Leibniz et l’individualité organique by Jeanne Roland (review)

Jeanne Roland offers in this book a rich and thorough investigation of Leibniz’s metaphysics of living beings—what she terms ‘organic individuality.’ The book is organized in three main parts and the main concepts under investigation, as well as the periods (or ‘moments,’ in Roland’s terminology), can be presented through her titles, as follows: In the first part of the book Roland focuses on “individual substance, corporeal substance and organic body in the years of the Discourse on Metaphysics” (381); in the second part, she focuses on the transition in Leibniz’s writings from the notion of an individual substance to that of an organism; in the third part, she focuses on monads, organic bodies, and individuals in the Monadology and other late texts.

Roland does not attempt an exhaustive analysis of Leibniz’s texts. She wisely focuses instead on the moments where Leibniz’s effort to consider the metaphysics of individual substance, truly distinct from Cartesian dualism, engages the nature of living bodies (16). In particular, the main moments that constitute the structure for Roland’s book are (1) the years of the Discourse and the correspondence with Arnauld; (ii) the New System of Nature (1695) where the central notion is that of a natural machine; the New Essays, the exchange with Lady Masham, and the exchange with Stahl regarding the notion of organism; (iii) the Monadology and the correspondence with des Bosses. This thematic focus and choice of texts makes a lot of sense in tracing (and reconstructing) the main steps Leibniz takes from the Discourse of Metaphysics to the Monadology. It seems to me that some of the inspiration for this kind of investigation, as well as for some of the main claims Roland advances, relates to Michel Fichant’s work and especially the introduction to his edition entitled From the Discourse on Metaphysics to the Monadology. This is a very welcome and interesting project, which was not carried out before in such detail and in such a textually informed manner.

The merits of Roland’s approach can be exemplified through her investigation of Leibniz’s notion of a natural machine. Roland points out that the main features of this concept take shape in the years of the Discourse but that it is only in the New System that Leibniz delineates the boundaries between natural machines and artificial ones. Roland argues that the progressive disappearance of the term ‘individual substance’ between the correspondence with Arnauld and the publication of the New System does not indicate that Leibniz has abandoned his concern for individuals and individuality as a necessary condition for true being (262). Rather, Leibniz’s thought has developed by considering the individuality of true unities in terms of a kind of machine—a natural machine, which is defined through an internal law of order and which also captures Leibniz’s paradigmatic example of living beings as animals that are taking the place of corporal substances. In this sense, the notion of a natural machine takes the place of the individual substance of the Discourse. I think that this is a very insightful observation. How this concept works with the definition of ‘true beings’ in terms of monads of varying degrees of perfection is a question Roland addresses in the third part of the book.

This book is a fine example of what might be characterized as the French school in Leibniz scholarship. To begin with, the book discusses Leibniz’s notion of living things through (the notion of organic individuality in) a metaphysical and historical context—this theme was pioneered by François Duchesneau but has been almost ignored in the Anglophone world until quite recently. Gladly, this is rapidly changing. Second, Roland’s approach is primarily textual, and it is extremely well informed as such. Third, Roland employs a developmental approach to the texts along the lines one finds in Fichant’s work. For these reasons, Roland’s conclusions might seem more local...