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

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It is a brilliant idea to compare and contrast these two philosophers - not only in respect of their ideas, but also in respect of their personalities, life-styles and the historical settings in which they operated. They are both very difficult philosophers, and it is one of the many virtues of this sparkling book that they are made as accessible to the general public as they can be. Even so, the relevant passages will still be rather hard going for readers new to the ideas. Particularly close reading is required for chapter 16 near the end of the book, in which Stewart shows that Leibniz was entangled with Spinozism even when the differences between the two men's philosophies appear at their starkest.

As for the description of their personalities, they come to life in the most vivid way. The different sides of Spinoza are arrestingly described, as is the vanity, the restless and pushy worldliness and the basic insecurity of Leibniz, of whose varied secular career we are also given an entertaining account.

Leibniz was a polymathic and imaginative thinker, but Stewart's picture of him leaves one with the impression that, especially in his relationship with Spinoza, he was thoroughly duplicitous: flattering in his correspondence with him, but denouncing him in letters written to others. Stewart plays fair and provides what excuses he (and other authors) can find for Leibniz (pp. 114 to 119), but there is no doubt that Spinoza emerges from his pages as much the more admirable, honest, austere and courageous human being.

In 1670 Spinoza had published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which caused such a European-wide storm of obloquy that he had arranged for his other books and papers to be published only after his death. Among these papers were letters he had received from Leibniz, and Leibniz was now terrified that their publication would compromise him: not simply because he had been in correspondence with Spinoza after the publication of the Tractatus and had even visited him for several days in 1676, just four months before Spinoza's sudden death, but also because Leibniz's papers show a constant battle within himself: there was so much of Spinoza's thought which he found persuasive, and yet so much which he found undermining not only the orthodox idea of God, but, he thought, the very basis of morality. In his later writings Leibniz occasionally confessed that he had once been tempted by Spinoza's ideas, but it became an obsession with him to brand Spinoza as a dangerous atheist and to ascribe non-existent Spinozist views to such as Isaac Newton and John Locke.

Leibniz thought that belief in a personal and benevolent God and in the immortality of the soul was necessary for human well-being and happiness; but, as Stewart several times points out, it was the beliefs themselves rather than their truth that mattered to him. He does not in fact seem to have been a very religious person himself: his faithful assistant Eckhart said that in the 19 years during which they worked together, he rarely saw him in church and never saw him take communion. And on his deathbed he refused the Last Sacraments.

I cannot help coming away from this book with the idea that not only was Spinoza by far the greater personality of the two, but also the clearer thinker. In grappling with Spinoza, Leibniz had to engage in intellectual fancies and contortions that seem to me totally absurd. I am probably missing something, since Bertrand Russell would call Leibniz "one of the supreme intellects of all time", and Stewart's own concluding pages express a sympathy for what Leibniz was all about which I cannot share.

The irony is that Leibniz was so frightened by the unorthodoxy of his own "solution" in La Monadologie that, like Spinoza in the case of his Ethics, he did not dare to have it published in his life-time. Curiously, Stewart does not mention that. And, describing the pathos of Leibniz's last years, Stewart suggests that at the end of his life he had come to the conclusion that this was not, after all, the best of all possible worlds.

What "Amadeus" did for Salieri, Stewart's book does for Leibniz. If Spinoza and Leibniz were in the midst of a bitter divorce, this is precisely the sort of book Spinoza's attorney would come up with. Here's the method...

*Dig up as much dirt as you can on Leibniz's character, make him look like a scoundrel and a buffoon, and when one has no proof, either make insinuations or "leave open" the question as to whether Leibniz was guilty of additional flaws. In the most comical instance, Stewart insinuates ever-so-vaguely that Spinoza may have been poisoned to death by a certain rascal Schuller, whose ties of friendship with Leibniz may implicate the latter in Spinoza's death in ways that are never quite specified. Stewart also "leaves open" the question of whether Leibniz had a homosexual lover, though he never leaves it open in the case of the equally ladyless bachelor Spinoza, his hero.

*Portray Spinoza as handsome and Leibniz as physically repugnant. We hear repeatedly that Leibniz looked like a dork when he walked, that his prematurely balding head bulged with some sort of disgusting protuberance, and finally read a strangely amused description of a "discharge of gas" in the philosopher's last moments that gave his attendant a headache. (Stewart also enjoys making fun of the outdated fashion sense of a 70-year-old man, which is one of the cheapest of cheap shots.)

