Why think that substances express their causes?

[Cross-posted from modsquad.]

Leibniz thought (at least sometimes) that substances express God, because they express their causes. But why did he think that substances express their causes? In this post I briefly explore three ways in which we might try to understand his reasons for this.

Version 1: expression and knowledge

The late-1670s note “What is an idea?” (L 207-8, A 6.4.1369-71) provides some possible illumination. In the course of his discussion Leibniz notes that “every entire effect represents the whole cause, for I can always pass from knowledge of such an effect to knowledge of its cause” (L 208). So if we have knowledge of an “entire effect” then we will be able to acquire knowledge of the “whole cause” of that effect. That seems to suggest this argument.

  1. If one has knowledge of an (entire) effect, one can acquire knowledge of its (whole) cause.
  2. That could only be the case if the effect represented the cause. So
  3. All (entire) effects represent their (whole) causes.

Some details about ‘entire’ and ‘whole’ aside, this gets us close to the Discourse’s claim that effects express their causes. Moreover, premise 1 might gain some motivation from widespread views of knowledge and understanding that adhere to or approximate the slogan that to know is to know through causes. On the other hand, this seems not tell us why effects express their causes, even if it does show us that it must be the case that they do. Moreover, this is a text from several years before the Discourse, and it is not so clear that the details of Leibniz’s views of expression (in particular, expression of God) were all that stable over time.

Version 2: the cause-effect relation as a special case of expression

Dan Garber discusses expression in his Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (216-24). Among other things, he argues that “The cause/effect relation is a special case of the expression relation” (218) (basically because expression requires a “constant and fixed” relationship, and causation is such a relationship).

Thinking along this sort of line, we might construct another argument for the claim that effects express their causes.

  1. The relation of expression holds between two things, A and B, when there is a regular relation between them.
  2. The cause-effect relation is an regular relation between two things. So
  3. When two things stand in the cause-effect relation, the relation of expression also hold between them. So
  4. All effects express their causes.

Evaluating this is largely going to be a matter of deciding whether causation is indeed among the ‘regular’ relations that Leibniz says are required for expression. It doesn’t seem to be one of Leibniz’s usual examples. (Though he does, as in DM15, attempt to explain apparent causal relationships, as between two finite substances, in terms of expression.) On the other hand, the expression of God is not a usual example of expression either.

Version 3: expression and complete concepts

There are yet other Leibnizian reasons to think that an effect will express its cause, if one focuses on the Discourse. Indeed we can I think find a complete Leibnizian reason for the view in the Discourse itself.

Consider in particular the views expressed in DM 8 (about complete concepts, etc). There will be true claims of the form ‘S is P’ that relate any substance to God. Suppose for instance that ‘P’ is ‘ultimately an effect of God’. For any created substance this will be true. Thus, by the view about concepts explained in DM 8, ‘ultimately an effect of God’ will be part of the complete concept of every substance. And, indeed, there will be marks and traces in each substance corresponding to this predicate. So we can at least say that each substance represents God. Though we are some distance from talk of functions and isomorphisms, we are, given that expression more or less is representation, at a point at which we might see why Leibniz would say that all substances express God. Thus, we could understand the view that all substances express their causes as a consequence of other Leibnizian views about substances and language.

The importance of expressing causes might appear to be minimal on this reading: substances turn out to express causes simply because they express everything that stands in any relation to them (not just a regular one, whatever that is). On the other hand, as a reading of the Discourse, or or Leibniz’s views in 1686, this approach has the (slight?) advantage that the resources for explaining why Leibniz thought that substances express their causes are contained in the text itself. This being the reason also fits nicely with the view (that all individual substance express God) being present in Leibniz’s “Primary Truths” essay, which attempts to ground many Leibnizian views in his views about language. And it might also help explain why the expression of God is not a persistent feature of Leibniz’s statements about substances — as the DM8 view tends to disappear, this view of all substances as expressing God might naturally tend to disappear with it.

Leibniz on substances’ expression of God

[Cross-posted from modsquad.]

