[Abstract submitted for the Theodicy anniversary conference at Notre Dame, Fall, 2010]
Leibniz composed the Theodicy at the very peak of
his activity as a historian. Contrary to widespread belief that he
undertook this activity only grudgingly, in fact he pursued his
historical research with great interest (even if he did it more slowly
than his employer would have liked), and even saw it as inseparable
from his broader intellectual project-- his philosophy, if you will.
Thus he complains to Nicolaes Witsen in a letter of 1698 that "people
criticize me when I attempt to take leave of the study of
mathematics, and they tell me that I am wrong to abandon solid
and eternal truths in order to study the changing and perishable things
that are found in history and its laws" (Ger'e 1873, No. 36). And in a
1708 draft of a proposal to Peter the Great for the classificatory
system to be used in the eventual library of the St. Petersburg Academy
of Sciences, Leibniz identifies history, alongside mathematics and
physics, as one of the three ‘Realien’ or distinct domains of science,
namely, the one that "involves the explanation of times and places, and
thus of singular things" including "the descriptions and attainments of
kingdoms, states, and peoples" (Ger’e 1873, No. 73).
But what are the laws of the study of res singulares? And do
these laws cover all human affairs, or only a certain subset of them?
There is a commonplace of later German philosophy of history, extending
at least from Kant to Marx, according to which history just is European
history, since only Europe had succeeded in initiating the process of
global change that alone makes human life more than static, and thus,
by implication, more than animal. Thus Kant thought that the
inhabitants of undiscovered South Sea islands are no more the subjects
of history than are sheep, while Marx maintained that the British
imposition of industrial weaving equipment in Bengal had been a
blessing to those upon whom it was imposed, since it is only through
technological change that cultural change can happen, and history just
is cultural change. The distinction that Marx would later make in terms
of technology was made by Leibniz, mutatis mutandis, in terms
of religion: only those who have been absorbed into the "true doctrine
of the unity of God and the immortality of souls" (Theodicy,
Preface) may be considered as having lived, as Kant would later put it,
a life worth living, and it's only a life worth living that is a life
worth writing down, which is to say a historical life.
For at least the early Leibniz, there is no hierarchy of races (pace
Fenves 2005), but only a basic distinction between barbarians on the
one hand and children of God on the other. This dichotomy comes out
very vividly in, for example, an early text such as the Method for Insituting a New, Invincible Militia
of 1671, in which he proposes that "slaves captured from all over the
barbarian world will
be brought [to an island such as Madagascar], 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!" (A IV i, 408-10). In an important
sense, it is true that what Leibniz is proposing is 'without
discrimination': the people he proposes to treat in this horrific way
are suitable subjects of such treatment because they lack knowledge of
what Leibniz would call in the Theodicy
the 'true doctrine'; if they had this knowledge, their Ethiopian or
Canadian origins would immediately become irrelevant to their moral
status. Leibniz's conception of how one might come to hold this true
doctrine, moreover, changes dramatically over the course of his career.
In 1671, he probably held that baptism alone could suffice; by the time
of the Theodicy, in contrast, the paths to the true doctrine
are many. One such path is Islam: Mohammed, he writes, "showed no
divergence from the great dogmas of natural theology: his followers
spread them abroad even among the most remote races of Asia and of
Africa, whither Christianity had not been carried; and they abolished
in many countries heathen superstitions which were contrary to the true
doctrine of the unity of God and the immortality of souls" [Theodicy, Preface, 51]. By the time of the Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese,
composed in 1715-16, Leibniz no longer requires even a genealogical
connection to the Abrahamic tradition and its revelations in order for
a people, such as the Chinese, to come to knowledge of the true
doctrine of God. Thus the clear distinction of the 1671 New Method
between us and them begins to collapse, as the possibility opens up
that the semi-beasts might simply happen upon knowledge of the true
doctrine by means of an innate, or natural, theology.
Already, we have ample material to ask a number of Theodicy-inspired
questions about Leibniz's conception of the histories of nations, and
his conception of the nature of human cultural difference. Does Leibniz
have any sort of account of the conditions under which a community,
such as the Chinese, might arrive unaided at the sort of natural
theological knowledge that moves one out of the barbarian's world? Is
there moreover any deep reason, motivated by Leibniz's abiding
commitment to the harmony of the world order, and the explanation of
degrees of perfection in terms of God's choice of the best --because
most plenitudinous-- order, why there should be barbarians at all? That
is, can we ask in the conceptual terms provided for us in the Theodicy, why there are barbarians in the same way that we are already familiar with asking, and with answering by means of tools the Theodicy gives us, the question as to why there are mosquitoes or earthquakes?
I will argue that we in fact can approach the question of cultural difference in terms of the basic argument of the Theodicy,
and indeed that Leibniz believes, notwithstanding his explicit disdain
for barbarianism, that cultural diversity is good when considered in a
holistic way. Evidence that this is in fact what he thinks can be
discerned, I will argue, in much of his work, contemporary to the Theodicy,
on the ancient history of preliterate Eurasian peoples such as the
Scythians and the Huns, and on their languages as the sources of modern
living languages. In this respect, Leibniz's mature conception of
history is much more capacious than that of Kant or Marx: it includes
everyone, and it includes the entire span of human existence, even what
would later come to be called 'prehistory'.
Finally, I will argue that, for the reasons already spelled out,
Leibniz's philosophy of culture and of cultural difference places him
in a lineage that will later include not Kant and Marx, but rather the
communitarian thinker Johann Gottfried Herder: Leibniz and Herder both
believe that cultural distinctness is rooted in linguistic community,
that the cultural identity preserved by language is one that is more
deeply rooted than the written records of history conceived as the
sequence of recorded events, and that, ultimately, distinct cultures
cannot be measured against one another, but rather each has its place
in the whole order of human culture, and each is in the end, in spite
of the superficial uniqueness of its cultural forms, an expression of
the same underlying human reality.
*
Select BibliographyPeter Fenves, “Imagining an Inundation of Australians; or, Leibniz on the Principles of Grace and Race.” In
Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, edited by Andrew Valls, pp. 73-89. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Stefano Gensini, Leibniz: L'armonia delle lingue. Bari: Biblioteca Universale Laterza, 1995.
V. I. Ger’e (Ed.), Sbornik pisem i memorialov Leïbnitsa
otnosiashchikhsia k Rossii i Petru Velikomu. Saint Petersburg, 1873. Schulenburg, Sigrid von der,
Leibniz als Sprachforscher. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973.