*Admit in passing that Leibniz was "the last great universal genius" and "one of the two greatest philosophers of the 17th century", but then don't dwell on the reasons for either of these phrases being in widespread use. Chuckle as his machines break down and his efforts at court fall flat. Expose his philosophy as a "reactive" medieval relic haunted at every layer by an obsession with Spinoza, whom he can never hope to equal.

*On the flimsiest of evidence, assert that Spinoza hurt Leibniz's feelings so badly during their one personal meeting that Leibniz was filled with suppressed rage for the remainder of his life. Concoct an Oliver Stone-like scene of Leibniz jumping up from the table, enraged at Spinoza and demanding recognition from him. (Come on, you know that one's going to make it into the final film script.)

*As an additional technique, don't put all the criticisms in your own mouth, but let others do some of the work for you. Cite Voltaire to make Leibniz look stupid ("can a drop of urine really contain an infinite number of monads?") when the same drop of urine would also take on equally remarkable powers in the philosophy of Spinoza, Stewart's hero.

*Psychologize Leibniz as "needy," while avoiding any psychologization of Spinoza's actions. Let these shine in pure Platonic nobility.

Despite all of the above, I did enjoy some aspects of Stewart's book. It's always interesting when someone brings a lost historical period to life. What I missed in his book is any trace of Leibniz the "universal genius" and "great philosopher" to whom Stewart refers in intermittent throwaway phrases. Instead, what we find is Leibniz the awkward, gangling suck-up and pathological liar whose doctrines are presented as nothing more than a vulgarized sell-out of the more radical philosophy of Spinoza. Stewart's sense of humor also tends toward the corny: abundant desktop computer metaphors and cheap plays for laughs whenever Leibniz's words coincide with the lyrics to present-day popular songs.

One could easily imagine the inverse to this book, written by a Leibniz fan with a grudge against Spinoza: "The Diplomat and the Outcast", perhaps. Spinoza could be presented as an antisocial invalid enfeebled by tuberculosis, cribbing his main ideas from Descartes, too cowardly to publish his own major work, obsessed due to "neediness" with provoking the religious authorities and getting a reaction out of them, and far behind his contemporaries such as Huygens, Leibniz, and Newton in generating concrete mathematical or scientific discoveries. In parallel, Leibniz could be portrayed as balanced and erudite, a philosophical revolutionary who managed to retrieve Aristotelian ideas for modern philosophy in a way that escaped both Descartes and Spinoza, co-inventor of the most important method in modern mathematics, someone who united theory and praxis and tried to engage in responsible political action rather than living a hermetic existence at home, and a generous man of the world willing to share his ideas with hundreds of correspondents across the continent. Such a book would teach us much about Leibniz and little about Spinoza-- the opposite of Stewart's problem.

There is a reason that Spinoza and Leibniz are both so highly regarded for their intellectual achievements. Stewart gives us the most flattering possible portrait of Spinoza, while making Leibniz look even more stupid and ridiculous than Voltaire already tried to make him look (at least Voltaire didn't tell us that Leibniz was ugly and a geek, as Stewart with his high school cruelty does). It's a shame that he has so little sympathy for Leibniz, since this could have been a dramatic story of Spinoza's hitherto unrecognized lifelong influence on Leibniz's thought.

Despite extensive background research (and he did come up with some fascinating tales that I've never heard of before), Stewart shows a lack of philosophical balance or depth. He also falls into occasional research howlers (such as claiming that Descartes thought the *pituitary* gland was the seat of the soul, when it was actually the pineal gland; Descartes specifically denied that it could be the pituitary).

I enjoyed reading the book in the same way that I enjoy watching "Amadeus" from time to time. It brings a certain lost historical period to life, and in that sense is refreshing. It might even be fun to see Stewart's book turned into a film, so we could catch periodized glimpses of Amsterdam canals and Leibniz's baroque clothing. But no one takes "Amadeus" seriously either as music history or as musicology, and no one should take Stewart's book seriously either as intellectual history or as philosophy.

Like most dust-jacket materials, the captions beneath author photos are generally drawn from material provided by the author. Stewart's caption tells us, with remarkable self-congratulation, that he has "retired in order to pursue a life of contemplation." I was surprised not to read that he's grinding lenses for a living.

