Leibniz and Confucius: The Foundations of Cultural Exchange
Richard N. Stichler
Alvernia University
Reading, PA
I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tshina (as they call it), which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the earth. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life. –G. W. Leibniz, Preface to Novissima Sinica.
Introduction
By the end of the seventeenth century the discovery of the new world had generated a vigorous debate about the significance of civilizations outside of Europe. Philosophers and theologians were confronted with cultures that challenged their understanding of the world and raised questions about their own intellectual heritage. The highly advanced civilization of the Chinese was of particular interest, for its achievements were viewed as a demonstration of the unaided power of natural reason. China was widely seen as a utopian society that had attained an advanced moral tradition without recourse to dogma or faith.
From the very beginning, however, the Western reception and interpretation of Confucianism was embroiled in theological controversy. In the early 17th century, the controversy centered on the so called “accomodationist policy” of the Jesuit mission in China. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the Jesuit founder of the first Catholic mission in China, viewed Confucianism as a theistic form of natural religion that was compatible with the basic principles of Christian monotheism; in order to win converts to Christianity Ricci thus advocated a policy of accommodating the Chinese ritual tradition of ancestor worship or allowing Chinese converts to continue their practice of Confucian rituals. Ricci’s Dominican and Franciscan opponents, however, strongly opposed such a mixture of what they deemed “pagan ritual” with Christianity. They maintained that the Chinese Confucians were actually atheistic materialists who lacked any understanding of the Christian conception of the Deity.
Initially, the dispute over the interpretation of Confucian natural theology was confined for the most part to the Catholic hierarchy, but by the end of the 17th century a wider knowledge of Confucian thought began to spread throughout Europe. In 1687, Philippe Couplet, a Jesuit missionary in China, published the first Latin translation of the Confucian classics. In the preface to his translation, Couplet wrote: "One might say that the moral system of this philosopher is infinitely sublime, but that it is at the same time simple, sensible and drawn from the purest sources of natural reason... Never has Reason, deprived of Divine Revelation, appeared so well developed nor with so much power"1 As Couplet’s interpretation of Confucian natural theology gained a wider European audience, the reception of Confucianism in the West became further entangled in an ongoing religious controversy over the foundations of natural law.
In The Law of War and Peace Hugo Grotius had argued that inasmuch as our knowledge of natural law could be acquired by human reason alone, it would still be binding on men even if there were no God. He thus maintained that natural law could be regarded as literally and exclusively natural, or as having no divine origin at all. Although Grotius added that it would certainly be impious to suppose that God does not exist, his shift toward a secular interpretation of natural law was particularly upsetting to European Pietists. According to the Pietists, natural law was based solely and entirely on the divine authority and decree of God, and without faith, human reason would be unable to attain knowledge of any truth whatsoever. In view of this controversy, Couplet’s interpretation of Confucian natural theology was warmly embraced by secularists who affirmed the independent validity of natural law, while fideists viewed Confucianism as a pagan religion that posed a grave threat to Christian orthodoxy. In their view, if human reason could attain knowledge of natural law without faith, then revealed knowledge of God’s will would be deemed unnecessary and irrelevant.
However, Pietists and fideists who claimed revealed knowledge of God’s will could not agree about exactly what God had decreed and how He wanted things done. Moreover, the sectarian violence and endless religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries intensified the search for a resolution of conflict based exclusively on natural or universal human reason. Explaining his motives for writing The Law of War and Peace, Grotius wrote: “Throughout the Christian world I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous races should be ashamed of; I observed that men rush to arms for slight causes, or no cause at all, and that when arms have once been taken up there is no longer any respect for law, divine or human; it is as if, in accordance with a general decree, frenzy had openly been let loose for the committing of all crimes.”2 Thus, while Europeans fought wars of religion, the Chinese, though “deprived of divine revelation” (as Couplet put it), had achieved a peaceful and harmonious civilization solely on the basis of Confucian principles of natural reason. In the practical realm of law and politics, it appeared that Europeans had much to learn from the Chinese. Leibniz and other philosophers of the enlightenment thus turned to the teachings of Confucius in order to advance their cosmopolitan and humanistic ideals.
Leibniz and the Pre-Established Harmony of China and Europe
In a world plagued with war and intolerance, Leibniz labored constantly to achieve peace and mutual understanding. Throughout his life he endeavored to bring about a universal synthesis, a grand scheme for reconciling everything and everyone—France and Germany, Catholics and Protestants, Cartesians and Aristotelians, science and theology—but his greatest ambition of all was to achieve cooperative and harmonious relations between Europe and Asia. Leibniz’s goals were enormous. As a philosopher and statesman, he aspired to achieve the “grand design” of creating global harmony through cultural exchange and cooperation, and to this end, he devoted himself to the task of constructing a harmonious universe in both theory and practice.
On the theoretical side, Leibniz wanted to set human thought on a new path by transforming the substance of the prevailing world view. He developed a totally new concept of universal science, according to Ernest Cassirer, by substituting the concept of a pluralistic universe for Cartesian dualism and Spinozian monism.3 He accomplished this by combining Cartesian mechanism with Aristotelian teleology thus giving precise mathematical expression to a dynamic Aristotelian world of multiple processes and events. Leibniz’s pluralistic universe was not merely the mechanical sum of its parts but a dynamic and continually unfolding actualization of multiplicity in unity. He found the key to understanding the law that would render the world’s diversity intelligible in his celebrated discovery of the infinitesimal calculus.4 This Leibnizinan conception of a dynamic pluralistic universe was to become the predominant worldview of the eighteenth century.
