Part 5 (2/2)

That is, you could feed, house, and clothe roughly eleven Spinozas for the price of one Leibniz.

It is also interesting to note that Leibniz indicates in the letter to his relatives that he has already ”ama.s.sed some little money.” His savings fell short of the amount required for his investment, but were not so small as to be irrelevant. It seems likely therefore that the young courtier was already in the possession of several hundred thalers-or several Spinoza Units. In other words, had he been content to live in the manner to which Spinoza was accustomed-say, renting a cottage on the outskirts of Paris, eating raisins for lunch and milk gruel for dinner, and dressing like the local pharmacist-Leibniz very likely already had the means to stay in Paris. But such an option was clearly unthinkable. Leibniz took for granted that the life of the mind is a life of status, too. He intended to leave his mark not in some future community of reason, but in the glittering society of the actual world, with its scarce supply of honors, offices, and riches.

G.o.d's plan for Leibniz's financial well-being, however, turns out to have been different from what the philosopher antic.i.p.ated. His relatives, not having heard from Gottfried for some time, and still in the dark about the plans that brought him to Paris in the first place, declined to partic.i.p.ate in the office-investment scheme. Instead, they dusted up the usual cloud of suspicions about his patriotism, his religion, and his personal behavior.

In his none too subtle message of 1675 to the Duke of Hanover, Leibniz sighs: ”A man like me has no choice but to seek a Grand Prince.” He yearns for the day ”when I shall have at length brought my s.h.i.+p into port, and be no longer compelled to run after people.” He is certain that a modest sum of money and a t.i.tle appropriate to his worth are all he requires in order to fulfill his destiny: ”For experience has taught me that one will be first eagerly sought after by the world, when one no longer needs to seek after it.”

But enough was never enough. Leibniz's s.h.i.+p never came into port. Even as he acc.u.mulated offices, t.i.tles, and savings enough to count as a very wealthy man, he never stopped running after people in search of still more money and more security. Life with Leibniz was a constant struggle against the depredations of the material world, a never-ending complaint against the precariousness of existence itself-a fact that stands in curious juxtaposition to the optimistic metaphysics he later revealed to the public, according to which all things happen for the best and the immaterial soul remains immune to all outside forces.

Leibniz never saw it as greed; he saw it as part of his plan to advance the sciences and serve G.o.d. Over and over, as he wrangled with one employer after another to claim monies he believed he was owed, he evinced genuine dismay, as though witnessing not merely an injury to himself but an injustice to humanity, which would suffer needlessly should one of its best philosophers fail to secure the funds he required to free himself from material worries. Among his contemporaries, however, there seems to have been little doubt about the matter. The generally upbeat Eckhart says: ”Leibniz had a love for money that was almost sordid.”

For most of his stay in Paris, in any case, Leibniz had a fall-back plan, though the prospect of falling back on it gave him no pleasure. As early as 1673, the Duke of Hanover had offered him a post in his court-in Hanover. The proposal hung over Leibniz's future with all the gloom of a dark home to which a child knows he must return sometime before nightfall. For three years, Leibniz finessed the offer, striving to keep it alive without accepting it. His letter of 1675 to the Duke would prove to be his last, valiant effort to keep the game going for a while longer.

THE POINT OF the struggle, of course, was work. Notwithstanding the financial worries and other distractions, Leibniz in his Paris years pursued scientific knowledge with the vigor of an entire university. He was a learning machine. His capacity for study and writing would seem terrifying were it not so spectacular. The 150,000 sheets of writing in his archives must surely put him at or very near the top of the list of history's most productive intellectuals, whether measured in terms of wpm (words per minute of life), imp (ideas per minute), or any other metric. the struggle, of course, was work. Notwithstanding the financial worries and other distractions, Leibniz in his Paris years pursued scientific knowledge with the vigor of an entire university. He was a learning machine. His capacity for study and writing would seem terrifying were it not so spectacular. The 150,000 sheets of writing in his archives must surely put him at or very near the top of the list of history's most productive intellectuals, whether measured in terms of wpm (words per minute of life), imp (ideas per minute), or any other metric.

