Possibly Hegel provides the most useful guidance on the matter: "Leibniz's philosophy appears like a string of arbitrary assertions, which follow one another like a metaphysical romance," he acknowledges. "It is only when we see what he wished thereby to avoid that we learn to appreciate its value." There is in fact a single thread that may lead one safely through the labyrinth of the monadology. The astonishing and bizarre features of the monads—the windowlessness, the pregnancies, the splotchy mirrors, the infinite replications of the infinite universe, and the pre-established harmony—all follow with admirable logical rigor from the premise that substantiality (i.e., absolute unity, self-identity, freedom, and permanence) is a quality of individual minds, and not of nature as a whole. What Leibniz is for is often difficult to grasp; but what he is against fits neatly into one word: Spinoza.
Salvation
Leibniz, like Spinoza, finds happiness in the love of God. But, as the two philosophers have very different ideas about the nature of both God and love, they inevitably arrive at very different destinations on their respective journeys to salvation. According to Spinoza virtue is its own reward. Therefore, the question of personal immortality can have no bearing on our salvation, for the wise man has no need of additional rewards in a purported afterlife to justify virtue in this life. Leibniz, on the other hand, takes the more usual view that in this life, at least, virtue often goes unrewarded, and evil often goes unpunished. Belief in the immortality of the soul, he argues, is therefore essential if we are to have faith that the calculus of rewards and punishments in the universe will ever add up to justice. The doctrine of personal immortality is thus vital to our happiness. Indeed, says Leibniz, Spinoza's attack on the doctrine of personal immortality, if successful, can serve only to bring great misery to the human race. (It is curious to note once again that, accord-ing to the logic of Leibniz's arguments, it is the belief in and not the fact of immortality that matters for our happiness. Even if the soul were mortal, we could still find a Leibnizian kind of bliss, provided we were able to convince ourselves otherwise.)
The difference between Leibniz and Spinoza on happiness, as on all subjects, comes down to their different attitudes toward God. For Spinoza, the intellectual love of God is the highest form of reason. But, as we know, this brainy love is not of the kind that can be returned. Spinoza's Substance is utterly indifferent to humanity's concerns. For Leibniz, on the other hand, the only love worthy of the name is the kind that promises punctual and copious repayment. Spinoza's unrequited love of God, Leibniz maintains, is in fact unreasonable:
Spinoza thinks that the mind can be greatly strengthened if it understands that what happens, happens necessarily. But the animus of the sufferer is not rendered content through his compul-sion, nor does it feel evils any the less on that account. The soul is happy if it understands that good follows from evil, and that what happens is for the best if we have wisdom.
In the Theodicy he adds that Spinozistic dogmas concerning the "brutish" necessity of things "destroy the confidence in God that gives us tranquility, the love of God that makes our happiness." His own doctrines, by contrast, guarantee that God does everything with our good in mind, and thus they give us the happiness and tranquil-ity we need. The crucial difference between the two philosophers comes down to this: Spinoza finds happiness in loving God; Leibniz finds it in God loving us back. (Or, again, more precisely, Leibniz finds happiness in the belief that God loves us back.)
and
When Leibniz submitted a condensed version of his Discourse on Metaphysics to Antoine Arnauld in 1686, his hopes were high that Protestants and Catholics would soon be taking communion together in a universal church. But Arnauld handed Leibniz a humiliating set-back. To Count Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels, who served as mediator in the discussion, the theologian offered this assessment of Leibniz's metaphysics: "I find in these thoughts so many things which terrify me, and which all men, if I, am not mistaken, will find so shocking, that I do not see of what use such a writing can be, which all the world will reject." Arnauld's primary initial concern had to do with Leibniz's concept of freedom of the will, or lack thereof. If "ate the apple" is a necessary predicate of"Adam" for all eternity,Arnauld rea-soned, then Adam was not really free; and if he was not free, he did not sin; and if he did not sin, there is no church. Leibniz wrote back immediately to defend himself from such dire
accusations.
