Today is the first in a series of New APPS Interviews, which will run every Wednesday through the end of May, picking up again in September.
Today's interview is with Justin E. H. Smith, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ from January through June 2011. His new book, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life has just appeared with Princeton University Press (2011). His website is here.
Thanks very much for doing this interview with us, Justin. Your book is subtitled “Leibniz and the Sciences and Life,” yet in the Introduction you also write that you will look at Leibniz in relation to "what we would now call 'biology'." Why the scare quotes on "biology"?
I don't take those as scare quotes so much as marks signaling a use-mention distinction. One of my guiding principles in the book was, to the extent possible, to respect actors' categories, to avoid using names for concepts, practices, or entities that would not have been familiar to the people I was writing about; and 'biology', for example, makes its first appearance only in the late 18th century.
Fair enough. What is at stake in this use-mention distinction for you in writing in the genre of history of philosophy? (If that is indeed the genre in which you would place your work.)
This is not just terminological quibbling: it is rather a necessary part of working one's way back into the problems that early modern philosophers faced, rather than allowing ourselves to update their problems so that they come out as more familiar to our own world of concerns than they in fact are. I certainly take this task to be a necessary and incontrovertible part of history-of-philosophy scholarship. The branch of philosophy that interests me is what was called at the time 'natural philosophy', which would later be sliced off and partitioned into biology, chemistry and other concrete 'sciences'. If we take actors' categories seriously, then, when we do the history of biology or chemistry we are willy-nilly doing the history of philosophy.
In chapter 7 I treat what I call 'the spectre of evolution' in Leibniz's natural philosophy. He was certainly aware of the possibility, and on occasion even acknowledges that, for example, marine mammals are likely descended from cows, and that fossilized mammoth tusks were left by now-extinct European elephants. I can't go into this history in any detail here, but it's clear that there's a rich and little-known story to be told about pre-Darwinian evolutionary thinking, which extends back much further than the familiar 'forerunners' of Darwin who begin to make themselves known in the late 18th century.
What about heredity and ecology as contemporary biological concerns? Are there echoes or “specters” here as well?
As for heredity and ecology, the list would have been more complete if I had mentioned these too, and in fact both play a crucial role in Leibniz's account (sketched in chapter 2 and then coming up again repeatedly in chapters 5, 7, and elsewhere still) of how it is that, to speak with Aristotle, 'like begets like', while at the same time never begetting exactly like. That is, sexual reproduction of the animal gives you something that is both a copy of its parents (or, as Aristotle would say, of its father) yet is somehow distinct from them. It is generally something like 'environmental' factors that are called upon to account for this distinctness.
You locate Leibniz as a "panvitalist" in relation to Descartes's natural mechanism. What do you mean by that, and how do you distinguish Leibniz from vitalism as ordinarily understood, that is, a reliance on an extra-material principle inherent in living beings?
The view is slow in developing, but by the end of his career Leibniz believes, first of all, that to live just is to perceive, and moreover that anything that deserves to be called a 'being' just is a perceiver. Whence panvitalism. Remarkably, however, this variety of vitalism is perfectly compatible with mechanism: Leibniz insisted to the end that he was a mechanist, in the sense that he thought that all motion, including the vital motion of animals, can be adequately accounted for in terms of the structure or organization of bodies. The more familiar assumption, that vitalism and mechanism represent opposing schools of thought, would only take shape over the course of the 18th century.
Your book intervenes in the scholarly debate between those who hold that there is a basic conflict between the idealist Leibniz, whose monadic ontology is based on immaterial substances, and a "realist" Leibniz who allows for a "corporeal-substance" metaphysics. For the sake of those of us who haven't followed this debate, can you rehearse its basics, and how you stand in relation to the debate?
This is an extremely recondite and complicated debate, and I can’t really do justice to it here, not even in outline. Suffice it to say that for years it has been presumed that Leibniz did not really believe there are such things as bodies, and that when he talked about them this was just a façon de parler. But such an approach constrains one to read the texts in a very selective way (one Leibniz scholar recently projected a few pages of a familiar Leibniz text with all of the corporeal-substance-realist passages blacked out; only about one third of the original remained). On my interpretation, Leibniz does indeed explain bodies in terms of perception, but this is precisely an explaining and not an explaining-away. To suppose that an account of bodies in terms of perceptions reveals the ultimate unreality of bodies is to assume that any body theory must be rooted by default in either res extensa or in atoms; but there is no reason why Leibniz should have felt constrained to make such an assumption. The big historical mistake --and this is a point that has been made before, and with particular force, by Michel Fichant-- is to suppose that because Leibniz is writing after Descartes his account of body must be understood as a rejection of res extensa, and thus must be a variety of idealism in the Berkeleyan or Kantain sense. Leibniz certainly doesn't have any need for res extensa, but this is because body, for him, is the result of a certain variety of perception, namely, confused perception. Such an account is more rooted in the theocentric metaphysics of an ancient thinker such as Origen than in any reaction to modern philosophy. I think Leibniz is in some ways a very premodern philosopher.
