Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Last
time, we covered the rise of Europe and the Enlightenment as a golden
age that followed similar golden ages in China and the Middle East. We
then spoke of the divide between the Analytic and Continental
traditions, and how the former is dogmatic and the later skeptical
relative to each other. In the beginnings of Modern European
philosophy, there was a similar split between two groups, one leaning
dogmatically and the other skeptically.
By
1700 CE, Europe had become powerful and wealthy, and with this came a
surge of new developments in science and technology that overturned many
older preconceptions, assumptions and understandings. Some Europeans
interpreted this dogmatically, arguing that science had discovered
unshakable truth, while others interpreted this skeptically, arguing
that science had uncovered the impermanence and and ignorance of human
understandings. In the first camp were the Rationalists, such as
Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, who argued that reason can eliminate
problems to reveal the uncontradicted truth. Rationalism will be our
topic for today. In the second camp were the Empiricists, such as
Locke, Hume and Berkeley (though Berkeley is sometimes considered an
Idealist), who argued that all understandings are based on experience,
and experience is always limited. Empiricism will be our topic for next
time.
Both
sides believed in the value of pursuing greater understandings through
philosophy and science, and that this involves both reason and
experience. However, the Rationalists stressed reason’s independence of
experience, arguing that universal truth can be determined
independently of and prior to experience, while the Empiricists stressed
reason’s dependence on experience, arguing that understandings are
determined after and depending on experience. Rationalists argued that,
like mathematics, philosophy and science can determine absolute
universal principles, and then from these proceed to additional truths
that will be absolute and universal.
Consider
one of Descartes’ central examples which he uses to support
Rationalism, that two plus three equals five. If I know this, and also
that five plus six equals eleven, then I can put the two together to
reason that two plus three (which is five) plus six equals eleven. I
can do this regardless of and prior to experiences with sets of two or
three things. Empiricists would agree that “two plus three equals five”
is a useful understanding, but that it is true given that we continue
to experience it as true, not because reason determines it to be true
regardless of experience. Empiricists argued that, unlike simple
arithmetic, philosophy and science are complex and contingent, dependent
on time and place, and so cannot prove understandings to be absolute or
universal.
In
the Ancient Greek Philosophy class, we cover skepticism and the works
of Sextus Empiricus. Sextus argues that there are two fundamental modes
skeptics can use to question all human understandings. Things must
either be known in themselves independently, or known via something else
dependently. If things are known in themselves, it results in circular
reasoning. How can we know someone speaks the truth based solely on
their own testimony? If things are known in something other than
themselves, it results in infinite regress. How can we know someone
speaks the truth based on the testimony of another, as that testimony
would require another to verify it, and then another and another.
Things can be relatively known in themselves and through other things,
but they cannot be known absolutely without escaping the dual problem of
circular reasoning and infinite regress.
Descartes
the Rationalist was well aware of Sextus’ skepticism, known as
Pyrrhonism after Pyrrho, the ancient Greek skeptic who traveled with
Alexander the Great to India. Descartes considered Pyrrhonism to be a
threat to rationality, and the Catholic Church did occasionally use
Pyrrhonism to attack discoveries in science that countered orthodox
dogmas. Similar to attacks on the theory of global warming today, the
Catholic theologians argued that all human understandings are mere
theory, which is true but no reason to question specific theories and
uphold others. Descartes believed that he could refute Pyrrhonism by
starting with consciousness, which he considered to unquestionably
exist, writing, “I think, therefore I am”. He could then proceed as a
Rationalist from this single irrefutable truth to prove the
understandings of both science and the Catholic Church.
Hume
the Empiricist was also well aware of Pyrrhonism. Hume argued that all
human understandings are assumptions, habits, and prejudices formed
from experience, and that we would all be Pyrrhonians, skeptical yet
practical with each and every understanding, if our nature were not too
strong for it. For Hume, understandings, which are always assumptions
based on experience, can become so entrenched that we fail to remember
that they are not universal or dictated by pure reason. Kant, who we
will study after the Empiricists, was “awoken from dogmatic slumbers” by
Hume, and attempted to, like Descartes, overcome the challenge of
Pyrrhonism by appealing to reason apart from all experience. Hegel, who
we will study after Kant, attempted to fuse the dogmatism of Kant and
the skepticism of Hume together to form what he believed was the full
true philosophy. Of course, we are getting ahead of ourselves, and must
start first with Descartes and his fellow Rationalists.
