Richard Halpern's "Leibnizing"

Richard Halpern is the author of books on topics ranging from Shakespeare to Norman Rockwell. At his retirement, he was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University.

Halpern applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Leibnizing: A Philosopher in Motion, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book occurs in a chapter titled “How to Build a Monad.” In it, I explore the philosopher G.W. Leibniz’s most famous concept--the monad--via a facetious thought-experiment in which I actually attempt to construct one (and of course fail miserably). A monad is a mind, but a mind all of whose perceptions are pre-programmed into it rather than received in real time from an external world. On page 99, I continue an analogy I had established earlier in the chapter between monadic perception and a video game. A video game likewise produces a “world” but generates it through its own algorithmic code rather than from some external reality. On page 99, I complicate things by acknowledging that a monad is not merely like a video game but rather like the (much more complicated) mental experience of playing such a game. I then go on to discuss two developments in contemporary thought that might bear on this problem. One is a notion proposed by some contemporary philosophers that a mind is an “information state” that happens to exist in our brains but could also be instantiated in a computer. The other is the claim by the physicist Stephen Wolfram that very complicated phenomena, including computers, can be generated from very simple algorithms of a kind known as cellular automata.

My book responds somewhat well but by no means perfectly to the Page 99 Test. I do frequently go back and forth between Leibniz—a seventeenth-century philosopher—and more contemporary figures, partly to demonstrate Leibniz’s continuing relevance and partly to help illustrate his sometimes difficult and elusive ideas. But the book’s focus is still mainly on Leibniz, while page 99’s focus is mostly on other thinkers, so the proportions get reversed. In addition, my book alternates between subject matter that is mostly of interest to humanists, such as aesthetics, and materials involving mathematics and science, though of a basic and easy-to-understand kind. But page 99 tilts heavily toward the science side. In fact, the whole chapter does.

My attempt to “build” a monad is based on Leibniz’s claim that both the content of our perceptions and their sequencing is governed by what he calls a “law of the series.” And there is good reason to believe he means by this an infinite series in the mathematical sense, a very simple example of which would be the harmonic series: 1 +1/2 +1/3 +1/4+… In other words, thinking is for Leibniz a mathematical process. This is an example of how he draws on unexpected areas of knowledge in the course of his philosophizing. To formulate his ideas about the monad, he borrows concepts not only from mathematics but from physics, biology, psychology, optics, painting, logic and theology. His distinctive philosophical style results from creating what cognitive linguists call “conceptual blends” of very different kinds of knowledge. It is one premise of my book that Leibniz’s wild and wide-ranging style of thought continues to inspire thinkers in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and can even provide a usable model for non-geniuses like ourselves.

Learn more about Leibnizing at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence.

--Marshal Zeringue