Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are attempting
something a little ambitious, maybe even a little
reckless. I think reckless is the right word.
Usually we tackle a subject, we can kind of map
out the boundaries. Yeah. With this one, the
map just keeps unfolding. There's no edge. We
are talking about... Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
And I want to set the stakes right at the top.
If you've ever used a computer, you are in a
very real way running Leibniz's logic. If you've
ever taken a calculus class, you were speaking
his language. And if you've ever found yourself
late at night wondering why a good, all -powerful
God would allow bad things to happen, you are
wrestling with a problem that Leibniz dedicated
years of his life to solving. He's been called
the last universal genius. And you hear a title
like that and you think, OK, it's a bit of hyperbole,
right? It's a nice poetic label. Yeah. Sounds
good on a book cover. Exactly. But then you actually
get into the sources. You look at the sheer volume
of his work. And it's not just in one field.
That's the key. We have his biographies detailing
his life in what was then the Holy Roman Empire,
Saxony, Hanover. And it's not like he just wrote
a few big definitive books. A lot of his genius
is scattered. It's completely fragmented. We're
working from something like 15 ,000 letters.
15 ,000. And who is he writing to? Everyone.
Literally everyone. He's writing to queens, to
dukes, to philosophers like Spinoza, to Jesuit
missionaries deep in China. And in these letters,
he's dropping bombshell ideas about physics,
about logic, about theology. So it's a treasure
hunt. It's a massive treasure hunt. Alongside
his formal philosophical works, like the Theodicy
or the Monadology, you have these thousands of
scraps of paper. Mathematical notes, diplomatic
memos. It's terrifying, really, the scope of
it. Terrifying how? Because we live in an age
of specialization. You're a physicist or you're
a historian or you're a coder. You can't be all
three. The body of knowledge is just too vast.
Right. But Leibniz lived just before that explosion.
He was a master of mathematics, philosophy, law,
history, engineering, geology, library, science.
And he was doing it all at a world -class level,
all at the same time. And that's our mission
for this deep dive. How did one human brain manage
all of that? How did he anticipate computers
three centuries early, invent calculus, try to
scheme his way to European peace and explain
the very fabric of the universe, while also holding
down a day job as a librarian and a courtier?
And maybe the biggest question, why does a man
who contributed so much die almost completely
alone, unmourned? and buried in an unmarked grave
it's a paradox so let's start at the beginning
we have to understand the world that made him
before we can understand the worlds he made section
one The child prodigy and the chip on his shoulder.
Okay, so you have to picture the time and place.
He's born in Leipzig in 1646. And this is not
a good time to be born in the German -speaking
lands. It's maybe the worst possible time. The
Thirty Years' War is just sputtering to an end.
This was a conflict that, it wasn't just a war,
it was a cataclysm. It completely devastated
Central Europe. We're talking about massive population
loss, right? Colossal. In some German states...
the population dropped by over 50%. The economy
was in ruins. Entire cities were burned to the
ground. There was famine, plague. It was a landscape
of trauma. And Leibniz is born right into the
rubble of that world. So his world is one of
chaos, but his family life is academic. His father
was a professor of moral philosophy at the University
of Leipzig. He was. So there's this intellectual
foundation there. But then tragedy strikes. His
father dies when Leibniz is only six years old.
Which is a huge blow for any child. A huge blow.
But it leads directly to the defining event of
his entire life. Because with his father gone,
Leibniz inherits access to his private library.
And a library in the 17th century wasn't like
a public library today. This was a treasure chest.
It was everything. And the formal schooling at
the time was incredibly rigid. It was what they
called a small canon. You learned some Latin
grammar, read a few approved classical authors,
and that was it. It was very narrow, very controlled.
But the library, the library was uncontrolled.
It was the wild west of ideas. Precisely. After
some initial hesitation, his family just Let
him loose in there. And you have to picture this.
A seven, eight -year -old boy surrounded by these
massive leather -bound tomes. He's pulling down
advanced Latin philosophy, Greek histories, books
on theology that university students would struggle
with. And he's teaching himself. He's teaching
himself Latin. This is incredible. By looking
at the woodcut illustrations in a history book
by the Roman author Livy and matching the pictures
to the captions. He's reverse engineering the
language from context. That's not normal. It's
profoundly not normal. By the time he's 12 years
old, he's not just proficient in Latin. He's
composing poetry in it. There's that story about
the school event, isn't there? The famous one.
He's 13. A student was supposed to deliver a
poem in Latin for some school festival and couldn't
do it. Leibniz's teacher asks if he can maybe
whip something up. Leibniz goes away and in a
single morning composes 300 hexameters of flawless
classical Latin verse. Okay, that's just showing
off. Oh, absolutely. There's a confidence there,
an intellectual swagger that never leaves him.
