[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.
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Select Bibliography
Peter 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.
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