For a long time now it's been usual
to see Western philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries as divided
between two opposing schools: British Empiricism and Continental
Rationalism; chief of the empiricists being Locke, Berkeley and Hume;
and the chief of the rationalists being Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
Of the many issues that divided them, the most important, put in its crudest, was this.
The rationalists believed that we human beings can acquire important knowledge of
reality by the use of our minds alone, by thinking, by pure reason.
The empiricists denied this, they insisted that experience was
always a necessary ingredient, and that all our knowledge of what actually exists
must, in the end, in some way or other be derived from experience. Again,
the traditional view has been that these two opposing schools finally came
together at the end of the 18th century and were combined in the work
of Immanuel Kant. In this program, we're going to take a look at Spinoza
and Leibniz, the two greatest of the rationalist philosophers after Descartes.
The first in time was Spinoza, born in Amsterdam in 1632. His family were
Portuguese Jews who, in the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition, immigrated to
Holland in search of religious freedom. Spinoza was brought up and educated
in an enclosed Jewish community. But he rebelled against religious orthodoxy,
and at the age of only 24, he was excommunicated by the Jewish authorities. Fortunately for him, he was a loner by
temperament as well as circumstances, and he chose a solitary mode of life in
order to do his work. When he was offered a professorship at Heidelberg
University, he turned it down. He earned his living grinding lenses for
spectacles, microscopes, and telescopes. And it's believed that the daily inhaling
of glass dust from this occupation aggravated the lung ailment that
killed him at the early age of 44. His acknowledged masterpiece, a book
entitled "Ethics", but in fact, dealing with a whole range of philosophy,
came out after his death, but in the same year, 1677. A striking
feature of this book is that it's modeled directly on Euclid's geometry. Starting
from a small number of axioms and primitive terms, it proceeds by
deductive logic to prove a long succession of numbered propositions
which, taken together, lay out the total scheme of reality. It's often held up as
the supreme example of a self-contained metaphysical system, whose object
is to explain everything. In only the year before his death, Spinoza had a series
of meetings with the other philosopher we're going to consider, Leibniz;
one of comparatively few instances of two of the greatest philosophers
actually meeting each other and having face-to-face discussions. As a
personality, Leibniz was a complete contrast to Spinoza: courtier and
diplomat, always traveling, honored in many countries. He was one of the
great polymaths of our culture. It was he who coined the notion of kinetic energy,
he invented calculus not knowing that Newton had already done so and published
it before Newton did -- in fact, it's his notation not Newton's that we use to
this day -- and he was among the great philosophers. Leibniz was born in
Leipzig in 1646, and died in Hannover at the age of 70 in the year 1716.
So brilliant was he as a student that he was offered a professorship at the age
of 21. But like Spinoza, he turned it down, though for the opposite reason,
he wanted to be a man of the world. He spent most of his life at the court of
Hanover in the service of successive Dukes, one of whom became King George the
first of England, founder of the present British Royal Family. Leibniz carried out
almost every task imaginable for a person in such a position. And his
philosophy was, as one might put it, written in his spare time. He wrote an
enormous amount, mostly in the form of quite short papers, but published
scarcely any of it during his life. He also maintained a voluminous
international correspondence which is now of philosophical importance. Among
his outstanding works are: The Monadology, The Discourse on Metaphysics, and a book called, New Essays Concerning
Human Understanding, which is a point-by-point argument with his English near
contemporary, John Locke. To discuss the work of Leibniz and Spinoza, I've
invited someone who is well-known both as a philosopher and as a historian
of philosophy: Antony Quinton, chairman of the British Library, formerly
president of Trinity College Oxford. Anthony Quinton, for clarity's sake,
I think we're gonna have to deal with our two philosophers separately, but before
we start doing that, is there anything that can be said usefully about them jointly?