When I was thrown out of my Philosophy course at Warwick University, my defiant riposte to my tutors was that philosophy should be taught in its historical context, not merely as an unmotivated collection of systems of ideas. This was interpreted at the time as juvenile Marxism, but Matthew Stewart brilliantly illustrates how philosophy only makes sense when construed as the systems created by brilliant individuals to make sense of the great issues of their day.

In the case of Spinoza and Leibniz, Stewart shows how those great issues - faith and transcendence vs. the significance of existence within (secular) modernism - have defined the terms of debate from the 17th Century through to the present day.

This is a book on many levels. Most immediately, in interwoven chapters, we are told the lives of these two extraordinary individuals: birth through death. Both Spinoza and Leibniz were observing and conceptually shaping the Age of Reason, but from very different social positions.

From these historical and intellectual foundations, Stewart explains with the greatest clarity the philosophies of the two men: Spinoza's Ethics, and Leibniz's Monadology. If only it had been explained like this at University!

Finally, Stewart critically situates these two systems as the purest opposed responses to post-medieval modernisation, one welcoming it, the other seeking to maintain the place of faith and spirit over a putative reduction of everything to the mundane. These remarks do not begin to do justice to the sophistication of Stewart's analysis. I could add that his witty and irreverent style makes it a joy to read, but perhaps this book has been praised enough!

In November, 1676, the German polymath and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646 - 1716) visited the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632 -1677) at the Hague. Leibniz, age 30, was a rising and ambitious young man who had already, independently of Isaac Newton, invented the calculus. Spinoza, age 44, had been excommunicated from the synagogue in Amsterdam at the age of 24. He had published a notorious work, the Theological-Political Treatise, and his as-yet unpublished masterpiece, the Ethics, had been widely if surreptitiously circulated among learned people. At the time of his meeting with Leibniz, Spinoza had only three months to live.

In "The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World"" (2005), Matthew Stewart takes as his pivot-point the Leibniz-Spinoza meeting. Little is known of what occurred at this meeting because Spinoza left no record of it and Leibniz rarely spoke of it. Nevertheless, Stewart uses this meeting as a fulcrum to illuminate the thought of these two philosophers and to show how their views developed into the two broad and competing responses to modernity and to the secular world that remain with us today. Stewart has the gift of presenting his story articulately and well. He combines elements of storytelling, historical narrative, and philosophy in an appealing and accessible fashion. He also shows a great dealing of learning and reflection. Stewart received a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford and is an independent scholar in California.

Spinoza was a self-contained individual. Stewart portrays him as the first and the prototypical secular thinker in philosophy. Stewart rightly places great emphasis on the Theological-Political Treatise, a work which until recently has not received the attention it deserves. Stewart emphasizes the political character of the work, its goal of freeing the state from the claims of revealed religion, its commitment to the value of free inquiry, and its leanings towards democracy. In this work, Spinoza used a historical approach to interpreting the Bible with the purpose of clearing away supernaturalism and establishing a basis for what became modern, secular life. In the Ethics, Spinoza rejected a transcendent God with a will and with commands for the good conduct of people. Spinoza equated God with nature and with the scientific laws of the universe. Human beings were subject to scientific law and could be studied, rather than constituting a realm separate from nature. The mind was tied to the activities of the body. Human ethics and well-being were naturalistically based.


Unlike Spinoza, Leibniz valued worldly success and the approval of others. For Stewart, Leibniz' mature philosophy, as set forth in the Monadology and elsewhere, developed as a response to and rejection of Spinoza's secularism. Leibniz argues for a transcendent God with a free moral will, for a plurality of independent and autonomous substances called monads, and for the immortality of the soul. Stewart places greater emphasis of the meeting between Leibniz and Spinoza, and on Spinoza's alleged influence on Leibniz , than would some historians of philosophy. But Stewart's philosophical approach doesn't appear to me to turn upon his reading of the historical record of Leibniz' actual contact with Spinoza. Rather, Stewart finds in Leibniz the first modern thinker who attempted, reactively, to restore many aspects of earlier, largely religious, thought, including a transcendent God, autonomous persons, and an afterlife, that have no place in Spinoza's thought. Thus, for Stewart, Leibniz is a distinctively modern thinker and the first to try to reconcile the world of physical science and physical law, with a form of transcendent, religious life not controlled by the dictates of science.

