Q&A: Leibniz and Judaism
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Leibniz and Judaism
Question
Hi,
Are you familiar with any research on how Jewish thinkers and Torah scholars of his time, and somewhat later, related to Leibniz’s philosophy?
For example, the influence of his ideas on trends in Hasidism, Kabbalah, and so on?
Answer
No. I’m not familiar with studies of that kind at all (not that there aren’t any. I’m just not interested).
Discussion on Answer
The only difference is that Leibniz’s monads don’t really communicate with one another.
As far as I remember, Moses Mendelssohn based his “doctrine of tolerance” on Leibniz’s monadological pluralism. Leibniz, who was a devout Christian, received a “Jewish” interpretation on the basis of Mendelssohn’s claim that Judaism allows and encourages a plurality of worldviews and conceptions, unlike Christianity (which strives for a privileged theoretical truth). In Judaism, he argued, there is a consensus on the centrality of Jewish law but not on “theory.” In his view, this is analogous to the system of monads that Leibniz describes (each monad reflects the entire universe in a different way).