Abstract

“It is well-known that language is a mirror of the intellect”: On Leibniz’ Monadological Conception of Language Leibniz’ interest in language is characterized by a tension. Anticipating many strands of later formal logic, on the one hand, he is centrally involved in the rationalist project of a universal language that would replace historically developed languages in all their ambivalences and inconsistencies by the mathematical formalism of a characteristica universalis (so that, as Leibniz concisely puts, humanity once would reach a stage at which problems of linguistic misunderstanding could be solved by a method of calculation). On the other hand, however, Leibniz emphasizes the both philosophical and political importance of national languages – and he is equally engaged, as one of the first German philosophers, in fostering the study of their complex history, their origins, and their etymologies. Whilst these two aspects, at first sight, seem to be at odds with each other, in Leibniz’ complex systematic conception they rather are internally connected. Accordingly, as a famous passage has it, Leibniz understands language not as an obstacle to rationality but as “a mirror of the intellect.” Instead of putting forward the conception of an abstract rationalism, Leibniz understands languages, insofar, as an irreducible and constitutive medium, as, in his terminology, an “expression” of rational thinking and the systematic unity of its logical rules. The present contribution aims (i) to clarify this connection by focusing on the monadological structure of Leibniz’ systematic conception (as published in his Monadologie). Monads, for Leibniz, are “living mirrors” of the entire universe that, as such, are constitutively determined by their worldly perspectives and the specific and concrete forms they have as being situated in the world. Instead of excluding each other, rationality and sensibility, for Leibniz, insofar, rather belong intrinsically together. Apart from overcoming the problem of dualism with which Cartesianism as the dominant paradigm of rationalism before Leibniz (by which one of Leibniz’ most popular students, Christian Wolff, is still influenced in his early Disquisitio philosophica de loquela) is confronted (as well as, later on, Kantianism), this systematic conception turns out to be a very original position of a philosophy of language, which, not least, lays the ground for later speculative strands of thinking about language in Post-Kantian German Idealism (– the term ‘speculative,’ following Leibniz, hereby precisely refers to the constitutively linguistic metaphor of ‘mirror’). Of particular interest (ii) are also the political-moral implications of this systematic conception: As well as rationality, within this model, has to express itself in language, language cannot be reduced to a merely historical or national particularity. As, in Leibniz, the per se irreducible plurality of languages goes systematically together with universality and, therefore, the possibility of universal communication and the constitution of a supra-national unity, this conception avoids the deadlock of a nationalistic understanding of language (with which later romantic and historicist conceptions, such as in Herder or in Arndt, indeed, are confronted). Rationality has to express and manifest, to embody itself in language. But instead of being caught in language and its Volksgeist, thinking rather necessitates its ongoing translation and interpretative transformation in new and other languages, hereby constituting a more and more complex, interconnected universalising texture. Keywords: Expression, Logic, Monadology, Rationality, Sensibility, Translation, Universality. Authors: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; with some references particularly to Christian Wolff and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Walter Benjamin.