He knows he's the smartest guy in any room he
walks into. And this just accelerates, right?
He goes to university at an absurdly young age.
He enrolls at his father's university, the University
of Leipzig, when he's just 14 years old. 14.
I think I was trying to figure out how to ride
a bike without training wheels at 14. And he's
not just there to take up space. He burns through
the curriculum. He gets his bachelor's in philosophy
by 1662, his master's a year later, and then
finishes his law degree by 1665. He's not even
20 years old yet. So he's on the fast track.
Everything's going perfectly. But then he hits
a wall. The first major rejection of his life,
and I think it shapes him profoundly. In 1666,
he's 19, maybe 20, and he applies for his doctorate
in law. He's written his dissertation. He's ready.
And the faculty at Leipzig turn him down. Why?
Was the work not good enough? The work was brilliant.
The official reason they gave was his relative
youth. So you're too young. Which was basically
academic code for, we don't like you, kid. It
was pure professional jealousy. The dean's wife
was apparently feuding with Leibniz's family,
and the older professors just couldn't stomach
the idea of this teenager becoming their equal.
It was petty university politics. And for a mind
like Leibniz, who operates on pure logic and
merit, that must have been infuriating. Infuriating
is an understatement. And this is where you see
that chip on his shoulder form. He could have
waited. He could have hung around for another
year. But he didn't. He was so disgusted that
he packed his bags and left Leipzig, his hometown,
forever. He never went back. He holds a grudge.
A serious grudge. And he immediately proves them
wrong. He takes his thesis down the road to the
University of Altdorf, submits it, and they're
so blown away they award him his doctorate in
a matter of months. Vindication. Total vindication.
Right. And here's the fork in the road. The University
of Altdorf immediately offers him a job, a professorship.
Stay here, they say. You're brilliant. Join the
faculty. Have a safe, stable academic career.
The ivory tower. The dream for most scholars.
And Leibniz says no. He turns them down flat.
He later wrote that his thoughts were turned
in an entirely different direction. This rejection
from Leipzig soured him on pure academia. He
decided he didn't just want to study the world
from a distance. He wanted to be in it. He wanted
to shape events. He wanted power. Or at least...
You wanted to be a man of affairs, which leads
to this absolutely hilarious first attempt to
get a job. The alchemist hustle. I love this
story. So he needs a job. He's got his new doctorate
and he ends up in Nuremberg. Right. And he finds
out there's a secretive society of alchemists
operating there. You know. Wealthy patrons trying
to discover the philosopher's stone, turn lead
into gold, all that stuff. A combination of mystical
belief and early chemistry. Exactly. And they
needed a secretary, a paid position to manage
their affairs and research. Now, does Leibniz
know anything about alchemy? I'm guessing zero.
Less than zero. He thinks it's complete nonsense.
But thanks to his father's library, he's read
all the old alchemical texts. He knows the jargon.
He knows the buzzwords. So he can talk the talk.
impressive sounding, completely meaningless cover
letter in history. It's just a word salad of
the most obscure, convoluted, alchemical terms
he can find. He's basically bluffing his way
in. It's the ultimate fake it till you make it.
He presents himself as this deeply learned master
of the secret arts. And the alchemists, who are
probably just as confused as anyone, they read
this letter and they're floored. They think,
my God, this man must be a genius. We don't understand
a word of it. So they hire? They hire him on
the spot. And it's just this perfect little story
that shows his incredible confidence and his
ability to master the language of any system,
whether it's real or not. And that confidence
lands him his first real serious job in the service
of the elector of Mainz. And this is where he
goes from being a brilliant academic to a player
on the world stage. Section two, the diplomat
and the Egyptian plan. Right. So he's now working
for a major political figure. And you have to
remember the geopolitical context. The Holy Roman
Empire, these German states, are weak and fragmented
after the war. And their neighbor is not weak.
Their neighbor is the global superpower. France,
under King Louis XIV, the Sun King. Louis has
the biggest, best -funded army in Europe, and
he has ambitions. He's looking east at the German
lands and the wealthy Dutch Republic, and he's
thinking of expansion. So everyone in Germany
is terrified of a French invasion. They are.
And Leibniz, who is still in his 20s, mind you,
decides he's going to solve this problem. He
comes up with one of the most audacious foreign
policy proposals in history. He's not going to
suggest a treaty, is he? That's too simple for
him. No, no. He proposes a grand distraction,
a geopolitical bank shot. He writes a detailed
memorandum that becomes known as the Egyptian
Plan. He wants to get France interested in Egypt.
Why Egypt? Because he frames it as the key to
world power. He essentially writes to the French
court and says, look, your majesty, why are you
getting bogged down fighting these pointless
wars in the muddy fields of Holland? It's expensive.
It's a slog. The real prize isn't in Europe.