Well, I think there is. The one you mentioned already, it's a standard piece of tidy,
convenient classification: They're the three rationalists who faced the three
British empiricists, these two opposed triads of thinkers. Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibniz, they do have a community of style and purpose. Descartes defined the terms, laid down
the agenda. But in a sense, the world that Descartes produced by the exercise
of pure reason or the conception of the world that Descartes produced is a
fairly straightforward affair. He does preserve the self in a recognizable form,
the human individual. He, in the natural straightforward terms of his age,
produces God, even if it's not a terribly human sort of God. And he preserves
the material world in a broadly speaking recognizable form, even if deprived of
some of its more vivid and colorful and odoriferous attributes. But the worlds
created by the application of the procedure of rationalism, the one you
mentioned -- you start from self-evident propositions like a person producing
a system of geometry, and then you carry out processes of absolute,
straightforward deduction from these self-evident propositions. What that led
to in the case of Spinoza and Leibniz is something very far removed in both of them
from the ordinary understanding of the world. To some extent, Descartes, by comparison
with them, is in the business of saving the appearances. Spinoza and Leibniz
both say, what the world is really like is very different from what it
appears to the ordinary person to be. But in both cases there is an underlying
reality which philosophy can tell us about even if common observation doesn't?
That's right. And a very odd world it is in each case. I mean, just to state in
very brief terms what it is in each of them. It's so utterly opposed in the two cases,
yet they purport to be following the same procedure, under what one might
call broadly Cartesian guidance. Spinoza's world is a unitary world, there
is only one true thing which is the world as a whole which is both extended and
in some sense mental system of ideas. On the other hand, in Leibniz's case,
the real world consists of an infinity of things that are purely spiritual, and
everything material and space itself are phenomena, appearances, byproducts,
as it were, of the real world which is this infinite array of spiritual centers.
Well now, let's start taking them one by one and let's begin with Spinoza. It
is this enormously elaborated, single system. And it's often difficult to know where
to break into a system when one wants to start expounding it. Where do
you think is the best place to start? Well, there are a number of places you
could begin. I think one had better say just a bit more about Spinoza's method,
because he himself says that this book the "Ethics" is demonstrated in the
geometrical manner. And as you mentioned in your remarks at the beginning, he does
set it out with all the familiar apparatus of geometry: things called axioms and
postulates and definitions, and at the end of each bit of argument, it has
the letters QED, as if it were a straight piece of geometrical reasoning. Funny
thing is, that on the whole, subsequent philosophers haven't taken Spinoza's
reasonings frightfully seriously. People don't think of him as a reservoir
of interesting arguments, whereas they do think that of Leibniz. So perhaps
the method, although it's the most obvious feature -- this very explicit and
conscious geometrical method is the real stylistically obvious feature of Spinoza's
work, it's not what's really important, which is I suppose, one must say, a vision.
And this vision is of the world as an absolutely unitary entity, any
division of which is a mutilation, some sort of misunderstanding.
He saw total reality as being one thing, one substance of which all apparently
different objects and indeed people like ourselves are merely facets,
merely modes, merely aspects. This is a very difficult idea I think for
most people to grasp at a first meeting, can you unpack it a bit for us? Probably the best place to begin
is again -- I promise I won't go on doing this -- with Descartes because
Descartes defined substance. And the idea of substance in philosophy is a
name for what it is that really exists, what the real components of the world are.
Descartes defined substance as that which requires nothing but itself in order to
exist. And in terms of his view of things, the only true substance therefore was
God, because everything that existed apart from God -- and he thought that
consisted of human souls & material objects, including the human body. Everything
apart from God was dependent on God for its existence. So, its substantiality, its
title to being substance was a little defective. God was the only absolute substance.
But from that point onward, he didn't draw any further attention to it.
Now you could see Spinoza as taking that point of Descartes' really seriously, and saying
no, there truly is only one substance; only one thing which, to use a translation
of his own essential phrase for it, is the explanation of itself; only
one thing whose essence explains its existence; whose nature it is to exist.
