He was small, awkward, ungainly, somewhat ugly and always wore one wig sillier than another. He was also called the "last Universal genius of Europe." Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German mathematician & philosopher. He - along with his British Nemesis Isaac Newton - invented Calculus as well as the first digital computer - an Arithmetical Calculating Machine. He is also known for his major contributions to Chemistry, Chronometry, Geology, History, Law, Linguistics, Optics, Philosophy, Physics, Poetry, and Politics. Like Spinoza, he would die a Virgin; and also, like Spinoza, Leibniz would spend his entire life thinking & writing on the Problem of God. His writings came to over 150,000 pages. He is perhaps best remembered as a Philosophical Optimist - Voltaire mocked him by using him as the model for the Sunny fool, Dr. Pangloss, in his vicious satire of the times and the minds of the times: Candide. Leibniz concluded that the Universe is the "best of all possible universes" that god could have created. Everything, he waxed, happens for the Best. He and Déscartes, along with Spinoza, were the 3 great 17th Century Rationalists. He thought very highly of himself and took to introducing himself as Gottfried "von" Leibniz though he had never been invited nor admitted into any form of Nobility. His first job was as a "salaried alchemist" in Nuremberg and typical of his style, he knew next to nothing about Alchemy when he took the position. His old man had been a professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig and had given young Gottfried free access to his huge library when the lad was seven. He spoke Latin fluently at 12 and once composed over 3000 hexameters of Latin verse in a single morning when he was 13. University at 14, his Bachelor's at 16, his Masters at 18. His first book published at 20. The Duchess of Orleans said of him: "It is so rare for an intellectual to dress properly, not to smell, and to understand jokes."
His Doctorate in Law followed in 1666 after which he declined an academic position and spent the rest of his life in the service of, and under the patronage of, two German families of Noblemen. Leibniz was the kind of dude who would write your name on the board if you were talking when the teacher was out of the room. He worshipped Authority and Hierarchy and thought the world would be wonderful if only everyone would know and keep his Place. Like Spinoza, he was obsessed with god, but unlike Baruch, Gotty actually believed in this god as the scriptures revealed him. His biggest fear was that the age he was living in seemed to be encouraging the brightest minds to "think their way outside of god." For the first time in the Christian West Atheism was becoming possible. There had always been men who had quarreled with the model of god being presented but there had never, yet, been an age when men had thrown the concept out with the model. The freedom of thought which was flowing out of Mokum A was washing the farm away. The flood of Logic & Rationalism was daring to ask the last great question: was god Necessary anymore? The 17th Century - the "century of genius" - was the time when the "theocratic order of the Medieval era ceded to the Secular order of Modernity." The Monkey was discovering what it might mean to be human "after our pretension to occupy a special place in nature had been shattered." Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno & Kepler - the Evangelists of the New Sciences and the New Solar System had pried the Monkey off the central cog and no one yet knew where to put him in the new Systems. Spinoza & Leibniz were the Cofounders of the Modern but were diametrically opposite. They, in fact, define the Culture Wars - the Kulturkampf - of Modernity. Everything about the two men were Complimentary Opposites: Birth, dress, eating habits & disposition. Leibniz is the proto-standard bearer of today's Religious Conservatism. Spinoza drips with "Secular Liberalism." Leib wanted to turn the age "Back to God" thru his analysis of the "limits of human reason." Spin sought to end the ages of Religious Superstition by elevating human reason and logic to "gospel." It is our Crises of Modernity to live in their continuing Argument. Matthew Stewart, in his book: The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, nails it: "God became the name of a problem in the 17th Century." And the problem is still ours today in 2011 as we countdown to the Mayan Shitstorm.
Descartes lived in Amsterdam for 20 years before he died in 1650. Spinoza was both an "expositor and critic" of Réne Descartes. Either way, Spin went radical on the Christian side of the Houtgracht: he said that the Moses books were written by men, not a divinely inspired Moses. Also - he claimed that the Soul dies with the Body. Worse: the Material world was a part of god. He wrote: "With regard to the Soul, wherever Scripture speaks of it the word Soul is used simply to express life, or anything that is Living. It would be useless to search for any passage in support of its immortality." After his Excommunication from Jewdom, Spinoza got this big, soulful-eyed, smile. Now he was nowhere and no one. He was a Portuguese Jew living in Holland, speaking in Dutch, writing in Latin, hanging with Protestant Christians in a Catholic Continent. He'd been thrown out of everything. So he was free at last to grok the "View from Nowhere" - the Sub quâdam Æternitatis Specie - Under the Form of a Kind of Eternity. Baruch Spinoza had won the Filosofie Lottery and was standing at the Gate. And here I am talking about "The" Gate. The one the Buddha called: The No Gate Gate. Beyond here, there be Dragons. But the Dragons are all your own. He wrote: "We see therefore that all the notions whereby the common people are wont to explain Nature are merely modes of imagining, and denote not the nature of anything but only the constitution of the Imagination." How fucking Postmodern is that? As Stewart comments: "He rejected the orthodoxy of his day not because he believed it less, but because he believed more." The "little jew" had asked the unaskable: What is the Possibility of Faith in a world without Religion? Is there a Secular path to Salvation? And what kind of Salvation is it without a Heaven or a Hell or any kind of Afterlife at all? After his meetings with Spinoza, a thoroughly shaken Leibniz wrote: "If all possibles were to exist, there would be no need of a reason for existing, and mere possibility would be enough. So there would not be a God, except so far as he is possible. But a God of the kind in which the pious believe would not be possible, if the opinion of those who believe that all possibles exist were true." The "those" he refers to is Benedictus de Spinoza. Gottfried's hands started shaking. His heart was exploding. Ideas like that could never be allowed. It didn't matter if they were true. Truth, he now understood, was a concept more empty than god.
