6

The Gnostic Leibniz

Or What Is It Like to Be an Atom?

Alfred North Whitehead maintained that all modern cosmologies are but detailed variations of the ontological schemes of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, Newton, and Leibniz. This “morphological” view of ontological models displays some similarities with the notion of ideal objects outlined in this book, but it is doubtful that Whitehead would have fully endorsed the implications of the ideal object. Yet he certainly was not averse to positing a delimited number of “variations on a theme” when examining key ideas in the history of Western thought. Whitehead maintains that all discussions of “atoms and the void,” receptacles and (Newtonian) sensoriums, “revolve around the diverse notions of Law, the diverse notions of the communication between real individuals, [and] the diverse notions of the mediating basis in virtue of which such communication is attained.”¹

The “notion of Law” in Whitehead’s examinations, I would say, bears a homologous relationship to that of the logos-code in the work of Fludd, Thom, and others: the idea that there is a “patterning” to the phenomenal world. Whitehead further suggests that another important question, derived from the above considerations, is the “status of the spirit of man in the scheme of things.”²

Both Robert Fludd and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, each in their own way, gave priority to this question. They proposed that the recognition of the operations of human perception and cognition were fundamental and preparatory to any description of the physical world. Both of these thinkers held that the subjective positioning of the “seeker of knowledge” led to certain inescapable conclusions regarding the relationship between the seeker and the phenomenal world.

The problem for Leibniz then was the problem of the “knower and the known.” For him it was acutely obvious that when we describe the characteristics of the world, we do so from the position of a cognizing subject. One may say that for Leibniz, as for scientists Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger several centuries later, the central epistemological problem was how to include the observing subject and its observations within the continuum of the phenomenal. It was in answer to this central problem that Leibniz proposed his philosophy of the monads, examined in terms of its fundamentally Hermetic figuration in this chapter.

Without an acknowledgment of the strong Magian aspects within the intellectual achievements of certain thinkers of the seventeenth century, scholars erroneously attribute to thinkers of the period a way of looking at ideas that is in fact a rather late twentieth-century manner of conceptualization. This is an outcome of the “rewriting” of intellectual history so that it may fit into the Anglo-American philosophical tradition (as discussed in chapter 3). Consequently Leibniz is most often portrayed as one of the earliest champions of the computational basis of mind. His famous remark that in the future two disputants will not sit down to argue a point but will rather say, “Let us calculate,” is routinely held up as evidence for his commitment to what we would now call the computational view of human cognition. Here we notice a spurious assumption that equates Leibniz’s conception of “computation” with modern versions of the computational theory of mind (such as that of Martin Davies and the mechanical thesis inherent within it). While there may be some limited truth to this assertion, it can only be sustained by the active suppression of the fact that Leibniz had a deep and enduring interest in esoteric traditions of thought. Without an acknowledgment of the influence of Hermetic thought and figuration on the development of Leibniz’s thinking we are at a loss to explain the peculiar tenor of his monadic philosophy. As already suggested in chapter 1 of this book, if we “factor in” the continuing influence of Hermeticism (through the continuing guidance of the fundamental figurations of its imaginary), then we are able to see that esoteric thinking has always been deeply intertwined with the modernist scientific project, taking the form of an inevitable “return of the repressed.”

One may say that the prefacing of the objective description of the physical world by a theory of the interpenetrative subjectivity of all beings and all matter was the ne plus ultra of Hermetic physics. It was also, one suggests, the very urgrund from which the investigations of both Leibniz and Fludd were generated. It was Descartes who, at the beginning of the modern scientific tradition, first divided the world into cognizing subjects and lifeless, mechanical objects, with both sides of this dyad beholden to, and providing the ideological support for, the Baconian command-obedience couplet. That which makes Leibniz’s work unique is, as Whitehead sees it, his exploration of one side of this Cartesian divide.

The notion that the cognizing self was fundamental to the explication of any ontology or epistemology, “the greatest philosophical discovery since the age of Plato and Aristotle”³ as Whitehead rather hyperbolically characterizes it, is the distinguishing mark of Leibniz’s philosophy. Whitehead proceeds to contrast Leibniz’s work with that of Newton and Lucretius, both of whom attempted to excise the thinking subject from an objective description of the world, thus “explicitly asking the question, What does the world of atoms look like to an intellect surveying it?”⁴ Leibniz was concerned, however, to answer a completely different question: “What is it like to be an atom?”

LEIBNIZ AND HIS TIMES

Leibniz was born in the final years of the Thirty Years’ War. He grew up in a Europe still suffering from the fragmentation, divisiveness, and enmity of political intrigues and the machinations of leaders who must have seemed little more than warmongers. One historian estimates that the population in the countryside of Germany alone fell 40 percent from what it was before the war, and up to 33 percent in the cities. It is in this era, in this political landscape, that we can discern the formative background to Leibniz’s work.

As Stephen Toulmin has pointed out, standard interpretations of the rise of seventeenth-century science have almost exclusively represented the era in which it arose as being one of increasing prosperity in which improvements in social, economic, and political institutions allowed greater “thinking time” within which the great innovators of science could flourish. A more careful scrutiny of the social and political conditions of the seventeenth century provides a quite different picture, such that the first fifty years of the century, rather than being years of increasing comfort and stability, are now recognized as some of the “most uncomfortable, even frantic, years in all European history.”⁵ Consequently, rather than the fruits of increasing leisure, modern science and philosophy should be seen as “responses to contemporary crisis.”⁶ Toulmin sums up the situation succinctly.

In early seventeenth-century Europe, life was so far from being comfortable that, over much of the continent from 1615 to 1650, people had a fair chance of having their throats cut and their houses burned down by strangers who merely disliked their religion. Far from this being a time of prosperity and reasonableness, it now looks like a scene from Lebanon in the 1980s, Bosnia in the 1990s or Syria in the twenty-first century. As many historians put it, from 1620 on the state of Europe was one of general crisis.⁷

And it is against this backdrop of general crisis that we should examine Leibniz’s response, for it is as a response to a generalized catastrophe that we should regard the development of his monadological metaphysics.

This generalized catastrophe could not have been more acute. In Leibniz’s Europe outbreaks of the plague were common. The population of France was decimated in 1630–32 and again in 1647–49; England’s Great Plague of 1665 was but the last in a series of continuing outbreaks. In the first half of the century food production was severely affected by continual bad harvests, and as the greater part of the European population (80 to 90 percent) relied on agricultural production, there was widespread misery and starvation. International trade all but disappeared—Spain lost its imperial command of the South Atlantic and the steady inflow of capital in the form of silver disappeared. Unemployment was rife in the cities, owing to the great influx of starving peasantry whose farms were being decimated. All this produced a willing army of mercenaries for the Thirty Years’ War. It is not surprising then that in the 1640s expectations grew as to the immanent end of the world, the Apocalypse being predicted to occur in the year 1657.

Historian Eugenio Battisti has called the late sixteenth-century Council of Trent an antirinascimento,⁸ a “counter-Renaissance,” in similar terms to the iconoclasm of the Reformation/Counter-Reformation as described in chapter 3. It was this particular expression of the counter-Renaissance that was one of the factors that directly culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, the other, in Toulmin’s analysis, being the assassination of Henry of Navarre in 1610. The perceived failure of Henry’s attempt at bringing together Catholics and Protestant Huguenots, signaled by the ineffectuality of the Edict of Nantes (1598), and of course, Henry’s eventual murder by a supporter of the Catholic League, would intensify into outright war in 1618, mirroring on an impossibly grand scale the bloody massacre of Saint Bartholomew that had attended Henry’s wedding to Marguerite de Valois thirty-eight years earlier.

In 1664, when Leibniz was eighteen years old and the secession of hostilities of the Thirty Years’ War sixteen years in the past, he dreamed of one day creating a universal language of thought.⁹ This language would be “very difficult to construct but very easy to learn,” and more importantly, “It will be quickly accepted by everybody on account of its great utility and its surprising facility, and it will serve wonderfully in communication among various peoples, which will help get it accepted.”¹⁰

It is not too difficult to see why the young Leibniz would feel such a pressing need for an international language of communication. All around him was palpable evidence of the effects of noncommunication or communication gone awry: the material effects of war, the fragmentation of society, and the bitter rhetorical battles still being waged by the church. Even thirteen years later, in his “Preface to the General Science,” Leibniz would defend his idea of a “language of thought” in terms of a sure method that would withstand future assaults of barbarous unreason. “For a school which followed such a method in philosophy would naturally attract from among its tyros the same leadership in the kingdom of reason as geometry has, and would not totter or collapse if as a result of invasion, in a new barbaric era, the sciences themselves went under with mankind.”¹¹

Only a year previous Leibniz had entered the employ of the Duke of Brunswick in Hanover as the duke’s librarian. This post would provide him with stability and comfort from this time until his death in 1716, yet despite his newfound security we can clearly discern his apprehension at the thought of some impending invasion of barbarism, of a return to the apocalyptic unreason surrounding his childhood.

Leibniz’s response to his times, to his fear of an impending rule of unreason, was unique. He proposed a metaphysical system that explained all phenomena in terms of spiritual fragments. As an anal-ogy we might recall the aesthetic response of the Dada artists to the Great War early in the last century. We see a fascination with the fragment, the broken message, the torn and rearranged surface. Each of these modes became techniques in their production of poetry, images, and performance. In a similar manner we can observe in Leibniz a response to the shrapnel-torn bodies of the Thirty Years’ War, the pockmarked landscape of his youth. But for Leibniz there was no question of embracing chaos. His shards and fragments became necessary unities—monads, all of which bore a secret pattern of association that no amount of barbarian firepower could tear asunder. In this way his response resembles the Surrealist answer to the despondency and nihilism invoked by the Dada artists. The Surrealist thinkers, like Leibniz, rejected the metaphysical and artistic celebration of division, fragments, and despair and attempted to create a new systematic philosophy that would unite rather than divide. It is no wonder that the Surrealist theoreticians listed Leibniz as one of the few philosophers they approved of. Just as their thought was an attempt at repairing the despair and nihilism foregrounded in Dada by way of a syncretic approach to the “marvelous,” so too Leibniz’s project can be recognized as one of a radical and quite literal surreality.

LEIBNIZ AND ALCHEMY

In answer to the question “what is matter?” Leibniz replied that it is spiritus coagulans—spirit made dense. Presently we will see what he meant by this, but first we must ask why he chose this particular phrase. I suggest that he used the term coagulans because he was deliberately acknowledging his debt to alchemical thought.

The question as to whether Leibniz had any real connection with alchemy is one that is not often asked. George Macdonald Ross’s “Leibniz and Alchemy” is one of the very few papers that address the issue. At the outset Ross states that the possible influence of alchemical thinking on Leibniz’s philosophical thought is not the subject matter of his paper. Instead he proposes to examine the “more straightforwardly factual question of what he believed about it.”¹² He immediately acknowledges that this is a pity as “facts about Leibniz’s alchemical beliefs acquire significance only through their relation to more important aspects of his intellectual development,”¹³ but in the absence of any systematic assembling of this evidence, its significance cannot be evaluated. This assumes, of course, that there is some ultimate form of evaluation, a juridical court of intellectual achievements that can pass judgment on the value of intellectual “influences” on any given thinker. Contra Ross, the theory of vertigrality suggests we can carry through an investigation despite the paucity of extensive textual evidence.