And his conclusion was that the only thing of which that is true is the totality
of what there is, absolutely everything. And the one vaguely common-
sensical element in Spinoza is to say absolutely everything, the totality,
the one substance is, in fact, nature as well as God. Another argument
that he used for that derived from God's infinite nature, didn't it? If God
was infinite, there isn't anything that isn't God. Or to put the same
argument the other way around: If the world is separate from God,
then God has boundaries, God has limits, God is finite and not infinite.
For God to be infinite, He must be coextensive with everything. That
I think is probably the most plausible a way as you could find of arguing
for Spinoza's position, and it has anticipations in earlier philosophy. He goes
through a good many other arguments to establish his general point, but what
it really amounts to is there's only one thing whose explanation lies
within itself. For everything else, its explanation lies somewhere outside it.
The odd thing is, there's one thing all right, so, on one point of view, it's nature,
the totality of what there is in space. But on the other hand,
it's God. It's something, broadly speaking, mental.
And he says "God or nature" is the true name of the one substance.
Now, there is a big step, isn't there, at least for us, and I'm sure
there must've been for him and his contemporaries too, between seeing the
whole of reality as being a unity, which is one idea. And then seeing that
unity as being divine or as being God. That seems a quite different
step to take in the argument. What were his grounds for doing that? Well,
I suppose it was essentially its/God's perfection. That nature wasn't treated as some
passive byproduct of God's activity. But nature was the totality of what there
was, the self-explanatory thing. And so, to that extent, was a perfect entity,
the most perfect thing there could be. And therefore, deserved the name "God".
The only God he was prepared to countenance was a God that was identified with the
whole array of natural things. So summing up Spinoza's "vision", which was a very good
word you used for it just now: He was saying in effect, that if we call the
totality of everything there is "nature", then we can say, in
our terminology, that there is no supernatural realm; and also
that God cannot be outside nature, God must be coextensive
with the totality of what there is if God is infinite. That seems perfectly
reasonable. Now, this would seem to solve one of the -- indeed the most notoriously
unsolved problem left by Descartes -- which was the problem of how mind and
matter interact with each other. Descartes's work posed that
problem but didn't really provide an acceptable solution to it. Spinoza is now in a position to say, well
the problem doesn't really arise because, in fact, everything is a different aspect of
"the one", the one thing which is everything. Certainly, the two things you mentioned
which constituted a special problem for Descartes, which he had a bold and highly
unsatisfactory solution for: mind and body, these are brought together in an
ingenious fashion by Spinoza, and it could be seen, as it often has been seen
by historians of philosophy, that we should best understand Spinoza as coping
with that problem of Descartes. But I think that's rather a limited conception
of what Spinoza's up to, he's after bigger game than that, a proper
total conception of things. What he says is, in developing this thought
that the one substance is infinite, he says not only does it contain everything and
have nothing lying outside it--which is an idea close to if not identical with the
idea of infinity--but that God or nature, the single substance, the one substance,
the totality of what there is, has an infinity of attributes. Now this sounds a little
puzzling, and it is puzzling because, as it turns out, only two of these
attributes are in any way accessible or intelligible to us, the others have to
be taken on faith that it has the rest of them. But the two we know are the
attributes of thought or consciousness, on the one hand, the attribute
of extension, on the other. What Spinoza maintains is that every
wrinkle in the total fabric of the one substance, these wrinkles he called
"modes", and that is the proper understanding of what we think of as
self-subsistent things: tables, chairs, our wife's family, whatever it might be,
various identifiable items that have clear definite contours. For Spinoza,
they're just temporary contours taken on by the fabric of everything that
there is. Like waves in the sea. Each of these is at once conscious and
extended. And so the phases or aspects or wrinkles as I called them of reality
are at one and the same time have these two aspects: a mental aspect
