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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of history's most astounding thinkers, a universal genius akin to Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin, but comparatively little known. In this mind-expanding biography, historian Michael Kempe charts a thrilling course through Leibniz's work, illuminating the continued impact of his unparalleled contributions to knowledge.Recreating seven crucial days in Leibniz's life, Kempe shows us a great mind in action, surging with ideas that would change the course of mathematics and philosophy, even laying early foundations for modern digital culture. We find him in Paris, working from his bed amidst a sea of notes when he puts the basis for modern calculus to paper for the first time; and in Vienna, enjoying a coffee as he discovers unforeseen links between biology and mathematics.Convinced that everything was profoundly interconnected, Leibniz was driven by an exhilarating optimism that allowed him to build bridges between faith and reason, physics and metaphysics - and to harness the endless potential of a single mind on a single day.
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The Best of All Possible Worlds
A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days
Translated from the German by Marshall Yarbrough
Michael Kempe
PUSHKIN PRESSiv
v
For Clara Emilia, Christiane,and a little fly
Contents
Introduction
Why is there a world at all, and why this one? It’s not a bad place to start things off. The question catapults us right into the middle of the labyrinthine thought of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Among the infinite number of possible worlds, there is one that is best, runs Leibniz’s answer—otherwise God would never have decided to create a world in the first place. And if there were a world better than this one, then God would have created it instead of the one we live in. In reading these words, we quickly find ourselves in a world of necessary logical conclusions and rigorous rationality, a world that seems to subject not just people but also God himself to the iron laws of truth and necessity. Today it has become alien to us to speak of the world in such a way. For one thing, ever since Kant made his critique of reason, such statements have come to be considered unreliable instances of the human ratio overstepping its bounds. For another, however, it has been a long time indeed since any single person could boast a command of all the sciences and humanities and achieve excellence in several branches of them at once. Thus it is with all the more fascination that we look back at a time when such a thing still seemed possible, and at those individuals who dared make the attempt. One of them was Leibniz, a polymath or universal genius—as many would consider him—and perhaps one of the last of his kind. In any case, he is a representative of a lost time: the early European Enlightenment, with its roots in the Baroque era. It was a time marked by a rational optimism and a belief in progress, by the confident assurance that humanity would xiistride forth into a bright future founded on the basis of a rational religion and driven forward by the achievements of science and technology. Today, given the critical lens through which we view progress and growth, given secularization and the stark differentiation that now exists among the sciences, it seems impossible to reconnect with the world of thought and ideas of Leibniz’s time.
Why a world, then, and why this one in particular? Today Leibniz’s answer to this question is known mainly through Voltaire’s 1759 satire Candide, which has almost completely overshadowed it. As a result, it seems possible to speak of the best of all possible worlds only if one criticizes and dismisses the proposition, or mocks it and takes it to ridiculous extremes. Whether Voltaire’s critique of Leibniz truly hits home is today a matter of debate. In order for us to understand Leibniz’s world, his view of things, and also the age that produced such a view, it’s necessary to set the critique aside and take a step back. The prospect of encountering Leibniz in the midst of his day-to-day life, of observing him in the act of thinking and creating, doesn’t just promise a thrilling journey into a fascinating time. It also makes it possible for us to gain a deeper understanding of his philosophy, his mathematics, and his wide-ranging scientific endeavors. Suddenly Leibniz doesn’t seem so alien at all; indeed, in many respects he may seem strangely familiar, since people in our own time are also wrestling with many of the questions and problems that concerned him. From this vantage, the full-bottomed wig and frock coat no longer seem essential characteristics of an inaccessible figure from a past epoch; they turn out to be mere trappings. Look past them, and a person steps into view who bears a resemblance to the isolated individuals of the present day, constantly communicating and yet simultaneously withdrawn into themselves.
