LEIBNIZ IN PRICELESS SELECTIONS

 

Leibniz was a genius philosopher, and his thoughts expressed in aphoristic form are priceless for any such collection. As always, I am not motivated by quoting for quote sake. In my personal selection of favorites, I am omitting many of his most famous, signature quotes, to focus on those only, to which I can relate in the explicitly idiosyncratic manner, to which my accompanying comments provide all necessary corroboration. So, here they are, his quotes and my comments.---

---“To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.” (The Elements of True Piety; circa 1677.)

This thought of a younger Leibniz rings a very powerful bell in my memory. This is what my mother used to tell me, in a slightly different way, as I reveal in my posted entry Proof Of True Friendship (February 11^th, 2012). There it says that the truest friend is revealed not so much in need as in his or her ability to be happy upon your happiness, as if it were their own. The parallel is clear … I wonder if my mother was somehow paraphrasing Leibniz, or, far more likely, had come up with this wisdom independently, out of her life experience…

---“Omne possibile exigit existere.” (“Everything that is possible demands to exist.”) (De veritatibus primis; 1686.)

Here’s one of the most profound ideas formulated on behalf of philosophy and science... I am jokingly alluding here to Kant’s famous boast, but otherwise, I am quite serious. The only catch is not to decide this matter ex post facto (It exists, ergo it was possible), but to ideate a possibility before the actual existence is discovered… The more I think about it, the more I realize how breathtaking this Leibniz thought truly is!

---“It is necessary to act conformably to the presumptive will of God, in so far as we are able to judge of it, trying with all our might to contribute to the general welfare and particularly to the ornamentation and the perfection of that which touches us, or of that which is nigh and, so to speak, at our hand.” (Discours de Metaphysique; 1686.)

Need I spell it out that Leibniz wrote this long before Kant would come up with his Categorical Imperative, and a very similar discourse on the principles of moral behavior?

--“One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from the dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.”

(Of the Division of the Sciences, Book 4, Chapter 21; written in 1704; published in 1765).

Definitions, definitions, definitions! Haven’t we been here before? But Leibniz was here long before us. Oh, yes, our friend Epictetus had been near the same place long before Leibniz, but not in such a sophisticated manner, tying science with linguistics, and words with scientific terms…

---“Now this supreme wisdom, united to goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best. For, as a lesser evil is a kind of good, even so a lesser good is a kind of evil, once it stands in the way of a greater good; and it would be something to correct in the actions of God if it were possible to the better. As in mathematics, when there is no maximum nor minimum, in short, nothing distinguished, everything is done equally, or when that is not, nothing at all is done: so it may be said likewise in respect of perfect wisdom, which is no less orderly than mathematics, that if there were not the best (optimum) among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any.” (Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God and Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil; 1710.)

I invite the reader already familiar with my treatment of evil as a product of the freedom of choice to make a comparison here with Leibniz’ proposition. In matters of choice, “a lesser evil” indicates a better choice, and therefore, a good thing, when compared to the “greater evil” of the wrong choice, which is a bad thing. On the other hand, “a lesser good” does indeed turn itself into a bad thing, even if it is intrinsically good, if we compare it to the “greater good,” which must be the one and only good thing, in matters of choice. This consideration, so important to our thinking about the freedom of choice, organically brings Leibniz to his most famous idea of our world being “the best of all possible worlds” on the grounds of the logical conclusion that “the second best” is a bad thing…

---“Music is the pleasure which the human mind experiences from counting, without being aware that it is counting.” (from Leibniz’ Letter to Christian Goldbach, of April 17, 1712.)

It is absolutely delightful to find this comparison of music to mathematics although it becomes less original in the shadow of a similar effort made by Leibniz’ senior partner Pythagoras. Yet, it was not Pythagoras but Leibniz whom Schopenhauer would later choose to paraphrase in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: Book I, as: “Musica est exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi.” (“Music is a hidden metaphysical exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is philosophizing.”)

“There are also two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible: truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary, reason can be found by analysis, resolving it into more simple ideas and truths, until we come to those which are primary.” (Monadologie; 1714.)

