BIOGRAPHY
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Go to some pictures of Leibniz.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was born on 1st July 1646, in Leipzig, where his father was Professor of Moral Philosophy. His father died when he was only six. He went to school when he was seven, and by the age of thirteen he was already trying to improve on Aristotle’s theory of the categories.
He entered Leipzig University at the age of fourteen (not especially young in those days), and finally emerged with a doctorate in law at the age of 20. For a mixture of reasons, he didn’t receive his doctorate from Leipzig, but from the nearby University of Altdorf. Although was offered a professorship there, he decided not to pursue an academic career.
His first job, which he held only briefly, was as secretary to a society of alchemists at Nuremberg. At the time, he was keenly interested in alchemy, and he believed that the newly discovered phosphorus might hold the key to the philosophers’ stone. In later life, he came to believe that alchemy was mere superstition, and he seems to have destroyed most of his papers relating to alchemy.
Shortly afterwards, he came under the patronage of the influential Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg, who got him a job as legal adviser to the Elector of Mainz. As well as working on the recodification of civil law, Leibniz spent a lot of time on his own projects, such as the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant churches, various political schemes, and the writing of an encyclopedia of all knowledge. In addition, Leibniz fancied himself as a humanist scholar. He knew most of Virgil’s Aeneid by heart, and all his life he wrote Latin poetry. He published an edition of a work called Antibarbarus by the 16th-century Italian humanist, Mario Nizolio, and included a long preface by himself in which he argued for a nominalist account of universals (a view he subsequently modified). He also translated Plato’s Phaedo and Theaetetus into Latin, and was perhaps the first person to make a clear distinction between the doctrines of Plato, and those of the later neoplatonists.
In 1672, Leibniz devised a plan to distract Louis XIV away from Northern Europe with an enticing scheme for the conquest of Egypt (almost exactly the same scheme as was carried out by Napoleon a century and a half later). Boineburg was so impressed, that he arranged for Leibniz to go to Paris, to try and lay it before the French government.
Nothing came of the plan, but Leibniz spent the four most instructive and constructive years of his life in Paris. Paris was then the centre of philosophical activity in Europe, and Leibniz made a wide range of acquaintances, including the philosophers Arnauld and Malebranche, and the mathematician and physicist Huygens. He managed to get access to the unpublished writings of the two greatest philosophers of the previous generation, Pascal and Descartes, and some of the latter survive only through copies he made.
When Leibniz arrived from Germany, he was unaware of the latest developments in mathematics. He thought he was the bee’s knees, and had some embarrassing moments when he was made painfully aware of his ignorance. But under the tutorship of Huygens, he made such rapid strides, that by the end of his stay, he had already developed what was to be one of the greatest mathematical discoveries of all time, namely the infinitesimal calculus. (In fact Newton probably got there first, but with an inferior notation. The one we use now is Leibniz’s. The much later dispute as to who was first was a major factor in bringing about the long-lasting divide between Continental and British philosophy and science.)
While in Paris, Leibniz also worked on physics, and he wrote a treatise called The Theory of Concrete Motion, which he presented to the Royal Society while on a short trip to England. In addition, he wrote about a number of technological ideas, such as an improved system of balance wheels for watches, a submarine, and an aneroid barometer. However, his most important idea was a calculating machine, which was way ahead of its time, and which incorporated devices such as the stepped reckoner (or ‘Leibniz wheel’), which had cogs of varying lengths, and which was still in use until mechanical calculators were replaced by electronic ones. He had a prototype constructed in Paris, and a later model still survives in the Hanover State Library. See picture.
After the deaths in quick succession of his patron Boineburg, and then of his employer the Elector of Mainz, Leibniz had to find another job. He settled for the post of Court Councillor at Hanover, under Duke Johann Friedrich of Brunswick-Lüneburg. At the end of 1676, when he was 30, Leibniz travelled to Hanover, via London and Holland. While in Holland, he visited the microscopist Antonie vean Leeuwenhoek, who had recently made the first observations of bacteria, protozoa, and spermatozoa; and he spent four days of intense discussion with Spinoza.
In addition to normal council duties, Leibniz was librarian and archivist, and he also advised on technological questions. As librarian, he had to oversee the removal of the Duke’s library from his palace in the suburbs to a house in the centre of Hanover. Leibniz was given a flat in the house, and the building later became known as the ‘Leibniz House’. See picture. (It was destroyed in World War II, but a replica was built, and inaugurated in 1983.) Leibniz seems to have been the first librarian ever to draw up a main-entry alphabetical author catalogue.
As for technology, his main interest was in devising schemes for draining the silver mines in the Harz Mountains, which were a major source of revenue for the state. There is no evidence that any of these schemes actually worked, any more than a myriad of other projects. Some of them were just batty, but others were just far ahead of his time.
Duke Johann Friedrich died in 1679, and was succeeded by his younger brother Ernst August. Ernst August commissioned Leibniz to write a history of the Guelf family, of which the House of Brunswick was a branch. Leibniz took the project very seriously (probably more seriously than was intended), and spent an enormous amount of time travelling around Europe, especially Austria and Italy, gathering materials. During his lifetime, he published nine large volumes of archival materials, and more saw the light of day after his death.
One of the spin-offs from this research was that Leibniz became an expert in dynastic history more generally, and he had at least some role to play in the negotiations surrounding Ernst August’s elevation to the status of Elector (rather than just Duke) of Hanover, and more importantly, in the decision that the line of succession to the English throne would pass through Ernst August’s wife, Sophie, who was the grand-daughter of James I of England. As it happens, Sophie died just too soon, and her son Georg Ludwig became King of England in 1714.
Although Leibniz was supposed to be employed full-time in Hanover, for many years he had a variety of part-time posts in other states (some of which were regarded as hostile). He spent more time abroad than at home, and was constantly angling for more prestigious posts elsewhere. Sometimes he received offers (e.g. that of Vatican Librarian), but he turned them down because he refused to convert to Catholicism.
When Leibniz heard of Georg Ludwig’s accession to the English throne in 1714, he rushed back to Hanover; but he missed the boat, since the bulk of the Court had left three days earlier, and he was not allowed to join them. Although Georg Ludwig had stoutly defended Leibniz in Hanover, he must have known that he would be a disastrous nuisance in England, particularly in view of his dispute with Newton.
The usual picture of Leibniz’s last two years is one of miserable neglect. I don’t see this, since he never got on with the Court anyway. It’s true that he still kept angling for jobs elsewhere (London, Vienna, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg), despite his age (68+) — but he’d been doing this for decades.
As throughout his life, his main love was reading and writing. He might have had few chums in Hanover, but his correspondence went on undiminished.
On 14th November 1716, after a week in bed with gout and colic, Leibniz died peacefully in the presence of his amanuensis and coachman. He was seventy years old. The rump of the Council still in Hanover refused to attend his funeral, but he was buried with otherwise proper ceremony in the Neustädter Kirche.
Leibniz would have been a significant figure, even if he had never done any philosophy at all. It is amazing that he could have written so much on philosophy, in the midst of all his other activities. Nevertheless, his life does gives some clues to his philosophy — his perpetual attempts to reconcile opposites; his faith in his own reasoning as an individual; and his personal motto that theory and practice go hand-in-hand (theoria cum praxi).
The fullest biography of Leibniz (in English) is E.J. Aiton’s Leibniz: A Biography (Bristol: Hilger, 1985). The second fullest is probably Chapter 1 of my own Past Masters: Leibniz (Oxford, 1984).
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