Ross limits himself to the question as to whether Leibniz believed it possible to make gold. While this is a worthy question to attempt to answer—Ross finds that Leibniz invested considerable time and money into the activities of several individuals trying to make gold—it has little bearing on the soteriological aspects of alchemy. Of more interest is Ross’s statement that “Leibniz always believed in the theoretical possibility of creating gold, apparently on the metaphysical grounds that matter is one.”¹⁴ As we have seen, the idea that “matter is one” was one of the basic tenets of Hermetic thought and therefore of alchemical practice.¹⁵

Toward the end of his life Leibniz seems to have experienced a turnaround in his attitude to the challenge of making gold. Originally open to the possibility, he finally came to reject it, along with the existence of the Philosophers’ Stone. This was mainly due to the fact that several alchemists to whom he periodically provided money and perhaps assistance never produced anything like a lapis philosophorum. The failure of these experiments probably came as no surprise to Leibniz, yet it is significant that he was for a long period open to the possibility of the transmogrification of “base matter” into gold. As Ross notes, the fact that Leibniz finally rejected the idea of the Philosophers’ Stone does not entitle us to assume that Leibniz therefore rejected all ideas that a contemporary scientist would consider irrational or mystical. While Leibniz was very careful to draw a distinction between rational and irrational ideas in scientific thinking “he drew the line differently from us” as Ross says. He considered reliance on biblical revelation as a guide to natural philosophy quite unsupportable, characterizing Fludd’s Mosaic philosophy as “fanatical.”¹⁶

Leibniz, like other thinkers of his time, was influenced by contemporary research into iatrochemistry, and Ross perceives a direct connection between this and Leibniz’s later monadic philosophy. He notes that as early as 1671 Leibniz was formulating a theory of “kernels” explicitly using chemical/alchemical terminology, this concept being “nothing other than a primitive and materialist version of the monads of his mature philosophy.”¹⁷ The idea that metals sprang from “seeds” and grew in the earth like plants was widespread from the earliest of times, so it is not unusual that Leibniz should have used this concept in his work. What is unusual for the times is the degree to which it was systematically developed.

The fact that Leibniz used the term spiritus coagulans in reference to matter is by no means a sure indicator in itself that he was influenced by the process and worldview of alchemy. Yet it is an unusual locution that points to a possible connection with the well-known alchemical motto: solve et coagula. If we add to this the essential alchemical concept of the perfectibility of matter, that matter contains the “seed” of its future transformation and is in certain respects “alive,” then we can appreciate that the development of his monadic philosophy owes more to alchemy than would be immediately apparent. Taking into consideration the fact that alchemy was the practice of which Hermeticism provided the theory, we are impelled to look closely at certain motifs in Leibniz’s philosophical development in terms of Hermetic figuration and thought.

MONADS AND THE ALIEN LIGHT

Considerable scholarly endeavor was once invested in trying to discover the origins of Leibniz’s use of the word monad.¹⁸ Most scholars considered that he derived it from F. M. van Helmont; others suggested that he got it directly from Lady Anne Conway.¹⁹ Even if Leibniz first heard the word from Conway, scholars claim, her ultimate source was van Helmont, and this is undoubtedly true. The most reasonable assumption, however, is that Leibniz, like any other scholar familiar with Neoplatonic philosophy, would have first encountered the word either in reference to Pythagoras’s concept of the One (monas) or in Plotinus’s formulation, monos pros monon, “from the one to the One.”^*83 As monad, van Helmont’s usage would only have reminded Leibniz of the richness of classical ideas associated with this term.

And it is Leibniz’s early conception of the “kernel” that reveals much of the richness attending his mature use of the word monad. A kernel, of course, is a seed, and we find throughout Leibniz’s writings numerous references to such an image. The mythology that most clearly antedates Leibniz’s use of the “seed” concept is Gnostic. The idea that hidden within all human beings languishes a trapped scintilla, a “seed of light” or spark (spinther) hidden not only in the “prison” of the body, but also in the phenomenal world, a world characterized by suffering and evil, is an essential element in Gnostic mythology. Following the determinations of the Conference on the Origins of Gnosticism in Messina in 1966, one can in fact confirm that it is the central, defining mythologem of Gnosticism. As Kurt Rudolph explains, the notion of the divine fragment is an essential element of the macro/microcosm couplet as expressed in Gnosticism.

This idea . . . is ontologically based on the conception of a downward development of the divine whose periphery (often called Sophia or Ennoia) has fatally fallen victim to a crisis and must—even if only indirectly—produce this world, in which it then cannot be disinterested, in that it must once again recover the divine spark (often designated as pneuma, “spirit”).²⁰

This spark is the sign of an inextirpable seed of alienation of humankind from the world of matter (hyle): just as the intelligential world is at a far remove from perceived reality, so has humankind an essential “otherworldly” essence to it. Human beings literally partake of the divine through the scintilla hidden within, a fragment that is the dormant virus of future development—a seed that, if properly nurtured, will eventually develop into a perfected being, ready to again become one with the deity.

In his New Essays (1704) Leibniz notes the various terms associated with the notion of innate ideas (his monadological philosophy, in its systematicity, embraces the nativistic principle), particularly mentioning Julius Scaliger’s semina aeternitatis (“eternal seeds”) or zopyra, “meaning to say living fires, flashes of light, hidden within us, but caused to appear by the contact of the senses, like the sparks which the shock of the flint strikes from the steel. And it is not an unreasonable belief that these flashes are a sign of something divine and eternal, which makes its appearance above all in necessary truths.”²¹

There is a direct acknowledgment of a particular aspect of the Platonic tradition in the last sentence of this passage. Leibniz invokes what may be called the “logos tradition” that holds that there must be certain a priori objects (“necessary truths”) that are immutable. His argument is almost tautological when he says that it is not “unreasonable” to accept the existence of a rational faculty at least in part constituted by “necessary truths.” Here he directly alludes to the tradition within the metaphysics of light that links the highest rationality (ratio or logos) with “illumination,” a tradition of photic imagery spanning from at least the time of the Plotinian texts and finding perhaps its greatest concentration in the work of Saint Augustine where it is used to support his conception of cognition as “illumination.” Already we can see that Leibniz is evoking the morphology of a particular ideal object. This object is that which observes the Stoic notion of the logos spermatikos become subject to logical deformations that allow the production of Plotinus’ logoi contained within the first emanation and Augustine’s rationes seminales and rationes aeternae (the latter closely corresponding with Leibniz’s “necessary truths”).

But there is much more besides the recognition of an “orthodox” tradition operating here. The Gnostic similes are unmistakable.^*84 In his New System (1695–96), Leibniz attempts to differentiate the “higher” monads from the lower.

We ought not to mix without distinction or to confuse with other forms or souls, minds or rational souls, which are of a superior order and have incomparably more perfection than those forms embedded in matter which . . . are found everywhere, since in comparison with these others, minds or rational souls are little gods, made in the image of God, and having in them some glimmering of Divine light.²²

For Leibniz minds are rational souls (nous) in virtue of the fact that they not only resemble the deity (are “little gods”) but participate in the divine through the presence of the “glimmering light”—a kind of hyper-celestial transistor—within. An equivalent contemporary figuration might well be that human beings have within them a luciform communication device that allows instantaneous translation between the language of the divine nous and the terrestrial nous/mens. My description of this device as being “luciform” is not just metaphorical—Leibniz himself invokes the notion of the “astral [i.e., luciform] body’” in his New Essays, noting that it is a pity that such a notion has been so uncritically rejected by his contemporaries, as this has contributed to “the neglect of the natural way of explaining the conservation of the soul.”²³

It would be a mistake to consider the above contemporary figuration as just a conceit. If the figure of the Gnostic scintilla is in fact a significant mythologem, part of a greater ideal object, then we should expect to find similarly functioning figures in contemporary times. And indeed we find such a similarly functioning figure within the burgeoning mythology associated with the phenomena of UFO and “alien abduction” reports. Not only do we encounter a profound light imagery, but we also consistently find the idea of the “alien implant”—a communication device—inserted within the abductee’s bodies. And just as with the Gnostic spark, this communication device is both the sign and agent of some future trajectory or growth toward the light (UFO) that implanted it, as the very word implant would certainly seem to suggest.

One suggests that Leibniz’s view of this alien implant is much more akin to the original Gnostic view than that propounded by Robert Fludd, for example. As noted in the previous chapter, Fludd expanded on the figure of the alien light to incorporate the human hypercorporeity. He furthermore predicated his Hermetic alchemy on the possibility of the eventual perfection of this principle so that it would one day reattain its perfection as a direct “linkup” with the anima mundi or Holy Ghost. This notion of the dormant perfectibility of the divinely implanted scintilla is not necessarily inherent in Gnostic descriptions. Although Leibniz’s idea of the perfectibility of monads will be discussed shortly, it is not at all clear that he imagined the scintilla as being capable of transformation (“perfectibility”) in time. This would seem to suggest that the absconditus creator had not indeed instantiated the “best of all possible worlds” as Leibniz so famously described the world of phenomena.

Leibniz’s idea that human souls and the Divine “mirror” one another is of course inescapably Hermetic.^*85 And like his Gnostic forebears, Leibniz believed implicitly in the perfectibility of all living things, that all “matter” (i.e., coagulated spirit) was drawn by an Aristotelian “final cause” up the Great Chain of Being.

The animals, of which some are raised by means of conception to the rank of the larger animals, may be called spermatic; but those among them which remain in their own kind (and they are the greater number) are born, multiply and are destroyed like the large animals; and there is only a small number of elect ones who pass into the greater theatre.²⁴

Leibniz’s use of the phrase “elect ones” and his description (previous quotation) of rational souls as partaking of “incomparably more perfection” is strongly reminiscent of the Valentinian division of souls. His use of the term spermatic in regard to the “larger animals”—that is, those with souls, not necessarily fully rational, but “seeded” with the divine spark nonetheless—is an almost unmistakable indicator of the refulgence of the Gnostic weltanschauung.

Leibniz notes that an “elect” few monads (souls) can rise above their kind to a “greater theatre,” but the greater number do not. Leibniz, in choosing the word monad for his necessary minimum, a minimum that is simultaneously a plenum, assumes a qualitative rather than a quantitative difference in kind, an interior difference described as a difference in perspective.

When we penetrate deeply into things, we observe more reason than would be believed in most sects of philosophers. The lack of reality in the things of sense, according to the Sceptics; the Pythagorean and Platonist reduction of everything to harmonies, numbers, ideas, and perceptions; the “One” and even the One Whole of Parmenides and Plotinus . . . the vital philosophy of the Cabbalists and Hermetics, who attribute feeling to everything. . . . These are all combined together as in a centre of perspective, viewed from which the object (confused from every other point of view) reveals its regularity and harmony of parts.²⁵

The sense of monas/monad as being the perspective of a single individual still inheres in its modern derivatives: monk, monastery. The proto-Indo-European root holds the sense of “solitary”: in the Buddhist text the Suttanipata (3.11.40) we find the words, ekattam monam akkhatam, “solitude is called wisdom.”²⁶ The Magian metaphysics of light behind the Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective has a curious “double” property, perhaps here first directly alluded to by Leibniz. As all objects emit rays corresponding to every point on their surface, and as these rays all converge on the axis visualis of the viewer, then one is entitled to note that—quite literally—everything is in the eye of the beholder. The monad contains the phenomenal world.

