Souls, Animals and Physics

0. More on life and machines.

1. The origin of the soul.

Philosophers have struggled with the question of the origin of the soul.  Some have said that human souls are created by God at the beginning of the human being’s existence.  Other said that they splinter off from the souls of the parents.

Leibniz thinks that the very same problem is to be found with the origin of non-human souls.  The medievals thought there was a significant difference between the human soul and the soul of an animal, because the human soul is capable of apprehending universals, i.e., abstract concepts such as horse or seven, and universals are immaterial and hence they thought that the human soul had to be less tightly bound up with materiality than an animal soul, and hence there was more of a difficulty as to how it originated.  But Leibniz thinks there is only a difference in degree between different kinds of souls.

Leibniz sees three solutions.  Either souls come from other souls.  But that requires causation between different monads, and he doesn’t buy that.  Or God makes each soul.  But that involves constant miracles, and Leibniz doesn’t like that.  Or all the souls that exist have existed from the beginning, pre-programmed to come into fruition now.

Leibniz accepts that there are spermatic animals—presumably found in the sperm—which become the human beings.  These spermatic animals have their own central monads, and their central monads become the central monads of the humans.  Thus, the origin of the soul is solved: the soul has existed since the start of the universe and will always exist.

So, we pre-existed, as spermatic animals, our conception.  We existed when the world started.

Do all the spermatic animals become human?  Here’s what Leibniz writes to Bourget: “Your conjecture that every human spermatic animal in the end comes to be rational is ingenious;  but I do not see it at all as necessary.   If many of them should remain simple animals, there would be no evil at all in that.” (G III, p. 579.)

This theory may seem to be ethically problematic.  Suppose I was once such a creature, then were you to have hurt or harmed such a creature, you would have been hurting or harming me.  And that surely would be just as wrong as hurting or harming me now—the victim is the same.  We were somewhere in Leibniz’s time.  Where?  Maybe in the testicles of our ancestors along the male line.  It would have been wrong to harm us back then.  Suppose now that in fact things turned out a little differently and we had never developed into full rational beings, but stayed at the level of spermatic beings—maybe someone further down the line just never had any children.  Hurting us wouldn’t have been any less of an evil back then, just because we wouldn’t develop.  After all, it would be the same kind of a victim, still.  How evil it is to hurt someone doesn’t depend on what will happen to the individual in the future: it just depends on the individual’s present and past states. 

This has the following absurd consequence: Cremation of men is wrong, and one has a duty to rescue a corpse from a fire even at significant risk of bodily injury.  For if you cremate a man, presumably you hurt all the spermatic animals in his testicles.  These spermatic animals are beings just like we used to be.  If it was wrong to hurt us back then—as it surely was since it was we—then it is wrong to hurt them.  Of course, one might insist that the spermatic animals don’t feel any pain when they are cremated.  They are very small, of course.

But now consider something else.  Maybe by not feeding me certain nutrients, my parents could have arrested my intellectual development in childhood.  If so, then they would have done wrong.  We need to supply people with whatever they need for full human development.  If my parents failed to give me these nutrients, they would have deprived me of intellectual development, and that is wrong.  But now suppose instead a different thing.  My great-grandfather, along the male line, decided never to reproduce.  Then, this would have also deprived me of intellectual development: I existed in him, and he would have neglected to give me intellectual development.  The harm to me would have been even greater than if my parents failed to nourish me, since if my intellectual development were stunted, I still would have had some intellect, while if my great-grandfather had never reproduced, my intellectual development would not have occurred at all.  Thus, it seems that Leibniz’s theory not only implies that contraception is wrong—there is nothing absurd about that, and like every other Christian in his time he probably thought that—but that abstinence in marriage is wrong, and indeed that one ought to have as many children as one can possibly physically have, because otherwise one is holding back spermatic animals from the fullness of their intellectual development.

Leibniz, however, would disagree with the above absurdity-finding.  For, Leibniz might well say that we had no rights when we were spermatic animals.  Even though metaphysically, the spermatic animals had the same souls as we do, they were not morally the same individual.  Recall how I started the argument: The spermatic animal back then was I.  But for moral identity, Leibniz thinks one needs to have a psychological continuity of memory.  So morally that animal was not I.

