The mind–body problem and the role of pain: cross-fire between Leibniz and his Cartesian readers

Abstract

International audienceThis article is about the exchanges between Leibniz, Arnauld, Bayle and Lamy on the subject of pain. If commentators have extensively studied the Leibnizian solution to the mind-body problem, they have usually overlooked a recurrent objection that Leibniz’s Cartesian readers addressed to his hypothesis of a pre-established harmony: the problem of pain, or, more exactly, the capacity of the Leibnizian solution to account for the phenomenon of pain. In this article, I examine how this phenomenon is interpreted in Leibniz’s exchanges with Arnauld, Bayle, Lamy and Malebranche, who called attention to three difficulties raised by Leibniz’s approach to pain: the problem of concomitance between pain and bodily injury; the spontaneity of the soul which is hardly compatible with the unpleasantness of pain; and the difficulty in admitting that pain might be a natural representation of a physical state. In successively analysing these three objections, my purpose is twofold. First, I want to show that for Leibniz’s contemporaries, the mind-body problem could not be reduced simply to the issue of causation with which his commentators widely dealt. Second, I want to clarify Leibniz’s pre-established harmony by opposing a representational to a functional account of psychophysical phenomena. This opposition will allow me to indicate what was left unexplained by Leibniz’s seductive version of parallelism