VV(11): Any Sovereign or Broken Continental Yo-Yo ...

[Dave Monroe]

"Any sovereign or broken yo-yo" (V., Ch. 8, Sec. i, p. 217)

To continue, from Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery
in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), Chapter 3,
"The Clockwork Universe," pp. 54-101 ...

A central characteristic of the Scientific Revolution was the commitment
of its participants to thinking "mechanically," and ... whenever it was
to be illustrated ... the choice was usually a clock. (54)

Above all, this term signaled a deliberate break with the traditional
scholastic philosophy, with metaphysical speculation, and with the
ancient custom of interpreting nature through magic. (55)

Mechanical, then, in a certain sense was the opposite of magical. (55)

Rene Descartes was the quintessential mechanical philosopher.  Mechanics
for him was the key to the secrets of nature; to him, mechanical meant
machinelike.  And it was the basis of his program to describe "this
earth and all the visible world in general as if it were only a machine
in which there is nothing to consider but the shapes and movements of
its parts" (62)

The cause-and-effect relationships between the wheels, springs, and
weights of machinery were openly visible, unambiguous, and expressible
in mathematical language.  It was Descartes's central belief that causal
relationships of the same kind were the basis of the processes of
nature. (62)

... automata--"self-moving machines" under which clocks were
subsumed--had a special fascination for him. (63)

The "natural bodies" ... to which Descartes applied the machine analogy
so rigorously and consistently throughout all of his writings were the
bodies of animals and humans. (64)

Descartes believed that animals were automata. (64)

Descartes took great care to avoid being interpreted as postulating any
identity of human beings with automata. (64)

... he insisted that there was one fundamental difference between man,
on the one hand, and automata and animals, on the other: man's endowment
with a soul [anima].  This led to the dualistic doctrine of man's two
aspects: the physical aspect of the machinelike body functions and the
spiritual aspect of the functions of the soul, reasons, emotions, and
free will. (65)

Pascal, Huygens, and Spinoza ... (67 ff.)

In his mature years, G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) spoke of the mechanical
philosophy as a phase through which he had passed in his youth....  At
the same time, however, he made such frequent and continuing use of
mechanical imagery and mechanical intellectual models--to say nothing of
his activities as an inventor of actual machinery ... (70)

When one surveys the clock and automaton metaphors in Leibniz's writing,
one can observe a common characteristic: they illustrate processes that
are deterministic.... "preestablished harmony" ... (71)

Leibniz, like the Cartesians, insisted that body and soul were strictly
separate and denied any interaction between the two.  How, then, was the
complete congruity of their actions to be explained?  Leibniz asserted
that both body and soul were programmed ("preformed") at their creation,
like automata, to such perfection that their actions would always be
coordinated in perfect harmony. (71)

Body and soul, then, are two automata programmed separately and
independently but nevertheless working in such perfect coordination that
they seem to form a single unit. (71)

Such determinism clearly excluded any freedom of will. (72)

Freedom, in short, was never more than the illusion of freedom. (72)

... his Monadology (1714).  There he proposed that the universe ... was
made up of a vast number of small force centers, particles resembling
atoms or mathematical infinitesimals, which he called monads.  The
monads filled all spaces, everything was connected, and all transitions
and graduations were continuous, without gaps.  Monads were ordered in a
pyramidal hierarchy, with God as the supreme monad. (72)

The monads did not interact.  They were enclosed, "without windows,"
self-sufficient.  Phenomena that gave the appearance of interaction ...
were actually manifestations of the preestablished harmony. (72)

... their behavior was controlled only by this internal program and not
by the contingent behavior of other monads. (73)

The determinism postulated here was that of an automaton ... the monads
themselves, of which the whole organism was composed, were also
comparable to automata. (73)

Voltaire (77-8)

Diderot (78-9)

La Mettrie and Holbach (79)

And then there's ...