Justin E. H. Smith
[Presented at the Fondacion Orotava, Tenerife, Canary Islands, 14 February, 2009]
In an audacious text of 1671, entitled “A Method for Instituting a New, Invincible Militia that can Subjugate the Entire Earth, Easily Seize Control over Egypt, or Establish American Colonies,” written as an addendum to his better known Consilium Aegyptiacum, Leibniz sketches out a plan for training a new army of warrior slaves:
A certain island of Africa, such as Madagascar, shall be selected, and all the inhabitants shall be ordered to leave. Visitors from elsewhere shall be turned away, or in any event it will be decreed that they only be permitted to stay in the harbor for the purpose of obtaining water. To this island slaves captured from all over the barbarian world will be brought, and from all of the wild coastal regions of Africa, Arabia, New Guinea, etc. To this end Ethiopians, Nigritians, Angolans, Caribbeans, Canadians, and Hurons fit the bill, without discrimination. What a lovely bunch of semi-beasts! But so that this mass of men may be shaped in any way desired, it is useful only to take boys up to around the age of twelve.
Leibniz proposes to segregate these prisoners according to language, which for him is the same as segregation by race or genus. In this way, unable to communicate with any warriors beyond their own small squadron, the warriors will be unable to plan an insurrection. In every race [genere], Leibniz writes,
whoever is most trained in his squadron, which is to say among those who speak his language, shall challenge those who are the best trained in the other squadrons. The people [gens] that wins that year shall be the leaders. They will be able to strike terrible blows with their very powerful curved swords, to hit targets with their slings, and to rip things apart with their lances. They are to be trained to run races at such a speed as will be equal to that of horses. Which will come about first by pursuing them until they are able to touch the mane or the tail, and then freely [i.e., without horses]. They shall learn to swim first with the help of an outer shell or bladder, and thereafter without any covering; they will descend under the water after the example of diving bells [this probably an example inspired by Cornelis Drebbel], and they will learn the method of ascending and descending as they please. They shall learn to jump after the manner of the Tenerifeans, first jumping with the help of a lance... as far as human strength is able to reach, and afterwards without these.
Leibniz goes on to describe the tremendous feats these warriors will perform with their lances:
In the beginning they will alight from a higher place by the means of their lance touching the ground below; then they will leap horizontally on a level plane, and finally from below they will leap to the top. The will learn how to climb up smooth surfaces [per lubrica klettern].... They shall become used to climbing however high their lance may be just by means of fixing their lances beneath them. They will learn moreover to carry the greatest and strongest lances, like Achilles, and like other ancients. Indeed, they shall learn to project them with great impetus towards a designated target, as well as of bringing one lance together with another if the one does not suffice for climbing. By means of this art they will easily conquer the mightiest European fortifications. They will be able to walk on their lances, as on stilts [wie auff stelzen].
Wherever did Leibniz learn so much about Tenerifean martial arts? In an anonymous travel report in Thomas Sprat’s 1667 History of the Royal Society, we find the following description of a native Tenerifean ‘Guanchio’ [today called Guanches], a description that Leibniz would reproduce four years later, sometimes nearly word-for-word:
[An English traveller] himself hath seen [the Guanches] leap from Rock to Rock, from a very prodigious height, till they came to the bottom, sometimes making ten fathom deep at one leap. The manner is thus: First they Tertiate their Lance (which is about the bigness of a half Pike) that is, they poise it in their hand, then they aim the point of it at any piece of a Rock, upon which they intend to light (sometimes not half a foot broad.) At their going off they clap their feet close to the Lance[,] and so carry their bodies in the Air. The point of the Lance first comes to the place, which breaks the force of their fall; then they slide gently down by the Stagge, and pitch with their feet upon the very place they first designed, and from Rock to Rock till they come to the bottome. Their Novices sometimes break their necks in learning (Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 1667).
