Conclusiones Parciales

Leibniz was born on 1 July 1646, at Leipzig in Saxony. He came from an academic family;

his father (who died when he was only 6) was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the

University of Leipzig. The young Leibniz appears to have had an eager appetite for learning, which he had ample opportunity to satisfy in his late father's extensive library. He entered the local university at the age of 15, where he continued the extensive study of the classics which he had begun as a young boy. At university Leibniz also acquired a detailed knowledge of the scholastic philosophy which still dominated European universities in the mid-seventeenth century; an early dissertation, De principio individui ('The Principle of Individuation'), written when he was still in his teens, was an exercise in scholastic metaphysics. But the intellectual climate

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in which Leibniz grew up was one in which scholasticism was under increasing attack and it was not long before he became dissatisfied with the traditional systems of learning. 'I had travelled far into the world of the Scholastics', he later wrote, 'when mathematics and modern writers lured me out while still a young man. I was charmed with their beautiful way of explaining nature mechanically, and scorned, with justice, the method of those who make use only of "forms" or "qualities", from which we learn nothing' (GP IV. 478; P 116).

Leibniz's university studies were wide-ranging in a way which prefigured the extraordinary breadth of his intellectual interests in later life. He had a semester at Jena, where he studied mathematics under a celebrated exponent of Greek mathematical systems, Erhard. Weigel;

returning to Leipzig he worked on an ambitious project--the developing of a scheme for translating logical combinations of ideas into a symbolic language--which led to the writing of his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria ('Dissertation on the Art of Combination'). ⁴⁵ Leibniz's main early ambition, however, was to gain an academic position in the field of law. He was unable to obtain a post at Leipzig, and moved to the small university of Altdorf, near

Nuremberg, where in 1667 he submitted his doctoral dissertation De casibus perplexis in jure ('On Disputed Cases in Law'); the work was so well received that Leibniz was forthwith offered a professorship, at the age of 21. But in the summer of the same year Leibniz made the acquaintance of the Baron of Boineburg, former chief minister of the Elector of Mainz, who was impressed by Leibniz's energy and erudition, and offered him employment. In what was probably the most significant decision; of his life, Leibniz resolved to abandon an academic career in favour of the more active and lucrative pursuits of the courtier and diplomat.

Under Boineburg's patronage, Leibniz was able to make contact with a wide variety of political thinkers, philosophers, and men of letters, and he began to build up a formidable circle of correspondents. He carefully preserved copies of most of the vast number of letters he wrote throughout his life, and these have become a valuable source for his philosophical, mathematical, and scientific views. The exchange and dissemination of ideas

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became one of Leibniz's major interests: apart from corresponding personally with over a thousand individuals, he was also actively involved in the launching of a seventeenth-century prototype of the learned journal, the Acta Eruditorun ('Proceedings of the Learned'), founded in Leipzig in 1682, ⁴⁶ while in his later years he endeavoured to set up a number of scientific societies. ⁴⁷ Much of Leibniz's time during his service with Boineburg, however, was devoted to more concrete political issues, in particular to the major problem troubling the German states at the time, the imperialistic designs of King Louis XIV of France. Among the many pamphlets and memoranda Leibniz composed during these years was the Consilium Aegyptiacum ('Egyptian Proposal'), whose aim was to divert the Sun King's expansionary energies from Europe to the Middle East.

A diplomatic initiative associated with this project led to Leibniz being sent to Paris in 1672, and he spent four exciting years in what was then the undisputed cultural capital of Europe.

The ' Paris years' were a source of immense and fruitful intellectual stimulus for Leibniz. He met the great Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche ( 1638-1715), ⁴⁸ and began a serious study of Descartes's philosophy; he also had discussions with the now famous logician and theologian Antoine Arnauld ( 1612-94), who had been one of Descartes's most searching critics. ⁴⁹ Leibniz continued to correspond with Arnauld after he left Paris, and the letters they

exchanged in the 1680s are a vital source for Leibniz's views on the concept of truth and the nature of substance. From Paris Leibniz visited London, where he met Henry Oldenburg and Robert Boyle; among the topics he discussed with the English scientists was his long-standing project for the construction of a machine for performing mathematical calculations.

Mathematics remained Leibniz's chief interest during these years: on arrival in Paris he

rapidly came to see that many of the mathematical techniques he had been taught at university were outmoded and inadequate, and under the stimulus of discussions with a number of brilliant mathematicians such as Christian Huygens, his own ideas developed at great speed.