Leibniz himself held to a hierarchy of souls. More than that, he held to the Gnostic/Hermetic belief that some occupy an immanently higher place on the ladder of Being, having a greater degree of perfection. In a letter to Princess Sophie (1706), we find him stating, “It is to be believed that there are rational souls more perfect in the scale of being than we are, which may be called genii . . . and it is quite possible that some day we shall be of their number. The order of the universe seems to require it.”²⁷

As noted earlier, it is almost certain that Leibniz did not believe in the perfectibility of certain monads or individuals within their lifetime, as this would have upset the systematic, hierarchical structure of his monadological universe. When he states that it is possible that “some day we shall be of their number” he refers, no doubt, to the afterlife.

The use of the term genii is unusual in its unmistakably Magian resonance. Nor is it an isolated occurrence (it appears in his Monadology as well). Why does he not use the more intelligible term (that is, for his times), angel? It certainly has the same meaning, i.e., an intermediary intelligence occupying the hyperlunary spheres between humankind and the divinity. It may be countered that Leibniz’s use of the term can be explained by the fact that Descartes used malin genie for the evil demon of his Meditations, and this would explain its currency within philosophical discourse. Yet Leibniz’s genii are clearly not evil demons, rather they are “more perfect” beings. The answer, I think, is that Leibniz is clearly signaling his indebtedness to the “Oriental” ideas that vertigrally contribute to his monadic philosophy.

Leibniz held that that which separates human beings (higher monads) from animals (lower monads) is humankind’s intellective faculties. It is knowledge, rational (“Platonic”) knowledge that is the determining factor in the potential ascension of rational monads to the intelligential status of the genii. In both Gnostic and Buddhist systems salvation is seen as being effected by gnosis (Gnostic) or jñana (Buddhist). According to the Valentinians, the process of gnosis reveals the knowledge of “who we were, what we have become; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whither we hasten, whence we are redeemed; what is birth and rebirth.”²⁸ In light of this, Conze notes that the Buddha’s enlightenment was directly preceded by the “cognition of conditioned co-production” (pratitya samutpada), the notion of the codependent arising of all beings and objects in the world, which has the same effect, in each particular, of the Valentinian conception of gnostic enlightenment. He further notes, “In both cases the mere insight into the origination and nature of the world liberates us from it, and effects some kind of re-union with the transcendental One, which is identical with our true Self.”²⁹

Conze also notes the existence of the negative corollary to the above, namely, the Buddhist/Hindu notion of avidya or ignorance (vidya means “knowledge,” yet it is a particular type of knowledge—the kind of knowledge produced by “enlightenment”). Avidya is the origin of the chain of causation; it is ignorance of the true nature of reality, a self-deception that “misdirect[s] our attention towards a manufactured world of our own making, conceal[ing] the true reality to which wisdom, the highest form of gnosis, alone can penetrate.”³⁰ Similarly, the Gnostics held that human beings are trapped in a demiurgic world, suffering an ignorance perpetuated by malevolent powers (archons) and the misinterpretation of New Testament and Mosaic texts by the early church fathers. The world as it appeared was a false, illusory world.

In a similar spirit Leibniz was clearly unconcerned with “saving the appearances”; he wanted to know what was necessarily true of reality, how things really are beneath the flux of phenomena. To this end his monadic philosophy represents his solution to an ontology that was absolutely committed to a realist description of the world: for Leibniz the Real had to be that way (i.e., composed of monads) because it would be irrational to admit otherwise. In this way his philosophy resembles the position of the Kabbalistic text Sefer Yetzirah and the Pythagorean philosophy that the Sefer Yetzirah closely parallels: the “Oriental” approach to scientia that is preeminently dismissive of the play of maya and that privileges the Magian geometrical approach to reality.

The idea that the phenomenal world is but a world of “appearances” is of course inherent in the very word phenomena (phaenomena), yet it is this sense of the word that is most absent in contemporary usage. In Aristotle’s time phaenomena were not the equivalents of the “objects” and “events” by which we today translate the term. The “middle voice of the Greek verb suggests neither wholly ‘what is perceived, from within themselves, by men’ nor wholly ‘what, from without, forces itself on man’s senses,’ but something between the two,” as Owen Barfield notes.³¹ For ancient philosophy “that which appears” is a space of liminal figuration, neither inside the Self, nor outside in “the world.”

Without doubt the sense of phenomena entertained by most philosophers of science today is that which focuses on the implication of “that which forces itself on consciousness from without”: a model inherent in Haraway’s call for the retaining of the notion of a “commonsense real world” in scientific work. We should compare this assessment with that of Neils Bohr and his celebrated “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics. For Bohr, experimental science had no need or justification for the metaphysical presumption of the existence of a “real world.” He summed up his assessment in a famous, terse sentence from his Como lecture of 1927: “An independent reality in the ordinary [that is, classical] physical sense can . . . neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.”³²

The key to understanding this anti-ontological/epistemological stance, according to his biographer Pais, is Bohr’s reconceptualization of the notion of phenomena. Bohr conceived of phenomena as including both the observed and the “mode of observation.”³³ To accord with “elementary epistemological principles” Bohr felt that we should “reserve the word ‘phenomenon’ for the comprehension of the effects observed under given experimental conditions.”³⁴

Ten years later he qualified this further by holding that the word phenomena should “refer exclusively to observations obtained under specified circumstances, including an account of the whole experiment.”³⁵ In other words, a phenomenon was that which “appeared” in a given (quantum mechanical) experiment coupled with the entirety of the experimental conditions that gave rise to it, including, most importantly, the “mode of observation” itself. Now this “mode” was intended by Bohr to mean the consciousness of the observing scientist as well as her “sensory extensions” such as photographic plates, particle accelerators, and so on. Bohr’s one-time student and biographer, physicist Abraham Pais, hails Bohr’s conceptualization of phenomena as “his most important contribution to philosophy,” a “dramatic” change that has been largely ignored by professional philosophers.³⁶ Quite obviously both Bohr and Pais are ignorant of the fact that this dramatically “new” definition of a phenomenon is actually a reinstatement of the ancient conception of phenomena as elucidated by Barfield. A phenomenon is that which lies within the cusp between observing subject and the Real, with the consequence that scientific and other “facts” become figural constructions obeying the particular observational setup (that is, the “psychological state”) of the observer.^*86

Leibniz was commited to just such an approach in his development of the notion of the monad.

KABBALISTIC MONADS

In his Monadology Leibniz reinvents the notion of the Pythagorean/Plotinian monas as the source of all subsequent monads: “Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced, and are born, so to speak, by continual fulgurations of the Divinity from moment to moment.”³⁷

The use of the word fulgurations is very significant, just as is his mention of Scaliger’s zopyra, “meaning to say living fires, flashes of light, hidden within us, but caused to appear by the contact of the senses, like the sparks which the shock of the flint strikes from the steel.”³⁸ Both terms point unequivocally to a significant source for his mature philosophy—the Kabbalah, and particularly the Sefer Zohar. Scaliger’s zopyra is a rendering of sephira, a central concept in the Kabbalah, and the word fulguration means “flash” or “lighting strike.” The name Zohar has most often been translated as “splendor” or “brightness,” but it is perhaps most accurately translated as “flashes.”³⁹ Leibniz’s image of fulguration, of fitful periodic descent (the reversed image of anabasis in the Chaldean Mysteries with its vision of ascent on a sunbeam) is his attempt to find a “middle path” between his determination of monads as absolute individuals (which would therefore be forever severed and separated from the deity after Creation) and the idea of emanation that would make them part of Creation, but violate his postulation of the identity of indiscernables. This latter Leibniz used in his rejection of the concept of atoms as “perfect simples” (for then every atom would be identical, with the consequence that there would be no difference in the world), but it also forces upon him the conclusion that human beings, through the process of emanation, share an identity with the deity. As Leibniz refused to consider any sort of direct similarity between God and his Creation, he needed a way to express his conviction that the deity was immanent in matter, but not identical with it (which, for example, he took Newton’s concept of the universe as the sensorium of God to imply.)

I suggest that Leibniz’s fulgurations are an equivalent figuration to standing-wave pulses that maintain the coherence of a subject so described. In this way his fulgurations are the precursor of what contemporary physicists describe as the vibratory characteristics of matter (as described in chapter 5), a consequence of the tensional nature of field phenomena. Just as an oscilliscope can be tuned to produce a continuous standing-wave pulse, so Leibniz’s monads are maintained in time by a formal, continual pulse or “fulguration.” A good analogy is that of a digital watch. The time that a digital watch keeps is maintained by the regular pulses emitted by an artificially created crystal. A tiny battery provides the energy, but it is the crystal, or more precisely, the regular internal structure of the crystal, that provides the “pulse of time.” It has been suggested that the ticking of an analog clock and the (normally imperceptible) crystal pulse of a digital watch engender the idea of time passing because they mimic the beating of the human heart. It is highly likely that a largely unconscious play of similar figurations lay behind Leibniz’s invoking of the image of the deity’s life-sustaining “flashes.”

One of Leibniz’s earliest influences was the mathematics professor Erhard Weigel of the University of Jena whom he studied under in 1663. Weigel was particularly noted for his expositions of Pythagorean mathematics, and was famous in his time for writing a book that professed to be an account of the mathematical basis of morality, solely derived from the Pythagorean formulation of the tetraktys.⁴⁰ In his Theodicy, Leibniz acknowledges the influence of Weigel on his development of the concept of fulguration.

M. Weigel communicated . . . a special demonstration of the existence of God [and] his continual creation. . . . He said that the basis of the demonstration was the Pythagorean Table: one is multiplied by one. These successively repeated unities, were thus the moments in the existence of things. Each of the unities of life depended upon God, who gave life momentarily. . . . And as these unities flagged in their life from moment to moment, he always created others to revive them.⁴¹

It is more than likely that Leibniz derived his fulguration imagery directly from his reading of the Zohar. Compare the following passage from the Zohar with Leibniz’s previously quoted image of sparks struck from a flint:

For just as the one hammer-blow causes sparks to fly off in all directions, so God brought into being simultaneously manifold species and hosts, each different from the other, without number. . . . Now when God was about to create the world, He produced a secret spark from which there issued and radiated all the lights which are disclosed.⁴²

“All the lights which are disclosed” is the manifest world, recalling precisely Scotus Erigena’s famous conclusion, “All things that are, are lights.” In the Zoharic scheme of course, all the manifold “lights” of the world partake in their ultimate nature of the first “secret spark.” Leibniz’s God, just as for Erigena, was the absconditus of Pseudo-Dionysius (with whose Mystical Theology and On the Divine Names Leibniz was familiar), but for Leibniz there was no Plotinian henosis, or return to the source. Invoking the Hermetic/Cusan figuration discussed in chapter 3, he notes, “It has been very well said that [God] is like a centre which is everywhere; but his circumference is nowhere, since everything is present to him immediately, without being removed from his centre.”⁴³

Concurring with Augustine’s explanation that God is omniscient because he is “outside” time (time coming into being only at the moment of Creation), Leibniz draws a distinction between the “timebound” rationality of lesser monads and their creator. Yet his conception of monads as each being little universes, so to speak, allows him to recognize that “the present is big with the future, what is to come could be read in the past, what is distant is expressed in what is near. The beauty of the universe could be learnt in each soul, could one unravel all its folds which develop perceptibly only with time.”⁴⁴

So in the end lesser monads are bound to a “different beat” of pulsation: time-bound, unwinding—but God ever maintains life through the “successively repeated unities” fulgurating timelessly within the one secret spark.

