The best of all possible worlds is not the biblical one. God created the world in seven days. In seven days, Michael Kempe tells the story of the life of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher who thought philosophically about the best of all possible worlds: seven days in which Leibniz travels restlessly, writes, speculates, scribbles on notes, begins projects, closes books, Invents machines, proves – in a word: works. God rested on the seventh day, Leibniz did not.
[Michael Kempe: Die beste aller möglichen Welten. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in seiner Zeit. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 2022. 352 Seiten, 24 €.]
Admittedly, it’s not just any working week that Kempe picks out. He chooses seven unconnected days, takes larger and smaller leaps through a 70-year life that began in Leipzig in 1646: 1675, 1686, 1696, 1703, 1710, 1714, 1716, the year of his death. The journey through time is also a hike across the European map: Paris, Zellerfeld, Berlin, Vienna. In between, Hanover, the Duchy of the Guelphs, in whose service the 30-year-old Leibniz entered 1766.
Kempe began the year before: Leibniz was in Paris on October 29, 1675, having turned down a professorship in Germany. Leibniz wants to go out into the world: the French capital promises intellectual and scientific exchange.
Plagiarism dispute with Newton
Leibniz has been engrossed in mathematical work for some time, and on that October day he takes a decisive step forward that seems quite inconspicuous on paper: he invents a new symbol: the integral symbol. The new symbolic language did not bring the hoped-for place in the Académie des sciences, but it did cause an annoying plagiarism dispute with Isaac Newton.
Kempe does not tell heroic stories: October 29 is an ordinary working day on the Rue Garancière, where Leibniz has settled. After all, he notes the date on the mathematical sheet, which he rarely does. Kempe shows Leibniz how he plans and reflects. This is what makes his biography in seven days special: it does not cut life into the smallest, thematic snippets, as Leibniz did with his full sheets of paper, but lets you participate in the world of work and thought of the man who, as the last of his kind, as a universal Genius counts.
In February 1686, when Leibniz was already in the service of the Hanoverians, he was staying in Zellerfeld in the Harz mountains: we not only see him there at his desk, thinking about possible worlds. At the same time, Leibniz is out and about in the mining areas, trying to use wind and water power more efficiently. When the Duke stopped funding the project, Leibniz continued at his own expense. But the theory still fails in practice: the temperatures are freezing, the materials are brittle.
self-imposed accountability
Leibniz was ill and exhausted in August 1696 – in his own household on Schmiedestrasse in Hanover. He believes he is close to death and begins a diary “to get an account of my remaining time”, as his first entry on August 13 states. With the self-imposed accountability, Leibniz writes himself out of the crisis, gains new strength, throws himself back into philosophical and structural projects.
Almost seven years later we meet him in Berlin. He neglected his household in Hanover, as the lamenting letters from his servant show. He is always on the move: in talks, in international exchanges with scholars and royal courts. Special precautionary measures apply – from encrypted words to cover addresses to pseudonyms. On the side, he constructs a small carriage for himself that can be attached to postal wagons so that he can read and write more comfortably when traveling.
In Berlin he is intensively involved in mathematical experiments, with dyadic number systems that point to the digital future and at the same time allow him to decipher an old Chinese code. A further seven years later, back in Hanover, Leibniz again occupied himself with his historical writing plans, while two brothers on educational trips rang his bell. This changes the perspective, a philosophically important concept for Leibniz: we see him through the lens of curious contemporary witnesses.
Stay or go in Vienna
When his Guelph employer is about to climb the English throne, Leibniz is absent again: he is in Vienna and doesn’t know whether to leave or wait. The hoped-for message that orders him to London is a long time coming. Finally he returns to Hanover. There we meet him in the last chapter, one day after his 70th birthday. Leibniz is in the process of completing his historiographical notes.
Seven days don’t make a life. Just as little can Leibniz as a whole be packed between two book covers: not as a day-to-day document, and certainly not in its world of thought and ideas, which no individual can oversee today. The historian Michael Kempe, who has headed the Leibniz Research Center at the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen since 2011, knows this precisely because he is so familiar with Leibniz.
[Alle aktuellen Nachrichten zum russischen Angriff auf die Ukraine bekommen Sie mit der Tagesspiegel-App live auf ihr Handy. Hier für Apple- und Android-Geräte herunterladen]
Kempe also knows about the pitfalls of the biographical genre. Two types are currently particularly common: the jubilee gift, written with a quick pen and lacking historical substance, and the long-winded researcher’s balance sheet, which still tries to accommodate every note from its own note box. Kempe’s “Leibniz in his time” avoids both: He finds a narrative form that is based on the history of ideas and culture, which reflects the past from the present without desperately updating it in storytelling mode.
By concentrating on a few hours at a time, Kempe succeeds in bringing Leibniz up close without stepping too close to him. Not seven, but five books are on the shortlist for the Leipzig Book Prize. Kempe’s “The Best of All Possible Worlds” deserved a spot.
