SELCER, 2007. Leibniz and the Encyclopedic Imagination

The Uninterrupted Ocean: Leibniz and the Encyclopedic ImaginationAuthor(s): Daniel SelcerSource: Representations, Vol. 98, No. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 25-50Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2007.98.1.25 .Accessed: 11/03/2011 12:07

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A B S T R A C T This article explores a remarkable moment in the history of the early modern encyclope-dia, namely G. W. Leibniz’s philosophical reflections on the procedures for its proper construction. Thefocus of the article is on the way that Leibniz develops a metaphysics of notation and cross-referenceintended to ground a generative encyclopedic strategy that both establishes an image of the systematicnature of human knowledge and produces the terms that it structures. / REPRES E N TAT I O N S 98. Spring2007 © 2007 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X,pages 25–50. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article con-tent to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI:10.1525/rep.2007.98.25.

DANIEL SELCER

The Uninterrupted Ocean: Leibnizand the Encyclopedic Imagination

Encyclopedias trouble themselves a great deal about words fallen intodisuse, never about words still unknown, burning to be uttered. . . . If itwere possible for us to catch, be it only in snatches, the language that is yetto come, we would immediately become men of more than one time, as thepolyglot is a man of more than one land. This enterprise will appear fool-hardy to some, but since it is by no means proven that that which must bedoes not already exist and that the division of time into past, present, andfuture is not due solely to our present incapacity to embrace everything in asingle glance, the method we envisage is perhaps an expedient, a short cut,which will enable us to reach where other more ambitious disciplines areincapable of leading us.

—from the “Encyclopédie” entry in Le Da Costa Encyclopédique (1947),by one or more of Georges Ambrosino, Georges Bataille,

André Breton, Jacques Brunius, Jacques Chavy, René Chenon,Marcel Duchamp, Charles Duits, Jean Ferry, Jean-Jacques Lebel,

Robert Lebel, Emmanuel Peillet, or Isabelle Waldberg.1

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz set himself the task of elaborat-ing the language that was yet to come in the introduction to one of his manyabandoned encyclopedias. In “De numeris characteristicis ad linguam uni-versalem constituendam” (c. 1679), he recounts his youthful proposal forthe construction of an “alphabet of human thoughts” and his notion that “bycombining the letters of this alphabet and through an analysis of the wordsthat are spelled with them, everything can be consistently discovered andjudged” (A, 6.4-a:265).2 This alphabet, a project that Leibniz traces as far ashis 1666 Dissertatio de arte combinatoria, was to be composed of a finite set ofsigns, each of which would correspond to one particular primitive concept(A, 6.1:163–230). These concepts were then to be the basis for the analysis ofany proposition or set of propositions via a logical calculus, the grammatical

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rules of the “general characteristic.” The value of such a system was to be anindisputable clarity of thought and the elimination of the uncertainty ofcommunication; not only was it to increase the power of our minds via thetransformation of language into a clarity-machine, but also to eliminate thevagaries of rhetoric and the practical barriers of dispute.3

The 1679 version of this project was to involve two operations: the reduc-tion of complex propositions to their constituent simple elements and thediscovery of the syntax governing the possible relations among them. Theseoperations required, according to Leibniz, only four simple steps: (1) take a setof propositions or things and imagine a corresponding series of numbers orsigns to be given (the letters of the alphabet of human thoughts); (2) observea general property to be true of the propositions; (3) arrange the imaginednumbers or signs in an order consistent with that property; (4) use this or-der and structure (which has been arbitrarily assigned and has no truthvalue in and of itself; the signs or numbers are utterly empty of content) to“demonstrate all the rules of logic through numbers, and show how we canknow whether arguments are well formed” (A, 6.4-a:269–70). Leibniz wasnot naively suggesting that the resolution of concepts into their constituentelements would be easy to perform, though he did claim that it would re-quire little more effort than was being expended by his contemporaries on writ-ing encyclopedias, such that, “a few able men would be able to finish it infive years; in two through an infallible calculus they could produce the doc-trines most frequently needed in life, that is, morality and metaphysics” (A,6.4-a:268). Leibniz’s real proposal is not for a device that relies on success inworking out the correspondences of this language, but for one that brings itssyntax into effect prior even to the discovery of its semantics. Even in the ab-sence of a ready-made lexicon of primitive concepts, the first stunning effectof Leibniz’s clarity-machine would be to give an a priori proof for its own pos-sibility.

Leibniz, of course, never completed the construction of this alphabet, buthe also never stopped evoking its power. As his thought matured, this aspectof his concern with structures for the organization of knowledge shifted awayfrom the manipulation of linguistic and numerical systems and toward,among other things, general methodological approaches to the constructionof encyclopedias.4 In what follows, I argue that one of Leibniz’s richest reflec-tions on the “foolhardy” enterprise of encyclopedism articulates an impor-tant connection between philosophical method and what I will call the prob-lem of repetition. The formal concept of repetition has taken on varied formsin the history of philosophical and theoretical discourse: the great Platonicyear; Origen’s apokatastasis, its role in the formation of David Hume’s “cus-tom”; G.W.F. Hegel’s and F.W. J. Schelling’s competing notions of philo-sophical systematicity; Søren Kierkegaard’s ethical, aesthetic, and religious

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despair; Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return; Sigmund Freud’s repetition-compulsion; Jorge Luis Borges’s library of Babel; as well as the transforma-tions of the concept by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and GillesDeleuze. For Leibniz, the problem has two versions. First, Leibnizian meta-physics posits the identity of singular things with the whole of the universeof which they are a part. As I will clarify, Leibniz provides an account of in-dividuals maintaining both that they are absolutely unique entities lackingreal relations to other existent things and that their conceptual structure(the arrangement of predicates inhering in their subjects or order of thequalities modifying their essences) is expressed by all the others. Thus, eachthing is absolutely singular but is also repeated within the structure of everyother singular thing. This apparent paradox lies at the heart of Leibniz’s ac-count of what it is to be a metaphysically real entity, and his solution to it—a perspectivism in which what it means to be a substance is to express aunique viewpoint on the universe—is one key to understanding how heconfronts and mobilizes repetition in less directly metaphysical contexts.5

Second, Leibniz’s metaphysical notion of repetition is put to work when heconfronts the project of establishing a static taxonomy of human knowl-edge in the face of its fluidity and mutability. As I will explain, Leibniz holdsthat most methods for the formation of classificatory structures implicitlydepend on an exclusion of the possibility that the terms to be classifiedappear in more than one category. The difficulty that Leibniz’s re-imaginingof the encyclopedic project activates is that the arrangement of the propo-sitions of human knowledge under an exhaustive organizational system(for example, within an encyclopedia) provokes their repetition in categoryafter category.6

Through a consideration of Leibniz’s reflections on methods for con-structing an encyclopedia in Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (fin-ished in 1705 but only published posthumously in 1765), in what followsI will show that Leibniz’s engagement with the latter version of this problemdepends heavily on his solution to the former. I first contextualize Leibniz’sencyclopedism and introduce his project in terms of both early modernand contemporary theoretical concerns. Next, I examine Leibniz’s critiqueof John Locke’s proposal for an encyclopedic system and explain why hethinks that it results in the dissolution of categorical boundaries via the rep-etition of each element of knowledge at every systematic location. In thethird part, I follow Leibniz’s explication of alternative methodologicalstrategies for the systematization of knowledge and examine his scheme ofcross-referencing and inventory. He is interested in a system of references,I argue, not only insofar as they provide a practical means for the organiza-tion of an encyclopedia but also in that they constitute a metaphysical solu-tion to the problem of repetition. In the fourth section, I elucidate this

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metaphysics of cross-reference by comparison with a hypothetical Newtonianencyclopedia and a consideration of Leibniz’s shift of theoretical attentionfrom the content of the encyclopedia to its form. Finally, I reframe thismove from content to form in terms of Leibniz’s break with Cartesian serialrationality and examine its impact on the development of a Leibnizian con-cept of method. Rather than simply discovering a method for the organiza-tion of knowledge, Leibniz sees it immanently developing out of the failureof other strategies.7

