‘A Series of Generations’: Leibniz on Race

Summary

In some very interesting recent work, Peter Fenves has sought to trace G. W. Leibniz's views on human diversity back to the philosopher's core philosophical concerns, in particular to his metaphysical picture of the world as consisting in causally unconnected substances, monads, that are ‘windowless’, ‘worlds apart’. In this article I argue by contrast that Leibniz's anthropological views develop quite independently of his core metaphysics, and are rooted instead in his significant work as a historian and genealogist. In this connection, he develops a conception of race as a ‘series of generations’, and of genealogy as ‘the explication of this series’, that will in turn ground much of his thought about not just human groups, but about living kinds in general. These conceptions, moreover, offer significant new insight into Leibniz's position with respect to the philosophical problem of the ontological status of species.

Notes

¹G. W. Leibniz, ‘Definitiones notionum ex Wilkinsio (1677-86(?))’, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1923-present), series VI, vol. 4, 30–34.

²See Peter Fenves, ‘Imagining an Inundation of Australians; or, Leibniz on the Principles of Grace and Race’, in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, edited by Andrew Valls (Cornell University Press, 2005), 73–88. See also Fenves, ‘What “Progresses” Has Race-Theory Made Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?’, in The German Invention of Race, edited by Sara Eigen and Mark Josph Larrimore (SUNY Press, 2006), 11–22. In an earlier engagement with Fenves's work, I mischaracterized his account of Leibniz's views on a few important points. In particular, I wrongly attributed to him the view that Leibniz supported Bernier's racial theory. I hope in this article to draw out some real points of difference between our interpretations, and to do so in due appreciation of Fenves's path-breaking work on Leibniz on race. See in particular Justin E. H. Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton University Press, 2011), ch. 7.

³Fenves, ‘Imagining an Inundation of Australians’, 73.

⁴A VI 4, 31–2; Fenves, ‘Imagining an Inundation of Australians’, 81.

⁵Fenves, ‘Imagining an Inundation of Australians’, 81.

⁶While we cannot devote attention to the development of Leibniz's metaphysics, we can at least remark in passing that in broad outline Dan Garber's account, according to which the theory of monads only begins to take shape over the course of the 1690s, and that it sharply distinguishes the late-period account of the constitution of the world from the account offered in the middle period (where we must place the notes on Wilkins), seems to us largely compelling. See Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (Oxford University Press, 2010).

⁷For a paradigmatic statement of the worlds-apart thesis, see for example Discourse on Metaphysics § 14, in G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, edited by C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1849–1860), vol. IV, 440: ‘Each substance is a world apart, independent of everything outside of itself except God.’

⁸Fenves, ‘Imagining an Inundation of Australians’, 73.

⁹Bernier, ‘Nouvelle division de la terre’, Journal des Sçavans, 1684, 133. On Bernier and the history of race, see Pierre H. Boulle, ‘François Bernier and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race’, in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, edited by Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Duke University Press, 2003), 11–27; Siep Stuurman, ‘François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification’, in History Workshop Journal, 50 (Autumn, 2000), 1–21; Joan Pau Rubiés, ‘Race, Climate and Civilization in the Works of François Bernier’, in L'Inde des Lumières, edited by Marie Fourcade and Ines G. Županov (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2013), forthcoming. Parts of the summary of Bernier's racial theory given here appeared earlier in Justin E. H. Smith, ‘The Pre-Adamite Controversy and the Problem of Racial Difference in 17^th-Century Natural Philosophy’, in Controversies within the Scientific Revolution, edited by Marcelo Dascal and Victor Boantza (John Benjamins Publishing, 2011).

¹⁰Bernier, ‘Nouvelle division’, 133f.

¹¹Bernier, ‘Nouvelle division’, 136.

¹²Bernier, ‘Nouvelle division’, 137.

¹³G. W. Leibniz, ‘Lettre de Mr. Leibniz à Mr. Sparvenfeld, (qui avoit soin de servir les Ministres étrangers qui étoient à Stockholm’, in Otium hanoveranum, sive Miscellanea, ex ore & schedis illustris viri, piae memoriae, Godofr. Guilielmi Leibnitii, edited by Joachim Friedrich Feller (Leipzig: Impensis Joann. Christiani Martini, 1718), 37f.

¹⁴G. W. Leibniz, ‘Pars altera, complectens meditationes, observationes et crises varias leibnitianas, gallico & latino sermone expressas’, XLVIII, in Otium Hanoveranum, 158–60. The text reads in part: ‘Nova terrae divisio per diversas hominum species vel generationes, quas magnus pergrinator misit Domino Abbati della Chambre, Parisino, extat in Diario Eruditorum Parisino A. 1684. d. 24. April. Res huc redit. Geographi terram per regiones (gubernationes potius) dividunt. Ego quinque species vel generationes observo. Prima continet homines Europae, parte Moscoviae excepta … Secunda species est Africanorum: Grandia labra, naso scaffo o simo, paucissimis labia mediocria, nasusque aquilinus … Tertia species implet partem regnorum Arakam, SIam, Sumatrae, Borneo, rum Philippinas vel Manillas, Japoniam, Pegu, Tunkinum … His omnibus color albus, sed humeri largi, facies plana (viso piatto,) nasus exiguus (picciolo & schiacciato) oculi exigui & porcini, (lungi & incavati) & pauci in barba pili.’

¹⁵Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate nativa, 3rd edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1795), 297.

