stylistic:tone
Enlightenment Europe

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was corresponding with Jesuits in China, wrote the first European commentary on the I Ching in 1703. He argued that it proved the universality of binary numbers and theism, since the broken lines, the "0" or "nothingness", cannot become solid lines, the "1" or "oneness", without the intervention of God. This was criticized by Georg Friedrich Hegel, who proclaimed that binary system and Chinese characters were "empty forms" that could not articulate spoken words with the clarity of the Western alphabet. In their commentary, I Ching hexagrams and Chinese characters were conflated into a single foreign idea, sparking a dialogue on Western philosophical questions such as universality and the nature of communication. The usage of binary in relation to the I Ching was central to Leibniz's characteristica universalis, or 'universal language', which in turn inspired the standards of Boolean logic and for Gottlob Frege to develop predicate logic in the late 19th century. In the 20th century, Jacques Derrida identified Hegel's argument as logocentric, but accepted without question Hegel's premise that the Chinese language cannot express philosophical ideas.