Abstract
Ohad Nachtomy notes that Leibniz’s distinction between an artificial and a natural machine coincides with his distinction between living and non-living things. Nachtomy argues that this distinction has considerable consequences for Leibniz’s metaphysics. Leibniz insists that natural machines have something substantial – soul or form – that makes them one and the same thing in the least of their parts. This characterization constitutes the main difference between two different types of machine. Furthermore, this characterization applies both to the internal structure of a natural machine (all its parts are machines) and to its development (it remains the same machine through its various states). After a brief presentation of the context, Nachtomy considers the suggestion that the distinction depends on the difference between finite and infinite number of organs or parts. He rejects this suggestion, arguing that the distinction turns on the infinite structure of a natural machine.
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Notes
- 1.
Schrödinger [1944] 2007: 85.
- 2.
Ibid., 79.
- 3.
See Jacob 1970.
- 4.
See for example, Langton 1984.
- 5.
Cited from Fox-Keller 2002.
- 6.
See Duchesneau 1998.
- 7.
As Justin Smith and Enrico Pasini have stressed, one has to be careful not to conflate Leibniz’s usage with the contemporary usage of organism, as designating an individual. While the term “mechanism” was used to qualify the mechanic, or machine-like, the term “organism” would be used to qualify the organic(um). On the other hand, Leibniz’s notion of a natural machine, on which I focus here, does designate an individual living being. In this sense, the notion of a “natural machine” might even be more important for the later notion of an organism in the sense of a living unit.
- 8.
In fact, in his Principles of Philosophy part 4, article 203, Descartes seems to assimilate the artificial and the natural. For him, artificial machines serve as models to explain the natural ones. Natural machines are like artificial ones, except much more complicated. He wants to establish that they are of the same kind. He uses the notion of divinely created machines to show that the subtle parts of machines are extremely complex and invisible to us. While both Descartes and Leibniz argue that machines are extremely subtle, Descartes uses this point to argue for his view that, in the final analysis, animals are nothing but subtle machines. By contrast, Leibniz uses this point to argue that there is a categorical difference between them. See also Les passions de l’ame, first part, articles 5 and 6 where he writes e.g., that the body has in it “the corporeal source of movement” (art. 6).
- 9.
See for example, Leibniz’s controversy with Stahl (Carvallo 2004). where Leibniz criticizes the Moderns for pretending that “nihil aliud sit natura corporum quam Mechanismus” (there is nothing in the nature of bodies but mechanism).
- 10.
“It is true that we may find it hard to believe that the mere disposition of the bodily organs is sufficient to produce in us all the movements which are in no way determined by our thought. So I will now try to prove the point, and to give such a full account of the entire bodily machine that we will have no more reason to think that it is our soul which produces in it the movements which we know by experience are not controlled by our will than we have reason to think that there is a soul in a clock which makes it tell the time.” (CSM I, 315)
- 11.
Hatfield 1992: 341–343.
- 12.
“…these functions follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels. In order to explain these functions, then, it is not necessary to conceive of this machine as having any vegetative or sensitive soul or other principle of movement and life, apart from its blood and its spirits, which are agitated by the heat of the fire burning continuously in its heart – a fire which has the same nature as all the fires that occur in inanimate bodies.” (CSM I, 108)
- 13.
“I do not recognize any difference between artefacts and natural bodies, except that the operations of the artefacts are for the most part performed by mechanisms which are large enough to be easily perceivable by the senses – as indeed must be the case if they are to be capable of being manufactured by human beings. The effects produced in nature, by contrast, almost always depend on structures which are so minute that they completely elude our senses. Moreover, mechanics is a division or special case of physics, and all the explanations belonging the former also belong to the latter so it is no less natural for a clock constructed with this or that set of wheels to tell the time than it is for a tree which grew from this or that seed to produce the appropriate fruit.” (CSM I, 288)
- 14.
