Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1646–1715

Philosopher

Pious Upbringing.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the son of a Lutheran pastor at Leipzig. Born at the very end of the devastation wrought by the Thirty Years' War, he was schooled outside the home, but seems to have found more inspiration for his learning in his father's large library. When he was fifteen he entered the University at Leipzig as a legal student, although learning about the new scientific breakthroughs that were becoming increasingly common in seventeenth-century Europe soon captivated him. He studied the works of René Descartes, Galileo, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes anxiously and began to develop a plan to harmonize their works with the philosophies of Aristotle and other great minds from Antiquity. In 1663, he completed and defended his bachelor's thesis, On the Principle of the Individual, a work that contained already one of the ideas that was to grow in his thought. Leibniz reasoned there that the individual was not to be understood merely by his material entity alone, or by intellectual forms, but by the entire scope of his being. A few years later in his De arte combinatoria, he argued that all logic and human reasoning might be reduced to a combination of symbols, a theory that has sometimes been interpreted as anticipating the development of the computer in the modern world.

Departure from Leipzig.

Although by 1666 Leibniz had completed the requisite course of study for the awarding of the doctoral degree in law, he was refused because he was too young to receive the degree. So he left Leipzig and never returned to his native city. He traveled first to Nuremberg's university city of Altdorf and took the doctoral degree, and was offered a professorship. He accepted instead a position with a local statesman, Johann Christian, Freiherr von Boyneburg, who introduced him at the court of the archbishop-elector of Mainz. He immediately found a place in the archbishop's service, who was worried at the time about the rise of Louis XIV to the west. To forestall a French invasion of the German-speaking territories, the elector hoped to divert Louis's attentions by involving him in a plan to stage a missionary expedition to Egypt. Leibniz offered his services to the elector by writing his Catholic Demonstrations, a work that developed a complex new theory about the soul's position in the body, and which expressed for the first time Leibniz's notion of "sufficient reason." He developed both of these concepts further in his mature philosophy, eventually producing his notion of the metaphysics of the soul known as "monadology" and the principle that nothing occurred in the world without a reason. In his years in the employment of the elector, he also examined certain problems in optics and physics, a common endeavor of the philosophers of the age. In 1672, Leibniz was sent on an ambassadorial mission to Paris and there he came in contact with Antoine Arnauld, leader of the Jansenist religious movement in the city. The deaths of his patrons the elector of Mainz and the Freiherr von Boyneburg left him for a time without employment, although bequests made to him in their wills left him free to pursue his studies without financial constraints. During 1673, he developed a computing machine which he took on his first visit to London in the same year, presenting it to the members of the Royal Society.

Life at the Hanoverian Court.

In the years following his journey to England, Leibniz continued his studies, and by 1675 he had come upon the breakthroughs that allowed him to advance the new mathematical discipline of integral and differential calculus. Isaac Newton had been at work on these problems in England, too, and the two figures came to relatively the same conclusions almost simultaneously. Although Newton has long been credited with pioneering this new science, it has long been recognized that Leibniz developed the same fundamental concepts in relative isolation from him. The following year Leibniz's experiments continued, and he pioneered the mechanical science of dynamics, a theory of movement based around the principles of kinetic energy. With his funds depleted by his period of independent study, he accepted a position at the court of Braunschweig-Lüneberg in 1676. Although this was a small territory in the German-speaking empire, it had recently become more important. In 1665, its ruler, Johann Frederick, had become duke of Hanover. At first, he was entrusted with the librarianship of the duke's enormous library, an institution that in the early-modern world was sometimes described as one of the "eight wonders" of the world. There, he continued to read voraciously, but he soon rose to a position of trust, being admitted into the duke's council. In the duchy Leibniz worked vigorously to establish a place for himself and his ideas. He formulated numerous plans to make the small duchy a model of technological and rationalist efficiency. When he was appointed to oversee the duke's famous library at Wolfenbüttel, he introduced the first catalogue and shelving system ever in a European library. He developed new kinds of windmills, water pumps, and hydraulic machinery, even as he advanced plans for the establishment of academies and schools. For a time, he even practiced mining engineering, an important industry in and around the Harz Mountains where the duchy was situated. All the while, Leibniz continued as well with his philosophical and mathematical work, although his ideas were beginning to become increasingly hostile to Descartes and his rationalism.

Monadology.

Leibniz's indefatigable efforts in the employment of the Hanoverian dukes led him into numerous new discoveries, which he increasingly broadcasted through the publication of articles in scholarly and scientific journals by the 1690s. He made numerous plans for the foundation of scientific academies similar to the Royal Society in England, and in 1700 Sophia Charlotte, the first queen of Prussia and a daughter of his Hanoverian employer, responded to Leibniz's plans by founding the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Although Leibniz's mind ranged far and wide in these years over many intellectual dilemmas, his chief fascination of the later years of his life was in developing a philosophy based around his concept of monads. In contrast to the "atomistic" views of matter that were developing at the time in many parts of Europe, Leibniz's complex and sometimes baffling metaphysics contained in his late work, Monadology (1714), promoted the notion that matter itself was indivisible and that reality was an illusion. As Leibniz characterized them, monads were complete concepts that were entirely self-contained and independent; he characterized monads as moving in a steady hierarchy from those that were least active, like stones, to those that were most active, like the human organism. Because Leibniz considered reality to be illusory, he jettisoned the idea of causation, and instead substituted his concept of "sufficient reason." Applying this notion of sufficient reason to the world in which he lived, Leibniz argued that there was a rational explanation for everything that occurred. It is in this sense that it is possible to extract from Leibniz's ideas the notion that we live in "the best of all possible worlds," because as he argued everything in the world had been created by God with a purpose. It was for expressing this fundamentally optimistic idea that the later French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire lampooned Leibniz in his Candide (1759).