It's in the East. The trade with the Indies.
Exactly. The Dutch control the incredibly lucrative
spice trade, and that's the source of their wealth.
Leibniz argues that if France were to conquer
Egypt, they could build a canal at Suez. proposed
a Suez Canal in the 1670s? He did. He said, if
you do that, you cut out the long, dangerous
trip around Africa, you bankrupt the Dutch, you
control the flow of wealth from Asia to Europe,
and you become the undisputed master of the world.
And as a bonus, it's a holy war against the Ottoman
Empire, so the Pope will love it. It's a brilliant
pitch, but of course he doesn't actually care
about any of that. Not in the slightest. The
real goal is to get the giant French army out
of his backyard. If they're off fighting in the
deserts of North Africa, they can't be burning
German cities. It's a strategy of containment
dressed up as a glorious crusade. It's incredibly
clever, so what happens? The Elector of Mainz
thinks it's brilliant and sends Leibniz himself
to Paris in 1672 to try and pitch the plan to
the French king. Does he get a meeting with Louis
IV VIII? He doesn't get that far. The plan gets
kicked around the French foreign ministry, but
before it can gain any real traction, the political
situation changes. Louis decides to invade the
Netherlands anyway. The Franco -Dutch war breaks
out, and the Egyptian plan is shelved. So it
was a failure. As a diplomatic mission, yes,
it failed. But there is this incredible, almost
absurd historical footnote. Oh, I know this one.
Napoleon. Napoleon. Over a century later, in
1798, Napoleon Bonaparte launches his invasion
of Egypt. And when historians were going through
the archives, they discovered that Napoleon's
foreign minister had found and read a summary
of Lagnis' old plan. So Napoleon actually implemented
Leibniz's grand strategy. He did, unwittingly.
Leibniz's idea was sound. He was just 100 years
too early. It's a recurring theme in his life.
He's operating on a timeline that nobody else
is on. But the trip to Paris wasn't a waste,
was it? In fact, it might be the most important
failure of his career. Absolutely. Because while
the political mission failed, the intellectual
mission was a staggering success. And Leibniz
was about to get a serious upgrade. Which brings
us to Section 3. Paris, physics, and the invention
of calculus. So Leibniz is in Paris, and he manages
to get an introduction to the most celebrated
scientist in the city, the Dutch physicist Christian
Huygens. And Huygens is a giant. He's famous
for his work on optics. He invented the pendulum
clock. He discovered Saturn's rings and its moon,
Titan. He's the real deal. He is. And Leibniz,
feeling very pleased with himself, goes to meet
him. They start talking, and Huygens very quickly
realizes that while this... young German diplomat
is clearly a genius, his mathematics is. Well,
it's a bit old -fashioned. He's not up to date
on the latest research. Exactly. He hasn't studied
the work of Descartes or Pascal on geometry and
probability in any real depth. So Huygens, sort
of as a test, gives him a problem to solve. It's
a challenge involving the summation of an infinite
series. And Leibniz can't do it. He can't. He's
humbled. But this is the thing about Leibniz.
A failure or a challenge doesn't make him quit.
It makes him obsess. He realizes there's a huge
gap in his knowledge, and he launches himself
into what he called a program of self -study.
He basically gives himself a PhD in advanced
mathematics in a few months. In his spare time,
while he's still supposed to be doing diplomacy,
he devours all the latest mathematical texts.
And as he's doing this, he starts to see a problem
that's looking at the very edge of what's known.
A problem that everyone is struggling with. The
problem of change. The problem of continuous
change. Let's break this down because the word
calculus makes everyone's eyes glaze over. Yeah,
I'm having flashbacks to high school. Okay, so
think about it this way. For thousands of years,
math was great at dealing with static things.
Things that stayed still. You could calculate
the area of a square, the volume of a cube. Easy.
Length times width. Simple. But what about things
that are in motion? What is the exact speed of
a cannonball at one specific instant in its flight?
Its speed is constantly changing because of gravity
and air resistance. Right, it's not a single
number. And what about the area of an irregular
shape, like the area under a parabolic curve
on a graph? You can't just use length times width
because the height is constantly changing. These
were the two great unsolved problems of 17th
century math. Finding the instantaneous rate
of change, the slope of a curve at a single point,
and finding the area... Under a curve? And everyone
knew they were important problems, but they were
treating them as separate. Leibniz, in a flash
of insight, realized they were connected. And
we actually have the date in his notebooks. On
November 11, 1675, he has his breakthrough. He
figures it out. He realizes that these two operations,
finding the slope, which he called differentiation,
and finding the area, which he called integration,
are inverses of each other. They undo one another.
It's like multiplication and division. The fundamental
theorem of calculus. That's it. It's the key
that unlocks the entire system. But here's where
Leibniz's genius goes in a different direction.
