Introduction: Leibniz in Context
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was active in Germany shortly after Boehme introduced his illuminism, was contemporary with Emmanuel Swedenborg, and was prolific in an age steeped in spiritual enthusiasm, pietism, vitalism, and esoteric undercurrents. This essay will examine the influences upon Leibniz directed from esoteric and Kabbalistic traditions and the possible effects within his work’s formation.
In this essay below, Leibniz is shown anecdotally to be situated in the esoteric traditions of his historical context and though inspection of his system reveals language and thought derived from Lurianic Kabbalistic and other ‘unapproved’ philosophic works, he was largely accepted in mainstream Western contexts though his sources were not. It remains to evaluate the argument advanced primarily by Allison Coudert whereby the process of Leibniz’s broad acceptance is established despite his unorthodox influences and how the view of Leibniz and his system has changed historically with the gleaning of new information and textual evidence. As Leibniz’s work and influence is popularly received as palatable to the rationalist Modernist tradition and is said to be “the last major philosopher to defend orthodox Christian doctrine in a systematic fashion”[1] he provides a portrait of how rigorous science and orthodox Christianity in his milieu was engaging the traditions which have in some contemporary instances been viewed as unorthodox. Whereas subsequent thinkers such as Foucher de Careil and Bertrand Russell would emphasize Leibniz’s stringently logical and rational system of thought, to the extent of disparaging esoteric influence, Coudert and others are stating that in Leibniz’s perspective, esotericism, science, and Christianity are not mutually exclusive.
To establish Leibniz’s welcoming attitude and integration of Christian Cabalist ideas, which in turn had been interpreted from Lurianic Kabbalah, Coudert argues from two connected premises. First, upon investigating the process and development of Leibniz’s thought, one may ascertain that he continually was growing, changing, and clarifying his system. It is revealed that his evolution is pointed in the time of greatest interaction between he and Francis Mercury van Helmont, a contemporary Christian Cabalist. This duration of inspired exchange and glowing respect towards van Helmont was in fact several years after his publication of Discourse on Metaphysics in 1686. Secondly, his impressionable nature and ability to draw new conclusions and refine his thought bears investigating his personal life and van Helmont figures largely. Moreover, there are a number of points where Leibniz’s language and constructions show strong confluence with Kabbalah and esotericism though iterated within orthodox Christian and Modernist normativity. His respect for van Helmont are drawn from biographical notes including writing an admiring epitaph which credited him with resurrecting Pythagoras and Cabala, and their extensive communication. More pointedly, Anne Becco has effectively concluded that Leibniz ghostwrote his last book, an interpretation of Genesis titled Premeditate and Considerate Thoughts.
Leibniz’s Influences
Mapping Leibniz’s influences is a complex one and not untouched with controversy and continued debate. Leibniz had stated that one influence upon him was the third century’s Greek philosopher Plotinus, whom he read in his formative years. Though his inheritance from Plotinus is not wholesale but rather conflicted, writing that he had left Plato’s clarity for ‘omens’, Catherine Wilson suggests that Leibniz is more philosophically akin to Plotinus than any other. Plotinus’ reception by Italian renaissance figures Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola established Neoplatonism as a bulwark of his thought within Europe through Giordano Bruno and others. Among Plotinus’ primary concepts that bear noting include his description of the One, which is primordial to the distinction of being and non-being and is whence from division and difference emanate. Plotinus’ development of the One is indebted in part to the Pythagorean school’s undifferentiated Monad. Though Plotinus was seen as corruptive of his forerunner Plato’s teachings, Plotinus’ themes will recur prominently in Leibniz.