Knowing this background to the Modus instituendi in Sprat’s History what has been denounced as a grossly racist tract by the young and impetuous Leibniz begins to appear more as the harmless musings of someone who has just read a compelling adventure story— one that just happens to be set here in the Canary Islands. The only two scholars, as far as I know, to have engaged with this text, Marcelo Dascal and, separately, Peter Fenves, have focused exclusively on the curious rule that Leibniz sets up for the kidnapped soldier boys, that they will all be prevented from learning each other’s languages, and from forging a new one in which communication, and so possibly dissent, might take place. Fenves describes the image of these isolated, unconnected boys as a ‘perverse’ anticipation of the theory of windowless monads; Dascal is similarly harsh. But in focusing on the language and domination aspect, they miss the mountaineering and sword-play aspect. This may be more important than it at first appears. Both scholars fail to note both the larger structure and aim of the report itself, as also the significance of this particular example for our understanding of Leibniz’s place as a thinker and an actor in the history of what is now often called ‘colonial science’.
As to the first of these oversights, it is important to note that the report published by Sprat was not principally an ethnographic account of the already largely Hispanicized Guanches’ cultural practices. The report has, rather, the classic structure of a cosmography: describing first the formation of the land and the properties of the rocks and minerals; then an account of the plant life, with particular attention to the more useful species; then a similar account of animal life; and finally an account of the local inhabitants. This is the standard form of much early modern natural history writing: from geogony and geology through botany to zoology and finally anthropology, with a parallel movement from consideration of potential for the extraction of natural resources, through pharmaceutics, perhaps some recipes, and finally to an account of the moral and physical or physiognomic character of the locals. True to the cosmographical convention, one also followed by Conring in his account of Helmstedt, the indigenous people of the Canaries are described, as they had been earlier by Columbus, as being extremely tall of stature.
Sprat’s account, in addition to following the general cosmographical structure of countless other natural-historical texts; it also makes explicit the connection between the study of geogony on the one hand and practical considerations on the other:
[T]he whole Island being a ground mightily impregnated with Brimstone, did in former times take fire, and blow up all or near upon all at the same time, and... many Mountains of huge Stones calcin’d and burnt, which appear every where about the Island, especially in the Southwest parts of it, were raid’d and heav’d up out of the Bowels of the Earth, at the time of that general conflagration; and that the greatest quantity of this Sulphur lying about the Center of the Island, raised up the Pico to that height at which it is now seen. .. And there remain to this time the very Tracts of the Rivers of Brimstone as they ran over all this quarter of the Island, which hath so wasted the ground beyond recovery, that nothing can be made to grow there but Broom... These calcin’d Rocks resembling some of them Iron-Ore, some silver, and other Copper. Particularly at a certain place in these South-west parts called the Azuleios, being very high Mountains, where never any English man but himself (that ever he heard of) was...
So much for the theoretical considerations. Our traveller goes on to report:
And a Portuguez told him, who had been in the West-Indies, that his opinion was, there were as good Mines of Gold and Silver there as the best in the Indies...
As to the second oversight, namely, the significance of the particular example of Tenerife, it is significant that, as historians such as David Abulafia have noted, the Canary Islands, explored already by 1330 and fully conquered by the end of the 15th century, amounted to a sort of prelude to the big event: the domination of the New World, which would begin a century later and which would still not be entirely finished by the time Leibniz proposes his militia for, among other things, setting up an American colony. When Leibniz proposes ‘an island off of Africa’, such as Madagascar, this is evidently because the Canaries have already been taken. But it is the Canaries, and the expansion of the Spanish Empire out from there, that serves as Leibniz’s model and inspiration. (And of course, eventually Madagascar would be taken by the French.)
Beyond simply expanding the territory under the rule of a sovereign, colonization of course has as one of its principle aims the extraction of natural resources. Indeed, even at home, the imperative to extract natural resources and their importance for measuring the magnificence of a sovereign are linked together; and for Leibniz these two are linked in turn to a third kind of project: the search after origins, both political and natural. It was this confluence of interests --geogonical speculation, the glorification of the Guelf family both by inquiry into its medieval roots as well as by the survey of its territory’s natural riches, and, finally, several years of experience as an unsuccessful mining engineer-- that explains how and why the Protogaea came into being. What I aim to do in the remainder of this paper is to explain how we get from the Modus instituendi to the Protogaea, or, in other words, what it is that binds together, on the one hand Leibniz’s theory of, and hands-on encounter with, the earth, and on the other hand his theory of, and proposals for, the sundry inhabitants of that earth. I shall proceed to consider this question under three broad headings: Geogony, Generation, and History, showing how all are interrelated yet distinct parts of a unified project of what Catherine Wilson has described as the ‘speculative science of origins’. Now I do not wish to claim that the account in Sprat has any enduring influence on Leibniz, or that there is a continuous development from the juvenile Modus instituendi to the mature Protogaea. I wish rather to argue that, by considering how the Sprat text unexpectedly overlaps with two very different interests and distinct periods in Leibniz’s thought, we may come to better appreciate the unity in Leibniz’s mind of the projects of historia naturalis and historia civilis: a disciplinary unity that would come to full maturity a century later with Kant’s inclusion of anthropology within physical geography.