Knorr von Rosenroth

The principal texts of the Zohar were introduced into gentile Europe mainly through the efforts of one man, Christian Freiherr Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89). Described by Scholem as a Protestant Theosophist,^*87 Knorr was reputed in his lifetime to be the most profound of Christian scholars of Kabbalah. Yet for one whose major contribution to Kabbalistic studies was to a great extent to determine the image of the Kabbalah for historians of philosophy until the end of the nineteenth century,⁴⁵ surprisingly little is known about him.

The son of a Silesian Protestant minister, Knorr traveled widely throughout western Europe in his youth, finally settling in Sulzbach in northern Bavaria, where at the age of thirty-six he became an official in the court of Prince Christian August, and eventually the prince’s close adviser. Both the prince and Knorr were strongly influenced by the writings of Jacob Boehme, and Knorr become known as an “inspired poet,” his work now regarded as being among some of the finest in German religious literature. It was not his poetry, however, that was to ensure his fame, but rather his anthology of Kabbalistic texts, Kabbalah Denudata: The Kabbalah Uncovered, or, The Transcendental, Metaphysical, and Theosophical Teachings of the Jews (first volume published in Sulzbach in 1677, the second in 1688), which would have such a profound influence not only on radical and separatist Pietist circles in Germany,⁴⁶ but an unprecedented influence on Leibniz and his circle of friends in particular.

Perhaps under the influence of Boehme, Knorr developed an interest in the Kabbalah during his early travels and, when he reached Holland, he began studies with several rabbis, including Meir Stern of Amsterdam. He was able thereby to study source material in the original, acquiring manuscript copies of the works of Isaac Luria (compilations of Luria’s teachings by his foremost disciple, Vital), and obtaining access to an Italian work on Kabbalah and alchemy, the Esh ha-Mezaref, the original of which is now lost, surviving only in the Latin translation of extracts in Knorr’s Kabbalah Denudata.⁴⁷

Scholem’s overall evaluation of Knorr’s scholarly efforts in the composition of the Kabbalah Denudata is salutary, and he defends him against detractors of the time: “Although the book contains many errors and mistranslations, particularly of difficult Zoharic passages, there is no justification for the contemporary Jewish claims that the author misrepresented the Kabbalah.”⁴⁸

Leibniz spent ten days with Knorr in Sulzbach late in 1687 where he discussed particularly the metaphysical doctrine of emanation and the nature of the hierarchical system as outlined in the Kabbalah Denudata.⁴⁹

Before proceeding further, I would like to address a question that is not often asked, a question that has direct bearing on the profound influence of the Kabbalah on Leibniz’s mature philosophy. The question is satisfyingly simple: What shape is a monad?

Few scholars have thought to consider the question as to the possible determining influence of Hermetic or Kabbalistic imagery on Leibniz’s thought. Politella, for example, notes that before 1700 Leibniz knew only one of Giordano Bruno’s Lullian works and perhaps his “mathematical circles” (Kabbalah-influenced “circuit-diagrams”: the first extant examples of a combinatorial approach to the characteristica universalis), maintaining that these works “could have provided no material for his Monadology.”⁵⁰

Politella’s conclusion serves to perpetuate the well-established conviction that philosophy—and particularly the thought of philosophical luminaries like Leibniz—avoids all figuration and recourse to, or influence from, images. Contra Politella, I would maintain that Leibniz was not only influenced by Bruno’s (and Ramon Lull’s, for that matter) circle diagrams, but was strongly influenced in the formation of his concept of the monad by circle and sphere images. In other words, he was availing himself of one of the most influential and insistent of attractors within the geometrical imaginary. This would not be inconsistent with the overall influence of the Hermetic imaginary on Leibniz’s thought, for the circle/sphere attractor, as discussed in chapter 3, exerts a primary vertigral influence here as well.

In reintroducing the Aristotelian doctrine of substantial forms, Leibniz says it was “necessary to form a conception of them resembling our ordinary notion of souls.”⁵¹ He shortly notes that his conception should not be confused with other notions of “souls, minds or rational souls, which are of a superior order and have incomparably more perfection than those forms embedded in matter.”⁵² We know that Leibniz was quite familiar with the idea, held by both Proclus and Plotinus, that the human soul is in the shape of a sphere (the better to facilitate celestial travel—like knows like), and he was certainly aware that it was a truism in the seventeenth century to consider atoms as being spherical,^*88 so it would not be surprising to find Leibniz describing the monad as a sphere. Of course, he does no such thing—in fact he expressly states that monads

cannot have shapes, otherwise they would have parts. And consequently a monad, in itself, and at a given moment, cannot be distinguished from another except by its internal qualities and actions which cannot be otherwise than its perceptions . . . and its appetitions . . . which are the principles of change. . . . It is as a centre or a point where, simple though it is, an infinity of angles are found made by the lines that come together there.⁵³

Monads, then, have no shape whatsoever—they are “metaphysical” points, without dimension, akin to, but not identical with, mathematical points (the latter being the “points of view for expressing the universe”⁵⁴ of metaphysical monads). But this does not in itself rule out the possibility that when imagining monads, he saw spheres. In his Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese Leibniz notes, “The Chinese also call their Li a globe or circle. I believe that this agrees with our way of speaking, since we speak of God as being a sphere or a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”⁵⁵

The neo-Confucian concept of li was an important influence on the development of Leibniz’s philosophy. Leibniz, like many of his contemporaries, was fascinated with China. He was in correspondence with several scholars of Chinese culture, the most important of whom were Claudio Grimaldi (1638–1712) and Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730). Bouvet was the tutor to the emperor Zhang Xi’s children in Peking and was a renowned philologist whose Historical Portrait of the Emperor of China Leibniz had published in the second edition of the Novissima Sinica. Both Grimaldi and Bouvet were Jesuit missionaries who had either spent many years in China, or in the case of Bouvet, actually corresponded with Leibniz from China.

Leibniz devoted considerable time to studying neo-Confucian conceptions of “substance and form.” In the cosmological philosophy of Chang Tsai (1020–77), the primary undifferentiated stuff out of which all things are made is ch’i (qi).⁵⁶ When the historian of Chinese philosophy Fung Yu-lan states that “Chang Tsai explained the appearance and disappearance of concrete particulars in terms of the condensation and dispersion of the Ch’i,” we appreciate the proximity of this idea to that of Leibniz’s characterization of matter as spiritus coagulans. Yet in espousing this idea of the condensation and dispersion of a material substrate Chang Tsai was at a loss to explain the differing types of things in the world. Chang Tsai’s philosophy of ch’i was subsequently modified by the neo-Confucians Ch’eng Yi and Chu Hsi to include the concept of li. This latter represented the particular “law” or “pattern” by which any actuality is formed.⁵⁷ According to Joseph Needham, li is not a mechanical order or “a pattern thought of as something dead . . . it is dynamic pattern as embodied in living things, and in human relationships and in the highest human values.”⁵⁸ This idea is closely aligned with the notion of logos or “pattern” in the West, yet it derives from ideas found in the appendices of the ancient divinatory text, the Yi Jing (I Ching) or Book of Changes.

Needham notes that “Chu Hsi and other thinkers of his group [i.e., the neo-Confucians] made a great effort to bring all of Nature and Man into one philosophical system,” using the concepts of li and chi.⁵⁹ The neo-Confucian project, then, exactly parallels Leibniz’s own philosophical project of including the “subjectivity” of psyches within the overall pattern of nature. Consequently it should come as no surprise to find that he considered the Chinese concepts of li and chi to be further confirmation that he was “on the right track” in forming his monadological system.

In fact Leibniz came to believe that there was a direct connection between Chinese thought and that of the Hermetic tradition. In the early 1700s Leibniz and Bouvet thought they had made some startling discoveries. It was Bouvet’s belief that the divinatory system of the Yi Jing represented a notation system for all of Chinese science. Not only that, but Bouvet believed that the legendary creator of the symbols of the Yi Jing, the mythical emperor Fu Xi, was in actuality the person otherwise known as Hermes Trismegistus.⁶⁰ In support of his contention he believed that he could demonstrate that the ancient form of the Chinese script and language displayed similarities both with ancient Hebrew and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Unfortunately the correspondence with Bouvet abruptly ceased at this point, and Leibniz never received confirmation of Bouvet’s theories. Leibniz did, however, believe in the possibility that Fu Xi was actually Hermes Trismegistus, or at least that the knowledge of the “patriarchs” (i.e., the prisca theologi) as transmitted through Hermes had reached China at some very early date.⁶¹

Needham strongly suggests that “Neo-Confucian philosophy was in fact a scheme of thought striving to be a philosophy of organism.”⁶² In an essay in his monumental Science and Civilisation in China Needham traces the origins of a nonmechanistic “philosophy of organism” in the West directly to Leibniz. He further suggests that, through his research into Chinese philosophy, Leibniz was the conduit, as it were, for the actual Chinese origins of the philosophy of organism as expressed in the work of Chu Hsi and others.⁶³ Elsewhere Needham briefly examines the influence of the Kabbalah on the development of Western science,⁶⁴ yet he does not make the obvious connection between the Kabbalistic tradition and Chinese thought as exemplified in the monadological system of Leibniz.

In regard to the above quotation wherein Leibniz describes li as being a “sphere or circle,” he is no doubt referring to a particular type of diagram found within commentaries on the Yi Jing. These diagrams are circular in form, and represent the changing states of the universe. These states are lawful, following the metaphysical structuring of what are known in the West as the “hexagrams” of the Book of Changes. These diagrams were given fulsome treatment by the neo-Confucian scholar Shao Yung, and led to the greater development of the concept of li. Fung Yu-lan notes that

Shao Yung’s diagrams . . . helped to suggest the idea of Li. According to Shao, what the diagrams represent is the law that governs the transformations of individual things. This law is antecedent not only to the diagrams, but also to the existence of individual things. Shao maintained that before the trigrams were first drawn by their discoverer, the Book of Changes already ideally existed.⁶⁵

The Chinese idea of a preestablished harmony operating throughout the universe would also have naturally appealed to Leibniz, as this was one of the key conceptions underlying his monadological universe. The idea of a preestablished harmony operating within the universe is inherent in a cosmological principle central to much Daoist and neo-Confucian thought, that of the taiji. In his Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese Leibniz discusses at length the Chinese concept of the taiji. This principle is most often represented in Chinese texts as a circle or sphere. Nowadays most people in the West know this symbol as the “yin/yang” (“double fish”) diagram. It is probable that Leibniz was thinking of both circular images of the taiji and Shao Yung’s diagrams of the cycle of lawful changes when he aligned these figurations with that of the Hermetic dictum regarding God and the sphere.

