The natural and the innate : a historical perspective

Until now, the collision of European philosophy with indigenous knowledge systems in the classical age has been little studied. I propose here to examine the philosophy of Leibniz as a particularly important chapter in the history of global epistemic exchange that is the hidden history of modern European philosophy. In 1695, the same year G. W. Leibniz introduced his system of pre-established harmony, the German philosopher devoted most of his intellectual efforts to studying the virtues of the ipecacuanha root, brought back from Brazil a few decades earlier by Wilhelm Piso. Leibniz wanted to extract from this plant not only medicinal remedies, but also, as far as possible, indigenous Brazilian knowledge. He rejects the opinion of others who "condemn everything exotic as useless for our [European] bodies". On this point, Leibniz can be characterized as a naturalist in the sense of Philippe Descola: the external conformation of Brazilians and Europeans is the same. But what about the interiority of both? Already in ^17th-century Europe, the indigenous knowledge systems of the non-European world represented a kind of tertium quid between the a priori and the empirical. This was the knowledge of singular facts about the natural world - the medicinal properties of this or that root, or the venomous powers of this or that snake - but this knowledge was not learned, at least not in the same way as a European decides to learn the science of chemistry or botany. Rather, it was supposed to be born together with the individual, simply by virtue of his or her integration into a society that was, itself, integrated into nature. Such a society was supposedly devoid of knowledge of eternal, unchanging truths - the existence of God in particular - but at the same time its members had what most European philosophers considered a contradiction in terms: innate knowledge of singular, contingent facts. One of the most astonishing innovations of Leibniz's radically rationalist philosophy was to show how this kind of knowledge is possible, and even necessary, for all human beings as human beings. Although it would take a few more centuries for this to develop into a mature research program, by the end of the ^17th century, then, indigenous knowledge systems were already offering a model for studying the mind as essentially rooted in the natural environment. While this innovation would later become the foundation of theoretical approaches in structuralist and cognitive anthropology, enactivist philosophy of mind and similar fields of research, all of which presuppose the absolute equality of all human beings, in the classical age it often served (if not for Leibniz himself) as an epistemic criterion for determining the boundary in the great divide between them and us, between the "natural" and the rational. Before there were racial categories rooted in observable physical traits, interpreted as external signs of essential internal differences, there was a perhaps even more fundamental distinction between two "species of mind": some who have, as it were, become fixed on the earth; others who derive their nature from the heavens, i.e. from a divine source or one external to the natural world. Leibniz, even if he wasn't fully aware of it, offers us a model of the human mind in which every spirit participates in both species, insofar as natural knowledge is innate in it, without being fundamentally different from knowledge of God and other a priori non-natural truths.