Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Sinophile

Sinophile

Leibniz was perhaps the first major European intellect to take a close interest in Chinese civilization, which he knew by corresponding with, and reading other works by, European Christian missionaries posted in China. Having read Confucius Sinicus Philosophus on the first year of its publication, he concluded that Europeans could learn much from the Confucian ethical tradition. He mulled over the possibility that the Chinese characters were an unwitting form of his universal characteristic. He noted with fascination how the I Ching hexagrams correspond to the binary numbers from 0 to 111111, and concluded that this mapping was evidence of major Chinese accomplishments in the sort of philosophical mathematics he admired.

Leibniz's attraction to Chinese philosophy originates from his perception that Chinese philosophy was similar to his own. The historian E.R. Hughes suggests that Leibniz's ideas of "simple substance" and "pre-established harmony" were directly influenced by Confucianism, pointing to the fact that they were conceived during the period that he was reading Confucius Sinicus Philosophus.