History of Philosophy in 17th & 18th Centuries

Leibniz 1

Leibniz on substance.

[Leibniz is difficult, but thrilling. I shall go slowly and carefully. You must ask questions as we go along.]

OH

Today the question is simple. What is the difference between a thing and a bit of stuff?

Remember the Cartesian picture.

Descartes thought individual objects were just parcels of stuff.

The universe was a great lump of cheese, or a great body of water. There was some variation - an eddy here and an eddy there. These were what we recognise as individual objects. An individual object for Descartes is an eddy in the water - just stretches of water moving in relation to their surroundings.

For Leibniz, things are not just stretches of quasi water, parcels of stuff, subdivisions of matter. What then are they?

I say that for the Cartesian an individual object is a stretch of matter.

This demotes the individual object. It isn’t anything but a scrap of matter. Another way of putting the point is to say that there is only one corporeal reality - and that is the continuous infinitely extended stuff which for Descartes is the universe. Individual objects are nothing but scraps of this stuff.

That is what is meant by saying that there is just one corporeal substance for Descartes.

There are different ways of expressing the demotion of individual objects in the this Cartesian account.

[OH]

You might try:

individual objects do not exist ‘in their own right’.

individual objects are just ‘aspects’ of matter.

individual objects do not exist independently.

individual objects are just properties of stretches of stuff.

individual objects are not fundamental

individual objects are not real, in the sense that matter is real

The philosophical problem is in giving a clear account of what any of these mean.

I hope you see at least half the picture. I hope you see that under the Cartesian view an individual object is a bit low-grade. Under the Cartesian view, the important thing is matter. Matter shows variation - variation in motion - here and there - and this gives us individual objects. But matter is what is fundamental.

We should get a more complete understanding by looking at an alternative to Descartes.

Leibniz has one. Leibniz says there isn’t just one corporeal substance, but many. How are we to understand him?

___________________________________________

I myself am going to say just one thing today:

OH

Leibniz thought that there were many individual substances of the corporeal kind (contra Descartes).

But as an overture, let me tell you, or remind you, that some people have thought there was just one individual substance of the mind kind.

SPINOZA ON THINKING SUBSTANCE

The position with Descartes is that you have two sorts of substance, corporeal and thinking; and that there are many individual things of the thinking kind (minds, God) but not a plurality of individual corporeal substances. Instead on the corporeal side you have lots of bits of corporeal substance. The objects we are familiar with - rocks, clocks, chairs - are for Descartes not individual substances but bits of substance.

' ... Cartesian extended substance does not provide for individual substances ...' Woolhouse, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, London, 1993, Routledge, (hereafter DSL), p. 55.

Spinoza maintained an interesting variant to Descartes'. Where Descartes held there were several individual substances of the mind kind, but just one corporeal substance, Spinoza thought there was plurality neither of thinking substances nor corporeal substances. There were neither individual corporeal substances nor individual thinking substances. What we take to be individual minds, Spinoza considered as bits of the one thinking substance.

Take a break to fill in this grid for yourselves before I have a go:

Take ‘body to be ‘individual physical object’

[Later: it’s confusing at this point.]

CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE CANNOT BE EQUATED WITH EXTENSION, BECAUSE THEN THERE WOULD BE NO EXPLANATION OF WHY A SUBSTANCE HAD THE PROPERTIES IT DOES HAVE.

Descartes had reached the conclusion that corporeal substance is extension.

Leibniz feels that the Cartesian concept of corporeal substance is wrong because it implies there is nothing in substance to explain why a thing has the properties it does have.

This needs a good deal of explaining. First we need to establish the distinction between a bit of stuff and a thing. Descartes you will recall thought of corporeal things as bits of stuff.

What is the difference between a bit of stuff and a thing?

Leibniz says, and keeps on saying: to be a substance whatever it is has to have a principle of unity.

I want to try and explain what I understand to be his point here.

Think of the difference between a piece of cloth and a shirt.

A shirt is a thing, while a bit of cloth is not.