“De plus, par le moyen de l’âme ou forme, il y a une véritable unité qui répond à ce qu’on appelle moi en nous; ce qui ne saurait avoir lieu ni dans les machines de l’art, ni dans la simple masse de la matière, quelque organisée qu’elle puisse être, qu’on ne peut considérer que comme une armée ou un troupeau, ou comme un étang plein de poissons, ou comme une montre composée de ressorts et de roues.“ (GP IV, 482)
- 15.
“La substance demande une véritable unité [… ] Tout être par agrégation suppose des êtres doués d’une véritable unité, parce qu’il ne tient sa réalité que de celle de ceux dont il est composé, de sorte qu’il n’en aura point du tout, si chaque être dont il est composé est encor un être par agrégation [… ] S’il y a des agrégés de substances, il faut bien qu’il y ait aussi des véritables substances dont tous les agrégés soient faits. [… ] Il n’y a point de multitude sans des véritables unités. Pour trancher court, je tiens pour un axiome cette proposition identique qui n’est diversifiée que par l’accent, que ce qui n’est pas véritablement un être, n’est pas non plus véritablement un être.” (Lettres de Leibniz à Arnauld d’aprés un manuscrit inédit, ed. Geneviève Lewis (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France: 1952), 68–69; see also GP II, 164–165)
- 16.
- 17.
Fichant 2003. Leibniz et les machines de la nature. Studia leibnitiana 35: 1–28. See also Monadology § 74: “a kind of divine machine which infinitely surpasses all artificial automats.”
- 18.
“In each machine, one has to take into consideration at once its functions or its end and the mode of operation or the means by which the author of the machine sought its end.” “In omni Machina spectandae sunt tum functiones ejus, sive finis, tum modus operandi, sive quibus mediis autor machinae suum finem sit consecutus ” (Pasini 1996: 212). The best way to define a machine is by its final cause, in a way that each of its parts would appear [in the explication of its parts] to be coordinated by its designated [destinatum] usage. “Machina autem omnis a finali causa optime definitur, ut in explicatione partium deinde appareat, quomodo ad usum destinatum singulae coordinentur ” (Ibid., 217–218; English translations are my own but see the forthcoming translation of these texts by Justin Smith).
- 19.
Fichant 2003: 7.
- 20.
“Cette différence se marque à deux traits: l’infinité de composition, garante d’indestructibilité, et l’unité véritable, fondement de substantialité.” (Fichant 2003: 2)
- 21.
“Dans les corps je distingue la substance corporelle de la matiere, et je distingue la matiere premiere de la seconde. La matiere seconde est un aggregé ou composé de plusieurs substances corporelles, comme un trouppeau est composé de plusieurs animaux. Mais chaque animal et chaque plante aussi est une substance corporelle, ayant en soy le principe de l’unité, qui fait que c’est veritablement une substance et non pas un aggregé. Et ce principe d’unité est ce qu’on appelle Ame ou bien quelque chose, qui a de l’analogie avec l’ame. Mais outre le principe de l’unité la substance corporelle a sa masse ou sa matiere seconde, qui est encor un aggregé d’autres substances corporelles plus petites, et cela va à l’infini.” (Draft letter to Thomas Burnett, 1699: AG 289, GP III 260) See also the Replies to Stahl (Carvallo 2004: 102–103).
- 22.
On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians, AG 253.
- 23.
- 24.
“[Le] corps est organique quand il forme une manière d’automate ou de machine de la nature, qui est machine non seulement dans le tout, mais encore dans les plus petites parties qui se peuvent faire remarquer.” (PNG §3 GF 224) See also Monadology § 67–70.
- 25.
See Nachtomy 2007: Chapter 10.
- 26.
“it is as if someone tried to strip Harlequin on the stage but could never finish the task because he had on so many costumes, one on top of the other; though the infinity of replications of its organic body which an animal contains are not as alike as suits of clothes, and nor are they arranged one on top of another, since nature’s artifice is of an entirely different order of subtlety.” (Bennett and Remnant 1996).
- 27.