and a physical aspect. Therefore, there isn't a question of two
utterly separated things happening to keep in some cases, in time with one
another, to chime in with one another. They are one of the same thing viewed
from two directions. Now, we both made much of the fact that Spinoza presents
his philosophy as if it were Euclidean geometry or on the lines of Euclidean
geometry. Now with a system that is set out deductively in which everything
follows from everything else, there simply isn't any room for free will,
is there? What was Spinoza's attitude to the whole free will question
or the whole free will problem? Well, I think that can be put very
clearly in a couple of sentences to start with. What he does maintain is that
what he would probably call the everyday, vulgar, commonsensical notion of freedom,
that is to say, the idea that the human individual can sometimes act as a
spontaneous uncaused cause of things, the freedom of pure spontaneity,
this he says is impossible; it's simply an illusion that's engendered by our not
knowing what the causes of our actions are. But on the other hand---this is the other
sentence--Spinoza says there is such a thing as human servitude or bondage. And that consists in being induced to
act by some causes rather than others. There are some causes--we can call them
generally speaking, the passive emotions, things like hatred and anger and so
forth, generated in us by the frustrating influence of the world outside us, the
parts of the world I'd better to say that are outside us. And he also believes that
we have active emotions which are those generated by an understanding of our
circumstances in the world, a knowledge of what's going on. And the greater our
activities are caused by active emotions and the less by passive emotions, the less in
bondage we are because we're more ourselves. I think he was probably the
first person in European thought to introduce this very important idea which,
in a quite different form, is made much of a great deal later by Freud and by
psychoanalysis, that discovering what the hidden sources of your actions
and emotions are will be in a sense liberating; it will make you happier even if
it doesn't literally increase your freedom. I think you're right. I mean, you could
see Spinoza's attitude to man's position in the world as a Stoic one, the
idea that the world around us is not particularly interested in us, therefore
we must diminish its power to make us suffer by controlling the
emotions it excites in us. That's a Stoic idea. But you're quite
right in saying there's something more in Spinoza because it's not the idea, by a
terrific effort, repressing or overcoming these sad, unfortunate, passive emotions;
it's by the exercise of the mind, gaining an understanding of the world which
just makes these emotions peter out or fade away and their place come to be
occupied by the active emotions; the most elevated of which as he described it is
what he calls the intellectual love of God, which is a rather mysterious business;
it's the emotion that attends metaphysical understanding, a total
comprehensive understanding of the world. Don't you think there's something
paradoxical about the fact that he's commonly thought of as a religious or a
quasi-religious thinker, in view of the fact that he doesn't believe in free will, he doesn't believe in the immorality
of the soul because he doesn't believe that anything is permanently
separate from anything else, he doesn't even believe in the existence
of a personal God because he thinks that the divinity is identical with nature...
Is it right to think of him as a pantheist? Well I think it's right to think of him
as a pantheist, but to go back to what you said before, to say that
isn't a deny that he's religious. The thing is, there's a very considerable
correspondence between many of his views and many of the views of the roughly
contemporary British philosopher Hobbes. But Thomas Hobbes was a man of, in
some ways, indestructible cheeriness, but who'd thought that the universe was
a pretty gloomy setup, and was, in fact, despite some references to God, I think
fairly clearly describable in a literal way as an atheist. Spinoza, on the
other hand, his attitudes are religious; it's one of awe and respect for
the universe at large. The thing is, in our Christian civilization, we've
laid down certain requirements on the religious attitude which are not
universally applicable. In other words, it's parochial of us to deny that
Spinoza is a genuinely religious person because the attitudes which in our
cultural background are normally adopted towards a personal, interested God,
are in his case, adopted towards the whole scheme of things. He's religious
if you like in the way perhaps Wordsworth is religious. One rather dramatic way he
