Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light

Franklin Perkins
Cambridge University Press, 2004

(Originally published in Philosophy in Review.)

It would be no exaggeration to say that increased contact with the world beyond Europe’s borders, picking up rapid speed after 1492, was the single most important factor in Europe’s transition into modernity.  By the 17th century, European thinkers were consumed by questions about the inhabitants of the rest of the world, and by the way in which their customs, technologies and beliefs compared with their own. 

This possibility of comparison with independently emerging, radically different cultures is responsible for many of the genuinely new developments in early modern philosophy.  Yet most scholars remain content to treat this period’s philosophy as though it emerged in a vacuum.  When non-European cultures play an indispensable theoretical role --such as that of the American savage in social-contract theory-- they are duly acknowledged.  But the curiosity that European thinkers had about the attainments of other cultures in science, mathematics, and technology goes largely unacknowledged.  One does not have to be all that enthusiastic about multiculturalism to find this neglect unfortunate.  For to consider Europe in relation to the rest of the world in the 17th century, whether one is interested in philosophy or in the spice trade, is not necessarily to engage in cross-cultural comparative study.  Such consideration is also a fundamental part of understanding early modern Europe itself.   

As Franklin Perkins notes in his fine new book, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light, the lack of acknowledgement among scholars has something to do with the self-presentation of at least some early modern thinkers themselves.  Descartes, for example, does not dwell on the Persians or the Chinese (though he does mention them more often than the index to the English edition of his writings would lead us to believe).  The world outside Europe, Descartes may have thought, could only provide complicating and messy evidence against the universality of his claims, and, more damagingly, against the a priori method of producing claims about what sort of entity a human being is.  This, as Perkins notes, is why far-away cannibals were, if a potential embarrassment to Descartes, celebrated by skeptics such as Montaigne. 

Cannibals and other so-called savages threatened to disconfirm universalizing claims made by Europeans about humanity.  But the Chinese presented a very different sort of problem: their advanced civilization (advanced, that is, according to all the indices that interested Europeans) threatened European claims to particularity.  Some thinkers, though, were happy to move beyond European particularism.  One particular early modern universalist --namely, the optimist who is the subject of Perkins’s book and who believed that every human being, not to mention every substance, constitutes a unique representation of the same harmonic order of co-existence-- did not perceive Chinese civilization as a threat at all, but as an opportunity for mutual benefit. As Perkins shows, attention to Leibniz’s engagement with China reveals the philosopher at his best, employing the method and principles familiar to us from other, better known aspects of his work in a creative way.  In Perkins’s account, we also learn quite a bit about the state of knowledge of the Far East in Europe in the 17th century.  Finally, because of the author’s impressive command of the intellectual traditions of both sides of this story, we gain extensive familiarity with the philosophical and scientific life of China during the period we, in another expression of our regional bias, think of as ‘early modern’. 

Perkins’s picture of early modern Europe’s contact with China is more nuanced than the common emphasis on the contemptfulness and aggression of Christian missionaries vis-à-vis the indigenous people they sought to convert.  Indeed, Perkins shows why Leibniz’s own support of the task of Christianization can only be called humanistic.  From Leibniz’s point of view, conversion was desirable because Christianity was true, and the Chinese were just as worthy of lives in accordance with the truth as were Europeans.  And in any case this would not be a one-way exchange.  The Chinese would be given spiritual salvation.  The Europeans would gain, in turn, ethical instruction from the ancient Confucian tradition and technological benefit from contemporary Chinese science.

Confucianism was often portrayed in early modern Europe as a system of laudable rules, the reasons for which had been forgotten in the flow of centuries.  This contrasted sharply with the assessment of, e.g., Buddhism and Taoism, which were taken as garden-variety idolatry.  According to the so-called Jesuit ‘figurists’, the admirable ethical code and technological adeptness of the Confucian Chinese, and the simultaneous evident absence of knowledge of things divine, lay in the ancientness of their civilization, and in its tragic forgetfulness.  For them,the Chinese were but a tribe of Israel that had wandered so far, and stayed there for so long, that they forgot the ultimate reasons for their wisdom, which were, namely, exactly the same sequence of revelations that made the acknowledged forebears of Christian Europe wise.  The Chinese became, as it were, wise automata, and missionary activity was in fact nothing more than the task of reminding them who they really were. 

Leibniz did not believe that the Chinese had biblical origins, but he did share with the figurists the belief that the Chinese have just as much access to the truth of Christianity as do Europeans. One of the great ironies of early modern ethnography is that it was the religious and creationist world-view that spoke in favor of common origins for all humanity, while the abandonment of the need to interpret human diversity in scriptural terms easily led to the racist idea that non-European peoples are unworthy of salvation simply because they lack truly human souls.  Leibniz, as a representative of early modern humanism, may effectively be serving as an apologist for missionary work in China.  But he believes missionary work is a worthwhile project only because he presumes the full humanity of the Jesuits’ targets.  Perkins treats Leibniz’s support for the Christianization of China with all the sensitivity and charity this potentially touchy topic deserves. 

As historians of philosophy grow increasingly interested in the contexts that produced the figures we study, and steadily less inclined to treat them as geniuses generated ex nihilo, we will need to pay attention not just to the narrowly focused questions of, e.g., scientific practices within the laboratories of Royal Society members, but also to the very wide-focused questions concerning the global context of early modern European history.  It will be best if this work is done by scholars trained in philosophy and appreciative of what Leibniz loved to call the ‘commerce of light’ between cultures rather than primarily the commerce of goods (even if the two must ultimately be studied in conjunction in order to arrive at an accurate picture).  For this reason, Perkins’s book is not just good and informative, but also pathbreaking.