This passage is very close to my two related lines of thinking on the question of truth. On the one hand, my skepticism about the” truth of fact” finds a genius champion in Leibniz, whom in the future I can always be calling as an expert witness on this subject. On the other hand, my concept of “truth of creation” holds well here, considering that the only “lie” to be concerned about there, would be an internal contradiction. Thus, my verification of truth in this instance, would be a thorough analysis and careful reasoning which turns the truth of this nature into a necessity, in the absence of self-contradictions, and its opposite within the framework of the same “fiction,” a total impossibility, as the said opposite immediately exposes itself as an internal contradiction, and therefore a lie.

---“These principles have given me a way of explaining naturally the union or rather the mutual conformity of the soul and the organic body. The soul follows its own laws and the body likewise follows its own laws; and they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.” (Monadologie; 1714.)

Remember Nietzsche’s splendid observation to the effect that we are by no means masters of our thoughts, as they come and go on their own will, not ours. Curiously, the Leibniz passage above addresses the same question (“the soul follows its own laws and the body likewise follows its own laws”), but he resolves this paradox immediately by stressing that they are not totally disattached, which would have been an absurdity, but that “they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.”

---“A great doctor kills more people than a great general.” (Alas, I have not been able, so far, to ascertain the Leibniz work, from which this wonderful quote has been sprung.)

Doctor James Tyler Kent, my frequently mentioned homoeopathic authority, and a great philosophizer too, candidly admits that before a physician reaches the end of his practice, he sends a lot of patients to the other world, as a direct result of his mistakes, but the difference between an average doctor and a great doctor is that the latter always learns a lot from each of his lethal mistakes, and thus gains a priceless experience that he starts using in much more rewarding instances of spectacular patient healing.

 

 

PROBABILITIES OF EXISTENCE

 

There is a connection of sorts between Leibniz’s published and esoteric philosophies. We shall enter it via his famous doctrine of many possible worlds. A world is possible if it does not contradict the laws of logic. In my understanding, any world can start with any kind of premise, or hypothesis, even the most fantastic one, as long as the logic of the development of this hypothesis is flawless, in which case, it is as perfectly viable as any other one. (In other words, which I have been using, as long as the creation is true within its properly defined boundaries.)

Now, according to Leibniz, an infinite number of possibilities of world creation existed to God, but, being good, He could only be satisfied with the creation of the best of all possible worlds, determined in this case by the greatest excess of good over evil within it. The existence of evil as such is necessitated within God’s creation by the presence within it of the goodness of free will, which, being a greater good than the fact of the collateral evil, wins over the alternative. In other words, a world with both free will and evil within it (the former cannot logically exist without the latter) is better than a world without evil, and, consequently, without freedom of the will. (The preceding discussion shows how much affinity my own thinking on this subject has with Leibniz’s. It is the more regrettable, for this reason, that Leibniz was a mean, unpleasant man, in which aspect of character we are worlds apart with him.)

And now comes the most philosophically interesting part of Leibniz’s philosophy, even more valuable for the fact that, looking back, it is unique to him in its complex wholeness. Rather than retelling it in my own words, which I may eventually end up doing, let me, once again, quote Bertrand Russell on it:

“There is… a point, which is very curious. At most times, Leibniz represents the Creation as a free act of God, requiring the exercise of His Will. According to this doctrine, the determination of what actually exists is not effected by observation, but must proceed by way of God’s Goodness. Apart from God’s Goodness, which leads him to create the best possible world, there is no a priori reason why one thing should exist, rather than another…

But… there is a quite different theory as to why some things exist and others, equally possible, do not. According to this view (laid out in Leibniz’s unpublished papers) , everything that does not exist struggles to exist, but not all possibles can exist, because they are not all ‘compossible.’ It may be possible for A or B to exist on their own but not together in which case A and B are not compossible. In other words, two or more things are only compossible when it is possible for all of them to exist together. Leibniz seems to have imagined a sort of war in the Limbo inhabited by essences all trying to exist; in this war, groups of compossibles combine, and the largest group of compossibles wins… Leibniz even uses this conception as a way of defining existence: “The existent may be defined as that which is compatible with more things than is anything incompatible with itself… The existent is the being which is compatible with the most things.”

