Candidate No.: Y3898820 Word Count: 2,499 University of York Department of Philosophy BA Second Year Summative Assessment, Autumn 2021/22 Rationalism: Spinoza and Leibniz (PHI00077I) Essay (2,500 words) Question 4: Does pre-established harmony improve upon interactionism and occasionalism? 1 Introduction In this essay, I will argue that Leibniz’s pre-established harmony is not so clearly an improvement upon interactionism or occasionalism, as many of his proponents may suggest. I will illustrate this by fi rst outlining what the system of pre-established harmony entails in terms of its central tenets, and then in the main sections, evaluate whether the two systems Leibniz attacked are improved upon by pre-established harmony, by considering the criteria, amongst others, of the preservation of the orthodox “conservation is continuous creation” thesis (as will be expanded on later) and intelligibility. I will show, respectively, that while the defence of interactionism against pre- established harmony presents some formidable challenges to Leibniz’s system, occasionalism, too, puts Leibniz in a predicament by challenging his interpretation of the “conservation is continuous creation” thesis. Leibniz’s Pre-Established Harmony Scholars generally agree that Leibniz’s pre-established harmony have the following features (Bobro, 2022): 1. There is no intersubstantial causation: different substances do not interact. 2. There is intrasubstantial causation: all change in the states of created substances is caused at least partly by the substance itself. 3. All created substances have a complete concept 1 4. Each created substance’s complete concept conforms with complete concepts contained in all other created substances. Leibnizian term, akin to a “blueprint” wherein lies all the states of the created substance. 1 2 5. This conformity is due to God, the universal cause. In addition, Carlin (2000) demonstrates that this harmony has an epistemological criterion of conceptual intelligibility: it results from the God’s giving unifying relations to the reality substances possess, such that “the objectively true description of the relations that obtain in the world lies in the divine mind.” Evaluative Criteria In what follows I will briefly introduce some evaluative criteria that need to be addressed beforehand. In my assessment of the accounts of causation, I will consider them alongside the obvious criteria such as the coherence and validity of the arguments. I. The “Conservation is Continuous Creation” Thesis Widely accepted by early modern theistic philosophers, the “conservation is continuous creation” thesis (hereafter “CCC”) maintains that God is casually involved in the conservation of created substances, by way of “continuous creation”. Leibniz explains that “the creature depends upon God insofar as it exists and insofar as it acts... God always gives to the creature, and produces continually, whatever in it is positive, good and perfect...” (Leibniz, 2014). The reason behind the orthodoxy of CCC is theologically grounded: if conservation of substances were not continuous creation, it would mean that the dependence of creatures on God would be significantly reduced after God’s creating them, rendering God’s volitions after creation redundant, given that God’s creation of substances ex nihilo should be perfect. 3 This seems to allow for a range of interpretive possibilities: for one, how is this continuity in creation to be understood? In fact, the different readings of CCC form the basis for the debate between occasionalists and Leibniz, as I will expand on later. II. Intelligibility Problems Intelligibility poses problems for all three accounts of causation to be dealt with here. For example, Leibniz attacks the influxionist picture of interactionists for being unintelligible; 2 occasionalism is also thwarted by an intelligibility issue: how can it be understood that, despite God’s divine wisdom, he has to constantly intervene in the world? In view of Leibniz’s characterisation of harmony with an epistemological condition—that is, that the order under which creatures relate to each other and conform in an all-encompassing manner must be intelligible, this becomes an important criterion. Interactionism, or Influxus Physicus It is not immediately clear what Leibniz was targeting when he attacked interactionism (or influxus physicus ) as he refers to its different variants (O’Neill, 1993). While all variants share a commonality—a picture of transmission of influxes between substances—there is a stronger model which Leibniz avoided: the atomistic-corpuscular model (O’Neill, 1993). I will look at this model instead of Neoplatonic or Scholastic models, so as to do justice to the influxionist case. I. The Atomistic-Corpuscular Model In fl uxes are the transference of accidents from an agent to a recipient. 2 4 O’Neill (1993) outlines the these primary features for the model: 1. There is intersubstantial causation. 2. The effect caused by the agent substance requires the agent’s continuous activity. These two aspects are similar to the Neoplatonic and Scholastic models, which Leibniz is believed to have targeted. However, there is the crucial ontological distinction, that: 3. What inflows in these interactions is continuous with the agent substance; it is a substantial effluxion direpted from the agent. Unlike in the two earlier models, where the efflux is distinct from the agent, being a replica of it. II. Leibniz’s Attack Leibniz challenges influxionists with the following (Watkins, 2004): 1. Even within finite substances, how could they interact, given that, presumably, accidents cannot migrate from one substance to another? 2. Does this account not violate conservation laws? 3. How is it possible that corporeal and incorporeal substances could interact, given their heterogeneity? III. Would Leibniz’s Attack Succeed on Corpuscularians? 