Speaking of the premoderns, you have some wonderful pages on the relation of Leibniz and Aristotle. One of my favorite passages in Aristotle is Politics 1.5.1254b1, where he writes "It is then in an animal, as we were saying, that one can first discern both the sort of rule characteristic of a master and political rule. For the soul rules the body with the rule characteristic of a master, while intellect rules appetite with political and kingly rule." Can you relate this to Leibniz's famous doctrine of the "dominant monad"?
This is tricky. There are obvious political analogies waiting to be made in Leibniz's theory of monadic domination and subordination, but Leibniz unlike Aristotle does not seem all that eager to make them. I used to use the example of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and of how what were once regional capitals such as Ljubljana and Zagreb became elevated to the status of independent national capitals, as an illustration of what goes on for Leibniz when a corporeal substance decomposes and once subordinate monads become the souls of now independent living beings (as when a maggot emerges heterogenetically from a rotting corpse). But these days my students are too young to relate to the Yugoslavia example, so I've switched to a hypothetical secession of Quebec from Canada instead. Given that I teach in Montreal, this always wakes them up. Surely, anyway, there is a connection to be made between Leibniz's monarchism and his theory of dominant monads, but I think I'll leave it to someone else to make it.
Let's come back to the question of panvitalism and ask how it relates to the question of panpsychism, a concept with which Leibniz is almost always associated. The "mind in life" school, as exemplified by Evan Thompson, would make perception (and indeed cognition) co-extensive with life. For them, perception and cognition are biological categories, able to be found in the simplest organisms. But Thompson hesitates to sign on to the current panpsychist revival (in which, for example, Galen Strawson is a prominent player). Can we say that Leibniz would be an advocate of a "life in mind" position, whereby organic bodies accompany immaterial monads gifted with (or perhaps better, composed of) perception and appetite? So that monads as "mind" is the larger category, with "life" (or living bodies) being a derivative of mind. Can you comment on this proposal?
Yes, certainly, insofar as life just is perception for Leibniz, and perception is any sort of mental or mind-like activity, this does qualify him as a defender of the 'life in mind' position. But we have to add the proviso that instead of saying organic bodies accompany immaterial monads gifted with or composed of perception and appetite, we should rather say that organic bodies necessarily result from the perceptual activity of simple substances.
Thanks very much, Justin for this wonderful tour of your book, which I expect to be widely reviewed. Why don’t we close by me asking you about your current projects: what are you doing nowadays? Do you have a specific project in mind for your time at the Institute for Advanced Study?
In my new project I’m still trying to bring some of the insights of recent history-of-science scholarship to bear on our understanding of what was really going on in early modern philosophy. In particular, I’m trying to show how what we might call early modern ‘globalization’ –the most important moment of which was the encounter with the New World-- impacted the scope and methods of a number of domains of natural philosophy, including taxonomy (along with the background nominalism-vs.-realism debate), philosophical anthropology (along with the background debates about human nature), and even mathematical physics (in the discovery of the problem of magnetic variation, for example, early modern philosophers had to face the fact that universal physics would always remain modulated by local differences). The project is called ‘Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Early Modern Philosophy in Global Context’. Again, much of it is simply an attempt to bring important insights of professional historians to the attention of historians of philosophy. Just to mention one game-changing work, I think Hal Cook’s Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age has profound implications, which ought to be of interest to philosophers, for our understanding of emerging notions of objectivity and universal validity in early modern thought. I see my work as an attempt to mediate between historians of science and philosophers who work on early modern figures, to bring these two scholarly communities together. They need to talk.
That’s a fascinating and very important project. I would think slavery and racism would play a role in the philosophical anthropology aspect.
Yes, indeed, slavery and race are definitely a part of it, even if I can't give these the attention they deserve. (I'm particularly enthused, by the way, by the work of people like Nick Nesbitt, who are looking at the way the conception of radical Enlightenment as developed by Jonathan Israel played out in the African diaspora, and particularly in Haiti.) My own sense is that the racialization of slavery took shape only after the African slave trade was already in full swing, and that at the outset the African slave trade was not motivated by any presumption of a racial hierarchy (it was after all preceded by several centuries in which the trade focused on Eastern Europeans). The racialization of slavery, then, had something to do with an increasing sense of a need to justify it both in political terms but also, in turn, in natural-philosophical terms (the Ottomans, by contrast, never offered exculpatory explanations of their preference for Circassian slaves). This is where the 'racial science' that emerges in the 18th century with Blumenbach, Kant, et al., comes from. So that's the short answer. For the long answer, we'll see when the book is finished...
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