On the surface, Leibniz's investigations in Paris show all the telltale signs of the omnimania that characterized his earlier activities in Germany. To the list of brilliant ideas he mentioned to the Duke of Hanover in 1671 must now be added a design for a new kind of watch, new insights into a variety of historical questions, and a project to translate certain ancient texts. He took particular interest in the mechanical arts. He visited many craftsmen in their workshops, noting that ”there is here [in Paris] an infinity of curiosities, in gold-smithy, enameling, gla.s.s-making, watch-making, tannery, and the manufacture of pewter.”

He also had an irrepressible fascination with believe-it-or-not-type mysteries. His far-flung network of intelligence operatives kept him informed of the latest oddities, such as a man who could eat fire (apparently by coating his tongue with some kind of resin); a seven-foot-tall giant; various inexplicable natural disasters, such as a mountain that mysteriously collapsed on itself; and, of course, the latest advances in alchemy. Once, later in life, hearing about a talking dog, he made a special journey to visit the supernatural beast. (He came away impressed, but not convinced that the case warranted any change in his philosophical views concerning the souls of animals.) Not surprisingly, Leibniz frequently complained that he had no time to get anything done.

Yet, in his Paris years Leibniz exhibited a degree of concentration in his studies that was exceptional in his long career. The focus of his intellectual pa.s.sion now was mathematics. Despite the inadequate training he had received in Germany, the audacious autodidact soon caught up with the leading mathematicians of Paris and began making seminal contributions in his own right.

Leibniz's mathematical investigations initially centered on the summation of infinite series. The concern with indivisibility and the infinitely small was linked in his mind to some fundamental, metaphysical truths about the nature of substance, matter, and mind. His intuition told him that the problem of how to make sense of the infinity of points on a line was an instance of the problem of how to make sense of the relation between indivisible, pointlike souls and the continuum of the material world. For roughly the same reason that no number of points could ever be strung together to make up a line, he believed that purely physical or material principles could not account for everything in the material world, and that therefore an incorporeal or ”mental” principle-”substance”-was required to explain the unity and activity of phenomena. He called this complex of ideas ”the labyrinth of the continuum.” Pursuing these premises through one end of the labyrinth, he would discover calculus; off in the opposite direction, he would envision a world comprised of nothing but an infinite number of pointlike, immortal souls. All of Leibniz's mathematical achievements in later life, and much of his metaphysics as well, had their origin in the ideas conceived in Paris before he turned thirty.

IF THE QUADRENNIUM in Paris was his time of glory, then Leibniz's thirtieth year and his last in the City of Light was his in Paris was his time of glory, then Leibniz's thirtieth year and his last in the City of Light was his annus mirabilis annus mirabilis. This was the year he invented calculus and this was the year in which his philosophical ideas were in their most fluid and chaotically productive state. It was also the year he faced Spinoza, first as an idea, then in person. If ever the errant courtier had an opportunity to make the case that his frantic efforts to find a secure position in life were in fact in the general interest of humankind, then this was that moment.

The year of miracles began in late August 1675 with the arrival of Walther Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus. Fresh from his sojourn in London, Tschirnhaus appeared at Leibniz's door in the Hotel des Romains with a letter of introduction from Henry Oldenburg. The two young Germans abroad became instant best friends, achieving a degree of intimacy rarely matched in the course of Leibniz's life. Leibniz was so pleased with his new friend that he immediately wrote back to Oldenburg: ”Sending Tschirnhaus to us was a true act of friends.h.i.+p. I take great delight in his company, and I recognize in him excellent abilities, notwithstanding his youth.” (At the time of writing, Tschirnhaus was twenty-five years old, and Leibniz was twenty-nine.) In a fictional dialogue written the following year, Leibniz gives Tschirnhaus a starring role in the semi-anagrammatic character of Charinus. ”There arrived a young man from a distinguished family,” he writes, ”who was nonetheless inquisitive and keen to learn, who had enlisted in the army at a tender age, and had become famous for his outstanding successes.” (In that dialogue, to be sure, Charinus has much to learn from the wise Pacidius, Leibniz's Peacemaking alter ego.) Their friends.h.i.+p was close enough that it admitted quarrels, too. Walther has a ”habit of stealing things,” Gottfried fumed some years later in connection with the calculus dispute, and the two refused to speak to each other for many years before finally making peace.

