LEIBNIZ, MYSTICISM AND RELIGION

Transcription

1 LEIBNIZ, MYSTICISM AND RELIGION

2 ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 158 LEIBNIZ, MYSTICISM AND RELIGION edited by ALLISON P. COUDERT, RICHARD H. POPKIN and GORDON M. WEINER Founding Directors: P. Dibon t (Paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA) Director: Sarah Hutton (The University of Hertfordshire, Uni ted Kingdom) Associate Directors: le. Force (Lexington); lc. Laursen (Riverside) Editorial Board: J.F. Battail (Paris); F. Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); J.D. North (Groningen); MJ. Petry (Rotterdam); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht) Advisory Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); B. Copenhaver (Los Angeles); A. Crombie (Oxford); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); K. Hanada (Hokkaido University); W. Kirsop (Melbourne); P.O. Kristeller (Columbia University); E. Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); J. Malarczyk (Lublin); J. Orcibal (Paris); W. Röd (München); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles); H. Rowen (Rutgers University, NJ.); J.P. Schobinger (Zürich); J. Tans (Groningen)

3 LEIBNIZ, MYSTICISM AND RELIGION Edited by ALLISON P. COUDERT Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A. RICHARD H. POPKIN University ofcalifornia, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. and GORDON M. WEINER Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, U.s.A. Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.

4 A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1998 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, induding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction vii 1. Some Occult Influences on Leibniz's Monadology Stuart Brown 2. Leibniz and Mysticism Donald Rutherford Leibniz and the Kabbalah Allison P. Coudert Leibniz, Benzelius, and Swedenborg: The Kabbalistic Roots of Swedish Illuminism Marcia Keith Scuchard Leibniz on Enthusiasm Daniel J. Cook Leibniz and Chinese Thought Yuen-Ting Lai Leibniz as a Lutheran Ursula Goldenbaum 169 Index 193 v

6 INTRODUCTION Some scholars in the history of ideas have had a growing interest in examining Leibniz's many discussions ofvarious aspects of religion, Christian, Jewish and far eastern. Leibniz, with his voracious interest and concern for so many aspects of human intellectual and spiritual life, read a wide variety of books on the various religions of mankind. He also was in personal contact with many of those who espoused orthodox and non-orthodox views. He annotated his copies of many books on religious subjects. And he was working on schemes for reuniting the various Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe. Studies on Leibniz's views on Judaism, on the Kabbalah, on Chinese thought have been appearing over the last decades. It was decided by some of us that since there has been a growing interest in this side of Leibniz's thought it would be a good idea to bring together a group of scholars working on different aspects of Leibniz's views on religion, mysticism and spiritualism, in order to h~ve them present papers on their current researches, and to have the opportunity for lengthy discussion, formal and informal, in the most pleasant academic ambiance of the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. Under the sponsorship of the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies, a workshop conference was held November 18-19, The participants who came from Israel, Germany, the United Kingdom, and North America, prepared the final form of their papers, which is what we are presenting here. Gordon Weiner and Allison Coudert have done the editorial work, getting the papers re-written, computerized, and prepared for publication. For a century or more Leibniz has been rescued from the murky worlds of metaphysics, theology, religion, and occult sciences by concentrating on his logical papers, and making them the key to understanding what the great man thought. Bertrand RusselI, in his Philosophy 0/ G. W. Leibniz, separated the public Leibniz from the private Leibniz. The public Leibniz had to toady to his patrons, especially Electress Sophie, and wrote semi-religious works like the Theodicy to keep them happy. On the other hand Russell portrayed the private Leibniz as writing a fantastic number of logic papers, purely philosophical and scientific studies, but which, according to Russell and to far too many who follow hirn, are the real philosophical thoughts of Leibniz. The Two vii

7 Leibnizes theory could allow for ignoring the large amount of material that dealt with all sorts of odd and arcane topics, far from the interests of contemporary philosophers. We now know that Leibniz's great contemporary and opponent, Isaac Newton, had a public and a private intellectual persona. The public man invented the calculus, wrote the greatest work in physics, the Principia, and other important scientific and mathematical works. Privately Newton was working away all of his intellectual life on alchemy and an antitrinitarian millenarian theology. Only after his death did some of this appear in print - one of his commentaries on the books of Daniel and Revelation, and two of his letters to Locke denying the historicity of the Doctrine of the Trinity. The vast amount of Newton's alchemical and theological writings remained in the possession of his heirs, unavailable to the learned world, until the Earl of Portsmouth had them auctioned off in 1936 at Sotheby's in London, after the British Library and Newton's college, Trinity, at Cambridge, refused to house them. These documents, now scattered around the globe, are gradually revealing the full picture of the views of the private Newton. Scholars are debating fiercely as to whether there was one Newton, the man who was a scientific genius and an antitrinitarian theologian and an alchemist, or whether he had a genuine split intellectual world in which the scientific side had nothing to do with the "crazy" Newton. Much is being written and debated about whether one and the same person had an intellectual view that encompassed harmoniously both his scientific theories and discoveries and his alchemical and theological beliefs. The Newton "problem" has been developing in the post World War 11 period as various manuscript collections of Newton's private writings have become available. The Leibniz problem has had an opposite history because the public Leibniz presented a range of religious and theological points of view attached to a metaphysics. The public Leibniz, a very public man, made no secret of his intellectual friendships with a range of strange characters including van Helmont, KnOIT von Rosenroth and Eric Benzelius. Leibniz's unpublished papers were not hidden away, but became a treasure trove from the mid-eighteenth century until today for scholars looking for more of Leibniz's thought. It was really not until the studies of modern symbolic logic at the end of the Nineteenth Century and the work of Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell that Leibniz was seen as the first formulator of this system that would replace Aristotelian logic. Leibniz's symbolic logic became the center of interest. Then the rest of his enormous corpus was either in harmony with this, or could be explained away by his viii