had of putting his identification of God with nature which appeals to me
very much, is this: He once said that it's quite right and proper that
an individual should love God, but it's absurd that he
should want God to love him. It's as if a man were to love nature,
and expect nature to love him back. That's quite right. There's plenty of parallel
for this kind of view of man's place in the universe in the more elevated and
sophisticated types of Buddhism. But I think on reflection one has to
admit that these are in their total place in the economy of human life, these
attitudes are genuinely religious attitudes even if they are directed towards
objects which are not the familiar objects of religious attitudes in our culture. Do you think that Spinoza was in any
important degree influenced in all this by his Jewish background? Well I would've thought so because -- just to
make two very simple points or perhaps three, to take up your big Kantian trinity
of God, freedom, and immortality -- The Jewish God is personal, but on the whole, immortality is not very
emphatically central to Jewish religion. And freedom, well, perhaps there's
freedom, but in the general domain of the ethical or the ethical relationship to God,
the Jewish religion doesn't have a place for petitionary prayer, for asking God to
do things for you. The Jewish view is one of grateful acceptance of what God
offers, one's not always seeking favors from God as the Christian is; one
accepts what God has to give one with such tolerance and submission as one can
bring to bear. And that is a very Spinozist point of view. Well, as you said
earlier, I think the thing for us to do with Spinoza isn't to attempt to
recapitulate the argument but to convey the vision, and I think you've done that
very well. I think we should now move to a discussion of our second philosopher,
Leibniz, who also had a great big interlocking metaphysical system, except
that in his case, he never put it forward in one single work, but it came out in
bits here and there in different papers, letters, arguments, discussions, and
so on; so that one has to, as it were, put it together for oneself. Where do you
think the best place to start with Leibniz is in trying to expound his system? Well, it's probably the case that,
were one writing a very serious professional treatise on Leibniz,
one would start with certain logical doctrines he has. But I think for the
comprehension of what he's up to in fairly short order, the place one
has to start is the idea of the "Monad", his notion of substance. And of course, as I
mentioned earlier, this is utterly opposed to Spinoza's, because the monad is
something tiny. It's unextended in fact. There will be monads of all sort--yes, I
think you must give some kind of general definition of what a monad is. Well, a
monad is Leibniz's word for substance, a single unit; it has a number of properties.
There's an argument at the beginning of Leibniz's Monadology which is, in fact,
not a very sophisticated argument for as clever a man as Leibniz. He says
whatever is complex is made up of what's simple, and the simple components of what's
complex are the real constituents of the world and the complex are just a byproduct
of the aggregation of these simples. But whatever occupies space is extended is
complex. Therefore, the ultimate components of the world as non-extended are
non-material, because not extended in space. Therefore, the real world is
composed of an infinity of unextended, metaphysical points. And each of these,
because non-material -- here he just relies crudely on Descartes -- is therefore
spiritual. Ergo, the world consists of an infinity of point-like spiritual items,
mental items or as people sometimes say he himself at times, "souls"; all the way
from the most important of them, the crucial one, God, down through the human
soul--which is the particular monad where we get the idea of substance from
in the first place--down to the ultimate constituents of what we conceive
confusedly as matter. I think this is such a lot for people to take in at once
that I'd like to go over the main points of it again. Leibniz is saying that
everything that's complex must be analyzable into simpler elements. If
the simpler elements are still complex then they must be further analyzable.
And therefore, it must be the case that sooner or later you come to simple,
not further analyzable constituents of matter or the world or the
universe or whatever it might be. Now, these simple constituents can't be
material, because the very definition of matter is that it's something extended,
and extension is always sub-divisible. So if they're not further subdivisible,
they can't be extended, and if they're not extended, they can't be matter.