From his great rival, Isaac Newton, who was working
on the same problem over in England. The Great
Showdown. Newton thought about the problem like
a physicist. He thought in terms of motion, what
he called fluxions and fluence, the rates of
flow. It was powerful. But his notation, the
way he wrote it down, was messy and confusing.
And Leibniz was a philosopher and a logician.
He was obsessed with creating a perfect language.
He wanted to create symbols that would make the
thinking process almost automatic. So he developed
a notation that was incredibly elegant and intuitive.
This is where we get the symbols we use today.
The very same. For integration, finding the area,
he used an elongated letter S -A -F -S for summa,
the Latin word for sum, because you're summing
up an infinite number of tiny rectangles under
the curve. Okay, that makes sense. And for differentiation,
finding the slope, he used the letter DS, as
in DX for differentia, the Latin word for difference.
It was a perfect symbolic language. It was a
better user interface. Newton built the engine,
but Leibniz designed the dashboard and the steering
wheel. That is a perfect analogy. And because
Leibniz's system was so much easier to use, it's
the one that eventually took over the world.
But he published it first in 1684. And Newton,
who had developed his own version years earlier
but had kept it secret, was not happy. And this
kicks off the dark cloud you mentioned, the priority
dispute. The nastiest, most vicious intellectual
property dispute in the history of science. It
gets ugly fast. So Newton's allies start accusing
Leibniz of plagiarism. Yes. A man named John
Keel, a follower of Newton, publishes an article
in 1708 flat out accusing Leibniz of stealing
the idea. Is there any basis for this? The only
thin reed they had to hang on to was that Leibniz
had visited London briefly in 1676 and had seen
some of Newton's unpublished manuscripts. But
modern historians who have studied the notebooks
of both men are almost unanimous. They were independent
discoveries. Their methods, their thinking, their
notation, they're completely different. But Newton
wasn't interested in the truth. He wanted credit.
And he was in a position of power. Immense power.
By this time, he's Sir Isaac Newton. the revered
national hero. And he's the president of the
Royal Society, the most prestigious scientific
body in the world. He decides the society will
form a committee to impartially investigate the
charge of plagiarism. Let me guess, the committee
was not impartial. The committee was stacked
with Newton's staunchest allies. And the kicker
is, we now know from historical analysis that
Newton himself secretly wrote the committee's
final report. He was the judge in his own case.
He was the judge, jury, and executioner. The
report, the Commercium Apostolicum, came out
and officially declared Leibniz a thief and a
fraud. It was a character assassination on an
international scale. That is just... unbelievably
petty from a mind like Newton's. Newton was a
brilliant, but also a deeply insecure and vindictive
man. And this feud completely poisoned the rest
of Leibniz's life. It tarnished his reputation,
especially in the English -speaking world. And
it had real consequences for science, didn't
it? It did. It created a huge rift between British
mathematicians and mathematicians on the continent.
For nearly a century, British mathematicians,
out of pure nationalistic loyalty, stuck with
Newton's clunky inferior notation while the rest
of Europe forged ahead using Leibniz's elegant
system. They basically cut themselves off from
major mathematical progress. So Leibniz won the
war in the long run, but he paid a heavy personal
price. A very heavy price. But even while this
intellectual war is raging, his mind is already
leaping ahead to the next century, to something
else entirely. Section four, the ancestor of
the computer. This is the part that just genuinely
blows my mind, because we are still in the late
1600s, and this man is thinking about binary
code. It's astonishing. He became fascinated
with the binary numeral system, base 2. The idea
that you could represent any number at all using
only two symbols, 1 and 0. Which is the fundamental
language of all digital computing today. Every
single thing your phone or computer does is,
at its core, a manipulation of ones and zeros.
Leibniz saw a deep, almost mystical elegance
in this. And he found inspiration for this in
a very unexpected place. Not from European mathematics.
He found it through his correspondence with Jesuit
missionaries in China. They sent him material
about the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of
changes. Which is a divination text, right? It
uses these hexagrams made of solid and broken
lines. Exactly. And for centuries, people in
the West who looked at it just saw mysticism.
Leibniz looked at the 64 hexagrams, and he saw
mathematics. He realized that if you treat a
solid line as a 1 and a broken line as a 0, the
hexagrams are a perfect representation of the
binary numbers from 0 to 63. He saw a binary
counting system hidden in an ancient Chinese
philosophical text. Yes. He was convinced that
the ancient Chinese sages had understood binary.
And being Leibniz, he immediately gave it a profound
theological meaning. Of course he did. For him,
it was a perfect image of creation. The number
one represented God, the ultimate unity being.
The number zero represented the void, nothingness.
So God creating the universe out of nothing is
symbolically represented by the way all numbers
can be generated from just one and O. Ex nihilo.