5 Earlier models failed to give an account that Leibniz deemed satisfactory. However with the modification to the theory as specified in the above subsection, we actually have a an improved picture of intersubstantial change: 1. With corporeal substances, unlike the Scholastic theory which merely appeals to occult powers (O’Neill, 1993), corpuscularians give a better answer to Leibniz’s first challenge with their direptive account of influxes—it does not deny the intuition that the recipient has the potency to act but merely lacks the “force” required before influxion. Phenomenally, since bodies are aggregates of component parts, we could actually conceive of the latter being transferred from the agent to recipient, given it diminishes the agent, as in the corpuscular picture. 2. Leibniz attacks influxionists’ account of heterogenous transmission by saying that if minds could act on bodies with their incorporeal will, there would be an incongruence of the amount of motion before and after the interaction. But if minds and bodies are heterogenous, would what holds for bodies, i.e. the law of conservation, still hold for minds? After all, momentum does take into account mass (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, n.d.), something that incorporeal substances do not have. Is the law of conservation still inapplicable? 3. The third challenge concerns the question of the relationship between monads and bodies. Being an idealist, Leibniz could deny that even if the corpuscularian account works for bodies on the phenomenal level, since they are not monads which do constitute reality, no satisfactory picture of natural change on the metaphysical level is given. But, if, as Leibniz maintains, bodies act in virtue of a derivative force which is a modification of monads’ primitive force , does that not entail that the primitive 3 force of monads cause bodies to act? Leibniz then has to explicate the On account of complete concepts contained in monads, monads’ “present state is pregnant 3 with the future” (Leibniz, 2014). 6 metaphysical mechanism that governs this conversion. Moreover, although Leibniz writes that monads are incorporeal, he does not deny that they cannot be physical points (Watkins, 2004): can they not have a spatial location and still be unextended? Which, then, would imply that, since, as physical points, monads too are capable of motion in the way bodies are, the picture of interaction could very well apply to monads—one physical point could push another physical point to move, for example. I have then shown that a direptive account of intersubstantial transmission could actually turn Leibniz’s attack towards influxionists against himself, unless the metaphysical machinery underlying his account is explained. IV. Is Pre-Established Harmony an Improvement? Leibniz’s pre-established harmony makes use of an emanative account as well (Duncan, 2015). It claims that (1) God’s emanative influence is continual, and (2) God does not lose any power, essence or virtue to the creature in the process, because it does not give a part of itself (Mercer, 2008). Notice that the first point is identical with the second feature of corpuscularianism as outlined in O’Neill in an above subsection. Mercer (2008) writes of his emanative theory that “the attributes exist in the products in a manner inferior to the way in which they exist in the Divine. God has the form or Idea perfectly; creature has it imperfectly.” So like, the Neoplatonists and Scholastics, Leibniz endorses a model where what is “emanated” is a replica of itself. In effect, it would indicate that it was because Leibniz adopted their account of emanation that he had to give another account of the metaphysical mechanism underlying causation—which means, it has not targeted a more convincing model of interactionism, i.e. the atomistic-corpuscular model. With this in mind, 7 it is doubtful whether we could call pre-established harmony an improvement, given interactionism can in fact be redeemed, as I have shown. However, when we consider God’s divine volition and CCC, pre-established harmony does have an edge—in direptive influxionism, causes are direpted from the agent substance, and so are diminished in the process. Given God is the First Cause of everything, does this not contradict the notion that he is continually creating by conserving the existence of creatures? It means that either God’s influence would wane gradually and ultimately exhaust itself, which would be absurd given his omnipotence; or, conservation is not continual creation, whereby CCC is rejected altogether, which would be just as unacceptable by Leibniz. Occasionalism I turn now to the discussion of occasionalism, another theory of causation that Leibniz targeted: in particular we will consider Malebranche’s account. I. Malebranche’s Occasionalism Lee (2019) outlines two tenets: 1. God is the only genuine cause. 2. No creaturely cause is a genuine cause but at most an occasional cause. I specify the Malebranchean version, as it is stronger than other forms of occasionalism. 8 II. Objections Leibniz’s objections can be summarised as follows: 1. Occasionalism runs the risk of committing to the idea that God perpetually creates miracles; since he must act for creatures without causal power—which is all of them. 2. Occasionalism requires that God constantly intervene, disrupting the laws of nature. 