Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194406 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

The Sunday Telegraph, 22nd January 2006
'...an absorbing book...[Stewart] has a gift for setting out abstract issues in clear and graspable ways...'

The Economist, 7th January 2006
'[Stewart] lays the ground for a new genre: rigorous, readable intellectual history...'

Edward Skidelsky, The Saturday Telegraph, 4th February 2006
'Matthew Stewart has written a elegant and erudite book...superbly elegant and intelligent prose'

Customer Reviews

Two Approaches to Modernity
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 He had published a notorious work, the Theological-Political Treatise, and his as-yet unpublished masterpiece, the Ethics, had been widely if surreptitiously circulated among learned people.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 find 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 does note a strong tendency among most thinkers and most individuals to try to work a compromise between them. But Spinoza appears to me to have the last word with his famous conclusion in the Ethics that "fine things are as difficult as they are rare."

A fascinating story brilliantly told
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.