The sort of “organic” order that Needham associates with the concept of li (and Leibniz’s understanding of this concept) is close to our contemporary notion of deterministic chaos. Dilating on Needham’s description of li as natural order, Alan Watts says, “Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the pattern of moving water, the forms of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.”⁶⁶ The ideogram li originally refered to the crazed pattern often found in jade, or on ancient pieces of porcelain. It was clearly a pattern, but one that would be well nigh impossible to associate with mechanical order, at least in terms of the relatively simple (and mathematically tractable) interactions proposed by Newtonian physics. Yet the idea that there exists an order behind the seemingly diverse phenomena of the turbulent flow of water and clouds, of the striations in the bark of a tree as well as the fluctuations in the stock market is what is now called “deterministic chaos.” Leibniz no doubt apprehended in the Chinese concept of li a principle that could stand for the sort of complex preestablished harmony he saw as systematically ordering his universe of monads. That this natural order is so complex that it mirrors the complexities of organisms rather than machines is an idea that Needham apprehends as being the leitmotif of the “philosophy of organism” as first promoted by Leibniz.

Given the textual evidence, it may be countered that Leibniz possibly conceived of the deity as “spherical,” but this does not entitle one to say that all monads are spherical. I can only say that this does not fit with his professed belief in the ultimate harmony of the world, a harmony not only best represented by a sphere, but that was almost universally represented using just such a figuration in Neoplatonic and Hermetic literature. I suggest that both Shao Yung’s diagrams and diagrams of the taiji served to further orient Leibniz within an imaginary that would naturally suggest the figural “shape” of monads to be that of spheres, and that the influence of these Chinese concepts supported the notions he was already deriving from his study of the Kabbalah. Not only that, but the very influence of the text of Knorr’s Kabbalah Denudata on Leibniz strongly supports the sphere/circle imagistic connection.

Attending the text of the Kabbalah Denudata are a number of diagrams and tables especially prepared by Knorr for his edition. He was encouraged in this by Henry More who advised:

Your two Cabbalisticall Tables with the Names and Attributes congested under each Sephirah (which will not be much unlike in nature and use Johannes Meursius his Denarius Pythagoricus) will also be very fitt for this first volume you intend. And if your Systema Theologiae Judaicae were in this volume too, all these would tend to the Sharpening of mens appetitts for the reading and understanding of the Soar [i.e., the Zohar].⁶⁷

More considered the information that Knorr had assembled in his tables and diagrams the “most authentick Treasure of their [i.e., the Jewish mystic’s] Cabbala,” and the Kabbalah Denudata was published with what may be the first in a long line of tables of anagogic “correspondences.”^*89 The diagrams consist of images of hierarchically placed circles, or a series of nested circles (circles within circles) or a combination of both. These images are representations of the manifestations and relationships among the sephiroth of the Kabbalistic “Tree of Life,” Etz Chaim.

This figure was first expounded in an eponymous text by Isaac Luria’s foremost disciple, Vital. The figure of the “Tree of Life” represents the series of emanations, the sephiroth or “spheres,” that depended from the Ein Sof or “Infinite” (the absconditus). The idea of the sephiroth is very much like the series of emanations enumerated in the Gnostic Valentinian account of Creation, and Scholem suggests a direct connection between Kabbalistic and Gnostic conceptions. This is particularly evident in the work of Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century Kabbalist of Safed, whose doctrine of the fragmentation of the divine essence (the shevirat ha-kelim, or “breaking of the vessels”) and the consequent imprisonment of the holy sparks in the lower world closely corresponds with the most significant of Gnostic mythologems.

Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbalah Denudata, apart from its substantial translations of the Zohar, is mainly given over to an exposition of Luria’s doctrines. When speaking of the sephiroth Knorr almost always says sphaera—Sphaera prima (the sephira Kether or “Crown”); Sphaera motus diurni (the sephira Chochmah or “Wisdom”).⁶⁸ That the emanations should be imaged as spheres is of course an almost foregone conclusion considering the strong Neoplatonic influence on Kabbalistic thinkers generally and Luria and Knorr in particular. What is most interesting, from my point of view, is that Knorr’s diagrams, and particularly the most famous representation of the sephiroth and “Tree of Life” mirror almost exactly contemporary diagrammatics for “connectionist” or “parallel distributed system” computer simulations. The reason for this is not difficult to see: like a connectionist computer system, the Tree of Life represents an initial message (input/divine spark) that enters a node “gate” (sephira) and is then “split” into paths that attend other nodes, the entire image/process representing the attractor or chreod (“output” answer/universe) that results from such initial input. In connectionist diagrams the input nodes are always represented by a circle. At this point, I think, it is unnecessary to ask why this should be.

Given all the above, I think it is quite likely that images of a universe composed of an infinite series of interconnected spheres—the Kabbalistic molecular model—would have had a determining effect on the development of Leibniz’s monadic philosophy. Still, Leibniz’s monads are “dimensionless” metaphysical points. How can this be reconciled with the sphericity of a sphere? If we remember that the sphere is a circle in three dimensions, and that a circle derives essentially from a point—what amounts to the intellectual equivalent of tracing a Euclidean circle with a compass—then we are entitled to say that a monad is the intelligential equivalent of a sphere. With this addendum, however: Leibniz’s monads are, strictly speaking, hyperspheres. We know this because, as Leibniz repeatedly reiterated, everything is contained in each individual monad—just like an infinite series of nested circles or spheres. A sphere is only a sphere if constrained to three dimensions; if it were able to be “unfolded” within a fourth-dimensional space (an operation implicit in Leibniz’s figural description), then perhaps “the beauty of the universe could be learnt in each soul,” as Leibniz says.

There is a further important consequence of the hyperspherical nature of monads. The Monadology (§65) notes that the deity is fond of a “divine and infinitely marvellous artifice”: “each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients recognised, but is also actually subdivided without limit, each part into further parts, of which each one has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe.”⁶⁹ He follows this passage with a now famous figure: “Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is itself likewise a similar garden or pond.”⁷⁰

We thus note—and we have Mandelbrot’s own acknowledgment of Leibniz’s intuitions concerning fractals to support the claim⁷¹—that, as a consequence of the infinitely mirroring, systemic iterability of monadic substance, monads are fractalic. In what may imaginatively be described as an act of marvelous prescience, Leibniz foresees not only the application of fractal algorithms to produce (simulate) the subtle bifurcations observed in the leaves and branches of plants, but also the more recent theories of cosmologist Andrei Linde who proposes that we live in a “multiverse” of embedded fractal universes.⁷² While in his own times Leibniz’s monadological philosophy was regarded as rather odd, his fractalic conception of the monad—where each monad is a fragment that contains the whole—is not at all difficult to assimilate in today’s scientific culture. We are now quite familiar with the “holographic” idea that a part may contain the whole (as indeed a holographic image physically demonstrates). The notion of recursion lies at the heart of Mandelbrot’s fractal algorithms, just as it does in Maturana’s idea of autopoiesis and the cybernetic notions of Bateson and Hoffmeyer. The circularity inherent in Leibniz’s conception of the monad—where, looking “inward” one finds the “outside” world mirrored—is the very epitome of the notion of the “causeless cause” of autopoietic systems. In fact, one recent writer attributes the discovery of the significance of “feedback” to Leibniz himself. Unlike the thinkers mentioned, of course, Leibniz did hold to the idea of an ultimate cause, but this does not affect the homologous relationship obtaining between his fractalic conception of substance and more recent formulations.

While Leibniz himself may not have been a mystic, his rhetorical model for the Monadology is certainly modeled on a mystical source: Pseudo-Dionysius’s On the Divine Names, a work that itself is beholden to Proclus’s Elements of Theology. Rather than a mystical philosophy then, Leibniz’s monadology is ultimately beholden to what I shall call the “esoteric model.” While mystics are primarily concerned with the ineffable, esotericists, on the other hand, have a positive predilection for complicated and involved structures and metaphors, as well as a predilection for a transhistorical perspective concerning the utility of certain knowledge structures. And Leibniz’s syncretic system, an intricate and finely wrought attempt at a systematic metaphysics, is similarly an attempt at a synthesis of ancient ideas and the ideas of his own times. In this way he resembles Philo of Alexandria who, while certainly not a mystic, sought to construct a systematic interpretation of the world derived from mystical sources as well as a realist (Platonic) approach to epistemological and ontological questions. Leibniz’s commitment to extreme realism is reflected in his conviction that only that which is a self-contained (bearing in mind that self-contained means “spherical”), completely independent individual is “real”—in other words, a monad.

While Leibniz’s monadological system is the result of a lifetime’s work of research into various esoteric systems of thought and a magnificent attempt at synthesizing these systems, I propose that it is the influence of certain key figurations that constitute its “center.” Without the organizing influence of these figurations we would have no modern “philosophy of organism” as Needham characterizes it, for we would have no Leibnizian monadology to have generated such a philosophy. As Mandelbrot admits, the simple algorithms that produce his fractalic “Mandelbrot sets” are just the mathematical formalization of ideas that he himself first attributes to Leibniz. As this chapter endeavors to demonstrate, we can go even further than this and suggest that if it were not for the substantial influence of Hermetic and Kabbalistic figuration on the development of Leibniz’s monadological system there would be today perhaps no such thing as fractal geometry.

KABBALISTIC CANALIZATION

In the Monadology (§71) we read, “Bodies are in a perpetual flux like rivers, and parts are passing in and out of them continually.”⁷³ Given Leibniz’s belief in the fractal organization of nature, and the vertiginous sensibility that this implies, it is not surprising that he thought bodies, including the human body, to be open sites of interactivity, temporary nodes for organizing influxes, rather than “closed worlds.” This is a way of looking at the universe that is central to the “philosophy of organism” that Needham attributes to Leibniz: the world is more like an organism than a machine. Leibniz’s conception of bodies in flux certainly adumbrates that of Hans Jonas (as discussed in chapter 3), when Jonas upholds the idea of metabolism (wherein we find a continual exchange of “matter” or “information” between an organism and its environment) as the principal “pattern which perpetuates itself.”

The Zohar is similarly unambiguous in describing the complexity of interconnections between human beings and the divine. And it is the activities and actions of individuals that will ultimately “complete” the creation of the divinity.

The smoke of the sacrifice rises and creates harmony above, so that all unite, and in this way there is completion in the supernal realm. The impulse comes from below and from this all is perfected. If the Community of Israel did not give the first impulse, the One above would not move to meet her, and by the yearning from below completion is effected above.⁷⁴

The erotic figuration, only suggested in this passage but quite forceful throughout many books of the Zohar (and a source of considerable embarrassment for many orthodox Jewish scholars), recalls the yab-yum imagery of Tantric Buddhist iconography, and serves essentially the same purpose: the hypostatization of an imagery of tensility, suspension, outpouring, and release that is associated with mystical ecstasy.

Kurt Rudolph notes that one finds a definite equivocation in certain Gnostic texts concerning figurations of corporeality.

It is sometimes difficult—for example in Mandean texts—to distinguish between individual and general statements about material and bodily existence: the body is described as a world (and therefore negatively) and the converse. The whole destiny of the world can be demonstrated in the figure of Adam, but so also can that of redemption.⁷⁵

We have already noted the import of the Hermetic Adam of the Pymander in the work of Ficino and Fludd. Leibniz himself held to the demiurgic capacities of human beings: “The mind not only has a perception of the works of God, but is even capable of producing something like them, though on a small scale.”⁷⁶ A similar notion to that of the Hermetic Adam reappears in the mythology of the Kabbalah.