RENE DESCARTES
(1596-1650) is known as the first great modern European philosopher.
He is known for the first canonical modern European philosophy texts,
his Discourse on Method and his Meditations, and also in mathematics for
the Cartesian coordinate system (X and Y as two dimensions), a device
useful for algebra and critical for the later European development of
calculus by Newton and Leibniz.
Descartes
was born in Touraine, France, a town which has since been renamed
‘Descartes’ after its most famous citizen. Descartes’ father was a
member of parliament, though his mother died when he was very young. He
went to law school to follow his father and become a merchant, but
decided to become a mercenary instead travel and fight in the 30 years
war, ‘to seek truth’. It seems that he did not find truth in law
school. As a soldier, he had much time waiting for battle, and studied
mathematics and science in his spare time. On the night of November
10th, 1619, Descartes had a series of visions that convinced him that
the world is a rational and mechanical system profoundly in tune with
the rationality of the human mind.
At
first, he intended on writing books on physics, but in 1633 Galileo was
condemned by the Church for his solar-centric theory, the idea that the
earth moves around the sun, which India and Islam had for more than 700
years. Interestingly, many put the sun at the center of the universe,
replacing the earth as center. Because of Galileo’s troubles, Descartes
decided not to publish his views on physics, his Treatise on the World,
but his ‘Discourse on Method’, his philosophy text, instead, and it is
today considered the first work of modern European philosophy. This
caution did not spare Descartes however, as the work was condemned by
the Pope in 1663, thirty years after Galileo’s work was condemned and
after Descartes’ death, and put on the prohibited index of books
alongside other authors who are foundational for European scholarship.
Like Aquinas, even though Descartes argued that reason teaches us that
the Catholic Church is the one true religion and there is a monotheistic
god, his heresy was teaching that it is reason that shows us this, not
the institution of the Church. Descartes remained a practicing Catholic
until his death.
Descartes’
death is famous and unfortunately funny. For the majority of his life,
he worked in bed until noon each day, an aristocrat who had the time
and leisure to do this. After he became famous and his works were
prohibited by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of
Sweden invited him to Stockholm to be her private tutor. Unfortunately
for Descartes, she wanted morning lessons, each and every morning at
five o'clock. Between the snow and the early mornings, Descartes was
soon sick with pneumonia, and died. Maybe we should all work on our
problems every day until noon, safe in bed. This is similar to Francis
Bacon’s famous death, catching pneumonia after repeatedly stuffing snow
into chickens to try to preserve the meat and keep it from rotting.
Some have argued that Descartes was killed with a poisoned communion
wafer given by a priest who feared Descartes’ Rationalism, but the
sources on this are questionable, and it is likely this story was
invented by Swedish protestants.
Descartes’
philosophical writings, particularly the Meditations, drew the
reactions of several philosophers who themselves went on to become
famous, particularly Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, and Locke. In the
Meditations, Descartes asks: What we can know for certain if it is
possible that everything is an illusion of the mind? Like Avicenna,
Descartes concludes that we can be certain that we are aware and
conscious. From this, he proceeds to conclude that we can be certain
that our thoughts are our own, that the world is real, that there are
regularities in the world that we can know for certain, and that there
is a good and loving monotheistic god who would not deceive us about
these things.
Some
philosophers agreed with this very much, but did not find Descartes’
argument convincing and tried to come up with more satisfying proofs.
Other philosophers who were more skeptical, such as Hume, did not buy it
and argued that human truth and certainty is always, in some way, an
assumption. The two sides of the debate became known as Rationalism and
Empiricism.
Descartes,
in a world of increasing algebra and mechanics, turns from an
understanding of causes up in the heavens to cause as the mechanics of
this world. Just like many Islamic and medieval European thinkers,
Descartes identifies the mind and heavens with freedom and consciousness
while putting the mathematical order of things down in the world. The
heavens remain the good and pure, but the order and mathematics becomes a
thing of this world and not the heavens above, a conception ancient
civilizations got from watching the stars and seasons. This change,
which is very modern, comes with a world increasingly full of algebra
and mechanics. While Descartes argued that a monotheistic god clearly
created the world, as reason tells us all things have causes, he was
condemned like Hobbes, Newton and others for arguing that nature works
like a machine, and once caused proceeds largely on its own.
