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Behind the facade
Update
140
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
| Book Reviews
Behind the facade Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development by Christia Mercer. Cambridge University Press, 2002. £60.00 (hbk, xiii þ 528 pp.) ISBN 0521403014
Philip Beeley Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet, Leibniz-Forschungsstelle, Rothenburg 32, D-48143 Muenster, Germany
The question of how Leibniz arrived at his mature doctrine of monads has long been a topic of debate among scholars. Broadly speaking, already at the beginning of the last century two main lines of thought emerged. While Arthur Hannequin and Willy Kabitz saw the Monadology as resulting from a distinctive early philosophy, Bertrand Russell and Louis Couturat held it to be logically deducible from the theory of truth put forward in a piece of writing entitled Primae veritates, at the time dated for 1686. However, as Christia Mercer argues in Leibniz’s Metaphysics, neither of these two approaches has been able to do justice to the genuine nature of Leibniz’s philosophical development. The former, because in the attempt to distinguish the early from the mature position it overemphasized the mechanistic side of his first philosophy, and the latter, because it failed to account for the precise form of the interrelations between doctrines. By contrast, Mercer seeks to show not only that central tenets of Leibniz’s mature thought are to be found in the writings of his youth, but also that core features of his later metaphysics, including the complete concept theory of truth and the doctrine of pre-established harmony were in place long before anyone up to now has even suspected. To a large extent, Mercer’s repudiation of the Russell – Couturat thesis is no more than shadow-boxing. No one in the academic community today would attempt to uphold their view, so deeply wedded to the logicism of the time it was first proposed. But with the Hannequin – Kabitz approach, things are different and it is here that Mercer seeks to break new ground. Rejecting what she calls the ‘standard account’, namely that Leibniz in his student days in Leipzig turned comprehensively from the scholasticism prevalent in German universities to the mechanistic philosophy of authors such as Gassendi and Descartes, she claims that Leibniz was never a wholehearted supporter of the new trend. He was at no time fundamentally committed to mechanism, atomism or occasionalism, nor did the philosophy of Spinoza have a major influence on his thought. Instead, she argues, Leibniz already in his youth pursued what she describes as ‘conciliatory eclecticism’. He was a circumspect collector of ideas, who sought ‘to weave a seamless garment out of borrowed threads’ (381) with the aim of creating a system that would ‘mirror the harmony and perfection of God and Corresponding author: Philip Beeley ([email protected]). http://ende.trends.com
solve the problems of the Eucharist and the Resurrection’ (472). Correspondingly, her central thesis, directed against those who emphasize Leibniz’s scientific endeavours as the motivating force for his interest in mechanistic philosophy, is that his most basic philosophical views evolved in an attempt to solve specific theological problems. The title of Mercer’s book is thus at once programmatic. While other commentators have in her opinion made comparatively little effort to accommodate those remarks in Leibniz’s early writings that evidently anticipate parts of his later metaphysics, she attempts not only to uncover the fundamental assumptions behind them but also to show that these assumptions are themselves rooted in internally consistent metaphysical positions. In effect, she suggests that we should not be mislead by the mechanistic facade of the early period. Behind this, Leibniz was quietly developing his metaphysics by harmoniously combining views gathered from various sources, including Aristotle, Platonism, and to a certain extent mechanism itself. However, there are serious difficulties with some of the conclusions at which she arrives. Part of the problem thereby is precisely her assumption that there must be one metaphysics on which Leibniz’s thought at any one time can be seen to rest. Because of this assumption, she is often forced to go beyond the often sparse evidence that surviving texts are able to supply. In so doing, she imposes a uniformity on the writings, which is both at odds with Leibniz’s own philosophical approach and leads to severe inconsistencies. More than once, Mercer concedes that the textual support for her interpretation is thin and on one occasion she justifies her interpretation with the almost ashamed remark that ‘it does not seem far fetched’ (252). Nowhere is the problematic character of her argument more apparent than in respect of Leibniz’s supposed second theory of corporeal substance. Of central importance here is the concept of momentary mind which the young philosopher introduces as a means of distinguishing the mental and the corporeal spheres. Drawing on Hobbes’s concept of endeavour (conatus), Leibniz finds that the distinction between mind and body rests fundamentally on the length to which such ‘infinitely small’ motions can be retained. While they are of lasting duration in the mind – in this way he explains memory and personal identity – they only fleetingly exist in bodies. Mercer’s interpretation, however, which asserts that Leibniz came to see the passive principle in corporeal substance to be a collection of mind-like substances has the consequence that it largely destroys the mind – body distinction; indeed, she describes Leibniz’s purported
