Pre-established Harmony

PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY. - It is a doctrine — or hypothesis — central to Leibniz, which, although it has various historical roots (Pythagorean harmony, Platonic mimesis of ideas in things, the Scholastic doctrine of analogy, the problem of predestination in 17th-century theology, etc.), is specifically grounded on the platform of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes in fact, with his dualism of res cogitans and res extensa, had split the substantial human unity into two complete substances, soul and body, each with perfectly heterogeneous attributes and laws. Their reciprocal influence thus became impossible, and there arose the problem of rationally explaining that relationship between them which experience nonetheless attests. Working on this Cartesian basis, Malebranche had appealed to the causality of God, operating in bodies and in spirits on the occasion of certain of their modifications (occasionalism, v.); while Spinoza had concluded in the pantheistic monism of a single substance, expressible and conceivable under different attributes, whose modifications correspond to one another in parallel series (parallelism of the modes of extension and of thought). Leibnizian speculation introduces critical corrections and contributions of original motifs. It criticizes Descartes, radicalizing his demands with the observation that the soul not only cannot increase the quantity of motion existing in bodies, but cannot even alter its direction; it integrates him, overcoming his mechanism and rationalism, with the vindication of the unity and finality of the organic body and with the broadening of the intellectualistic mens into an anima also furnished with subconsciousness. It criticizes Malebranche, observing to him that that recourse, case by case, to the direct intervention of God postulates more or less a continuous miracle. Against Spinoza it asserts the undeniable existence of a pluralism of active or conscious centers, that is, of substantial and microcosmic monads. There remains unshaken, however, the persuasion (metaphysical and methodological) that an influence between monad and monad, or between mechanical laws and vital laws and spiritual laws, is impossible. So that, in order to explain the consensus or the correspondence between body and soul and between monad and monad, there remains only the hypothesis of a p. h.: God, that is, has so contrived from the beginning, once and for all, the elements and the nexus of the existing world, that every monad, at every moment of its independent and spontaneous development, agrees with the contemporary state of the universe (recall the comparison of the clocks, a little mechanical, but precisely for that reason significant).

It is easy to guess what discussions such a doctrine was bound to provoke: discussions that continued in various directions for more than thirty years in the world of philosophers and theologians. The principal difficulty raised against it stemmed from the concern to safeguard the freedom of the human will, effectively compromised by such a prospect governed by a rigorous and refined rationalistic mentality. Soon, however, after the middle of the 18th century, upon the accusations, the defenses, and the attempts at contamination and conciliation by the epigones there supervened a transfiguration of the problem, due to the resolution of Leibnizian rationalism into idealism. In Kant and in the great systematizers of idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), with the subjectivization of the corporeal world and with the absorption of the monadic egos into the transcendental ego, the very terms of the p. h. came to be emptied out and to fail; although on the other hand the problems of the p. h. reappeared to fertilize idealistic transcendental subjectivity and almost to overcome certain of its dead points (especially in Kant's Critique of Judgment and in Schelling).

Mariano Campo