Descartes
argued that the natural world, including animals and human bodies,
nothing but mechanics and causation, completely devoid of intention or
feelings that require a mind. Descartes argues for a radical dualism,
an exclusive division, between the mechanics of the world below (body)
and the consciousness and intention of the world above (mind).
Consciousness or mind or spirit is in the upper world, while all in the
given world is mindless mechanics. The worst consequence of this was
that Descartes practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while alive
to learn about anatomy, and helped popularize the practice in Europe,
arguing that animals do not have minds and thus do not feel a thing,
their behavior being mere automatic reflexes of causal forces.
Descartes even argued that the belief that animals can have conscious
sensations is one of the worst errors possible, a great hindrance to
science and rationality.
In
his Discourse on Method, he lays out the famous “I think therefore I
am” thought experiment, remarkably similar to Avicenna’s Floating Man
thought experiment. In the beginning of the work, Descartes says he
won’t tell us about his first meditations, “for they are so abstract and
unusual that they will probably not be to the taste of everyone”. He
starts with the meditations he will
tell us about. Descartes argues that we all accept things that we
believe to be certain, but sometimes these then turn out to be wrong.
Therefore, we cannot use certainty as the sole criterion for truth. We
have to separate out the categorically certain from the seemingly
certain.
Descartes
says that it seems certain that he is sitting by the fire writing, but
we can doubt this and believe that Descartes is simply dreaming that he
is Descartes, by the fire. He uses the example of madmen who think that
they are kings or that their bodies are made out of glass. Obviously,
Descartes had some familiarity with at least literature about types of
madness and delusions, as did Avicenna, who understood imagination and
mental conditions such as hysteria and hallucinations. King Charles the
Sixth (VI), also known as Charles the Mad, ruled France until 1422. He
would sometimes forget his own name and run through his castle
believing himself to be a wolf. Also, he was afraid of being touched by
others, fearing that he was made of glass. When Descartes says that
his audience is familiar with instances of insanity such as people
believing they are made of glass, he is referring to Charles VI without
needing to mention his name.
Let
us remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment, in which he
suggests that the reader imagine floating in a void and having all
sensation, including of the body or senses, slowly taken away. What are
you left with as the essential factor once the accidental sensual
factors are removed? Self consciousness, with the awareness of
consciousness and mind itself. For Avicenna, as for Descartes, this
awareness and self-circling is the small piece of God, the big all
awareness, that is one’s soul, humanity and life. Descartes proposes a
very similar thought experiment. He asks the reader to imagine that
there is a deceiving demon that is trapping us in an illusion of a
world, casting doubt on everything except the essence of the human being
and soul, the self-awareness which Descartes believes must exist.
Thus, his famous line: “I think, therefore I am”.
Where
does the deceiving demon of Descartes come from? Why the radical
psychological skepticism, and then the simple positive affirmation? To
see this, we must speak of the Cathars, a Gnostic Christian and
Manichean heresy that was being persecuted in France in the 1400s.
Descartes is writing in France in the late 1600s, two hundred years
later. Gnosticism spoke of a deceiving demon false god, the devil, that
controls the appearance of this false world below, similar to the
Indian doctrine of the world below as not only evil but illusion and
false. Manichaeism was a religion started by a Syrian named Mani
(200-276 CE), who claimed to be the final coming of Jesus, the third
Persian Zoroastrian saoshyant, and the Buddha Amitaba, the messiahs of
three great religious traditions. Buddhism and Christianity flourished
in Syria and Afghanistan as a middle ground of cultures, where they were
both in contact with ancient Persian Zoroastrianism, then later Islam.
The religion spread up through Europe in 300 CE, and the Cathars were
an offshoot that survived in France up until the persecutions of 1400s.
Thus,
Descartes (the first modern philosopher) is arguing for Christianity
and its simple positive faith in the world vs. the
Cathar-Manichean-Gnostic deceiving demon. Notice that Descartes’
thought experiment suggests that a Demon could not keep us in the dark
the way the Cathars believe. Instead, because of our
consciousness/mind/soul that we get from God, and then using this as an
anchor of certainty, Descartes argues that God does not completely
deceive us in this world, and thus we can know certain truth in the name
of both science and religion.
There
do seem to be universal truths that cannot be untrue in any situation,
like 2 + 3 is equal to 5, or a square always has 4 sides, both examples
Descartes uses. Notice that both of these are mathematical examples.