Despite the general polemic surrounding its reception and evaluation,one of the touchstone interpretive works dealing with the taxonomic ob-session in early modernity remains Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses.Foucault mentions Leibniz only in passing, but in the preface he describesthe origin of his own project in the shattering laughter provoked by a nowfamous passage by one of Leibniz’s intellectual heirs, Jorge Luis Borges.The passage presents the impossible taxonomy of an imaginary Chineseencyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.8 Inthe decades subsequent to Foucault’s book, in theoretical circles at least,this reference has become the best-known quotation of that master of fan-tastical citation.9 Despite its familiarity, it is worth repeating:

On those remote pages it was written that animals are divided into (a) those thatbelong to the emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) sucklingpigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included inthis classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, ( j) innumerable ones,(k) those drawn with a very fine camels’-hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that havejust broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.10

While the encyclopedia Borges describes never existed, the context of thecitation is interesting both in its own right and in relation to early moderntaxonomy. Not from one of his metaphysical fictions, Borges’s fantastic imageappears in an essay on John Wilkins, the seventeenth-century philosopherand theologian whose An Essay Toward a Real Character and a PhilosophicalLanguage (1668) is both a masterpiece and a reductio of the impulse to pro-vide an overarching taxonomy and systematic description for all that exists.11

In his book, Wilkins attempts to construct a written language capable of cap-turing every nuanced detail of reality within a vast symbolic terminology. Hisproject is in many ways typical of other early modern attempts to construct auniversal language, but it exceeds them in its obsession with the possibility ofmapping a universal taxonomic structure. Wilkins’s “language” is in fact anenormous system that attempts to classify all objects of perception and ex-pression within a single synoptic table, including the denotation of all possi-ble predicates and their modalities. Thus, like more directly philosophical


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thinkers of his day, Wilkins was involved with the construction of an encyclo-pedia of simple concepts and their reduction to a system of arbitrary signs. Itis Borges’s evocation of this project (as well as the Chinese encyclopedia)that so fascinated Foucault and (on his account) led to his obsession withmapping the episteme of the tables, schemata, and other practices of classifi-cation in the so-called classical age.12

As Foucault demonstrated, this early modern fascination with taxonomyis above all an obsession with the nature of methodological thinking, whichhe interpreted specifically in terms of a shift toward the representationaland reflexive theories of the sign. More generally, in René Descartes’s earlywork we can already see methodological reflexivity begin to take its defini-tive rationalist form: an immanent self-constitution of method that resultswhen method takes itself as its own object, repeating its own structure as thefirst task of its self-articulation.13 Philosophical method, on this model,emerges precisely out of its repetition of itself; it arises from the methodolog-ical investigation of the nature, status, and form of rule-governed thinking.For Leibniz, by contrast, this methodological reflexivity is a result of thema-tizing the encyclopedia. This encyclopedia was to be both a comprehensiveand generative text, its categorical structure not merely recording scientific,intellectual, historical, and literary achievements but functioning as a philo-sophical machine for the production and organization of knowledge. It iswithin the context of this project that repetition becomes a philosophicalproblem for Leibniz in the sense outlined earlier, and that this problem isinvestigated through its differentiation into a struggle among competing en-cyclopedic methodologies.

The English translators of Leibniz’s Nouveaux essais claim that his use of“encyclopédie” should be rendered as “the realm of knowledge” so as notanachronistically to invoke what they call its “twentieth century sense.”14

Their claim is somewhat supported by the etymology of the word as well asits general usage at the time. “Encyclopedia” derives (via an error in a hu-manist transcription of Quintilian) from enkuklios paideia, the circle of artsand sciences of ancient Greek education.15 Both Antoine Furetière’s 1690Dictionnaire universel and the 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française use simi-lar definitions, the former giving “Science universelle, recueil ou enchaîne-ment de toutes les sciences ensemble” and the latter “Enchaînement ou cercleoù sont enfermées toutes les sciences.”16 Therefore, when Leibniz writes ofthe rules for the construction of the encyclopedia, he has in mind the vastepistemological project of weaving the multilayered structures of humanknowledge into a single, systematically unified tapestry. It is also true, how-ever, that as early as 1620 our contemporary sense of the term—a printedreferential artifact containing the whole of human knowledge and not just re-flecting its structure—had begun to appear in book titles.17 Leibniz, for


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example, was familiar with the Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta (1630)of Johann Heinrich Alsted, an earlier and less elaborate version of whichwas one of the first modern works to use the word in its title.18 While nei-ther Alsted’s encyclopedia nor that of his student Johann Amos Comenius(which Leibniz also knew) was meant to be a comprehensive informationinventory, they both orient their accounts of the branches of humanknowledge around their primary propositions and frame the project ofthe encyclopedic work as a tool for the organization and generation ofparticular truths.19 As William West has argued with particular referenceto the Margarita Philosophica (1535), although the primary sense of ency-clopedism in early modernity was that of the construction of a space forthe preservation and discovery of knowledge, many such texts mobilizedthe encyclopedic project in such a way as to transform it into a methodfor the production of truths rather than the mere reflection of theirstructure.20 At the very least, by the seventeenth century the project ofconstructing the material apparatus that would house, generate, organ-ize, and present the fully schematized linkages of human knowledge hadalready begun. Leibniz’s references to constructing, writing, and publish-ing an encyclopedia make it clear that this is the sense he has in mind.His encyclopedia project is indeed a realm of knowledge that encircles orencloses all the sciences, but it is also a text, an apparatus, a machine,and a book.

The problem facing any attempt to deal with human knowledge as a sys-tematic totality, Leibniz writes in the fragmentary preface to De l’Horizon de ladoctrine humaine (c. 1690), is that “the entire body of the science can be con-sidered as an ocean, continuous everywhere, without interruption or break,though men conceive parts in it, and give them names according to theirconvenience” (C, 530–31).21 Leibniz returns to this issue in his Nouveaux es-sais. He wished to engage in a public debate with Locke, either in the pagesof one of the learned journals with which Leibniz was involved (probably theLe Journal des sçavans or Acta eruditorum) or in some other form of collabora-tive writing. In the absence of an answer (or even acknowledgment) fromthe author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) to critical re-marks sent by Leibniz, the latter began crafting the Nouveaux essais, hopingto provoke a response.22 Never one to let mortality stand in the way of agood philosophical argument, when Locke died in 1704 (nine months afterLeibniz had completed his first draft), Leibniz transformed the whole of thetext into a massive exercise in prosopopeia, framing it as a dialogue betweenPhilalethes (who has read Locke’s Essay and will argue on his behalf ) andTheophilus (who largely articulates Leibniz’s positions, or at least those pre-sumably cast as such).23 Together, they consult a copy of Locke’s book, with


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Philalethes for the most part simply articulating Locke from beyond thegrave by reading passages from his work aloud.

In the final chapter of the Essay, Locke proposes a threefold division ofthe sciences into physics, ethics, and semiotics.24 Leibniz responds in the fi-nal chapter of the Nouveaux essais where the issue at stake is precisely that ofthe division of knowledge and the construction of an encyclopedia. His at-tack on Locke’s schema is notable not only for its stringent criticism of theimprecise nature of the latter’s concepts of logos and semiotikos, but also for itsdiscussion of the possibilities for division and classification of concepts ingeneral. Noting that Locke’s proposal corresponds to an ancient versionof the division (physics, ethics, and logic, a system that can be traced, viaDiogenes Laertius, to the Platonic-Stoic tradition), Leibniz argues that itschief defect is that “each part appears to devour the whole” (A, 6.6:522).25 Afull and encyclopedic elaboration of natural philosophy will include an ac-count of living beings with understanding and will, and thus of the whole ofthe logical and ethical systems that govern their structure. Likewise, because“everything is useful for our happiness,” the category of practical philosophyextends its hold over every segment of human knowledge. Most important,the same holds for logic, insofar as any analysis or knowledge whatsoever hasthe form of a set of words or characters and is thus governed by the scienceof sign and signification. “So here are your three great provinces of the ency-clopedia,” Leibniz writes, “continually at war because each is always usurpingthe rights of the others” (A, 6.6:523).