Leibniz frequently uses the notion of expression. Expression is apparently a sort of representation relation. But what, according to Leibniz, has to happen for one thing to express another? Well, what often seems clear is the requirement that there be a regular relation between the expresser and the expressed. We might understand the debates in the secondary literature on this topic as largely about how exactly to understand Leibniz’s notion of a regular relation. There has been, for example, debate about whether expression is isomorphism. (See among others Kulstad, Mates, Simmons, and Swoyer.)

The most discussed examples of expression are cases like an ellipse expressing a circle and a map expressing a piece of land. But Leibniz puts the notion of expression to a variety of other uses. Among them is his claim that some, or perhaps all, substances express God. Thus in the Discourse on Metaphysics we learn that “God’s Extraordinary Concourse Is Included in That Which Our Essence Expresses…” (DM 16 title); that “our soul … express[es] God and, with him, all possible and actual beings, just as an effect expresses its cause (DM 29); that “Minds Express God Rather Than the World, but That the Other Substances Express the World Rather Than God” (DM 35 title); and that “we may say that, although all substances express the whole universe, nevertheless the other substances express the world rather than God, while minds express God rather than the world” (DM 36).

This issue of the expression of God has been rather less discussed than expression in general. However in one relatively recent discussion, Alan Nelson says that “…spirits express God in virtue of being able to know eternal truths” (“Leibniz on Modality, Cognition, and Expression”, 284). That is, only some substances (spirits) express God. And they do this by being able to know eternal truths. In this post and a couple of following ones I want to consider both the suggested restriction to some substances, and the reasons why substances express God. I pay particular attention to the 1686 Discourse on Metaphysics.

A first question then: why, according to Leibniz, should we think that minds express God? Well, DM 16 tells us that “an effect always expresses its cause and God is the true cause of substances”. Given that, we can construct the following argument:

  1. An effect always expresses its cause.
  2. Every substance is an effect of God. So
  3. Every substance expresses God.

Similarly, Leibniz said — in some comments about expression in a letter written that year to Simon Foucher — that “Each effect expresses its cause, and the cause of each substance is the decision which God took to create it” (WFNS 53; A 2.2, p.91). That suggests a slight variant on the above argument:

  1. An effect always expresses its cause.
    2*. Every substance is an effect of God’s resolution to create it. So
    3* Every substance expresses God’s resolution to create it.

Despite some variation in exactly what is said to be expressed — which may not even be real disagreement, without a more detailed understanding of what it means to express God — we have very similar argument in both cases here. Substances express God, because God is their cause. Moreover, all substances do this, not just minds.

More posts to come on this: on why Leibniz thinks that substances express their causes; on the passages in the Discourse that distinguish minds from other substances; and on the extent, if any, to which Leibniz maintained this view over time.

Pasnau, Hobbes, and substance

[Cross-posted from http://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/pasnau-hobbes-and-substance/.]

Robert Pasnau, in his Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671, draws attention to two ways in which we find Hobbes talking about substance. One is found in De Corpore, among other texts. On this, “there is no room for metaphysical entities like the thin substance and its inhering accidents” (Pasnau 117). Indeed Hobbes wrote against Bramhall that nothing could be compounded of substance and accident. However we also find Hobbes talking about substance in the earlier Third Objections, and there he appears more open to a substance-accident distinction and to accidents as “metaphysical parts” of things. Hobbes says there that “all philosophers distinguish the subject from its faculties and acts” and that “even the old Peripatetics taught clearly enough that substance is not perceived by the senses but is inferred by reasoning” (Pasnau 137). This suggests a picture on which we perceive accidents and infer the existence of the (underlying) body, contrary to the first picture. So how do the two ways of talking about substance fit together? Continue reading “Pasnau, Hobbes, and substance”

What does Cavendish’s supernatural soul do?

[Cross-posted from http://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/supernatural-soul-2/.]

