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Articles

Leibniz & the Infinite Mechanism of Life

Audrey Borowski peers into the infinity inside all organisms, including us.

Far from shunning the infinite as his philosophical predecessors Pascal and Descartes had done, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) embraced and celebrated it, seeing it as a mark of the divine. According to him, the infinite permeated reality, in the microscopic as well as in the infinitely large, in such a manner that “every particle of the universe contains a world of an infinity of creatures” (Leibniz, Collected Papers and Letters, Series 6, Volume 4, 1647-8).

Leibniz was writing at a time of intellectual upheaval. The early Seventeenth Century had ushered in an era of scientific discoveries and innovations – an era in which mechanism, as exemplified by clockwork, had emerged as the privileged conceptual tool through which to elucidate and grasp the cosmos, the state, and even the human body. The application of this mechanized world picture to life was pioneered by René Descartes, who in his Treatise on Man of 1637 effectively equated living bodies to complex automata.

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