After establishing what he sees as the ineptitude of the ancient andLockean divisions to maintain their boundaries, Leibniz offers two possi-ble explanations. A nominalist stance would claim that every particulartruth provokes a corresponding particular science; thus, the great geneticgroups of the division are merely the imposition of some meddlesome cat-egorizer and bear no intrinsic relation to the sciences themselves. Theholist approach, by contrast, would reject this particularization of thesciences in themselves and disrupt the identity of truth and knowledge (A,6.6:523). While in this context Leibniz clearly has more sympathy for thedescriptive validity of the latter strategy, he holds that it alone is notenough to avoid the dissolution of categorical thinking. The problem withboth approaches is that these modes of the division of knowledge guaran-tee that each proposition or truth will appear more than once and thateach will be repeated in different divisions or even within the same divi-sion many times. Under the rule of either of these potential encyclopedicmethodologies,

an anecdote [histoire memorable] may be placed in the annals of universal history,and in the particular history of the country where it happened, and in the history


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of the life of a man who was concerned with it. And suppose that it has to do withsome fine moral precept, some military stratagem, or some invention useful for thearts which serve the convenience of life or the health of men; then this same storywill be usefully attached to the science or art that it concerns, and one could evenmention it twice within that science; namely, in the history of the discipline it con-cerns, in order to recount its effective development, and also in that discipline’sprecepts, in order to confirm or clarify them through examples (A, 6.6:523).

We are faced, in other words, with a quandary of multiplication and repe-tition. If the disciplinary boundaries of knowledge turn out to be arbitrary,whether following from classical, Lockean, nominalist, or holist grounds,then any given proposition will necessarily be repeated throughout the sys-tem meant to organize and classify propositional knowledge as such. At first,Leibniz’s discussion appears to indicate only that this repetition of proposi-tions throughout the classificatory systems in which they are located may posea practical problem. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that he takes theimpasse to be far more general, in that it generates potentially devastating im-plications for the project of the classification and systematization of knowledge.The logic of Leibniz’s position indicates that the multiplication and repetitionof terms throughout encyclopedic systems is generated not by the insuffi-ciency of the notions of conceptual division and organization in themselves,but by their strategic reliance on the content or meaning of the terms to be di-vided. Insofar as an encyclopedic system of classification organizes proposi-tions by virtue of their content, those propositions will never find their homein a proper categorical locus or encyclopedic term. Instead, each position willbelong to many categories, and the more rigorously we examine its connec-tions and internal structure, the more we will find it implicating still otherpropositions and demanding its repetition in the context of their encyclope-dic location. In other words, the problem is not simply that the vagaries oflanguage require each proposition to include reference to others, but thatclassification of propositions on the basis of their content will result in an infi-nite proliferation of terms and thus fundamentally weakens the classificatorycategories themselves.

This means that the repetition of a single truth within a classificatory divi-sion renders that category incapable of doing more than distinguishing itsmembers from the members of other divisions. Within their own division,these members can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from one an-other; bodily organs are now merely “organs,” no longer livers, hearts, andspleens. Natural philosophy is nothing more than the set of all truths that fallin neither practical philosophy nor logic. Conversely, the repetition of thetruths of a particular division within the set of its competing divisions renderstheir very organizational boundaries meaningless. The class of ethical con-cepts can no longer be described as a meaningful category when all of its


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members also appear in every other category. The result of pursuing classifi-cation on the basis of propositional content is that a division of knowledgebecomes a set of propositions that repeats its members indefinitely and thatis itself repeated in all other divisions. A single proposition, in other words,comes to occupy every possible categorical location, and the classificatoryschema lies in ruins.

In the Discours de métaphysique (1686), Leibniz provides a theory of indi-vidual substances that helps to explain his thinking here. In that text, sin-gular things are understood to be beings with “a notion so complete, that itis sufficient to comprehend and to allow us to deduce from it all the predi-cates of the subject to which this notion is attributed” (A, 6.4-b:1540). The“predicates” that can be truly said of the notion of an individual substanceinclude all the events and actions connected to it, such that (to use Leibniz’sexample) the notion of the soul of Alexander the Great includes les restes ofeverything that has happened to him, les marques of everything that willhappen to him, and les traces of all that occurs in the universe: not just thathe vanquishes Darius and Porus, but also that Leibniz uses him as a philo-sophical example in the seventeenth century (A, 6.4-b:1540–41). Understoodon this model of individual substances, the notions of the encyclopedia’spropositions include not just the predicates related to their own specificreferents—the particular qualities of the things they are supposed toexplain—but also traces of every proposition in the classificatory universeof knowledge. Thus, taken purely in terms of their content and organizedaccording to the classical, Lockean, nominalist, or holist schemes, eachproposition in the encyclopedia is completely identical to all the others.The identification of their proper classificatory location is not merely com-plex, but impossible.

The crux of the problem is that these schemes are incapable of grap-pling with what Leibniz would describe as the unique perspective that dif-ferentiates and individuates singular things. If real things are understoodmerely in terms of their content (as heaps of qualities or predicates), heargues, they lack a principle of individuation. What makes them unique,he proposes, is that “each singular substance expresses the whole universein its own manner” (A, 6.4-b:1541). While on the one hand each singularthing is the same as all the others—it “is like an entire world and like amirror of God or even of the whole universe” insofar as it includes “all itsevents, along with all their circumstances, and the entire series of exteriorthings”—its uniqueness is constituted by the singular perspective fromwhich it represents this totality. Just as each urban dweller possess aunique point of view on and situation within the city that she inhabits, soeach individual substance expresses the totality of the universe in its ownway (this is another of Leibniz’s examples) (A, 6.4-b:1541–42). Classifying


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propositions according to the encyclopedic schemas hitherto consideredis like forgetting that without their individuating perspective (somethingthat has nothing to do with their content), they are all identical. Sincethey attempt to organize propositions according to their content, underthese schemas the encyclopedic imagination generates a classificatory textconsisting of the interminable repetition of the same infinitely long andunpronounceable word.

Leibniz is not satisfied with the metaphysically and epistemologicallyincoherent result generated by the traditional strategies for the division ofknowledge, and he proposes and evaluates four more methods of arrange-ment. He quickly discounts the “civil” method, which consists of nothingmore than a historical refinement of the Platonic-Stoic division (physics,ethics, and logic) through the medieval system of trivium (grammar, logic,and rhetoric) and quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and mu-sic) into the modern classification by faculties (theology, jurisprudence,medicine, and philosophy). While Leibniz allows that this method is de-serving of pedagogical respect, it in no way escapes the problems of Locke’soriginal division. The first meaningful procedure that he identifies is the“synthetic and theoretical” method. It consists in arranging propositions ortruths according to the order of their proof, such that “each propositioncomes after those on which it depends.” The second is the “analytic andpractical” method that “begins with the goal of human beings, which is tosay with the goods whose fulfillment is happiness, and conducts an orderlysearch for the means which serve to acquire these goods and to avoid theircontrary ills” (A, 6.6:524).26 Even using both these methods in tandem forthe construction of the encyclopedia, however, Leibniz thinks one cannotavoid the same problem of repetition and dissolution of categoricalboundaries described earlier. Both methods still rely on the content of aproposition to furnish its systematic location, and thus both are susceptibleto the same topical explosion that destroyed the original divisions of thesciences. Finally, Leibniz points to a new possibility with consequences thatturn the entire problem of encyclopedic propositional repetition on itshead. He postulates, “in writing the encyclopedia following both thesemethods together, one may take referential measures in order to avoid rep-etitions.” These mesures de renvoi constitute another form of ordering alto-gether: what Leibniz calls “disposition by terms” and the subsequent gener-ation of a systematic inventory (répertoire)(A, 6.6:524). Rather than arepetition of terms in their content, meaning, and sense, these referencessend us back to the single and simple occurrence of truths or propositionsvia a series of arbitrary signs.