I found Stewart's reading highly challenging and suggestive, and he goes on to characterize the subsequent 300 year course of philosophy as a continuation of the basic divide between Spinoza and Leibniz. Thus, the basic issue that modern philosophy has addressed is the way in which meaning, purpose, and value are to be found in a secular world. Stewart finds that the dominant trend of modern philosophy has been an attempt to follow and strengthen Leibniz' approach and to answer Spinoza. He writes:

"Kant's attempt to prove the existence of a `noumenal' world of pure selves and things in themselves on the basis of a critique of pure reason, the nineteenth-century-spanning efforts to reconcile teleology with mechanism that began with Hegel; Bergson's claim to have discovered a world of life forces immune to the analytical embrace of modern science; Heidegger's call for the overthrow of western metaphysics in order to recover the truth about Being; and the whole `postmodern' project of deconstructing the phallocentric tradition of western thought- all of these diverse trends in modern thought have one thing in common: they are at bottom forms of the reaction to modernity first instantiated by Leibniz." (p. 311)

Stewart might also have included the American philosopher William James, whom I have been studying recently, in this latter group. Stewart does not come to a firm conclusion regarding the merits of the Spinozian and Leibnitzian positions, but he notes a strong tendency among most thinkers and most individuals to try to work a compromise between them. But to me Spinoza appears to have the last word with his famous conclusion that "fine things are as difficult as they are rare".

Robin Friedman

The Courtier and the Heretic is a remarkable essay on the confrontation of the two greatest philosophers of the 17th century: the heretic, Baruch (or Benedictus) de Spinoza (1632-1677) and the courtier, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).

Leibniz traveled to The Hague with the express purpose of meeting Spinoza and discussing Spinoza's philosophical system. The two men met for three days beginning on or about Nov. 18, 1676, when Spinoza had only three more months to live.

Spinoza's detractors called him "that atheist Jew." (Spinoza had been excommunicated from the synagogue because of his heretical ideas.) He propounded a "mystical pantheism" (God is the world; the world is God), denied the existence of the "soul" or "mind" (our intelligence being simply the product of our bodies or, more specifically, of our brains), and, therefore, also denied the immortality of the soul.

Spinoza's "God" (if such deserves the title of divinity) was not transcendent (that is, not before, beyond, above, and separated from the world), but immanent, totally present within the here and now. Spinoza's monistic "theology" branded him as a philosophical materialist.

Leibniz was (publicly, at least) highly offended and scandalized by such atheistic heresy. In his voluminous writings, he attacked Spinoza directly (or wherever he sniffed out the deadly virus of Spinozism: in Rene Descartes, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton).

The end result of Spinoza's philosophy, said Leibniz, was the "death of God," the loss of faith in the doctrines of the established church and the undermining of morality, and "the death of man," chaos, nihilism, anarchy, and the collapse of Western civilization.

In opposition to Spinoza's immanent God, Leibniz held to the orthodox view of God's transcendence (that is, God's existence as a Person with a free will who makes choices), the reality of indestructible "souls" (he called them "monads"), and the belief in immortality.

Stewart sees Spinoza as a "secular liberal" and Leibniz as a "religious conservative." Leibniz has the utopian dream of uniting the Catholic Church with the Protestant denominations, thereby setting the stage of a hope-for (in his view) emergence of a Christian Theocracy in Europe. For his part, Spinoza spoke of nation-states as emerging from a "social contract," and his ideas greatly influenced the idea of the separation of church and state and the genius behind the United States Constitution, with its series of checks and balances on constituted authorities.

Leibniz, at least ostensibly and in his public pronouncements, believed in orthodox doctrines such as a future life in which rewards were given to the faithful and punishment imposed on unbelievers. Spinoza believed that "virtue is its own reward," and that those who lead an exemplary life, treating their fellow human beings with tolerance, love, and respect, have no need of financial gain, ecclesiastical titles, offices, and honors, or rewards in a future life in order to assure their happiness. Those who have what he called "an intellectual love of God" need not expect or demand that God love them in return.

The epic contest of these two philosophers shook the 17th century and continues even today. Witness the current campaign for "Intelligent Design," the bombing of abortion clinics, and the enthusiastic rumblings for an American Theocracy by Christian fundamentalists.

Matthew Stewart points out that the (apparent) contradictory philosophies of Spinoza and Leibniz were divergent approaches to modernity, especially to the inroads of modern science. Spinoza took an active approach to modernity, accepting its challenges and opportunities; Leibniz took a reactive approach to modernity, bemoaning its dangers to the status quo.