However, we can even imagine that this itself is all delusion. Hence,
we assume for skepticism’s sake that there could be a deceiving demon
(much like in the movie The Matrix). He also says it could be someone
extremely powerful who could use ‘industry’ to deceive me. This is the
“brain in a vat” mad scientist thought experiment used today rather than
a demon in philosophy classrooms. The demon or mad scientist can
convince me of many false things, but they cannot convince me that I do
not exist, and so I am certainly an existent thing that thinks. The one
point of certainty is self-awareness or consciousness, the one thing
that we cannot be fooled about because it is self-evident.
Because
we are sure of this, and because we get our truth from something that
we are within, Descartes argues that we are not in the power of
something that completely lies to us. Descartes then quickly, and
without much of a convincing argument, declares that we can trust that
God is good, the world is not an illusion and 2 + 3 is equal to 5. When
we aspire to God and truth, using reason correctly, we discover certain
truths, such as the truths of mathematics, the sciences, the existence
of the soul, and of God, the certainty that the body is not our true
self, and that animals do not have souls or awareness. Note that
everyone after Descartes found this reasoning a bit too quick and slim,
both those who agreed with him and those who did not. Note also that
Descartes starts off saying he will be entirely skeptical of all truth
to beat Pyrrhonians at their own game, but then concludes that we should
believe what religion and science tell us.
I
did not give you Descartes’ Meditations for this class, as I found a
work that scholars have rediscovered, Descartes’ Principles of
Philosophy. In this work, Descartes carefully sets out the same
argument he put forward in the Meditations, clearly aware that his
earlier work was not rigorous enough and invited criticism. As in the
Meditations, Descartes argued that to seek truth one must start by
doubting everything that can be doubted, and considering the case that
everything that can be doubted is in fact false. Even mathematics can
be doubted, as mistakes in math are made all the time. We have the
freedom of will to doubt anything, no matter how certain it may seem.
What can be known in this extreme case? While the body can be doubted
(note the similarity to Avicenna), the mind’s awareness cannot, and
hence things which seem self-evident can be counted as simply known in
themselves, and must come from a source that is most certain, which is
God. While some are prejudiced and thus prevented from believing in the
certainty of God and mathematics, reason necessarily leads us to affirm
these as certain.
Baruch Spinoza
(1632 - 1677 CE) was born in the Portuguese Sephardic Jewish community
of Amsterdam, and was thus Jewish, Portuguese, and Dutch. Jews had fled
from Spain and Portugal to nearby lands during the Spanish Inquisition
of 1492 and the Portuguese Inquisition of 1536. If 1492 is a familiar
date, that is because it is the year that Christians retook Spain from
Muslims, and also the year Columbus chose to leave Spain and sail as far
around the world as he could. While Jews thrived in Spain and Portugal
under Islamic rule, often occupying high places in the government,
education, science and medicine, the Christians had not yet learned to
be tolerant or multicultural. The Portuguese Inquisition that caused
Spinoza’s own Jewish community to flee to Amsterdam happened only a
hundred years before his birth. Some scholars argue that the Portuguese
Spinoza family was originally of the Spanish Espinosa family, some of
whom fled to Portugal to avoid the Spanish Inquisition while others
remained in Spain and converted to Catholicism. If this is true,
Spinoza’s family successfully fled both inquisitions.
Spinoza
was not only a great philosopher, but also a scientist, mathematician,
and early scholar of serious biblical criticism, studying the bible
critically to understand and interpret it’s authorship, meaning, and
historical context. Spinoza’s views of the bible and its authorship,
radical for the time, got him not only kicked out of his Jewish
community at the age of 23, but ostracized by the surrounding Christian
community of Amsterdam. Like Descartes’ work, his work was put on the
Catholic Index of Forbidden Books. He was also attacked as he was
leaving synagog by a man with a knife who yelled out, “Heretic!”, and
Spinoza wore his cloak with a tear made by the knife for years
afterwards as a badge of honor. Because Spinoza believed in undertaking
philosophy and science rather than performing ritual, and because he
never converted to Christianity, he is considered by some to have been
one of the first secular Jews of Europe.
Amongst
other radical views that I will discuss as we examine his philosophy,
Spinoza was one of the first European biblical scholars to question the
traditional understanding that the first five books of the Old
Testament, for Jews the Torah, the only testament, were not written by
Moses. At the time, they were still known as the five ‘Mosaic Books’,
until Spinoza and others pointed out that not only did the book of
Exodus speak about Moses in the third person, but Moses dies near the
end of the book of Exodus, making his authorship of the book quite
questionable. Islamic scholars had noted this centuries earlier.