Along with Plotinus, however, Plato, Proclus, and wider Platonic and Neoplatonic themes are evident and Donald Rutherford delineates three Platonic and Neoplatonic propositions that figure largely within Leibniz’ philosophy. Firstly, Leibniz maintained that there exists a schism between the real and the illusory; reason and the senses, spiritual unity and apparent material division. The sensory world of material objects is an illusion whose reality is contingent on the primacy of a spiritual reality which is a spectrum of soul-like substances. The physical senses can reveal only partially and errantly knowledge, but reason and especially mathematics can reveal the truth of the world. The truth of the spiritual reveals the world as ‘most perfect of possible worlds’ composed of mathematical harmony. The second theme is the rational mind that avails the accessibility of non-material reality. By Leibniz pictured the human mind, as gifted with reason, as sharing the ‘seeds’ of divinity he accepts the Neoplatonic teaching of divine innate ideas. These ideas include being, the One, and spiritual substance. While imperfect, these ‘seeds’ or Platonic ‘reminiscences’ understand and perceive reality as God does. These ideas exist as ‘emanations’ from the mind of God and, writes Leibniz, our minds are constructed to receive and synthesize these thoughts just as an eye does with light. Leibniz’s depiction of the mind he saw as cohering with divine illumination attributed to Augustine and stated that with proper rational investigation, we encounter not illusory or secondary objects but rather the divine mind and God alone is the object of knowledge. This leads to the third theme enumerated by Rutherford of Neoplatonism in Leibniz. This is the process whereby a person’s rational attainment of truth in the mind of God is associated as a moral or religious realization. The piety exercised in this program involves benevolence and charity towards others however virtue is primarily the disinterested acceptance and celebration of the perfection of the world. The obverse of this is the training of an individual to view the evils and sufferings of the world as deceptive for they are composed in the perfect mind of God and God’s plan for the world.[2]
The composition and nature of non-material reality was developed over his career and is most concisely stated in his work popularly known as Monadology, written at the behest of the Duke of Orleans’ counselor Nicolas Remond. The monad, writes Leibniz is a simple substance that exists in a non-composite unity and is uncreated and non-perishing. Infinitely small in size to the point of being unextended and non-spatial, they are immaterial and apart from the ‘natural order’ which they wholly permeate. They are ‘windowless’ in that they undergo no change or influence from exterior forces but contain in themselves the entirety of the universe. Many researchers have attributed the development of Leibniz’s monad to Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth century martyr of the Roman Inquistion. Bruno’s theory of the monad was largely appropriated by Leibniz including their characteristics of immaterial substance that yet generated physical force, each containing the divine spark, and comprising the world through their existence along a psychic spectrum of consciousness. Bruno’s interest in Neoplatonism, hermeticism and execution for the heresy of pantheism establish him as an auspicious source for Leibniz’s philosophy.
Through Allison Coudert’s extensive research into the libraries of Hanover and Woldernbuttel she has been able to better establish Leibniz’s esoteric influences including Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614-1699), a fellow alchemist with whom Leibniz shared correspondence with concerning alchemical considerations between 1694 and 1698 and established a longer relationship that involved an even longer deep and mutual sharing of philosophical preoccupations. Their shared interest in opposing the Cartesian dualism of matter in a mechanistic/materialistic view of nature and consciousness and the mechanistic causality dualism affected upon nature drew their philosophical endeavors together with shared values in purview. Numerous scholars have hence placed both Leibniz and van Helmont within the scope of what has been called Renaissance Occultism which is characterized by a worldview that sees vitalism defining a complex universe undergirded by a unified harmony though the coherence of divine emanations. This shared worldview of Renaissance Occultism between Leibniz and van Helmont “served to explain how the one became the many or how spirit was gradually transformed into matter.”[3]
Lurianic Kabbalah
Van Helmont also is credited with introducing Leibniz to Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, a Christian Kabalist whose Kabbala denudata outlines the analogical and mystical power of numbers and figures, the ontology of souls and the various spiritual hierarchies of demons and angels. Much of Leibniz’s previous biographers prior to Coudert had been tentative to explore the ramifications of Leibniz’s personal relationships and correspondences in an effort to first state that Leibniz’s philosophy was rigorously rational and to secondly exclude esotericism from being compatible with reason. That von Rosenroth was compiling Kabbalistic texts detailing the correspondences between the auspicious human body, or Microprosopus and Primordial Adam, the divine, and the universal system of meaning of Gematria and Temura at the time of their meeting in 1671 has been largely unexplored in relationship to Leibniz’s monads and quest for a universal language.
