The Crucible of Modernity

Last night I stayed up late in order to finish Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. While sometimes dense and filled with philosophic constructions, this book is also compelling and well written as it explains some of the most important ideas of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

As the title suggests, the central concept is Western humanity's understanding of God. And Stewart manages to make abstract arguments about God embody concrete meaning through the lives of Leibniz and Spinoza. To begin, Stewart establishes the family histories and personalities of Leibniz (the courtier) and Spinoza (the heretic). With great detail the central events in the lives of each man, including the events which bind the two men together, are laid out.

For example, Leibniz appears to have had a "craving for affirmation and longing for security . . . [that] only grew more insistent" (53) as his life proceeded. To be fair, it would seem that Stewart is more gracious in his treatment of Spinoza than he is in his rendering of Leibniz. Indeed, many times in the text, Leibniz is painted as a vain and greedy man whose philosophy is simply a tool to be exploited in the climb to social greatness. Leibniz is also portrayed as something of a pathological liar when Stewart declares "there was hardly a strategem Leibniz pursued in this long and colorful political career that did not make use of deception" (302) and that he "did not scruple to lay at the foundation of the future church a number of doctrines in whose truth it is quite implausible to maintain he believed" (303). This suggests to the reader that Leibniz would say anything to achieve fame (and its attendant financial success), even those philosophical constructions he did not subscribe to personally.

Spinoza, on the other hand, is depicted as a stately hermit whose ideas go on to make him "arguably the most important philosopher in the world" (307). Furthermore, although "the problem with Spinoza is that he is an atheist" (224), this does not stop him from contemplating God. Indeed, Spinoza's outsider position allows him to contemplate God in entirely new ways and with enormous consequences. "Philosophy, as Spinoza understands it, does not peddle in temporary cheer . . .; it seeks and claims to find a basis for happiness that is absolutely certain, permanent, and divine" (57). One could say that according to Spinoza, philosophy can direct one toward what is divine: God, or Spinoza's term for God, Nature. In other words, philosophy "achieves its end . . . [in] the life of the mind" (57) in the mind's quest for wisdom and knowledge. Furthermore, "blessedness comes only from a certain kind of knowledge" which is, in Spinoza's words, the "knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature" (57). Thus Stewart depicts Spinoza as an atheist who achieves a knowledge and understanding of God.

This, then, is the grand distinction. Spinoza achieved in the life of the mind all that Leibniz desired in his quest for security in the material world. Furthermore, Spinoza died in poverty, but was lauded by thousands at his funeral. Leibniz died wealthy, but was buried alone. Spinoza was denounced as a heretic but lived the life of a saint. Leibniz defended Christianity but never went to church. The ironic dualism of their lives remains stark and poignant even in the 21st century.

Perhaps this dualism is the best way to describe the theme of Stewart's book. On the one hand, Spinoza was a visionary who "perceived the fragility of the self, the precariousness of freedom, and the irreducible diversity in the new society emerging around him" (180). His ideas about Nature, the role of the nation-state, and reality are full of "uncanny prescience" (181). Indeed, "he anticipated insights from the neurosciences that would be three centuries in coming . . . [and] the world he describes is in many ways the modern one within which we live" (181). Much of what Spinoza wrote about in the late 17th century still holds truth and value to this day.

And then there is Leibniz. Stewart claims that "the world Leibniz describes [in his writings] is the one first properly observed by Spinoza" (292). But because Leibniz had an ego that would not allow him to acknowledge the primary work of another, and because Leibniz sought to gain recognition by adhering to Christianity rather than undermining the claims of the church, Leibniz had to come up with a philosophy that controverted Spinoza's. Stewart also claims that the most controversial aspect of Leibniz's work -- the monads and their nature -- leads to a complicated problem for the courtier. Stewart claims that "if God is not a monad, in short, then Leibniz is a Spinozist" (289). But, on the other hand, "if God is a monad, Leibniz is an atheist" (290). Both of these options seem, to this reader, to be untenable for Leibniz. Furthermore, "the monadology is best understood as an attempt to show that one may grant the existence of a universe in every way indistinguishable from the one Spinoza describes and still cling to old hopes about God and immortality on the basis that these matters lie beyond the limits of anything that can be observed or proved by Spinoza" (292). Here Stewart is claiming that the methods each man used to arrive at a modern understanding of God may have been different, but the conclusion each man reached was, ultimately, the same. Leibniz sought to shore up the church but ironically "his work amounts to a deconstruction of modern philosophy in general and Spinozism in particular. It is defined by -- and cannot exist without -- that to which it is opposed. It is, in essence, a reactive philosophy" (293).

The irony is that "Spinoza could see clearly that the old God was dying" (36). Leibniz desperately sought to undermine this and thereby prop up the traditional view of God and the church that was built around it. Leibniz realized that "Spinoza's doctrine . . . takes down not just the God of orthodoxy, but also all of morality" (208). As a result, Leibniz spent the rest of his life attempting to establish a negation -- a reactive philosophy -- of Spinoza's position. Leibniz needed Spinoza. Spinoza died without knowing this, and would not, in all likelihood, have cared.