Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord, and: Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (review)

476 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY David E. Mungello. Leibniz and Confucianism: The Searchfor Accord. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977. Pp. xii + 200. $10.00. G. W. Leibniz. Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese. Trans. Henry Rosemont, Jr. and Daniel J. Cook. Monograph of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. no. 4. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977. Pp. xi + 187. $5.00, paper Despite the fact that Leibniz's interest in things Chinese was enduring enough to persist from before 1690 to his death in 1716 and intense enough to lead him to believe that "human cultivation and refinement" were concentrated in only two places, Europe and "'Tschina," that interest has been passingly noted rather than intensively studied. The two volumes under review thus constitute a significant addition to the Leibnlz literature. Completed with full knowledge of each other (each refers to the other in its bibliography), the two are exemplary complements, the second presenting the text most central to the first. For the student of Leibniz, Mungello offers a number of valuable disquisitions: on Leibniz's sources for knowledge of China, on his understanding of Chinese thought and the uses to which he hoped to put it, and on probable reasons for his failure. Based on scholarship in Chinese as well as in the appropriate Western languages, his book gives balanced views of Leibniz's dependence upon but critical distance from the missionary situanon in China; the philosopher's religious and d~plomatic motivations in seeking rudiments of a universal, natural, and in some sense "Christian" religion and metaphysics within Confucianism; and the effects both those motivations and his underlying philosophic Pythagoreanism had upon the formulations at which he finally arrived. It was this Pythagoreanism, of course, which welded together his interests in Chinese as a possible universal language, in the hexagrams of the 1Ching as a binary calculus, and tn the elements he found to be both rationahstic and religious in Confucian metaphysics. Mungello's subject matter forces him to take Leibniz's religious sennments and theological interests seriously, as against secularizing interpreters like Russell. The same subject matter, however, forces him away from such theologizing interpreters as Kroner and Schmalenbach, since he sees Leibniz's crucial failure to understand Chinese thought to lie in his taking spiritual cultivation to be synonymous with intellectual cultivation. This was, of course, a common weakness in Leibniz's age; Mungello even suggests that it may be more generally a characterisnc of the West, one that limits attempts to achieve philosophic accord with China: Though his mtennons seem sufficiently genuine, he was obviously no religious sage, as the fadure of the rehglous sideof his phdosophy amply confirms. Yet by most Western criteria, he could bejudged a genius. The importance of analyzing this judgment m such detail lies in the possibihty of what u m~ghttell us about ourselves. , our mability and perhaps our reluctance to judge his spmtual achievements may reflect our own weakness as well as his (P. 128) The other volume under review presents the first Enghsh translation of a 14,000-word discourse in French that Lelbniz wrote, in his seventieth year (1716), to Nicholas de Resmond, as a response to two works on Chinese religion by Catholic missionaries. Therein he discusses, in light of his own vtews of God, preestablished harmony, entelechy, substances, and binary notation, a number of items in Chinese thought he found to be analogous, presenting along the way his own mature methods of argument and demonstration. The translation seems to have been done with care, with ample notes identifying indwiduals and giving and explaining terms and references not only in Chinese but in Western theology and in Leibniz's own philosophy. The forty-page introduction covers more tersely some of the same questions of sources, and so on, given more extensively in Mungello, but adds, m small compass, a remarkably rich overview of "the Chinese intellectual tradition" and those of its classics central to Leibniz's discussion, most useful for the reader largely innocent of Sinology. Both volumes contain adequate indexes, useful bibliographies, and footnotes that present a great BOOK REVIEWS 477 deal of historical and explanatory material. In addition, the...