So the ultimate constituents of reality must, he thinks, be something
immaterial and not occupying space. I suspect that it's only our way
of putting it up to this point in the discussion that makes it sound as weird
as it does because, after all, one of the most influential doctrines of 20th century
physics is that energy is the ultimate constituent of the universe, and that all
matter is ultimately constituted by energy. Now, it seems to me, that Leibniz
was groping towards, in the vocabulary of his day, something very close
to that; that he was trying to say that all matter is ultimately made up of
centers of activity which are not matter. And I think in the 17th century, if
you were trying to talk about centers of activity which are not matter, the only
vocabulary available to people was the vocabulary of 'minds', 'souls', some
thing of that kind. Do you think I'm falling over backwards to save him? No, not at all. I think that Leibniz is in
many striking ways a very modern thinker. I mean, when you read him, it's a bit
like reading the early Bertrand Russell or Frege or the young Wittgenstein or something.
And one of the strikingly modern doctrines, which I think he was the first person to
formulate clearly, and which certainly plays a very powerful role in
philosophy to this day, is the idea all meaningful statements must be one
of two kinds: that a statement can either be true in the way that a definition is true;
that's to say, that if you say something like: "All bachelors are unmarried", you
don't have to look, you don't have to carry out a survey of the bachelors
in society to see if that's true or not, you know it must be true by virtue of the
meaning of the terms; so all you have to examine outside the statement itself is
the rules governing the use of the terms in the statement. But there's another
kind of statement like, for example, "There's a monkey in the next room". To find
out that may be true or may be false, it can be either, unlike the statement "All
bachelors are unmarried", and the only way you can find out whether it's true
or false is to go and have a look. In other words, there are truths that must be true
because of the nature of the terms involved, there are other truths which are
or are not true by virtue of the way things are in the world, and therefore
that can only be established by experience; and Leibniz was, I think I'm
right in saying, the first person thoroughly clearly to expound that dichotomy,
is that not so? That's perfectly correct. You mentioned earlier that Locke was
a near contemporary, there's a sort of adumbration of it in Locke, but it's a bit
misty. In Leibniz's case, it's absolutely clear and lucid a distinction between what
he calls "truths of reason" on the one hand, which it would be a contradiction to deny,
and "truths of fact" on the other hand, which it's not a contradiction, or not evidently, at any rate, a contradiction
to deny. The trouble is that under the pressure of his metaphysical commitments, the
distinction between the two, as it were, evaporates at the margin. Sometimes
it's put by saying, well, there are finitely analytic statements or finite
truths of reason which in a finite number of steps can be shown to be such that
it would be a contradiction to deny them. But truths of fact turn out to be
infinitely analytic in a certain sense. You can never 100% know.
We can't know--we can't know that they are necessarily
true or that it would be a contradiction to deny them. But in
spite of the qualifications that you draw, it would be difficult to think of any
philosophical doctrine that had been more influential in the last 200 or
300 years. No, you're quite right, because it was in terms of that distinction
-- which he proceeded to muddle in a fruitful and interesting, but I would
suggest, ultimately mistaken way -- that Kant set the main problem of his
own theoretical philosophy, the Critique of Pure Reason. He wanted to say there
was a third type of assertion over and above truths of reason and truths of fact
as described by Leibniz. And for a good deal of the 20th century,
in slightly different terminology, the distinction between those two things
has been absolutely central to philosophy. Some teachers of the subject when I was
younger used to say "whatever else one does to one's pupils, if one gets that
distinction across to them, it's been worthwhile they're studying the subject".
And that, I think, you're quite right in saying was put onto an altogether new level
of clarity and explicitness by Leibniz. Sometimes, because of our some-
what parochial Britishness, we tend to attribute this doctrine to Hume. And it
is in Hume and he probably did work it out for himself on the basis of pointers
from Locke as you say. But the fact is that Leibniz said it half a century
before Hume, and said it very clearly and said it over and over again. Yes, the thing about Hume is it's done
in a kind of drawing room, relaxed, rather imprecise manner, that the nature of the
distinction isn't very precisely worked out. Whereas, in Leibniz's case, a great
deal of energy is expounded on making it quite clear what the logical
foundations of the distinction are. Another thing that Leibniz offers us
is a solution again to the Descartes problem of interaction; a solution to the
problem of how mind and matter interact. His solution is entirely different from
Spinoza's solution, can you tell us what it is? I mean, insofar as it is a solution,
it's rather like preventing oneself losing at chess by kicking the table
over because, in effect, he says that matter is not real, matter is phenomenal.