I should note that the commentators I have seen using and developing this analogy are not attending to the fact that the geometrical analogy, which they call the schema of emboitment, does not come right after the passage cited. In between there is a complex discussion not only about matter but about machines, entelechies and their complex relations. In fact, it is not obvious which passage Leibniz does attempt to exemplify with the analogy. What he says immediately before “I shall use an analogy” is this: “Yet you see that it should not be concluded from this that an infinitely small portion of matter (such as does not exist) must be assigned to any entelechy, although we routinely jump to such conclusions.”
- 28.
To Des Bosses 11–17 March, 1706; G 305–306; Look 2007.
- 29.
For more details on the way in which Leibniz uses this principle, see Phemister 2004.
- 30.
The idea of using a fractal analogy to exemplify the distinction between a composed substance and an aggregate has been proposed (though in a very loose and imprecise way) in an article by Chazerans 1991.
- 31.
Nachtomy 2007.
- 32.
“Quand aux Mouvemens des corps celestes, et plus encore quant à la formation des plantes et des animaux, il n’y a rien qui tienne du miracle, excepté le commencement des ces choses. L’organisme des animaux est un mechanisme qui suppose une préformation divine: ce qui en suit, est purement naturel, et tout à fait mechanique.” (GP VII. 417–418)
- 33.
“As to my claim that the soul and the animal do not perish, I shall again explain it with an analogy. Imagine an animal as a drop of oil and the soul as some point in the drop. If the drop is now divided into parts, the point will exist in one of the new drops, since any part in turn is transformed into a spherical drop. In the same way, the animal will survive in that part in which the soul remains and which best agrees with the soul itself. And just as the nature of the liquid in any fluid aims at sphericity, so the nature of the matter constructed by the wisest author always aims at order or organization. From this it follows that neither souls nor animals can be destroyed, although they can be diminished and concealed, so that their life does not appear to us. And there is no doubt that in generation, as also in corruption, nature obeys certain laws, for nothing of divine workmanship is lacking in order. Moreover, whoever reflects on the doctrine of the conservation of animals, must also consider, as I have shown, that there are infinite organs in the body of an animal, some enfolded in others; and from this it follows that an animated machine, and in general a machine of nature, is [not] absolutely destructible.” (Look and Rutherford 2007: 35–7)
- 34.
See also this passage: “… la matière arrangée par une sagesse divine doit être essentiellement organisée partout, et qu’ainsi il y a machine dans les parties de la machine naturelle a l’infini, et tant d’enveloppe et des corps organiques enveloppés les uns dans les autres, qu’on ne saurait jamais produire un corps organique tout a fait nouveau“ (GF 99; G VI 539–46).
- 35.
“In omni Machina spectandae sunt tum functiones ejus, sive finis, tum modus operandi, sive quibus mediis autor machinae suum finem sit consecutus.” (Pasini 1996).
- 36.
“Machina autem omnis a finali causa optime definitur, ut in explicatione partium deinde appareat, quomodo ad usum destinatum singulae coordinentur.” (Ibid., 217–18)
- 37.
“Thus every organic body of a living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses any artificial automaton, because a man-made machine is not a machine in every one of its parts. For example, the tooth of a brass cog-wheel has parts or fragments which to us are no longer anything artificial, and which no longer have anything which relates them to the use for which the cog was intended, and thereby marks them out as parts of a machine. But nature’s machines – living bodies, that is – are machines even in their smallest parts, right down to infinity. That is what makes the difference between nature and art, that is, between the divine art and our own.” Franks and Woolhouse 1998: 277.
- 38.
“We have recognized a great difference between machines and aggregates or masses, because machines have their effects and ends by the force of their proper structure, while the effects and ends of aggregates originate from a series of concurrent things and diverse machines…”(Carvallo 2004: 102–103; my translation)
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Nachtomy, O. (2011). Leibniz on Artificial and Natural Machines: Or What It Means to Remain a Machine to the Least of Its Parts. In: Smith, J., Nachtomy, O. (eds) Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 67. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0041-3_5
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