The form of man contains all that is in heaven above and upon earth below, the superior as well as the inferior beings; it is for that reason that the Ancient of the Ancients has chosen it for His own. No form, no world could subsist before the human form, for it contains all things, and all that is, subsists only by virtue of it: without it there would be no world.⁷⁷

This is the Adam Kadmon that literally means “previous man,” or metaphysical “archetypal man.” Adam Kadmon is also referred to as Adam Eelo-o, the “high” or “celestial” man.⁷⁸ Frank characterizes the Celestial Man, the first divine manifestation, as “the absolute form of all that exists,” and directly associates it with the “Logos, or the Word.” Although Frank does not acknowledge it, Knorr von Rosenroth was probably the first to hold that the figure of Adam Kadmon was equivalent to the Logos.⁷⁹ Now, if logos means “pattern”—which is the meaning René Thom asserts Heraclitus assigned it—then it is not difficult to see that the Zohar ascribes to the figure of Adam Kadmon, and consequently the form of humankind, the Protagorean conclusion that “Man is the measure of all things.”

Similarly Gnostic texts see the macro/microcosmic couplet in terms of a gigantic anthropos. The Valentinian “Tripartite Tractate” describes the “aeon of Truth” as being “a unity and a multiplicity” that is “by way of analogy, like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into rivers and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root which extends into trees with branches and fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.”⁸⁰

These images of a spring from which flows a river and its tributaries or of the root from which grows a tree and its branches are essentially equivalents. They are all examples of the “emanation schema” that is, I would suggest, a fractal mnemonic. What is interesting in this example is the connection with the human body, a body seen as a system of bifurcations. This bifurcation set is also expounded in the Zohar.

From this we may reckon it so: One, is the source of the sea. A current comes from it making a revolution which is yod. The source is one, and the current makes two. Then is formed the vast basin known as the sea, which is like a channel dug into the earth and it is filled by the waters issuing from the source; and this sea is the third thing. This vast basin is divided up into seven channels, resembling that number of long tubes, and the waters go from the sea into the seven channels. Together the source, the current, the sea, and the seven channels make the number ten.⁸¹

As the word emanation itself etymologically intends, the sephiroth of the Kabbalah (in the above passage the “source,” “current,” “sea,” and “seven channels” are symbolic of the ten sephiroth) “flow out” from the Ein Sof, each an “intrinsic dimension of [God’s] being,”⁸² the entire process eventually (in point of fact the “process” is outside of time and space) crystallizing into ten sephiroth, each being functions of the deity’s continuing manifestation of his- or herself in the “Upper World.”

We discover the same imagery, indeed, almost the same examples, used in recent discussions of fractal mathematics. In a review of the work of Benoit Mandelbrot, Freeman Dyson notes that many phenomena in the world are best described by what is called their “fractal dimension,” a geometric dimension that obtains independent of scale: “Important examples from human anatomy are our vascular system (veins and arteries) and the bronchiole structure of our lungs. In the vegetable world we have trees, in the world of geography we have river networks and archipelagos, in astronomy we have the hierarchical clustering of stars and galaxies.”⁸³

Each of these differing phenomena exhibits fractal structure. This similarity of fractal structure leading from the interior to the exterior of the body and from the smallest plant to the greatest star clusters is an unusually audacious notion for contemporary science, indeed one may say that it is comparable in its audacity to Newton’s uncovering of the “universal” law of gravity that also encompasses everything from the atom to the farthest spiral galaxies. Mandelbrot himself states that fractals are but “mathematical and scientific implementations” of ideas expressed by Aristotle and Leibniz that “permeate our culture, and affect even those who think they are not subject to philosophical influences.”⁸⁴ Specifically, Mandelbrot mentions Leibniz’s belief in the “principle of continuity” that guaranteed the existence of a monadic “plenum.” Mandelbrot states that it was the idea of the plenum “that sat at the very core of this thought” and that explains “Leibniz’s haste to talk about fractional differentials.”⁸⁵

That which is contemporaneously called the fractal dimension is the bifuraction set observed to be associated with certain natural phenomena. It is associated with what I have called the “emanationist schema,” and is explicitly found at the center of Leibniz’s monadological worldview. It lies too behind the structure of the Kabbalistic and Zoharic figuration of the Tree of Life. I suggest that Leibniz discovered in the imagery of the Zoharic Kabbalah, and in particular the figuration of the Tree of Life described and imaged in Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbalah Denudata, confirmation of his theory of a universal structure composed of hierarchically ordered monadic substances.

I further suggest that one should think of this particular imagery of branching bifuractions in terms recommended by Guenther in his examination of Tantric imagery discussed in chapter 2, where “channels,” “drops,” and “motility” refer to the intelligential equivalents of pneumatic, somatic processes. All these figurations may be considered as relational terms within a communicative economy where soma deliquesces into thought itself—or rather into the great, participatory Thought (logos) that is imagined as the Hermetic kosmos. If we recall Fludd’s Hermetic alchemy in terms of the Zoharic quotation regarding the initial “yearning for completion” that is necessary for the supernal One to initiate this completion or “harmony,” we observe the appearance of the figuration of the mutual interpenetration of rays once again: an “impulse” comes from below (Fludd’s Hermetic alchemist initiating her or his “mental beam”) that is met by the One (in Fludd’s case, the Holy Ghost or anima mundi) moving to “meet” it.

In Lurianic Kabbalah particularly, the pneumatic mechanism of ecstasy served the purpose of a direct “linkup” with the continual process underpinning reality. As Fine notes the idea that terrestrial acts of religious observance and piety would have an effect on the deity thoroughly changes the idea of the deity’s autonomous, “alien” status.⁸⁶ God is no longer the overseer of history, but is rather ineluctably caught up in the process, his or her own being dependent on the good works of human beings. Yet the situation is more complicated than Fine admits, for the actions of human beings can only affect the sephirotic aspects of the Ein Sof, such that the situation resembles—again—that of a mirror: the actions, good or bad, of human beings are like the now-healthy, now-ill organs in a divine anthropos, the body of this anthropos consisting of the sephiroth (the organs) and their numerous connections (blood vessels? nerves?). Furthermore, just as the soul of a human being is that part that is not amenable to observation, that does not partake of “extension,” so the Ein Sof is the Unknowable, Unnamable^*90 aspect of God. (The name Ein Sof, which has the literal meaning of “infinite” or “without end,” unambiguously observes a continuously escaping attempt at denotation; the “endless” will always elude the bounds of human language.) Here again we should note the mystical equivalence of the divine and terrestrial nous/mens.

Unlike the philosophy of the medieval via negativa, however, wherein we also find the alien, unknowable deity, the Kabbalists had a means of participation in the nature of the Godhead. Through the union of ecstatic contemplation and the translative medium provided by the sephiroth, or divine emanations (the “fulgurations” of Leibniz), these thinkers were allowed occasional glimpses of the integrated structure—Logos, Adam Kadmon, Hermetic Adam, monadic plenum—that undergirds the kosmos.

The Kabbalistic imaginary of Adam Kadmon, of the various sephirotic nodes that constitute a kosmic corporeity, of the interconnections between them, of the canals and fonts that sustain this pneumatic system—all this was greatly contributory to both the Hermetic imaginary and Leibniz’s development of his monadological universe. The fact that similar figurations and the relationships they serve to articulate are found within the Kabbalistic, Gnostic, and Hermetic imaginaries would only have confirmed in Leibniz’s mind that he was “on the right track” in delineating a rational reconstruction of the phenomenal world that was undergirded by figurations derived from a metaphysical imaginary.

PNEUMATIC FIELDS

Leibniz, like many of his contemporaries, shared with Aristotle the refusal to believe in the existence of a void or vacuum. In his letter to Wagner (1710) we see that Leibniz associated the idea of a physical void with what he called the “metaphysical void” that would follow from the denial that God worked toward creating a universe made up of “perfections or forms.”⁸⁷ In place of a physical void, Leibniz saw a continuum of matter that proceeded from the smallest “animalcule” up to the genii, with humankind placed somewhere in the middle. This led to certain epistemological conclusions such as “all things in nature are analogous, and the subtile may be understood from the course, since both are constituted in the same way.”⁸⁸ The doctrine of the Book of Nature is thus reinvoked, but in terms of the scientific debate of his times.

Leibniz was well aware of the experiments of Guericke with his “Magdeburg spheres” and of Torricelli’s earlier efforts to experimentally prove the existence of a vacuum. In answer to this experimental evidence, Leibniz sides with the Cartesians and diehard Aristotelians in asserting that—in the case of Torricelli’s glass tube filled with mercury—the space at the top of the tube is actually filled with “rays of light, magnetic rays, and other very fine sorts of matter” that are able to pass through the “fine pores” in the glass.⁸⁹ Today we would find it difficult to associate imagery such as magnetic and solar rays with the concept of “fine matter,” but for Leibniz these were but modes of the one underlying substratum. Like the Cartesians, Leibniz postulated the existence of a plenum as opposed to a void, and when Torricelli demonstrated that light was transmitted through an artificially created vacuum, Leibniz and others countered that the rays were transmitted by virtue of this plenum. For these thinkers the notion that movement could be conserved without some sort of transmitting medium was inconceivable. By the nineteenth century the difficulties of reconciling the “action at a distance” implied by Newton’s theory of universal gravitation with a science that sought to rid itself of “occult qualities” led to the almost axiomatic acceptance of the concept of the “luminiferous aether.”

The origin of the idea of the aether is often traced to William Gilbert’s De Magnete (1600). In his “Causes and Forces in Sixteenth-Century Physics” William Wallace places Gilbert within a tradition “decidedly under Platonic influences” that includes such luminaries as Bernadino Telesio, Johannes Kepler, and William Gilbert. Wallace calls this tradition the “anima mundi tradition.”⁹⁰

Gilbert ascribed the influence of the magnet or lodestone to “effluvia,” a term that recalls both the atomist’s conception of eidola and the Hermetic conviction (explicitly described by Alkitab and Synesius) that all objects irradiate a field of causal interactivity. In book 5, part 12 of De Magnete Gilbert titles the chapter, “The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while that is united to an organic body.” In support of his view that the loadstone was animate, Gilbert recalls the Classical belief that the agent behind motive force was the soul: “For they deemed that not without a divine and animate nature could movements so diverse be produced, such vast bodies revolve in fixed times, or potencies so wonderful be infused into other bodies; whereby the whole world blooms with most beautiful diversity through this primary form of the globes themselves.”⁹¹

He notes that philosophers from Thales to the Neoplatonists “seek in the world a certain universal soul, and declare the whole world to be endowed with a soul.” He is aware that Aristotle allows that the “spheres and heavenly orbs” have souls “for the reason that they are capable of circular motion and action.”⁹² Though Gilbert may not have been aware of it, this idea was expanded on by both Proclus and Plotinus to include the notion that the shape of the human soul itself was spherical,^*91 an idea that would no doubt have delighted him as he called his lodestones Terrella (“little earths”), believing that they similarly embodied the magnetic activities of the Earth and other celestial bodies. He recalls that “Hermes, Zoroaster, Orpheus, recognise a universal soul. As for us, we deem the whole world animate, and all globes, all stars and this glorious earth too, we hold to be from the beginning by their own destinate souls governed.”⁹³

Clearly Gilbert equated magnetic forces with the anima mundi. His effluvia also recall both Arabic and Kabbalistic and Hermetic conceptions of the presence of a vast network of pneumatic rays enveloping the Earth. This radiation is described in a significant passage in the Zohar.