In this account there is no mention of God, and apparently no act of creation. Nor is there need of anything but pure logic for determining what exists. The question whether A and B are compossible is for Leibniz a logical question: does the existence of both A and B involve a contradiction? It follows that in theory logic can decide what group of compossibles is the largest, and this group consequently will exist.

This is a breathtaking philosophical exercise on Leibniz’s part squarely putting him in a place of the highest honor among the pre-Socratics. Compare this to Empedocles’ ontology, for instance! Alas, poor Nietzsche missed the discovery and publication of Leibniz’s papers by a few decades; otherwise, he would have been eager to communicate with him, among those selected underworld shadows, either raising their number to nine, or at somebody else’s expense. I am particularly impressed by Leibniz’s leap off the beaten track, by his return to the noble pre-Socratic origins of philosophy, as well as grateful to him for providing me with ample intellectual fodder to further develop my truth-of-creation theory. In Leibniz’s bold and unorthodox cosmogony I see a clash of what I perceive as incompatible creations, which must coexist in separateness, as the basic ontological law of coexistence, but, somehow, got themselves embroiled in an internecine war, by unlawfully intruding into each other’s sovereign territory… What a supreme intellectual feast! Thank you, Leibniz!

 

THE LEIBNIZ COMET

Having in the previous entry agonized over the fact that our dear Leibniz was not a nice man by any stretch of imagination, I still have this entry left to give him his due as one of the greatest geniuses of all time. In the words of the English essayist Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), which have inspired the title of this entry: “There are such people as Leibnizes on this earth, and their office seems not to be that of planets to revolve within the limits of one system, but that of comets: to connect different systems together.” Having studied a long time ago Frege’s mathematical logic, this becomes a personal thing for me to try to reach into the depths of Leibniz’s genius (as deep as I can), to find out how this great intellect was capable of overturning the millennia of Aristotelian unassailable logic (not that the latter was to be proven faulty in any measurable way, but by the same token as Lobachevsky, and, perhaps, even Gauss before him, would be much later capable of reaching beyond the Euclidian flat-earth truth) and produce the science of mathematical logic, which, most ironically, was never published in his lifetime, but was kept virtually under lock and key until the twentieth century when, to everybody’s great astonishment, it was accidentally discovered. But this thrilling incursion into Leibniz’s logic will take place much later, if at all, under the customary condition, by now, that I shall have the luxury of time in the future to engage myself in this adventure.

Leibniz’s philosophy (of the published kind) is most famous for the eerie fantastic concept of “windowless monads.” Here again we are turning to our Bertrand Russell to provide us with the stock summary (I have compressed and rearranged this summary, to the point that it no longer looks like his quotation):

Like Dèscartes and Spinoza, Leibniz based his philosophy on the notion of substance, but he differed from them radically as regards the relation of mind and matter and the number of substances. Dèscartes allowed three substances: God, mind, and matter; Spinoza admitted God alone. In Dèscartes’ view extension is the essence of matter; for Spinoza both extension and matter are attributes of God. Leibniz held that extension cannot be an attribute of a substance. He believed in an infinite number of substances, called monads. Each can be roughly likened to a physical point, but in fact each monad is a soul. This follows naturally from the rejection of extension, leaving thought as the only remaining possible essential attribute. Thus, Leibniz is led to deny the reality of matter, and to substitute an infinite family of souls… The Cartesian doctrine that substances cannot interact was retained by Leibniz. No two monads, he declared, can ever have any causal relation to each other. “Monads are windowless,” in his words. The semblance of interaction is produced by a “pre-established harmony” between the changes in one monad and another. This parallels the concept of two clocks which strike time simultaneously not because of their interaction, but because of their accuracy in keeping the correct time.

Monads form a hierarchy and thus in the human body, which consists of monads entirely, there is one that is dominant, which is what is called the soul of the person to whom the body belongs.

Of the infinite number of monads, no two are exactly alike. (This is one of his famous principles called the “identity of indiscernibles,” also known as Leibniz’s Law.)