After
having been banished from Amsterdam for a brief period and then
returning, Spinoza lived as a lens grinder, making lenses for telescopes
and microscopes, turning down several teaching positions for a quiet
and private life. Because Spinoza died at the relatively young age of
forty four from an unknown lung condition, it is suspected that his
death was in part caused by glass dust inhaled while grinding. He was
known as an outstanding producer of lenses, and these were used by
scientists in the fields of optics, astronomy and medicine during the
European enlightenment as they had been used in earlier forms by Islamic
scientists.
After
writing several short works on science, theology, and philosophy,
particularly criticism of the work of Descartes, Spinoza wrote his
masterpiece, the Ethics, which was only published after his death and
written in Latin, as was most European scholarship for centuries.
Leibniz, who we will examine next, visited Spinoza and discussed the
Ethics as yet unpublished, and according to some after Leibniz returned
to Germany he plagiarized parts of the work and published them
interspersed with his own without giving Spinoza credit. Whether or not
there was plagiarism, Leibniz was clearly influenced by Spinoza. There
are many instances in philosophy, both ancient and modern, of
duplicated work that dances on the boundary between illegitimate
plagiarism and legitimate influence. Philosophers often fail to mention
names when using ideas in the sequence of an argument.
Although
Spinoza was interested in investigation and observation of the
sciences, he was drawn to Rationalism and mathematics. His Ethics is an
attempt to do philosophy as a formal Euclidean geometric proof.
Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician, is known for his geometric
proofs, by which he proceeded from assumptions and principles to deduce
conclusions that necessarily follow. While Euclid did not have
equations, which were invented with Algebra by Islamic mathematicians
who drew on Indian symbolic mathematics as well as the work of Euclid,
he worked systematically much in the way that mathematical and logical
proofs work, and Spinoza attempted to follow Euclid’s method to make his
thinking rigorous and sound. This is why he is known as a Rationalist,
falling under the same heading as Descartes.
Central
to the work, Spinoza attacked Cartesian dualism (the dualism of
Descartes), arguing that mind (also spirit) and body are not two but
one, an anti-dualist position known as monism. When teaching about
ancient thought, I often use the term ‘philosophical monism’ to label
the belief that all things are part of a great One without any entirely
exclusive divisions. This was not only central to the thinking of much
Indian thought, of Chinese Daoism and Greek skepticism, but also to some
medieval Islamic and European Neoplatonists, such as the Irish
philosopher Eriugena who lived almost a thousand years before Spinoza in
nearby Ireland and France. While dogmatic and conservative thought
tends to justify traditional divisions as exclusive, skeptical and
progressive thought tends to attack traditional divisions and attempt to
be inclusive in nontraditional ways.
For
Spinoza, there is only one unified reality, which he identified with
God, and any difference or separation is ignorance and misunderstanding.
What are perceived to be distinctions are really various modes and
perspectives within the unified whole, an understanding quite similar to
Eriugena and other European Neoplatonists who were influenced by
Eriugena such as Nicholas of Cusa. Each individual thing, including
minds, are like a wave on the sea. Nature, indeed all of Being, is God,
a pantheism that infuriated the traditionally religious and got Spinoza
barred as a heretic by both his Jewish community and the larger
Christian community of Amsterdam.
In
fact, right wing evangelical Christians in America today have taken to
attacking the environmental movement as satanically inspired pantheism, a
heretical worship of nature rather than of a god that created nature
but is separate and distinct from it. As a counterpoint to that, on the
Eric Andre show (a surreal comedy skit show hosted by a guy who likes
to crash through walls and furniture), he interviews famed 80s
action-movie actor Dolph Lundgren, and, suddenly cutting off Lundgren as
he is talking about his Nordic “rapist blood”, asks him if he believes
in God. Lundgren replies, “Well, there’s rocks and trees”, and trails
off as Andre sits watching him, nodding thoughtfully, before suddenly
and violently karate-chopping a birthday cake in two with his bare hand.
Like
American and European deists, some of whom were American Founding
Fathers, Spinoza believed that doing philosophy and science was the
method of achieving greater visions of the whole through reason and thus
regaining one’s identity with the whole. Spinoza argued that God is
not personal but abstract and transcendent, and he argued against the
immortality of the soul, all of which helped to label him as a heretic.
