The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

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 He had published a notorious work, the Theological-Political Treatise, and his as-yet unpublished masterpiece, the Ethics, had been widely if surreptitiously circulated among learned people.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 mona

Will the historical status of Baruch Spinoza, the "atheist, excommunicated Jew", ever find a proper niche? His accustomed place is among the "philosophers", and there are those who place him with early Enlightenment "scientists". Strangely, the description "theologian" is almost never advanced. Yet, it was his definition of "God" that provided him a unique place in history - and stirred no end of resentment among his peers. The strength and endurance of that resentment is testimony to the power of Spinoza's ideas. Among the critics, the polymath Gottfried Leibniz, perhaps stands tallest in a mob of Spinoza's decriers. Matthew Stewart considers the role and impact of both men in this excellent study. Born of the post-Expulsion exiles from Roman Catholic Iberia, Baruch Spinoza entered life in an Amsterdam mercantile family. His schoolboy nickname, "Bento" reflects the family's Portuguese roots. Schooled in a local synagogue, Baruch's world-view expanded far beyond the classroom, his city and the tumult of European politics. For expressing what he perceived, he was expelled from the congregation, the Jewish community and Amsterdam itself. A single act transformed a young man of middle-class respectability into "the atheist Jew" [sic] and less flattering terms. Even Christians joined the clamour, denouncing "Benedictus" [the name Baruch adopted when writing in Latin] as "the vilest thing ever vomited on the Earth" - which must take some kind of award for vilification. What idea brought such a storm of abuse and, clearly, fear among European churchmen of nearly every stripe? Put simply, Spinoza rejected all forms of intermediary between humans and their deity. No rabbis, bishops, priests or popes had a role to play in communicating with the god nor in setting moral standards. The god and Nature, Spinoza contended, were one, leaving the door open for any individual to communicate with it in their own way. To label such a view as "heretical" in the 17th Century, Stewart explains, is almost simplistic. Apart from the theological issues, such a concept struck at the roots of Europe's hierarchical society. Among those potentially threatened by reconsidering how society should be run was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Although a brilliant man, Leibniz was also beset with a major ambition streak. The rich and powerful were there to act in sponsorship of his ideas. Ideas, in Leibniz' mind, proliferated. Stewart bemoans the thousands of pages of Leibniz notes that lie untended and unedited in archives. Proposals, commentaries and enquiries remain but superficially investigated according to the author. Among Leibniz more bizarre notions was to plant a set of windmill-driven water pumps in the Harz Mountains where there's little wind to be found. Leibniz patron funded this project for years before it was finally abandoned. More flighty yet was his proposal under the name "Pacidius" ["peace spirit"?] seeking another Crusade under the leader

Great original thinkers are rarely the best at explaining their ideas to a general audience. Matthew Stewart does a superb job of making the ideas of Spinoza and Leibnez lucid, accessible and relevant. He does this without ever talking down to the reader or glossing over the difficulties and contradictions in these men's writings. This book reminded me of Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club" in the way it was simultaneously effective as a work of philosophy, history and biography. Leibnez and Spinoza were foundational figures in the Enlightenment. Both shared a deep belief that the universe is a lawful and orderly place susceptible to human understanding through the application of reason to experience. Stewart makes a convincing argument that Kant's classification of philosophers into empiricists and rationalists, which has been nearly universally accepted, is a very poor way to understand these two men. Spinoza's pantheistic metaphysics was tied to an early vision of the modern pluralistic secular state. Leibnez, who feared anarchy more than repression, was an eager defender of the establishment of the day. Stewart ably defends Leibnez against Voltaire's devastating satire of him as Doctor Pangloss blissfully unaware of the imperfections in the world. He also rejects the idea that the problems Leibnez seeks to address are no longer relevant. Apart from this defense, Stewart's treatment of Leibniz is almost entirely hostile. Both his philosophy and his character are subject to withering criticism. The thesis here is that Leibnez shared Spinoza's key beliefs but lacked the courage to follow them to their logical conclusion. Fans of Leibnez will not be happy with this treatment but will want to read this book anyway because it is likely to affect the discussion of these two for the forseeable future. This is one of those rare books that should have wide appeal to the general reader as well as the specialist in the field.

