This is a slightly modified version of a talk delivered to the Department of History and Civilisation, European University Institute, Florence, on May 21, 2020.
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A question, to begin: What would intellectual history look like if its pedigree were traced back not to G. W. F. Hegel, but to G. W. Leibniz?
Peter Gordon has observed that “German nationalist historians of the nineteenth century tended to believe that history is first and foremost a study of political narrative.” They thus modeled themselves on the ideal of historical Wissenschaft as national-historical narration. No author embodies this approach more fully than Hegel. For him, the home of history is in Europe, as history is nothing other than the coming-into-self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit. Hegel thinks it is the work of European philosophers to help Spirit along, to birth it, while European states are for him, as it were, the armed wing of philosophy. Beyond the boundaries of Europe, what we find in terms of statecraft is either its absence, or some species of more or less eternal and unchanging despotism, while in terms of philosophy what we find is its admixture into, and vitiation by, mythology and other expressions of culture. For Hegel, the Greek miracle lay in the separating out of mythology and philosophy, so that the articulation of questions about, say, the nature of time, could be addressed in a universal idiom that would not presuppose the existence of Chronos as a divine personification of time. For the ancient Persians, by contrast, to use Hegel's own example, reflection on the nature of time could only proceed through culturally embedded narratives inseparable from religion and lore.
Thus for Hegel only those expressions of philosophy that descend from the Greeks have any claim to universality, and thus only these expressions deserve to be exported from their place of origin throughout the world. This 19th-century Europeanisation of philosophy witnessed the destruction of millennia-old disciplinary divisions in India and China, notably, as newly subjugated institutions of learning rushed to model their curricula on those of European universities, creating neologisms for “philosophy” where these had not existed before. Thus, to note one striking example from China, the cultivation of wisdom was separated from the perfection of calligraphic technique.
This disruption of intellectual traditions throughout the world is just one of the many measurable shockwaves of imperialism. Hegel's articulation of it is not surprising, yet it is a far cry from the common view among European philosophers of barely more than a century prior, where we find, for example, Leibniz calling for a “commerce of light”, a bidirectional exchange of wisdom that would piggy-back upon the commerce of goods between Europe and Asia. Nor, for Leibniz, would this exchange be limited to the textual traditions of literate non-Western “civilisations”; it would also extend to the oral traditions and natural languages of Indigenous peoples. Thus Leibniz writes in 1704, that
When the Latins, Greeks, Hebrews and Arabs shall someday be exhausted, the Chinese, supplied also with ancient books, will enter the lists and furnish matter for the curiosity of our critics. Not to speak of some old books of the Persians, Armenians, and Brahmins... And when there is no longer any ancient book to examine, languages will take the place of books, as they are the most ancient monuments of mankind.
In time, Leibniz thinks,
all the languages of the world will be recorded and placed in the dictionaries and grammars, and compared together; this will be of very great use both for the knowledge of things, since names often correspond to their properties (as is seen by the names of plants among different peoples), and for the knowledge of our mind and the wonderful varieties of its operations.
The fruit of such research, Leibniz thinks, will be a sort of mirror of the rational order of nature itself; it would amount to a sort of global survey of human reason, differently inflected according to circumstances, but nonetheless unified and universal.
In what follows I would like to look at three complexly intertwined cases of transregional philosophical encounter in the early modern period, each of which illustrates in its own way the challenges, for us, of studying the history of philosophy across borders, and the challenges, for the people we are studying, of understanding one another.
1.
Hegel's view is not without precedent in the early modern period, and it should not be surprising that its clearest expressions come from figures we may fairly associate with the “radical Enlightenment”: materialists, crypto-atheists, neo-Epicureans. François Bernier, to turn to our first of three case studies, furnishes a vivid example of this incipient tendency.
A devotee of the French Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi, and a physician by training, Bernier found himself working as a doctor in Shiraz for six years, where, according to his own claim, he passed his time translating Descartes and Gassendi into Persian. Subsequently he was assigned in 1658 as the court physician to the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb, in Delhi, where he befriended the Persian prince and philosopher Dara Shikoh.
