Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher, mathematician, and universal scholar, one of the last figures who could plausibly claim command of the whole of learning in his day. Born in Leipzig in 1646, he worked as a diplomat, librarian, and court councillor, corresponded with hundreds across Europe, co-invented the calculus independently of Newton, and built a metaphysical system whose strangeness has kept it alive. He died in Hanover in 1716, in some disfavour, and was buried with little ceremony.

His mature metaphysics turns on the monad — from the Greek for “unit.” In the Monadology, a short late summary, Leibniz held that the ultimate constituents of reality are not bits of matter but simple, indivisible, immaterial centres of perception, “windowless,” each mirroring the entire universe from its own point of view. Nothing passes between them; their changes run in a harmony established by God at creation. From this followed his most quoted claim, set out in the Theodicy of 1710 — that a perfect God, choosing among all the worlds he might have made, must have chosen the best, so that ours is the best of all possible worlds. The phrase was later turned against him as a byword for naive optimism; in his own argument it was a tight piece of reasoning about why a good God permits evil at all.

The word monad was not new. It carried a long Pythagorean and Neoplatonic charge, where the One is the source from which all number and being descend, and the term had passed through Renaissance occult writers before reaching him. Scholarship has shown that the young Leibniz read deeply in this material, and that his early years brushed the hermetic world directly: around 1666 he served as secretary to an alchemical society in Nuremberg, a circle later associated with Rosicrucian enthusiasms. How much of his philosophy grew from that soil remains debated. He kept the vocabulary of emanation and living force while recasting it in the rigorous, almost mathematical idiom that is his own.

One thread has drawn particular attention. Leibniz worked out the binary arithmetic that underlies modern computing, writing every number with only 0 and 1, and he read into it a theological figure — creation of all things by God out of nothing. When a Jesuit missionary in China sent him the hexagrams of the I Ching, Leibniz saw in their broken and unbroken lines an image of his own binary notation, and took it as evidence that an ancient sage had grasped the same order. Historians treat the resemblance as real but the inference as his own enthusiasm rather than a recovered secret.

What makes Leibniz a borderline figure for the esoteric tradition is exactly this doubleness. He is a founder of modern logic and mathematics who never quite left behind the world of correspondences, hidden harmonies, and a cosmos in which every smallest unit reflects the whole. The system he left is severe and luminous at once, and it has been read in both directions ever since.

→ Related: Neoplatonism · The One · Emanation · Cornelius Agrippa