And yet, asserts Stewart on several occasions, Leibniz was more concerned that people believe his overblown and convoluted metaphysics (such as his bizarre monadology) than that his philosophical doctrines were true. And, in the final analysis, does not Leibniz's lifelong opposition to Spinoza collapse into Spinozism?

Voltaire was wrong, says Stewart, when in his novel Candide he portrayed Leibniz with savage sarcasm as Dr. Pangloss, the eternal optimist who held that "this is the best of all possible worlds". Stewart asserts that "[Leibniz] was in fact one of history's great pessimists" and says that Leibniz skated on the thin ice of doubt must closer to the edge of unbelief than did Spinoza.

On one point, I must take issue with Stewart. He writes of "thinkers who publicly derided Spinoza--Locke, Hume, Voltaire, and Nietzsche, to name some examples." Au contraire, Mr. Stewart! Is this the same Nietzsche who, in 1881, wrote the following?

"I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now was inspired by 'instinct.' Not only is his over-all tendency like mine--making knowledge the most powerful affect--but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself. This most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the differences in time, culture and science. In summa, my solitude, which as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is at least a dualitude."

In other words, Nietzsche expresses his delight and joy on discovering that he was not utterly alone in his philosophical quest; he had, as it were, a doppelganger with whom he shared a close intellectual, moral, and emotional affinity.

The Courtier and the Heretic is Exhibit #1 that philosophy can be both entertaining and enlightening. By putting in context the philosophies of Spinoza and Leibniz, and supplying colorful historical background to their confrontation, Stewart has written a highly accessible work that brilliantly explicates the contributions of these two thinkers to the history of ideas.

This book fascinated me by telling a story of an intellectual connection between two of the greatest thinkers of our time in a way that makes it apparent that the connection and the debate between the two men is really the personification of the debate between the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason that is still very much alive. The book starts out, innocently enough, with descriptions of the childhoods and early education of Spinoza and Leibniz. This makes it seem that the book will turn into two parallel biographies of the two men, and in a way it does, but the weight that it gives to each of their lives is not equal. It is really a story of Spinoza's discovery of the modern, secular worldview and it's the impact on the medieval, God-as-Supreme-Being-based worldview that was predominant in the 17th century, and that had an unrelenting hold on the philosophy of Leibniz.

The connection between Leibniz and Spinoza begins when Leibniz finds out about Spinoza's early work while working as an adviser for a German noble. He is intrigued by Spinoza's ideas on the nature of God and the attempts to describe God in a way that, unlike the traditional religious outlook, is logically consistent. At the time, Spinoza was hated and reviled by the mainstream culture because the description of God as an impersonal Substance, instead of a Supreme Being, was more than the religion-dominated society could comfortably tolerate. Leibniz begins a clandestine correspondence with Spinoza, which culminates in a brief visit to Spinoza's room in The Hague. During the discussions with Spinoza, or shortly after the visit, Leibniz realizes the full implication of his host's philosophy. The implication was that, if Spinoza was correct, then the revealed truths of any religion can no longer be accepted by anyone with a shred of reason. This presented a big problem for Leibniz because his greatest ambition was to contribute toward stopping the constant wars tearing through Europe at the time and he was convinced that the key to peace was a theocracy of a single unified and universal Christian Church. Leibniz makes an intellectual U-turn and spends the next forty years of his life trying to refute Spinoza's ideas with new philosophical theories with, in hindsight, a very limited success at best.

In addition to the dramatic plot, the lively style of the book makes it a pleasure to read. Descriptions of Spinoza's and Leibniz's personalities make the two characters come alive and create the impression that you begin to know then as people. The writing is at times humorous and even sarcastic, though most of the humor and all of the sarcasm is at Leibniz's expense. It is obvious that the author is much more sympathetic toward Spinoza, understandably so. This brings me to the drawbacks of the book, which were the reason why I gave it four stars. Not enough credit is given to Leibniz. One or two times he is described as the "last universal genius" and it is briefly mentioned that he left his mark on almost every branch of science of his time. But, besides inventing calculus, there is no description of what it is that he did to deserve such a grand title. I wish the author spent at least as much time on Leibniz's achievements as he did on waxing sarcastic on Leibniz's nerdy and awkward appearance.

