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Week 7
Leibnizian Forms
THE LEIBNIZIAN FORM HAD WITHIN IT A PRINCIPLE OF ACTION
There is one reason why Leibniz wanted to invoke forms which I haven't gone into. It is that a form gives a way of thinking of a substance as having inside itself the basis for its properties. I will have to come back to this, but let me just leave it as a mention at this stage.
There was another reason, and this is something we dwelled on particularly in
the seminars: a substance had to be a source of action, and the form was a way
of thinking about this too.
Leibniz' forms embodied a principle of action.
It is not crystal clear how these two reasons related together. Leibniz goes on about both, it seems indiscriminately. Anyhow, let me lay out systematically the second reason, and then you can help me work out if and how the two reasons relate.
Physics attempts to understand, perhaps among other things, change. Things happen, and it is part of the task of physics to explain why they happen.
This implies that physics cannot be regarded as complete until it has identified the source of change. If you have an explanation which goes some way towards explaining why something happened, perhaps by explaining a sequence of changes leading up to the change in question, you have the beginnings of something satisfactory. But it will not be a complete explanation until you have said how the changes you have referred to got started.
Perhaps the very same point can be put this way: if a substance is the sort of thing physics must invoke in its explanations, substances must be the sort of things that initiate change.
Or:
If you had some things which initiated change and some things which didn't (call these blobs), the ones which did would be more important for physics than those which didn't.
If you had just blobs, nothing would happen.
If you had a physics which just explained what happened to blobs when they were hit, you would have an incomplete physics. For it would not explain how the sequence of bumps started. It might be a very good account of the sequence of changes once initiated, but it wouldn't have anything to say about what started the sequence off.
You might say that mechanism, as an approach to physics, is a sort of physics of blobs.
Mechanism might make a gesture at completion by saying: What started it all was God. We have talked about that.
What is Leibniz' alternative to an incomplete physics, a physics which only talked about blobs?
Leibniz took his inspiration from animals.
He thought an animal gave you an idea of what the fundamental units of the universe must be like. He thought animals were things which appeared to initiate action.
Animals, when stood alongside rocks for example, did not just sit there waiting to be bumped into, or washed away, or swept by the wind. Animals appeared capable of spontaneous movement.
Summary
Leibniz is saying that a true substance
(a) has to have integrity.
(b) has to have within it a principle of change.
Both these requirements he meets by postulating that a substance has a 'form'.
A SUBSTANCE AS CONTAINING A COMPLETE SCRIPT.
I have mentioned that in scholastic thought the properties of a thing are somehow
based in its form.
An oak seed grows into a particular shape and style of tree: that for the scholastics is down to the form that is somehow present in the seed. A kitten grows into a particular style of animal, with a particular style of life. That, for the scholastics, is down to the 'form' of the cat, somehow present in the cat embryo, and guiding the cat's development.
[Later: I think this answers the question of the connection between initiating change and grounding properties.
The scholastics the form of a thing gave it its property of initiating change. It was from a thing's form that its characteristic development, and its characteristic mode of behaviour, flowed. It was the form of an oak tree, somehow present in the seed, which guided the plant's growth and development into maturity. It was the form of a cat, present somehow in the cat, which lead it behave in the typical cat way.
Scholasticism thus placed things capable of initiating action at the centre. The things it recognised as fundamental were of this kind: substances with natures from which action flowed.]
This is the point I mentioned earlier but didn't develop: for the scholastics,
a thing's form is somehow responsible for the properties, or at least some of
them, which a substance has.
The thought that in a substance there has to be a grounding for the properties
the substance possesses Leibniz develops in an extreme way.
He thinks that somehow the form of a substance contains the basis for all the properties of the thing. And by 'properties' Leibniz means everything that is true of the thing; and everything that has been true of the thing; and everything that will come to be true of the thing.
I must explain that the Scholastics thought some properties of a substance were grounded in the thing's form, in a way that we can see the point of today.
Some properties seem to belong to a thing because it is the sort of thing that it is. If a thing is a horse, and it is a normal horse, we will think of its being a quadruped, of its having hard hooves, of its having a flowing mane and tail, as properties it has in virtue of being a (normal) horse.
Other properties it may have we will not include in such a list - a list of what one may call 'essential' properties, properties which flow from the 'essence' of the thing: its being scarred on the left knee; its having won the 2.15 at Hey dock last Saturday; its being stabled on Grange Farm.
Properties - essential and accidental
| Dobbin | 'Essential' | 'Accidental' |
| being a quadruped | being scarred on the left knee | |
| having hard hooves | having won the 2.15 at Heydock last Saturday | |
| having a flowing mane | being stabled on Grange Farm | |
| having a flowing tail | having missed its breakfast today |
For the Scholastics, those properties which were essential to the horse were
thought of as flowing from the form of the horse.
Non-essential properties were thought of as not.
Leibniz extended the Scholastic principle dramatically. He held that every property of a thing was, in the terms we have been using 'essential': that every property had its basis in the thing's form.
By 'every property', Leibniz meant every property!
At any given moment, some of the properties of a thing related to what was going to happen to it in the future. For example, at a time when a thing is an acorn, it has the property of going to be growing into an oak.
