LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM

LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM (1646–1716), was a German polymath. Leibniz was born in Leipzig on July 1, 1646. Trained in the law, he earned his living as a councillor, diplomat, librarian, and historian, primarily at the court of Hanover. Leibniz made important intellectual contributions in linguistics, geology, historiography, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Although he did not view himself primarily as a theologian, he devoted considerable time and energy to church reunion projects, engaging in extended efforts to provide a basis for reunion among Catholics and Protestants, and, that project having failed, attempting to provide a basis for reunion between Lutherans and Calvinists.

Leibniz completed the arts program at Leipzig University in 1663 with a philosophical dissertation titled Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation. He then entered a program at the university leading to the doctorate of law. By virtue of a quota system, he was not awarded the doctorate in 1666, although his final dissertation was written. Offended, Leibniz enrolled in the law program at the University of Altdorf in October 1666 and almost immediately submitted his completed dissertation, Disputation concerning Perplexing Cases in the Law, which was accepted. He was awarded the doctorate in 1667.

After declining a teaching position offered at Altdorf, Leibniz was employed first by Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg, and, then, by Boineburg's sometime employer, Johann Philipp von Schönborn, elector of Mainz. While in the employ of the elector he initially worked on a project aimed at a codification of German civil law, and later as an officer in the court of appeal. During his time in Mainz Leibniz produced work in physics, the law, and philosophy, especially philosophy of religion. It was in this period that he formulated the idea of writing a definitive apology for Christianity, under the title The Catholic Demonstrations. While at Mainz he outlined the entire project and filled in some of the details. The aims of the project included proofs of the propositions of natural theology, proofs of the possibility of Christian dogmas not included in natural theology, and the adumbration of a philosophical system that would provide a basis for reunion among the Christian churches.

In the winter of 1671–1672 Leibniz drew up a plan for the French conquest of Egypt, which appealed to his German superiors because, if carried out, it would have provided Louis XIV with a task they assumed to be incompatible with his attacking Germany. Leibniz was sent to Paris to present his plan to Louis. He was never granted an audience with the French king, but during his protracted stay there (spring 1672 to December 1676) he met and conversed with some of the leading intellectuals of Europe, including Antoine Arnauld, Nicolas Malebranche, and Christiaan Huygens. Huygens became Leibniz's mentor in mathematics. When Leibniz arrived in Paris his mathematical knowledge was out of date and superficial; by the time he left he had developed the basic theory of calculus, which he first published in 1684. Later in his life a storm of controversy was to arise over whether he or Isaac Newton deserved credit for laying the foundations of calculus. Modern scholarship seems to have reached the verdict that Leibniz and Newton both developed the idea of calculus independently. Newton was the first to develop calculus, Leibniz was the first to publish it. A time of intensive effort in mathematics, Leibniz's Paris period was also a period of serious work in philosophy and, in particular, philosophy of religion. During the Paris years he wrote The Faith of a Philosopher, apparently for Arnauld, a work that considers many of the same problems treated in his only philosophical monograph published in his lifetime, The Theodicy.

Leibniz left Paris in October 1676 to accept a position as councillor and librarian to Duke Johann Friedrich in Hanover. During the trip from Paris to Hanover Leibniz had a four-day visit with Spinoza, which generated Leibniz's particular contribution to the ontological argument for the existence of God. He believed that the ontological argument, as formulated by Descartes, for example, established the conditional proposition that if the existence of God is possible, then the existence of God is necessary. Leibniz set out to prove the antecedent, that is, that the existence of God is possible. The main idea of the proof is that God may be characterized as a being having all and only perfections; perfections are positive simple qualities, and, hence, collections of them must be consistent.

During his years of service to Johann Friedrich, a convert to Catholicism, and his early years of service to Ernst August, a Lutheran, Leibniz was deeply involved in reunion projects, first with the apostolic vicar Nicholas Steno, who read and commented on Leibniz's The Faith of a Philosopher, and then with Cristobal de Rojas y Spinola, the representative of the emperor Leopold I, who, with papal approval, engaged in extensive negotiations in Hanover in an effort to find compromise positions acceptable to both Catholics and Protestants. Although not an official party to the negotiations, Leibniz produced various documents intended to further their progress, including A System of Theology, a document that has generated considerable debate about Leibniz's attitude toward Catholicism. What is clear is that the work considers some of the problems relating to church reunion from the Catholic standpoint. What is less clear is the extent to which Leibniz accepted its contents.

Much of Leibniz's intellectual effort went into his extensive correspondence. The most famous of his irenic correspondences was with Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux and leading French prelate, a correspondence that began in earnest in 1691 and continued with some interruptions until 1702. Leibniz aimed at compromise, Bossuet at capitulation. Neither succeeded.

