Gotfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Leibniz is a renaissance man’s renaissance man. He was one of those guys who mastered Greek and Latin by the age of four or five and happened upon differential calculus in his spare time, while serving as an ambassador to China for the House of Hanover. His contribution to Western thought has yet to be fully catalogued. To date, the critical edition project has published about 44 volumes of his writing, ranging from philosophy and political theory to mathematics, history, and linguistics as well. Much of his 15,000 letters (to over 1000 people) remains unpublished or even translated. In all, it is estimated that we have over forty-four thousand pieces by him, which have yet to be translated or even read by most anyone, save specialists.
But where he fits into my life and work is rather small, and I do not consider myself a Leibniz specialist by any means. I took a class from one once, and I quickly found that my interpretation of his writing is much more “liberal” than your average Leibnizian would ever accept. Leibnizians are a taciturn and recalcitrant bunch who have spent centuries creating and refining a standard way of interpreting his work and by their estimation, my interpretation is heresy.
A simple way to understand the discrepancy between them and me is in how they perceive his attitude toward life in general. They see him as equally taciturn and stoic in outlook. They see him as the serious philosopher who takes everything he says as absolute eternal truth with a capital “T”. I don’t because, unlike them, I look at his biography as well as his writings to arrive at my picture of him as a person.
Philosophers always assume that the biography has nothing to do with the philosophy, which is all that matters to them. They would like to keep philosophers in a box, devoid of life’s trials and tribulations, which is rather short-sighted and naive if you ask me. Leibniz’ life was rather funny and dynamic. He was a social butterfly who was always in everyone else’s business. But given his massive intellect, he did not feel himself superior to those around him.
What I admire most about him is his view on life as a dynamic, ever-changing process and his utter belief in man's ability to comprehend and understand his place in it as well. And what remains unexplored by all save specialists are his views on such fundamental concepts such as space and time. In particular, he argues against Newtonians (and today, we are all Newtonians in our outlook) who say space is a container. Space, Leibniz says, is a relationship among things, not something independent of them. Part of my academic mission, I feel is to explore and delineate what a universe under this condition of space would look like. And a universe with space as a relation looks very alien to us.
Another thing he denies is the vacuum, which at the time seemed absurd. Today, contemporary physicists are showing that he was correct to deny the vacuum. And he did so by using the logic of the Newtonians against hem: if space is a container, independent of the things that occupy it, then how can there be a vacuum between two bodies in space? If there were an actual vacuum, then the distance between these two bodies would be zero.
Such are my intellectual hobbies.
A Good Leibniz Site: http://www.friesian.com/leibniz.htm
A Good Site on Leibniz and his Calculus: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Leibniz.html
The Leibniz Society of North America’s Website: http://www.gwleibniz.com/