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On the one hand, there is nothing mysterious about Leibniz’s innova-tion. The mesures de renvoi that he proposes are nothing more than the useof a system of cross-referencing footnotes and the generation of an index. Atthe same time, the notion of organizing and sustaining a work through astructure of numbered marginal references not reducible to a series of ex-ternal commentaries on a main text was something fairly new in this period.Anthony Grafton has suggested, for example, that the origins of the modernhistorical footnote can be found in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et cri-tique (1697).27 The Dictionnaire is an enormous work originally intended tobe a catalog of the errors and omissions in contemporary reference booksand histories, which becomes an enormous biographical-historical-philo-sophical dictionary supported by an elaborate system of notes.28 It is, infact, a vast assemblage of articles, notes, and subnotes, each displacing thepriority of the others, each referring to an almost infinite set of markswithin its many pages, as well as to the thousands of external works its articles,notes, and subnotes cite, quote, or paraphrase. Indeed, the vast majorityof Bayle’s text—both its literal instantiation on the page and its concep-tual content—is located in its complex layers of citation rather than in the“articles” that provide its architectonic. The folio pages of its volumes(two in 1697, three by 1702) are given over primarily to the notes, the pri-mary set of which run in two columns occupying the bulk of most pages,complemented by two (and sometimes three) sets of marginal notes tothe columnar remarks and primary article. Occasionally, as one might ex-pect, these notes refer the reader to other notes in other articles, which inturn contain notes referring to still further articles, and so on.29

It is not that Bayle’s complex mise en page and referential system issomething entirely new. Scribal culture was, of course, rife with a variety ofsystems for the juxtaposition of text and glosses, including the use of read-ers’ marks that could key one element of text or commentary to anotherelsewhere in the work.30 Renaissance editions of ancient and classicaltexts also frequently made use of marginal commentaries and notationaldevices in many forms, and by the early modern period printed notationhad proliferated into a standard typographical practice as the marginalspace of the page became an integral part of the visual schema of theprinted book.31 Even beyond texts requiring commentary and supple-ment, the diversity of typographical conventions on the printed page of-ten differentiated it into multiple layers of referentiality. Henri-Jean Martin’scomparison of French editions of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologicafrom a 1471 incunabula through mid- and late-sixteenth-century print-ings, for example, displays the evolution of a single text from a plain set ofcolumns into a typographically complex artifact that visually distinguishes


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questions, articles, conclusions, and marginal references to other sectionsof the work.32

With Bayle’s Dictionnaire, however, something fundamental has changed.For Bayle, the master text to which marginal glosses are appended as inter-pretive or contextual supplements has effectively disappeared—or, rather, ithas been replaced with a series of texts, each of which refers its readers to afurther series. As a reader, one can orient oneself in any direction onepleases throughout Bayle’s Dictionnaire: any or every text can be taken to bethe master text that grounds the systematic ordinatio of the work. This mas-ter text can be Bayle’s article itself, the text that is the source of the com-mentary in that article, the discursive footnotes to Bayle’s text (individuallyor as a whole), the quotations or references located in the margins of eitherBayle’s article-text or his footnotes, and so on. Readers of the Dictionnaireare faced with a massive and unprecedented freedom in construing themethodological order of the work and constructing the function of a systemof reference and commentary. At the very least, they are invited to developa new set of capacities for orienting the text according to their reasons forreading it or for orienting their reasoning according to the order they dis-cover within it.

Before composing the Nouveaux essais, Leibniz himself had appeared asa figure in this system of reference, when Bayle devoted note H (as well asits subnotes, and the marginal notes to those subnotes) of his entry onJerome Rorarius to a discussion of Leibniz’s 1695 “Système nouveau de lanature et de la communication des substances, aussi bien que de l’unionqu’il y a entre l’âme et le corps.”33 Leibniz responded with private lettersand articles in learned journals, and Bayle included portions of these re-sponses (along with his own counter-responses) in a further remark to thisarticle in the 1702 second edition of the work (note L, its subnotes, andtheir marginal notes).34 While Leibniz himself offered suggestions to Bayle re-garding the organization of his text through referential marginal citations,it is clear that Bayle’s actual practice of mobilizing citations and notationalcommentary far exceeded the recommendations of his correspondent.35

By 1702, for example, the “Rorarius” article spread over 14 pages in folio,with the article text including a mere 25 sentences and four marginalnotes. The 11 lettered “supplementary” remarks to the article, however, to-gether with their 162 marginal notes, constitute roughly 95 percent of thepage space of the “Rorarius” text.36 This is especially significant, given thatit is this equivalence of citational and referential organization that comesto characterize Leibniz’s own metaphysics of encyclopedic reference. Thetypographical explosion of notes and references on the pages of Bayle’sDictionnaire may be what eventually convinced Leibniz to radicalize hisconception of encyclopedic referentiality, transforming his mesures de


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renvoi from a simple textual addendum into a metaphysical theory of en-cyclopedism.

Since Leibniz never published an encyclopedia and never actually usedsuch a system of references despite his dozens of introductions andschematic plans, it is not the actual technique of his references that interestsme here. What is important about Leibniz’s gesture toward a system of tex-tual cross-referencing is instead the role it plays in the formation of his ency-clopedic methodology. Leibniz does not simply propose—as Denis Diderotwould in 1755—that references are an essential element of an encyclopedicscheme.37 Instead, Leibniz claims that the very notion of an encyclopedicmethod structured by cross-referencing emerges out of a philosophical con-sideration of the other options for constructing a total system of knowledge.It is the particular way in which other encyclopedic methods fail, he argues,that produces the concept of textual reference. Moreover, this failure is notprimarily a practical one. The problem, as we have seen, is not that othermethods for the encyclopedic organization of knowledge are simply clumsy.Rather, there is something about the nature of propositions, the fluidity ofknowledge, and the project of organizing it into a total system that bringsabout the failure of these methods. Leibniz, that is, is not so much interestedin proposing a practical model for the organization of encyclopedic texts ashe is in grasping the metaphysics of a referential system and the philosophi-cal methodology that it demands.

The simple and common predicates Leibniz uses in his mesures de renvoiform the structure of a system of reference confronting the problems ofrepetition found in all other methods of classification. Leibniz frames ency-clopedic reference, that is, as the contrary to and solution for the problemof encyclopedic repetition. Where arbitrary division, synthetic arrange-ment, and analytic ordering all generate the aporia of repetition that de-stroy their very structure, cross-reference and its inventory constitute thecircle of human knowledge as a coherent and consistent totality. Put an-other way, Leibniz articulates two forms of repetition, standing in radical oppo-sition: the iterative power of categories that explodes the encyclopedia’spropositional structure and the return or sending back of cross-referencethat constitutes its possibility. What is it about Leibniz’s method of referen-tial return that avoids the dangers posed by repetition? What exactly is thedifference between the two movements of repetition? How is it that themethod of classification by terms and the inventory it generates manage tomaintain the stability of categories and organization where both synthesisand analysis fail?

Both the synthetic and analytic methods depend on the linear motion ofan intellect scanning the order of a series, the former rising from the order


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of proofs and the latter retracing a path of causes. A synthetic and theoreti-cal method, that is, arranges its encyclopedic categories by beginning withthe simplest and most fundamental concepts and then tracks the way theirpossible conjunctions and disjunctions generate a further series of complexnotions. Thus, the method of synthesis focuses on the notional origins of en-cyclopedic terms, arranging its entries according to the order by which theycan be generated. An analytic and practical method, by contrast, locatescomplex concepts at the root of encyclopedic terms and simple ones attheir endpoints, arranging its entries according to the logic by which theformer can be unfolded in a logical series from the latter. Here, the ency-clopedia is structured by the way general categories can be broken up intotheir constituent elements. The assumption both these procedures share isthat encyclopedic classification requires tracing a conceptual series. ForLeibniz, however, this figure of the series fails to comprehend the ultimatecircularity and referential totality that constitute the form of human knowl-edge and encyclopedic systems. Insisting that the content of a concept de-termines its place in an ordered line of classification, both methodologicalapproaches dissolve in the face of the problems of repetition discussed ear-lier. For the system of cross-reference, however, it is the form of the concept,truth, or term that gives it its categorical location, rather than the way thecontent of propositions can be serially arranged in order of their genera-tion or dismemberment.

