The Invisible Book
Thousands of our readers have been clamoring to know when to expect our next article on Leibniz. Well, we didn’t plan to have one until a week from Tuesday, but what’s the difference — he’s a long time gone.
Since our exhaustive explication of Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus was greeted with such hoots of derision (we added wrong), this time we’ll stick to biographical matters.
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Gottfried Leibniz was Europe’s great man of learning (and the model for Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss), a pedestal like that occupied by Isaac Newton in 17th century England or Albert Einstein 300 years later. His patron was the Hanoverian Duke Georg Ludwig in lower Saxony, who by treaty was soon to become King George of Great Britain and Ireland. Looking ahead to the public relations requirements of that post, the Duke asked Leibniz to assemble a family tree of the Hanovers back through Otto of Brunswick and, if possible, to the Guelph dynasty in Lombardy around the year 1000.
Most court philosophers would know how to toss off such an undertaking in a month or so with a list of legendary forebears, each festooned with heroic deeds such as winning crucial battles or, as youths, killing four bears. The key to winning the court’s gratitude and a fat raise would be the lavish ensconcement of such materials on uterine vellum bound in gold-trimmed leather and velvet and magnificently illustrated.
Not Leibniz. He became convinced that the royal line should be traced clear back to the Holy Roman Empire and, to lay the groundwork for that, should begin with a complete history of the earth and of each of its nations and its language.
That takes time. Understandably, the Duke grew impatient and began to complain about Leibniz’s “invisible book.” By the time the Duke ascended the English throne, the genealogy was thirty years overdue, so when the new king and his entourage departed for London, they left Leibniz behind.
The book was finally published in two splendid volumes in 1750 — 74 years after it had been commissioned and long after both its writer and its subject had moved on. Even then, it turned out that Leibniz’s genealogy had got only as far as the year 1005, still mired in the Guelphs, stopping 700 years short of his patron’s reign.
If Leibniz had trouble meeting deadlines, it may be because – in a devastating critique of Newton – he had argued that space and time had no fundamental reality but, rather, were mere properties of the objects that Newton and everyone else saw as located in space and time.
It’s a more erudite excuse than ‘the dog ate my homework,’ but few employers accept it even today, after relativity and quantum mechanics.
As they say in newsrooms and in the piranha tanks of academic publishing, “Don’t get it right; get it written.”