The courtier and the heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the modern world by Stewart Matthew

Author:Stewart, Matthew [Stewart, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780393329179
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2006-01-15T02:48:08+00:00

SOMEWHERE ON THE left bank of the Seine, another individual was beginning to trace the contours of the new world. In light of the new ideas radiating from The Hague, a keen, scrutinizing, and very different set of eyes began to take in the challenges of modernity. Here was a mind that longed to see God as clearly as one could see a triangle, too, that grasped the general direction of history, and that sought a response to the problems of the modern condition. But it was a mind with tastes and proclivities very much its own. And so it began to fumble with the questions that must inevitably arise from any serious contemplation of Spinoza’s thought.

Does Spinoza manage to construct a new theory of the human being, or does he simply destroy the old one? Does he demonstrate that there is only one Substance—or that the very idea of substance is incoherent? Is his form of exposition really a method, or is it just a style? Is the “intellectual love” of his Nature-God in fact reasonable?

The questions all circle back to the point where Spinoza’s philosophy begins and ends: God. Spinoza claims to find divinity in nature. He avows that God is in all things—in the here and now. But, in all of human history, God has always been understood as something supernatural—as a being outside of all things, residing in the “before and beyond.” Does Spinoza’s God really deserve the name of God? That is, does the philosopher succeed in his project of deifying Nature? Or does he merely naturalize—and thereby destroy—God?

These were the questions that first met modern eyes when Leibniz sat down in the Hôtel des Romains in the winter of 1676; and these were the questions whose answers the tireless, reckless courtier sought when he journeyed to The Hague in November of that year.

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