One way to explain this shift of emphasis from the content of encyclo-pedic concepts to their form is by casting it in the terms of Leibniz’s1715–16 correspondence with Samuel Clarke. That exchange is a battleby proxy with Isaac Newton, largely devoted to arguments regarding con-ceptions of space and time.38 Clarke, following Newton, holds that spaceand time are containers and measures for the objects that appear withinthem, while Leibniz argues that they are “phenomenal” orders of existencethat are real only insofar as they are representative expressions of things.In other words, for Clarke, space is an empty and absolute field in whichthings appear and relative to which they take up a position, while time is ameasure of motion across this field. Most crucially, for Clarke, space andtime are both independent of the bodies that have positions and coordi-nates within them. For Leibniz, by contrast, space and time are merely“well-founded phenomena,” the former in the perceived simultaneous co-existence of things and the latter in their perceived sequentiality. Thismeans that for Leibniz, space is simply the way we perceive things to bearranged in relation to one another, while time is a condition of percep-tual confusion that results from our inability to conceive an ultimately si-multaneous reality.39 The most important contrast to Clarke’s Newtonianismhere is that Leibniz holds that space is perceptually constituted by perceived


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relations of things, and thus depends on those perceptions. Where forClarke, being and events unfold in time, for Leibniz, as for the authors ofLe Da Costa Encyclopédique, “the division of time into past, present, and fu-ture is . . . due solely to our present incapacity to embrace everything in asingle glance.”40

On the basis of this fundamental philosophical difference betweenClarke’s Newtonianism and Leibniz’s phenomenalism, we can propose aNewtonian model of encyclopedic classification and explain the Leibnizianmodel by contrast. Our imaginary Newtonian encyclopedia would be or-ganized by the notion that the classificatory space of its pages and volumesis absolute and empty, ready to receive its content from the substance ofparticular truths. No matter which propositions those truths may be, theclassificatory system awaiting them is understood to be already given.More important, the “terms” of a Newtonian encyclopedia—the “truths”or “propositions” to be organized—occupy a location within that classifica-tory space. These terms are the content of the encyclopedia, arranged ac-cording to a schema that bears in itself no intrinsic relationship to them.The Newtonian encyclopedia, that is, has the form of an absolute con-ceptual container within which content is arranged and according towhich it is measured and understood. A Leibnizian critic of this Newton-ian encyclopedia would insist that insofar as the encyclopedia as a wholeis understood to be a conceptual structure by which propositions arearranged according to their content, it dissolves before the force of therepetition of those terms as they reappear in multiple classificatory loca-tions simultaneously. If the content of a single substantial truth expandsinto the totality of human knowledge—each page unfolding in all pages,the least scientific treatise or moral tract becoming a comprehensive en-cyclopedia of human knowledge—then the Newtonian encyclopedia liesin ruins.

Only the method of reference is adequate to the uninterrupted ocean ofknowledge, Leibniz thinks, because only referential return can tame thedanger of the repetition of terms. Sending its terms back through each oftheir iterations, the method of reference models the encyclopedia onLeibniz’s answer to Clarke: classificatory space is a relational totality of si-multaneous coexistents. This means that on the Leibnizian model, the termsof the encyclopedia are understood through their formal structure of refer-ence to all other terms rather than through their role as the content of an al-ready given structure. Thus, the infinitely complex and mutually implicatedrelationships reflected in the structure of each of the terms are what gener-ate the categories of the encyclopedia. It is because every substantial proposi-tion contains an entire world—because every truth mirrors the universe ofknowledge from a particular perspective—that the repetition of all truths in


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every truth and every truth in all truths does not destroy the system. Leibnizholds, in other words, that the system of classification through reference is it-self constituted by the infinite repetition of terms that destroyed the previ-ous alternatives. Rather than seek a model for the encyclopedia that avoidsthe problem of repetition, the Leibnizian encyclopedia takes conceptualrepetition as its organizing principle.

To review, Leibniz holds the position that a self-undermining conceptualrepetition results from approaches to the construction of an encyclopediathat depend on the arbitrary imposition of classificatory categories (the clas-sical, Lockean, nominalist, and holist models), from strategies that rely onthe serial arrangement of the content of terms according to their origins orends (the synthetic and analytic models), and from procedures in whicheach term is a type of content to be located in an absolute classificatoryspace (the Newtonian model). These methods of organization generate asituation in which the propositions of human knowledge overflow theirclassificatory boundaries, reappearing within all other classifications anddestroying the structure of the encyclopedia as such. Leibniz, by contrast,proposes a method of formal cross-reference and inventory in which theterms to be classified are not separable from the structure of their classifica-tion. According to this approach, the particular form of repetition that con-stitutes a term’s structure of reference to all other concepts (that is, to theconceptual “universe” of which it is the expression) is what makes it the con-cept that it is. Insisting that through the system of cross-referencing eachproposition must be “sent back” to the whole of which it is a part, Leibniz al-lows the formal referential structure of concepts to determine the encyclo-pedic categories themselves.

If the Leibnizian model of the encyclopedia is to rely on and be gener-ated from the explosion of its terms throughout its classificatory space, howwill these terms be distinguished from one another? What is it that consti-tutes the identity or singularity of a given “entry” within the encyclopedia?If we maintain fidelity to Leibniz’s model of individual substances as out-lined earlier, then for one encyclopedic term to stand in the same relationto the whole of human knowledge as another (for two truths to occupy thesame part of a classificatory space, in the terms of the Newtonian encyclope-dia) is simply impossible for the Leibnizian concept. In a statement of theprinciple of the identity of indiscernibles in the same part of the Discours demétaphysique discussed earlier, Leibniz holds that “it is not true that two sub-stances can resemble one another entirely and be different solo numero” (A,6.4-b:1541). Put positively, this means that any two individual substancespossessing the same predicate structure are in fact one and the same sub-stance; two conceptually identical things are one and not two. If Leibniz’s


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method of encyclopedic cross-reference embraces the repetition of everyconceptual term in each encyclopedic category, then it would seem that allof these categories would possess the same conceptual structure. Leibniz’sprinciple of no difference solo numero would demand, it seems, that there beonly one encyclopedic category. If there is no difference among the cate-gories, then the categories are identical; and if the categories are identical,then they are one and the same thing. At the limit of the formalization of en-cyclopedic terms, “writing” the encyclopedia again seems to be impossible.

Thus, with the generation of encyclopedic structure by way of referenceand inventory, the full problem of the organization of knowledge has by nomeans been solved. Leibniz’s move from the content of propositions to theirformal repetition has provided a general structure for the classification ofany and all human knowledge. If this structure is to be filled—if the re-peated encyclopedic terms are not all to be identical and if content is to beprovided for Leibniz’s formal encyclopedic structure—then this reversalthrough content to form must itself be repeated. This second reversal is, forLeibniz, a reiteration of the problem of classificatory repetition and canbe elucidated by way of comparison with Descartes’s project for the self-certification of knowledge in order to ground its formal certainty.

In important ways, Leibniz has remained Cartesian up to this point. Asfor Descartes, the moment of certainty for the foundation of a system ofknowledge has turned out to be the discovery of an empty and formal point.Leibniz’s move to an absolute formality of thinking via an encyclopedicmethod of reference parallels the following way of reading the foundationalmoment of Cartesian metaphysics. Readers familiar with Descartes’s Medita-tiones de prima philosophia (1641) will recall his famous account of the Carte-sian meditator’s skeptical “general demolition” of his opinions in the searchfor a certain and indubitable foundation for knowledge (scientia) in Medita-tion One, as well as the subsequent discovery of a “necessarily true” proposi-tion that can serve as such a foundation in Meditation Two. What tends to beforgotten is that the order of reasons in the argument of the Meditationes isdifferent from that found in the Discours de la méthode (1637) or the Principiaphilosophiae (1644). While in the last two texts the indubitable propositionDescartes discovers is “Je pense, donc je suis” or “Ego cogito, ergo sum,” inthe Meditationes its initial form is “Ego sum, ego existo.”41 While Descartestempts his readers to conflate these notions by arguing from “I am, I exist” to“I am therefore nothing but a res cogitans,” it is nevertheless the case thatthese claims have a very different status in the unfolding of his methodologi-cal thinking.42 What distinguishes the ego sum, ego existo from the totality ofdubitable propositions tested in Meditation One is neither the immediacy ofthe ego to thinking nor the instantaneity of its utterance and conception(though it is also the case that “this proposition is necessarily true whenever


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I bring it forth or conceive it in my mind”).43 While the activity of thinking isindeed the guarantor for the certainty of this proposition, it is the empty for-mality of ego sum, ego existo that constitutes its indubitability. The certainty of“I am, I exist” does not immediately refer to what I am (my nature oressence, my quiddity), but merely to that I am (my existence). In the order ofDescartes’s Meditationes argument, even while that I am has been firmly estab-lished, what I am still remains to be seen. As Descartes puts it after claimingcertainty for his “thatness”: “But I do not yet sufficiently understand whatthis ego is, which now necessarily is.” It is not until three full paragraphs ofphilosophical meditation later—a methodological eternity for the scriptiveself—that the meditator is able to claim that he knows with certainty that heis, in fact, a res cogitans.44

Given this reminder, it is plausible to claim that the dubitability of eachopinion Descartes’s meditator examines in Meditation One is not the resultof his failure to dig far enough into the soil of hyperbolic doubt, but ratherto the way he posits the content—the “whatness”—of any given proposition asthat which is to be tested. The mechanics of Descartes’s argument thus turnon the way propositional content as such always fails to attain indubitabilitybefore the test of hyperbolic doubt and its personification in a supremely slyand powerful deceiver. What this deceiver does not and cannot destroy is theformality of the proposition as such, because even his deception has apropositional form; I only escape his clutches by positing something ab-solutely emptied of content: “I am, I exist.” It is of course true that all such“positing” turns out to be a kind of thinking and that “he will never bring itabout that I am nothing so long as I think I am something.”45 It is still, how-ever, the pure propositional formality of ego sum, ego existo rather than its con-tent that renders it indubitable. In these terms, the gradual evacuation of allpropositional content is the target of the meditator’s general demolition ofhis opinions.

