32 The New York Review
The Imperfect Telescope
Merve Emre
The Organs of Sense
by Adam Ehrlich Sachs.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
227 pp., $26.00
The German philosopher Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, the main character
of Adam Sachs’s debut novel, The Or-
gans of Sense, had a minor obsession
with telescopes. His hero was Johannes
Kepler, the mathematician who had
invented the refracting astronomical
telescope in 1611. “Kepler, thanks to
the force of his genius, has discovered
a telescope whose glasses are con-
vex,” Leibniz announced in a letter to
a friend in 1679. Kepler’s glasses were
“far more excellent than others”—
more durable than the silver mirror
in Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope,
more powerful than the concave eye-
piece Galileo Galilei gazed through, in
which the evening star appeared only
thirty times bigger than it did to the
naked eye. Elsewhere, Leibniz rebuffed
René Descartes as a geometer with a
“rather limited mind” whose only re-
deeming ambitions were astronomi-
cal: “The only useful thing he thought
he had given were his telescopes,” he
sniped, “with which he promised to
show us animals, or parts as small as
animals, on the moon.” But the tele-
scope that Descartes designed, the
telescope Leibniz longed for, proved
impossible for Descartes’s workmen
to manufacture. The animals on the
moon remained, regrettably, invisible.
At eighteen, Leibniz had decided
that the highest effort of philosophy
would be to construct a language of
metaphysics that could perfect the ex-
tension of human thought with no less
precision or glory than the telescope
had perfected the extension of the
human eye. The language he imagined
would serve as the “greatest instrument
of reason”: a universally comprehensi-
ble system of signs that would “supply
not only the words but also the things”
to which the words referred—the ideas
that were a “reflection and refraction
and multiplication” of the infinite wis-
dom of God, “supreme Author” of the
cosmos. Perfectly mimetic, scrupu-
lously logical, Leibniz’s language would
transform every mind into “a perpetu-
ally living mirror of the universe,” al-
lowing strangers to calculate their
way to shared judgments about art,
ethics, and politics, clearing the way
for worldly happiness and harmony. It
would even bring order to blind emo-
tional impulses like love. “We should
not have to break our heads as much
as is necessary today,” Leibniz wrote.
Surely there was a way to reflect God’s
ideas, and the thoughts of others, too,
in our language.
Leibniz’s fondness for the language
of optics ignored the fact that, in the
seventeenth century, mirrors were ter-
rible reflectors. Made from silver, they
were prone to tarnishing, enveloping
whoever stood before them in an ob-
scuring mist. Flattened by hand, they
bent in or out, enlarging or diminishing
whatever they beheld, focusing on the
wrong things, or the right things in the
wrong proportions. The same defects
were found in the glass lenses of the
earliest telescopes, whose convex lenses
produced inverted images. Telescopes
were “false Informers” and “meer de-
luders,” according to the Empress who
rules over Margaret Cavendish’s late-
seventeenth-century work of utopian
fiction The Blazing World. “Nature
has made your Sense and Reason more
regular than Art has your Glasses,”
she rages at her palace astronomers, a
pack of half-bear, half-man creatures
who cannot agree on how many stars
burn in the night sky. She commands
them to break their telescopes and use
only their eyes. They demur, preferring
the estranging pleasures of art: they
“kneel’d down, and in the humblest
manner petitioned, that they might not
be broken; for, said they, we take more
delight in Artificial delusions, than in
Natural truths.”