• Suppose Leibniz offers you a deal.  You can be king of China, with all the privileges and riches appertaining thereto.  But there is a price.  You must submit to having your memory wiped before hand.  Would we go for it?  Leibniz thinks we shouldn’t.  For even though metaphysically we would be the same being, we would not morally count as the same being.  From our subject standpoint, it would be just as if we were suddenly killed, and a king of China came into existence right after that.  It would not matter to us.
• Thus, for moral identity, Leibniz thinks we need the continuity of memory.
• But now consider the following variant.  You are going to the hospital.  The surgeon tells you that he’s run out of anesthetic.  But fortunately for you, he has an amnesia-inducing drug and an anti-amnesia drug.  His plan is that he’ll give you a shot of the amnesia drug just before the surgery: you will at that point forget everything you knew before.  Then he’ll do the surgery, without any anesthesia.  And after that, he’ll inject the anti-amnesia drug which will wipe away all your memory of the operation, and restore the pre-operative memory.  The surgeon insists that this is just as good as anesthesia.  After all, even though the patient will writhe in horrific pain during the surgery, it won’t be you writhing.  Because of your anesthesia, you won’t have, in Leibniz’s terminology, moral identity with the person writhing.  And you won’t remember writhing.  Sounds like a good deal?  I expect not.
• Note the nominalism behind Leibniz’s views.  Nominalism denies there are such things as natural kinds or species of beings.  All there are beings, and the classification of these beings is entirely arbitrary and up to us.  Leibniz does not want to make a big deal of things like species.  If he did, then he would have to treat our spermatic animals as members of the same species as we are, as beings of the same kind.  But he doesn’t want to do that. 

2. Appetitions, perceptions and final causes. Freedom as bound up with final causes.

3. Mechanism.

• Leibniz’s view of physics, like that of Descartes, is mechanistic.  Physical reality is a giant machine, made of various parts that push and pull against each other.  On Leibniz’s view, some of these parts are fluid.  And unlike in Descartes, L. thinks this is ultimately grounded in a reality that consists only of monads.
• Descartes had a geometric physics.  He thought that he could derive everything from the geometry of physical objects.  If this was true, then the laws of physics would have the same logical status as the laws of geometry: they would be metaphysically or logically necessary.
• Leibniz noted, however, that this was not so.  Descartes’ laws of motion were incorrect.  In particular, Descartes did not see the “law of conservation of force”.  By “force”, Leibniz means what we call “energy”, and he argues that this is proportional to the mass of an object and to the square of its velocity.  One way to argue for the latter claim is just to notice that if we toss an object up in the air, the height it will reach is proportional to the square of the velocity with which we throw it up—and surely the height is a good measure of the “energy”.
• Leibniz notes we cannot geometrically derive such things as inertia or that one body gives momentum to another.  Sure, energy is conserved.  But it need not be so.  There is no geometric proof of this.  The proof comes from the metaphysical principle that whatever power there is in one object that collides with another, this power will not disappear, but any part that leaves the first object will go to the second.  This is how it is in the best, most elegant universe.  This may be morally necessary, but it’s not metaphysically necessary.
• There must be more to matter, L. insists, than mere extension.  Mere extension has no properties sufficient for deriving laws of motion.  Matter must have conatus, an active force, a striving to resist the motion of other things and to impart its motion to other things—think of inertia.
• Basically, L. is noting that the laws of nature are not laws of logic.  And he thinks this gives another argument for the existence of God.  The laws of nature are so nicely adjusted.  Logically, they could have been different.  What makes them be as they are?  God.
• Besides all of which, L. notes that Descartes’ physics violates the principle of continuity.  Descartes thinks that when a lighter body hits a heavier one, the heavier is not moved at all.  But if a body of equal weight hits a body of equal weight, there is movement.  Thus, there is a big difference between what happens when a body of mass 0.9999 pounds hits a body of 1.0000 pounds and what happens when two bodies of mass 1.0000 pounds hit.
• Though Newton also disagreed with Descartes’ physics, L. disagreed with Newton.  Newton believed in action at a distance: the sun affects the most distant planet instantly, and if it moved, the planets would instantly change direction.  L. thought this was incomprehensible.  But why?  On his monadic system, there is no real causation between things, only a pre-established harmony of coordinated movements.  And the latter could exist for widely separated objects, it would seem.
• This is a puzzle.  I know of two possible solutions.  The first is that L. simply thinks it’s a fact about us that we wouldn’t understand a motion at a distance.  Mechanical explanation is an extremely clear form of explanation.  Once you see how the parts in a mousetrap fit together, you understand the mousetrap really well—much better than you understand gravity, even if you know all the mathematics of it through-and-through.  Our minds, perhaps, are built so as to analyze mechanisms.  God wouldn’t create a world where we couldn’t understand forces of nature.
• But there is another answer.  And to see that answer, we will need to look at Leibniz’s views of the nature of space.

4. Bipartite.

• As in the case of Parmenides, we have a two-part system: a metaphysical account of reality in terms of monads (except that Parmenides thought there was only one of them) and a physical account of the appearances of things—both agree that things like tables and chairs are mere appearances, figments of perceivers’ perceptions.  However, while in Parmenides there was no connection between the metaphysical reality and the appearances, in Leibniz the latter are grounded in the mutually coordinated perceptions of the monads.  In Leibniz, when I say there is a table there, I am not saying a falsehood: I am talking about the network of monadic perceptions throughout the universe having a perception of the table there.  Physical reality is a figment of perceivers’ perceptions, but not just of the mind: of everything’s perceptions.  The table perceives itself, after all, and is not just a figment of our imagination.