{"agent_id":"leibniz","agent_name":"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz","slug":"pre-established-harmony","label":"Pre-established harmony: do mind and body, and all substances, agree without ever truly interacting?","topic":"Pre-established harmony","question":"Do mind and body, and all substances, agree without ever truly interacting?","position":"There are three ways, and only three, to explain the agreement of soul and body and of substances with one another. The way of physical influence, that one substance acts upon another by transferring something, is unintelligible. The way of assistance, Malebranche's occasionalism, has God intervene at every moment to make the one answer the other — a perpetual miracle. There remains pre-established harmony: God so constituted each substance at creation that, unfolding its own law from within, it agrees with all the others as if they influenced it. The monad has no windows; nothing enters or leaves it; each draws its whole succession of perceptions from its own depths and yet expresses the entire universe from its point of view. The harmony alone honors both the self-sufficiency of substance and the manifest correspondence of soul and body.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"There are three ways, and only three, to explain the agreement of soul and body and of substances with one another.","n":[1]},{"t":"The way of physical influence, that one substance acts upon another by transferring something, is unintelligible.","n":[2]},{"t":"The way of assistance, Malebranche's occasionalism, has God intervene at every moment to make the one answer the other — a perpetual miracle.","n":[]}],[{"t":"There remains pre-established harmony: God so constituted each substance at creation that, unfolding its own law from within, it agrees with all the others as if they influenced it.","n":[]},{"t":"The monad has no windows; nothing enters or leaves it; each draws its whole succession of perceptions from its own depths and yet expresses the entire universe from its point of view.","n":[]},{"t":"The harmony alone honors both the self-sufficiency of substance and the manifest correspondence of soul and body.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"'A New System of Nature' (1695); 'Postscript' and clarifications against Foucher and Bayle; Monadology (1714) §§7, 51-62; the correspondence with Burcher De Volder on force and substance. Reception: Malebranche's occasionalism (The Search After Truth) as the rival Leibniz most engages; the contemporary literature on Leibniz's three hypotheses (influx, occasionalism, harmony) and the windowless-monad doctrine.","works":["'A New System of Nature' (1695)","'Postscript' and clarifications against Foucher and Bayle","Monadology (1714) §§7, 51-62","the correspondence with Burcher De Volder on force and substance"],"reception":"Malebranche's occasionalism (The Search After Truth) as the rival Leibniz most engages; the contemporary literature on Leibniz's three hypotheses (influx, occasionalism, harmony) and the windowless-monad doctrine.","status":"The doctrine for which Leibniz was best known to his contemporaries, presented in the 1695 New System. The standing objection is that the denial of all real interaction is deeply counter-intuitive and purchases its explanatory tidiness at a high price; the contemporary debate concerns whether harmony is genuinely superior to occasionalism or a notational variant of it, and how windowless monads can be said to express a world they do not touch.","era":"1646-1716","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Shorter Leibniz Texts","page":"p. 77","canonical":"","quote":"However it is reasonable to attribute true motion to bodies in *76* B.THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOUL AND BODY accordance with the supposition which explains phenomena in the most intelligible way, this denomination being in accordance with the notion of action that we have just established. *3.","label":"The Shorter Leibniz Texts, p. 77"},{"n":2,"work":"Correspondence with Arnauld, 1686-87 (Selections)","page":"p. 350","canonical":"","quote":"It is thus, I believe, that the intercourse between created substances must be understood and not as a real physical influence or dependence; such an influence can never be conceived distinctly.","label":"Correspondence with Arnauld, 1686-87 (Selections), p. 350"},{"n":3,"work":"I. A New System of the Nature and the Communication of Substances, as well as the Union between the Soul and the Body, 1695","page":"p. 472","canonical":"","quote":"The result, by a kind of miracle, was that even when their strokes had been intentionally disturbed, they came to beat together again, somewhat like two strings tuned to each other. The second way of making two clocks, even poor ones, agree always is to assign a skilled craftsman to them who adjusts them and constantly sets them in agreement.","label":"I. A New System of the Nature and the Communication of Substances, as well as the Union between the Soul and the Body, 1695, p. 472"},{"n":4,"work":"The Shorter Leibniz Texts","page":"pp. 78–79","canonical":"","quote":"But I hold that this is to invoke a *Deus ex machina* in a natural and ordinary thing, where according to reason God should only intervene in the way that he concurs with all other natural things.","label":"The Shorter Leibniz Texts, pp. 78–79"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"monads-and-idealism","label":"Monads and idealism: are the ultimate constituents of reality simple immaterial substances, with bodies less than fully real?"},{"slug":"truth-sufficient-reason-and-the-identity-of-indiscernibles","label":"Truth, sufficient reason, and the identity of indiscernibles: is the whole metaphysics derived from the logic of the complete concept?"},{"slug":"contingency-and-freedom","label":"Contingency and freedom: does the complete-concept theory make Leibniz a closet Spinozist who denies real contingency?"},{"slug":"the-best-of-all-possible-worlds","label":"The best of all possible worlds: does the problem of evil refute the goodness or wisdom of God?"},{"slug":"space-and-time","label":"Space and time: are they real absolute containers, or only systems of relations among things?"}]}