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

So, it comes down to this: Spinoza believed that there was only one substance--make that Substance--to everything there is--all things, events, thought, everything--and everything is a mode of this substance. It can be called Substance, or it can be called Nature, or it can be called God. Therefore, mind is not separate from body, therefore there is no immortal soul--mind is really only an abstraction that the body has of itself.

"The most important feature of Spinoza's Nature--and, in a sense, the very point of his philosophy--is that it is in principle intelligible or comprehensible…there is nothing that cannot be known--even if we do not necessarily know everything."

"Spinoza claims to demonstrate once and for all that there can in fact be only one Substance in the world…everything in the world is merely a "mode" of an attribute of the Substance, or God"

(and how does he prove this? What does Spinoza take for his starting point? This crucial step is not in my highlights for the book. I wonder if I missed it or if Stewart put this in? If this is missing, then Substance becomes just another article of faith…and I don't think that Spinoza would have gone down that path. Does it follow from the determination that everything can be known? That seems to be Leibniz's jumping on point, where he found Spinoza so attractive, and so dangerous. "With a chain of definitions, axioms, and proofs…" is about the closest I can come to this. Isn't Kant's point that we cannot know how things really are?)

Leibniz sees the possible consequence to social order of this seemingly metaphysical proposition, and Stewart claims that Leibniz's mature philosophy is built on a rejection of Spinoza--namely that the universe consists of an infinite number of immortal "monads" and that the world was created and set into eternal harmony by God, who chose this universe out of an infinity of other universes as being the best that there is. Hence, Voltaire's Pangloss: this is the best of all possible worlds.

From this basic conflict, which Stewart calls "the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza…and there is no more compelling expression of this reaction to Spinoza…than …Leibniz." We live largely in a world of thought traced back directly through Spinoza: liberal, secular democracy, a naturalistic explanation of the growth and order of the world we see around us, and a concept of human life that is naturalistic and materialistic (vide Antonio Damasio's books: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain) Leibniz, in Stewart's explanation, stands for those forces who look to authority, especially to divine authority, to give order and meaning to life and to the universe.

The central act of the book is three days of conversation between Leibniz and Spinoza calls the defining moment of Leibniz's life and thought: the rejection of Spinoza's naturalistic explanation of everything--which Leibniz really saw as depending on Spinoza's concept of Substance.  Substance = Nature (as in natural law) = God. Unfortunately, there is no there there. There is only the sketchiest of records of the conversations themselves--some marked over notes that Leibniz made--and so what we're really left with is an act of imagination on Stewart's part of what must have taken place. Leibniz himself downplayed the importance of the conversations in trying to distance himself from Spinoza's thought, but as Stewart makes clear, Leibniz is hardly to be trusted in matters of honesty.

The books has given me the best description of Spinoza's thought and of Spinoza's importance in the history of thought. A lot of Jonathan Israel's ideas about the "radical enlightenment" now make more sense to me. The chapter of "A Secret Philosophy of the Whole of Things" is alone worth the price of the book. I still can't grasp the proposition of Spinoza's thought, but at least I can see how it came about. About Leibniz's thought, which is given equal treatment in "The Antidote to Spinozism," however, I'm not so sure. I guess that I get, in some measure, the idea of monads, but I'm not quite sure why Leibniz felt so compelled to go there. I understand the reaction to Spinoza, but I don't find his logic for the monads very compelling. But then, neither did Bertrand Russell, who called Leibniz's metaphysics "a fascinating fairy tale, coherent, perhaps, but wholly arbitrary," so I guess I'm in good company.

I suspect that Stewart gives Leibniz fairly short shrift in his descriptions of his character and motivations. Leibniz comes off as fairly shady and self deluded, so it's hard to say how much of Leibniz is a straw man who is chosen for the purpose to represent an idea--a conservative, religion idea. (the T. S. Eliot of his day--"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics.") How much of his character is caricature?

Author: Stewart, Matthew

Date Published: 2006

Length: 312 pp

electronic print

Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

I've been waiting to read this book for a long, long time. I bought this copy of Lila shortly after it came out in paperback almost 20 years ago and wanted to jump right into it since I was so transfixed, and transformed, by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have told a couple of groups now that not only was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance my favorite book of all time, it was also the most important. What's not to love about: "You should remember that it's peace of mind you're after and not just a fixed machine."? And it's a book that I've both reread a couple of times and listened to recently. It's held up well each time. That's kind of what made Lila an intimidating presence on my bookshelf, for what else could it be but a let down. It certainly has garnered that reputation over the years. Many reviewers talk about how much they enjoyed ZAMM and then slam Lila because it is not ZAMM.