Now there are stars in the heavens which have emerged from that firmament to which all the stars are attached. In that firmament there are one hundred latticed windows. . . . At each window there is one star. And when the sun passes by these windows and lattices in the firmament he sends out flashing rays, and the stars catch up these rays. . . . The stars which shine by night mingle with those that proceed from that firmament and they sparkle and shine, ruling over the elements in this world.⁹⁴

The “latticed windows” each with its own star recall contemporary figurations of “fields of force,” a lattice composed of (Faraday’s) “lines of force,” or tensional points: at each window there is one star. It is also a clear description of some manner of celestial “grid.” Elsewhere in the Zohar we find a text describing the “three souls belonging to the celestial grades,” one of which is a certain “soul of all souls, inscrutable and unknowable. . . . Everything is dependent upon it, and it is veiled in a covering of exceeding brightness. It drops pearls which are linked together like the joints of the body, and it enters into them and displays through them its energy. It and they are one and there is no separation between them.”⁹⁵

The “soul of souls” (a figuration equivalent to the anima mundi) is the supervenient principle from which the individuated “pearls” (i.e., scintillating spheres) depend, their interconnection represented by the harmony observed in the constitution of a body. This passage recalls Averroës conception of Aristotle’s nous poetikos as a single continuous corporeity and is strikingly similar to Leibniz’s monadic conception of the Real. It should also be noted that Simone Luzzatto, a nineteenth-century commentator on the Kabbalah, in his Discorso circo il stato de l’ Hebrei, thought that this intermediary “soul of souls” was the equivalent of the Neoplatonic “astral body.”⁹⁶ We should note again the equivalence figured between an all-encompassing anima mundi and its localizations in the form of monadic subtle corporeities.

According to my vertigral reading therefore, while Gilbert certainly was the first to introduce into the scientific parlance of the seventeenth century an idea that would eventually reappear as Faraday’s magnetic “lines of force,” the figuration was already inherent in Hermetic physics. And judging by his familiarity with the anima mundi we can be assured, I think, that Gilbert was also cognizant of its “extended,” causal nature.

The figuration of the anima mundi is arguably first encountered in Plato’s Timaeus. We are told that the Demiurge created the universe and

in the centre he put a soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also the exterior environment of it; and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god.⁹⁷

An alternative translation of this section of the text has it that the demiurge “set soul in the midst [of the body of the universe] and spread her through all its body and even wrapped the body round with her from without.”⁹⁸ Also this soul was “woven in everywhere and encompassed it round from without, and having her movement in herself she began a divine beginning of endless and reasonable life for ever.”⁹⁹ This latter rendering of the passage more clearly delineates the resemblance of the figuration of the anima mundi to that of contemporary ideas of a physical field: it is “woven” into the fabric of the universe, the warp and weft of the pneumatic threads producing the image of the grid of a force field. We should notice too the image of a spherical universe (inherent in both the contemporary big bang cosmological theory and Einstein’s idea of the universe as the hypersurface of a hypersphere) and its relationship to an ultimately spherical (because it is “soul matter”) anima mundi. The idea that the anima mundi has her movement “within her-self ” is particularly important when we come to consider the resonance of these ideas with the thought of Leibniz.

In his extended correspondence with the Newtonian scientist and natural theologian Samuel Clarke, Leibniz, among many other points of dispute, particularly objects to Newton’s famous description in his “General Scholium” of space as the sensorium of God. Leibniz considers Newton’s concept of space as a kind of hegemonikon of sensory information to be equivalent to the ancient concept of the anima mundi: “If ’tis by means of a sensorium that God perceives what passes in the world; it seems that things act upon him; and that therefore he is what we mean by a soul of the world.”¹⁰⁰ This idea of a anima mundi is for Leibniz tantamount to making God in man’s image, for God then acts “by a kind of perception, such as that by which men fancy our soul perceives what passes in the body. This is a degrading of God’s knowledge very much.”¹⁰¹

Leibniz rejects the idea that the universe is like the body of the deity—a concept, it should be noted, that is equivalent to the functioning of the Kabbalistic figure of Adam Kadmon—on the grounds that this imposes inconceivable/unconscionable limits on the being of God. This is not because the notion that the universe is an astronomically extended sensory system implies some sort of time-boundedness to the “accessing of information” on God’s part (similar to the worldly lot of human beings), but because it necessarily implies that God created an imperfect world that has to be supervised and occasionally “fixed up.” Leibniz’s God is not a “tinkerer,” but a being whose work is always already accomplished: the “best of all possible worlds,” as he so famously noted. Leibniz’s universe is a world of “perfections and forms” as he states, for the idea that God would have created a world that is in any way less than he could have seems monstrous to him.

Leibniz ultimately rejected the concept of the anima mundi (at least in its new incarnation as the sensorium) as it implied for him the idea of the perpetuity of the presence of God in his creation. As the “supreme monad” the deity was of a qualitatively different order to that of lesser monads, and as a monad he was removed from all others, a deus absconditus rather than an ever-present tremendum. For this reason Leibniz rejected any idea that saw lesser monads finally reunited with the source of creation. In his New Essays he states his position as being against the “Averroists and certain pernicious Quietists, who picture an absorption and reunion of the soul with the ocean of Divinity, a notion whose impossibility is perhaps shown up by my system alone.”¹⁰²

It is his system of monadic substances that, he believes, rationally precludes any actual contact with the deity. For Leibniz there could be no one universal anima mundi, but rather an infinity of hierarchically ordered individual anima (monads). But while Leibniz held that the deity was not actually present in the universe, he was certainly immanent in the monadic system.

Many contemporary thinkers attribute to Leibniz the earliest inklings of what physicists today call a “field.”¹⁰³ It should be clear by now that I am suggesting that the imagery of the field was already inherent in both the figuration of an anima mundi and its more “secular” equivalent, the aether. While the similarity of the aether to that of (Maxwell’s) field of force is probably not too controversial, the “backdating” of the connection with Hermetic and Kabbalistic figurations certainly may be seen to be. Specifically I want to suggest that the Hermetic doctrine of a field of causal influence is the intellectual and figural forebear of contemporary physical notions, and with but a little reduction in poetic phraseology we find striking descriptions of something that any contemporary physicist would recognize.

Without doubt the Hermetic conception of the anima-field has close associations with the Stoic pneuma. As physicist and historian of science Samuel Sambursky states outright, the pneuma was the forerunner of the modern concept of a field of force.¹⁰⁴ It has tensional properties akin to the modern conception, and Neoplatonic interpretations strongly associated the pneuma with the Platonic conception of the relational nature of physical space. The fourth-century Syrianus wrote of space, “It is an interval with its own specific distinctions derived from the various orders of the soul and the illumination of the creative forms. It appropriates the various bodies and, with respect to one element, makes itself the proper place of fire . . . and, with respect to another, the proper place of earth.¹⁰⁵ We see here the hieratic view of space as systemic relationship rather than a void in which bodies juggle for position. Motion and rest (later, “force” and “inertia” in Newtonian mechanical corpuscularianism) were not the proprietary functions of bodies in themselves, but the effects of the geometry of relationships within the space-field at any given moment. Syrianus and others easily combined the activities of the harmonizing world soul of the Timaeus with this—surprisingly modern—natural physics. Broadly characterized, Leibniz conceived of force as the product of “soul-energy,” a curiously pre-Galilean conception.^*92 Leibniz’s spermatic characterization of monads, along with his more explicit statements concerning the vis viva, indicate that he saw an immanent scintilla of the deity in all matter.^†93

Einstein’s biographer Abraham Pais points out, “As Einstein saw it, Maxwell’s introduction of the field concept was a revolutionary advance which, however, did not go far enough.”¹⁰⁶ He believed further that all references to the Newtonian world picture “should be eradicated.” In 1931 Einstein wrote:

Since Maxwell’s time, physical reality has been thought of as [being] represented by continuous fields, governed by partial differential equations, and not capable of any mechanical interpretation. . . . It must be confessed that the complete realization of the program contained in this idea has so far by no means been attained. The successful physical systems that have been set up since then represent rather a compromise between these two programs [Newton’s and Maxwell’s], and it is precisely this character of compromise that stamps them as temporary and logically incomplete.¹⁰⁷

Of course, the other program that Einstein insisted was necessarily “temporary and incomplete” was the field/corpuscle discontinuity, the trigger for Bohr’s “complementarity” thesis. It seems clear that for Einstein the mathematical equivalent of space-time was the concept of the field. Mathematically, space-time is imagined as the system of coordinate geometry that allows one to map an event. As a consequence of the grid of coordinates representing time and space, an “event” becomes extended into a “time line” occupying four rather than three spatial dimensions. Any point in this four-dimensional “search space” becomes the “point mass” of contemporary physics, a geometrized matter. This is the logical development of Newton’s concept of mass in the formula, force = mass × acceleration. Newton’s mass recalls the geometrized matter of Plato’s Timaeus rather than the “Aristotelian” mass of Galileo, for example. This latter is much closer to the “naive” sense of mass (weight) that is derived from its etymological root, the Greek massein, “to knead,” i.e., an unformed mass, like bread waiting to be shaped.

The ultimate status of the “field” in contemporary physics is still undecided. Most scientists will say that it is none of their business to enquire as to its ontological status—all that matters for the moment is that use of (the mathematical description of) the field continues to yield results. Faraday thought that his “lines of force” were invisible strings of matter surrounding objects; Lorentz held that the properties of a field were actually a particular state of the aether, a nonmechanical (non-Newtonian) substance. Einstein rejected the idea of the aether entirely, considering the concept of the field to be an irreducible element of physical description, a geometrized property of space-time.

With Einstein the ontological status of “geometry” achieved a renewed emphasis. The mere fact that the curvature of space-time accounted for the effects of the gravitational field was enough to encourage him to consider a “unified field theory” in which the forces of gravity and electromagnetism would be reconciled under a single theory. The significance of this is that Einstein hoped that one day physical science would provide a single description for all phenomena: all forces would be reduced to one force, and all bodies would become mere vortices in the aether/field. It is clear too, based on the evidence of his previous theories, that Einstein thought that this single description would be a geometrical description.

We should remember too that Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity were not, in the final analysis, about events in space-time, but about relationships. This way of thinking about the world is reminiscent of the Hermetic worldview in which, at the most fundamental level of description, a vast set of interconnected relationships characterized the pneumatic economy. This emphasis on relationships is the result of looking at the phenomenal in terms of geometry. As I have previously stated, it is possible to think of geometry as being fundamentally about relationships between immaterial elements, and not about any particular figure that may be instantiated by pen and paper. That is, geometry somehow encapsulates the logos-patterns in nature, and is not just a historically (and humanly) constructed set of axioms and postulates, images and diagrams. It is his emphasis on the relational that closely links Einstein’s thought with that of Leibniz, and through this latter, with the hieratic conception of space articulated within the Hermetic imaginary.