That's exactly how he saw it. It was a mathematical
proof of a theological principle. But he didn't
just stop at the philosophy. This is the key
with Leibniz. He always wanted to build something.
He was a theorist and a tinkerer. He wanted to
make a machine. He envisioned a machine that
could calculate using binary. In a manuscript
from 1679, he sketched out an idea for a mechanical
binary calculator that would use marbles. Marbles.
Yeah, a system of gates and channels. A marble
would fall, and a gate could be open or closed.
If it falls through, that's a one. If it's blocked,
that's a zero. He even described using a moving
platform with holes in it. To control the gates.
Wait, holes? Like a punch card? It's the essential
logic of a punch card system. He's describing
the basic mechanics of digital hardware 250 years
before it became a reality. Why didn't he build
it? The materials and manufacturing technology
of the 17th century just weren't precise enough.
It would have jammed constantly. He did, however,
build a more conventional calculator that worked
in base 10. The stepped reckoner. The stepped
reckoner. It was a brass and steel marvel. It
was the first mechanical calculator in history
that could perform all four basic arithmetic
functions. Addition, subtraction, multiplication,
and division. It was a masterpiece of engineering.
But even that was just a small part of a much
bigger dream he had. The Ars Combinatoria, the
great art. Yes. This might be his most ambitious
idea of all. He called it the Characteristica
Universalis. The universal characteristic. This
is the idea that you could create a kind of alphabet
of human thought. Precisely. He believed that
all complex human ideas were built up from a
small number of simple primitive concepts. Like
all words are built from 26 letters, or all numbers
are built from primes. So you could assign a
symbol to animal, a symbol to rational, and if
you combine them, you get the symbol for human.
Exactly. And if you could create this perfect
logical language, it would revolutionize everything.
He argued that human disputes in law, in politics,
in philosophy were mostly caused by the ambiguity
of our language and errors in our reasoning.
So if you could translate a political argument
into this symbolic language. You could solve
it like a math problem. This led to his famous
quote. He said if two philosophers were to disagree,
they could simply say, Calculamus, let us calculate.
They would just sit down, do the math, and one
would be able to point out the other's logical
error. You see here, in step three, you made
an invalid deduction. and the argument would
be over. Truth would be a matter of calculation.
That is profoundly optimistic. It's hyper rational.
Because it completely ignores human emotion,
ideology, values, greed, all the things that
actually drive conflict. You can't calculate
your way out of a deeply held belief, even if
it's illogical. You can't. And that's the major
criticism of this part of his philosophy. He
had this unwavering faith in the power of reason
to solve all problems. And that same rational
optimism is at the heart of his most famous and
most controversial. philosophical doctrine. Which
brings us to section five, the philosopher of
optimism. Yeah. The best of all possible worlds.
The phrase that has been attached to him and
often used to mock him for centuries. Right.
It comes from his major work on the subject,
the theodicy. Theodicy. Which is a term he coined,
right? That means literally the justice of God.
Correct. And he's tackling the oldest, hardest
problem in theology, the problem of evil. Which
is, simply put, if God is all powerful, all knowing,
and all good, why does evil exist? Why do children
suffer? Why are there natural disasters? It's
a logical contradiction. If he's all good, he
would want to prevent evil. If he's all powerful,
he would be able to prevent evil. Yet evil exists.
So either God isn't all good, or he isn't all
powerful, or he doesn't exist. And Leibniz says,
no, there's a fourth option. Says the premise
is wrong. Yeah. His solution is, in a way, an
engineering solution. He argues that before creating
the universe, the mind of God contained an infinite
number of possible worlds. Every conceivable
way the universe could have been set up. Yes.
A world without gravity. A world where humans
have wings. A world with no free will. An infinite
menu of options. But God, being supremely rational,
is bound by the laws of logic. He can't create
a contradiction, like a four -sided triangle.
So God... in his infinite wisdom, surveyed all
of these possible worlds and chose to create
the one that was the best. But best doesn't mean
perfect in the sense of having no suffering or
evil. So what does it mean? It means the world
that contains the optimal balance of simplicity
in its laws and richness in its phenomena. It's
the world with the most reality, the most variety,
the most complexity that can exist under the
simplest and most elegant set of physical laws.
So suffering and evil are somehow a necessary
part of this optimal balance. In his view, yes.
He breaks evil down into three types. First,
there's metaphysical evil, which is just the
unavoidable imperfection of all created things.
Only God can be perfect. Everything else, by
definition, falls short. Okay, that's just a
given. Then there's physical evil, pain, suffering,
natural disasters, and moral evil, sin, cruelty.
Leibniz argues that these are the necessary consequences
of a greater good. For example, for humans to
have free will, they must have the ability to
choose evil. A world of robots who are programmed
to always do good might have no sin, but it would
also have no genuine love or courage or virtue.