And that kinda describes my reaction, too. I enjoyed Lila, to be sure, and found the story of Phaedrus having to deal with her one way or another to be fairly compelling. There's even  a sinister quality with Jamie and Fatso that give a hint of a detective novel. It's one of the few times that Pirsig steps out of Phaedrus' consciousness and into another character, a bit strange in a book prety much devoted to Phaedrus' philosophizing. He does it with Riegel, once, and he does it more effectively with Lila, especially when she is trying to get back to the boat and begins a psychotic episode. Phaedrus' decision to care for her until she cures herself, regardless of how long that takes, gives a depth and a reality to all the sermonizing going on in his head. It also gives an ironic twist to all his thinking since he really is pretty naieve about what's going on with her.

The question that drives the book, of course, is "Does Lila have Quality?" which Riegel asks him the night after he picks Lila up in a bar, and Phaedrus is forced to justify his reasons after he tells Riegel yes. His response then becomes the whole Metaphysics of Quality, from the first moment of insight on a peyote high with Dusenberry to his final pronouncement that Good is a noun.

And I got lost in there somewhere. One of my annotations says: "pure experience = pure value? what does this mean?" It's the heart of quality--of the Metaphysics of Quality--  in that precognitive moment of awareness before the subject/object dualism of conceptions and things come to the fore, before the intellectual patterns give birth to our awareness of things. Is it the Tao? But then, aren't the Tao and Quality really just abstractions for a physiological process of sensory intake? Or is it more than that? Pirsig brings in religious mysticism and dharma and rta to make metaphors for this preintellectual event that suggests so much more than physiology. It has value, and, he suggests, something almost supernatural or mystical, comparing it to the dharmakaya light. He calls it Dynamic Quality and keeps insisting that it is higher on the evolutionary scale than intellectual or social or biological or material patterns of matter. As a matter of fact, it drives evolution. "Because Quality is morality…They're identical. And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. That just seems too big of a leap for me to take right now. What to make of a sentence like this: "if one applies the Metaphysics of Quality and sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern and sees that all static patterns are composed of value, and that value is synonymous with moral, then it all begins to make sense." That's just it. It doesn't all begin to make sense for me. Sometimes I wondered that all of his ratiocinations weren't really just rationalizations for judgements that he had already made.

Then, as in ZAMM, Pirsig uses this value driven system as a means of social criticsm--a paralysis of moral patterns in the modern world that MOQ could set right if given the chance. Plato, of course, said the same thing, that when philosophers are made kings then all would be right with the world. And these philosophers were specially qualified because they knew the Good--and that brings us around to the final sentence of the book: Good is noun. I just don't get it.

Author: Pirsig, Robert

Date Published: 1991

Length: 468 pp

print

Tortilla Flat

I can remember being puzzled by this book the first time I read it years ago. I came to it expecting Cannery Row and was disappointed that it wasn't. I had the same expectation this time around, even though I knew better, and I was disappointed all over again. I kept expecting to like Danny and the Paisanos like Mac and boys, but I just couldn't feel a whole lot for them. They may have intended good, but their lack of perspective, the "moral" shortcomings kept torpedoing those good intentions. They were just fooling themselves.

Maybe part of the problem was trying to listen to the book when I was already tired and driving down to Durango late. The more that I drove, the sleepier that I got, and the more disjointed that the story felt. When I eventually turned the story off, I wasn't sure that I wanted to continue.

But I persisted in listening to the second half of the book, and that made all the difference. No, it still wasn't Cannery Row--very few things are--but the book seemed to pick up with Danny's gift of the vacuum cleaner to Sweets and take on a new comic richness that I found lacking before. The electric vacuum cleaner raised Sweet's status in the community which had no electricity. She ran it over the floor of her house making a humming sound, and that was OK since it turned out that the vacuum cleaner had no motor in it anyway.

That led to the episode where Big Joe Portagee stole the money that the Pirate had been saving to buy a candle for Saint Francis. The money had become a central trust between the boys, and the violation of the trust was met with a vengeance and a brutality that was shocking, but also totally in character for the paisanos. The money was restored, the sacred trust was reestablished, Big Joe Portagee was readmitted into the society, and the Pirate bought the candle. The scenes where the dogs burst into the church to find the Pirate, and then his preaching to them in the woods, were some of the funniest and most touching scenes in the book. That led to the boys going on a crime spree to feed the children of Teresina Cortez, also central to the book. Critics have made a lot of the ironic parallels with Arthurian legends, and these chapters certainly best best represent the comparisons, although, in all honesty, I didn't feel it at the time.

The final scenes, with Danny going berserk and trying to regain his freedom, and then the boys trying to restore Danny's health with a party, leading to the final confrontation with the Beast outside the door, reminded me a lot of Mac and the boys trying to throw a party for Doc. It's as if Danny and the paisanos  morphed into Mac and the boys, with the same wry humor in describing their ways of thinking, justifying their own short term wants with ironic turns of logic and self-deception. Certainly what Doc said about the boys, that they were the true philosophers, applies to the paisanos, but somehow they don't seem quite as agreeable as the boys.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1935

Length: 7 hr 03 min

Narrator: McDonough, John