The Dutch in their Golden Age were alone in a Europa in the midst of a "Festival of Holy Violence." The 30 Years War burned across Zentrum Europa - the ratio of murder was higher than even the bloody 20th Century. Germany fell from 21 Million Souls to 13 Million. Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other at a clip far exceeding anything between Shia & Sunni Ragtops. God was Skitzoid and eating himself up. The milieu that Leibniz had been born into in 1646 was one of total exhaustion & desperate for Peace. Security was the Value which lurked behind all attempts at a World Vision. While he was working on his Law degree he wrote an essay called: The Art of Combinations. It was in this work that Leibniz first used the term "Universal Characteristic" which opened his lifelong obsession with Symbolic Logic. It was Gott's plan to reduce all Human Thinking to "mere mechanical calculations" by rendering it in Universal Symbols. Truth would then be flawlessly discovered thru the "Combinations" of Universal Symbols & all men could therefore see the same Truths and then all Religious arguments could end. In the one big Universal Truth.
It was thru his obsessions with Universal Symbols that Leibniz got sucked into Alchemy. There is a story that Leibniz wrote a parody of Alchemical Texts - this is just after the period of the Rosicrucian Furor - using a bunch of high-toned garbage all peppered with esoteric symbols. The danger of all such Satire & Sardony is that most people won't get it and bam! - he was invited to accept a paid position as Secretary in an Alchemical society. This is how he meets Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg - the "Boinkster" - who is the 1st Minister to the Elector of Mainz and a recent fanatical Catholic Convert. The Boinkster is "intelligent rather than intellectual" - he's a man with a million ideas. Leib is 21 and looking to make money - another lifelong obsession - so he joins the Boinkster's Posse as "Secretary, Librarian, and Policy Advisor." The Baron Boinkster is the Aide de Camp of Johann Philipp von Schönborn, the Elector of Mainz and when Leibniz writes his essay: "A New Method for Learning and Teaching Jurisprudence," and caps it off with a lavish and toady dedication to Schönborn his position is secured. The Essay is published to great acclaim. Suddenly all the Prussian Nobles want their own talking monkey and Leibniz is deluged with offers. But he stays with the Baron and next he flew to the defense of the newly minted Catholic and writes: Catholic Demonstrations - a defense of Catlick weirdness like: Transubstantiation, the Trinity, Resurrection, Incarnation, the Immortality of the Well-Polished Soul. All those things which Spinoza was busy Deconstructing in Holland. By 1670 Leib has sucked his way & risen to the top and is now the Privy Counsel of Justice for the Elector of Mainz. Electors are the small fellowship of Nobles who elect the Holy Roman Empire so they are the most powerful men in all the Germanies. The 30 Years War had fragmented Europa & the time was ripe for powerful men to seek new alliances.
Then Louis 14 of France started looking East & the Germanies. started feeling unnaturally coveted and began arguing among themselves about what to do. Join the Triple Alliance?  England, Holland and Sweden were beckoning them in. But when the French sent 20,000 troops to Rape & Ravage Lorraine the Germanies were still staring at their navals & spitting about whether or not Jesus was a Catholic or a Protestant. So in 1671 the Ambitious & Cocky Leibniz comes up with a plan to rescue and cure Europa. It was diabolically simple. He called it the "Egypt Plan." Leibniz called for a New Crusade - a Holy War to call the Catlicks & Prods together & get them to Kill Muslim Infidels and quit killing each other. That was it, no shit. His plan to save Europe and Christianity was to Kill Egyptians. Hell, I'm convinced already.