Likewise, at any given time, some of a thing's properties relate to what has happened to the thing in the past. For example, it is one of my properties that I was born in Leicester.
Leibniz treats all these properties as alike in having their basis in the thing's
form. Everything that is true of a thing, everything that has been true of it,
everything that will be true of it is based in, flows from, its form.
This is what Leibniz means by saying that a form of a substance contains its complete concept.
'We have said that the notion of an individual substance contains, once and for all, everything that can be truly stated of it, as we can see in the nature of the circle all the properties that can be deduced from it.' DM 13; Parkinson, p.23.
Roger Woolhouse uses the metaphor of a script.
'The form of a substance carries a script which details everything that is to happen to it, its whole life-story. The unfolding of the life of the thing is acting out the script. '
(R.S Woolhouse, 'The nature of an individual substance' in Leibniz: Critical & Interpretative Essays, ed. M. Hooker (Manchester, 1982).)
This is rooted in an idea that is familiar enough. An animal develops from embryo
to maturity in accordance with a pattern that is characteristic of its species.
Its script unfolds. Leibniz is saying everything about an animal is in the script;
and every substance is like an animal in this respect of having a complete concept.
There are, Leibniz says, in a person's form, 'traces of all that has happened to him [sic] and marks of all that will happen to him [sic] ...' DM8
[This conception is linked with Leibniz celebrated principle of the identity
of indiscernibles. If two thing have exactly the same properties, they cannot
be two things at all.
Two things cannot differ solo numero, which can be translated as numerically only. ]
[Has anybody found the 'country of possibles' yet? It is God's understanding. (Parkinson, p. 56.)]
ARGUMENT FOR EVERYTHING HAVING A COMPLETE CONCEPT
Leibniz gives a reason for holding that a substance must have a complete concept in his correspondence with Arnauld. (Parkinson, p.55.)
He claims that if this were not so, there would be the possibility of two things
existing which would have exactly the same properties. And this he thinks unacceptable
(invoking the support of Aquinas.)
Think of the mathematical sphere (not an individual material sphere). How many
of them are there? Only one. If you thought of creating another, you couldn't,
because, if you are really trying to make a second mathematical sphere, you
can't find an attribute which will make a difference between the sphere you
are attempting to create and the one that is there already.
God exercised choice in creation. What he created were substances.
He considered more possibilities than he created. He chose, because he was good, the best possibilities. We have the best of all possible worlds.
'... [T]here is an infinity of possible first men, each with a great following
of persons and events, and ... God chose the one who together with his following
pleased him.' Leibniz, Correspondence with Arnauld, Parkinson, p.58.
FREEDOM OF ACTION?
This account of things appears to leave no room for freedom of action.
My recommending Cottingham's edition of Descartes might for example have come about because that version had just come out quite cheaply in a nice-smelling paperback edition. An accident, something impinging on me from without. Leibniz of course can have none of this. My recommending Cottingham is one of my properties and would have been part of my script. It happened just as everything else in a substance's life happens, as an episode in the play.
Leibniz however certainly wants to reject this charge of determinism. It is
one levelled by Arnauld, and you find Leibniz discussing it in the Correspondence
- around page 60 in Parkinson, for example.
[Don' read out!]
'Indeed, I think that this will open up to us a way of reconciliation; for I imagine that M.Arnauld felt a repugnance against assenting to my proposition only because he took the connexion, which I am maintaining, to be intrinsic and necessary at the same time, whereas I hold it to be intrinsic, but in no way necessary; for I have now sufficiently explained that it is founded on free decisions and actions. I do not mean any other connexion between subject and predicate than that which is found in the most contingent truths; that is to say, there is always something to be conceive in he subject which provides the explanation why this predicate or this event belongs to it, or why a particular event happened rather than not. But the reasons of these contingent truths incline without necessitating. It is true then that I could fail to go on this journey, but it is certain that I shall go. This predicate or event is not certainly connected with my other predicates conceived incompletely or sub ratione generalitatis, but it is connected certainly with my complete individual notion, since I suppose that this notion was expressly so constructed that it might be possible to deduce from it everything which happens to me.' Leibniz, Correspondence with Arnauld, Parkinson, p. 60,1.
Here is Leibniz insisting that you can be free while following your script:
'... I agree that the connexion of events, although it is certain, is not necessary, and that it is open to me to go or not to go on this journey; for although it is included in my notion that I shall go, it is also included that I shall go freely.' Leibniz, Correspondence with Arnauld, Parkinson, p.61.
[He clearly wishes to retain the distinction between necessary and contingent
truths, maintaining only that both are deducible from the form.
The necessary ones are linked together, but the contingent ones aren't - i.e. you can deduce one necessary property of a thing from another, but you can't deduce any of its contingent properties from its necessary ones. They are deducible, but from the form itself.
(Leibniz seems to focus on the freedom enjoyed by God when creating substances,
not on the freedom enjoyed, as he claims, by the substance in spite of it having
a complete concept.)
]
The problem remains for most of us: how can this be so?
Solutions on a postcard please.
Last revised 22:01:04
Prepared by VP