Talking about Leibniz’s fundamental philosophical Principles, here they are:

Identity. If a proposition is true, then its negation is false, and vice versa.

Identity of indiscernibles. Two things are identical if and only if they share the same properties.

Sufficient reason. There must be a sufficient reason often known only to God for anything to exist, for any event to occur, for any truth to obtain.

Pre-established harmony. The appropriate nature of each substance brings it about that what happens to one, corresponds to what happens to the others, without, however, their acting upon one another directly. (Discourse on Metaphysics, XIV) A dropped glass shatters because it knows it has hit the ground, and not because the impact with the ground compels the glass to split.

Continuity. Natura non saltum facit. A mathematical analog to this principle would proceed as follows. If a function describes a transformation of something to which continuity applies, then its domain and range are both dense sets.

Optimism. God assuredly always chooses the best.

Plenitude. He believed that the best of all possible worlds actualizes every genuine possibility, and argued, in Théodicée, that this best of all possible worlds would contain all possibilities, with our finite experience of eternity giving no reason to dispute nature’s perfection.

A much more questionable endeavor on Leibniz’s part was to finalize the corpus of metaphysical proofs of God’s existence. (The reader knows of my objection, as a matter of principle, to any effort to prove matters of faith, under the slogan: if the proof were available, who would need the faith?) Still, Leibniz made this effort obviously in vain, but for us it has the indisputable value of giving us these grounds for arguing with him. His arguments are (following Russell’s order):

(1) the ontological argument; (2) the cosmological argument; (3) the argument from the eternal truths; (4) the argument from the pre-established harmony, which may be generalized into the argument from design, or the physico-theological argument, as Kant calls it.

The ontological argument is terribly arcane, and at the end of a successful demonstration the proof is most probably achieved through the listeners complete bafflement and resignation to the prover, rather than by a genuinely successful proof of anything whatsoever. The argument strives to prove the existence of God by virtue of the existence of the idea of God. Its silliness becomes instantly exposed when we consider any of the universally known purely fictitious characters, like, say, Zeus of the Greeks, or Goethe’s Mephistopheles. Many of the heroes of literary fiction and folklore have very elaborate ideas spun around their existence but that kind of existence by virtue of an idea by no means proves their existence in reality. Leibniz sees the basic flaw of the ontological argument, but instead of rejecting it altogether, he decides to supplement it by formally suggesting that God is the ideal sum of all perfections, and existence being among those necessary perfections, it means that God exists. The way Leibniz goes about it, reminds me of Zeno the Trickster and his signature “proofs” of the realistically impossible, yet mathematically comprehensible, and of course the value of Leibniz’s ontology of God is about the same as Zeno’s argument (actually, quite valuable for science!) that Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise.

The cosmological argument is once again based on a shaky foundation. Everything has a cause for being, but for some reason it is believed that the backtrack of the causal chain must be finite, and thus there has to be the First Cause, itself uncaused, of everything, and that First Cause must be God. This argument reminds me of the backtracking puzzle of the chicken and the egg. In this latter case we are resigned to the fact that in this case the first cause (either the chicken or the egg) does not exist, but still we allow the First Cause of everything being possible, and call it God. Leibniz obviously tweaks this argument, to make it more plausible, and he succeeds in formulating a challenging logical puzzle, which however does not result in solving the problem of the objective existence of God.

The other two arguments follow the same pattern. Leibniz sees the deficiencies of the arguers before him, and he considerably improves on each argument in so far as its logical sophistication is concerned, but he obviously fails to perfect what is impossible to prove to make it possible.

All of these arguments are of interest to me in terms of their formal logic, but not in terms of their pragmatic value in proving what they set out to prove. In the future I may probably write a lengthy analysis of this whole effort, say, in the Acorn section. But for now, I will only refer the curious reader to Russell’s chapter on Leibniz, where he gives his own take on Leibniz’s vanity project. In the meantime, we are now about to move on from here.

And next we are coming to the most interesting part of Leibniz’s philosophy: the unpublished lot, and to do it justice, we might just as well start a new entry, which is the one that now follows, to be posted tomorrow.