A Muslim keenly interested in “interfaith dialogue,” Dara Shikoh nonetheless understands this in a very different way than today's multiculturalist. For him, the possibility of finding truth in the Brahminic faith is premised on the conviction that the Upaniṣads, properly understood, reflect and confirm the fundamental, revealed truth of the Qur’ān. He has translated large portions of the Sanskrit text into Persian, thus working towards the same target language as Bernier, but is doing so within an intellectual framework that calls to mind nothing so much as Jesuit figurism, as for example in Athanasius Kircher's interpretation of Chinese sources, which buys the harmony of traditions at the expense of understanding foreign traditions on their own terms: figurism, that is, argues that, properly understood, the claims of foreign wisdom traditions corroborate and deepen the truth of our own.
Bernier himself is far less ecumenical; he tends to understand Sanskrit learning as the crystallization of Indian folk tradition. In this judgment, Bernier is in part importing battles he has already long been fighting in Europe. In effect he is disappointed to see Indian popular tradition unwittingly favoring the world-view of Gassendi’s adversaries, such as Robert Fludd, particularly in their interpretation of a recent eclipse as a harbinger of supernatural wrath, rather than as a natural phenomenon “of the same nature with so many others that had preceded without mischief.” Bernier believes that his Muslim interlocutors are better disposed to appreciate the force of his own rigorously naturalistic philosophical views. He discerns a spirit of toleration in the political order of the Mughal empire that he himself would not support in Europe, describing the emperor, “though he be a Muslim,” as “suffer[ing] these Heathens to go on in these old superstitions,” simply for the sake of maintaining social harmony.
When for his part Bernier listens to the pandits, he hears only “tales”, that is, articulations that, whether they contain any philosophical insight or not, are so vitiated by local cultural forms as to make the philosophy unrecoverable. He writes that when he grew weary of explaining to his Muslim host “those late discoveries of Harvey and Pecquet in Anatomy, and of discoursing with him of the Philosophy of Gassendi and Descartes,” the two of them would turn to the Hindu pandit in their midst, and beseech him “to discourse and to relate unto us his stories, which he delivered seriously and without ever smiling... At last we were so much disgusted with his tales and uncouth reasonings, that we scarce had patience left to hear them.”
Bernier listens attentively enough to be able subsequently to recall from memory, and more or less accurately, the six schools of āstika philosophy. He also correctly identifies Buddhism as a nāstika school, whose members are despised by the pandits “as a company of irreligious and atheistical people.” He is simultaneously attentive and dismissive, curious and contemptuous, and his negative judgments flow from his status as a libertine materialist philosopher in the battle against superstition back home in Europe. Bernier does recognize tendencies that bring certain Indian traditions closer to his view than others, traditions for example “which approach the opinions of Democritus and Epicurus.”
At one point Bernier relates a remarkable, indeed absurd, effort he had made, during a particularly tense interfaith dialogue session, to give an impromptu lesson in physiology by cutting open a live goat and thereby displaying the truth of Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood. The image of Bernier sacrificing an animal in front of an audience of horrified Brahmins could very well serve as an emblem of the difficulties of communication between intellectual traditions.
2.
Some decades later, another noteworthy philosophical encounter took place in an aristocratic court after a long voyage. This time, however, the court was in Germany, and the voyager, when he arrived in 1706, was still a small boy. Anton Wilhelm Amo, who first came on a Dutch West Indies galley ship from Guinea to Amsterdam, and was sent from there to work at the court of the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, was baptized into the local faith, Lutheran Christianity, in 1707. He soon began learning Latin, and it is likely that as a boy he also conversed with Leibniz on the philosopher's frequent visits to the Wolfenbüttel Hof. In 1727 Amo is sent to the University of Halle to study, first law, then philosophy. He produces two philosophical dissertations, and one lengthy treatise on logic. His patron Duke Anton Ulrich dies in 1731, initiating several years of financial hardship partially mitigated by precarious employment at the Universities of Halle, Wittenberg, and Jena. In 1746 Amo writes a letter to the Dutch West Indies Company, requesting transit on a slave ship back from Amsterdam to Guinea, and he departs in January of the next year. If the somewhat unclear circumstances of Amo's arrival in Europe are anything like those of his fellow Ghanaian Jacobus Capitein, the author of a 1741 work entitled Slavery, Not Incompatible with Christianity, it was likely with the intention of training Amo up as a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church and sending him back to Africa to lead an orphanage school that he made the initial voyage. How he ended up in Germany instead of stopping in the Netherlands, and how he passed from theology to philosophy, are questions we are still seeking to understand.