Rebuffed by Arnauld, he raised his sights to one of the most powerful figures in the Catholic world of the time, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the Bishop of Meaux. Bossuet was Louis XIV's premier spir-itual adviser. He was dour, severe, and neither unfamiliar with nor averse to the pleasures of exercising immense political power. He was just then articulating the ideological foundations for the expulsion of the Huguenots, in which hundreds of thousands of the French Protestants were tortured, raped, murdered, and otherwise induced to leave their homes, all at great expense to French economy and soci-ety, but to the profound satisfaction of the King and his counselor, who at last saw their nation united under a single church. Bossuet's intellectual contributions to his country included a book in which he used extensive citations from the New Testament to demonstrate that the rule of Louis XIV was ordained by God. In between acts of eth-nic cleansing and scholarly tasks, the Bishop took time to campaign against the new opera in Paris—a form of entertainment that, he was convinced, involved putting Satan's words to music. As Bossuet was a rather busy man, Leibniz corresponded mainly with a circle close to the Bishop: the French theologian Pelisson, who published an argument in favor of the infallibility of the pope; the Abbess of Maubuisson, who happened to be Princess Sophia's sister; and Marie de Brinon, a former schoolmistress and the secretary to the Abbess. According to Sophia, Brinon was extraordinarily elo-quent—for she never stopped talking. The topic of the day was heresy. Specifically, Leibniz needed to know whether the Catholics planned to stick to the decree made in the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century to the effect that Protestants were heretics. Seven years, of correspondence and a num-ber of lengthy manifestos concerning the nature of heresy spilled from Leibniz's plume before he understood that his interlocutors had no interest in negotiating the Catholic Church's right to make infallible judgments concerning just who would or would not count as a heretic.
and finally
Now imagine that your friends are named Leibniz and Spin-oza, and that instead of a particular city they are discussing the nature of the universe. The question then is: Do they share the same philos-ophy? Or, in other words, is philosophy about what you see, or the way you see it?
It is a startling fact that Spinoza considered and rejected something very like Leibniz's transcendent concept of God before the two philosophers met. In a letter dating from 1674, Spinoza writes: "He who affirms that God could have refrained from creating the world is declaring in an indirect way that it was made by chance, since it pro-ceeded from an act of will which might not have been. Since this belief and this view is quite absurd, it is commonly and unanimously admitted that God's will is eternal and has never been indifferent." The idea that God has the option not to create the world, of course, is a defining feature of Leibniz's concept of divinity. Spinoza's critique of that concept begins with a premise with which Leibniz must agree: that God must have reasons for what it does. When God creates the world, Spinoza therefore infers, it cannot do so by whim or accident, but because some reason compels it to do so. Since that reason is always there—it is "eternal"—then it is "quite absurd," as Spinoza puts it, to speak of God as having the option not to create the world. Spinoza's comments on a proto-Leibnizian concept of God antic-ipate a set of criticisms later offered by others in direct response to Leibniz. The debate boils down to a simple question: Does Leibniz's God really have a choice? Many have argued that he does not. Leib-niz seems to add fuel to the fire under his feet with comments such as "everything [is] settled in advance" and "God's decree [to actualize the best of all possible worlds] is immutable." A version of the critique runs like this: How do we know that this is the best of all possible worlds? It cannot be because we observe it to be so—for, to sift through all possible worlds and rank them according to their merits requires the kind of omniscience that only God has. It must therefore be because the choice of the best of all possible worlds follows from God's nature. In other words, God chooses the best of all possible worlds because it is in his nature to be good. God could not do otherwise because if he did so he would not be good, and therefore he would not be God. But this implies that God does not have a choice at all. He must create this world, exactly as it is, if he is to deserve the name of God.