In the Hotel des Romains, the two expatriates promptly engaged in heated mathematical parleys. Their exchanges reached such a pitch that the papers preserved in Leibniz's files are crisscrossed with the scribbled handwriting of both men. It was around this time that Leibniz pa.s.sed the threshold of the calculus. In a note from October 29, 1675, two months after Tschirnhaus's arrival, Leibniz for the first time used the symbol? to stand for integration, replacing the earlier ”omn” (for ”omnes”). Two weeks later, on November 11, he used dx dx for the first time to represent the ”differential of for the first time to represent the ”differential of x x.” Leibniz now believed himself to be in sole possession of the general method we call calculus. At some point he shuffled his new equations over to Tschirnhaus. But the youthful warrior-ultimately no match for the eagle-eyed man on the other side of the table-dismissed it all as mere playing with symbols.

Through the autumn of 1675, the winter, and into the spring of 1676 Leibniz organized his thoughts on the calculus. Not until he had it all down on paper would he learn through Oldenburg that a reclusive Cambridge don named Isaac Newton had arrived at substantially the same discovery ten years earlier.

But more than just mathematics filled the chambers of the Hotel des Romains in those crucial days in which Leibniz discovered the calculus. Tschirnhaus could hardly avoid raising the specter of his favorite living philosopher: Spinoza. Shortly after Tschirnhaus arrived in Paris, Leibniz dove back into the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. His notebooks suddenly teem with excerpts from the notorious atheist's book-sixteen pages' worth, followed by brief annotations that, on the whole, add to rather than subtract from the author's claims. Spinoza's criticisms of the scriptures-just as one might have expected-meet little resistance from the young German. One of Leibniz's Paris notes on the Tractatus Tractatus, however, cautions against any direct rapprochement. Where Spinoza hints at his doctrine that G.o.d is Nature, Leibniz writes bluntly: ”I do not agree with this.”

The tete-a-tetes with Tschirnhaus and the renewed readings of the Tractatus Tractatus reawoke Leibniz's urge to make personal contact with the great thinker of The Hague. In the same week in November in which he put the reawoke Leibniz's urge to make personal contact with the great thinker of The Hague. In the same week in November in which he put the dx dx in calculus, Leibniz reinitiated, in strangely indirect form, the exchange with Spinoza that had begun in 1671. in calculus, Leibniz reinitiated, in strangely indirect form, the exchange with Spinoza that had begun in 1671.

On November 18, 1675, Georg Hermann Schuller posted a letter to Spinoza, purportedly on behalf of his friend Tschirnhaus in Paris. Schuller starts by pa.s.sing on Tschirnhaus's thanks for providing him with an introduction to Christiaan Huygens, who has proved quite helpful in finding him a job as tutor to the son of Colbert. After discussion of a philosophical difficulty occasioned mainly by a flaw in Tschirnhaus's copy of the propositions of the Ethics Ethics, Schuller turns to the main purpose of the letter. He relates that in Paris Tschirnhaus has met a man named Leibniz and ”established a close friends.h.i.+p with him.”

He goes on to describe this new acquaintance in terms bound to appeal to Spinoza. According to Tschirnhaus, says Schuller, Leibniz is a man of remarkable learning, most skilled in the various sciences and free from the common theological prejudices.... In Ethics...Leibniz is most practiced, and speaks solely from the dictates of reason.... [I]n physics and especially in metaphysical studies of G.o.d and the Soul he is most skilled.... This same Leibniz thinks.h.i.+ghly of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, on which subject he once wrote you a letter, if you remember.

Leibniz, then, is a Spinozist in embryo. And he ”thinks highly” of the work he described to Antoine Arnauld as ”horrible” and ”terrifying.” Next comes the point of all these good words: Tschirnhaus believes that Leibniz is ”ready to receive” Spinoza's writings. Schuller hastens to add that if Spinoza should decline to allow Tschirnhaus to share the secret gospel, the philosopher should have no doubt that Tschirnhaus would ”honorably keep them secret in accordance with his promise, just as in fact he has not made the slightest mention of them.”