I have read every known word written by Amo, and I can report that nowhere in his writing does he mention even once his identity as an African, let alone does he speak as a representative of any native African tradition. Unlike Bernier, Amo arrives in the foreign court still too young and pliable to see it as his mission to mediate between traditions, to represent one tradition while witnessing another. Amo is, therefore, I maintain, a German philosopher, the author of a handful of minor works in the Lutheran academic tradition of the early 18th century.
It may or may not be surprising, however, to learn that Amo has been posthumously taken up and restyled as, precisely, an African philosopher. The founder of the Republic of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, for example, gives significant space to Amo in his 1964 philosophical treatise, Consciencism, depicting Amo as a materialist thinker and thus as an embodiment of traditional African thought's anticipation of Marxism-Leninism. Nkrumah's speculation is interesting in its own right as a matter of intellectual history. What interests me more, however, is to determine what significance the case of Amo might have for our understanding of the global context of early modern intellectual history, even in the absence of any explicit engagement with the question of cross-cultural encounter in Amo's work?
Part of the answer to this difficult question lies in the history of institutions, and the way German universities came to conceive their mission in the early 18th century. Halle, in particular, from its origins deeply symbiotic with the Pietist Orphanage in the same city, had an academic mission that was inseparable from missions in the narrow sense. It is to the Halle Pietists that Leibniz turned with his vision for a Protestant emulation of the Jesuit missions to Asia. It is also to Halle that, for a time, scholars from Europe and beyond would turn to study the Orient, conceived broadly as the cultures and languages reaching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Kamchatka peninsula. The learning was, as Leibniz always insisted it must be, bidirectional, with missionaries heading out, and young students coming in: Salomon Negri from Syria, a certain Ahmet Gül from Rajasthan, a handful of Jewish students (a first in Germany), and Anton Wilhelm Amo-Afer of Guinea, via Wolfenbüttel.
In his elogious afterword to Amo's 1734 dissertation, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, the rector of Halle Johannes Gottfried Kraus appears to mistakenly identify Amo's place of origin is not Axim, in West Africa, but Axum, the ancient Ethiopian city associated with the antiquity of African Christianity. In this way and many others, Amo was a representative of Africa, and of African learning, whether he wrote of it or not.
But Amo, who spent the last part of his life back in Africa, represents the Leibnizian bidirectionality of which we have spoken in surprising ways, in ways that might confound our expectation of the respective intellectual goods that Europe and Africa have to bring, as it were, to the exchange. Two fragmentary but revealing documents may illustrate this. The first is a description from the archives of the University of Jena, for a course Amo was to offer in the Michaelmas term of 1736. He promises to cover for his students “parts of the more elegant and curious philosophy,” including:
physiognomy; chiromancy; geomancy, commonly known as the art of divination; purely natural astrology; ... dechifratory, or the art of deciphering, which is opposed to the superstitions of the common people.
For any philosophy professor who complains today that curricular standards are slipping, it might help to remind them that in the early 18th century you could teach palm-reading in a philosophy classroom. We also see, as with Bernier, a concern to disavow superstition, and an identification of superstition with the beliefs of the benighted masses. However, the boundaries as to what ought to count as superstition are drawn differently in the two cases.
This document is mirrored in a curious way by the final documentary testimony of Amo's life recorded in 1753 by the Swiss traveler Henri David Gallandat, who met the philosopher in Axim after his return home. We learn from Gallandat that in Africa Amo “lived as a hermit, and was reputed to be a soothsayer. He spoke various languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, High and Low German, was very learned in astrology and astronomy, and was a great philosopher.” This description suggests that Amo had taken up a social role in his late life in Africa that was in some respects analogous to that of a philosopher in Europe. It also suggests that he had acquired or re-acquired the Nzema language to which he would have been exposed in early childhood, as he would not have been able to gain the reputation ascribed to him without the ability to communicate with local people.