For Descartes’s hyperbolic theatrics of the subject, Leibniz substitutes anequally exaggerated and analogous staging of the encyclopedic system. Justas the Cartesian meditator gradually eliminates all propositional content byway of an exaggerated method of doubt in order to arrive at a self-certifying,foundational, and purely formal claim, so too is Leibniz’s philosophical con-sideration of encyclopedic methodology a reversal through content-orientedsystems of organization to the absolute propositional formalism required bythe method of reference. The metaphysics of the Leibnizian encyclopedia,however, is eventually forced to leave this formality behind. It does so by sub-stituting the circular conception of encyclopedic categorization for the serial-ity of Cartesian rule-governed thought. For Descartes, the absolute certaintyof the empty and formal proposition establishes a foundation on which


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I can build a system of knowledge. Once the cornerstones of this founda-tion are laid, however, the Cartesian meditator slowly retraces the serialdubitability of Meditation One and supercedes it with serial clarity and dis-tinctness. I will once again distinguish my dreams from my waking hours;the existence of my body will be reestablished; I will rely on my senses oncemore; and I will go on to investigate scientific, philosophical, and theologi-cal problems of all sorts.

For the Leibnizian encyclopedist, on the other hand, the reversal frompure formality back into conceptual content is instantaneous and total.First, the consideration of content-oriented methods for constructing anencyclopedia shows that they dissolve before the repetition of propositionalcontent throughout their classificatory systems. Second, the failure of thesemethods prompts the generation of an inventory and the development of anew method depending entirely on the establishment of terms through aformal structure of cross-reference that replaces propositional content. Atthe limit of this empty methodological formality, each “term” to be organ-ized and classified within the encyclopedic structure is in fact nothing morethan a referential reflection of the totality of that structure. In this way,encyclopedic cross-reference does not do away with the repetition of eachelement of human knowledge in every conceptual category, but insteadprovides a method for incorporating repetition into a stable systematic struc-ture. Finally, while at the level of pure formality each of these referentialstructures reflects the entirety of the encyclopedic system—both its classifi-catory framework and the totality of its terms—each is also individuated byway of the referential and perspectival expression of the total conceptual“universe” of the encyclopedia. The “thisness” or haecceity of an entry inthe Leibnizian encyclopedia consists in its being a particular and uniquepoint of view on the infinite system of cross-referencing that structures thework as a whole. Every concept includes a reference to every other, but eachis also a unique pattern of that total system of references.

Put another way, the individual substances of Leibniz’s Discours de méta-physique are each structurally and formally identical to the totality of whichthey are a part (“complete worlds,” “mirrors of God or of the entire uni-verse”). At the same time, they are absolutely individuated by virtue of theirsingular perspective on that whole (“each singular substance expresses thewhole universe in its own manner” and “each substance is like a world apart,independent of all other things outside of God”) (A, 6.4-b:1541, 1550). Anal-ogously, each term in the Leibnizian encyclopedia is an absolutely self-con-tained and singular text. At the same time this singularity is constituted pre-cisely by its status as an elaborate and total system of cross-reference to everyother concept, the unique order of these references constituting its identity.


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At the limit of the formality of categorical organization, the shimmering sur-face of the Leibnizian encyclopedia refigures the depths of human knowl-edge as a unique and total set of internal references.46

I have suggested that the Leibnizian encyclopedia constitutes a theo-retical framework for reflection on one form of the problem of repetition.It is a proposal for the reconciliation of a formal taxonomy with a totalityof human knowledge that refuses to submit to organizational stasis. Inpractical terms, of course, it is an impossible project. Our Leibnizian ency-clopedia would be an infinite set of volumes containing entries for everyparticular concept and entity, these entries each consisting of an infinitelycomplex pattern of reference to every other entry. In his critique of Lock-ean categories and the ancient division of knowledge, Leibniz first articu-lated a problem of repetition: concepts cannot be contained within thebounds of such a structure but are repeated at every categorical locationwithin it. The only possible adequate method for categorizing concepts,Leibniz argues, is a method of metaphysical cross-reference that developsout of the failure of the analytic and synthetic attempts at arrangement, re-placing an emphasis on the content of concepts with a consideration oftheir formal structure. This method ultimately breaks with the seriality ofCartesian thought and replaces it with the circularity of a referential systemthat is able to encompass rather than reject the methodological alterna-tives and problem of repetition with which it struggled. Ultimately, it ar-rives at a substantial ontology of concepts and an imaginative vision of theentries in a total encyclopedia for words still unknown and still burning tobe uttered.

Notes

1. Le Da Costa Encyclopédique, [ed. Robert Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg with theassistance of Marcel Duchamp], (Paris, 1947), extremely rare except in itstranslation in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Alastair Brotchie, trans. Iain White(London, 1995), 122. Fascicle 7, volume 2 of Le Da Costa Encyclopédique—beginningmidword in the entry on a mysterious topic whose identity can only be guessedbut whose first letters are certainly “ec” and ending midparagraph in the entry“Extasiée”—was the only section of the work ever to appear (though fascicles 2and 1—in that order—of the nonencyclopedic Le Memento universel Da Costawere published in 1948). It is unknown which of the contributors pennedthe “Encyclopédie” article. For an account of the text’s history, see Brotchie,Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 17–19.

2. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Quotations from G.W.Leibniz’s works are cited in the text with the following abbreviations:


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A: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Berlin-Brandenburgerischen [form. Preussis-che] Akademie der Wissenschaften and Akademie der Wissenschaften inGöttingen (Darmstadt/Berlin, 1923–). Citations to this work begin with theabbreviation “A” followed by the series, volume, part, and page numbers ofthis multivolume and as yet incomplete publication of Leibniz’s manuscripttexts.

C: Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz, ed. Louis Couturat (Paris, 1903).G: Die Philosophische Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1875–90).

3. The literature on Leibniz’s characteristic is enormous. Prominent exemplarsare: Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language andIntellectual History (Minneapolis, 1982); Marcelo Dascal, Leibniz: Language, Signs,and Thought (Amsterdam, 1987); Albert Heinekamp, “Sprache und Wirklichkeitnach Leibniz,” in History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed.Herman Parret (Berlin, 1976), 518–70; Hidé Ishiguro, Leibniz’s Philosophy ofLogic and Language (Cambridge, 1990); Paolo Rossi, “The Twisted Roots of Leib-niz’s Characteristic,” in The Leibniz Renaissance, ed. Centro Fiorentino di Storia eFilosofia della Scienza (Florence, 1989), 271–89; and Donald Rutherford,“Philosophy and Language in Leibniz,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz,ed. Nicholas Jolley (Cambridge, 1995), 224–69.

4. For an index of many of Leibniz’s extensive writings on the encyclopedia,see C, 670.

5. Insofar as this version of the problem turns around the metaphysical issue ofunity in relation to multiplicity, see the excellent collection of essays in Unità emolteplicità nel pensiero filosofico e scientifico di Leibniz, ed. A. Lamarra and R. Palia(Florence, 2000).

