|
Contents |
History of Philosophy in the 17th & 18th Centuries
Week 9
THE FORM HAS THE CHARACTER OF THE MENTAL
Leibniz introduced the need for a form by exposing as he saw it the weakness of the material (Cordemoy) atom as a substance.
There were two - maybe 3 - defects in the material atom he sought to remedy.
1. The purely material atom had no principle of unity.
2. The conception of a material atom made it impossible to think of the atom as having the capacity to originate change.
3. The conception of a material atom gave no basis for understanding why a particular atom had the properties it had.
His remedy was to say we have to think of the basic building blocks - the basic substances - as material atoms plus. The additional factor was: the form. The Leibnizian substance when it is defined in this middle period as a bit of stuff - eg a Cordemoy atom - plus a Leibnizian form.
For the time being let us establish that picture, the picture of substances as material-atoms-plus-forms.
This is how Leibniz presents them, at least some of the time.
The material atoms of the atomists, or the corpuscularians, are deficient in lacking a grounding for properties, and a principle of action, deficiencies which are remedied if you think of the material atom as imbued with a form.
So a Leibnizian substance on this understanding is a material-atom-plus-form.
The form adds to the capacity of the atom in at least three ways.
1. It grounds the atom's properties.
2. It holds the 'complete concept'
3. It provides a 'principle of action'
I have made the connection before, but let me just emphasise that this role, and particularly the second two of these functions, relies on the form having the character of the mental, relies on the form as being 'mind-like'.
Taking the second function:
The form holds the complete concept of the substance - what we have been calling the 'script'.
It is easier to think of a mind-like entity performing this function than something that is physical. One reason I have alluded to before: to represent every feature of an infinitely large universe would surely require an infinitely large physical thing to carry the representation. A mind does not need to be extended at all: indeed is not extended in its very nature. An ordinary mind such as mine or yours seems even at first sight capable of representing quite a lot - all my past, much the environment I find myself in. Perhaps it is not stretching things too far to suggest that it could be representing quite a lot more, without my knowing it. At any rate, the difficulty seems to lie in how a mind can represent. Perhaps it is this that allows the problem of whether there are any limits to the quantity of things it can represent seem secondary or even negligible.
Here is a comment from Leibniz himself:
'There can be absolutely no doubt about of the possibility of a good representation of several things in one single thing; for our soul presents us with an example. This representation is accompanied by consciousness in a rational soul, and it is then called thought.' (Leibniz, Correspondence with Arnauld, Parkinson, p.72.)
The third function of the form is to serve as a principle of action.
But this too involves thinking of the form as a kind of mind.
For to take action a thing has to be capable of envisaging ends. It might be claimed perhaps that it is the envisaging of the end which makes a movement into an action.
My arm goes up. Is it an action, or some kind of involuntary jerk?
This is the question, it might be said, of whether it went up as an expression of my wanting to achieve something. If there was no wanting there, no purpose, no intention perhaps it isn't an action but a jerk.
BUZZ: examples of actions without ends.
[Contrast
(a) the chiming of a Grandfather clock
with
(b) my going to the bank.]
The envisaging of ends is what minds do: this is the point.
In following the script, the substance is envisaging ends. It is exhibiting its mind-like character.
Altogether then what we have is a substance as
a material atom
with a form
which contains a full script
of the substance's existence through time
The form is mind-like because
it has an unique capacity for representation,
and
it is capable of envisaging ends (and thus action).
LEIBNIZ' EVENTUAL ABANDONMENT OF THE MATERIAL
I have said that Leibniz arrives in the period of the New System with the idea
of substance as an atom plus form. He eventually reaches the conclusion however
that the idea of a substance comprising a corporeal body - a bit of material,
say - was a contradiction in terms. '... material atoms,' he eventually says,
'are contrary to reason ...'
Exactly at what point does he arrive at the abandonment of the corporeal? It is difficult to say. And we have to note that at least one commentator, Adams, disagrees with this whole way of understanding the corpus of Leibniz' thought. The 'idealism' of the later years is also there in the earlier 'middle' period.
