The Philosopher and the Oracle: Gottfried Leibniz and the I-Ching" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Living I Ching: Using Ancient Chinese Wisdom To Shape Your Life"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 14
The Philosopher and the Oracle: Gottfried Leibniz and the I-Ching
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On April 1,
1703, a letter arrived in Hanover after a journey of nearly a year and a half.
It had been written in Beijing by a French Jesuit missionary, and folded inside
it was a woodcut of the sixty-four hexagrams of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes.
The man who opened it was thunderstruck. In those mysterious stacks of broken
and unbroken lines, he saw his own life’s most cherished discovery staring back
at him.
His name
was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
and he died on November 14, 1716. He is remembered as the co-inventor of
calculus and the father of binary arithmetic, the code that runs every computer
on earth. He was also a young alchemical secretary, a dreamer of a magical
universal language, and a man convinced that an oracle held the secret of
Creation itself…
Born in Leipzig in 1646, Leibniz was a prodigy who devoured his late father’s library as a boy and earned a doctorate in law at the University of Altdorf in February 1667, when he was barely twenty. Offered a professorship, he turned it down, and for a short while served instead as secretary to an alchemical society in nearby Nuremberg. Here the column must sort fact from legend. Later biographers loved to claim that the society was a Rosicrucian lodge, that Leibniz was taken for one of the secret brotherhood, and even that he won admission by writing a letter crammed with impressively obscure alchemical jargon he didn’t understand himself. The alchemical society and his role in it are documented; the Rosicrucian trimmings are much harder to pin down, and should be taken with a generous pinch of salt. What isn’t in doubt is that the young philosopher was fascinated by the hidden workings of nature, a curiosity he never really lost.
That
fascination took a more ambitious form in his youthful treatise De Arte Combinatoria (1666),
inspired in part by the medieval Majorcan mystic Ramon Llull, whose rotating wheels of
divine attributes promised to generate all truths by combination. Leibniz
dreamed of a characteristica universalis,
an alphabet of human thought in which every concept could be expressed as a
combination of simple symbols, so that disputes could be settled by
calculation. It was a scientific project, but its roots ran through Llull and
through the Kabbalistic dream of a perfect language of Creation, and Leibniz
never fully gave it up.
Binary
arithmetic grew out of the same dream. Leibniz was working out how to write all
numbers using only 0 and 1 by 1679, but for him it was never just a calculating
trick. In 1697 he proposed to his patron, Duke Rudolf August of
Brunswick, a commemorative medal bearing the binary numbers under
the motto “imago creationis,” the image of Creation, because, as he explained,
just as all numbers could be generated from one and nothing, God had created
all things out of nothing. For Leibniz, binary was theology written in
mathematics.
Enter Father Joachim Bouvet, a French Jesuit at
the court of the Kangxi Emperor in Beijing.
Bouvet belonged to a small circle of missionaries later called the “Figurists,”
who believed the Chinese classics preserved fragments of a primordial divine
revelation shared by all humanity, and who were prepared to identify the
legendary sage-king Fu Xi with figures like Enoch or
Hermes Trismegistus. In February 1701, Leibniz wrote to Bouvet describing his
binary system and its image of Creation from nothing. Bouvet instantly
recognized the pattern, and on November 4, 1701, he sent back a woodcut of the
hexagrams arranged in the “Former Heaven” sequence attributed to Fu Xi. Read as
binary numbers, with unbroken lines as 1 and broken lines as 0, the sixty-four
hexagrams counted perfectly from zero to sixty-three. When the letter finally
reached him, Leibniz was elated. Within about a week he had sent his Explication
de l’Arithmétique Binaire to the Paris Academy of Sciences, now with a
section explaining what binary revealed about the ancient Chinese figures of Fu
Xi.
The arrangement Bouvet sent was not Fu Xi’s at all, but the work of the eleventh-century Song dynasty philosopher Shao Yong, and Chinese commentators had read the hexagrams in many ways, symbolic, moral, and cosmological, but never as base-two numbers. Leibniz, in other words, found what he was looking for. Yet the structural match is real, because the I Ching and binary rest on the same logic: two kinds of line in six positions yield exactly sixty-four possibilities. Readers of our November 9th post on Napoleon’s Book of Fate will recognize the principle, since the figures of geomancy, built from odd and even marks in four rows, produce exactly sixteen. Divination and computation, it turns out, have been speaking the same two-letter language for a very long time.
Leibniz’s
esoteric connections didn’t end there. In the 1690s he spent long hours with Francis Mercury van Helmont,
the wandering Kabbalist, alchemist, and collaborator on the great Latin
compendium Kabbala Denudata, who stayed with him in Hanover in 1696.
Around the same time, Leibniz began using the word “monad” for the simple,
living substances that, he argued, make up all of reality, a term van Helmont
and his late friend, the English philosopher Anne Conway, had
already been using. Leibniz acknowledged that his views on the living nature of
the world came close to those of “the late Countess of Conway,” a rare and
generous nod from one of Europe’s greatest minds to a woman philosopher.
Scholars still debate exactly how much he owed to both of them, but the
Kabbalistic air around his mature philosophy is unmistakable.
His final
years were bitter. Embroiled in a vicious priority dispute with Isaac Newton
over the invention of calculus, sidelined by his employer, the Elector of
Hanover, who had become King George I of England, he died in Hanover on
November 14, 1716, at seventy. By most accounts, his funeral was attended by
hardly anyone but his secretary, and while the Paris Academy honored him with a
eulogy, the Royal Society in London let his death pass in silence. And yet the
language he believed was the very image of Creation, the one he recognized in
an ancient oracle, sat waiting for more than two centuries until engineers and
mathematicians built it into the foundations of the digital age. Every screen
you’re reading this on runs, in the end, on Leibniz’s ones and zeros.
The Living I Ching: Using Ancient Chinese Wisdom To Shape Your Life
By Deng Ming-Dao | HarperOne
Deng
Ming-Dao’s The Living I Ching, published by HarperOne, offers a fresh
translation and interpretation of one of the world’s oldest books. Deng is a
widely respected authority on Taoist practice and philosophy, the author of
eight books including 365 Tao, Everyday Tao, Scholar Warrior,
and Chronicles of Tao, translated into fifteen languages. He sets out to
steer between the two extremes he sees in most editions, dense scholarly
commentary on one side and fortune-cookie platitudes on the other, presenting
the I Ching as both a practical oracle and a three-thousand-year
repository of philosophy. His language is warm and accessible, and each chapter
opens with one of his own watercolors.
What makes it
the right companion for today’s post is that it gives readers the other half of
the story Leibniz only glimpsed. Leibniz saw the hexagrams as an elegant
mathematical structure and an image of Creation; Deng shows what they have
meant to those who have actually lived with them: a language of change, cycles,
timing, and right action. Reading him alongside today’s post, readers can
appreciate both the binary skeleton that thrilled Leibniz and the living spirit
that has kept the I Ching in use across the centuries.
This is a practitioner’s interpretation rather than a scholarly history of the text, and readers wanting the full story of the I Ching’s origins, its commentaries, or its reception in Europe will want to supplement it with academic works. It also leans toward a Taoist reading rather than the Confucian traditions that shaped much of its history. But for readers who finished today’s post wanting to pick up the coins and consult the Book of Changes for themselves, Deng’s Living I Ching is a gracious, wise, and inviting place to begin.
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