¹⁶G. W. Leibniz, Otium hanoveranum, 160. ‘Ego velim regiones dividi per linguas & has notari in cartis.’

¹⁸Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series IV, vol. 1, 408.

¹⁷G. W. Leibniz, ‘Modus instituendi militam novam invictam’, Winter, 1671–72, in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series IV, vol. 1, 408–10.

¹⁹Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series IV, vol. 1, 409.

²⁰Fenves, ‘Imagining an Inundation of Australians’, 79.

²¹Fenves, ‘Imagining an Inundation of Australians’, 79.

²²Thus Leibniz writes to Arnauld on 30 April, 1687: ‘It seems too that what constitutes the essence of an entity through aggregation is only a state of being of its constituent entities; for example, what constitutes the essence of an army is only a state of being of the constituent men. This state of being therefore presupposes a substance, whose essence is not a state of another substance’ (Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 2, 96–7).

²³Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series IV, vol. 1, 408.

²⁴Lazaro Soranzo, L'Ottomanno (Ferrara, 1599). See G. W. Leibniz, ‘Directions Pertaining to the Institution of Medicine’, in Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, edited by Justin E. H. Smith, Appendix 1.

²⁶‘A Relation of the Pico Teneriffe. Receiv'd from some considerable Merchants and Men worthy of Credit, who went to the top of it’, in The History of the Royal Society, edited by Thomas Sprat (London, 1667), 200–213, 212.

²⁵The connection between Leibniz's 1671 Justin E. H. Smith, ‘Method’ and the travel relation from Tenerife is investigated in detail in Justin E. H. Smith, ‘Leibniz on Natural History and National History’, History of Science, 1 (2012), 377–401. Some of the same passages that are discussed there are treated here as well, though in the course of making a very different argument.

²⁷‘A Relation of the Pico Teneriffe’, 206.

²⁸‘A Relation of the Pico Teneriffe’, 206.

²⁹See David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (Yale University Press, 2008).

³⁰See G. W. Leibniz, Protogaea, edited and translated by Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

³¹On Leibniz as a historian, see, for example, Louis Davillé, Leibniz historien: Essai sur l'activité et la méthode historiques de Leibniz (Paris, 1909); Werner Conze, Leibniz als Historiker (Berlin, 1951); Lewis W. Spitz, ‘The Significance of Leibniz for Historiography’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1952), 333–48; Günter Scheel, ‘Leibniz als Historiker des Welfenhauses’, in Leibniz: Sein Leben – Sein Wirken – Seine Welt, edited by Wilhelm Totok and Carl Haase (Hanover, 1967), 227–76; Scheel, ‘Leibniz und die geschichtliche Landeskunde Niedersachsens’, Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte, xxxviii (1966), 61–85; Günter Scheel, ‘Leibniz und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft um 1700’, in Historische Forschung im 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Karl Hammer and Jürgen Voss (Bonn, 1976), 82–101; Alfred Schröcker, ‘Die deutsche Genealogie im 17. Jahrhundert zwischen Herrscherlob und Wissenschaft: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von G. W. Leibniz’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, lix (1977), 426–44.

³²See G. E. Stahl, Negotium otiosum: Seu Skiamachia adversus positiones aliquas fundamentals, Theoriae varae medicae (Halle, 1720), 4.

³³Immanuel Kant, Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen, in Werke, Bd. 9 (Darmstadt, 1964 [1775]); cited in Ernst Cassirer, Die philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Bd. II: Das mythische Denken (Berlin, 1925), 180.

³⁴Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 2009 [1936]), chs. 5–6.

³⁵For an extensive analysis of Leibniz's model of organic body, and how this is distinguished from corporeal substance, see Smith, Divine Machines, ch. 3.

³⁶Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, 288.

³⁷Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, 288.

³⁸A dense set is not strictly speaking a continuum, and if Leibniz conceived of the principle of plenitude of kinds in nature as a continuum, then it is clear that he did so in a fairly loose sense, dispensing with the narrower sense of ‘continuum’ he deploys in mathematics, according to which there simply are no pre-given elements members in the continuum that could separate one member from another.

³⁹Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, 296.

⁴⁰The animal is a perpetual machine to the extent that it requires, for the duration of its life, no outside machinist to see to its operation. It is only quasi-perpetual, however, to the extent that it does require outside fuel, in the form of nutriment it seeks out itself, something a perpetuum mobile in the strict sense would not need.

⁴¹See in particular the ‘Corpus hominis et uniuscujusque animalis est machina quaedam’, Leibniz-Handschriften III, 1, 2, 1–2; in English translation in Justin E. H. Smith, Divine Machines, appendix 3.

⁴²G. W. Leibniz, Gothofredi Guilelmi Leibnitii Opera Omnia, edited by Louis Dutens (Geneva, De Tournes, 1768), vol. II, 2, 171.

⁴³Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, 293.

⁴⁴Leibniz's ‘glottoprospecting’ efforts, particularly in his correspondences with Peter the Great's advisors and others with special knowledge of the ethnography of the Russian empire, is treated in detail in Justin E. H. Smith, ‘Leibniz on Natural History and National History’. Portions of the present section overlap with that article, though the argumentative aim there was fully separate from the one here.

⁴⁵Leibniz, Sbornik pisem i memorialov Leïbnitsa otnosyashchikhsya k Rossii i Petru Velikomu, edited by V. I. Ger'e (St. Petersburg, 1873), 88.

⁴⁶Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, 317.

⁴⁷Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, 317.

⁴⁸Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, vol. 5, 318.