In my previous posts (see here, here, and here), I provided some historical background regarding Gottfried Leibniz’s efforts to develop a universal symbolic language (characteristica universalis) and universal thinking machine (calculus ratiocinator), and I also mentioned how one of Leibniz’s greatest admirers, Kurt Gödel, postulated the existence of a hostile centuries-old conspiracy to conceal Leibniz’s ambitious project. But how plausible is this conspiracy theory? Today, I will explore the inner logic of Gödel’s conspiracy theory, what I like to call “The Leibniz Conspiracy“, using Franz L. Neumann’s influential and oft-cited essay on “Anxiety and Politics” as my point of departure.

In summary, Neumann (pictured below) identifies three features that all conspiracy theories or alternate realities have in common: “intensification of anxiety through manipulation, identification, [and] false concreteness. (See Franz Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics”, page 283, in Herbert Marcuse, editor, The Democratic and Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, The Free Press (1957), pp. 270–300.) The first of these elements—anxiety—refers to the psychological aspect of alternate realities: who is most likely to fall for a conspiracy theory? The last two elements—identification and false concreteness—refer to the content or internal logic of any given conspiracy theory: the identity of the conspirators and their nefarious goals.

With this theoretical background in mind, let us return to Kurt Gödel to illustrate the internal logic of his conspiracy theory, and let’s start with the element of false concreteness. According to Neumann, there must be an element of truth to some aspect of the conspiracy; i.e. the conspiracy must be plausible. (Ibid., pp. 283-287.) In Gödel’s case, his conspiracy theory, although unlikely, was not entirely far-fetched, for some of Leibniz’s writings—specific passages that Leibniz himself had referred to in some of his works—had apparently gone missing. Karl Menger, for example, reports at length the following conversation between Oskar Morgenstern and Gödel:

“Later, I once discussed Gödel’s ideas on Leibniz with a common friend, the economist Oskar Morgenstern. He described to me how Gödel one day took him into the Princeton University Library and piled up two stacks of publications: on one side, books and articles that appeared during or shortly after Leibniz’ lifetime and contained exact references to writings of the philosopher published in collections or series (with places and years of publication, volume and page numbers, etc.); on the other side, those very collections or series. But in some cases, neither on the cited page nor elsewhere was there any writing by Leibniz; in other cases, the series broke off just before the cited volume or the volume ended before the cited page; in still other cases, the volumes containing the cited writings never appeared. ‘The material was really highly astonishing,’ Morgenstern said.”[1]

Although Menger’s statement is hearsay, since he is reporting what a third party (Morgenstern) told him, his hearsay testimony, if true, presents a genuine mystery about the whereabouts of some of Leibniz’s writings. After all, it was not just one obscure reference or a few isolated passages of Leibniz’s that went missing; it was a large collection of them consisting of “two stacks”!

Moreover, Gödel did not simply imagine or conjure up the existence of some long-lost Leibnizian manuscript, a mythical Holy Grail of philosophical legend. Instead, Gödel had done a meticulous amount of research, assembling two stacks’ worth of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materials with “exact references” to specific writings and passages of Leibniz—passages that had disappeared completely, despite the existence of such precise references to those writings.

Perhaps one or two lost references would be just a coincidence, works lost to the ceaseless march of time (to paraphrase The Great Gatsby), but how do we explain the disappearance of such a large collection of Leibniz’s writings? Next, I will explore Neumann’s remaining features of conspiracy theories and their relation to the Leibniz Conspiracy in my next post.

To be continued (footnote below the fold) …

[1] Karl Menger, “Memories of Kurt Gödel”, pp. 223-224, in Louise Golland, et al., editors, Reminiscences of the Vienna Circle and the Mathematical Colloquium, Springer Science (1994), pp. 200-236