DETESTABLE GENIUS

This entry opens the fairly short series on Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), one of the greatest giants of mathematics, science, and philosophy who ever lived. Having co-invented the infinitesimal calculus (his work was done independently from Newton’s), he was the sole inventor of mathematical logic, but, having left it unpublished, it took some two hundred years after his death to have it “officially” reinvented. Also, having generated the concept of the binary system, and a score of other revolutionary ideas, he is seen as a precursor of modern cybernetics, computer science, and even quantum mechanics, among many-many other things. But as a philosopher he was no less groundbreaking, although his most spectacular philosophical ideas remained unpublished until the twentieth century.

***

In his philosophical play Mozart and Saglieri, the great Pushkin argues that “genius and evil are two things incompatible,” and it is up to us to agree or disagree with him, provided only that we understand Pushkin’s point. He means, of course, a very special kind of genius, never to be confused with the supervillains on the Manichean scale, such as Ahriman, Voldemort, or Professor Moriarti. Nor does he have in mind the great statesmen of history: Alexander, Genghis Khan, Peter the Great (and later Stalin), and others, all of whom must have appeared as the consummate evil-doers to their numberless victims, but who can also be seen in a much more appreciative light, through the macroscopic lens of world history.

The kind of genius Pushkin has in mind is spelled out in the name Mozart. It is the wholesome, beneficent type of genius, who inspires admiration in the hearts and minds of humanity, and a pride to be a part of the civilization which had given him birth. It is that kind of genius, which seems totally incompatible not only with any manifestation of evil, but even with regular impropriety. We want to love such genius, not to hate him, not even to dislike him, for that matter.

It is therefore extremely unfortunate and objectively deplorable (meaning, not even aimed at the particular offender, but at the fact itself that we should be offended by his offense) when a benefactor of humanity, a great genius, whose name is spoken with reverence in professional settings, fails to elicit similar reverence as a person whose biography we were so eager to read, unsuspecting of the dismal disappointment lying in store for us.

Alas, the great Leibniz was of such kind, namely, not a nice man at all. Here is what Bertrand Russell says about him on that account:

“Leibniz was one of the supreme intellects of all time, but as a human being he was not admirable. He had, it is true, the virtues that one would wish to find mentioned in a testimonial to a prospective employee: he was industrious, frugal, temperate, and financially honest. But he was completely destitute of those higher philosophic virtues that are so notable in Spinoza. His best thought was not such as would win popularity, and he left his records of it unpublished in his desk. What he published was designed to win approbations of princes and princesses. The consequence is that there are two systems of philosophy, representing him: one, which he proclaimed, was optimistic, orthodox, fantastic, and shallow; the other, that has been slowly unearthed from his manuscripts by fairly recent editors, was profound, coherent, largely Spinozistic, and amazingly logical. It was the popular Leibniz who invented the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds; it was Leibniz whom Voltaire caricatured as Doctor Pangloss. It would be unhistorical to ignore this Leibniz, but the other is of far greater philosophical importance.” (Pausing right here, I am so glad that Russell is giving this proof first of Leibniz’s unadmirability. It is a crime against one’s own genius to keep it under wraps and possibly never to see the light of day, while publishing the “commercial” philosophical fare, apparently with good conscience.)

“…It was in Paris, in 1675-1676, that Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus, in ignorance of Newton’s previous, but unpublished work on the same subject. Leibniz’s work was first published in 1684, Newton’s, in 1687. The consequent dispute as to priority was unfortunate and discreditable to all parties.” (This is not the only such occurrence of petty ugly bickering over works of genius, and each time it looks reprehensible and utterly unworthy of genius. I may want to repeat that being a genius is not only God’s special gift, but also a social and moral obligation to behave accordingly, that is, at the highest ethical level. Unfortunately, this obligation is hardly always honored.)

“Leibniz was somewhat mean about money. When any young lady at the court of Hanover married, he used to give her what he called “a wedding present,” consisting of useful maxims, ending up with the advice not to give up washing now that she had secured a husband.” (Leaving the question of money aside, even if we are to take this last phrase about “washing” figuratively, it does sound like a very mean joke, and it is awfully unpleasant at the least.)

