The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Stein - Leibniz und Spinoza

by John Watson

Leibniz und Spinoza. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Leibnizischen Philosophie. Von Professor Dr. Ludwig Stein. Mit neunzehn Ineditis aus dem Nachtlass von Leibniz. Berlin, Druck und Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1890. — pp. xvi, 362.

In this able and scholarly work the editor of the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie has added to the debt of gratitude which all earnest students of philosophy already owe him. That the philosophy of Leibniz bore an intimate relation to the system of Spinoza was felt, as Professor Stein points out, even in Leibniz's own lifetime; and ever since the controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi as to Lessing's views, the precise relation of the two philosophers has been a subject of dispute. No satisfactory conclusion, our author contends, is possible, so long as the 'speculative-constructive' method is employed: and therefore he has had recourse to the 'literary-historical' method, now generally recognized to be the true one. The completion of Gerhardt's edition of Leibniz's philosophical works, and the discovery, in the Leibniz archive at Hanover, of nineteen new pieces (now published in this volume as an Appendix), have enabled the author not only to show that the association of Leibniz and Spinoza was for a short time of a close and intimate kind, but to throw light upon the mental development of the former in all its stages.

Under Dr. Stein's enlightened guidance we learn that up to the age of twenty-five, Leibniz (b. 1646) was on the whole a follower of Hobbes, or rather he adopted the mechanical conception of Nature in the form set forth by Hobbes, though he never ceased to believe that it was capable of being reconciled with his early religious conceptions. From 1672 to 1695 his attitude towards Descartes is one of doubt. Even in 1670, though he accepts the Cartesian doctrine that the essence of matter consists in extension, he is sceptical of its conception of force; and in 1672 he raises the difficulty that, if matter is pure extension, a body cannot alter in size without losing its reality. But it was only about 1675 that he became profoundly dissatisfied with Cartesianism. In this dissatisfaction he was strengthened by his intercourse in Paris with Tschirnhausen, from whom he learned that Spinoza like himself had revolted from Descartes, and in particular that he denied the Cartesian definition of matter, and did not entirely accept the laws of motion as formulated in the "Principles." From Spinoza, then, might he not get valuable aid in reaching a truer conception of things? Stimulated by this idea, he sought, and after some difficulty obtained, the favor of a personal acquaintance with Spinoza at the Hague, and was even allowed to take away with him a copy of the initial definitions, axioms, and propositions of the Ethica. His interest in the philosophy of Spinoza was, Dr. Stein contends, very great, as his correspondence with Schuller (1677-78) clearly shows. Thus, in a conversation with Eckhardt, in April, 1677, he maintains, with Spinoza, that the existence of God follows from his very nature (Deus est ens, de cujus essentia est existentia) . So, he holds that God esse ens a se, seu quod existentiam suam a se ipso, nempe a sua essentia, habeat (cf. Spinoza's definition of causa sui). He also accepts the view of Spinoza that pain is something positive, not a mere want or privation. On the publication of the Opera Posthuma in January, 1678, Leibniz read through the Ethica in a few days, and, in a letter which Dr. Stein prints in his Appendix, he says that it contains "a number of beautiful and true thoughts," together with certain "paradoxes" which he cannot accept. Of these "paradoxes" those which he most decidedly rejects are the denial of intellect and will to God as natura naturans, and the denial of final causes. We may say in fact that, when Leibniz began to see that Spinoza denied self-consciousness to God, and, therefore, reduced the processes of nature to a blind necessity, the hope he had entertained of finding in him the antidote to Descartes received its deathblow. Thus he was thrown into a state of mental unrest, which lasted till about 1686. Meantime he clung to his early faith that there was a divine purpose in the world, and his main problem was to reconcile this idea with the inviolability of law, which he held with equal tenacity. This explains why his polemic against Descartes is so bitter and unsparing. "I have no hesitation in saying," he writes in a letter to Philippi, 1679, "that the philosophy of Descartes leads to atheism." This harsh judgment he seeks to justify on the ground that Descartes virtually denies that there is any purpose in nature, inasmuch as he affirms that "matter assumes in succession all the forms of which it is capable," — in other words, is under the dominion of a blind necessity. Such a view, he says, necessarily leads to the denial of intelligence and will in God, and hence Spinoza is simply Descartes developed to his logical consequences.

In this period of search Leibniz seemed to find in Plato what he had in vain sought for in Spinoza. He repeatedly quotes the well-known passage of the Phædo, in which Socrates is made to say that only in the changeless idea of the 'good' can the ultimate explanation of the world be found. At the same time he was seeking, from the other side, to deepen the conception of nature. Thus, in his De vero methodo philosophiæ et theologæ (1680), he maintains that all bodies are endowed with force, as well as extension, though he has not yet reached his conception of the individuality of substance. Professor Stein finds in Plato's view of the 'ideas ' as the only active causes of things (see the Phædo) the suggestion of this advance towards the monadology. Still, as he points out, it would be a mistake to think of Leibniz as merely borrowing from Plato, the truth being that he simply found in Plato that which helped him to answer his own problem. Similar was his relation to Aristotle, or rather to his scholastic followers, especially Aquinas. In the essay just mentioned he speaks highly of the scholastics, and later he commends the Aristotelian conception of 'entelechies' or 'substantial forms'; indeed, even when in 1686 he published, in the Discours de Métaphysique, the first draft of his own theory, it is under the name of 'substantial forms' that the doctrine of the 'monads' appears.

To appreciate the conscientious industry and the acumen displayed by Professor Stein in tracing the gradual growth of the various parts of Leibniz's philosophy until they coalesced in an organic system, his book must itself be read. The reader will there find, among other things, an interesting discussion of the origin of the term 'monad,' and a concluding chapter in which, after the birth of his own philosophy, Leibniz is seen, at least in public, as the uncompromising foe of Spinoza.

Nothing but commendation can be bestowed upon such a work as this. I believe the conclusions reached by the author, in the prosecution of his 'literary-historical' method, to be on the whole sound. But, perhaps, it may not be superfluous to point out a danger which is apt to beset that method. In such hands as Dr. Stein's, speculative insight is combined with patient investigation and judicious inference; in less skilful hands the method he sets up as a rival to the 'speculative-constructive' is apt to result in mere biographical gossip, throwing no real light upon the history of philosophy. As the late Professor Green remarked, "it is possible for knowledge about philosophers to flourish inversely as the knowledge of philosophy."^[1] And even at the best, as it seems to me, the 'historical' method can only prepare the way for a 'speculative' — which need not be a 'speculative-constructive' — method. When we have learned that Leibniz passed through a Hobbes-stage, a Cartesian-stage, a Spinoza-stage, and that in a certain year he was occupied mainly with a certain philosopher, we have still to ask what was the value and the relation to one another of the stages through which he passed, and of the ideas so occupying him. The history of the struggles of the individual thinker towards a new conception of things may throw much light upon the application of ideas, if the historian is himself a man of speculative insight, but not otherwise; and, in any case, occupation with biographical details is apt to distract attention from the evolution of thought, which after all is the main thing in these remarks. I have had no desire to minimize the value of such an investigation as Dr. Stein has conducted with characteristic skill and judgment, but only to enter a caveat against the abuse of his historical method, and the undue importance which some are apt to attach to it.

John Watson.

 

1. Green's Hume, I, 4.