Update
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
metaphysics of the period as ‘panorganism’. Admittedly, the task Mercer sets herself is to find the metaphysics beneath the surface. But how plausible can this metaphysics be if it renders Leibniz’s claimed achievements unintelligible and even contradictory? In many ways this outcome would appear inevitable, because the writings from which Mercer draws her interpretation often set out to fulfil quite different aims. Leibniz’s prime concern during his youth was to solve problems rather than to create a unified system. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the numerous philosophical drafts written during his stay in Paris (1672 –1676), in which his investigations on topics such as the nature of motion, cohesion and the constitution of matter often start out from explicitly different premises. Precisely this approach and the interdependency of his work on law, theology, mathematics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics are characteristic for the fecundity of Leibniz’s thought. By contrast, the purported metaphysics
141
of the young Leibniz at which Mercer arrives is decidedly sterile; indeed, she describes it herself as ‘strangely unmodern and provocatively weird’ (472). But this criticism of the general approach and some of the conclusions contained in Leibniz’s Metaphysics should not take anything away from Mercer’s scholarly achievement. Her arguments are well-researched, her analysis of the early theological writings thorough and enlightening. For too long, Leibniz scholars have conveniently avoided the questions with which she is concerned. In taking up this challenge she is to be congratulated unreservedly. The importance of a book is often to be measured by the debate it provokes. That there will be intensive discussion of her arguments is something of which there can be no doubt.
0160-9327/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2003.08.001
Alchemy, chrysopoeia, chymistry and chemistry – a historiographical transmutation Alchemy Tried in the Fire by William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe. University of Chicago Press, 2002. US$40.00 (344 pp.) ISBN 0226577112 Gehennical Fire. The Lives of George Starkey an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution by William R. Newman. University of Chicago Press, 2002. US$27.50 (paperback, 348 pp.) ISBN 0226577147
William H. Brock Centre for History & Cultural Studies of Science, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, UK CT2 7NX
It is universally acknowledged today that Americans are the world leaders in chemical research, a hegemony that only began in the 1930s. It is an equally common historical assumption that chemistry only began to emerge as a science from the ‘mysticism’ of alchemy when forged by the 17th-century skepticism of the Irishman Robert Boyle. It is the contention of the authors of Alchemy Tried in the Fire, however, that if anyone deserves the title ‘Father of Chemistry’ it was not Boyle, but an American chymist named George Starkey, who also wrote allegorical alchemical works under the pseudonym of Eirenaeus Philalethes (‘a peaceful lover of truth’). At the beginning of the 1990s, a Sinologist who specializes in the history of Chinese alchemy pronounced that the history of alchemy was, if not dead, at least moribund. This negative comment has proved entirely wrong, for during the past decade not only has alchemy attracted many younger scholars, but the Corresponding author: William H. Brock ([email protected]). http://ende.trends.com
reinterpretation of its history has begun to cast new light on the development of chemistry between the 16th and 18th centuries. The new scholarship has also promoted chemistry to playing a serious role in the narrative history of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. Much of this revival of alchemy’s fortune is due to the work of William R. Newman. His magisterial edition of the 13th-century Summa Perfectionis by ‘Geber’ in 1991 first demonstrated how Arabic chymists (Newman’s and Principe’s preferred spelling term for practitioners of all forms of early practical chemistry, including alchemy or chrysopoeia) reinterpreted Aristotelian matter theory in terms of corpuscles belonging to two material principles of liquidity (Mercury) and heat (Sulphur). Metals could be created or transformed, it was supposed, by rearrangements of the internal particles of these principles. This corpuscular chemistry, Newman showed, was transferred to the Latin west and formed the conceptual basis of chymists’ and alchemists’ understanding of the malleability of matter. In particular, the theory formed the basis of the work of Paracelsus (who added Salt to Sulphur and Mercury as the bearers of the properties of matter), as well as that of the Wittenberg chymist Daniel Sennert, and the Netherlands genius, Joan Baptiste van Helmont.
