“The Holy Roman Encyclopedist”
LEIBNIZ: An Intellectual Biography
Maria Rose Antognazza
Cambridge University Press, 2009
Reviewed by Tony Trull
Leibniz pops up everywhere, it seems, and is a foil for everyone. Of worst effect was Voltaire, using Dr. Pangloss in his Candide to mock Leibniz’s assertion in “Theodicy” that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” He makes cameo appearances among the English scientists in Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits and in the collected essays of Isaiah Berlin and in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. He is a worldwide letter-writer in Osterhammel’s Unfabling the East. He is a foil again in Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic as a disingenuous courtier v. Baruch Spinoza. (Spinoza, in Stewart’s telling, on the other hand, is the heretic who invented the modern world.)
Antognazza begins by noting the difficulty contemporaries encountered when eulogizing Leibniz, facing as they were the difficulty of “keeping eight rampant lines of intertwining intellectual development from getting hopelessly tangled with one another.” Leibniz gives the impression of a grasshopper leaping willy-nilly among topics. This is Wikipedia’s list of his interests:
Mathematics, physics, geology, medicine, biology, embryology, epidemiology, veterinary medicine, paleontology, psychology, engineering, linguistics, philology, sociology, metaphysics, ethics, economics, diplomacy, history, politics, music theory, poetry, logic, theodicy, universal language, universal science.
He is a forerunner of the computer age by promoting binary arithmetic (which he saw as reflected in China’s “I Ching” and he thought binary’s 0 and 1 somehow represented God’s creation ex nihilo), he improved on Pascal’s addition-and-subtraction mechanical calculator by designing one that could also multiply and divide – manufacture of which was hampered by the fabrication technology of the time. He invented the Calculus (he and Isaac Newton independently – or, as Newton and the Royal Society would have it, he stole it from Newton and hurried to publish it…seven years later). He gleaned information and spread ideas wherever letters could travel, writing 15,000 letters to more than 1,000 recipients in his lifetime.
In a way, his many interests that seemed to fragment and hinder his own achievements are mirrored by his context in the patchwork of kingdoms and principalities of the Holy Roman (Austrian) Empire. Unable to find employment in Paris – he loved the intellectual ferment of Paris – he spent his career working in the backwater court of Hanover with forays to Berlin and Vienna. Although a foreign member of the Royal Society he never had the supporting network of the Royal Society or the Academy in Paris. The Empire, delicately balanced between Lutheran, Calvinist and Catholic in the tired years after the Thirty Years War, wedged between expansionist France of Louis XIV and the Ottoman Turks, fighting the War of the Spanish Succession, never had the funds to support the learned society he finally got chartered.
Nor was he skilled at the long slog, nitty-gritty campaign needed to get things done. Ever brimming with ideas he offered to solve the problem of water accumulating in Hanover’s silver mines, but his several different schemes mostly just irritated the miners. His employers would ask him to write a speech or a pamphlet to support an appointment or policy and he would deliver a book-length manuscript long after it was needed. He published two books and numerous papers but most of the ideas he is now credited with were gleaned from his letters long after his death.
Yet he was optimistic, brilliant and indefatigable. I am repeatedly amazed at how much the leading figures of the 17th and 18th centuries accomplished working by candles and oil lamps without modern eyeglasses. Often thought by his contemporaries to be a “believer in nothing”, Leibniz remained a Lutheran all his life, passing up lucrative employments that would merely have required converting to Catholicism – while repeatedly engaging in hopeful negotiations for the reunification of Christendom.
One thing Leibniz lacked was the support structure of something like England’s Royal Society. If he had had equally sharp, sympathetic but competing minds to channel him and a Robert Hooke to bring his ideas to practical use, he would have been a towering figure of the Scientific Revolution.
He could also have used a biographer who held a little more loosely to the idea of an intellectual biography. We get details about Leibniz’s ideas, the development of his ideas, especially from his voluminous correspondence, but little about Leibniz the man. He found several devoted, royal women as patrons with whom he formed apparently deep intellectual friendships. We learn that he once proposed marriage – at 50 years old and was declined – in one paragraph and nothing about the woman, no other word about romantic relationships. While the absence of speculation on this score is a relief it is also a gap. We learn, in one reference late in the book and his life, that he dressed eccentrically in old-fashioned clothing and that he was humorous.
For an intellectual history, there was less background and follow-up than I needed. Leibniz grew up influenced by “Semi-Ramist” ideas. It would have added a few pages to a long book but I could have used a briefing on what that meant. I think it involves different “predicates” in “combinatorial” relationships to encapsulate human knowledge – but even Wikipedia leaves me imagining it as the answer wheel in the Hugger-Mugger game.
And what has been the effect of this idea if any? Coincidentally I came across a possible descendant of this Ramist idea in a piece about various approaches to Artificial Intelligence:
“These facts would then be entered into an "inference engine," which can reason about them in long chains of valid proofs. Right now, CycCorp claims Cyc has a knowledge base with 25 million axioms, 40,000 predicates, and so on.” (Emphasis mine.)
Was this Leibniz’s influence? No telling from this book.
That’s how it is with so many ideas presented here. Because Leibniz buried ideas in letters and the letters weren’t published for over half a century, what was their impact, did they germinate ideas in later thinkers or are they just novelties? Look at what Leibniz thought of so long ago, isn’t that remarkable?
What Antognazza does very well is to show Leibniz between this ideal…
Page 459: “Leibniz…pursued his longstanding agenda – promoting knowledge through the search for enlightened patronage and the establishment of learned academies or societies. As a consummate networker, he gained the support of the Russian tsar, Peter the Great…”
And this sad reality…
p. 324-5: His employer for the latter half of his life, the Duke of Hanover, was intrigued by Leibniz’s suggestion that a documented history of his family line would bolster Hanover’s claims to a greater place in the Holy Roman Empire. But to Leibniz this did not mean starting with “the foundation of the Braunschweig dynasty, nor even by that of the Holy Roman Empire, but by the foundation of the world itself….What we appear to have here is further evidence of the incapacity of the encyclopaedic mind to resist connecting everything with everything else and the consequent tendency of all his projects ultimately to snowball into unmanageable proportions.”