The Organic vs. the Living in the Light of Leibniz’s Aristotelianisms

Enrico Pasini argues that the development of Leibniz’s metaphysics during the 1670s and 1680s shows that its core focus is not a theory of substance, but a theory of essence and existence. The theory of substance is a theoretical middle ground that connects pure metaphysics to the epistemic level of natural science, on the one hand through dynamics, and on the other hand through a theory of the composition of substances. The latter in turn is two-sided, with a permanent component, namely, pre-established harmony, and a variety of solutions to the problem of what will be called by Leibniz “composite substance” – as well more generally, as solutions to the “form-matter” problem that is traditional in the theory of substance and that represents a recurring strain of Aristotelianism, with different phases and versions, in Leibniz’s thought. For Pasini, the relation between the dominating monad and the bodily machine is of particular importance in Leibniz’s multi-level monadological universe. Aristotelian conceptual tools are instrumentally used by Leibniz to provide a theory that can describe its metaphysical structure, but at the core of this theory we can find a peculiarly Leibnizian identification of the true living and the vere unum.