One of the most important distinguishing features of geogony, or the coming-into-being of the early earth with its distinct geographical features such as mountains, oceans, and continents, is the experimental reproducibility of what nature does on a much larger scale. Human beings are capable of creating on a small scale what nature does on an immense one : nature, Leibniz writes in the Protogaea, “who has mountains as her alembics, and volcanoes as her furnaces” (Protogaea X). When it comes to what we think of as biological generation, in contrast, our experiments are useless: the homunculus created in the laboratory is only a part of alchemical legend, not of real experiment.
The coming-into-being of crystals as well can be explained in terms of the ‘ordinary repetitions’ of geometrical forms, which can in principle be created through chemical procedures. Leibniz contrasts the growth of crystals from the origins of organic forms in matter as follows: “[In the case of organic forms] it is not at all a matter of certain radial bodies and of regular polygons as we see in crystals, garnet, and other gems and fluors, as well as in various other mnerals, no more than the figures shaped by hexagonal snow, by beehives, in vitriol and aluminum, by common salt and nitre... it is not at al a matter of all that geometry of inanimate nature, which can be easily understood by the juxtaposition of parts, as in crystallization.”
Now, what about the organic forms found in geological substrata, and contrasted by Leibniz with the merely geometrical crystals? Leibniz’s theory of fossils might be understood as a special application of his general theory of the constant organic embodiment of corporeal substances. That is to say that for Leibniz, wherever there is an infinitely integrated structure, there is a living being. For him, therefore, those who believe that fossils are products of nature’s formative power alone “allow themselves to be seduced by the fairy tales... of Kircher and Becher, and other authors as vain as they are credulous, who have written of the wonderful games of nature and of her formative power.” Leibniz believes that only organic beings can give rise to organic forms. Fossils are not imitations of anything, but rather are traces or vestiges.
In the Protogaea Leibniz relates several examples of fossils that he himself has seen in the Harz mountains:
I have seen many marine animals, such as the shark, the herring, the lamprey, and this latter sometimes stuck beneath the herring. Looking at these phenomena, most observers are content to say that they are games of nature, a term that is devoid of meaning, and they present to us these ichthyomorphous stones as an example of the undeniable capriciousness of nature’s genius [rerum genii], hoping by this to solve all the difficulties and to prove that nature, this great fabricator, imitates, as if playing, the teeth and bones of animals, shells, and serpents.
Leibniz notes that the defenders of the sort of explanation often find not only images of animals, but also of the face of Christ, of the Virgin, or --the Protestant variant-- the face of Martin Luther. “So they believe,” he writes, “that they have discovered Christ and Moses in the cave at Baumann, Appolo and the muses in veins of agate, the Pope and Luther in the stone at Eisleben” (99). He relates a story of the miners of the Harz Mountains, who even found the figure of a little man in silver, “of the length of a finger, wearing a miner’s clothing, and carrying a tray [hotte] full of metal.” He shrewdly explains that ‘Christians and miners’ are predisposed to perceive those things that are naturally present to their minds. In such cases, “art comes to the aid of nature,” or, in other words, the imagination imposes forms where they are not to be found in the matter itself. But there is a tremendous difference for Leibniz between the fortuitous products of chance, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the remains of the organic bodies of corporeal substances. Leibniz is ready to admit that it is possible that the figures of living beings or of particular human beings ‘which deviate but little from reality’, might be produced, “but never to the point that they could be mistaken for the works of Scopas” (101). Chance can never copy never exactly, and thus those who argue that the resemblance of a stone to Christ is no less verisimilar than an ichthyomorphous stone run the risk of appearing foolish after closer examination:
But it is to be feared that such poorly measured blows will fall back upon their author, and that an argument drawn from such a perfect resemblance will only prove the contrary of what it was meant to establish. There is such a relationship between these supposed simulacra and real fish, their fins and scales are reproduced with so much precision, and the great number of these images in one place is so great, that we can only suppose a manifest and constant cause, arther than a game or chance, or I-don’t-know-what gererative ideas: the inane words of the philosophers.
