The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza & the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Security Against Freedom

Who could have anticipated that a three day visit in The Hague by Gottfried Leibniz to Baruch Spinoza in 1676 would set a cultural agenda that would still be relevant three and a half centuries later? Not the men involved. Nor their contemporaries who weren’t even aware of the meeting. And certainly not the leaders of today who believe that they are running the show but who are actually acting out the meeting’s result.

As it has turned out, the script for much of today’s politics and intellectual debate was set at that meeting in The Hague. The encounter was decisive, not because it came to a union of the minds, but because of the precisely opposite result. It effectively established an enduring dialectic that is not just intellectual, but also spiritual, moral, and political. The strategies of the culture wars being waged today were mapped out then and are still being followed in ways that are remarkably consistent with the views of the original protagonists.

Matthew Stewart’s book is much more than a comparative biography of Leibniz and Spinoza. It is a narrative that explains each man in terms of his intentions rather than merely his background or history. The fact that their intentions implicitly involve each other is the vital crux of both their lives. Stewart recognises this and uses it to establish the peculiar rationale, the meaning of reason itself, for each man. I doubt there is any other way to either get to the truth about their lives, or their enduring legacy other than by Stewart’s highly creative technique.

It is difficult to imagine more different personalities than Leibniz and Spinoza. Aside from their exceptional intellects, they shared nothing. One an ambitious, well-born, polymath, and inveterate do-gooder, inserting himself into every controversy - theological, political, and practical as well as intellectual - for, in his mind, the benefit of others. The Other, a self-effacing yeshiva-boy whose primary ambition was to be left alone to figure out how to live his own life responsibly, and who believed other people ought to be entitled to do the same.

Both men were, I think it is fair to say, odd, in the very specific sense that each was attempting to establish a vision of the world which compensated for what each lacked. Stewart makes an excellent case that for Leibniz, this meant security. His personality was stamped by the horrors of the Thirty Years War. He knew and feared the tenuousness of civilised existence. This clearly shaped his Idealism and rationalises not just his ambition, and his almost frenetic engagement in a continuous string of diverse projects, but also his pronounced social conservatism extending not infrequently into vulgar snobbery and prejudice.

Spinoza, on the other hand, a religiously and racially vulnerable Jew, was brought up to keep a low profile, to conform, to do one’s duty as a member of a community which had been historically harassed and constrained by discriminatory legal systems. His concern could have run to something similar to Leibniz, to security, but it didn’t. Spinoza’s vision is one of freedom, freedom to reason without constraint, freedom to judge right and wrong without the interference of religious doctrine, and freedom to express oneself without fear of official reprisal.

These two objectives, security and freedom, permeate not just their personalities but also their philosophies. Spinoza effectively established the charter for the liberal democratic state as it emerged a century after his death. The precise freedoms that he enumerated are the one’s that we now take for granted: of religion, of conscience, of the press, of living in a manner one chooses. Spinoza set a trajectory for world history which has been a dominant cultural force for three and a half centuries.

But this force, although dominant, has never gone unchallenged. Resistance to the Spinozan liberal agenda has always been fierce right from its first formal statement in his two major works in the late 17th century. And the original front-line commander of that opposition was Leibniz who would not conceive of a world without a fixed order, without permanent hierarchy, without an elite in charge... and, importantly, without God to guarantee cosmic stability. Spinoza’s ideal of freedom was Leibniz’s worst nightmare; and I suppose the reverse is also true.

I would be lying if I said I admired both men equally. While I appreciate Leibniz’s remarkable intellectual achievements, I can only view his political tendencies as rotten. The sentiments of conservatives around the world - from American Evangelical Republicans, to the Eurocrats of Strasbourg, to the pious clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church - are Leibnizian in remarkable detail.

These are people who desire orderliness, coherence, and stability at any price. The challenge as they see it is to impose their version of the Good (and of God) on the world. This requires ‘strong leadership’ and followers who ‘stand united’ in the cause. They, of course, are referring to the cause of power, their power. That this cause is self-serving, unjust, unreasonable, and ultimately self-defeating are not things they want to hear. They never have. So they remain a constant danger to the legacy of Spinoza. I fear them as he did.

Postscript: I think it’s interesting to note that Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen uses a similar meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr to the same effect as Stewart’s narrative (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). It’s also interesting to note that the personalities of Leibniz and Spinoza are wonderful representatives of Isaiah Berlin’s parable of the Fox and the Hedgehog - The Fox knowing a great deal about many things, and the Hedgehog knowing everything about the one big thing (See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...).

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