The last important influence on Leibniz’s philosophy was that of Spinoza, whom he visited in 1676. He spent a month in frequent discussions with him, and secured a part of the Ethica in manuscript. But in later years he joined in decrying Spinoza, and minimized his contacts with him, saying that he had met him just once, and that Spinoza had told some good anecdotes about politics.” (Such dishonesty on his part is all the more deplorable that both men were geniuses, and genius must recognize his kind, and grow an affinity to him, which ought to rise beyond all friendships!)

It is not my intention in this entry to trash poor Leibniz, but its outburst must be definitely attributed to the fact that I have admired Leibniz since my school math years (I studied advanced mathematics there, along with other advanced subjects… It was a very good school!). It is therefore still inconceivable to me how an object of my profound admiration could be so mean and ugly, so utterly unworthy of himself!

 

SUB SPECIE SPINOZAE

 

(The title of this entry borrows Nietzsche’s Spinoza pun from his book Antichrist, #17. Like in a number of other instances, this entry is eminently postable on account of my original commentary. The selections of particular quotations, as opposed to others, no less well-known, yet ignored in this entry, are deliberate, and indicative above everything else of my personal preferences.)

***

The following are a few of Spinoza’s aphoristic phrases, primarily found in his magnum opus Ethica.---

“Nature abhors a vacuum.” (Ethica, Part I, Proposition XV, Note.) This is a thought about life and death. Vacuum in this case is nothingness, and nature revolts against nothingness. The natural cycle goes on, of course, but something being natural, like death, does not preclude its being abhorred by the living nature.

“He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.” (Ethica, Part II, Proposition XLII, Proof.) My general appeal Definitions! Definitions! Definitions!, has the question of true and false as its particular. Remembering Epictetus, first learn the meaning of what you are going to say, and only then say it.

“Will and Intellect are one and the same thing.” (Ethica, Part II, Proposition XLIX, Corollary.) I would be in strong disagreement with this, just as much as Schopenhauer would, if we allow an element of irrationality to the Will, and limit the Intellect to rationality only.

“Sadness diminishes or hinders a man’s power of action.” (Ethica, Part III, Proposition XXXVII, Proof.) It is so true that powerful feelings, especially the most humane ones, like compassion, have a paralyzing effect on both our capacities: to act and to think!

“Fear cannot be without hope, nor hope without fear.” (Ethica, Part III, Definition XIII, Explanation.) This is true, of course. A fearless Siegfried has no capacity for hope, whereas all of us who hope are beset with a host of fears, not the least of which is that our hope will be murdered by circumstances beyond our control.

“Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.” (Ethica, Part III, Definition XXIX, Explanation.) Dickens’s Uriah Heep is of course a classic illustration of the thing that Spinoza is writing about. Compare this, although do not confuse it with, my observation that humility is the highest form of arrogance.

“One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e. g. music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.” (Ethica, Part IV, Preface.) This is so very true! A hurricane causing death and destruction in its path, is not an evil in itself, as it can also be good for something. In other words, evil is only a consequence, but not a thing in itself. I have elsewhere described evil as the wrong choice in our exercise of the God-given freedom of choice.

“Avarice, ambition, lust, etc., are nothing but species of madness, although not enumerated among diseases.” (Ethica, Part IV, Proposition XLIV, Note.) I like this, even if this sounds overly declarative. It is quite obvious that greed, covetous desire, and such, are ubiquitous qualities of human nature, but so is disease in the world and all around us. The fact that Spinoza’s examples of madness are so common among men has no proof in itself that they are the norm, rather than an aberration, natural states of man, rather than a disease.

“To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man… Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.” (Ethica, Part IV, Appendix, XVII.) Here is a straightforward advocacy of socialism, just as I espouse the socialist responsibilities of the State. In a future return to this ground theme of mine, I will be well served to quote Spinoza among my appeals to authority.

“Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.” This is a splendid proof of the fact that freedom as such is not possible in the world where all individual things are tightly interconnected.

“Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.” That’s precisely it! There is nothing heroic in one’s incapacity to play the villain. It is only the strength of character, directed toward the good, despite all the temptations of evil, which makes the hero. In other words, there is no hero without claws.

“If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.” Isn’t there an uncanny connection here to Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse?! Indeed, Spinoza clearly says here that the free dwell beyond good and evil. The difference between Spinoza and Nietzsche, though, comes down to Spinoza’s “if,” which obviously implies that men are not free, whereas for Nietzsche, the notion of freedom is heroically projected and taken for granted as the key characteristic that distinguishes the master from the slave, the Übermensch from the Untermensch.

 

SPINOZA'S FREEDOM

Spinoza is a God-loving man, and what makes his philosophy so attractive is that it is filled with optimism. His boundless optimism, in my view, consists in the repudiation of free will, in conjunction with the belief in God’s Absolute Goodness. Free will is, in fact, the one and only source of evil, as it is logically impossible to have a choice between different courses of action, including the opposites, that would be all “good,” so that there would be no ethical preference whatsoever of the right choice over the wrong choice, depending on the course which we may choose to take. In fact, free choice is the choice between good and evil. It is therefore extremely depressing to realize ex post facto that we have made a mistake while exercising our free will, and then yet another mistake and another, eventually screwing up our life beyond redemption. It is for this reason that Christianity has come up with the concept of repentance, and Evangelical Christianity with its source of unconditional optimism, albeit restricted to professing born-again Christians only, which is the notion that any sin, even of the very worst kind, will be washed away by the blood of Jesus in the hereafter.

But philosophically, free will can only be a source of our frustration, and ultimately of indecision, where the circumstances require a prompt, energetic and ethically complex action. Such indecision has no place in the deterministic view of life, where anything which happens has been preordained, and, therefore, hesitation is nothing but procrastination.

Spinoza sees everything in the world as ruled by absolute logical necessity. All events are manifestations of a higher power, over which we have no control. By the same token, as he denies free will in human conduct, he rejects the notion of chance in nature. As Russell summarizes Spinoza’s doctrine, “It is logically impossible that events should be other than they are. This leads to difficulties with regard to sin, which the critics were not slow to point out. One of them observing that, according to Spinoza, everything is decreed by God, and therefore must be good, asks indignantly: “Was it good that Nero should kill his mother? Was it good that Adam ate the apple?” Spinoza answers that what was positive in these acts was good,--- and only what was negative was bad; but negation exists only from the point of view of finite creatures. In God, who alone is real, there is no negation, and therefore the evil in what to us seem sins, does not exist whenever they are viewed as parts of the whole.”

This dismissive view of sin, and the resultant denial of damnation, are completely consistent with Spinoza’s metaphysics. In the previous entry we have referred to the latter as a modification of Dèscartes’, but this is in no way indicative of Spinoza’s acceptance of Dèscartes. Quite the contrary. Using Cartesian metaphysic only as the starting point, Spinoza parts ways with Dèscartes right away, moving instead toward Parmenides and The One. In Dèscartes there are three substances altogether: God, mind, and matter. Mind is defined by the attribute of thought, matter by the attribute of extension. But in Spinoza’s metaphysic there is room for one substance only, which is God. Both thought and extension are attributes of God. ("God is a thing that thinks. He is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of infinite attributes expressing His eternal and infinite essence." [Ethica]). Human souls or particles of matter are not things to Spinoza, but aspects of God. This is where Spinoza’s theology is seen as a quintessential representation of pantheism, if ever there was such a thing at all.

It should come as no surprise now that, to Spinoza, the concept of freedom is nothing but an illusion. When he talks of freedom, which he often does, he uses this term in a patently restrictive sense (for example, “He alone is free who lives with free consent under the guidance of reason,” etc.). On the other hand, talking of freedom in the sense that we might expect, or want to hear, he says that “those men who think that they are free, do not understand the sources of their actions.”

 

In other words, Spinoza’s freedom is man’s capacity to understand that freedom as such does not exist, and to be able to say “yes” rather than “no,” to the events which take place, with the full comprehension of their metaphysical and logical inevitability.