So The Baron's Boy Gottfried connives to get himself sent to Paris from where he can devote his time to 2 pursuits: 1. The Egypt Plan - he's just got to persuade Louis 14th on the Joys of Matamoros - Killing Moors for Jesus. 2. The Leibniz Plan - his real reason for absconding to Paris is that the city has emerged from the Medieval as the Axis-Mundi of Euro-Politik, Art, Fashion, & Presumptuous Living. Paris is the place to be and the Baron's Boy desperately wants to BE. He wants to be the most famous Philosopher in Christianity. He wants Fame and Titles, Degrees, Awards, and Money. God damn, how we wants Money! His real plan was this: he was going to "thrust himself into the limelight of the Pan-European Intellectual scene." Unannounced if need be. But to grease the flow he bombarded Euro-Thinkers of all stripes with a barrage of letters, missives, poems, essays, witticisms & ditties. He wrote Hobbes but that British Twit didn't write him back. He wrote Henry Oldenburg on "The Philosophy of Motion" and the "Labyrinth of the Continuum" or the old Greek problem of how "infinitely small points come together to constitute a line." A hint of the future Calculus and Mathematical Infinitesimals. Leib had come up with the "Bubble Theory" which was the Superstring Theory of his time. "Bubbles are the Seeds of Everything!" He wanted in to the Big Clubs: the Royal Society of London, as well as the Academie Royal de Paris. So he sent them both his thoughts on "Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles . . ." Leibniz was the classic Overfuturer. He had a billion plans; most of them never went anywhere. Stewart calls him an OmniManiac to distinguish him from Spinoza, a MonoManiac who had produced "a lifetime of insights into a single, adamantive volume." Leib's ouevre was huge, but nothing compared to his plans. His Egypt Plan would solve all the World's problems at once - and his too. Get France busy outside Europa. Kill infidels; convert the survivors. Plus: he would get Titles, Awards, Benefactors, Money . . . and like the George Bushes, he would remake the Middle East and bring about a New World Order & World Peace. Harmony was his goal and he would kill to get it. It may have been thru Oldenburg that Leibniz made contact with Spinoza. In 1665 Spinoza told Oldenburg - Secretary to the Royal Society of London - that he was going to publish a treatise on his views regarding Scripture. People kept calling him an Atheist and he wanted to address that topic - not refute it, but address it.
It took him 5 years. Up until this point Spinoza had only published one work: The Principles of Descartes' Philosophy. There were rumors about an other work, an underground manuscript called: "The Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being," which flew around the bookstores & cafes with such adjectives as: Blasphemy, Heresy, Devilish, and Brilliant. But for the most part, they were just rumors. In 1670 Spinoza published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. It's a deeply seditious work which postulates a new political system of total religious tolerance along with individual rights to freely express religious opinions. The Calvinist Council of Amsterdam denounced it as a "work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil ..." Spinoza's book takes the Bible apart and exposes its contradictions and absurdities. Moses did not write the Pentateuch - several men did it over centuries. Jews are not, he claims, god's chosen people. Miracles are bull shit. Prophets are on crack & have no special powers except their various insanities. The Bible, he says, is not divinely inspired and contains no factual truths. Established Religion amounts to "the relics of man's ancient bondage." Organized religion = organized fraud. Stewart sums: "Ultimately, Spinoza's aim in robbing the bible of mystery is to destroy the theocratic order of his time." And he's not calling for Revolution but rather "for the overthrow of an unjust and tyrannical system of oppression." Theocratic States serve god and its priests exist to tell the People what god wants. Spinoza wants a Secular State whose purpose is to serve Mankind - where people tell the State what they want.
Like Slag & the Founding Fathers, Spinoza believed that Self-Interest is the engine that drives society. Men should be free to strive after their wishes. Self-Interest, when practiced by all, peacefully leads to cooperation. Both Spinoza and Hobbes came to the same meme at once because they were breathing the same Zeitgeist: the Social Contract. It was breathtakingly clear: "The function of the state is to provide the peace and security that enable naturally free individuals to cooperate with one another and thereby fulfill themselves." Suddenly! The "little jew" saw the T-Shirt: "The Purpose of the State is Freedom." Unlike Hobbes, Spin's Social Contract is constantly up for Rejection or Renewal; and unlike Hobbes' - the contract should be fulfilled in a Democracy and not under Absolute Monarchy or any other form of Hierarchal & Inherited Right to Govern. Bingo! Baruch Spinoza became the 1st Modern Political thinker - crafting thoughts that will, in a century, lead to the American Constitution and the French Revolution, "and the rest of the secular, liberal, and democratic order of today." Enlightened Self-Interest is the guiding engine of Modernity. Still, Spinoza suspected that the Masses - the Lumpen - would always have to be strictly governed. So he advocated a new and "Popular" Religion - one controlled by the State and not by Priests. It should be bright & cheerful & sparkly, like most of the New Age Pap today. No sins & no punishments. No heaven. No hell. Nothing most of the Lumpen would or could call "god." And also - and here you can see the twinkle in those big brown eyes - The New Religion would keep the "Truth" about Religion quiet. Sub Rosa. Cauté, Cauté. The Masses, Spinoza knew, could not handle the Truth. So it was best to keep the Secret about god to oneself. His Non-Existence was detrimental to good order. So about his Formless Form, he said, nothing should be said. Keep the Esoteric Silent. Let the Lumpen wallow in the Exoteric. It had always been this way. Even his Rabbis would admit to that. The fact that god does not have to exist does not mean he doesn't. But it trims the odds.
