Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 303 Catherine Wilson. Leibniz'sMetaphysics:A Historicaland ComparativeStudy. Studies in the Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 199o. Pp. vii + 35o. Cloth, $39.5oIn this lively book, Catherine Wilson analyzes Leibniz's metaphysics "not... as a coUection of theses and principles, but developmentally and thematically." Her "governing assumption" is that the words of a philosopher so distant from us in time "cannot be determined by an internal inspection of his texts" because this method "leaves too much undecided." The resolution of indeterminacies, insofar as it is possible, requires historical and comparative analysis (2). Accordingly, she traces the evolution of Leibniz 's metaphysics while carefully considering how other philosophers contributed to it. Wilson's most distinctive virtue is her great erudition and the range of historical figures she has at her command. She discusses not only the influence on Leibniz of the great thinkers from antiquity to the seventeenth century, but also that of an impressive array of minor figures. Her use of other figures, moreover, is usually very helpful in placing Leibniz in context. On Wilson's analysis, Leibniz emerges as more of a Neo-Platonist than has been thought. Plotinus, we learn, is his "closest philosophical relative": the two share "a vision of the hidden and multiple perfections of the world" (4), the belief that the whole living world divides into living beings and these into ever smaller living beings, and the idea that the universe is a self-creating emanation from the God-head. This last thesis--expressed in Leibniz's conception of possible things as divine ideas endowed with a self-realizing "urge" to exist--was especially offensive to Christians. For it implies that God is the immanent rather than transcendent cause of the world and that the universe "brings itself into existence without the intervention of anything whatsoever analogous to human reasoning and human will." Leibniz was therefore "not eager to advertise" his opinion, which he states plainly in private writings, but elsewhere obscures by combining it with the more conventional thesis of a transcendent God who creates the universe by an act of free will (275-81). Thus, Wilson revives Russell's claim that Leibniz had incompatible accounts of creation, as well as a set of esoteric and exoteric writings.* Another major thesis concerns the nature and fate of doctrines of the Discourse. The Discourseis "not a single system" but three "semi-systems": A, the theory of individual substance, based on Leibniz's containment theory of truth; B, the scholastically inspired theory of corporeal substances, complemented by the v/s viva; and C, the theory of the harmony of perceptions and actions. Metaphysics C "fits together well with A" and "A and B also show points of parallelism," but they form an inconsistent triad (81f.). Leibniz would like to explain the existence of a common world of objects that we refer to in a public language--and metaphysics B provides that world. But A and C, taken together, imply that each substance is dreaming up a world of other ' Unlike Russell, however, she does not think Leibniz was insincere about the free willtheory, but that the divergent views of creation arose from conflicting intellectual commitments (28of.). 304 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL I992 substances whose dreams cohere with its own. Yet one cannot possible construct our world of common reference from a set of harmonizing solipsistic perceptions (ao7f.). The tension between these semi-systems is reflected in Leibniz's inability to decide whether "perceives" is a one-term or a two-term predicate, i.e., "whether it consists in the modification of a conscious subject or in a relation between the subject and some external thing" (81). This indecision also infects his theory of the unreality of relations, which consequently "can be given no sound interpretation" (1 lo). Leibniz's views subsequently underwent many changes. As he became preoccupied with empirical force-concepts, for example, the basis of his metaphysics shifted from the subject/predicate principle of semi-system A to the idea that a substance acts from its "nature," which involves a "force" that gives rise to its states. Although he did not...