6. On Leibniz’s proposals for various schemas for the organization of the disciplinesoutside of a directly encyclopedic context, see Wilhelm Totok, “Die Einteilung derWissenschaften bei Leibniz,” in Akten des II. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses, Stu-dia Leibnitiana Supplementa 15, 4 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1975), 4:87–96. On Leibniz’sprecursors in this area, see Joseph S. Freedman, “Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen-tury Classifications of Philosophical Disciplines: Leibniz and Some of HisPredecessors,” in 1:193–202. On the more general context of the problem ofknowledge classification in the period, see Lorraine Daston, “Classifications ofKnowledge in the Age of Louis XIV,” in The Ascendancy of French Culture in the Ageof the Sun King, ed. David Rubin (Washington, 1992), 207–20; and Ulrich G.Leinsle, “Wissenschaftstheorie oder Metaphysik als Grundlage der Enzyk-lopädie?” in Enzyklopädien der Frühen Neuzeit: Beiträge zu ihrer Erforschung, ed. FranzM. Eybl et al. (Tübingen, 1995), 98–119.

7. Literature dealing specifically with Leibniz’s encyclopedia project includesLouis Couturat, La logique de Leibniz d’après des documents inédits (Paris, 1901),235–77; Ulrich von Dierse, Enzyklopädie: zur Geschichte eines philosophischenund wissenschaftstheoretischen Begriffs (Bonn, 1977), 25–36; François Duchesneau,Leibniz et la méthode de la science (Paris, 1993), 18–55; Herbert H. Knecht, LaLogique chez Leibniz: Essai sur le rationalisme baroque (Lausanne, 1981), 257–91;Gottfried Martin, “Thesaurus omnis humanae scientiae. Une requête deLeibniz,” Archives de Philosophie 30, no. 3 (1967): 388–97; and Robert McRae,The Problem of the Unity of Science: Bacon to Kant (Toronto, 1961), 69–88.

8. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris, 1966), 7–11.9. The only real competition for a Jorge Luis Borges figure obsessing philoso-

phers and theorists is Jean Baudrillard’s reference to a passage where Borges


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describes a map of an empire so detailed that it coincides with the territoryit represents, its frayed and ruined remnants blowing through a dusty land-scape while locals make use of its fibers for the construction of shelters(Gilles Deleuze’s fascination with “The Garden of the Forking Paths” exercisesless influence). Baudrillard proclaims that the hilarity of this abstraction has“today” (i.e., by the mid-70s) become trite. To we apparently post-Buñuelianthinkers who live in the realm of the hyperreal, it expresses nothing but “thediscrete charm of second-order simulacra.” Like many readers of Borges, Bau-drillard neglects the context of the imagery. “Of Exactitude in Science” is oneof a number of quotations “collected” pseudonymically by Borges and AdolfoBioy Casares under the heading “Museo” and first published in 1946. The frag-ment is attributed to one nonexistent J. A. Suarez Miranda in book 4, chapter14 of his never-written Viajes de Varones Prudentes (Lérida, 1658, supposedly).The image is a reconfigured version of Josiah Royce’s illustration of self-repre-sentative systems in his 1899 The World and the Individual (Borges cites a smallportion of Royce’s figure in “Partial Magic in the Quixote”), which was in turnprobably inspired by a similar figure in Lewis Carroll’s 1893 Sylvia and BrunoConcluded. The Borges-Casares text is thus an imaginary recasting of a citationof a citation that itself is presented in the form of citation. Jean Baudrillard,Simulacres et simulation (Paris, 1981), 9–10. Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo BioyCasares, Extraordinary Tales, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York, 1971), 123.Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli (Paris, 1988), 83–84. Josiah Royce, The World and the Indi-vidual, 2 vols. (New York, 1927), 1:502–7. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, ed. andtrans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York, 1964), 195–96. The Com-plete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York, 1960), 616–17.

10. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in Borges: AReader, ed. and trans. Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (New York,1981), 142.

11. John Wilkins, An Essay Toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language(London, 1668).

12. It is strange how many readers and critics of Foucault fail to realize (a) thatBorges’s encyclopedia is a fictional construction, and (b) that Foucault is quiteaware of this. At a 1999 presentation on Enlightenment classification systemsand early-nineteenth-century libraries by librarian and history-of-the-bookresearcher Jeffery Garrett, I was amused to witness various audience membersoffering as proof for their dismissal of Foucault’s account of the rise ofseventeenth-century-epistemological procedures of classification nothing morethan their indignant insistence that “Chinese encyclopedias are not really likethat!” Foucault’s account contains, of course, documented historical flaws.Naiveté is not among them. Jeffrey Garrett, “Books and Things: The Crisis ofRepresentation in German Libraries After 1800” (presentation, NorthwesternUniversity, Evanston, Ill., March 8, 1999). See, however, George Huppert,“Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault,” History and Theory 13, no. 3 (Oct.1974): 191–207, which attacks Foucault’s selection of sixteenth- and early-seven-teenth-century texts used to build his account of the Renaissance episteme. Forthe development of a similar argument keyed particularly to the way aspects ofLeibniz’s thought defy Foucault’s account of the conditions for discursive exis-tence in the Baroque, see André Robinet, “Leibniz: La Renaissance et l’ÂgeClassique,” in Leibniz et la Renaissance, Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 13, ed.Albert Heinekamp (Wiesbaden, 1983), 32–36.


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13. In particular, see Rule 8 of Regulae ad directionem ingenii, in Oeuvres de Descartes,ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. (Paris, 1996), 10:392–400.

14. G. W. Leibniz, Leibniz: New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. and trans. PeterRemnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, 1993), 532 n. 1.

15. Dierse, Enzyklopädie, 7–8.16. Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (Rotterdam, 1690), s.v. “encyclopédie.”

Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Paris, 1694), s.v. “encyclopédie.”17. On the changing notions of encyclopedism in the period leading up to Leibniz

see (in addition to the texts cited earlier) Leroy E. Loemker, “Leibniz and theHerborn Encyclopedists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961): 323–38; JeanCérard, “Encyclopédie et encyclopédisme à la Renaissance,” in L’Encyclopédisme,Actes du Colloque de Caen, 12–16 janvier 1987, ed. Annie Becq (Paris, 1991),57–67; J.-F. Maillard, “Fortunes de l’encyclopédie à la fin de la Renaissance,”in ibid., 319–25; Arno Seifert, “Der enzyklopädische Gedanke von derRenaissance bis zu Leibniz,” in Heinekamp, Leibniz et la Renaissance, 113–24; andWalter Tega, “Encyclopédie et unité du savoir de Bacon à Leibniz,” in Becq,L’Encyclopédisme, 69–96.

18. Johann Heinrich Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta (Herborn, 1630);and Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia libris XXVI (Herborn, 1620). The former isoften cited as Encyclopaedia universa, the latter as Encyclopaedia alone. Leibniz’sexcerpts from and commentary on Alsted’s work can be found at A, 6.2:394–97and A, 6.4-b:1122–62.

19. Johann Amos Comenius, Pansophiae prodromus (London, 1639). Leibniz’s refer-ences to Comenius are scattered, but see, for example, A, 6.4-a:683–85.Loemker argues that the Herborn encyclopedists were influenced by Baconianscience and its emphasis on the apprehension of particulars together withpositing the unity of human knowledge, while still remaining “Ramist in proce-dure.” Thus, as Loemker cites Leibniz, the encyclopedists put the classificatorymethods of Peter Ramus to work in the metaphysical interpretation of the par-ticulars of natural philosophical investigation by way of “joining method tothings”; Loemker, “Herborn Encyclopedists,” 324–26, 332–33.

20. Gregor Reisch, Margarita Philosophica (Basel, 1535). William West, Theaters andEncyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), 22–28.

21. The text can also be found, along with the two versions of De l’Horizon itself, inGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, De l’Horizon de la doctrine humaine. Apokatastasispanton (La Restitution universelle), ed. Michel Fichant (Paris, 1991), 35–53.

22. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, 1995).23. Portions of the book were already written in dialogue, but only after Locke’s

death does the whole work take this form. For a brief account of the composi-tion of the text, see Leibniz, New Essays, xi–xii.

24. Locke, Essay, 607–8.25. Translations from the Nouveaux essais are my own, though I have consulted the

Remnant and Bennett edition cited in note 14. On framing the “problem” ofencyclopedic methodology see McRae, The Problem of Unity, 83.