Leibniz himself dated his philosophical maturity from 1686 and the writing of The Discourse on Metaphysics. Leibniz's original work in dynamics, begun prior to The Discourse on Metaphysics and reaching its culmination in the Specimen Dynamicum of 1695, and his original work in logic, begun in 1679 and reaching a high point in the General Inquiries concerning the Analysis of Concepts and Truth of 1686, partially motivate the metaphysics of The Discourse on Metaphysics. But so do the theological aims of The Catholic Demonstrations, previously mentioned. Thus it is plausible to see The Discourse on Metaphysics as attempting to provide a philosophical framework adequate to permit a satisfactory account of the relation of human freedom to divine causality. Indeed, the major project of The Discourse on Metaphysics is an attempt to provide a theory of individual created substances that will permit a distinction between those actions properly attributed to creatures and those properly attributed to God, yet a distinction so drawn that it is consistent with God's universal conservative causation.

Much of Leibniz's philosophical work in the mature period may be seen as a contribution to the aims of The Catholic Demonstrations. Thus, in The Theodicy (1710), Leibniz set out to show, contrary to the claims of Pierre Bayle, that the tenets of Christianity are not contrary to the dictates of reason; in particular, that the Christian view that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and the creator of the world is consistent with the fact that there is evil in the world. He believed that his views about the structure of possible worlds, composed of independent possible substances, from which God chose at creation in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, provided a suitable framework for resolving the problem of evil, as well as the problem of the relation of human freedom to divine grace. The basic idea of Leibniz's solution to the problem of evil is this: God's choice among possible worlds, like every choice of every agent, is subject to the principle of sufficient reason. God's reason in connection with creation is based on the principle of perfection; hence, God chooses the best possible world. There is evil in the world and there are possible worlds containing no evil. Still, this is the best possible world, so the evil it contains must be necessary for good things without which the overall perfection of the world would be diminished.

Leibniz's major metaphysical thesis, articulated in his mature period, is that there is nothing in the world except simple substances (monads) and, in them, nothing except perceptions and appetites. He believed that monads, although capable of spontaneous action, could not causally interact, but that they were so programmed by their creator that they appeared to interact in accordance with the principle of preestablished harmony. An extensive correspondence with Bartholomew des Bosses, a Jesuit professor of theology in Hildesheim, dating from 1706 until Leibniz's death, considers, among other things, whether Leibniz's major metaphysical thesis is consistent with the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation and the Christian understanding of the incarnation.

Leibniz traveled extensively in connection with his historical research and on various diplomatic missions, particularly to Berlin and Vienna. During the same period he made efforts to bring about the establishment of scientific academies, particularly at Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, and Saint Petersburg. Of these proposals, only the plan for an academy at Berlin came to fruition in his lifetime. In 1700 the Brandenburg Society of Sciences was founded in Berlin, with Leibniz its president for life.

The later period of Leibniz's life produced important philosophical work in addition to The Theodicy, for example, The Monadology (1714); The New Essays on Human Understanding (1703–1704), a commentary in dialogue form on John Locke's philosophy; and the correspondence with Samuel Clarke, a disciple of Isaac Newton, on the nature of space and time.

Bibliography

Works by Leibniz

Much of the material Leibniz wrote on philosophical and theological topics was not published in his lifetime, in part, because it was not intended for publication. Some remains unpublished. The work of producing a definitive edition has been undertaken jointly by various German academic groups. The "academy edition," as it is usually called, is being produced under the title Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Until that grand project reaches fruition it will be necessary to rely on partial editions, among which the most useful is Charles James Gerhardt's Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1875–1890). The most complete edition available in English is Leroy E. Loemker's Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2d ed. (Dordrecht, 1969).

Works about Leibniz

The Leibniz manuscript material available in Hanover is cataloged in two volumes by Eduard Bodemann: Der Briefwechsel des Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1895; reprint, Hildesheim, 1966) and Die Leibniz: Handschriften (1889; reprint, Hildesheim, 1966). Two major works of Leibniz bibliography are Émile Ravier's Bibliographie des œuvres de Leibniz (1937; reprint, Hildesheim, 1966) and Albert Heinekamp and Kurt Müller's Leibniz Bibliographie: Verzeichnis Der Literatur über Leibniz bis 1980 (Frankfurt, 1983).

A scholarly exploration of some aspects of Leibniz's theological thinking is Gaston Grua's Jurisprudence universelle et théodicée selon Leibniz (Paris, 1953). On the specific topic of Leibniz's reunion efforts, see Paul Eisenkopf's Leibniz und die Einigung der Christenheit: Überlegungen zur Reunion der evangelischen und katholischen Kirche (Munich, 1975). Two penetrating studies of his philosophy in English are Bertrand Russell's A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, new ed. (London, 1937), and G. H. R. Parkinson's Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics (Oxford, 1965). An excellent introduction to Leibniz's philosophy is Nicholas Rescher's Leibniz: An Introduction to His Philosophy (Totowa, N.J., 1979). The scholarly journal Studia Leibnitiana (Wiesbaden, 1969–) is devoted to the study of Leibniz.

R. C. Sleigh, Jr. (1987)