Together with the Jena course description, it also suggests that Amo's restyling of himself for a local audience might not have been as radical an overhaul as some may imagine. Bernier had expressed his disdain for Brahminical superstition by comparison to those of the common people of Europe; Amo, whether in Europe or Africa, was more adaptable to the interests of the common people, whether first-generation university students in Jena, or, we may suppose, African merchants operating in the liminal trade zones between Africa and Europe. It is of course possible that Amo had not only adapted his soothsaying to the local idiom, but was also helping to promote the bidirectionality of the exchange of ideas, and just as Bernier had translated Gassendi into Persian, Amo may have been busily discoursing, between or during his fortune-telling sessions in Africa, on Leibnizian preestablished harmony in Nzema. This remains a matter of pure speculation, but is somewhat more grounded in plausibility than Nkrumah's transformation of Amo into a proto-Marxist.
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But let us move back now to the path carved from Halle to Russia. We know, incidentally, from a 1736 letter discovered by my student Dwight Lewis in an Estonian archive, that Amo himself had sought to go down this path, writing to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and requesting a research position there. His letter goes unanswered, and a few months later he will begin his Michaelmas course at Jena. If he had made it to the new Russian capital, he might have been swept up in some capacity, like so many other former Halle students, in the Great Kamchatka expedition that was currently under way. As I have shown elsewhere, this expedition might justly be seen as the systematic, institutionally backed mise-en-oeuvre of a vision of science that Leibniz had spelled out to Peter the Great some decades before, beginning from their first encounter in Hannover in 1698.
The list is long of desiderata that Leibniz, before his death in 1716, spelled out to Peter and his advisors, for an eventual scientific mission across the eastern reaches of the Empire. These desiderata included the determination of whether northeast Asia and northwest North America are connected by a land bridge; the establishment of research stations at fixed intervals for the measurement of magnetic variation; the collection of unknown plant species, pressed dry in books; and the collection, as well, of samples of unknown languages, also pressed into books, in the form of short translations of the Lord's Prayer or the Apostle's Creed in the indigenous languages of North Asia. The choice of canonical prayers as the standard unit of such samples was part of Leibniz's thoroughgoing commitment to bidirectionality: we European researchers get a fragment of Samoyed or Yakut, the Samoyeds and Yakuts get access, by the same gest, to an article of Christian faith. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, throughout the 18th century, Leibniz would be principally known as a Sprachmeister, that is, as a collector and classifier of language samples. He received many such samples from the Dutch naval architect and voyager Nicolaes Witsen, corresponding from Moscow. Witsen sent him not only indigenous languages of the polyglot Russian empire, but others he had collected from his own global network of Dutch seafarers. One such sample sent to Leibniz from Moscow was a bilingual transcription of the Lord's Prayer in Dutch and “Hottentot”, which is to say a Khoi-San language of Southern Africa. I have found as late as 1809, demotic editions of polyglot prayer manuals would include the Hottentot prayer with the notice: ex Leibnitio.
Leibniz never made it to Russia himself, let alone to Siberia, though he became a Privy Councillor to the Tsar in 1712, and like Amo he spent some years petitioning to relocate to the new Russian capital. If Leibniz came to have the posthumous reputation of a language-prospector, this is in large part thanks to his many proxies working in the field to realize his vision. No one demonstrates this relationship more clearly than the Swedish officer, geographer, and linguist Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, the author of the 1730 work Das Nord und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia. Like many Swedish officers, Strahlenberg had been taken prisoner in the 1709 Battle of Poltava, which ended Swedish military ascendancy, and yielded the first wave of prisoners to be “sent to Siberia”, with all the connotations that phrase would come to have. Like many generations of intellectuals who suffered a similar fate, Strahlenberg passed his time studying the region and the peoples around him, distinguishing himself in particular as a pioneer of Yakutology and thus of comparative Turkic linguistics.
At several points in his 1730 work, Strahlenberg explicitly cites Leibniz as his guide and director in the collection of language samples. The Swedish author has read and internalized a set of instructions that Leibniz had decades earlier sent to Giovanni Batista Podestà, interpreter at the court of Vienna and author of a 1677 trilingual Ottoman-Persian-Arabic dictionary. Podestà had been in charge of an expdition into “deepest Tartary”, which is to say to the region of the Caspian Sea, and Leibniz took this opportunity to send the Italian dipomat a list of queries pertaining, particularly, to the diversity of the Tatar language subfamily: which region do the speakers of Karakalpak inhabit? What of the Tatars of Cathay, whom we today know as Uighurs? And so on. This list of queries was published in the first posthumous edition of Leibniz's writing, in 1718, a miscellaneous compendium of Leibniz's notes and letters principally on linguistic questions.