8 circumstances. His best known work, the Theodicy, the only complete work published in his life time, no longer had to be taken seriously since it could be explained away as part of his public duty to his patron, Sophie. His best of all possible worlds theory that was so brutally ridiculed by Voltaire no longer had to be defended by Leibniz's admirers, since it was part ofhis public philosophy. In the course of this century there has been a growing picture of Leibniz's thought, often fusing the public and private Leibnizes. It has been realized that Leibniz was not just a brilliant critical opponent of Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, but that he had absorbed many intellectual traditions from Scholasticism, Renaissance naturalism, as weil as various religiophilosophical currents of the period. Leibniz read almost everything that appeared at the time. He corresponded with people of all sorts of intellectual and religious persuasions. He personally knew the French skeptics, Simon Foucher and Pierre Daniel Huet. He corresponded with Pierre Bayle. Some of the first formulations of his philosophy appeared in articles against them. He personally knew theologians like Antoine Amauld, and his Monadology is a discussion with the Jansenist theologian. Leibniz was interested in the spiritualistic currents, the followers of Jacob Boehme, theosophists like van Helmont, the Pietists, the Cambridge Platonists (especially Lady Anne Conway, whose work he leamed about from van Helmont). Leibniz was very interested in the Kabbalah that was appearing in Latin translation late in the seventeenth century. He went to see its editor, Knorr von Rosenroth, for four weeks to discuss kabbalistic issues. The marginalia in his books reflect this wide variety of interests. He read leading Jewish thinkers like Maimonides and annotated his copy of The Guide for the Perplexed. He read lots of orthodox Catholic and Protestant writers and lots of unorthodox ones as weil. He was interested in finding out about the infamous Three Imposters, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed in both the Latin and French versions, and he was interested in Bodin's notorious un-published dialogue on religion, the Colloquium Heptaplomes. He was very concemed to find out what Chinese philosophy was all about, and corresponded with Jesuits who had been in China, and he wrote some pieces about the meaning of Chinese thought. Trying to find the true Leibniz is getting to be a more and more difficult task, as many vers ions of Leibniz' s philosophy are em erging from fusing the published and unpublished writings, the public and the private person. I have previously asked whether we have to have two, three, or perhaps four Leibnizes to make his various writings compatible, or can we see all of this as part of the religious context of his ideas? ix

9 Our conference provided a chance for people working on aspects of Leibniz's concerns about religion at1d mysticism from different perspectives to exchange ideas and interpretations. Some very significant findings emerged, as weil as perspectives for understanding and assessing Leiblliz's thought on many matters. Stuart Brown's examination of occult influences on Leibniz's metaphysics, and Leibniz's later attempts to cover up how involved he was in occult studies, makes us realize that there is much more to Leibniz the thinker that just the picture of hirn as"a supreme rationalist. Donald Rutherford carefully explores what Leibniz saw as valuable amongst mystical thinkers of the past and present, and what he saw as possible dangers in their thought. Allison Coudert's exploration of Leibniz's intellectual friendship with the spiritualists Francis Mercury van Helmont and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth throws new light on an aspect of Leibniz's monadology and his conception of spiritual forces. Marsha Keith Schuchard's picture of Leibniz's relatiqns with Swedenborg's brother-in-iaw, Eric Benzelius, who jointly wanted to set up a center for the study of calculus and Kabbalah, puts the German thinker at the heart of illuminist, Rosicrucian and perhaps Masonic ideas and forces current in the Europe of the time. Daniel Cook deal~ with Leibniz's views about "enthusiasm," a widespread kind of religious expression in the second half of the seventeenth century, especially in Germany. Cook shows that Leibniz was not taken in by any of these kind of thinkers, but had an amazing tolerance for their views and their persons, even protecting some of them from the authorities. Yuen-Ting Lai deals with one of Leibniz's late interests, that of understanding Chinese philosophy and religion. She stresses the importance for Leibniz, and for other European philosophers of the time, of fitting the newly discovered Chinese thought into the issues perturbing European thinkers. Lastly, Ursula Goldenbaum synthesizes many ofthe threads from the other papers in what at first sight might seem a pedestrian topic, Leibniz as a Lutheran thinker. However, she traces how Leibniz throughout his intellectual career kept trying to make Lutheran theology compatible with mbdern scientific thought and modern philosophy. Dr. Goldenbaum reports on her discovery of Leibniz's own copy of Spinoza's notorious, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, with many annotations by Leibniz. At the time of the conference I was asked, "Does any of this have anything to do with Leibniz's philosophy?" It might be interesting gossip about Leibniz's biography, but does it show anything about whether his philosophical arguments are sound? The question already makes a great presumption, namely that philosophy is just the study of arguments. It x