Unhappiness and suffering, people torturing one another, and on top of all that, horrifying natural disasters like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755: Voltaire has Candide, dismayed, bleeding, and trembling, ask himself, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be like?”1 Leibniz views the problem from another angle. xiiiWe can no longer go back and change what has been, but we can try to improve what is. Leibniz views the world in terms of its possibilities. Not everything that is possible must or can become reality. But at least some of it can be realized, maybe more than it would sometimes seem. If everything in the world happened out of necessity, then individuals could not be held responsible for their actions; there would be no morality and also no freedom. Not only was God free to choose between different possible worlds; humankind is also, notably, granted the freedom to change the world, to help shape it.
For a long time, this line of thinking has been interpreted solely as abstract reflection of a strict rationalistic bent. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, however, Leibniz was by no means an inflexible rationalist who always had his head in the clouds and dismissed experience. In fact, he had both feet planted firmly in the soil of reality, in his case the reality of the Baroque Fürstenstaat, the small state with a prince at its helm. Still, while he did seek the support of the powerful for his ambitious plans to improve the world, at the same time he also sought independence from them so that he could remain free in his scientific pursuits. For Leibniz, freedom has a concrete meaning and a concrete place—or better yet, places. Not just while he is bent over a desk but also as he travels between the courts he serves, a welcome space of freedom opens up for him. For example, when official business takes him to Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel, he takes the opportunity to make a stopover in Ermsleben, a small town south of Halberstadt, and spend a few days visiting Pastor Jakob Friedrich Reimmann. Leibniz enjoys the unstructured hours. He eats at the family table, contents himself with plain cooking, and gives himself over to long learned discussions in Reimmann’s study. Leibniz, writes Reimmann looking back, “has on more than one occasion sat up with me till twelve or one o’clock in the morning, chattering away.”2
Chatting about heaven, earth, and everything in between, deep into the night, as if there were no tomorrow. Every day moves slowly, inexorably toward its end, and a new one begins—not even Leibniz xivcan change that. Accompanying him in his day-to-day life, observing him on seven days in different stages of his life in various places, gives us a chance to better understand his thought and his actions, to more clearly see the connection between his experience of the world and his worldview. On each of these days, we can regard Leibniz from an altered perspective, just as his philosophy calls for constantly changing one’s position and taking on a new point of view. Granted, the days selected here can offer only small snippets. Certain things appear only briefly. But what becomes apparent is how Leibniz manages, again and again, to connect far-flung fields of knowledge. Along the way, his dictum that everything is connected to everything else must occasionally double as an excuse for the far-reaching nature of his studies, which often keeps him from finishing anything. A universal scholar simply cannot allow himself to neglect any area of knowledge. One improves the world not only on the grand scale but also with regard to small things, such as by forging a nail shaped in such a way that it becomes wedged in the wood into which it has been hammered—a kind of wall anchor, that is, that Leibniz invents more or less in passing and that today literally holds the world together.3
How concrete can or should a philosophy actually get? As we shall see, without coffee or chocolate, at least, Leibniz might not have regarded this as the best of all possible worlds. But it is precisely in the concrete examples that Leibniz’s views come to life. Take his contention that God decided to create lions, even though they pose a danger to humans, because without lions the world would be less perfect. Even before Leibniz, variety or diversity was one aspect on which the theologians of Spanish late scholasticism in the seventeenth century, otherwise prone to rather dry and unwieldy arguments, could become astonishingly specific. A world consisting only of flies—so argued the Spanish Jesuit Antonio Perez—is absolutely inconceivable, even if God hadn’t been compelled by necessity to create the optimal world.4 Speaking of the fly, while it doesn’t play a large role in Leibniz’s philosophy, it does play a small one. For this xvreason, it also appears occasionally throughout this book: a fictitious fly to begin with, it buzzes off only to suddenly reappear every now and again as an object of Leibniz’s thought—like a kind of metaphysical alter-ego for Leibniz himself.