Like Jains and Buddhists of ancient India (and modern everywhere),
Spinoza believed that the self as an exclusive separate thing dissipates
back into the whole, but the individual lives on in that with which
they have come to identify. This would mean that Isaac Newton would not
live on as Isaac, but as a greater soul who had come to understand
gravity he would live on not as an individual but as gravity and the
eternal ways of the cosmos. Unlike Jains and Buddhists, Spinoza did not
believe in stages of reincarnation.
Spinoza
believed that reality, which is nature and God, is one substance. Like
waves on an ocean, all particular beings are modes or situations of
this substance which are linked together by chains of causation.
Spinoza was a determinist, and believed that there was no real freedom
or chance in the universe. The will and mind of God was not the
personal care of an emotional being with a personality, but the causal
workings and design of nature. Much like pre-chaos theory science,
reason reveals the necessary causal connections between things. Spinoza
argued that human beings, like Descartes, believe in free will because
they are aware of desires but do not understand the reasons behind these
desires, and so they perceive the gap as freedom when in fact there is
none, as the great rational mind is the necessary process of all things.
Just
because there is no free will does not mean that human beings have no
degree of control over their actions. Indeed, if one understands the
causes of one’s behavior and situation with reason, this gives one
greater ability to act in various ways. If one has a greater exercise
of reason, one will naturally be determined to take a better path that
one may not have been aware of before. Spinoza noted that people who
are driven by passions, such as the baby seeking the breast, the cruel
boy who lashes out at others, and the drunk who seeks more to drink, all
feel that they are free because they do not understand the forces that
determine their actions.
In
this sense, one gains freedom by reason, but much as immortality is not
immortality for the individual but the individual conforming to nature,
so too is freedom not freedom for the individual but the individual
conforming to nature, becoming more capable. Scholars have noted that
this is similar to Daoism of ancient China and Stoicism of ancient
Greece and Rome. As we become more active, we become the universe, the
sum of all activity. Like the Mutazilites of Islam, who believed that
God is reason and the necessary logic of all being, Spinoza was
committed to the position that God is not free to be illogical or be
contradictory, but as the sum of all activity this absolutely determined
being is the sum of all freedom.
Hegel
was a big fan of Spinoza, writing in his History of Philosophy that one
could not be a legitimate philosopher without being a Spinozist.
Considering Hegel geared his system to overcome and synthesize all
dualisms, such as those he saw left incomplete by Kant, Hegel was of the
opinion that Spinoza’s monism had overcome Descartes’ dualism just as
his own monism had overcome Kant’s dualism. Deleuze, a French
postmodernist we will study at the very end of the course, called
Spinoza the prince of philosophers. Indeed, for many thinkers skeptical
of exclusive dualist distinctions, Spinoza’s opposition to the dualism
of Descartes became one of the first glorious moments of European
thought. I was myself quite inspired by Spinoza as an undergraduate
philosophy major.
Einstein,
who said that Spinoza had more influence on his views than any other
philosopher, when asked if he believed in God, said, “I believe in
Spinoza’s God”. A determinist like Spinoza, Einstein argued against the
chaos theorists who would surpass his work on relativity saying, “God
doesn’t play dice with the universe”. According to chaos theory,
Einstein was right that time and space are relative, but he did not see
that necessity and chance are also relative, and thus the absolute
determinism of Spinoza and Einstein is impossible.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646 - 1716 CE) was a German philosopher and mathematician who, as
mentioned, invented calculus at the same time as Newton and we still use
his system of notation. His first job was as an alchemist’s assistant,
then he became a lawyer’s assistant.
As
also mentioned, he met Spinoza, and though the two disagreed on much,
Leibniz is known to have borrowed, possibly plagiarized, parts of
Spinoza’s Ethics. Leibniz published little during his lifetime, and to
this day no definitive collection exists of his various and disparate
writings. His most famous writings are his Monadology and his Discourse
on Metaphysics.