26. For an excellent explanation of the relation of encyclopedic synthetic and ana-lytic methodology in their wider philosophical signification for Leibniz, seeDuchesneau, Leibniz et la méthode, 41–55.

27. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass., 1997),190–222. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 1st ed., 2 vols. (Rotterdam,1697).


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28. More specifically, the project begins in 1689 as a series of notes intended for anemended edition of Louis Moréri’s Le Grand Dictionnaire Historique, ou le Mélangecurieux de l’Histoire sacrée et profane, etc. (Lyons, 1674). It is reconceptualized—inan announcement in the journal Histoire des ouvrages des savants (Sept.–Nov.,1690): 136—as the Dictionnaire Critique, “où l’on verra la correction d’uneinfinité de fautes repanduës soit dans les Dictionaires, soit dans d’autres livres.”A preliminary version (ostensibly a preface) is then published anonymously as amere 400 octavo pages of experimentation with the mobilization of notes, pagespace, and conceptual explanation under the title Projet et Fragments d’unDictionnaire Critique (Rotterdam, 1692). Finally, the first edition of the Diction-naire historique et critique appears in 1697, and Bayle immediately begins revisionand expansion for the second edition of 1702. For a comprehensive account ofthe composition, publication, and revision history of the Dictionnaire, see H. H. M.(Leny) van Lieshout, The Making of Pierre Bayle’s “Dictionaire historique et critique,”trans. Lynne Richards (Amsterdam, 2001), 1–54 and 259–75.

29. On the implications of Bayle’s use of notes, see van Lieshout, Making of, 68–79;and Pierre Rétat, “Le remarque baylienne,” in Critique, savoir et érudition à lavielle des Lumières: le “Dictionnaire historique et critique” de Pierre Bayle, ed. HansBots (Amsterdam, 1998), 27–39. On Bayle as encyclopedist, see Frank A.Kafker, Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Nine Prede-cessors of the “Encyclopédie” (Oxford, 1981), 83–104; and Sebastian Neumeister,“Unordnung als Methode: Pierre Bayles Platz in der Geschichte der Enzyk-lopädie,” in Eybl et al., Enzyklopädien der Frühen Neuzeit: Beiträge zu ihrer Erforschung,188–99.

30. A good discussion of some of the central aspects of this graphic referentialtradition (and especially the relation between the shifts it undergoes fromthe twelfth to the fourteenth centuries and the corresponding changes in themethodological demands of practices of philosophical reading) can be foundin Malcolm Beckwith Parkers, “The Influence of Concepts of Ordinatio andCompilatio on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning and Literature(Oxford, 1976), 115–41. Also see Olga Weijers, “Funktionen des Alphabets imMittelalter,” in Seine Welt wissen: Enzyklopädien in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. UlrichJohannes Schneider (Darmstadt, 2006), 22–32.

31. William W. E. Slights, “Back to the Future—Littorally: Annotating the Histor-ical Page,” in The Future of the Page, ed. Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor(Toronto, 2004), 71–72, 87 n. 1. According to Slights, the majority of Englishprinted books between 1525 and 1675 include marginal printed notes. For anaccount of the relationship between encyclopedic “text types” in the six-teenth century and their projects for the organization of knowledge, see UdoFriedrich, “Grenzen des Ordo im enzyklopädischen Schrifttum des 16.Jahrhunderts,” in Die Enzyklopädie im Wandel vom Hochmittelalter bis zur FrühenNeuzeit, ed. Christel Meier (München, 2002), 391–408.

32. Henri-Jean Martin, La Naissance du livre moderne (XIVe–XVIIe siècles): Mise enpage et mise en texte du livre français (Paris, 2000), 272–74.

33. Bayle, Dictionnaire (1697), 2:966–67. G, 4:477–87. The “Système nouveau” wasoriginally printed in Le Journal des sçavans no. 25 and 26 (1695): 294–306.

34. For Leibniz’s responses to Bayle’s comments in note H, see G, 4:517–54 andG, 3:55–63. Note L is added in Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique,2nd ed., 3 vols. (Rotterdam, 1702), 3:2610–12.


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35. G, 6:16–20. Van Lieshout, however, suggests that it is unclear whether this letterever actually reached Bayle (Making of, 17). In this letter, Leibniz is responding tothe Projet et Fragments, which experiments with multiple forms of citation andtypographical arrangement throughout its articles. Only the form of the lastarticle in the collection (“Zeuxis,” Projet et Fragments, 383–400) directly resemblesthe notational methodology Bayle uses in the Dictionnaire itself. On this exchangebetween Leibniz and Bayle, see van Lieshout, Making of, 17–19; and LiefNedergaard, “Le genèse du ‘Dictionaire historique et critique’ de Pierre Bayle,”Orbis Litterarum 13, no. 3–4 (1958): 215–16.

36. Bayle, Dictionnaire (1702), 3:2599–2612.37. In the article “Encyclopédie” appearing in the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie,

Denis Diderot describes analogous techniques of cross-referencing as “themost important part of the encyclopedic order,” which would “give to thewhole thing that unity so favorable to the establishment of truth and to its per-suasion,” allowing “the work as a whole to receive an internal force and secretutility, the silent effects of which will necessarily become sensible with time.”Explicitly acknowledging his formal debt to Bayle, implicitly and inadvertentlyDiderot is tracing the genealogy of his system of encyclopedic reference backto Leibniz. Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonnédes sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres (Paris, 1751–65),5:642.

38. See Leibniz’s fourth and fifth letters to Clarke, especially G, 7:372, 393.39. In regard to time in particular, Leibniz’s position relies on an account of the

constitution of “apperception” through an infinity of confused and uncon-scious microperceptions (petit perceptions). As he puts it in the Nouveaux essais,“Moreover, there are a thousand signs [marques] leading us to judge that atevery moment there is an infinity of perceptions within us, but without apper-ception and without reflection; that is to say, of changes in the soul itself ofwhich we apperceive nothing, because the impressions are either too small andtoo great in number, or too uniform, so that they are not sufficiently distinctiveon their own. But joined to others, they nevertheless make their effect andmake themselves felt, at least confusedly in the assemblage” (A, 6.6:54).

40. In Brotchie, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 122.41. Oeuvres de Descartes, 6:32, 8:7, 7:25.42. Ibid., 7:27.43. Ibid., 7:25.44. Ibid., 7:27.45. Ibid., 7:25.46. It is, of course, tempting to take Leibniz’s hypostatization of encyclopedic ref-

erentiality as a useful model for thinking about our contemporary electronicinformation networks. It is easy enough to imagine an idealized version of theWeb where meaning is constituted purely through the network of relationallinkages rather than the more commercialized content they tend actually tostring together. Certainly, the general encyclopedic dream of a machine or textin which the totality of human knowledge is assembled and organized resem-bles the hyperbole surrounding the possible futures of the Internet. Further-more, it is certainly the case that the entries in the Leibnizian encyclopedia—ascomplexes of total internal relations—bring to mind the sudden and surpris-ing sequences that can unfold in online experiences. My inclination, however,


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is to claim that such parallels posit a series of structural continuities where thereare primarily superficial resemblances. What is most interesting about the mise enpage of Bayle’s Dictionnaire is not the way it resembles, for example, medievalTalmudic commentaries and gloss editions of Aristotle, but rather the way that itsmobilization of notational structure makes possible conceptually unique ways ofreading. In the same sense, the more general aspects of Leibniz’s theory of ency-clopedism can capture the way only a few clicks through url links may connectsixteenth-century linguistic theory with the details of a teenage pop star’s recentfashion purchases. To focus on this, however, is to miss the philosophicaloriginality of Leibniz’s notion. Furthermore, it seems to me that Leibniz’spresentation of encyclopedic notions as absolutely referential and indexicalterms is a way of imagining a structure far more variegated than the online worldwe encounter. Our reliance on search engines means that the “reflections” of thetotality of the universe of knowledge we encounter are structured not by theunique point of view on the whole that individuates a Leibnizian encyclopediaentry, but rather by the vagaries of fashion as inscribed by algorithms of usage,volume, and traffic, not to mention sophisticated techniques of niche-marketingand surveillance.


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SELCER, 2007. Leibniz and the Encyclopedic Imagination

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