What Tschirnhaus may have understood by ”slightest mention” here is open to question. Schuller's reference to an earlier letter from Leibniz to Spinoza strongly suggests that Leibniz himself was involved in drafting this communication with Spinoza. How else would Schuller and Tschirnhaus have known about a letter that Leibniz sent to Spinoza several years before either had met Spinoza? And if Leibniz was involved in this particular exercise in persuasion, then he must have had some inkling about the hidden treasure in Tschirnhaus's possession. In fact, it was widely known that Spinoza had produced a comprehensive statement of his philosophy: Oldenburg was in the know, as were many of Spinoza's other friends, not to mention some extremely irate Dutch theologians. The most likely scenario is that Leibniz was well aware of the existence of Tschirnhaus's stash of secret wisdom, and that he was frantic to get his hands on it. Schuller's communication from Tschirnhaus was, in effect, a plea from Leibniz to Spinoza.

Spinoza evidently considered the request a very important matter, for he replied on the same day that he received Schuller's letter. But the answer must have landed with a humiliating thud in Paris: I believe I know Leibniz, of whom he writes, through correspondence, but I do not understand why he, a Counselor of Frankfurt, has gone to France. As far as I can judge from his letters, he seemed to me a person of liberal mind and well versed in every science. Still, I think it imprudent to entrust my writings to him so hastily. I should first like to know what he is doing in France, and to hear our friend Tschirnhaus's opinion of him after a longer acquaintance and a closer knowledge of his character.

Why did Spinoza spurn the overture from Leibniz? Most likely, as we know, recent developments-van den Enden's execution in Paris and the threat of mob violence against Spinoza in The Hague-made him exceptionally wary of contacts with Paris. His question for Tschirnhaus was, in effect: Is Leibniz a spy?

While Leibniz struggled to penetrate Spinoza's defenses, he suffered a grievous blow to his plans to remain in Paris. On January 11, 1676, at the very moment he was composing his customary New Year's greeting for Johann Friedrich, he received a formal notification of his appointment as librarian at the Duke's court. The meaning was clear: take it or leave it. With no other honorable occupation in sight, Leibniz concluded his New Year's salutation to the Duke by saying he was overjoyed to accept the position. On the very same day, evidently dreading the prospect of returning to the hinterlands, he sent off a letter to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, pleading one more time for help in getting a position in the French Academy. There followed another flurry of letters to other notables of Paris, all asking for help in securing a position that might save him from the horror of life in Hanover.

Even as he juggled his job prospects and the calculus, however, Leibniz did not relent in his pursuit of the truth about Spinoza. The rejection of his request for admission into the Spinoza fan club, it seems, did little to diminish his desire to uncover the secret wisdom of the mysterious philosopher to the north. There is no record that Spinoza ever gave express consent to Tschirnhaus's request to share his writings with Leibniz. Possibly, the Schuller/Tschirnhaus/Leibniz trio rushed another plea to the philosopher of The Hague over the winter holidays, received a prompt and favorable response, and then destroyed the evidence. But that doesn't seem likely. There is a clear record, however, that, some weeks after being denied permission to do so, Tschirnhaus did indeed share with Leibniz what he knew about the contents of Spinoza's masterwork.

On a piece of notepaper that dates from early February 1676, Leibniz wrote the first words in the story that came to dominate the rest of his life: ”Tschirnhaus has told me many things about the book of M. de Spinosa.”

10.

A Secret Philosophy of the Whole of Things ”Spinosa's book will be about G.o.d, the mind, and blessedness, or the idea of the perfect man,” Leibniz announces in his notes on his discussion with Tschirnhaus. He then attributes to Spinoza a series of claims that must seem opaque to the uninitiated: ”G.o.d alone is substance” ”all creatures are nothing but modes” ”mind is the very idea of the body” and ”man is in no way free-even if he partic.i.p.ates in freedom more than other bodies do.” Within the confines of a single sheet of paper, as it turns out, Leibniz traces the signature doctrines of Spinoza's philosophy.