At this point in the argument, of course, the mature Leibniz would concede that a transcendent God must have a sufficient reason fo his actions. But, the author of the Theodicy would add, the reason for this world is a "moral" one and not a "metaphysical" one; specifically, it is the "principle of the best," to which God appeals in justifying his decision to create the world. Unfortunately for Leibniz, Spinoza has already anticipated this response. People like Leibniz, he sneers ii the Ethics,
seem to posit something external to God that does not depend upon him, to which in acting God looks as if it were a model, or to which he aims, as if it were a fixed target. This is surely to subject God to fate; and no more absurd suggestion can be made about God, whom we have shown to be the first and only free cause of both the essence and the existence of things. So I need not spend any more time in refuting this absurdity.
Leibniz's God, according to Spinoza, is not a free agent, but rather is beholden to some preconceived idea about the good—"a fixed tar get." More generally, Spinoza's point is that Leibniz's transcendent Go is not a God of reason, for it must act in some arbitrary way, accordin to externally presented criteria over which it has no control.The onl way out for those who believe in a God of reason, Spinoza implies, is to regard the "good" for which God allegedly aims as something inter nal to God's own nature. But this, of course, would be to accept a vet sion of Spinoza's own concept of an immanent deity and reject the very idea that God chooses among possible worlds. Spinoza's implicit critique of the distinction between "moral necessity" and "metaphysical necessity" was made quite explicit by Leibniz's later critics. In his exchange with Leibniz, for example, Samuel Clarke argues that "necessity, in philosophical questions, always signifies absolute necessity; hypothetical necessity and moral necessity are only figurative ways of speaking." The twentieth-century philosopher Arthur Lovejoy is even blunter: "The distinction Leibniz her attempts to set up [between moral necessity and brute metaphysic necessity] is manifestly without logical substance; the fact is so apparent that it is impossible to believe that a thinker of his powers can have been altogether unaware of it himself." But a good indication that the matter here runs much deeper than a simple logical error is that the literature is also not short of scholars willing to defend Leib-niz's distinction. The trouble with Leibniz's transcendent God, expressed in the most general terms, concerns the very nature of the choice Leibniz asks God to make. Leibniz often seems to imply that God's choice is something like the selection of an entree from a menu of dishes. But, in fact, the nature of the choice God makes is very different from that faced by the typical restaurant patron. It is not a choice between this and that, but between something and nothing—or, more precisely, between anything at all and absolutely nothing. God's choice must take place outside, before, or beyond this (or ariy other possible) world. And yet it must be a rational choice; that is, it must involve comparing possible options and maximizing preferences. The ques-tion that troubles Leibniz's more acute critics is: Is such a transcen-dental choice conceivable? Is it possible to imagine a choice that takes place without also imagining a world within which to make it? Can you do it? Leibniz, it seems, could not. Indeed, in the Theodicy, he goes to the trouble of providing a detailed description of the "higher" world within which' God's transcendental choice is allegedly made—namely, the fabulous, pyramid-shaped palace of all possible worlds. We may prefer to imagine a different setting—say, we could picture God shuffling cards in a weighty game of cosmic solitaire, or stopping in for a treat at a cosmic diner. Spinoza, for his part, had Leibniz's God either sculpting from a model or firing arrows at a bull's-eye. In any case, it seems impossible not to imagine some sort of scenario within which God's transcendental choice occurs. The question then arises: Who created this higher world? Who constructed that beautiful, baroque pyramid, the green felt card table, the bow and arrow—i.e., all the constraints, norms, and preferences according to which all pos-sible worlds are defined and judged? If we say that this higher world is God's creation, too, then we seem to acknowledge that there is only one possible world from which God may choose—namely, this higher world—and all the so-called possible worlds aren't really "worlds" at all, but merely features of the one true world created by God, like the blocks of a pyramid. At the end of that road lies Spinozism. If we say that this higher world has always been there and has always been the way it is, on the other hand, then we make God one of its creatures and we subject God to its rules, and he acts unfreely—i.e., according to its nature and not his own. In a sense, God is no longer God, but just a logical operator within the scheme of some preexisting nature. At the end of that road lies atheism—or, one could say, a form of Spinozism without Spin-oza's belief in the divinity of nature. Indeed, some such charge is what Spinoza implicitly levels at Leib-niz. The label of "fatalism" that Spinoza hurls against (people like) Leibniz, ironically, is the same that Leibniz tosses at Spinoza in his later works. Had Spinoza lived long enough, he might have accused Leibniz of being a godless Spinozist after clarifying that he himself was not one. Perhaps the most curious feature of Spinoza's implicit critique of Leibniz, though, is its tone. Spinoza's dismissal of a proto-Leibnizian concept of God as utterly absurd hardly suggests much room for negotiation on the subject from Spinoza's end. Indeed, his contemptuous treatment of the idea offers an intriguing clue as to how he might have responded if and when Leibniz let slip his com-mitment to it when they met in 1676.
