Allison P. Coudert & Taylor Corse

Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, Leibniz,
language & a universal character

Van Helmont’s Short Sketch of the Truly Natural Hebrew Alphabet was only one of many books written about language in the seventeenth century. During the early modern period more books were written on this subject than in any previous period. Every major figure, and these include Reuchlin, Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Postel, Boehme, Kircher, Hobbes, Descartes, Comenius, Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz, as well as many lesser ones were fascinated by the idea that a “natural” language or “real” character could be devised in which words would unambiguously indicate the nature of things. [100] But van Helmont took for granted ideas that were the focal point of fierce controversy. He believed without question there was a transcendental order of reality derived from God that lay behind the changing world of appearance. This assumption was the main issue in the debate between realists and nominalists that began in the twelfth century, reaching a climax in the seventeenth. On one side were the skeptics, who argued on the grounds of history and psychology that there was no such thing as absolute and a priori truth. Thomas Hobbes had made this point in his Leviathan some sixteen years before van Helmont published his Short Sketch. Hobbes argued that human conceptions arise from sense impressions and the signs human beings arbitrarily assign to them. Words are therefore conventional and have no inherent relation to things. And since scientific and philosophical propositions consist of conventionally defined words to form sequences of arbitrarily defined concepts, there is no guarantee that such concepts tell us anything about reality. Knowledge will always be hypothetical and conditional. John Locke reached similar conclusions in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. To anyone deluded enough to think that words had intrinsic meanings he says in an amusing aside, “Let him try if any words can give him the taste of a pine apple, and make him have the true idea of the relish of that celebrated delicious fruit.” [101] Totally opposed to this way of thinking were the realists, who argued that a divinely ordained order of truth and reality guided human action and thought. These men were appalled by the conclusions of the skeptics and nominalists and considered them dangerous threats to the social order and political stability. For if there are no incontestable truths resting on universal consent to which human beings can turn amid the doubts of theology and philosophy, how could one trust or judge anything? The search for a “natural” language became involved in the conflict between nominalists and realists, for the concept of such a language rested on the assumption that there was an objective correspondence between human reason and nature that could be expressed in meaningful, self-explanatory symbols.

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A short introduction does not allow for a discussion of the many different natural language schemes put forth in the seventeenth century, but the last and perhaps greatest of these, the one devised by Leibniz, provides a representative example. Although Leibniz’s attempt to formulate a universal character was much more sophisticated than van Helmont’s and led him to some scientifically useful results, the two men shared certain basic ideas. Leibniz described himself as a Platonist and believed in an intelligible realm of ideas. This, in turn, led him to think that all knowledge could be reduced to a finite number of simple ideas, which together would form what he called “l’alphabet des pensées humaines” (the alphabet of human thoughts). He proposed a project to draw up all these simple ideas, each of which could then be expressed by a suitable sign. Together these signs would make up a universal characteristic. By combining and separating them, men would arrive at a true understanding of propositions. There would be no place for misunderstanding or ill-founded opinions; reason would triumph over emotion, and instead of arguing men would sit down and calculate. In the end Leibniz was unable to draw up the encyclopedia of simple ideas upon which his universal character depended. But however unproductive his thinking was in terms of a natural language, it did have fruitful side effects for mathematics in terms of the binary system. Numbers do not express simple ideas such as divisibility in a clear straight-forward way, but by removing their artificial and accidental properties, the binary system of notation does. Leibniz also drew a connection between his characteristic and his invention of infinitesimal calculus, which he considered a restricted and partial application of his proposed universal character. [104]

SOURCE: Helmont, F[ranciscus] M[ercurius] van. The Alphabet of Nature, translated with an introduction and annotations by Allison P. Coudert & Taylor Corse (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007); Introduction, pp. xxi-xxxii, xxxiii-xxxiv. (Alphabeti vere naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio, 1667.)

Leibniz & Ideology: Selected Bibliography

Philosophical and Universal Languages, 1600-1800, and Related Themes:
Selected Bibliography

Offsite:

Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature
by Jé Wilson
(The Public Domain Review, June 1, 2016)