The Philosophy of Philosophy

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The New York Sun

“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been,” Nietzsche wrote in “Beyond Good and Evil”: “a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” In “The Courtier and the Heretic” (W.W. Norton, 320 pages, $25.95), Matthew Stewart takes Nietzsche’s principle to its logical conclusion. If what really matters about a philosophy is the personal experience behind it, then it makes sense to be curious about that experience. What private and public events, what cultural and religious influences, made a thinker think the way he did? In this double study of Spinoza and Leibniz, accordingly, Mr. Stewart focuses less on their philosophy than on what he calls their “philosophy of philosophy,” examining how their utterly different lives defined the purpose and style of their work.


Mr. Stewart’s decision to pair Spinoza and Leibniz allows his biographical method to shine. These two men, who met only once over a few days in 1676, divided the empire of European thought between them, and they could not have ruled their provinces more differently. Baruch de Spinoza (1632-77) is known from his Latin writings as Benedict, but Mr. Stewart, true to his focus on the personal, refers to the philosopher as “Bento,” the Portuguese name his friends and family would have used.


Spinoza was born in Amsterdam into a thriving community of Portuguese Jews, who had fled the Inquisition for the tolerant, mercantile culture of the Dutch. The Netherlands, Mr. Stewart shows, made Spinoza’s work possible. In any other country of 17th-century Europe, his outspoken atheism and materialism might have sent him to the stake. As it was, he was excommunicated by Amsterdam’s Jewish congregation, making him a double exile – a Jew in a Protestant country, and a heretic among the Jews. He spent his short life quietly, working as a lens-grinder during the day and composing his two major works – the “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” and the “Ethics” – at night.


This life experience, Mr. Stewart convincingly argues, helped to shape the way Spinoza thought about religion and politics. Living in a prosperous, secular city, he affirmed the separation of church and state, and became one of the earliest theorists of liberal democracy: “His mature philosophy,” Mr. Stewart writes, “became a celebration of the spirit of freedom that characterized his parents’ adopted country.” More daringly, and more dangerously, he refuted all the cherished dogmas of Jewish and Christian believers: the inerrancy of the Bible, Divine Providence, personal immortality.


Against these traditional beliefs, he posed the radical and majestic vision of what he called “God or Nature”: the notion that God is nothing other than the totality of what is. For Spinoza, it made no sense to pray to God for help; the only true piety is intellectual understanding, which helps us to embrace the unalterable unfolding of natural laws. These principles, distorted by malicious gossip, made Spinoza a figure of scandal and execration – but also of profound fascination – in Europe’s republic of letters.


One of the most fascinated, Mr. Stewart shows, was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). If Spinoza was the first modern philosopher – single-minded and existentially committed – Leibniz was the last Renaissance man. He was fascinated not only by metaphysics but by mathematics (he invented the calculus, independently of Newton), engineering, economics, diplomacy, and Chinese culture, among many other things. He spent his life as a courtier and adviser to princes, dabbling in fantastic projects for the conquest of Egypt, and amassing a large personal fortune.


Leibniz, in other words, was deeply committed to the existing order. Lacking Spinoza’s alienation, he was never able to pursue his thinking so far or dare the same negations. Yet as Mr. Stewart writes, with only slight exaggeration, Leibniz was obsessed with his philosophical opposite. Whether he was fiercely denouncing Spinoza or secretly recasting Spinoza’s arguments in more acceptable terms, Leibniz recognized him as the philosopher to be reckoned with.


“The Courtier and the Heretic” displays a genuine understanding of the ideas at stake in this complex story. If anything, Mr. Stewart, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, seems wary of delving too deeply into Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s metaphysics. He seems to want to ingratiate the general reader with garish scene-setting and artificial techniques of suspense; these, along with a clunky prose style, make the book less good than it deserves or wants to be. For Mr. Stewart has discovered an appealing and novel way to write the history of ideas, and “The Courtier and the Heretic” is finally, despite its flaws, an enlightening, absorbing study.


The New York Sun

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