Philosophy in the late seventeenth century was a dangerous business. No careerist could afford to know the reclusive philosopher known as the 'atheist Jew', Baruch de Spinoza. Yet the wildly ambitious young genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz became obsessed with Spinoza's writings, wrote him clandestine letters, and ultimately called on Spinoza in person at his home in The Hague. Both men were at the centre of the intense religious, political and personal battles that gave birth to the modern age. One was a hermit with many ...
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Philosophy in the late seventeenth century was a dangerous business. No careerist could afford to know the reclusive philosopher known as the 'atheist Jew', Baruch de Spinoza. Yet the wildly ambitious young genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz became obsessed with Spinoza's writings, wrote him clandestine letters, and ultimately called on Spinoza in person at his home in The Hague. Both men were at the centre of the intense religious, political and personal battles that gave birth to the modern age. One was a hermit with many friends; the other, a socialite no one trusted. One believed in a God whom almost nobody thought divine; the other defended a God in whom he probably did not believe. Their characters and ways of life defined their philosophies. In this exquisitely written philosophical romance of attraction and repulsion, greed and virtue, religion and heresy, Matthew Stewart dramatises a titanic clash of beliefs that still continues today. 'A sprightly and enlightening biography ... this is an exhilaratingly epic canvas. Stewart's writing has huge panache ... It is philosophy exuberantly rooted in history, grabbing you by the lapels and making sure that you know why you are being dragged round the backstreets of The Hague and up the front of the Leineschloss in Hanover. You will not regret the visits.' Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, 'The Guardian' 'Gripping ... the best current untechnical introduction to the lives and philosophies of the two men. Stewart does it in very agreeable prose, and what he says rests on a sound bottom of historical and philosophical scholarship, so lightly worn that one is not conscious of the skill that has gone into making the epoch and its seminal ideas accessible. The result is a thoroughly good book, hard to put down for anyone interested in the great story of the Western intellectual tradition.' A. C. Grayling, 'Literary Review' 'A compelling adventure' Nicholas Fearn, 'The Independent' ' ... superbly elegant and intelligent prose.' Edward Skidelsky, 'The Saturday Telegraph' Matthew Stewart received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University. He sold his management consulting firm so as to devote his time to other thoughts. He lives in New York.
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In November, 1676, the German polymath and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646 - 1716) visited the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632 -1677) at the Hague. Leibniz, age 30, was a rising and ambitious young man who had already, independently of Isaac Newton, invented the calculus. Spinoza, age 44, had been excommunicated from the synagogue in Amsterdam at the age of 24. He had published a notorious work, the "Theological-Political Treatise", and his as-yet unpublished masterpiece, the "Ethics", had been widely if surreptitiously circulated among learned people. At the time of his meeting with Leibniz, Spinoza had only three months to live.
In "The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World"" (2005), Matthew Stewart takes as his pivot-point the Leibniz-Spinoza meeting. Little is known of what occurred at this meeting because Spinoza left no record of it and Leibniz rarely spoke of it. Nevertheless, Stewart uses this meeting as a fulcrum to illuminate the thought of these two philosophers and to show how their views developed into the two broad and competing responses to modernity and to the secular world that remain with us today. Stewart has the gift of presenting his story articulately and well. He combines elements of storytelling, historical narrative, and philosophy in an appealing and accessible fashion. He also shows a great dealing of learning and reflection. Stewart received a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford and is an independent scholar in California.
Spinoza was a self-contained individual. Stewart portrays him as the first and the prototypical secular thinker in philosophy. Stewart rightly places great emphasis on the "Theological-Political Treatise", a work which until recently has not received the attention it deserves. Stewart emphasizes the political character of the work, its goal of freeing the state from the claims of revealed religion, its commitment to the value of free inquiry, and its leanings towards democracy. In this work, Spinoza used a historical approach to interpreting the Bible with the purpose of clearing away supernaturalism and establishing a basis for what became modern, secular life. In the Ethics, Spinoza rejected a transcendent God with a will and with commands for the good conduct of people. Spinoza equated God with nature and with the scientific laws of the universe. Human beings were subject to scientific law and could be studied, rather than constituting a realm separate from nature. The mind was tied to the activities of the body. Human ethics and well-being were naturalistically based.
Unlike Spinoza, Leibniz valued worldly success and the approval of others. For Stewart, Leibniz' mature philosophy, as set forth in the "Monadology" and elsewhere, developed as a response to and rejection of Spinoza's secularism. Leibniz argues for a transcendent God with a free moral will, for a plurality of independent and autonomous substances called monads, and for the immortality of the soul. Stewart places greater emphasis of the meeting between Leibniz and Spinoza, and on Spinoza's alleged influence on Leibniz , than would some historians of philosophy. But Stewart's philosophical approach doesn't appear to me to turn upon his reading of the historical record of Leibniz' actual contact with Spinoza. Rather, Stewart finds in Leibniz the first modern thinker who attempted, reactively, to restore many aspects of earlier, largely religious, thought, including a transcendent God, autonomous persons, and an afterlife, that have no place in Spinoza's thought. Thus, for Stewart, Leibniz is a distinctively modern thinker and the first to try to reconcile the world of physical science and physical law, with a form of transcendent, religious life not controlled by the dictates of science.
I found Stewart's reading highly challenging and suggestive, and he goes on to characterize the subsequent 300 year course of philosophy as a continuation of the basic divide between Spinoza and Leibniz. Thus, the basic issue that modern philosophy has addressed is the way in which meaning, purpose, and value are to be found in a secular world. Stewart finds that the dominant trend of modern philosophy has been an attempt to follow and strengthen Leibniz' approach and to answer Spinoza. He writes:
"Kant's attempt to prove the existence of a `noumenal' world of pure selves and things in themselves on the basis of a critique of pure reason, the nineteenth-century-spanning efforts to reconcile teleology with mechanism that began with Hegel; Bergson's claim to have discovered a world of life forces immune to the analytical embrace of modern science; Heidegger's call for the overthrow of western metaphysics in order to recover the truth about Being; and the whole `postmodern' project of deconstructing the phallocentric tradition of western thought- all of these diverse trends in modern thought have one thing in common: they are at bottom forms of the reaction to modernity first instantiated by Leibniz." (p. 311)
Stewart might also have included the American philosopher William James, whom I have been studying recently, in this latter group. Stewart does not come to a firm conclusion regarding the merits of the Spinozian and Leibnitzian positions, but he notes a strong tendency among most thinkers and most individuals to try to work a compromise between them. But to me Spinoza appears to have the last word with his famous conclusion that "fine things are as difficult as they are rare".