With this apotheosis of Spinoza’s ethical determinism, we are about to end this terribly abbreviated series on Spinoza. It must be remembered that there are considerably developed entries on him scattered throughout this book, so that my decision to make this series short has been made merely in order to avoid unnecessary repetition. Yet, there is one more thing left before we part with him in this section, which happen to be, predictably, his dicta. This is going to be the subject of my last Spinoza entry, to be posted tomorrow.

THE PUREST PHILOSOPHER

[Spinoza (1634-1677) deserves a lot of personal attention on several fronts, which in no way can fit into one entry or inside a single section. A very large separate entry Ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch all devoted to him, already exists in the Tikkun Olam section, and to it I am now eagerly directing my reader for reference. The epithet “purest philosopher” was applied to Spinoza by Nietzsche.]

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Baruch/Benedict Spinoza is universally considered among the greatest philosophers of the Western world. Not only that, but he also appears to be among the best-loved personalities in history. Let us therefore start the roster of his character references providers with our much-beloved source Bertrand Russell: “Spinoza is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.” In another place, Russell observes: “We may, again, take philosophy aesthetically, as probably most of us take Spinoza.” (From his 1899 essay Seems, Madam? Nay, It Is.)

As I had a chance to observe elsewhere, Nietzsche goes out of his way in his praise for Spinoza calling him a “learned genius” (in Menschliches 157), or making the following comment in Menschliches 475, which I am quoting in a broader context in the entry Nietzsche And The Jews: I’d like to know how much one must excuse in the overall accounting of a people (the Jews), to whom we owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world.

In fact, Nietzsche’s lavish tribute to Spinoza can be called exorbitant, as the latter is most unusually being included into a number of elite “sets of greatness,” which, when reduced to a common denominator, leave a peculiar club, more exclusive than any other club on earth:

From Nietzsche’s 1879 Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche (408). The Journey To Hades: I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, to speak with a few of the dead. Four pairs did not deny themselves to my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. On these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me. May the living forgive me, if occasionally they appear to me as shades, while those men seem so alive to me. In another note, Nietzsche calls four names: My ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe. In the cross-section of these two sets we are now left with just Goethe and Spinoza, but after Spinoza receives an honorable mention in the company of his fellow philosophers per se, this leaves Spinoza by himself in the most exclusive and infinitely elite club of one! And there are, indeed, an unusually high number of usually positive references to Spinoza throughout Nietzsches Werke, to mention just this one, as an illustration: For, this overestimation of, and predilection for, pity is something new: hitherto philosophers have been at one as to the worthlessness of pity. I name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant--- four spirits, as different from one another as possible, but united in one thing: in their low estimation of pity. (Preface to Genealogie [#5]). Knowing, as we do, that Nietzsche was himself an anti-pity Crusader, he ought to appreciate the low estimation of pity in any philosopher, and the choice of these four, as exemplifying such an attitude, is a mark of their particularly high status, in his eyes.

Apparently, Spinoza’s genius was not explicitly recognized either in his time or in the century following his death. Quoting Bertrand Russell again, “He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him. Christians abhorred him equally; although his philosophy is dominated by the Idea of God, the Orthodox accused him of atheism. Leibniz, who owed so much to him, concealed his debt, and carefully abstained from saying a word in his praise.”

In a curious historical “tit-for-tat” (I am alluding to the famous rediscovery of the German Bach by the Jew Mendelssohn-Bartholdy), Spinoza’s genius was first rediscovered for posterity by the Germans Lessing and Goethe (as well as by the Englishman Coleridge, whose admiration for Spinoza saved his reputation in the English-speaking world from David Hume’s stigma, the latter branding Spinoza’s philosophy “an hideous hypothesis.”)

Spinoza’s main philosophical value lies in his ethics. He was also writing on the subject of politics, but his political theory was derivative from Hobbes, with whom he agrees on many things, but disagrees on which form of government is the best, preferring democracy. His psychology is also reminiscent of Hobbes, while his metaphysic is a modification of Dèscartes. (See Bertrand Russell on this!) But his ethic is original, and it is his ethics, going hand in hand with theology, which is by far of the greatest interest to us in this series and elsewhere.