We know with certainty that Strahlenberg read Leibniz's vocabulary list, because it is substantially the same list that appears as a fold-out appendix to Strahlenberg's book, to which he gives the title “Tabula Polyglotta Harmoniae Linguarum”: The “Polyglot Table of the Harmony of Languages”. The invocation of “harmony” is also explicity Leibnizian, and it shows that Strahlenberg followed Leibniz not just in practical matters, but in philosophical commitments as well. For Strahlenberg, the study of comparative linguistics reveals the preestablished harmony between the different perspectives or points of view that rational beings have on one and the same world. Languages, like monads, are mirrors of the rational order of nature.
Like Dara Shikoh, Strahlenberg presupposes the unity of human reason, but he discerns this unity not at the level of textual traditions, but rather of natural language. Unlike Dara Shikoh, he does not suppose that any of these “monuments” has any pride of place alongside the others, as the Persian prince had supposed the Qur’ān stands in relation to the Upaniṣads. Stripped of their canonical texts, every society stands naked with its bare words, and is seen to be substantially the same as every other. This, as Han F. Vermeulen has also remarked, is the key conviction that underlies the newly emerging science of ethnography, which Leibniz did so much to stimulate. It is also the central commitment of the communitarianism of Johann Gottfried Herder, which we might fairly describe as a “monadological egalitarianism”. It is also, finally, the ideal to which the Soviet model of the autonomy of ethnic groups often sought to adhere: the union of socialist republics and oblasts as a sort of imaginary museum of folk costumes and songs and traditions, each with its own room and none primus inter pares.
Except that of course Russia was always de facto first among equals. This is inscribed in the first lines of the anthem of the USSR; and it is detectable too in Leibniz's earliest explanations to Peter of the value of a comprehensive linguistic survey of the empire: Leibniz is no friend of, say, Samoyed nationalism, but rather believes that knowledge of ethnolinguistic diversity brings into relief the magnitude of the empire and thereby glorifies its sovereign. Here, then, we may reach a limit of the cosmopolitan aspiration of Leibniz's thought: our equality as rational beings does not translate into an imperative for political equality. And yet, as an alternative to the project, as exemplified notably by Immanuel Kant and others, of bringing indigenous peoples within the fold of reason by expanding the boundaries of European historical agency, the Leibnizian alternative, and its reverberations in Herderian communitarianism and elsewhere, continues to hold out some attraction as we negotiate, in the 21st century, the delicate balance between the preservation of dwindling Indigenous communities, on the one hand, and on the other the universal claim to basic rights, such as to education or to medical care, that in some cases only the homogenising apparatus of the modern state is capable of furnishing.
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But to conclude, in this talk I have, by way of a tour of some case studies, attempted to convey an idea of what intellectual history may look like when it is decisively decoupled from national narratives. I have effected this decoupling by shifting the point of anchorage of the tradition of intellectual history from Hegel, often taken as the tradition's patron saint, to Leibniz, seldom if ever considered for such a role. I have taken the history of philosophy, against the protectionist interests of those who study this history from within academic departments of philosophy, as itself an appropriate, indeed ideal, focus of intellectual history. I have shown that with such a focus, when we depart from the history of political philosophy narrowly conceived, and consider also the history of natural philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics, we do not so much abandon the political as rather enhance our capacity to discern its contours.
Finally, in showing some of the ways in which early modern European philosophy was implicated in the commerce of both goods and light with the world beyond its borders (and here I emphasise only some of the ways, for I have not even mentioned America and the conceptual revolutions unleashed by the Columbian exchange): in showing some of these ways, I have shown that, far from Western philosophy being the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, it was all along, but particularly from the early modern period on, much sooner an enfolding of foreign spirits, faintly discerned, generally misunderstood, often held in contempt by the voyagers who first encountered them and by the philosophers who got reports of them, but nonetheless fundamental for the emerging shape and character of modern European thought.