I have said earlier that the material atoms plus form theory is best represented in the Discourse in Metaphysics. But Michael has pointed out that that text is explicitly committed to material atoms not having a causal impact on each other. So hoe exactly the Discourse fits in is not quite how I thought of it.
Thanks to Michael!
[What is his reason for abandoning the corporeal?
Leave this an an exercise for the reader - the following is probably too indefinite to be helpful:
I'm not sure can make it out.
What seems to weigh with him is his early point that extended things are in principle divisible, and so cannot be indivisible.
'a material being cannot be at the same time material and perfectly indivisible'. Leibniz, 'A New System of the Nature and the Communication of Substances, as well as the Union between the Soul and the Body', 1695, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, Edited and translated by Leroy E. Loemker, 2nd edition, 1969, Dordrecht, Reidel, p. 454.
But as I understand it, this point had been met by the introduction of the form.
It was my suggestion that in saying that a substance had to be indivisible Leibniz'
point was that a substance had to have integrity, ie that it was the sort of
thing that couldn't be split into two without destruction. I suggested that
Leibniz reintroduced the form because a form conferred integrity on a thing.
A form made a mass of flesh and bones into a horse.
But clearly even when the form has been reintroduced, Leibniz still feels, in the end, that substances cannot be material, or a material thing cannot be a substance, for the reason that 'a material thing cannot be indivisible'.
Maybe the point is this. The form may confer integrity upon a material thing, but it doesn't permanence.
In dwelling on integrity, we have been concentrating on a particular feature of a true substance. A fundamentally real thing, we have been taking it, is one that has within it the basis for a set of properties. This is the importance of having integrity: a thing with integrity has a set of properties, and those properties are grounded in the thing itself.
But this leaves unemphasised another feature of the fundamentally real: independence.
Remember I hazarded some time ago that a substance was something that was not dependent on anything else, though with other things dependent on it.
You could also argue that the fundamentally real are the things which go on existing when other things change. The truly real is that which persists through change. This picks up an ancient theme.
The trouble with integration that forms confer on material things is that the things created thereby are not Invulnerable to change.
Very much the reverse. Cats and horses and oysters and violets are destroyed perfectly easily, if we think of them as material things. They are integrated things, but they are not the bedrock unchangeables that Leibniz appears to think his true substances must be.
Scruton: an extended thing can be divided into two and thus cease to be. Therefore,
an extended thing is dependent on something else and so cannot be a substance.
... ? Scruton, p. 73.
Whether by this route or not, Leibniz reaches the conclusion that material things cannot be substances. His notion eventually is that that a substance has a form but no extension - no 'matter'.
[Yet Scruton says a monad has both matter and form - p. 75.]
He finds this distinctly awkward. If he simply thinks of a substance as immaterial,
like say a geometrical point, he will be stuck for an account of how a plurality
of immaterial things can add up to a material thing - for an account of materiality
in other words. His solution is to invent something very special: a metaphysical
point.
A substance is a metaphysical point: not a little bit of matter, but not an
immaterial point either. Something in between.
"It is only metaphysical points, or points of substance, which are exact
and real, and without them there would be nothing real...." Leibniz, A
New System, 1695, in Loemker, p. 456-7.
A substance then becomes what he calls a 'metaphysical point' animated by a form.
]
Summary
Altogether then what we have is a substance as
a metaphysical point
with a form
which contains a full script
of the substance's existence through time.
AGGREGATES OF SUBSTANCES: BODIES ARE MADE OF ANIMALS
Though Leibniz drew inspiration from the capacity of animals for spontaneity of action, this inspiration leads him to the concept of a substance as only partly, or even quasi-material, the material atom, or the 'metaphysical point' as the locus of a form.
Animals do not appear to be metaphysical points themselves. How then does Leibniz think of the connection between his metaphysical point substances and the gross things of our ordinary experience such as donkeys and toads? For that matter, how are we to conceive of gross things like houses and rocks?
