helmont," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 171-189.

Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1985.

Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999.

Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Leibniz, la philosophie juive et la Cabale. Trois lectures à l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris: Auguste Durand, 1861.

Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Alan Gabbey, "Anne Conway et Henry More," Archives de Philosophie 40 (1977): 379-404.

M. B. V. Hellmont [Francis Mercury van Helmont], Kurtzer Entwurff des eigentlichen Natur-Alphabets der heiligen Sprache: Nach dessen Anleitung man auch Taubgebohrne verstehend und redend machen kan, Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtenthaler, 1667.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687): Tercentenary Studies, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990.

Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, seu Doctrina hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theologica, Sulzbach and Frankfurt: J. D. Zunneri, vol. 1, 1677; vol. 2, 1684.

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata: The Kaballah Unveiled, S. L. MacGregor Mathers (ed. and tr.), New York: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1912.

G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1849-60.

G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (later Berlin-Brandenburger Akademie der Wissenschaften): Berlin, 1923--.

Éliphas Lévi, Le livre des splendeurs contenant le soleil judaïque, la gloire chrétienne et l'étoile flamboyante, Paris: Chamuel, 1894.

Carolyn Merchant, "The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz's Concept of the Monad," Journal of the History of Philosophy 17, 3 (July, 1979): 255-269.

Henry More, Conjectura cabbalistica, Or, A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Mind of Moses, According to a Threefold Cabbala: Viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mysitical, or, Divinely Moral, J. Flesher: Cambridge, 1653.

William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Richard H. Popkin, "Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story," Jewish History 8 (1994): 43-54.

Richard H. Popkin, "The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway," in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 97-114.

Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, tr. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Meridian, 1978.

Justin E. H. Smith, "'Spirit Is a Stomach': The Iatrochemical Roots of Leibniz's Theory of Corporeal Substance," in Gideon Manning (ed.), Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy, Brill, 2012, 203-224.

Justin E. H. Smith Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

--

[1] G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (later Berlin-Brandenburger Akademie der Wissenschaften): Berlin, 1923--, Reihe 6, Band 2, 283.

[2] Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. See also Allison Coudert, "A Quaker-Kabbalist Controversy: George Fox's Reaction to Francis Mercury Van Helmont," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 171-189; Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the 17th Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999.

[3] See Carolyn Merchant, "The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz's Concept of the Monad," Journal of the History of Philosophy 17, 3 (July, 1979): 255-269.

[4] Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Amsterdam and London: M. Brown, 1692 [1690].

[5] Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, seu Doctrina hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theologica, Sulzbach and Frankfurt: J. D. Zunneri, vol. 1, 1677; vol. 2, 1684.

[6] Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata: The Kaballah Unveiled, S. L. MacGregor Mathers (ed. and tr.), New York: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1912.

[7] Éliphas Lévi, Le livre des splendeurs contenant le soleil judaïque, la gloire chrétienne et l'étoile flamboyante, Paris: Chamuel, 1894.

[8] See in particular Justin E. H. Smith Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

[9] See in particular Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Meridian, 1978.

[10] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah.

[11] See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, tr. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973; Richard H. Popkin, "Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story," Jewish History 8 (1994): 43-54.

[12] See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

[13] Henry More, Conjectura cabbalistica, Or, A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Mind of Moses, According to a Threefold Cabbala: Viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mystical, or, Divinely Moral, J. Flesher: Cambridge, 1653, Preface, no page numbers. See also Stuart Brown, "Leibniz and More's Cabbalistic Circle," in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 77-96; Alan Gabbey, "Anne Conway et Henry More," Archives de Philosophie 40 (1977): 379-404; Richard H. Popkin, "The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway," in Sarah Hutton (ed.), Henry More (1614-1687), 97-114.

[14] See Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[15] F. M. B. V. Hellmont [Francis Mercury van Helmont], Kurtzer Entwurff des eigentlichen Natur-Alphabets der heiligen Sprache: Nach dessen Anleitung man auch Taubgebohrne verstehend und redend machen kan, Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtenthaler, 1667.

[16] Hellmont, Kurtzer Entwurff, no page numbers.

[17] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, 38, 80.

[18] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, ..

[19] Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Leibniz, la philosophie juive et la Cabale. Trois lectures à l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris: Auguste Durand, 1861.

[20] Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, ...

[21] Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, ...

[22] G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1849-60, vol. 3, 217.

[23] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, "Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae," ch. 2, 6-7.

[24] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, "Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae," ch. 23.

[25] See Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

[26] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata I, 1: 28, 30; 2: 33, 37; 3: 31-64, 37-38; Kabbala denudata II, 2: 244.

[27] Conway, Principles, Chapter 3, 9; Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata I, 2, 310.

[28] Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata, "Tractatus de revolutionibus animarum," §§ 19-24, pgs. 267-68. 

[29] Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, London: Thomas Tegg, 1845 [1678], vol. 3, 406.

[30] See Justin E. H. Smith, "'Spirit Is a Stomach': The Iatrochemical Roots of Leibniz's Theory of Corporeal Substance," in Gideon Manning (ed.), Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy, Brill, 2012, 203-224.

[31] William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.