It is a brilliant idea to compare and contrast these two philosophers - not only in respect of their ideas, but also in respect of their personalities, life-styles and the historical settings in which they operated. They are both very difficult philosophers, and it is one of the many virtues of this sparkling book that they are made as accessible to the general public as they can be. Even so, the relevant passages will still be rather hard going for readers new to the ideas. Particularly close reading is required for chapter 16 near the end of the book, in which Stewart shows that Leibniz was entangled with Spinozism even when the differences between the two men's philosophies appear at their starkest. As for the description of their personalities, they come to life in the most vivid way. The different sides of Spinoza are arrestingly described, as is the vanity, the restless and pushy worldliness and the basic insecurity of Leibniz, of whose varied secular career we are also given an entertaining account. Leibniz was a polymathic and imaginative thinker, but Stewart's picture of him leaves one with the impression that, especially in his relationship with Spinoza, he was thoroughly duplicitous: flattering in his correspondence with him, but denouncing him in letters written to others. Stewart plays fair and provides what excuses he (and other authors) can find for Leibniz (pp. 114 to 119), but there is no doubt that Spinoza emerges from his pages as much the more admirable, honest, austere and courageous human being. In 1670 Spinoza had published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which caused such a European-wide storm of obloquy that he had arranged for his other books and papers to be published only after his death. Among these papers were letters he had received from Leibniz, and Leibniz was now terrified that their publication would compromise him: not simply because he had been in correspondence with Spinoza after the publication of the Tractatus and had even visited him for several days in 1676, just four months before Spinoza's sudden death, but also because Leibniz's papers show a constant battle within himself: there was so much of Spinoza's thought which he found persuasive, and yet so much which he found undermining not only the orthodox idea of God, but, he thought, the very basis of morality. In his later writings Leibniz occasionally confessed that he had once been tempted by Spinoza's ideas, but it became an obsession with him to brand Spinoza as a dangerous atheist and to ascribe non-existent Spinozist views to such as Isaac Newton and John Locke. Leibniz thought that belief in a personal and benevolent God and in the immortality of the soul was necessary for human well-being and happiness; but, as Stewart several times points out, it was the beliefs themselves rather than their truth that mattered to him. He does not in fact seem to have been a very religious person himself: his faithful assistant Eckhart sai

When I was thrown out of my Philosophy course at Warwick University, my defiant riposte to my tutors was that philosophy should be taught in its historical context, not merely as an unmotivated collection of systems of ideas. This was interpreted at the time as juvenile Marxism, but Matthew Stewart brilliantly illustrates how philosophy only makes sense when construed as the systems created by brilliant individuals to make sense of the great issues of their day. In the case of Spinoza and Leibniz, Stewart shows how those great issues - faith and transcendence vs. the significance of existence within (secular) modernism - have defined the terms of debate from the 17th Century through to the present day. This is a book on many levels. Most immediately, in interwoven chapters, we are told the lives of these two extraordinary individuals: birth through death. Both Spinoza and Leibniz were observing and conceptually shaping the Age of Reason, but from very different social positions. From these historical and intellectual foundations, Stewart explains with the greatest clarity the philosophies of the two men: Spinoza's Ethics, and Leibniz's Monadology. If only it had been explained like this at University! Finally, Stewart critically situates these two systems as the purest opposed responses to post-medieval modernisation, one welcoming it, the other seeking to maintain the place of faith and spirit over a putative reduction of everything to the mundane. These remarks do not begin to do justice to the sophistication of Stewart's analysis. I could add that his witty and irreverent style makes it a joy to read, but perhaps this book has been praised enough!