And so there isn't any "matter" in itself for mind to interact with. Everything that
really exists is, in some degree or other, mental in nature: at the lower end,
very rudimentary; at our end, quite sophisticatedly mental; and of course,
perfect in the case of God, who is a purely mental being, not at all the
extended, all-inclusive physical entity of Spinoza's system. Now, if he
thought that there was in fact nothing sufficiently materially real to interact,
how did he explain apparent causality, because the world does, in fact, seem to
consist of things interacting with each other? Well, let me give you the short answer first
because it's going to provoke, I think, a further question. I mean, the short answer is:
Here are all these, this infinite array of mind-like entities which constitute the
universe. And he says, each of these -- this is actually what he says--each of these
has a perception, very often a very obscure, confused, and limited perception of all
the others; it has a point of view on the whole world. Now, each of these inner
worlds of perception, the picture of the world formed in each of these spiritual
centers--one should make it clear that these include us -- we're included --
is correlated, it's different from but correlated with the perceptions of
others, like a whole lot of photographs taken of a scene from different points
of view--of a wedding group, some of them show the back of the head, some of
them the side, some of them from the front, but all the same persons can be identified. Well likewise, every individual monad
has its own perspective on the world. Now Leibniz's view is that there is in
fact no interaction between monads, there's merely a correspondence between
their contents. Each monad has its own inbuilt history, which develops; one quality
succeeds another in the history of the monad. But part of the content of the monad,
a very principal part of the content of each monad is its awareness of other
monads, and they are correlated by what he calls a "pre-established harmony".
And sometimes he uses this is an argument for the existence of God that there is a pre-
established harmony, perhaps he needs God to show that there is such thing. I mean,
this seems to be attaching overwhelming importance to God in the scheme of
things; that God created everything, ordained the way everything is,
keeps everything going all the time including us. And therefore, there
is no need for a belief in causality. The very idea of causality,
it's a sort of extraneous or superfluous concept
because God is doing it all all the time and there's therefore, as it were,
no way in which things can cause other things by interacting. All is being
caused by God. But in this picture, how can free will come in? Because
Leibniz certainly thought that he believed in free will in some sense. That's quite right.
His arguments for the existence of God are fairly traditional and conventional, they have
some slight new attachments or modernities about them, but, on the whole, they're
very much like those of Descartes and Anselm and others, going back in the
history of the subject. But what he does with the idea of God is very striking. I mean,
he carries the idea of God's omnipotence a very long way and says God creates all
the other monads that constitute the world and equips them with an intrinsic
nature which decides or determines everything they subsequently do. So
everything, as it were, is prepared by God. Leibniz himself doesn't see this theory
of programming, as one might call it, of all the contents of the universe --
which as you rightly say rules out literal causality between one thing and
another which is at best some sort of correspondence or regularity of happenings
in one and another. Leibniz reconciles this as far as you can with free will, and indeed
quite well, because, in a way, what lack of free will is is to be caused to do
things by something outside you, to be externally compelled to do something
against the grain of your own real nature you might say. Well in Leibniz's
picture of the world, every individual's determining force, once we get set on
from God so to speak, is the nature with which God has equipped that individual.
So Leibniz, in a somewhat debating-society way could say, "in no system of the
universe are individuals freer than in mine, every individual is perfectly self-
determining, what more could you ask for freedom?" But let me just make a more
sensible comment on that. I mean, I was throwing myself into the metaphysical
idiom there. The thing is, it seems to me that it's very difficult for rationalism to allow
for anything we'd recognize as human freedom just because of
its intellectual ambition. It's determined to explain everything.