Leibniz
invented the binary system still used by computers today, which may or
may not give way to something else like quantum computers in the near
future. Leibniz, a sinophile (one who loves Chinese culture), studied
Chinese thought, at least that which was available to him, and invented
his binary system inspired in part by the Yi Jing divination system, the
ancient Chinese binary divination system that represents all possible
situations with solid and broken lines just as Leibniz’s binary system
represents all numbers with ones and zeros. Leibniz was communicating
with Christian missionaries in China, and he, like some of the
missionaries, believed that Europeans could learn much from Confucianism
that was quite in line with Christianity. Also an admirer of the
Chinese abacus, Leibniz was one of the most important innovators of the
mechanical calculator, the reason for which he invented his binary
system.
Like
Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz believed that God created the world as a
rational, mechanical apparatus. Because of this, Leibniz famously
argued that this is the best of all possible worlds. As God is
omniscient, God was aware of all possible worlds before creation, and
chose this to be the created world, so it must therefore be the best.
Of course, many who ponder the problem of evil, the theological problem
debated for centuries about how suffering in a rational world is
possible, would question this assertion. Like Spinoza, Leibniz tried to
come up with pure deductive understanding of the world. Unfortunately,
unlike the Empiricists, this meant the world was very unlike how we
experience it.
The
infinite, the eternal, is for the mathematician Leibniz an infinite
series of distinct points, not a unity beyond all division as it is for
Spinoza. These are the elementary particles of the universe, eternal
and indivisible, like the atoms (“without cut”) of the ancient Indian
and Greek atomists. Unlike the ancient Indian and Greek atoms, however,
Leibniz's points are individual minds he calls monads. This infinite
plurality is entirely made of mind, yet they are a mass of distinct
plurality, as opposed to Spinoza’s anti-dualist monistic God-mind.
It
seems as if the minds perceive each other imperfectly, but in actuality
they do not interact. Each is its entire universe. In what Leibniz
calls a pre-established harmony, each monad was set apart from the
central monad, God. When the monads split and became individuals, they
were set in motion such that they could all run independently but seem
to share a universe and interact. Space, matter and motion are
subjective phenomena, not objectively real. Notice how this follows
Descartes insofar as all can be doubted other than mind, and that
mathematics is given as true by virtue of the essentially quantitative
nature of being. It seems similar to Frege and set theory, which we
will study later with Logical Positivism.
While
there are similarities to Descartes, it is also similar to Berkeley the
idealist, who thinks reality is God’s dream, and we are dreams within
the dream, except in this case, we are each having God’s dream, but
separate from God and each other, each privately having the same dream
but not contained within a single dream but rather derived from the
original dream, each an individual dubbed copy. Notice that for Spinoza
and Berkeley, there is an underlying identity with God which allows the
individual be eternal, while in Leibniz, it is the underlying complete
separation that allows the individual to be eternal, unlike any
substance, which is an illusion, but like the original mama Monad, and
like the infinite nature of the endless series of numerals. It is also
similar to Indra’s net of the Indian tradition, a net of mirrors that
all reflect each other, a metaphor that Leibniz uses without referring
to India or Indra.
There
are several principles Leibniz draws upon again and again. One is the
principle of identity or noncontradiction: if a statement is true, then
its negation is false, and if a statement is false, then its negation is
true. Kant and Russell, both like Leibniz fans of logic and the
principle of noncontradiction, studied the work of Leibniz intensely,
advocating his principles, which are often staples of dogmatic thought.
Another central principle of Leibniz’s is the Identity of
indiscernibles: if two things are without any discernable difference,
then they must be not two things, but identical, the same single thing.
Of course, if two things are in different locations or exist at
different times, this is a discernable difference. A third principle of
Leibniz’s is the principle of sufficient reason: if something exists,
there must be a good enough reason that it exists and is the way it is.
Of course, Leibniz, as a Rationalist, believes that the world was
rationally created by God, who controls all in this best and most
rational of all possible worlds, and so he assumes, quite
teleologically, that each thing can be rationally explained because each
thing was rationally created.
In
the text I gave you by Leibniz, The Principles of Nature and of Grace
Based on Reason, he argues against the Cartesians by name (the followers
of Descartes), writing that they were mistaken to believe that animals
do not possess minds or have sensations. However, only human beings
with reason can become not merely souls, but genuine, “sublime” spirits.
The Empiricists (who we will study next time) are like beasts
according to Leibniz, because they learn only from experience, like dogs
afraid of a stick with which they have been beaten, rather than become
sublime through the use of pure reason, like the Rationalists such as
Leibniz himself. Hume, the Empiricist and skeptic, would agree, but
argue that we are all dogs even when we are at our most rational, only
capable of using reason in terms of experience.