René Thom more recently proposed a further modification of the concept of the field organization of matter. In a manner that I propose is not that far removed from Einstein’s project of finding a unified field theory, Thom considers that “we might look upon all living phenomena as manifestations of a geometric object, the life field (champ vital), similar to the gravitational or electromagnetic field; living beings would then be particles or structurally stable singularities of this field.”¹⁰⁸

Singularities in a field—this figuration appears remarkably often in the literature describing the long-lived history of “atoms and the void.” The late nineteenth-century scientist Lasswitz described the fundamental status of the atom as being “a mobile portion of space whose geometrical parts are at rest in relation to each other.”¹⁰⁹ As Meyerson notes, matter thereby becomes “nothing by [sic] hypostatized space, since . . . it has no other property than spatial magnitude.”¹¹⁰

This is not far at all from Leibniz’s picture of space as completely filled with a “homogenous matter, fluid and incompressible . . . capable of whirling motions [to which] are due all the phenomena of the sensible world.”¹¹¹ Meyerson goes on to point out the unmistakable analogy between Leibniz’s conceptions and the “vortex atoms” of Helmholtz and Thompson. It is this relationship, this way of picturing the operations of the field in terms of an omnipresent medium and its localizations, that is structurally equivalent to that operating between the anima mundi and living beings in the Hermetic conception of things. There is an unmistakable figural and conceptual continuity that spans the historical gap between the Platonic receptacle and Lucretian void and the “vortex atoms” of Leibniz, Helmholtz, and Thompson. This structural continuity is even more evident in the remarkable similarity between Thom’s figural description of the relationship between the champ vital and its singularities and the Hermetic conception of the anima mundi and its psyche localizations. According to my vertigral reading of this continuity, we are observing the morphological adaptations of a single ideal object that operates similarly over apparently divergent discourses. This ideal object is figured in the circle and its bindu, the sphere and its center: Deus est sphaera cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi.

Writing before Rutherford’s modification of Thompson’s conception of the atom,^*94 Meyerson would no doubt be further convinced that the proposition of the existence of the atom is a product of the insistence of a metaphysical imaginary rather than an empirical fact if he could have encountered a very recent scientific idea. Recently physicist David Bohm has asserted that “atoms” are but temporary vortices in a field he calls the “implicate order.” Bohm’s conception is essentially a modification (some would say a hyperbolic modification) of Einstein’s idea that a field is spread continuously throughout space. A “particle” (electron, photon, etc.) in this field, according to Bohm, is like the formation of a vortex in a fluid: “Within this fluid there is a recurrent, stable pattern. You may abstract it in your mind as a vortex, though there is no vortex. There is nothing but a flowing pattern of water. But a vortex is a convenient word to describe that pattern.”¹¹²

If two vortices come close together, they will interfere with each other, creating a different pattern, and if they come too close they will eventually become a single vortex. From this Bohm concludes that “there is an inherent interaction of these patterns, but the basic reality is unbroken wholeness in flowing movement. Separate entities such as vortices, are relatively constant and independently behaving forms abstracted by the mind from the whole in perception and thought.”¹¹³

For Bohm this abstraction of stabilities from the unbroken flow is not an unavoidable propensity of the human mind, rather it is a way of looking forced on it by history. The fact that science uses a Newtonian representative system of mathematics and proceeds by an analysis of quantities rather than qualities is entirely contingent upon historical factors. Science does not have to proceed in this manner. For Bohm the concept of a “deep” field (which he calls the “implicate order”) and its recurrent singularities is the first step in beginning to reconceptualize the aims and merit of the scientific project.

Bohm’s talk of deep flow and recurrent patterns, his Lucretian locutions and Heraclitean figurations (process as a flow or river) are strongly reminiscent of the imagery of René Thom. In regard to his concept of the “life field” Thom says that the question of the “ultimate nature of this field” is “ultimately a metaphysical one.”¹¹⁴ I suggest that this applies to all conceptions of the field as used in contemporary science, for all are morphological variations of the one ideal object—the anima mundi.

Interestingly, Meyerson himself seems to have come to a very similar conclusion in regard to the nineteenth-century conception of the aether and atoms. He finds it remarkable that scientists such as Tait, Thompson, and Helmholtz should have erected such a monumental edifice on such paltry experimental evidence: “It is surprising that these theories have had such considerable success, and, still more astonishing, that their authors have been able to be deceived about their value; this fact alone would make us suspect the presence of some secret propensity of the human mind.”¹¹⁵ (my italics)

A little later, following a thorough analysis of the concepts of the luminiferous aether, matter, and space he concludes that “these conceptions are so contradictory that they could only have arisen, just like that of the corpuscular atom, at the command of an a priori tendency”¹¹⁶

Meyerson does not hypothesize about the cause of this “secret propensity of the human mind,” this a priori tendency that seems to force its figurations on the minds of contemporary scientists, but he strongly advocates the metaphysical origins of physical notions and demonstrates them to be influenced by figurations that can have no possible experimental verification. My reading of the history of the field concept comes to similar conclusions regarding the organizing influence, and continuity of, the Hermetic imaginary on these scientific figurations and notions. Whatever the particular historical explanation of the field concept, and whatever ontological status (or lack of one) it is accorded, one thing is certain: while Leibniz may have been the first to have an inkling of its future importance, the idea of a luciform intermediary is both more ancient and more vertigral than an orthodox reading of the history of scientific imagination is prepared to admit.

CONCLUSION

In place of the Lucretian/Newtonian attempt to picture the world from an objective position, Leibniz pursued his description in terms of differing “modes” or perspectives. On one level a monad (an infinite unity) is a metaphysical conception, on another level it is the abstract description of “force,” and on yet another it is that behind the phenomenal perception of bodies, which are merely aggregates of monads. This is a rational (for Leibniz this is equivalent to the Hermetic conception of rationality) reconstruction of the Real, and the varying levels of description are linked together in the perspectival field of one monad or soul: that of Leibniz himself. This was Leibniz’s contribution to the panpsychic hypothesis. All activity, all processes in the world were the result of what he called “perception”: “The passing condition, which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unit or in the simple substance, is nothing but what is called Perception.”¹¹⁷

Thus all “forces” and all activity are the result of the perceptions of monads, and everything, according to this description, is alive to the degree of the keenness of its perceptions. Therefore a stone (for example) appears non-sentient to us merely because the perceptions of its aggregate monads are primitive and “unconscious” compared to those of higher monadic aggregates. Stones have a differing consciousness to our own.

For Leibniz there was no “real” relationship between monads—no relationship of proximity or exchange of influence. Each saw the world from its own perspective, “mirrored” the world as he so famously asserted. The relationship between monads is therefore of an “ideal” nature, and this relationship is what we call the world.

Just as two paintings could be of a precisely similar object but in a different perspective, without this being necessarily a matter of their actually being of any same thing or of any actual thing at all (without, that is, their painters having been depicting the same actually encountered things, or even any such things at all), so two monads are related as being of the same world, without there being any world they are of, except as quite specific represented object.¹¹⁸

While this inarguably metaphysical conception of individuals and the world they inhabit may seem preposterous to the twenty-first-century scientific mind, such a resolutely “subjectivist” starting point for a complete description of the physical world is certainly one solution to reimagining the status of the epistemic project in our century. And, rather surprisingly, it is not without its parallels in contemporary science.

David Bohm uses the analogy of the perspective of two differently positioned video cameras to describe the observation of the interactions of subatomic particles. The purpose of his analogy is to explain certain peculiarities of quantum phenomena. Bohm states that a study of the implications of quantum theory reveals that the analysis of an experimental system into a “set of independently existent but interacting particles breaks down in a radically new way” and that consequently “the particles have to be taken as literally projections of a higher-dimensional reality which cannot be accounted for in terms of any force of interaction between them.”¹¹⁹ In other words, classical notions of locality and causality have to be thrown out the window.

Bohm’s analogy imagines two video cameras set up at different angles to observe a fish tank. The two cameras feed their images into two separate monitors in another room. If one observed the monitors one would notice certain types of phenomena. First, one would apprehend that there exists a relationship between the images. If we look at a fish (or a number of them) on the monitors we will see that even though the fish on the two screens look different, when one fish moves in one monitor there will be a corresponding movement on the other screen, but perhaps in another direction. There appears to be, therefore, a correlation between the different elements on both screens. Bohm suggests that this is precisely what happens in regard to the famous EPR paradox of quantum mechanics. I do not want to go into the details of this paradox, as it will suffice to know that it maintains a noncausal, nonlocal relationship operating between subatomic particles. As in his analogy, the reason that apparently different particles, separated in space and with no possible proximate influence, can seem nonetheless to be causally related is because they are in reality the same object “projected” by a higher-dimensional space.

Unlike Sprigge’s analogy (see here) of the two paintings with regard to Leibniz’s perspectival monads, Bohm’s analogy does not make a distinction between “ideal” and “real” relations, but rather inserts them within a more inclusive higher-dimensional continuum. This solution is, I would maintain, strikingly similar to Leibniz’s own conception of the “ideal” interaction of monads. Inherent in Leibniz’s conception of the monad is the “blindness” (a result of the relative degree of their “perceptions”) of some monads in regard to some actual but unperceived aspects of the world. Human beings cannot conceive of the world in the manner of the genii, for example. The genii are higher on the Great Chain, and this means that they are possessed of keener perceptions than those below. We observe here a variant on Plato’s fable of the cave, and particularly Hinton’s explication in terms of fourth-dimensional realities.

And what, in the end, is to be gained by excluding from the outset the notion that all matter can in some way be considered “alive,” that all existents have perceptions and are interrelated by virtue of these very apperceptions? Poincaré conceived of Thompson’s electron as a “singular point in the ether,”¹²⁰ a geometric abstraction from a greater luminiferous continuity. How far is this from Bohm’s conception of subatomic particles being projections of a higher-dimensional “wholeness”? Leibniz was certainly an adherent of the atomistic view of material interaction, yet he did not thereby exclude the idea that atoms/monads were alive. For Leibniz each monad was the source of its own motive force or power; it was not a “dead,” passive object in the Laplacian “billiard ball” description of reality. As Charles Hartshorne succinctly notes:

The Leibnizian distinction between active singulars and seemingly inactive composites whose active singulars escape our sensory detection, taken in conjunction with modern physics and biology, is showing ever more clearly that the concept of mere insentient matter plays no role in explaining the world. We can abstract from whatever sentience may be there, but the denial that it is there adds nothing to the explanatory power of our science.¹²¹

On the experimental evidence provided by the observation of quantum phenomena one suggests that a truly open theoretical physics cannot afford to reduce the world wholly to the interactions stipulated by the materialist/mechanical thesis. Quite plainly there is a level of explanation missing. My vertigral examination of the influence of the Hermetic imaginary suggests that while contemporary science has availed itself of certain persistent figurations provided by this imaginary, it has so far refused to accept the logical import of the worldview Hermeticism proposes. In this regard, Antoine Faivre has recognized that the Gnostics and Hermeticists asked perhaps the most fundamental of all scientific questions: What is the relationship between mind and nature? He adds, “When microphysicists and astrophysicists pose this same question, they seem to take up and rediscover, in a different language, the hypotheses or ideas that previously belonged to some religious traditions.”¹²²

Here Faivre is clearly (and imaginatively) alluding to the intellectually symmetrical relationship between the micro/macrocosmic relation and the two extremes of physical exploration. As stated in the opening section of this chapter, no description of the phenomenal world can possibly be considered complete without a theory of the interpenetrative subjectivity of all matter (as held by both Fludd and Leibniz in their own way), a notion that was at the very heart of Hermetic physics. I think that it is perhaps time both to recognize the continuing guiding influence of the Hermetic imaginary and to reinvent Hermetically influenced conceptualizations that may similarly help us in the development of a future natural philosophy.