Mind
One might have hoped that Leibniz's theory of mind, as represented in his monadology, would lead us safely out of this labyrinth of Spin-ozistic Leibnizes and Leibnizian Spinozas. The monads, after all, are where Leibniz draws his line in the sand: Spinoza would be correct, if there were no monads. But this line in the sand turns out to be something of a mirage, too. Leibniz's readers have frequently complained that the monads belong to a thoroughly deterministic cosmos, in which history unwinds like the ticking of a second hand through eternity. Aril uld —oddly echoing Spinoza—accuses Leibniz of propounding a view
"more than fatalistic." "Once [God] has chosen," Leibniz acknowl-edges, once again adding fuel to the fire, "one must grant that every-thing is included in his choice, and that nothing can be changed." Life in Leibniz's world, practically speaking, would seem to be indistin-guishable from life in Spinoza's world. Leibniz, of course, responds that the monads' ignorance of their own true nature requires that they act as if they were free. That is, God knows Caesar will cross the Rubicon, but when Caesar stands on the banks of the river, he faces a momentous decision. Thus, Cae-sar, like the rest of us, has free will. The best reason to think that Leib-niz's argument in favor of free will is as bad as it sounds is that it is indistinguishable from Spinoza's argument against free will. This sur-prising coincidence is evident in a moment when Leibniz lets down his guard and speaks frankly. The will, he says, "has its causes, but since we are ignorant of them and they are oft-hidden, we believe we our-selves independent. . . . It is this chimera of imaginary independence which revolts us against the consideration of determinism, and which brings us to believe that there are difficulties where there are none." These words could have been simply lifted out of the Ethics, where Spinoza writes that "men believe they are free . . . because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, yet ignorant of the causes that have determined them to desire and will." Leibniz was—and, at least in the privacy of his personal notebooks, understood himself to be—a determinist. Of course, it is possible to be a determinist and still not be a Spin-ozist, and, at first glance, that is precisely the niche that Leibniz seems to want to occupy. Spinoza's determinism is closely linked to his doc-trine of parallelism, according to which mind and body pursue par-allel paths through life because they are the same thing viewed from different perspectives. Spinoza's determinism, in other words, trans-lates into the claim that all of our mental acts may ultimately be mapped into physical processes, which themselves operate necessarily according to laws of cause and effect. Leibniz's determinism, on the other hand, arises from within the mind itself, and not from interac-tion between mind and body, for he allows no such interaction. That is, it is because all predicates are contained within the concept of a monad that it follows a predetermined path through life. According to the doctrine of pre-established harmony, mind and body move in parallel only because God has seen fit to harmonize the predeter-mined activities of independent mind- and body-substances, and not because they are two attributes of the same substance. While the theoretical difference between Spinoza's parallelism and Leibniz's pre-established harmony is easy to understand, however, the practical implications of this difference are much harder to see. How, one should ask, might a neutral observer detect whether he happened to be in a Leibnizian universe rather than a Spinozan one? In both cases, after all, every mental act without exception occurs alongside a corresponding physical event. As a matter of principle, there would be no way to establish through any observation whether this apparent unity of mind and body is the consequence of an underlying iden-tity, as Spinoza suggests, or an amazing coincidence, as Leibniz argues. As early as 1712, and then again in the 1720s, Leibniz's critics said flatly that there was no way to tell the difference. In fact, they said, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is a plagiarism of Spinoza's doc-trine of parallelism. Leibniz, of course, insists all over again that his form of parallelism is different because, whether we observe so or not, it occurs by the will of God, not through the common identity of mind and body in substance. But, unfortunately, this approach does not forestall the col-lapse into Spinozism for long. The pre-established harmony is the prime example of a choice that, according to Leibniz, is "morally" necessary but not "metaphysically" necessary. God has the metaphys-ical option, Leibniz implies, to create a disharmonious universe, even if it is morally incumbent upon him to favor a harmonious one. If, however, Leibniz's distinction between "moral" and "metaphysical" necessity is specious, then we would have to conclude that the pre-established harmony follows necessarily (tout court) from the nature of God, and that the parallelism in Leibniz's world is every bit as logi-cally necessary as that which obtains in Spinoza's world. Supposing we allow Leibniz the distinction between moral and metaphysical necessity, the question still remains: Is a "disharmo-nious" universe metaphysically possible, as he implies? According to