So this is the best possible world, not because
it's pleasant, but because it's the most meaningful
or the most complex. It has the richest possibilities,
as he put it. The different elements are compatible
in the most fruitful way. But you can see how
this could come across as very cold and abstract
to someone who's actually suffering. And that's
exactly what his critics seized on, most famously
Voltaire. Voltaire absolutely savaged him for
this. The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 happens,
kills tens of thousands of people. And Voltaire
is horrified by philosophers who are trying to
explain it away. So he writes his satirical novel
Candide. Featuring Dr. Pangloss. Whose name literally
means all tongue. He's this ridiculous caricature
of Leibniz who wanders through a world of unending
horror war, disease. torture, constantly repeating
the mantra, all is for the best in this, the
best of all possible worlds. And it makes the
philosophy look absurd. It does. It was a brilliant
piece of mockery. Now, to be fair to Leibniz,
he was never saying, don't worry, be happy. He
was making a metaphysical argument that the universe
is fundamentally rational and ordered, not chaotic
and meaningless. But it's an argument that's
very hard to hear when you're in pain. And this
faith in a deeply ordered, rational universe.
It leads him to his wildest, most abstract creation.
Section 6. Monads, space, and time. Okay, buckle
up. This is where we go into the deep end of
the metaphysical pool. The monadology. I have
tried to wrap my head around this, and it is
difficult. He claims the universe is ultimately
composed of these things called monads. Are they
like atoms? That's the first thing everyone thinks,
but no. They are fundamentally different. An
atom, for a physicist, is a physical object.
It has a size, a shape. It occupies a piece of
space. Leibniz approaches this with pure logic.
He says anything that is extended in space, no
matter how small, can be divided. You can cut
it in half. If you can cut it in half, it's made
of parts. And if it's made of parts, it can't
be the ultimate simple substance. So you have
to get to something that has no parts, something
indivisible. Exactly. But a physical point with
no size is nothing. So he concludes that the
fundamental building blocks of reality can't
be physical at all. They must be non -physical.
It must be something more like souls. The entire
universe is made of an infinite number of tiny
souls. That's essentially it. He calls them monads.
They are simple, indivisible, eternal centers
of force or perception. Everything, you, me,
this table, a rock, a star, is a colony or an
aggregate of these monads. Okay. That's already
pretty strange, but then it gets stranger. Then
it gets much stranger. He says that each monad
is completely unique. Each one perceives the
entire universe, but from its own unique perspective.
And this is the famous part. Monads have no windows.
What on earth does that mean? It means they cannot
actually interact with each other. Nothing can
pass from one monad to another. They can't cause
anything to happen in another monad. Wait, wait,
stop. That makes no sense. If I push this table,
my hand, which is made of monads, interacts with
the table, which is made of monads, and the table
moves, that's cause and effect. Leibniz says
that is an illusion, a very compelling illusion,
but an illusion nonetheless. So how does he explain
it? He explains it with his doctrine of pre -established
harmony. This is his solution to the intractable
mind -body problem that plagued philosophers
like Descartes. The problem of how a non -physical
mind can move a physical body. Right. Leibniz
says they don't. He uses an analogy. Imagine
you have two perfect clocks built by a master
clockmaker. You set them to the exact same time
and hang them on the wall side by side. Okay.
The first clock strikes noon. At the exact same
instant, the second clock strikes noon. Does
the first clock cause the second clock to strike?
No, of course not. They're just perfectly synchronized.
Exactly. Leibniz says the entire universe is
like that. God, the master clockmaker, created
all the monads and, at the moment of creation,
programmed each one with a complete script of
its entire existence. So my mind monads were
pre -programmed to decide to push the table at
this exact moment. And the table monads were
pre -programmed to move away at that exact same
moment. Precisely. They are running in perfect
pre -established harmony without ever actually
influencing each other. It's a universe of infinite,
parallel, synchronized processes. That is one
of the most bizarre and elaborate philosophical
systems I've ever heard. It is. It's a consequence
of taking pure rationalism to its absolute limit.
But what's fascinating is that while he's developing
these very strange metaphysical ideas, he's also
having another major debate with Newton. A debate
about the nature of space and time. And on this
one, history has proven Leibniz right. This is
the argument about absolute versus relative space.
Yes. For Newton, space was like a giant invisible
empty box. An absolute container. He said if
you took everything out of the universe, all
the stars, planets, everything, the empty box
of space and the ticking clock of absolute time
would still exist. Unchanging. It's the stage
and the actors are optional. A perfect way to
put it. Leibniz thought this was philosophically
absurd. He argued that space and time are not
things in themselves. They're relational. What
does that mean, relational? He said that space
is simply the order of coexistences, is the set
of all the distance relationships between objects.