It is a rare event in the history of philosophy when an abstruse system of metaphysics manages to summarize everything that matters about an age; and rarer still when it portends a worldwide revolution. Such was the nature of the system that Leibniz now beheld, and whose implications he was, arguably, the first to understand.

”The vulgar begin philosophy with created things, Descartes began with the mind, [Spinoza] begins with G.o.d,” Leibniz continues. No truer statement about Spinoza's philosophy can be made-save possibly the claim that ”Spinoza begins and ends and ends with G.o.d.” Part I of the with G.o.d.” Part I of the Ethics Ethics is t.i.tled ”Of G.o.d” but in fact all of Spinoza's philosophy is all about G.o.d, the subject to which we now turn. is t.i.tled ”Of G.o.d” but in fact all of Spinoza's philosophy is all about G.o.d, the subject to which we now turn.

G.o.d G.o.d became the name of a problem in the seventeenth century. No doubt many historical factors contributed to this unexpected development. The bewildering diversity of religious faiths arising out of the Reformation, for example, produced a crowd of new conceptions of the deity, none of which seemed to get along particularly well with the others; and this fact in turn stimulated much theorizing concerning their similarities and differences. The increasingly secular tone of public and economic life, too, eroded some of the evidence on which belief naturally rested. Among a small elite of educated Europeans, however, it was modern science that threw the most troubling spotlight on the Almighty. Learned individuals could not overlook the fact that recent advances in human knowledge rendered the biblically sanctioned stories on the genesis and structure of the cosmos untenable. Eppur si muove Eppur si muove-”and yet it moves”-Galileo's alleged words concerning the earth after his trial-had become the secret rallying cry of humankind's newest pioneers.

In retrospect, of course, we know that science still had a long way to go. But even at the time, at least two farsighted philosophers could see where it was headed. The scientific investigation of nature, our heroes suspected, might one day unravel the mysteries of the world into a series of efficient causes. Miracles would dissolve into ignorance, and the cosmos in all its splendor would stand revealed as a grand but ultimately self-sufficient machine. In that event, what would be left for G.o.d to do? In more recent times, the physicist Richard Feynman has framed the problem in a laconic way: when you understand the laws of physics, he pointed out, ”the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for G.o.d to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.” Or, as the physicist Steven Weinberg put it: the more we know about the origins of the universe, the more pointless it seems.

The question for seventeenth-century philosophers was not yet about the existence existence of G.o.d-for no writer of the time, not even Spinoza, explicitly doubted that-but rather about the of G.o.d-for no writer of the time, not even Spinoza, explicitly doubted that-but rather about the function function of G.o.d. If science did eventually manage to explain all of nature in terms of mechanical principles, it seemed, then the providential, miracle-working G.o.d of old would be out of a job. Science and religion-or G.o.d and Nature-seemed locked in irreconcilable conflict, or so the seventeenth-century philosophers sensed. of G.o.d. If science did eventually manage to explain all of nature in terms of mechanical principles, it seemed, then the providential, miracle-working G.o.d of old would be out of a job. Science and religion-or G.o.d and Nature-seemed locked in irreconcilable conflict, or so the seventeenth-century philosophers sensed.