Leibniz's principle that One is All, each individual monad entails the entire existing universe of monads, in the sense that its internal "mirror" replicates the activities of all the other monads, no matter how many or how far. Choose one monad, in other words, and you choose the entire universe. In a disharmonious universe, however, the "universe" within each monad would have nothing to do with the "universe" outside. A mind-monad might be in Paris, for instance, while its body is in Hanover (or, better, nowhere at all—for there is no obvious sense in which the body a monad thinks it has should refer to any outside monad at all). Choose two or more monads, in other words, and you choose two or more universes that have noth-ing to do with one another. But, if monads belong to universes that have nothing to do with one another, then they cannot be conceived of as belonging to the same universe. Even God, through whom all substances must be conceived, would not be able to imagine such dis-parate substances as belonging in any sense to the same universe. But if disharmonious monads do not belong to the same universe, then a disharmonious universe is not possible. And if a disharmonious uni-verse is not possible, then Leibniz's God has only harmonious possi-ble universes to choose from, which is to say that in all possible universes mind and body are harmonious, which is to say that the parallelism of mind and body exhibits just as much logical necessity in Leibniz's world as it does in Spinoza's. The dangerous and unexpected convergence of Leibniz's views on the mind-body relation with Spinoza's also raises a worrisome chal-lenge to his doctrine of personal immortality. To be sure, Leibniz ever and always avows his faith in personal immortality, and repeatedly chastises Spinoza and his proxies for their belief in "an immortality without memory" However, as a Consequence of his commitment to a form of parallelism, Leibniz is forced to acknowledge that even in its before- and after-lives, the mind-monad remains tied to some parallel manifestation of body-monads. Before life, roughly speaking, we are something like seeds; after life, we reside in microscopic form somewhere in the ashes, for example. As a further consequence of his own parallelism, Leibniz is compelled to acknowledge that our faculties of perception are greatly influenced by the kinds of body-monads with which we are surrounded. He hastens to add that even a mind-monad buried in a speck of ash will control some set of sub-ordinate body-monads, thus forming an organic structure. But, Leibniz's assurances about the fire-resistant properties of monads notwithstanding, many have found it difficult to believe that immor-tality as a cinder is all that it is cracked up to be. Perhaps understand-ably, the skeptics question whether the perceptive faculties of the average speck of ash may attain a degree of acuity sufficient to per-mit it to bask in the rewards or suffer the punishments that Leibniz insists must come its way in the course of its eternal afterlife. The implosion of the doctrine of immortality reflects an even deeper crisis in Leibniz's thought concerning the very idea of indi-viduality. In his effort to secure the absolute permanence and unity of the individual soul against all outside influence, Leibniz is forced to represent the body and all of its activities as the workings of an infinity of monads external to the individual mind-monad. The ques-tion then naturally arises: Why not ascribe to this outside infinity of monads all of the attributes that we use to define our identities—beginning with height and weight but not ending with our memo-ries, preferences, and passions? Instead of preserving the sanctity of the individual, Leibniz may be inadvertently engaged in a decon-struction of individuality itself—which, of course, is exactly what Spinoza accomplishes in his system. All of the suggestions that Leibniz is some sort of Spinozist can be mapped into the claim that monads are not true