This thing is next to that thing and far from
that other thing. If there are no objects, there
are no relationships and therefore no space.
So no actors, no stage? Exactly. And time, he
said. is the order of successions. It's the relationship
between events. This happened before that, which
happened before that other thing. No events,
no time. And for 200 years, the scientific consensus
was that Newton was right. Overwhelmingly. Until
a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office named Albert
Einstein came along. With his theory of relativity.
Einstein's theory of general relativity describes
gravity as the warping of space -time by mass
and energy. Space -time is not a static background.
Its very shape is determined by the matter within
it. It's a fundamentally relational concept.
Einstein himself was a great admirer of Leibniz's
thought on this and explicitly sided with him
against Newton. So Leibniz had the correct physical
intuition two centuries before the mathematics
existed to prove it. Once again, correct, but
way ahead of his time. And it's important to
remember, he wasn't just a thinker. He was always
trying to apply these ideas. Section 7. The doer
engineering science and projects. Right. He's
not just locked in a room writing about monads.
He has a day job and he takes it seriously. Very
seriously. For a large part of his career, he
worked for the House of Brunswick in Hanover.
And one of their main sources of wealth was a
series of silver mines in the nearby Harz Mountains.
And these mines had a problem. A chronic, persistent
problem. They kept flooding. The deeper they
dug, the more groundwater would seep in, making
it impossible to work. So Leibniz puts on his
engineer's hat. He does. He dedicates almost
five years of his life, from about 1680 to 1685,
to solving this problem. He's not just drawing
up plans. He's down in the mines in the dark
in the mud, supervising. He designs an ambitious
new system to pump the water out using wind power.
Windmill. Not just any windmills. He designed
a new type of vertical -axis windmill and a series
of linked pumps and propellers to lift the water
out of the shafts. It was a very complex, very
innovative piece of engineering. And did it work?
In the end. No. It was a failure. Why? What went
wrong? A combination of things. The technology
was pushing the limits of the materials available.
But the biggest problem was human. The miners
and the mine administrators were deeply skeptical
of this court philosopher coming in and telling
them how to do their jobs. They actively resisted
him. And according to his letters, they may have
even sabotaged the equipment. A classic case
of innovation clashing with entrenched interests.
Yes. He finally had to abandon the project, much
to his frustration and the annoyance of his employers.
Yeah. But he just moved on to the next thing.
His mind never stopped. He was making contributions
in fields that didn't even really exist yet.
Like psychology. Absolutely. Yeah. He essentially
anticipates the concept of the subconscious mind.
He wrote about what he called Petite's perceptions
or small perceptions. He used a brilliant analogy.
Imagine you were standing by the ocean. You hear
the roar of the waves. That sound, he argued,
is composed of the sound of countless individual
water droplets crashing. You are not consciously
aware of the sound of any single droplet. Right.
It's below the threshold of my perception. But
your mind is still processing them. Those are
the petite's perceptions. And when enough of
them accumulate, they cross a threshold and enter
your conscious awareness as the roar of the sea.
That conscious awareness he called apperception.
So he's saying we're constantly being influenced
by stimuli that we aren't consciously aware of.
That's a foundational idea of modern psychology.
150 years before Freud, he was also a pioneering
geologist. In a work called Protogia, He proposed
that the earth was once a molten ball of fire.
Which was a pretty radical idea at the time.
Usually radical. The biblical account of creation
was still the dominant model. He also correctly
identified fossils as the remains of ancient
living creatures and argued that by studying
rock strata, you could read the history of the
earth. He was laying the groundwork for modern
geology. And all this while doing his actual
day job, which for many years was being a librarian.
And he revolutionized that too. As the librarian
for the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel, one of
the best in Europe, he wasn't just a caretaker.
He created one of the first alphabetical author
catalogs. He argued a library's purpose was to
be a tool for research, not a dusty museum for
the Duke to show off. He wanted to make the information
accessible. He even proposed that publishers
should be required to create abstract, short
summaries of all new books published each year.
He wanted to create a searchable database of
human knowledge. He's inventing Google Scholar
in the 1690s. It's the same impulse that drove
his characteristica universalis. The desire to
organize, to systematize, to make all knowledge
accessible and calculable. So when you stack
it all up, calculus, binary, physics, philosophy,
engineering, psychology, geology, library science,
this man's resume is just staggering. He should
have been the most celebrated intellectual in
Europe. You should have died rich and famous.
You should have. But that is not what happened.
And the story of his final years is deeply tragic.
Section 8. The Lonely End in Hanover. It all
comes down to a history project, doesn't it?
It does. His primary official duty for his employers,
the House of Brunswick, was to serve as their
historian. They commissioned him to write a grand
history of their family line, the House of Gulf.