The Organs of Sense imagines that
Leibniz’s entire philosophical proj-
ect emerged from one possibly hal-
lucinatory afternoon—an “Artificial
delusion,” or, as Sachs introduces his
counterfactual history, “the sole sig-
nificant intellectual crisis of a philo-
sophical career otherwise dominated
by the sanguine rationalism for which
it is now known, and for which, at least
since the time of Voltaire, it has peri-
odically been ridiculed.” On the last
day of June 1666 —the same year Cav-
endish published The Blazing World,
Newton started his work on the three
laws of motion, and Giovanni Cas-
sini measured the rotational period ofMars—a nineteen-year-old Leibniz
seeks an old astronomer in a crumbling
observatory perched somewhere above
the dense forests of Bohemia. The as-
tronomer possesses the largest and
most powerful telescope in the world,
and has predicted a solar eclipse that
will plunge Europe into total darkness
for four seconds. Leibniz has jour-
neyed to the astronomer’s observatory
because he doubts the prediction, and
with good reason: the astronomer is
blind. His eyes have been plucked out,
leaving “two empty eye sockets,” “two
uncanny voids,” Leibniz writes in an
account of his visit, that the astronomer
presses “to the brass eyepiece of that
colossal telescope” while jotting down
strange sequences of numbers. Hav-
ing observed this “ceremony of sight,”
Leibniz resolves to prove the astrono-
mer is insane:If this was a sort of performance,
it was not clear for whom he might
be performing, since there was no
one else save a fat slumbering cat
in the observatory, and as far as
Leibniz could tell, he, Leibniz, had
not yet been detected. If this was
a performance for God, God, the
being that need only be possible
to be actual, and Who therefore
is actual, because He is possible,
and Who as a consequence of His
actuality perceives at every instant
an infinity of perceptions, would,no doubt, not be fooled, a fact of
which reason itself, if it functioned
rightly in him, would inform the
astronomer. And if it is a perfor-
mance for himself, he is, as I will
prove, mad, Leibniz wrote, for it
is part of the essence of a perfor-
mance that one stages it for oth-
ers, so anyone who performs for
himself acts as if he has within him
another being, who might be per-
formed for—an evident absurdity;
and if he believes this absurdity,
then he is mad, and if he acts this
way without believing it, then he is
also mad.If it is not a performance—if the
astronomer is sane—then, Leibniz
concludes, “either he really sees, or
he thinks he really sees.” But what
can a blind man see? And how can an
observer confirm that the blind man
sees what he claims to see? Amid the
apparent impossibility of blind sight,
Leibniz glimpses the possibility of an
epistemic breakthrough: “The problem
of getting inside another head, and see-
ing what that head was seeing (or not
seeing) and what it was thinking (or
not thinking), now struck Leibniz as
a profoundly philosophical problem.”
Though he yearns to crack the astrono-
mer’s head open, to drill into his skull
and cut through its membranes, he
knows that doing so would bring him
no closer to the truth—that it would
annihilate the truth he seeks to dis-
cover. The only instrument he can use
to get inside the astronomer’s head is
language. But, as Leibniz will discover
over the three hours he spends listen-
ing to the astronomer tell the story of
how he lost his eyes, language is never
as transparent as one would hope.The problem of making other peoples’
thoughts transparent was Leibniz’s
lifelong philosophical challenge, but it
is also the representational challenge
the novel as a genre sets for itself. The
structure of human subjectivity and
the structure of the cosmos were often
spoken about in the same breath after
the Galilean revolution, when the dis-
covery that the earth revolved around
the sun overthrew the Ptolemaic belief
that the universe was ordered around
the earth’s single, centralizing point of
view. Subjectivity could never be abso-
lute, bounded, complete, or fixed by a
single, logical perspective. Fictions, as
Cavendish wrote in The Blazing World,
“are an issue of man’s fancy, framed in
his own mind, according as he pleases,
without regard, whether the thing he
fancies, be really existent without his
mind or not.” Like Leibniz, Cavendish
was a believer in panpsychism, the view
that sentience was ubiquitous to real-
ity; that not just man, but the inanimate
matter of which man was made, had
experiences of sense and sentience.*
When Cavendish’s Empress asks the
spirits that counsel her “Whether ManWilliam Blake: frontispiece from The Song of Los, 1795; from Roberta J. M. Olson
and Jay M. Pasachoff’s Cosmos: The Art and Science of the Universe.
It is published by Reaktion and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.HuntingtonLibrary,^ SanMarino,California*I’m grateful to Jonathan Krammick
for his reading of Cavendish’s panpsy-
chism in Paper Minds: Literature and
the Ecology of Consciousness (Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2018).