What is the distinction? One mark is this:

If you divide a piece of cloth down the middle you get two bits of cloth, but if you cut a shirt into two you don't get two shirts.

And, a second (similar) point:

You can make a variety of different things with a bit of cloth, but not out of a shirt: unless you are prepared to tear the seam apart and treat the shirt as a bit of material.

Can we say this? A shirt has a certain form, a certain organization, of a sort that a piece of material doesn't.

Leibniz' point in these terms is that truly fundamental things are like shirts not like pieces of cloth.

Why might the distinction matter between thinking of an individual physical object as like a shirt or like a bit of cloth ?

One suggestion is this: a shirt has a nature which explains why the thing has at least some of the properties it has.

This idea would suggest the following:

The nature of the shirt makes it clear that it will have sleeves, and a hole for the neck. A piece of cloth doesn't have a nature in the same sense.

The trouble is, what we think today is that bits of stuff also have ‘natures’. And this fouls the point up.

All I can do is to ask you to think whether nevertheless shirts have natures in a sense that bits of cloth do not.

One point at any rate may be put like this: a shirt has more in the way of ‘organisation’ than a piece of material. In general this would be the claim that the distinction between bits of stuff and things is perhaps a matter of a thing having more in the way of organisation than a bit of stuff.

It is the same point perhaps when I say: A bit of stuff can be made up into a variety of things. A thing has to be pulled apart, effectively so that it becomes a bit of stuff, before being used to make up into something else.

A possible test to pick out items which have ‘more in the way of organisation’: what happens when you divide the item down the middle?

Let us see how the test of dividing a thing down the middle divides up things in the world:

Leibniz thought that to be the right hand sort of thing you had to have what he called a 'principle of unity'.

In both cases you have a thing made of materials. But in the right hand case something united the materials into a special kind of integrity.

What do I mean by a special kind of integrity? A thing on the right hand side cannot be split without being destroyed. I.e. the materials of which it is composed 'hang together' in a special way insofar as they make up that thing. That is the sense in which they have a special integrity.

Notice I am not saying the materials comprising a thing on the right hand side are somehow glued together in an especially strong way. (It is tempting to slip into this way of thinking of the distinction, but a complete mistake.) It is no more difficult to put a knife through an oyster than through a rock: quite the contrary. The materials of an oyster are not more strongly glued together than the material of a rock. It is just that when you manage to get your knife through a rock you have two rocks; while when you slice an oyster in two you have got no oyster at all, but two bits of flesh.

There is a distinction then between bits of stuff and shall we say things 'with their own integrity'. I have not established why Leibniz thought that things with integrity were more fundamentally real than bits of stuff. The hint I have given though is this: There is a basis in things with their own integrity for understanding why they have the properties they have.

Things with their own 'integrity' have within them the basis for an understanding of why they have the properties they do.

Is Leibniz' concern this? - If stuff is completely propertyless, except for the principle attribute of extension, as Descartes made it out to be, the distribution of properties in the universe must be completely arbitrary. I might discover that this bit of stuff was red, and sticky, and sweet: but I could never hope to discover any reason for this, no reason why the bit of stuff should have these properties rather than any set of others. I would never be able to discover any reason, because there wouldn't be any. It would be an entirely contingent matter what properties a bit of stuff were to have.

This implication of the Cartesian concept of substance might not be unacceptable particularly to you or me, but for Leibniz it was powerfully unattractive. Perhaps it ought to have been so to Descartes. For like Leibniz, Descartes assigned a powerful role in the task of finding out about the world to reason. But to maintain that there was neither rhyme nor reason to the distribution of properties was to place draconian limitations the role of reason. If it could say nothing about properties and to what they belonged, it could say very little. All we could do would be to look and see.

This merely explains why as a rationalist Leibniz would have been motivated to find an alternative to the Cartesian concept of substance. It doesn't do anything to justify the rejection of the latter. Maybe we shall be able to marshal such a justification later.