Another point rubbed me the wrong way. For Spinoza, Matthew Stewart writes, "self-interest is virtue itself." On the other hand, when talking about Spinoza's main motivation in philosophy, he writes that Spinoza looked at himself as a revolutionary out to bring freedom to the masses and destroy the old theocratic political order. While doing so, "Spinoza brazenly crossed the line that divides self-interest from the common good" (p. 107). The same inconsistency is on p. 176: "Spinoza maintains that virtue in fact leads to a very unselfish social behavior." It seems that Stewart has a very narrow view of self-interest and does not see that self-interest and the common good can be one and the same. In other words, the common good was in Spinoza's self-interest, and the self-interest and "selfishness" of each individual becomes the common good. Its hard to believe that a writer such as Stewart would miss this point, but I see no other interpretation.

To finish up, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about Spinoza and the philosophy of the Age of Reason.

Will the historical status of Baruch Spinoza, the "atheist, excommunicated Jew", ever find a proper niche? His accustomed place is among the "philosophers", and there are those who place him with early Enlightenment "scientists". Strangely, the description "theologian" is almost never advanced. Yet, it was his definition of "God" that provided him a unique place in history - and stirred no end of resentment among his peers. The strength and endurance of that resentment is testimony to the power of Spinoza's ideas. Among the critics, the polymath Gottfried Leibniz, perhaps stands tallest in a mob of Spinoza's decriers. Matthew Stewart considers the role and impact of both men in this excellent study.

Born of the post-Expulsion exiles from Roman Catholic Iberia, Baruch Spinoza entered life in an Amsterdam mercantile family. His schoolboy nickname, "Bento" reflects the family's Portuguese roots. Schooled in a local synagogue, Baruch's world-view expanded far beyond the classroom, his city and the tumult of European politics. For expressing what he perceived, he was expelled from the congregation, the Jewish community and Amsterdam itself. A single act transformed a young man of middle-class respectability into "the atheist Jew" [sic] and less flattering terms. Even Christians joined the clamour, denouncing "Benedictus" [the name Baruch adopted when writing in Latin] as "the vilest thing ever vomited on the Earth" - which must take some kind of award for vilification.

What idea brought such a storm of abuse and, clearly, fear among European churchmen of nearly every stripe? Put simply, Spinoza rejected all forms of intermediary between humans and their deity. No rabbis, bishops, priests or popes had a role to play in communicating with the god nor in setting moral standards. The god and Nature, Spinoza contended, were one, leaving the door open for any individual to communicate with it in their own way. To label such a view as "heretical" in the 17th Century, Stewart explains, is almost simplistic. Apart from the theological issues, such a concept struck at the roots of Europe's hierarchical society.

Among those potentially threatened by reconsidering how society should be run was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Although a brilliant man, Leibniz was also beset with a major ambition streak. The rich and powerful were there to act in sponsorship of his ideas. Ideas, in Leibniz' mind, proliferated. Stewart bemoans the thousands of pages of Leibniz notes that lie untended and unedited in archives. Proposals, commentaries and enquiries remain but superficially investigated according to the author. Among Leibniz more bizarre notions was to plant a set of windmill-driven water pumps in the Harz Mountains where there's little wind to be found. Leibniz patron funded this project for years before it was finally abandoned. More flighty yet was his proposal under the name "Pacidius" ["peace spirit"?] seeking another Crusade under the leadership of Louis XIV, to rid Egypt of Muslims! Europe, "Pacidius" declared, would be reunited in one mega-church and superstate.

Adoring pomp and circumstance, which Leibniz considered his due, the young genius encountered Spinoza's ideas while in Paris. He objected to the idea of a deity that allowed people to make up their own minds about virtue. He preferred one that could entertain appeals and make judgements. Almost clandestinely, Leibniz visited Spinoza in what is now considered one of the turning points in European philosophy. It's not known whether the visit lasted "few days" or a week, but it remained a focus for the remainder of Leibniz' life. Nearly all his non-mathematical writings touch on Spinoza's ideas to the end of the German's life. According to Stewart, the tight concentration on the "heretics" suggests Leibniz was a "closet Spinozist" without being aware of it.

Both men wished to view the deity from a stance of "reason". That outlook was, after all, the foundation of the Enlightenment, and these two major architects of that era. More significantly to Stewart, it was Spinoza's ideas that led to modern ideas of a democratic and egalitarian society. Neither "philosopher" nor "theologian", Spinoza was a "rationalist" who raised questions all people could consider themselves worthy of answering. Matthew Stewart is one of those people and he's performed an substantial feat of explaining why you might wish to contribute your own answer instead of relying on others to provide instead. Read this and find out why. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Stewart's book doesn't require great philosophical background, but certainly presumes a reader with a strong philosophical interest. It might be described as reasonably popular intellectual history. The book is at once a dual biography and a recounting of the development of the two philosophers, built around the single meeting they had in 1676, and of Leibniz's life-long obsession with Spinoza and Spinozism. It doesn't appear that Spinoza thought all that much about Leibniz, who lived quite a bit longer and thus had more time to think about Spinoza than Spinoza had to think about him. (Spinoza died in 1677, eleven years after their meeting, at the age of 44; Leibniz in 1716 at 70).