The book caused the worst raging backlash until Darwin 200 years later would pick up where Baruch left off in diminishing the importance of the monkey and say: "Not only that, but ..." Spinoza had given the book a false Author and a phoney city of publication - he knew damn well they would be coming after the author. Still, within weeks all of Europa knew that Spinoza was the father of the Tractatus. All the usual compliments followed: Obscene. Abomination. Vile. Sacrilege. Diabolical. The Christian idiots fell over themselves fulminating: "Spinoza would deserve to be covered with chains and whipped with a rod!" Then the "Shit" metaphors broke wind: "defecated erudition and masticated critique..." and "the most subtle atheist that Hell has vomited on the earth." It was boffo! It was a huge success. It had to be sold "under the counter" but quickly ran thru several printings. It was "must reading" in all Europa. Spinoza freaked! Ubersuccess was not his plan. He quickly withdrew the book from publication in Holland "in hopes of avoiding charges of spreading impiety among the non-latinate masses." His Hymies among them, too - there was still the embarrassing matter of his Kherem. Best to keep a low profile where you eat. Too late. As Stewart says: "He was like a downhill skier who reminds himself that breaking a leg is no virtue; it never occurred to him to get off the slopes." And here he had hoped that publishing his thoughts would clear him of the charges of atheism. He thought that since he was only dealing in "facts" and truths - things self-evident to reason - that reasonable people would leave him alone. Leibniz read the book too. It rocked him to his soul. In public he railed against it, saying things like: "writings of this type tend to subvert the Christian Religion, whose edifice has been consolidated by the precious blood, seat, and prodigious sacrifices of the martyrs." He said it was a "terrifying book" a "horrible book," and "one of the most evil books in the world." But then in 1671 Leibniz writes Spinoza directly: "Illustrious and most honored sir ..." and a dialogue begins between the two. Leibniz discovered to his own horror that he had hidden sympathies with Spinoza's thinking. He tried to hide them deeper, but even Baron Boinkster noticed and called Leib "Pro-Hobbes," who at that time was seen as a dangerous radical, a free thinker, possibly even an atheist. At first the 2 philosophers discuss things like Optics & theories concerning the constitution of Light. But that's a ruse and they both know it and very soon the letters have gotten to the point.
Stewart asks: So why did Leibniz write Spinoza? Well for 5 reasons: 1. Leibniz had set himself up as Europa's Intellectual Gatekeeper and Spinoza was now a Player. 2. Spin's critique of religion had found a sympathetic ear in Leibniz whether or not he consciously knew that. 3. Spinoza's notion of a "Popular Religion" fit one of his own. Both men wanted to remove Religion from its bureaucracy. 4. Leibniz, if nothing else - very much like Spinoza - believed in the Sanctity of the Individual. 5. Leibniz too thought that since god was omni-omni he decides everything and that nothing can happen in nature which does not follow nature's laws. Even god, both men thought, is constrained to act Reasonably. "The Principle of Sufficient Reason binds everything together in a chain of Necessity; its iron grip must begin with god and include even all those things we call evil too." In a very real, but odd way, All Sinners owe their Sin to god. In March of 1672, the Baron's Boy, Gottfried Leibniz sets off to Paris to sell the Egypt Plan for Euro-Salvation. Kill a Kommie for Krist. With him came his copy of Spinoza's book. In 1594 there had been only 8 Carriages in all of Paris, by the time that Leibniz arrived there were nearly 20,000. Paris had sewers and paved roads. It had fountains & cafes. Its population was now a half-million. Leib set up his digs on the Left Bank in the Faubourg St. Germain. The wine was good and there was abundant sin around him to concentrate his mind on god's plan. He wrote: "It is necessary to snare the world in the trap, to take advantage of its weakness, and to deceive it in order to heal it." And then he wrote: "The Vulgar begin Philosophy with created things. Descartes began with the Mind, Spinoza begins with God." Why couldn't he get that fucking little jew out of his mind? How had Spinoza put it: "If a Triangle could speak, it would say that god is eminently triangular." Why did that haunt him? And why did the most of him know that it was True?
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Leave the Moth alone. You'll only become Confused.