Leibniz shares with the fly his stubborn insouciance. He won’t be shooed away; he persistently disturbs the peace of powerful princes to try to win their support for his plans for progress. Conversely, Leibniz never allows the little buzzing pests to keep him from writing. It’s hard to fathom that someone who welcomes every distraction, who immediately seizes on every source of stimulation, who postpones nothing, but who tries, rather, to do everything at once, could at the same time be capable of concentrating on reading and writing anywhere and in every situation imaginable. No noise, no stench, no pothole on a carriage ride, no amount of sorrow keeps him from filling one sheet of paper after another with letters, numbers, and drawings. Call it serene graphomania. Leibniz seems to wake up writing in the morning and go to bed writing at night. Along the way, one tower of paper rises up alongside the next, massive edifices built of pages of every size imaginable, down to the tiniest slips. Leibniz left behind about 100,000 pages, including drafts, notes, and letters. The majority of it is today housed at the state library of Lower Saxony, which bears Leibniz’s name: the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek. Leibniz corresponded with about thirteen hundred people. Since 2007, the letters written by and to Leibniz have been included in UNESCO’s list of documentary heritage, and it will likely take decades more for all the material to be published as part of the historical-critical edition of Leibniz’s work being put out by two separate academies. He was no flyweight, then, among the great minds of world history.
Whether one encounters Leibniz while he is traveling, sitting at his desk amid his manuscripts, exchanging letters with scholars from all over Europe, or conversing with princesses and princes, it becomes immediately apparent that his fundamental attitude is consistently optimistic. But this optimism is of a very particular mold xvithat distinguishes it from the dreamy progress-euphoria of the late eighteenth century. Occasionally, around the edges of his optimism, a certain melancholy comes into view. He has often, Leibniz writes on one occasion, thought with sorrow of all the evils we humans are subjected to, including the brevity of life, vanity, disease, and finally death, which threatens to annihilate our achievements and efforts: “These meditations put me in a melancholy mood.”5 Thus the hope that the world might be getting better seems, to some extent, to spring from the worry that things might not turn out well, that our condition might not improve after all.
In any case, it won’t improve without our own efforts. Leibniz’s world is the best possible only because he conceives of it as containing the possibility that humankind may strive toward the best. To continue realizing the best world anew becomes a perennial task—the daily business of a world in a permanent stage of awakening. Every day, like a small god, every human individual faces the challenge of choosing, from among many possibilities, that which is to become real. All possible worlds, according to Leibniz, strive to become real, but only one can actually exist, while all the others must linger in the realm of the merely possible. For Leibniz, who makes his ideas reality primarily by means of quill and ink, this means deciding day after day what notions he will set down on the page and what notions he will continue to develop in the process of writing. During the moment before his quill touches the white emptiness of the page, all possibilities are hanging in the air, all of them equally full of potential—but at the moment of contact, one of them enters the world.
231Notes
1 Voltaire, Candide, trans. John Butt (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1947), 37.
2 Jakob Friedrich Reimmann, Jacob Friederich Reimmanns, Weyland HochverdientenSuperintendentens der Evangelischen Kirchen … Eigene Lebens-Beschreibung oder Historische Nachricht von Sich Selbst (Brunswick, 1745), 44.
3 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Damit Nägel sich nicht leicht aus dem holze ziehen” (Incipit), LH 38, Bl. 147, in Ernst Gerland, Leibnizens nachgelasseneSchriften physikalischen, mechanischen, und technischen Inhalts (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1906), 244.
4 Sven K. Knebel, “Necessitas moralis ad optimum. Zum historischen Hintergrund der Wahl der besten aller möglichen Welten,” Studia Leibnitiana 23, no. 1 (1991): 21.
5 “Ces meditations me rendoient melancolique”: Leibniz, “Songe philosophique de Leibniz, parmi les Collectanea de scientia generali de Guil. Pacidius, c. 1693,” handwritten superscript by Johann Daniel Gruber, LH 4, 8, Bl. 51; published in Eduard Bodemann, Die Leibniz-Handschriften der KöniglichenÖffentlichen Bibliothek zu Hannover (Hanover: Hahn, 1895), 108.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
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