One of Margaret Cavendish’s longer discussions of the supernatural soul comes towards the end of part 2 of the Philosophical Letters [PL], where she discusses the work of Henry More. Unlike More, who believes in natural, extended, incorporeal spirits, we ought — Cavendish thinks — to distinguish between natural and supernatural souls. Natural souls are indeed extended, but are corporeal. Supernatural souls are something else entirely. But what are they? At times, Cavendish appears inclined to say that we simply cannot say what the supernatural soul is, only that it is. Thus PL 2.29 begins “Touching the State or Condition of the Supernatural and Divine Soul, both in, and after this life, I must crave your excuse that I can give no account of it”. And the remainder of that letter is partly occupied with listing topics that we should not meddle with, some of which are “Poetical Fancy”. Elsewhere she offers reasons why we cannot, at least naturally, know anything about this soul. But Cavendish is nevertheless sometimes more forthcoming about what the supernatural soul is like.

Some seemingly relevant passages — the passages featuring immaterial spirits in the Blazing World — contain her own fancies. These passages are certainly related to philosophical discussion, but we cannot simply read statements about Cavendish’s views about immaterial beings out of that fictional work. They would contradict things she clearly states elsewhere, in her more directly philosophical writings. For example, the immaterial spirits in the Blazing World talk about the “corporeal vehicles” that they require, but in PL 2.29 Cavendish lists the vehicles of souls as among the things to be taken “rather for Poetical Fictions, then Rational Probabilities; containing more Fancy, then Truth and Reason, whether they concern the divine or natural Soul”.

Leaving the fiction and fancy aside, however, Cavendish did venture some claims about what the supernatural soul is like.

Continue reading “What does Cavendish’s supernatural soul do?”

Cavendish and the divine, supernatural, immaterial soul

[Crossposted from http://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/cavendish-and-the-supernatural-soul/.]

Despite her materialism about nature, and her related view that the human mind is corporeal, Margaret Cavendish thought that human beings also have a divine and supernatural soul, which is not corporeal. There are plenty of questions one might ask about this, but for now I just want to ask when she thought this, and whether and why she changed her mind about the issue.

The view that there is such a soul is most prominent in two works of the 1660s in which Cavendish engages with the work of other philosophers, the Philosophical Letters (1664) and the Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). The first engages with the work of Descartes, Hobbes, More, J.B. van Helmont, and others. The Observations engages with, among others, experimental philosophers such as Hooke and Power.

In the Letters we learn that the natural mind is material: “For the Natural Mind is not less material then the body, onely the Matter of the Mind is much purer and subtiller then the Matter of the Body. And thus there is nothing in Nature but what is material” (PL 2.6, 149). However, there is also another human soul: a “Divine Soul, which is not subject to natural imperfections, and corporeal errors, being not made by Nature, but a supernatural and divine gift of the Omnipotent God, who surely will not give any thing that is not perfect” (PL 2.26, 209-10). Similarly in the Observations: “The spiritual or divine soul in man is not natural, but supernatural, and has also a supernatural way of residing in man’s body; for place belongs only to bodies, and a spirit being bodiless, has no need of a bodily place (p. 79).

There are, as I said, plenty of questions about this. But for now I just want to notice that Cavendish seems not to always to have said this. To see this, one can look at another group of her works, a series of four books — or, we might say, four versions of the same book — in which she sets out her own views in natural philosophy.

Continue reading “Cavendish and the divine, supernatural, immaterial soul”

Cavendish, strings, and sympathy

At one point, ‘sympathy’ seems to have been (largely?) a name for a physical phenomenon, and a certain sort of explanation of that phenomenon (see this earlier post on More and Mersenne). Over time, ‘sympathy’ seems to have become more exclusively used to describe a psychological phenomenon (e.g., Hume, Smith). I’m curious about how sympathy moved from being one thing to the other. Even Hume uses an ancient example of physical sympathy to illustrate the psychological sort: “As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature” (Treatise 3.3.1.7). Well before Hume, however, we seem to find find Margaret Cavendish, in an early poem, explicitly making the connection between the two sorts of sympathy.

According as the Notes in Musicke agree with the Motions of the Heart, or Braine, Such Passions are produced thereby.

IN Musicke, if the Eighths tun’d Equall are,
If one be strucke, the other seemes to jarre.
So the Heart-strings, if equally be stretch’d,
To those of Musick, Love from thence is fetch’d.
For when one’s strucke, the other moves just so,
And with Delight as evenly doth go.

(Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), p.40. )

Toland and testimony

Thinking about a comment of Eric Schliesser’s about “Toland’s defense of book learning against the distrust of it by Moderns” reminded me of a feature of Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious [CNM] that I find a little puzzling.

Early in Christianity not Mysterious Toland seems largely to be summarizing familiar Lockean views from the Essay. Thus he tells us, for example, that “all our Knowledg is, in effect, nothing else but the Perception of the Agreement or Disagreement of our Ideas in a greater or lesser Number, whereinsoever this Agreement or Disagreement may consist. And because this Perception is immediate or mediate, our Knowledg is twofold” (CNM Sect. I, ch. ii; p.12). Toland thus echoes Locke’s claim in Essay IV.i.2 that “Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connecxion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas“, as well as his later distinction between intuitive and demonstrative knowledge.

Toland goes on, in the next chapter, to talk a little about testimony. Now Locke has often seemed to be highly individualistic about knowledge (at least in his theoretical discussions in the Essay). Either your ideas agree or they don’t, and what other people say doesn’t have anything to do with it.[1] Toland however appears to give testimony a more central role.

Continue reading “Toland and testimony”

Cudworth and basic obligations

In my previous post, I looked at Cudworth’s argument that good and evil (and other moral features) cannot arise from decision alone, for something good cannot simply be made good by decision, without being also given the underlying nature of a good thing. Of course, his opponents have some possible responses open to them. Not all obligations, they might well argue, arise from the natures of the things we’re obliged to do. For instance, if I promise to do X, there may be nothing in X considered alone that makes it obligatory. But it nevertheless is obligatory, just because I promised to do it.

Cudworth does respond to that argument. He concedes something to the objection, but thinks that enough remains of his argument to show that Hobbes et al are mistaken.

For though it will be objected here, that when God, or civil powers command a thing to be done, that was not before obligatory or unlawful … the thing willed or commanded doth forthwith become obligatory … And therefore if all good and evil, just and unjust be not the creatures of mere will (as many assert) yet at least positive things must needs owe all their morality, their good and evil, to mere will without nature (TEIM 18).

Continue reading “Cudworth and basic obligations”

Cudworth, tautologies, and natures

Prompted by Lewis’s mention of Cudworth, a post or two on Cudworth’s most famous argument.

Book 1 of Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality [TEIM] contains a relatively short, and apparently free-standing, argument that morality cannot arise merely from decisions, either human or divine. Hobbes is among Cudworth’s targets, but so are Descartes and others. But some commentators have thought the the crucial passage in Cudworth’s text fails to do what he thinks it does, because it is merely tautological. Thus Zagorin (1992, 131-2): “As John Tulloch pointed out in his classic study of the Cambridge Platonists, Cudworth failed to realize that he was guilty of a tautology” (cf. Passmore 1990, 41-2).

The central passage in Cudworth’s argument is the following:

Continue reading “Cudworth, tautologies, and natures”

Antarctic sympathy

While looking a little more at early modern texts that talk about sympathy, I came across this (which is apparently distinguished by being the earliest text returned in a search for ‘sympathy’ and its variants in Early English Books Online.)

Likewise néere to this Ilande is founde a kynde of fish, and also vpon the coaste of America very daungerous, also much feared and redoubted of the wilde men, for that she is a rauening fish, and as daungerous as a Lyon or a Woulfe famished: this fish is named Houperou, in their language, and eateth other fish in the water, excepting one that is as greate as a little Carpe the which foloweth him alwayes, as if there were some Sympathia or secrete loue betwene them, or else he foloweth him for to be preserued and kept sure from other fishes.

That comes from pp.117-8 of André Thevet’s The new found worlde, or Antarctike wherin is contained wonderful and strange things… (London, 1568), an English translation of his 1557 Les Singularitez de la France antarctique (EEBO-TCP record). The ‘Antarctike’ here is not the antarctic continent, but France Antarctique, a sixteenth-century French colony in Brazil.

There’s a short biography of Thevet on the English-language Wikipedia, and a rather longer one on the French-language WIkipedia, which also has an article on Les Singularitez de la France antarctique. One can also download scans of the French edition of the book from Gallica, and from a UVa site.