3. Occasionalism is dangerously close to Spinozism, that is, they may have to deny that there are two distinct types of substances. III. Two Readings of CCC In responding to Leibniz’s third objection, Malebranche invokes traditional Christian metaphysics and writes that these creatures are conserved in existence only because God continues, actively, to preserve them (Rutherford, 1993). This is crucial for the preservation of CCC: his interpretation of CCC is that conservation is in fact continuous re -creation, as all apparent causes in the world are in actuality caused by God. We have here, then, an important interpretive distinction—occasionalists and concurrentists (represented by Leibniz) give di ff erent readings of CCC so as to justify 4 their positions: occasionalists take the continuous creation in conservation to have qualitative identity with creation ex nihilo , that is, what God does after creation to conserve the existence of creature requires just as much e ff ort as his act of creation, reading CCC in such a way that it supports their case; whereas concurrentists maintain that God does less in conservation than in creation, but this need not entail the Concurrentists maintain that God causes all creatures, but at the same time creatures have 4 secondary causes on their own. 9 redundancy of God’s volition after creation, rather, they propose that we look at the acts of creation and conservation as a continuous whole, that is, one numeric identity, preserving CCC despite their position. I fi nd the concurrentist reading to be unsatisfactory. For even if they consider the acts of creation and conservation as one single act, it does not do away with the problem that what God does in the two phases di ff er in terms of qualitative, perhaps even quantitative, e ff ort—while creation is the production of substances ex nihilo , whereby substances come into being, conservation is just the preservation of such state of a ff airs—and so God’s in fl uence is markedly diminished. Via this line of argument, we may come to prefer the qualitative identity reading over the numeric identity reading. Occasionalists can then establish that God must act by a continuous series of volitions at all times, such that there are no secondary causes. Now, Leibniz’s objection was that occasionalists must deny the existence of two distinct substances, in order to deny that creatures have genuine causal power, which is to say that they do not satisfy the conditions of persistence and independence constitutive of substantial being (Rutherford, 1993). Despite the interpretive advantage, occasionalists still do not provide a solution to this challenge, and they are yet to give an account that does not lapse into Spinozism. IV. Is Pre-Established Harmony an Improvement? The fi rst and second objections are related in that the former builds on the latter: that occasionalism entails perpetual miracles is based on the assumption that nature has to be intelligible—because Leibniz takes miracles to mean anything that occurs 10 supernaturally, defying general laws—and Leibniz thinks occasionalists fail to account for causation in a way that makes nature intelligible. But cannot occasionalists simply deny that nature be intelligible? After all, occasionalists explain the perfection of the world with God’s divine will throughout his conservation of his creation, whereas Leibniz turns to the intrinsic order God embeds into creatures, as we just saw. The two are then arguing from di ff erent interpretations of God’s way of working. Bearing this in mind, it is hard to evaluate whether Leibniz’s theory is an improvement on the occasionalist account. But given our evaluative criterion of intelligibility, which demands that the relations between all creatures be cogitable in God’s mind—even if occasionalists argue that things needs only be intelligible for God and not for us—the occasionalist’s account would be an obscure argument. On this view, pre-established harmony seems to have some advantage over occasionalism. Now, turning back to the third objection: we ended with the conclusion that occasionalists have yet to give an account of causation that does not lead to Spinozism. However, is Leibniz’s system better? Leibniz seeks to avoid the problem by giving an account were an inherent law is inscribed into substances by God in creation. But this, again, brings us to the problem of whether Leibniz’s interpretations of God’s conservation and CCC are feasible, since in order to defend his system, Leibniz has to interpret CCC in such a way that conservation and creation are just two di ff erent phases of one act, as I have already shown to be problematic. So we run into the same problem again. Conclusion 11 In my discussion, I have shown that there seems to be no de fi nitive answer as to whether pre-established harmony is an improvement upon interactionism or occasionalism— because his rivalry with both interactionism and occasionalism concern some fundamental interpretive di ff erences: the defence of interactionism against pre- established harmony, grounded in interpreting Leibnizian metaphysics, actually raises some explicatory questions left for Leibnizians to answer, which have to do with the metaphysical machinery governing the convertibility of laws between those of monads and those of bodies. Against occasionalism, too, Leibniz’s arguments are not without fl aws: they keep running into the problem of how a concurrentist could give a satisfactory interpretation of CCC. Considering that Leibniz bases his very concept of harmony on the notion of intelligibility—that the order and relations that hold between created substances and explicate the conformity in the world should be intelligible—these present serious di ffi culties for his system, given the interactionists’ and occasionalists’ counter-attacks, which concern problems of interpretation and intelligibility. It seems, then, that pre- established harmony is not so clearly an improvement upon interactionism or occasionalism. Bibliography Bobro, M. (2022). Leibniz on Causation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) . Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-causation/ Duncan, S. (2015). Leibniz on the Expression of God. 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