On Leibniz: Expanded Edition

5. Leibniz and the Concept of a System

106 1. The Concept of a System The aim of this essay is to examine the role of the systems concept in Leibniz’s thinking. It addresses the questions, Whence did Leibniz obtain the idea of system? How did he develop it? What sort of role did it play in his philosophy? While the underlying idea of what we nowadays call a “system” of knowledge was certainly alive in classical antiquity—with the Euclidean systematization of geometry providing a paradigm for this conception—actual use of the term “system” in this connection is of relatively recent date. In fact, as we shall shortly see, Leibniz was the first thinker to describe himself as having a system of philosophy and to attribute the possession of one to others. To be sure, the underlying idea of a cognitive system unquestionably goes back to classical antiquity. In fact, it has been insisted throughout the history of Western philosophy that men do not genuinely know something unless this knowledge is actually systematic. Plato’s thesis in the Theaetetus that a known fact must have a logos (rationale), Aristotle’s insistence in the Posterior Analytics that strict (scientific) knowledge is a fact about the world calls for its accounting in causal terms, the Scholastic analysis of scientia, Spino­ za’s celebration of what he designates as the second and third kinds of knowledge (in bk. II of the Ethics and elsewhere), all instantiate the common, fundamental idea that what is genuinely known is known in terms of its systematic footing within the larger setting of a rationale-providing framework of explanatory order. The root idea of system is that of structure or organi-  5 Leibniz and the Concept of a System Leibniz and the concept of a system  107 zation, of integration into an orderly whole that functions as an “organic” unity. And a specifically cognitive system is to encompass these desiderata with respect to our knowledge. A cognitive system is to provide a framework for linking the disjecta mem­ bra of the bits and pieces of our knowledge into a cohesive unity. A cognitive system is to be a structured body of information, one that is organized in accordance with taxonomic and explanatory principles that link this information into a rationally coordinated whole. The functional categories governing this organizational venture are those of understanding, explanation, and cognitive rationalization. From antiquity to Hegel and beyond, cognitive theoreticians have embraced this ancient ideal that our knowledge should be developed architectonically and should be organized within an articulated structure that exhibits the linkages binding its component parts into an integrated whole and leaves nothing wholly isolated and disconnected. But while the concept of cognitive systematization is very old, the term “system” itself was not used in this sense until much later. In ancient Greek, systēma (from syn-histēmi, “to [make to] stand together”) originally meant something joined together—a connected or composite whole. The term figures in Greek antiquity to describe a wide variety of composite objects— flocks of animals, medications, military formations, organized governments, poems, musical configurations, among others.1 Its technicalization began with the Stoics, who applied it specifically to the physical universe (systēma mundi)—the composite cosmos encompassing “heaven and earth.”2 But the term continued in use throughout classical texts in its very general ordinary sense (which it shared with terms like syntagma arid syntaxis). The Renaissance gave the term a renewed currency. At first it functioned here too in its ancient applications in its broad sense of a generic composite . But in due course it came to be adopted by Protestant theologians of the sixteenth century to stand specifically for the comprehensive exposition of the articles of faith, along the lines of a medieval summa: a doctrinal compendium.3 By the early years of the seventeenth century, the philosophers had borrowed the term “system” from the theologians, using it to stand for a synoptically comprehensive and connected treatment of a philosophical discipline: logic, rhetoric, metaphysics, ethics, and so forth.4 (It was frequently employed 108 Leibniz and the concept of a system in this descriptive sense in the title of expository books.)5 And thereafter the use of the term was generalized in the early seventeenth century to apply to such a synoptic treatment of any discipline whatever.6 This post-Renaissance redeployment of the term system had a far-reaching signi...