To examine Leibniz’s philosophy as Coudert has, the connections of influences upon Leibniz from various ‘outside’ or esoteric traditions, opens insights into his difficult and dense system. One aspect of his philosophy which gains clarity through an esoteric lens is his explanation of materiality. While Leibniz wrestles with Cartesian dualism and within the vitalist theories of his day, he determines that materiality is not a substance in itself, but rather a phenomenon of his non-material monads. Against idealist interpretations, Leibniz constructs a pan-psychism that is nuanced through Kabbalistic understanding. Leibniz ghostwrites as van Helmont, “there are always parts asleep…yet to be roused and yet to be advanced to greater and better things…progress never comes to an end.”[4] Here he establishing the ‘sluggish monad’ the idea that matter is the effect of spirit which has a lower register of illumination and development.
The insight of Kabbalistic influence allows following consequences from his sluggish or asleep monad an efficacious reading regarding his position that the present world is ‘the best of possible worlds’. The various levels of monads’ consciousness and their ability to awaken affords the position of a best possible world to also include corruption, ignorance, suffering, and occasions of malevolence without contradiction. This is facilitated and informed by the Kabbalistic idea of a continually improving world that requires spiritual endeavors of humanity to restore the world to its origins in the pure and perfected light of divine truth. This ‘restoration of the world’ is Kabbalistically understood as tikkun (in Hebrew, literally ‘repair’) whose premise is “that every created thing would eventually reach a state of perfection as a result of repeated transformations.”[5]
Tikkun, or repair of the world, is established in Kabbalistic cosmology as necessary due to the emanations from the Absolute or Ein Sof seeking their return. As the esoteric teaching of Rabbi Isaac Luria details, the Ein Sof in its contraction or hiding of itself created a void which was filled by the Primordial Man or Adam Kadmon. This being, akin to Plutarch’s macroanthropos comprised the cosmos in human form and itself was constituted by the Sefirot. The Primordial Man’s energies were evidenced by flashes of light issuing from its body and these lights formed vessels (Kelim) that were intended to contain further emanations from the Ein Sof. However, before they could do so, the containers were shattered, dispelling the twenty two Hebrew letters into confusion, created distinctions and oppositional forces, and thus their sparks of divine illumination were subjected to darkness, ignorance, and degrees of distantiation from their origin. Through humanity’s action of bringing balance to opposites, righteous sexuality, confronting chaos and evil, and adherence to the 613 scriptural commandments, all creation is subject to a ‘raising of the sparks’ to spiritualize fallen matter and restore the dispersed sparks to their rightful divine harmony.[6] While Leibniz never stated in his published works that he agreed with van Helmont, von Rosenroth, and Lurianic Kabbalah that the cosmos would with certainty be restored to its pre-cataclysmic perfection, he retains a number of important correlations and knowledge of Lurianic Kabbalah gains insight to his positions. An example of this can be stated in the Lurianic statement that while the current state of the cosmos can be considered the worst of possible worlds, it is also the ‘best of possible worlds’ in that it avails connection with the Absolute in the work of tikkun.