10 makes another presumption as weil, that the study of a philosopher should be restricted only to the studying of his arguments, and still another, that if a past philosoph er for various idiosyncratic reasons dia non-philosophical things, like talking to crack-pots, attending church, and reading nonphilosophical books, then a current philosopher does not have to take account of any ofthis. Weil, as we say, it all depends on how you define philosophy and philosopher, and how one thinks a person's many interests fit together. The present rather narrow notions of philosophy and philosopher, so current in Anglo-American academic philosophy departments, is, of course, a historical development in the twentieth century. Its focus on examining, analyzing and evaluating arguments to the exclusion of anything else is itself a peculiar way of approaching the intellectual concerns of mankind. Rudolf Carnap's claim in the The Logical Syntax 0/ Language that the best one could do is to see if the arguments presented by any philosoph er are valid in terms of what assumptions the philosopher made restriets the on-going intellectual life of man to being a form of intellectual chess. With any luck or ingenuity a computer properly programmed could do the job of checking the validity of the arguments. There is stili the problem of preparing the philosopher's arguments for the computer, which may involve a lot of careful probing of the language usage and the context. But when all is said and done on this score, is this all that we want to know about philosophy and philosophers? Philosophizing by philosophers goes on in historical time and places. In most cases people philosophize because there are questions or problems of concern in the world in which he or she is living. Even those Iiving in, or wishing that they lived in, ivory towers have some contact with the worlds around them and can find wars, famines, etc. impacting their intellectual life. Those not in ivory tower isolation, Iike active political figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, formulated phiiosophical arguments in terms of the rich, murky context in which intellectuallife was going on at their time and place in history. The ongoing controversies about the meaning and merits of the work of two of the most important twentieth century philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, show that many people are concerned to understand the work of these thinkers in terms of the social, political, personal, and religious issues faced by these thinkers. Is there any relationship between Heidegger's involvement with the National Socialist movement in Germany and his philosophy? Did Wittgenstein's strange psychological personality, and/or his homosexuality contribute to his xi

11 ideas? The contextual examinations of these two thinkers that has been going on in print for a couple of decades now indicates that there is serious concern to integrate the ideas and arguments of philosophers with their life and times. Are Wittgenstein and Heidegger exceptional cases, or should we consider all philosophers both as constructors of arguments and as human beings facing and trying to understand an ongoing world? Spinoza tried to pretend that his work could be considered, like Euclid's Elements, solely in terms of its logical coherence. And he tried to be outside the public arena as an actor or participant. But year by year, as we leam more about Spinoza's life and tim es, new interpretations are offered of the meaning of his writings in terms of what the Amsterdam Jewish community was like, in terms of who Spinoza knew at the time of his excommunication and later on, etc.. In Leibniz's case, we have an enormous amount of data about his public life, his private intellectuallife (in terms ofwhat he read, whom he talked to, what he wrote at various times, etc.). If we feel we can profit from understanding his contributions in various areas, then it would seem to be the case that the richer the context we can place hirn in the better. If we are concerned to assess his influence as a thinker, the broader the range of thinkers who knew hirn, or knew of hirn, and used some of his ideas, and the richer the picture of his many-sided influences the better. If we only want to know if a Leibniz-like philosophy can be constructed as a consistent logical system, then the various historical and contextual investigations probably have little relevance, except for the all-important matter of determining what constitutes a "Leibniz-like" philosophy. I personally think that an honest effort to determine this quickly leads one into historical and contextual matters of assessing the meanings of terms in seventeenth and eighteenth century German, French and Latin, the seriousness of various statements of the historical Leibniz about what he was doing, the value to be given to various assessments of Leibniz's views by contemporaries like Bayle, Arnauld, Pfaff and many others. If we ignore the context of Leibniz's ideas, I think we end of up with a sterile logical Leibniz, far removed from the intellectual giant who has played so great a role in so many areas over the last three centuries. All ofus who participated in, and enjoyed, the Clark conference on Leibniz, hope that this volume will aid and abet those seeking to understand Leibniz's world of ideas, especially religious ones, and his place in intellectual history. We all feel that a much richer Leibniz emerges from seeing hirn as a man with very broad interests and curiosity. In the xii

12 course of looking in all sorts of corners of the intellectual and religious world, Leibniz made many interesting and often profound contributions. If one 'just restricts his contribution to a small part of his intellectual worid, his logical system of metaphysics, much is lost that is valuable both for understanding one of the most amazing minds of modern times, and for understanding some of our own intellectual world, which, of course, grew out of his, as weil as that of many other historical thinkers. Richard H. Popkin Pacific Palisades, California January 1998 xiii