140
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
| Book Reviews
Behind the facade Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development by Christia Mercer. Cambridge University Press, 2002. £60.00 (hbk, xiii þ 528 pp.) ISBN 0521403014
Philip Beeley Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet, Leibniz-Forschungsstelle, Rothenburg 32, D-48143 Muenster, Germany
The question of how Leibniz arrived at his mature doctrine of monads has long been a topic of debate among scholars. Broadly speaking, already at the beginning of the last century two main lines of thought emerged. While Arthur Hannequin and Willy Kabitz saw the Monadology as resulting from a distinctive early philosophy, Bertrand Russell and Louis Couturat held it to be logically deducible from the theory of truth put forward in a piece of writing entitled Primae veritates, at the time dated for 1686. However, as Christia Mercer argues in Leibniz’s Metaphysics, neither of these two approaches has been able to do justice to the genuine nature of Leibniz’s philosophical development. The former, because in the attempt to distinguish the early from the mature position it overemphasized the mechanistic side of his first philosophy, and the latter, because it failed to account for the precise form of the interrelations between doctrines. By contrast, Mercer seeks to show not only that central tenets of Leibniz’s mature thought are to be found in the writings of his youth, but also that core features of his later metaphysics, including the complete concept theory of truth and the doctrine of pre-established harmony were in place long before anyone up to now has even suspected. To a large extent, Mercer’s repudiation of the Russell – Couturat thesis is no more than shadow-boxing. No one in the academic community today would attempt to uphold their view, so deeply wedded to the logicism of the time it was first proposed. But with the Hannequin – Kabitz approach, things are different and it is here that Mercer seeks to break new ground. Rejecting what she calls the ‘standard account’, namely that Leibniz in his student days in Leipzig turned comprehensively from the scholasticism prevalent in German universities to the mechanistic philosophy of authors such as Gassendi and Descartes, she claims that Leibniz was never a wholehearted supporter of the new trend. He was at no time fundamentally committed to mechanism, atomism or occasionalism, nor did the philosophy of Spinoza have a major influence on his thought. Instead, she argues, Leibniz already in his youth pursued what she describes as ‘conciliatory eclecticism’. He was a circumspect collector of ideas, who sought ‘to weave a seamless garment out of borrowed threads’ (381) with the aim of creating a system that would ‘mirror the harmony and perfection of God and Corresponding author: Philip Beeley ([email protected]). http://ende.trends.com
solve the problems of the Eucharist and the Resurrection’ (472). Correspondingly, her central thesis, directed against those who emphasize Leibniz’s scientific endeavours as the motivating force for his interest in mechanistic philosophy, is that his most basic philosophical views evolved in an attempt to solve specific theological problems. The title of Mercer’s book is thus at once programmatic. While other commentators have in her opinion made comparatively little effort to accommodate those remarks in Leibniz’s early writings that evidently anticipate parts of his later metaphysics, she attempts not only to uncover the fundamental assumptions behind them but also to show that these assumptions are themselves rooted in internally consistent metaphysical positions. In effect, she suggests that we should not be mislead by the mechanistic facade of the early period. Behind this, Leibniz was quietly developing his metaphysics by harmoniously combining views gathered from various sources, including Aristotle, Platonism, and to a certain extent mechanism itself. However, there are serious difficulties with some of the conclusions at which she arrives. Part of the problem thereby is precisely her assumption that there must be one metaphysics on which Leibniz’s thought at any one time can be seen to rest. Because of this assumption, she is often forced to go beyond the often sparse evidence that surviving texts are able to supply. In so doing, she imposes a uniformity on the writings, which is both at odds with Leibniz’s own philosophical approach and leads to severe inconsistencies. More than once, Mercer concedes that the textual support for her interpretation is thin and on one occasion she justifies her interpretation with the almost ashamed remark that ‘it does not seem far fetched’ (252). Nowhere is the problematic character of her argument more apparent than in respect of Leibniz’s supposed second theory of corporeal substance. Of central importance here is the concept of momentary mind which the young philosopher introduces as a means of distinguishing the mental and the corporeal spheres. Drawing on Hobbes’s concept of endeavour (conatus), Leibniz finds that the distinction between mind and body rests fundamentally on the length to which such ‘infinitely small’ motions can be retained. While they are of lasting duration in the mind – in this way he explains memory and personal identity – they only fleetingly exist in bodies. Mercer’s interpretation, however, which asserts that Leibniz came to see the passive principle in corporeal substance to be a collection of mind-like substances has the consequence that it largely destroys the mind – body distinction; indeed, she describes Leibniz’s purported
