|
|
by Michael Weiss (Originally published in the New York Post) Matthew Stewart's altogether excellent double- barreled biography, "The Courtier and the Heretic," has a great deal of back story and an equal amount of epilogue, but there's no confusing his climactic main event, which occurred over a few days in 1676, in The Hague. Its participants were rival philosophers of a budding modernity, who, as presented here, probably had more in common than either would have cared to admit. Had he lived closer to our own time, Benedict de Spinoza would have been labeled a "free-thinking" or "Hellenized" Jew. His family had fled Portugal to evade the Inquisition, and landed in the cosmopolitan and mercantile milieu of Amsterdam, which no doubt facilitated the wry genius' formulation of what might be called the materialist conception of purpose. A nice cross between Epicurean and Stoic, Spinoza toiled in an age not quite ready to slough off medieval superstition but happy enough to snuff out those who tried. Thus, he developed an austere aesthetic and moral code for career thinkers, descried as the "philosophy of philosophy." (Spinoza's own day job was in optics.) This didn't stop him, however, from chasing down alienation at a brisk pace: an excommunication, encouraged by his own rabbi, and a mundane struggle in what Stewart smartly terms a "double exile," earned him the might-as-well attitude required to carry his worldview to its logical terminus. Just how heretical was Spinoza? His rhetoric was the sort that could get one killed before the Enlightenment. Spinoza always maintained that God existed, albeit in sublimated form within and throughout Nature (he used God and Nature interchangeably and synonymously), as a force that could only be paid tribute by self-actualization. He posited that all possibilities were manifest and necessary; that everything in existence felt an indomitable urge to become its own ideal expression of itself. Indeed, we now read that the latest advent of string theory hits upon a cosmological equivalent of Spinozism. Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz was more "of" his time, if no less ahead of it. A German attorney with well-attended sidelines in philosophy, statesmanship, engineering, mathematics and sinology, his real expertise was sycophancy, being "all things to all men." He invented the calculus (after but independent of Newton), was the most plangent advocate of the reunification of the Catholic and Protestant churches and was only thwarted by the indolence of Louis XIV from engaging in a little Machiavellian holy warring in Egypt. Was he also a closet atheist himself? Stewart thinks so, and I must say, his approach is au courant and quite convincing. Stewart employs the Straussian method of inquiry, delving into the minutiae and subtext of Leibniz's work and coming up with new understandings that contradict the superficial shopworn ones. While little is known about what went on during the two philosophers' seminal encounter at The Hague — which Leibniz initiated after years of paying obsessive attention to Spinoza's reputation and doing what he could to alter it for the worse — Stewart argues that the former was so transformed by it that practically everything he put down thereafter bore some vague imprint of the latter's influence. Stewart, a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford, has formerly worked in management consulting, so he deserves a medal for avoiding jargon and opting instead for accessibility.The only quibble here is with his recourse to colloquialism or anachronism. When told that a Hanoverian advisor engaged in a "direct-mail" campaign, one can safely assume that today's headlines have subliminally seeped into the musty folios of the 17th century. Otherwise it might be said that if Karl Rove has seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants. |