Leibniz thought of them as made up of substances. Groups of the elementary substances he has described associate together to form gross things.
But then of course he has to account for the distinctions we found him making much of earlier. Some things have integrity and and some don't: horses on the one hand, heaps of pebbles on the other.
It seems that Leibniz invokes the forms at this point for a second time!
Not only is a human body made up of metaphysical-point-substances, each of which has a form, but there is a further form embracing the collection. Just as there is a form or 'soul' or 'entelechy' informing each metphysical-point-substance, so there is a form or 'soul' or 'entelechy' informing the group of metaphysical-point-substances which make up the human body.
The same is true of animals and plants.
Heaps of pebbles on the other hand are mere aggregates of elementary substances, with no form operating at the gross level to give integrity. It is the same with ploughs and clocks. They are made up of substances, but they do not have a gross level form. Aggregates are 'substantial entities put together by nature or human artifice'. They are to be contrasted with things possessing 'true unity'.
Leibniz here simply reflects the Scholastic distinction.
'Perfect unity should be reserved for animate bodies, or bodies endowed with
primary entelechies; for such entelechies ... are ... indivisible and imperishable
as souls are.' G.W. Leibniz New Essays on Human Understanding (1st published
1765) this edition translated and edited by Remnant, P and Bennett, J. (Cambridge,
1981, CUP), p.328/9.
LIFE & THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF SUBSTANCES
A human being then is made up of metaphysical-point-substances, each with its form, and also has a form at the gross level, informing the collection. This is the soul.
You see the connection between soul and life. A corpse is a collection of elementary substances with the gross-level form or soul gone. As John Cleese might have said, a corpse is a former substance. It was a substance but has become an aggregate.
Here is Leibniz commenting on the implications of this view for our understanding of death:
What becomes of ... the forms at the death of the animal [they inform] or at the destruction of the individual unit of organised substance? ... It hardly seems reasonable that souls should remain, useless in a chaos of confused matter."
Lengthy consideration led him to conclude, he explains, "that there is only one reasonable view to take - that of the conservation ... of the animal itself and its organic machine, even though the destruction of its grosser parts may have reduced this machine to a size so small that it escapes our senses just as it did before birth." (Leibniz, New System ..., in Loemker, p. 455; or Parkinson p.118.)
'[S]ince the animal has always been living and organised (as some people of fine perception are beginning to recognise) ... it follows ... that it will suffer no final extinction or complete death, in the strict metaphysical sense; and that consequently, instead of a transmigration of souls, there occurs only transformation of one and the same animal, according as its organs are differently folded, and more or less developed.' (Leibniz, New System ..., Parkinson p.119.)
Thus is Leibniz lead to defend a preformationist view of animal and plant development. The whole animal, for example, is present in the animal that gives rise to it: and so on back to the moment of Creation.
'... the animal and every other organised substance does not begin when we think, but that its apparent generation is only a development, a kind of increase.' (Leibniz, New System ..., Parkinson, p.118.)
So much for animals. But the point holds generally for Leibnizian substances:
'[A] substance cannot come into being except by creation, or perish except by annihilation; ... a substance cannot be divided in two , or one substance made out of two, so that the number of substances does not increase or diminish naturally, though they are often transformed.' Leibniz, 'Discourse on Metaphysics', 1686, in Loemker, p.3 [misprint]
This is to say that substances are indestructible, and can only come into existence through the direct activity of the Creator: a formulation of thinking about what is fundamentally real which (as I have said) goes back to the Greeks. Substances are the things which survive change.
Since the forms involved in these eternal substances partake of the character of the mental, it follows that "Everywhere there are innumerable minds," and indeed that "there are minds in the human egg before conception, and they are not lost even if conception never takes place..." (Leibniz, Paris Notes (1676), in Loemker, p. 160.)
Last revised 22:01:04
Prepared by VP