Leibniz denies in this connection that whatever comes to be in the ‘matrix’ of the earth does so as a result of ‘gestation’. At the same time, as Cohen and Wakefield note, he is eager to identify the structure and production of minerals with artificial mechanical processes. This sets off gestating things, i.e., embryos of biological entities, from both mineral and artificial entities. Biological entities are the things that, unlike the products of geological processes, cannot be reproduced in alchemical furnaces. Geological and technological processes are related to one another to the extent that both provide, or are capable of providing, a means for understanding the other. The volcano can be adequately simulated in a furnace, for example. Biological processes are distinguished from both of these in view of the infinite complexity of the entities it produces (or unfolds), and also, in view of the fact that generation is always generation within a ‘generational series’, which is to say a biological kind, all of whose descendants are linked together, as Leibniz writes in his polemic with Stahl, in a sort of eternal golden chain.
As I argue in my forthcoming book on Leibniz’s philosophy of biology, Leibniz’s nominalism about species must not be extended to sexually reproducing biological species. Individual members of species are bound together by their chain of generation, and they remain so bound even where there is great morphological drift over time: Leibniz accepts the same degree of intraspecies adaptation that any so-called ‘creation scientist’ today would allow, as his discussion in the Nouveaux essais shows of the parallel cases of the different ‘races’ of great cat, such as lions, lynxes, and tigers, on the one hand, and on the other the different races or breeds of domestic dog. As for lions and tigers, so for men and apes. In the same text, Leibniz takes up the famous problem of the Orang-Outang, and sides firmly, against Locke, with the rigid species-fixist Edward Tyson. Leibniz, unlike Tyson, holds open the possibility that the orang-outang is human, as it may possess a share of reason, even if it is not gifted at showing it; though unlike Locke he believes there is a fact of the matter as to whether it is human or not: Tyson and Leibniz agree on the principle, Inter humanum et non-humanum tertium non datur. Thus Leibniz writes:
Few theologians would be bold enough right away and unconditionally to baptize an animal that has a human figure but that lacks the appearance of reason, if it were found as a baby in the wild, and a priest of the Roman Church would perhaps say conditionally, if you are human, I baptize you.
Here Leibniz is evidently taking a cue from Augustine, who writes similarly: “Whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance...or how peculiar in some part they are human, descended from Adam.” For Leibniz as for Augustine, morphological deviance has nothing to do with the possession of that special office of humanity, the contemplative rational soul, and this even in the case in which the morphology is so distorted as to conceal from outside observers whether the creature in question is a human or not. Leibniz continues:
[I]t would not be known if it is of the human race, and if a rational soul lodges within, and this could be the case of the Ourang-Outang, an ape that is outwardly so similar to a man, of which Tulpius speaks from his own experience, and whose anatomy has been published by a learned Physician.
The learned physician in question is Edward Tyson, who published his anatomical study, Orang-Outang, sive, Homo sylvestris, Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie, compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man, in 1699, and who by the time Leibniz wrote the Nouveaux essais had far surpassed his predecessor Tulpius as the most thorough and influential investigator of primate anatomy, and of the boundary between human beings and their nearest ancestors. In 1704, it is clear that Leibniz is familiar with one of the more important arguments of Tyson’s Orang-Outang, and that he deploys this argument in his response to Locke’s 1690 essay, written nine years before the Orang-Outang had been published.
