A newly translated biography rescues Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – the 17th-century German philosopher – from Voltaire’s parody of him as a sunny but deluded soul
What would you prefer: to be forgotten altogether or to be remembered only because you had been wickedly parodied, skewered, by a famous writer? Saul Bellow, for example, filled his novels with richly realised but cruel renditions of people close to him and lost many friends as a result. In Humboldt’s Gifthe reinvented the poet Delmore Schwartz as the dissolute and volatile Von Humboldt Fleisher – but the novel is more widely read and admired than Schwartz’s poems. A posthumous insult or a helping hand out of oblivion?
The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is at no risk of being forgotten – he routinely appears on lists of the greatest philosophers of his or any age – but he is unusual in that the most famous summary of his thought is taken not from his own work but from the best-known parody of him: the figure of Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, who proclaims, in the face of a relentless series of indignities pointlessly suffered, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. If this kind of sunny metaphysical optimism was proving difficult to sustain when Voltaire wrote his 1759 novel, thanks not least to disasters such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, it may seem to have even less to offer our own moment, when every news cycle brings catastrophes and atrocities of which Candide’s author could scarcely have dreamed.
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Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/dec/01/the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-by-michael-kempe-review-life-of-gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz
Author : Joe Moshenska
Publish date : 2024-12-01 15:00:09
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