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
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