By the end of his time in Paris Leibniz had arrived at one of his most celebrated discoveries, the theory of the Infinitesimal Calculus. The fame of Leibniz's

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achievement was later somewhat tarnished by a long and acrimonious dispute with the friends of Newton over who had discovered the calculus first; though Newton arrived at the idea some years before Leibniz, it is now generally accepted that Leibniz reached his own results independently. ⁵⁰

Leibniz clearly wished to stay in Paris longer, but no suitable employment was forthcoming.

51 In 1675 he accepted the post of Court Councillor and Librarian at Hanover, in the service of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Leibniz returned to Germany following a circuitous route which took him first to London, then to Holland (where he had his meeting with Spinoza--see above, p. 22), and finally to Hanover where he arrived in January 1676; he was to remain in the service of the ducal house for the remaining forty years of his life. A

considerable portion of his energy was to be devoted to research for a family history of the House of Brunswick, a project dear to the heart of Ernst August, who to the dukedom on the death of his elder brother in 1679. That Leibniz should have squandered his intellectual talents on such a task has contributed to the rather poor view of his character and personality which some commentators have taken. Bertrand Russell, for example, referred scathingly to Leibniz's 'undue deference to princes and lamentable waste of time in the endeavour to please them'. ⁵² But Leibniz's service to the Hanoverian dynasty provided him with a comfortable income which left him free to travel extensively (he made a grand tour of Bavaria, Austria, and Italy from 1687 to 1690), to pursue a wide variety of scientific and philosophical

interests, and to work on a number of technological projects. ⁵³ While it is no doubt true that his courtly commitments contributed to his failure to write a magnum opus comparable to Descartes Principles or Spinoza Ethics, Leibniz did produce a formidable number of shorter essays, articles, and pamphlets, which taken together constitute a philosophical corpus that is quite as impressive as the grander works of Descartes and Spinoza. Among the most

important of these writings were the Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas, published in Latin in 1684; the Discourse on Metaphysics, composed-in French in 1686;

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the Remarks on the General Part of Descartes's Principles, a critical discussion of Descartes's system, written in the early 1690s; the New System and Explanation of the New System, published in French in 1695-6; the New Essays on Human Understanding, an extensive dialogue criticizing John Locke Essay concerning Human Understanding, written in French in the early 1700s (but not published until 1765, long after Leibniz's death); the Metaphysical Consequences of the Principle of Reason, a short paper written in Latin around 1712; and a concise summary of Leibniz's metaphysics, the Monadology, written in French in 1714 (but first published posthumously, in a German translation of 1720).

To a far greater extent than is true of the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz's philosophy has called forth a variety of competing interpretations--something which is partly due to the fact that Leibniz himself approached the subject from many different angles:

epistemological, logical, metaphysical, and theological. He was fascinated by the concept of knowledge, and the distinction between what can be known a priori and what can be

discovered by experience; he was preoccupied with the nature of truth, and with developing the kind of analysis that would reveal the logical structure of true propositions; and he was intent on exhibiting the universe as' a harmonious system, created by a benevolent God. But perhaps his main concern, the theme to which he repeatedly returned throughout his life, was the nature of individual substance, and the problem of how the world can be described in a way which does justice to the individuality and unity of the entities which make it up. In Leibniz's many discussions of this issue there is a recurring tension between the terminology of the scholastics which he had imbibed in his youth, with its apparatus of substantial forms and qualities, and the influence of the new reductive systems like those of Descartes and Spinoza, which dispensed with the traditional apparatus and endeavoured to explain the universe in terms of supposedly simple and straightforward categories such as thought and extension. Leibniz's goal was to effect a kind of reconciliation between these approaches, as can be seen from the following

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extracts from his New System, written in his fiftieth year:

To find the principles of true unity of things . . . I found it necessary to recall and in a manner to rehabilitate substantial forms, which are so much decried today . . . I found that their nature consists of force, and from this there follows something analogous to feeling and appetite; and that therefore it was necessary to form a conception of them resembling our ordinary notion of souls . . . I saw that these forms must be indivisible, like our mind . . . I am as ready and wining as any man to give the moderns their due; but I think they have carried reform too far [in taking a purely mechanistic view] confusing the natural with the artificial. For they have not had a sufficiently exalted idea of the majesty of Nature (GP IV. 478-81; P 116-20).