Update
Endeavour
Vol.27 No.4 December 2003
metaphysics of the period as ‘panorganism’. Admittedly, the task Mercer sets herself is to find the metaphysics beneath the surface. But how plausible can this metaphysics be if it renders Leibniz’s claimed achievements unintelligible and even contradictory? In many ways this outcome would appear inevitable, because the writings from which Mercer draws her interpretation often set out to fulfil quite different aims. Leibniz’s prime concern during his youth was to solve problems rather than to create a unified system. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the numerous philosophical drafts written during his stay in Paris (1672 –1676), in which his investigations on topics such as the nature of motion, cohesion and the constitution of matter often start out from explicitly different premises. Precisely this approach and the interdependency of his work on law, theology, mathematics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics are characteristic for the fecundity of Leibniz’s thought. By contrast, the purported metaphysics
141
of the young Leibniz at which Mercer arrives is decidedly sterile; indeed, she describes it herself as ‘strangely unmodern and provocatively weird’ (472). But this criticism of the general approach and some of the conclusions contained in Leibniz’s Metaphysics should not take anything away from Mercer’s scholarly achievement. Her arguments are well-researched, her analysis of the early theological writings thorough and enlightening. For too long, Leibniz scholars have conveniently avoided the questions with which she is concerned. In taking up this challenge she is to be congratulated unreservedly. The importance of a book is often to be measured by the debate it provokes. That there will be intensive discussion of her arguments is something of which there can be no doubt.
0160-9327/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2003.08.001
Alchemy, chrysopoeia, chymistry and chemistry – a historiographical transmutation Alchemy Tried in the Fire by William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe. University of Chicago Press, 2002. US$40.00 (344 pp.) ISBN 0226577112 Gehennical Fire. The Lives of George Starkey an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution by William R. Newman. University of Chicago Press, 2002. US$27.50 (paperback, 348 pp.) ISBN 0226577147
William H. Brock Centre for History & Cultural Studies of Science, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, UK CT2 7NX
It is universally acknowledged today that Americans are the world leaders in chemical research, a hegemony that only began in the 1930s. It is an equally common historical assumption that chemistry only began to emerge as a science from the ‘mysticism’ of alchemy when forged by the 17th-century skepticism of the Irishman Robert Boyle. It is the contention of the authors of Alchemy Tried in the Fire, however, that if anyone deserves the title ‘Father of Chemistry’ it was not Boyle, but an American chymist named George Starkey, who also wrote allegorical alchemical works under the pseudonym of Eirenaeus Philalethes (‘a peaceful lover of truth’). At the beginning of the 1990s, a Sinologist who specializes in the history of Chinese alchemy pronounced that the history of alchemy was, if not dead, at least moribund. This negative comment has proved entirely wrong, for during the past decade not only has alchemy attracted many younger scholars, but the Corresponding author: William H. Brock ([email protected]). http://ende.trends.com
reinterpretation of its history has begun to cast new light on the development of chemistry between the 16th and 18th centuries. The new scholarship has also promoted chemistry to playing a serious role in the narrative history of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. Much of this revival of alchemy’s fortune is due to the work of William R. Newman. His magisterial edition of the 13th-century Summa Perfectionis by ‘Geber’ in 1991 first demonstrated how Arabic chymists (Newman’s and Principe’s preferred spelling term for practitioners of all forms of early practical chemistry, including alchemy or chrysopoeia) reinterpreted Aristotelian matter theory in terms of corpuscles belonging to two material principles of liquidity (Mercury) and heat (Sulphur). Metals could be created or transformed, it was supposed, by rearrangements of the internal particles of these principles. This corpuscular chemistry, Newman showed, was transferred to the Latin west and formed the conceptual basis of chymists’ and alchemists’ understanding of the malleability of matter. In particular, the theory formed the basis of the work of Paracelsus (who added Salt to Sulphur and Mercury as the bearers of the properties of matter), as well as that of the Wittenberg chymist Daniel Sennert, and the Netherlands genius, Joan Baptiste van Helmont.