At any rate, Leibniz directs his attention to things with integrity, or in his terms, to things possessing a principle of unity.

What is responsible for conferring the unity that they enjoy? His answer is, crudely: a form.

He turns back to the Scholastics, for he thinks they had the answer to this question. In scholastic thought, which was the system he had been educated into, there was a firm distinction between bits of stuff and things, and the distinction was made in terms of the possession of a form. A cat, to take a helpful example, was a parcel of matter organised through a form.

I have said a little about forms here and there. Now I had better be a bit clearer and say roundly what the scholastic apparatus was.

Substance in scholastic thought

There are two ideas in Aristotle.

(Woolhouse, p. 8)

One is that the fundamental things are individuals like this table, that blackboard, Jason.

The idea is that each of these things is various material things brought into coherence under a form.

The other is that everything is made of a stuff.

The idea that is commandeered by Scholasticism is that an individual thing - eg a house - is a matter (such as timber) organised in a certain way. It has organisation in virtue of its form. (W. p.9)

A substance is an individual thing, which is a set of parts united under a form. Some of these individual things are 'natural' and some are artifacts. Horses are 'natural' substances, products of nature; houses are not.

The scholastics said something that was a product of nature was a unum per se or an entia per se.

An artefact was an accidental unity, a unum per accidens. Accidental unities are not substances. They are entia per accidens ('accidental beings').

Heaps of pebbles were seen as belonging to the same category as clocks and houses: accidental beings all.

The substantial form of a substance is what makes it an individual of a particular kind. The substantial form of a living thing (the main example of an entia per se) were called their 'souls'.

Secondary substances are the kinds to which primary or first substances belong.

Red Rum was a first substance. Horse is a second substance.

The form of horseness is Red Rum's substantial form.

There are also accidental forms. These are properties that can change without the thing losing its identity. Red Rum can become hot and cool down again while remaining the self-same horse.

Some properties belonged to the essence or definition of the substantial form. Some were accidental. Still others were suppose to follow necessarily from the substantial form, but not actually to be part of the essence or definition.

Geometrical examples are easiest to devise. All triangles have angles equal to two right angles, but this is not part of heir definition. Nevertheless, it flows from the definition ...

(The definition is a closed three straight-sided figure - ?)

FORM AS GROUNDING PROPERTIES

I have said that 'Form' is like 'organisation'. But this embraces a good deal. It goes far beyond mere shape for example. The form of an oak tree, for example, 'encompasses ... its various parts and their purposes, such as its leaves and bark and their functions; its characteristic activities, such as growth by synthesising water and other nutrients, and its production of fruit; its life cycle from fruit to fruit bearer. It is in being organised and active in this way that the matter which constitutes an oak 'embodies' or is 'informed' by the substantial form 'oak'; it is only by virtue of this that it 'forms' an oak tree at all. The oak's properties and activities 'flow' or 'emanate', are 'formally caused' by its nature.' (Roger Woolhouse, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, London, 1993, Routledge, p.10.)

'A thing's characteristic operations derive from its substantial form.' (Aquinas, ST 3a.75, 76) Quoted by Woolhouse, p.10.

The scholastic tradition, in sum, was to think of 'forms as the organising active natures of substances as they develop and change' Woolhouse p.59.

This is the conception of an individual substance as active, as something which 'embodies' in itself, as its 'nature', the principles of its development and change. To understand and explain why an individual substance is as it is, and does as it does, is - except when it is on the passive receiving end of the activities of other substances - to understand how its properties and changing states 'flow' or 'emanate' from the nature, essence or form of the kind of thing it is.' (Roger Woolhouse, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, London, 1993, Routledge, p. 11.)

'There are individual and particular behaviours appropriate to each individual natural thing, as reasoning is to human beings, neighing to horses, heating to fire, and so on ... [T]hese behaviours ... arise from the substantial form.' A medieval commentary on Aristotle's Physics, quoted by Woolhouse, p. 11, who is borrowing the quotation from Garber.

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