The author's thesis is that these two 17th Century philosophers set the terms for a debate that goes on to this day in the area of political and moral philosophy. Spinoza is the progenitor of today's secular humanist; Leibniz of today's theocrat.

What was new to me was how much both were, at bottom, political philosophers. I had thought of them both as rationalist metaphysicians. Presumably this was not true of Spinoza's ethics, but on the one occasion I tried to read the book several years ago I found it impenetrable. Maybe I'll try again. In any event, Stewart argues that the metaphysics and debates about the nature of God were essentially political debates in disguise.

Another surprise for me was Stewart's characterization of Spinoza's views on the mind-body problem as closer to Hume's than to the rationalism with which, in Stewart's view, Spinoza is often incorrectly identified.

As an amateur at philosophy, I found the book both very readable and very informative. Highly recommended.

Great original thinkers are rarely the best at explaining their ideas to a general audience. Matthew Stewart does a superb job of making the ideas of Spinoza and Leibnez lucid, accessible and relevant. He does this without ever talking down to the reader or glossing over the difficulties and contradictions in these men's writings. This book reminded me of Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club" in the way it was simultaneously effective as a work of philosophy, history and biography.

Leibnez and Spinoza were foundational figures in the Enlightenment. Both shared a deep belief that the universe is a lawful and orderly place susceptible to human understanding through the application of reason to experience. Stewart makes a convincing argument that Kant's classification of philosophers into empiricists and rationalists, which has been nearly universally accepted, is a very poor way to understand these two men.

Spinoza's pantheistic metaphysics was tied to an early vision of the modern pluralistic secular state. Leibnez, who feared anarchy more than repression, was an eager defender of the establishment of the day. Stewart ably defends Leibnez against Voltaire's devastating satire of him as Doctor Pangloss blissfully unaware of the imperfections in the world. He also rejects the idea that the problems Leibnez seeks to address are no longer relevant. Apart from this defense, Stewart's treatment of Leibniz is almost entirely hostile. Both his philosophy and his character are subject to withering criticism. The thesis here is that Leibnez shared Spinoza's key beliefs but lacked the courage to follow them to their logical conclusion.

Fans of Leibnez will not be happy with this treatment but will want to read this book anyway because it is likely to affect the discussion of these two for the forseeable future. This is one of those rare books that should have wide appeal to the general reader as well as the specialist in the field.

Like "Wittgenstein's Poker" this book turns a single event in the lives of two important philosophers into a full-length book. Where one book concerned a possible fight, here it's a meeting which is believed by Stewart to have caused a painful conversion-epiphany in Leibniz, the conservative courtier. Both works are lively, good reads, but that's where the similarity ends. While "Wittgenstein's Poker," at least in the main, gets analytical philosophy, logical positivism, and ordinary language philosophy right, Stewart makes quite a mess of Leibniz. In fact, while he has an advanced degree in philosophy, he seems to have a very limited understanding of either of his subject's main works. And, unfortunately, what he does seem to get right, he feels the need to explain by the main thesis of his book--that Leibniz was a closet Spinozist for most of his life and only pretended to disagree with him to protect his status.

I can't go into the details of these errors in a brief review of this type, but Leibniz's understanding of necessity was very different from Spinoza's and Stewart's limited understanding of modal logic has produced a hash, rather than anything coherent out of Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" claim (which, while it may be difficult to believe, can at least be made coherent if one understands the notion of possible worlds in the manner of that philosopher). Stewart's botching of Leibniz is clear and will be fairly obvious to students of that philosopher's works, but his take on Spinoza (on whom I wrote my own Ph.D. thesis) is hazier and, as a result, arguably not so awful. I do think, though, that Spinoza's notions of "salvation" and intuitive knowledge can only be made to jibe with this book after considerable analysis and explication--very little of which can be found here.

At any rate, I learned a good deal about the life, times and psychological make-up of these men, for which I'm grateful to the author.