But if everything has an explanation, it looks as if that explanation is going to
be causal; that everything that happens is going to be intelligible as part of some
huge, unitary design or plan. So there's no room for the toss of the coin or choice.
There doesn't seem any room for freedom of the maneuver for the individuals
in a world as conceived by rationalists. Now, you started by comparing Spinoza
and Leibniz with each other, now that we've expounded their views in some individual
length for each, I'd like to come back to a joint question, so to speak. How would
you assess their relative contributions to the history of philosophy? Well they contribute to different strands
in it. Spinoza was much deplored in his own age. The thing questioned is
sincerity in his religious professions was very much questioned his own age.
People talked of the awful atheist Spinoza, frequently free-thinkers like Hume
and Bayle in this. And it wasn't until the Romantic movement in Germany at the end
of the 18th early 19th century, with people like Herder and Goethe that Spinoza came more
of less into his own. And he's always been an object of veneration because
of his personal dignity, this unworldly withdrawal from ambition and self-
affirmation and cutting a dash and all that, that was utterly foreign to Spinoza.
He's a person of great sincerity, his own activities, his own life story is
perfectly in accordance with his philosophic doctrines.
And he's admired therefore. But he doesn't appeal enormously to what
one might call the more technical kind of philosopher, whereas I would
be inclined to say of all the great philosophers of the post-medieval world,
there is none who makes a more immediate appeal to the technical philosophers
at least in the anglo-saxon world in the 20th century because of his unwearying
professionalism, his abstention from any form of rhetoric. It's noticeable that
Bertrand Russell, who wrote some 60 books, only wrote one book about another philosopher
and that was about Leibniz, with whom I think he probably must have identified very
considerably. But one thing that strikes me about both of them, and I'd like to
hear your views about this, is something that is in a sense unmodern about them,
is that they were both profoundly and sophisticatedly versed in mathematics,
and indeed Leibniz was a mathematician of genius and a mathematical
physicist of genius. And yet, both of them had this overwhelming
concern with God and the place of God in the scheme of things. Now, I get the impression that
there's a kind of subtext to a lot of this philosophy; that what they're actually
trying to do is to maintain a conception of the world which can accommodate
the new mathematical physics of Newton, but which has God in it.
Do you think that's true? Yes, I think that's certainly true. I'd just
like to interpose first of all that despite all that mathematical looking apparatus
in Spinoza, he wasn't a mathematician. He had studied a little mathematics, but he's
in a completely different world from Leibniz, who, as you rightly say, is a
major creative figure in the history of mathematics. In Spinoza's case,
it's rather like the apparatus of pastoral poetry. The pastoral poet is not really
an expert on the culture of sheep or lamb rearing or anything like that. At any rate,
ignoring that for the moment, I think you're quite right that there is a common
topic that obsesses them in some way which they both resolved in their very different
ways, which is: finding a place for religion in the world as it had come to seem in the
light of the great post-Galileo and after discoveries about the nature of the
physical world. Descartes' technique was more or less to sell ground, to say well
the material world is unthinking matter and that's where the Galilean rules prevail;
but as well as the material world, there are individual human souls and there's God,
these are purely spiritual entities, both free, both detached from, though in various
ways associated with, the material world. In other words, it was like splitting Germany
into two, a demarcation; that area is given to physics, this area is preserved
for religion. Both Spinoza and Leibniz are understandably dissatisfied with this kind
of Solomonic carve-up of the cosmic baby, and are both anxious to combine
religion and science. Spinoza does it in effect by adopting the world picture
of 17th century science, and then recommending religious attitudes
towards the world so conceived. Leibniz, the other way around, wants to say the
world is in fact much more as religion represents it, a much more spiritual affair
than science realizes. And yet, we can rest the whole of the scientific conception of
phenomena on an essentially religious understanding of the world as the
working out of the purposes of an infinitely intelligent being, namely God.
Thank you very much, Anthony Quinton.