In his Ethics Ethics Spinoza presents his bold solution to the apparent conflict between G.o.d and Nature, a solution whose essentials had been undoubtedly already clear in his mind when he faced expulsion from the Jewish community in his twenty-fourth year. In Spinoza's view, to put it simply, G.o.d and Nature are not and never will be in conflict for the simple reason that G.o.d Spinoza presents his bold solution to the apparent conflict between G.o.d and Nature, a solution whose essentials had been undoubtedly already clear in his mind when he faced expulsion from the Jewish community in his twenty-fourth year. In Spinoza's view, to put it simply, G.o.d and Nature are not and never will be in conflict for the simple reason that G.o.d is is Nature. ”I do not differentiate between G.o.d and Nature in the way that all those known to me have done,” Spinoza explains to Oldenburg. In Part IV of the Nature. ”I do not differentiate between G.o.d and Nature in the way that all those known to me have done,” Spinoza explains to Oldenburg. In Part IV of the Ethics Ethics he tosses off an enigmatic phrase that has since come to stand for the whole of his philosophy: ”G.o.d, or Nature”-which really means: ”G.o.d, or what amounts to the same thing, Nature.” On the basis of this daring intuition, Spinoza constructs something that looks very much like a new form of religion-what should perhaps count as the first religion of the modern era (although it would also be true to say that in some sense it was the revival of an ancient and long forgotten one). he tosses off an enigmatic phrase that has since come to stand for the whole of his philosophy: ”G.o.d, or Nature”-which really means: ”G.o.d, or what amounts to the same thing, Nature.” On the basis of this daring intuition, Spinoza constructs something that looks very much like a new form of religion-what should perhaps count as the first religion of the modern era (although it would also be true to say that in some sense it was the revival of an ancient and long forgotten one).

The ”Nature” in question here is not of the blooming and buzzing kind (though it would include that, too). It is closer to the ”nature” in ”the nature of light” or ”the nature of man”-that is, the ”nature” that is the subject of rational inquiry. Inasmuch as Spinoza speaks of ”Nature” with a capital N N, he refers to a generalization over all these other ”natures.” It is the ”Nature” of everything, or that which makes all the other natures what they are. One may also think of ”nature” as an ”essence” Nature, in this sense, is the essence of the world, or that which makes the world what it is.

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. His philosophy is at a deep level a declaration of confidence that there is nothing ultimately mysterious in the world; there are no inscrutable deities making arbitrary decisions, and no phenomena that will not submit to reasoned inquiry-even if that inquiry is inherently without end; in short, that there is nothing that cannot be known-even if we do not necessarily know everything.

Spinoza's concept of G.o.d, or Nature has this in common with the more pedestrian notions of divinity: G.o.d is the cause of all things. However, Spinoza hastens to add, G.o.d ”is the immanent cause of things, and not the transitive cause.” A ”transitive” cause lies ”outside” its effect. A watchmaker, for example, is the transitive cause of his watch. An ”immanent” cause is in some sense ”inside” or ”together with” that which it causes. The nature of a circle, for example, is the immanent cause of its roundness. Spinoza's claim is that G.o.d does not stand outside the world and create it; rather, G.o.d exists in in the world and subsists together with what it creates: ”All things, I say, are in G.o.d and move in G.o.d.” In simple code: Spinoza's G.o.d is an the world and subsists together with what it creates: ”All things, I say, are in G.o.d and move in G.o.d.” In simple code: Spinoza's G.o.d is an immanent immanent one. one.

Spinoza also refers to his ”G.o.d, or Nature” as ”Substance.” Substance is, very generally speaking, that stuff in which ”attributes”-the properties that make something what it is-inhere. By way of skirting the arcana of Aristotelian and medieval metaphysics, one may think of substance as that which is ”really real,” or the ultimate const.i.tuent(s) of reality. The most important thing about substance is that no substance can be reduced to the attribute of some other substance (which would then, of course, const.i.tute the ”real” substance). Substance is where the digging stops-where all investigations come to an end.

Before Spinoza, it was generally taken for granted that there are many such substances in the world. With a chain of definitions, axioms, and proofs, however, Spinoza claims to demonstrate once and for all that there can in fact be only one Substance in the world. This one Substance has ”infinite attributes” and is, as a matter of fact, G.o.d. Leibniz accurately sums it up: According to Spinoza, he notes, ”G.o.d alone is substance, or a being subsisting through itself, or, that which can be conceived through itself.”

According to Spinoza, furthermore, everything in the world is merely a ”mode” of an attribute of this Substance, or G.o.d. ”Mode” is just Latin for ”way,” and the modes of G.o.d are simply the ways in which Substance (i.e., G.o.d, or Nature) manifests its eternal essence. Leibniz once again hits the nail on the head in his note on the discussion with Ts.h.i.+rnhaus: ”All creatures are nothing but modes.”

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