Basically a vanity project to prove their ancient
and noble lineage. Exactly. Prove we're descended
from Charlemagne. For any normal court historian,
this would be a straightforward job of, you know,
some creative genealogy. But this was Leibniz.
He couldn't just do a simple job. He couldn't.
He decided he had to do it properly. He had to
write the definitive, most rigorously researched
history ever produced. He started his research
not with the recent Dukes, but in the early Middle
Ages. He traveled all over Europe to archives
in Austria and Italy. digging up ancient manuscripts.
He's treating it like a massive scientific undertaking.
He is. And the project just balloons. Decades
go by. And his employers, the electors of Hanover,
are getting more and more annoyed. They just
want the book. They keep writing him letters
asking about his dilatoriness. They think he's
slacking off. They don't appreciate that he's
also, you know, inventing modern science on the
side. They don't care about his mornads or his
calculating machines. They want their family
history. Yeah. And this all comes to a head in
1714. This is the big political moment. The biggest.
Through a series of dynastic and political events,
which Leibniz actually helped facilitate, his
boss, the elector George Louis of Hanover, is
named the heir to the British throne. Queen Anne
of Great Britain dies and he becomes King George
I. So the whole Hanoverian court is about to
pack up and move to London, the biggest, richest
city in the world. It's the ultimate promotion.
And Leibniz, who has served this family faithfully
for nearly 40 years, surely expects to go with
him. He expects a prestigious position at the
British court. But the new king has other ideas.
King George III forbids Leibniz from coming to
London. He just leaves him behind. Wow. Two main
reasons. The official reason was the unfinished
history book. The king basically tells him, you
are not to come to London until you have finished
your work. It was a punishment for his perceived
laziness. And the unofficial reason. The unofficial
reason. was Isaac Newton. By 1714, Sir Isaac
Newton is a god in London. He's the president
of the Royal Society, master of the mint, the
nation's greatest scientific icon. And he loathes
Leibniz. For King George, a brand new German
-speaking king who was already unpopular with
some of his new subjects, bringing his pet philosopher
Newton's mortal enemy to London would have been
a political disaster. So Leibniz was sacrificed
for political convenience. He was left behind
in the provincial backwater of Hanover while
the court he had served his whole life moved
on without him. It must have been utterly devastating.
And he dies there not long after. He dies two
years later in 1716 at the age of 70. And the
circumstances of his death are just so sad. He'd
been suffering from gout. He was increasingly
isolated. He went to funeral. The funeral was
a disgrace. He was so out of favor with the court
that no one attended. No official representatives.
The Royal Society in London, which he should
have been a member of, completely ignored his
passing. The Berlin Academy of Sciences, which
he himself had founded and served as president
for, didn't even mention it. So who was there?
Only his personal secretary. One man walked behind
the coffin. He was buried in an unmarked grave,
which remained that way for more than 50 years.
A man who'd given the world so much was treated
as if he was nothing. It's a tragic end. You
have to wonder, if he had just been a specialist,
if he had only done calculus or only done philosophy,
would he have been better understood and celebrated
in his own time? I think it's very likely. He
was a man of so many talents that he didn't fit
neatly into any box. People couldn't see the
whole picture. It took centuries for us to piece
together the true scale of his contributions.
So let's try to do that. As we wrap up here in
the outro, how do we synthesize this legacy?
What's the final score on Leibniz? The score
is that he's everywhere. His binary logic is
the foundation of the digital world. His calculus
is the language of science and engineering. His
physics, with the idea of the relativity of space
and time, was a crucial step on the road to Einstein.
He laid the conceptual groundwork for computer
science, for artificial intelligence, for modern
psychology, for geology. It's this incredible
breadth. He really was the last person who could,
with some justification, claim to have a grasp
of the totality of human knowledge before it
fractured into a million specialized fields.
He was the end of an era. But there is that dream
of his that still haunts us. The Calculimus.
Let us calculate. The dream of the rational world.
And that's the final thought I want to leave
you with. Leibniz genuinely believed that if
we could perfect our language and our logic,
we could resolve our deepest disputes as easily
as solving a math problem. We could literally
debug human society. A world without misunderstanding.
A world without a rational conflict. And today,
we have the tools he dreamed of. We have computers
that can calculate billions of times faster than
he could have imagined. We have access to more
information than ever before. And yet, we seem
to be more polarized, more divided, more trapped
in our conflicting narratives than ever. We have
the hardware, but we don't seem to have the right
software. So here's the question. Was Leibniz's
dream just a naive, rationalist fantasy? Or have
we just not figured out how to use his legacy
properly yet? Is the problem that a universal
language is impossible? Or is the problem, as
it always has been, simply us? That's a calculation
we're still trying to run. And a deep dive for
another day. Thank you for joining us for this
look into the mind of a true universal genius.
My pleasure. It was a fascinating journey. We'll
see you next time.