On a practical level, Leibniz sought to develop harmonious relations between Europe and Asia by facilitating a process of cultural exchange and by demonstrating the compatibility of Confucian and Christian ethics. He thought that the Chinese had much to contribute to Western civilization, but the main impediment to cultural exchange lay in the controversy over the “natural theology” of the Chinese. Between the two extremes of a secularism that rejected revealed theology and a fideism that rejected natural reason Leibniz typically tried to find the middle ground. He attempted to defuse the tension between China and the West by drawing parallels between Confucianism and the natural philosophy of the ancient Greeks. He reasoned that just as Christian theology had previously retained its commitment to its principles of revealed theology while being enlarged and improved through its assimilation of Greek philosophy,5 so could it once again be further perfected by absorbing the wisdom of China.
Throughout his life Leibniz maintained a lively interest in China which he cultivated through his reading and correspondence with a number of Jesuit missionaries in China. For his time, Leibniz was extremely well-informed about Chinese thought and culture; he read Philippe Couplet’s translations of the Confucian classics, the Yi Jing, and learned what he could about Zhu Xi and other neo-Confucian philosophers. Wishing to become better informed about Chinese culture, he even “expressed a desire to travel to China himself.”6 Leibniz strongly supported the work of the Jesuit missionaries in China who followed the ecumenical policies of Matteo Ricci and staunchly defended their accomodationist interpretation of Confucianism against Christian critics who claimed that the Chinese were atheists. In his Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, Leibniz argued that the ancient Chinese concept of tian or heaven was the equivalent of the Christian idea of God, and he argued against the materialistic interpretations of Confucianism propounded by the Jesuit Nichola Longobardi and the Franciscan Antoine Sainte Marie.7
Although the Jesuit missionaries had provided the Chinese with much information about Western science and civilization, Leibniz regretted the fact that the West was still relatively uninformed about China. Believing that the West had much to learn about practical philosophy from the Chinese, he wanted to promote further cultural exchange and even wanted to invite the Chinese to send its own missionaries to the West to teach Europeans the art of practical politics. For in comparing the civilizations of China and Europe, Leibniz found that although the West was more advanced in the theoretical sciences, China was far superior in moral philosophy. He wrote: “it is difficult to describe how beautifully all the laws of the Chinese, in contrast to those of other peoples, are directed to the achievement of public tranquility and the establishment of social order, so that men shall be disrupted in their relations as little as possible.” And though he found the West more advanced in military science, Leibniz attributed this fact to the superior wisdom rather than the ignorance of the Chinese. “For,” he wrote, “they despise everything which creates or nourishes ferocity in men, and almost in emulation of the higher teachings of Christ…. They would be wise indeed if they were alone in the world.”8
In developing his defense of Confucianism, Leibniz noted many similarities between the neo-Confucian metaphysics of Zhu Xi and his own conception of a pluralistic universe. According to the Leibnizian worldview, the universe consists of an infinite series of simple substances or monads each of which is “a perpetual living mirror of the universe.” “Every substance,” Leibniz states, “is like an entire world and like a mirror of God, or indeed of the whole world …”9 In Zhu Xi’s account of the relationship between li and chi Leibniz found a striking resemblance to his own conception of substance. According to Zhu Xi, Li is the first principle and ground of all things, or the universal substance which is present in each individual being while chi is its coordinate material principle. Leibniz considered Zhu Xi’s conception of Li to be the equivalent of his own idea of God. In comparing the two concepts, Leibniz wrote: “We say as much when we teach that the ideas, the primitive reasons, the prototypes of all essences are in God. And joining supreme unity with the most perfect multiplicity, we say that God is one in all things, one containing all, all things in one; but formally, all things as their perfection.”1
In the Yi Jing (Book of Changes) Leibniz discovered yet another remarkable correspondence between Chinese thought and his own philosophical system. In his youth Leibniz had developed a system of binary arithmetic in order to facilitate the solution of mathematical problems. In a binary system only two numbers, 0 and 1 are needed to generate all numbers, and a zero added to any number will multiply it by two. Thus, the numerical sequence counting from zero to eight could be expressed as: 0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, 0100, 0101, 0110, 0111, and 1000. When mathematical calculations “are reduced to the simplest principles, like 0 and 1,” Leibniz wrote, “a wonderful order appears everywhere.”11 Leibniz further maintained that the binary system not only simplified mathematical operations but also symbolically expressed the Christian doctrine of God’s creation of the universe out of nothing. He wrote: “All combinations arise from unity and nothing, which is like saying that God made everything from nothing, and that there were only two first principles, God and nothing.”12
Leibniz was thus astonished to find that the Yi Jing employed precisely the same set of binary symbols that he had independently discovered. Through his correspondence with the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, Leibniz learned that the Yi Jing was composed of a series of sixty four hexagrams each of which consisted of a set of six broken and/or unbroken lines. Each line could be individually interpreted as a symbolic representation of the numbers one or zero. Thus, a broken line (--) represented 0 while an unbroken line (–) represented 1. Moreover, the sequence of hexagrams which he received from Bouvet actually corresponded point by point to the binary sequence which Leibniz himself had previously constructed. Beginning with a hexagram composed of six solid lines, the number of broken lines gradually increase and end with a hexagram consisting of six broken lines. If the hexagram’s broken and solid lines are converted to zeros and ones, the numerical values of the sequence turn out to be identical to Leibniz’s binary numbers with the exception of the fact that their order is inverted, sixty three being the first number in the series and zero the last. Leibniz was delighted with his discovery, for he considered it further proof of his view that spiritual truths can be expressed mathematically.