Shared ancestry, in sum, is equivalent to shared species membership, for Leibniz as for John Ray and other well-known species-fixists. This remains the case even where we cannot determine the ‘interior nature’ of a species, since, as Leibniz writes to Gackenholtz in a letter on botanical method of 1701, “as a result of the work of Jungius, Malpighi, Hooke, Swammerdam, and Leeuwenhoek, soon we will arrive at something more profound” than our current, arbitrary taxonomical criteria in our study of plants. He goes on to suggest that classification with respect to the flowering part of the plant may be more profound than any other morphological criteria, since “there is in fact a very great connection between the flowers and the generation of the plant; and it is above all useful to find the variety of principles in generation; which Aristotle himself saw when he undertook to trace the variety of animals back to this capital point.” Leibniz, in short, defends what Kant would later call ‘the unity of the generative power’, that is, the priority of ancestry over morphology in the determination of biological kind membership.
In notes on a text by Wilkins taken at some point between 1677 and 1686, (citation 10), Leibniz lists the terms Race, genus, Geschlecht, and series generationum as synonyms, further identifying genealogy as the “explication of this series.” Now, recall that in the Modus instituendi, Leibniz had referred to the Ethiopians, Canadians, etc., variously as gentia and as genera. Does this mean that each group constitutes a generative unity, which is to say that each group is reproductively isolated? Certainly not; throughout his life Leibniz remains committed on Christian grounds to a monogenetic account of human origins; even in the Modus instituendi, the barbarians are to be captured and enslaved not as subhumans, but simply as non-Christians. Thus Leibniz recalls in a text included in the Otium hanoveranum, published posthumously in 1718, having read François Bernier’s Nouvelle division de la terre in the Journal des Savants some years earlier:
I remember reading somewhere (but I cannot recall where) [evidently a reference to Bernier] that a certain voyager divided human beings into certain tribes, races, or classes. He assigned a particular race to the Lapps and Samoyeds, a certain one to the Chinese and neighboring peoples; another to the Negroes, still another to the Cafres or Hottentots. In America there is a marvelous difference between the Galibis or Caribbeans, for example, who have a great deal of value and just as much spirit, and those of Paraguay, who seem to be children or youths all their lives. This does not prevent all human beings who inhabit the globe from being all of the same race, which has been altered by the different climates, as we see animals and plants changing their nature and becoming better or degenerating.
A generational series, then, is something quite distinct from an isolated reproductive community, as the ‘Biological Species Concept’ proposed by Ernst Mayr and others would define a species. But as biologists today know full well, interfertility in potentia does not necessarily lead to offspring –for many subspecies of finch, for example, it is enough that the one has slightly different markings on its feathers than the otherin order to turn both parties off from the prospect of mating. It is clear that Leibniz takes Ethiopians, Canadians, and Europeans to be in much the same situation: relatively reproductively isolated because mutually uninterested, even if biologically the same, and descended from the same ancestors.
Another reproductively isolated community is constituted by the European nobility, with its complicated rules governing the political union of families through marriage. And here we come back now to the Guelf-Este history, and Leibniz’s inclusion in it of a survey of the dominion’s geographical features, as well as of the riches that could be extracted from these. Recall that Leibniz’s real task in writing the history of his employer, the task for which what came to be known as the Protogaea was but a preface, was to establish the ancient connection between the Guelf family and the Este family. This task was ultimately one of genealogy, which is to say the explication of a generational series.
But this project was of a pair for Leibniz with that of surveying the family’s wealth in natural resources. Why does he see them as connected? In part, as I have suggested, it was just a matter of cosmographical convention: we’ve already seen just the same sweeping survey that moves from volcanoes through plants and animals and finally to a consideration of the indigenous people in the travel report from Tenerife. Beyond this, however, Leibniz evidently acccepts a benign form of the view that blood and soil are profoundly connected, as it is geography that over time comes to shape the bodies, and ultimately the characters, of a region’s inhabitants. There is indeed a story yet to be told about the coemergence of geology and physical anthropology in history, a story that, again, seems to reach its climax in Kant’s physical geography, but of which Leibniz’s larger Protagaea project represents a fascinating earlier draft.
So now we have come full circle. I hope I have not made too many leaps on imaginary lances to propel myself into the fortifications of European nobility, and there to unravel the threads of Leibniz’s ambitious historical project, which included the history of the earth, of its flora and fauna, as well as of its peoples, of their languages and civilizations, and of a particular noble family that happened to be willing to fund this unfinished, and unfinishable, undertaking.
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