Alchemy and Leibniz’s Treatment of Theodicy
Leibniz’s theodicy serves as another example of light able to be shed on his system when esoteric traditions are not elided from his context and influences. Aside from the arguments of evil as being illusory in the sight of finite and ignorant humanity, evil as a vehicle for greater good, and being requisite to appreciate the good, Leibniz in On the Radical Origination of Things uses a rather esoteric understanding of evil to round out his theodicy. Here he appeals to language and sensibilities that are resonant with alchemical qualifications of evil through his arguing from the ‘germination of seeds’. In alchemical traditions, elements contained ‘seeds’ of potentiality which through suffering and the crucible of tribulation could be released to greater purification. Leibniz writes, “So a seed sown in the earth suffers before it bears fruit…So in physics the liquids which ferment slowly also are slower to settle, while those in which there is a stronger disturbance settle more promptly, throwing off impurities with greater force.”[7] The suffering faced by ‘seeds’ or sparks which effect their purification becomes expressed in Leibniz’s earlier philosophic works through his description of the transformation of human souls. Human spirits and animate beings are incapable of destruction, so that one’s death only reflects a transition of one’s spirit would only be perfected in another material body as it progressed onwards towards unification with God.
Though Leibniz over his career developed his description of the spirit and unified and cohered identities, his early language is heavily reliant on alchemical philosophy. Leibniz turns to alchemy and adopts the term flos substantiae which is a unified essence that persists over transformations, and animates material bodies. Alchemists had spoke of the flos as a quintessence that was able to be discovered through refinement and when discovered revealed the true essence of a substance obscured by deceptive forms. Leibniz’s interest in establishing the coherence of identities centered in his desire to explain bodily resurrection and found the most adequate language through alchemical sciences. He writes, “We shall put off the body, it is true, but not entirely…in the same way as chemists are able to sublimate a body or mass, the defecated part alone remaining.”[8]
Though Leibniz’s elaborations upon death and resurrection in his early work draw upon alchemical science, his explanation of animal and human birth writes Stuart Brown needed only to look within more condoned or orthodox venues for foundation. Stuart Brown writes that flos as rendered in German as Kern, or seed and ‘seminal principal’ had its own history in Christian metaphysics via Augustine and Jan Baptist van Helmont, father to Francis Mercury. Augustine had set out in his On The Trinity his belief that each corporeal being was endowed with and veiled a hidden seed created by God.[9] Leibniz’s ability to derive aspects of his philosophy from such wide sources that nevertheless share similarities, in this case the philosophy of ‘seeds, scintillas, and flos demonstrates the background of what can appear to be perennial philosophies that occur again and again and also the seemingly arbitrary distinctions of orthodox and public metaphysics and the esoteric.
While throughout his career Leibniz largely distanced himself from alchemical sciences he evidenced a lasting interest and hope for its knowledge. Biographically, it remains that on his very deathbed he spent his last hours discussing the alchemical claims of Furtenbach transmuting iron into gold.[10] Tying this information to his early use of the alchemical terminology of kernels to describe his proto-monadology in 1671 creates a thread of consistent interest throughout his career.
Panpsychism vs. Vitalism
Though a term he never employs, Leibniz’s monadology, along with the works of Baruch Spinoza, is largely credited with bringing the cosmology of panpsychism into major philosophical dialogue in the Modern era. It is necessary to clearly examine the distinction of his system from the vitalist and proto-vitalist beliefs that were developing concurrently in the sciences. Both as cosmological explanations share likenesses and can be located within Wouter Hanegraaf’s living nature as an identifying characteristic of esotericism. Both were born out of efforts to qualify or reinterpret the brute facticity of causal materialism, but differ in integral ways. A problem they sought to rectify was problem created by the Cartesian cogito interacting with its environs and its relationship to embodiment.
Vitalism can be easily be taken to assert similar notions that of Leibniz and has similar affinities to Lurianic Kabbalah also. This is most directly pointed at by vitalism’s principle of the élan vital, or a substance’s quintessence. Vitalism has been popularized by conflating it with Henri Bergson’s description of natural change and evolution, though he explicitly distanced himself from vitalists in his 1907 publication Creative Evolution. As the will-to-life or vital force of animate beings, vitalism can recall the language of monadology, the élan vital can be spoken of as the ‘spark’ or ‘seed’ of life that gives a being its life and purest essence.