The majesty of nature was for Leibniz a reflection of the power and goodness of its creator, and it is impossible to read many of his writings without being struck by the sincerity of his religious faith. But, like Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz abhorred theological dogmatism, and towards the end of his life he gave considerable thought to devising possible ways of

reconciling the Catholic and Protestant Churches, whose followers had clashed so repeatedly and bloodily during the seventeenth century. The problems of religious faith were a major topic of conversation between Leibniz and an influential friend of his latter years, Sophie Charlotte, daughter of the Duchess of Hanover and Electress of Brandenburg (later to be Queen of Prussia). Leibniz acted as her tutor for a time, and their discussions were an important stimulus for the composition of the Theodicy (that is, a vindication of God's justice), the largest work Leibniz published during his life (the book appeared in 1710). ⁵⁴ Leibniz's concern to defend the cause, of religion also emerges in the important exchange which he had in the last two years of his life with the English cleric and disciple of Newton, Samuel Clarke ( 1675-1729). As Leibniz wrote in his first letter to Clarke,

It appears that natural religion is growing steadily weaker. Many hold that souls are corporeal;

others hold that God himself is corporeal. Mr Locke and his followers are at any rate doubtful whether souls are not material and naturally perishable . . . Mr Newton and his followers have an extremely odd opinion of the work of God, according to which he is

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obliged to wind up his watch from time to time to prevent its running down, and even mend it.

According to my view, the same force and vigour goes on existing in the world always, and simply passes from one matter to another, according to the laws of nature and a beautiful preestablished harmony . . . (GP VII. 352; P 205-6).

Side by side with his philosophical pursuits, Leibniz's political and diplomatic activities continued unabated until he was in his late sixties. He had contacts with a number of royal and princely houses, including several audiences with Peter the Great of Russia, and he made frequent visits to Vienna (where both the Theodicy and the Monadology were written), attaining the distinction of being made a Privy Councillor at the Imperial Court in 1712. In 1714, the Elector Georg Ludwig (the nephew of Leibniz's original ducal patron) acceded to the British throne; though Leibniz hurried back to Hanover on hearing the news he found that the court had already left for England. For the remaining two years of his life Leibniz

remained at Hanover labouring over the family history of the House of Brunswick, on which he had now been working, though very intermittently, for over thirty years. He died

peacefully on 14 November 1716, at the age of 70.

Spinoza, whose views Leibniz mistrusted as 'dangerous', ⁵⁵ had seen man's highest fulfilment in terms of an intellectual contemplation of his essential union with the whole of reality.

Leibniz, in his Principles of Nature and Grace, written two years before his death, had come to a different, but not entirely dissimilar conclusion:

The beauty of the universe could be learnt in each soul, could one unravel all its folds; . . . each soul knows the infinite, but confusedly. Just as when I walk along the shore of the sea, and hear the great noise it makes . . . so our confused perceptions are the result of the impressions which the whole universe makes on us (GP VI. 604; P 201).

But unlike Spinoza, Leibniz was able to combine his grand metaphysical vision with an altogether simpler and more traditional piety--the piety he had learned as a boy from his family in Leipzig:

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the love of God gives us here and now a foretaste of felicity to come . . . for it gives us perfect confidence in the goodness of our Author and Master, which produces a true tranquillity of mind, not as in the Stoics, who resolutely force themselves to patience, but by a present contentment which assures us of a future happiness (GP VI. 606; P 203). ⁵⁶

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2

Method

On the tenth of November 1619, I went to bed full of mental excitement, wholly preoccupied with the thought that I had that day begun to discover the foundations of a wonderful system of knowledge ( Descartes, Early Writings).

There are some who have taken pity on the wretched plight of philosophy and departed from the common way of treating the sciences. They have entered on a difficult new path, aiming to bequeath to posterity the other parts of philosophy, beyond mathematics, demonstrated by mathematical method and with mathematical certainty ( Lodewijk Meyer, Preface to Spinoza Principia Philosophiae Renati Descartes, 1663).

Scarcely any sane man will question many . . . arguments of Aristotle in his eight books on physics and the whole of his metaphysics, logic and ethics . . . The one question is whether in place of Aristotle's abstract theories of matter, form and change, there can be explanations involving only size, shape and motion ( Leibniz, letter to Jacob Thomasius of 30 April 1669).

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