However, vitalist cosmologies differ from the panpsychism that has been used to describe Leibniz’s monadology in a number of important aspects. First, at a very pragmatic level, vitalism was severely left daunted by progressively sophisticated microscopic technologies which unlocked the world of microorganisms and germs. On a broad general sense, vitalism and panpsychism represent two distinct solutions to materialism. Rather than ascribing to mind or consciousness to all, vitalism sides with emergent theories of mind. Emergent consciousness theories accepts brute physical entities and energies of atoms and quarks and states that only at certain levels of complexity does mind arise. This is at its base a physicalist position and mind, or life, is an ancillary by-product.[11]
Panpsychism’s uniquely approaches dualism from an entirely different perspective from vitalism. Rather than a bottom-up configuration where materials converge into states that become recognizable as life or mind, panpsychism proposes a top-down model where all is at least permeated if not derived from pure mind, depending on the specific articulation of panpsychism, of which there are several. It also coheres all things into one common denominator rather than the often difficult to determine animate versus inanimate, for all material is an aspect of the mental state or awareness of the mentalistic monads comprising it. In these distinctions, one can see how Leibniz’s system varies from esoteric traditions which owed to vitalism, such as the animal magnetism of Mesmer who conceived fluidic energies as residing in and relating animate beings while still remaining within the scope of ‘living nature’.
Concluding Remarks
Leibniz, a champion of reason and orthodox Christianity, challenges post-modernist conceptions of the limits of reason and the boundaries of hard versus speculative sciences. Returning to his depiction by Bertrand Russell and others as being rigidly stalwart to the cause of rationalist Modernism, one can affirm that while Leibniz does indeed fall within that frame, the presuppositions, methods, and influences of his work would in many cases today be considered outside the scope of rationalist philosophy. Through piecing together his biography including personal correspondences, and personal anecdotes, and reviewing his monadology and theodicy in light of the Lurianic Kabbalah he was exposed to via Francis Mercury van Helmont, Leibniz is revealed to be squarely situated in the corpus of Western esoteric traditions. His influence while remaining perhaps strongest in computational sciences, artificial languages, and his contributions to calculus, is opened to other reevaluations in light of his esoteric leanings. His desire to mediate peacefully between Protestant and Catholic parties and explain the universal truth pervading all the world’s religions reveal him as being more than just a scientist, but as also embodying the spiritual concern for a wisdom that would bind humanity together with meaning and divinity.
[1] Daniel J. Cook “Leibniz on Enthusiasm” Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion Allison P. Coudert ed. (Boston: Kluwer. 1998), p. 108-9.
[2] Donald Rutherford “Leibniz and Mysticism” Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion Allison P. Coudert ed. (Boston: Kluwer. 1998), pp. 25-28.
[3] Allison P. Coudert Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Boston: Kluwer. 1995), p. 50.
[4] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz G.W. Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays D. Garber and R. Ariew trs. And eds. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. 1991), p. 48.
[5] Allison P. Coudert “Leibniz and the Kabbalah” Allison P. Coudert, Richard H. Popkin, Gordon M. Weiner eds. Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion (Boston: Kluwer. 1998), p. 56.
[6] “The Lurianic Kabbalah” http://www.newkabbalah.com/newkabbalah.html
[7] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol. 2 L. Loemker, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1956), p. 797-8.
[8] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz System of Theology C.W. Russell trans. & ed. (London: Burns and Lambert. 1850), p. 164.
[9] Stuart Brown “Some Occult Influences” Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion Allison P. Coudert ed. (Boston: Kluwer. 1998), p. 11.
[10] George MacDonald Ross Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Critical Assessments. Vol IVPhilosophy of Mind, Freewill, Political Philosophy, and Influences R.S. Woolhouse ed. (New York: Routledge. 1994), p. 508.
[11] “Panspychism and the Scientific World View” Panpsychism Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ accessed 05/12/2009