substances, as Leib-niz maintains, but rather something more like modes of a single Sub-stance. Leibniz himself acknowledges the centrality of the matter when he says that Spinoza would be right, if there were no monads. All of the challenges to the substantiality of monads in turn come down to a question about the relation between monads and God. In his metaphysical system, Leibniz strives to maintain a delicate balance between God and the monads. For example, he avers that monads are eternal and indestructible—as indeed substances must be—but then turns around and allows that God can create them or annihilate them all in a flash. He grants monads freedom in their own eyes—which is as it should be for all substances—but then seems to
take away their freedom in God's eyes.These and other tensions in the City of God come to a head in a simple question: Is God a monad? It would seem a straightforward question, the sort to which the great monadologist would have a ready answer.Yet Leibniz is surpris-ingly cagey on the subject. His best hint comes in the phrase that God is the "monad of monads." One would have thought that, after three centuries of effort, the Leibniz scholars would have reached a consensus on just what Leibniz means by "the monad of monads." But such is not the case. Some argue that God must be a monad, others that he cannot be. In fact, there is no answer that works within the constraints of the Leibnizian system. Consider the possibility that God is not a monad.This makes sense: since God chooses to "flash" the monads into existence, he must exist before the "flash." In that case, however, it follows that the monads exist and have their properties only in virtue of the properties and/or deeds of this flashing, nonmonadic entity. But if monads depend on some other entity in this way, then they are not substances, for a sub-stance by definition depends on nothing else to be what it is. Rather, the so-called monads must in fact be considered merely "modes" of substance. And since God is the only entity that does not depend on some other entity to be what it is, then God alone is substance. Hegel sums it up nicely: "There is a contradiction present. If the monad of monads, God, is the absolute substance, and individual monads are created through his will, their substantiality comes to an end." If God is not a monad, in short, then Leibniz is a Spinozist. Needless to say, Leibniz would now rush to open the other door. So, consider the option that "the monad of monads" is indeed a monad. But, if God is a monad, then by definition he cannot interact with other monads, for otherwise be would determine their essence and they his. If he cannot interact with them, he cannot create them. As a monad, in fact, God may have concourse with his so-called cre-ations only in a "virtual" way, by means of the pre-established harmony. If God acts only through the pre-established harmony, then he can't be said to create that either. And whatever it is that God does—if there is anything at all left for him to do—all of it follows with absolute, logical necessity from his monadic essence. That is, the fact that he will "create" this particular universe (if he can) is already contained within his concept, in the same way that "cross the Rubicon" is a necessary predicate of Caesar. Indeed given the lemma that to choose one monadis to choose its entire universe, it follows that once God exists, then the universe such as it is exists with rigorous neccessity except insofar as, like Caesar, he is ignorant of his true nature. In short, if God is a monad, he isn't God at all; he's just another one of us. Russell alludes to this eventuality when he remarks that Leibniz's monadism should have impelled him to an even greater heresy than Spinozism. To put it crudely: if God is a monad, Leibniz is an atheist.
Salvation
Those still hoping for a hard and fast distinction between the Leib-nizian and Spinozan philosophies might look forward to building the fence somewhere along the path to salvation. After all, it seems embarrassingly obvious from their different lifestyles, if nothing else, that the two philosophers represent very different ideas about the nature of human happiness. Unfortunately, the differences between the two on salvation turn out to be no less elusive than the putative differences between monads and modes. Leibniz's determinism inevitably draws him very close to Spinoza's ethical positions—and even opens him up to attack from the same, orthodox antagonists. For example, to the extent that God's decision to create the best of all possible worlds is "immutable," as Leibniz has it, then it would seem pointless to pray to him, just as it is pointless to pray to Spinoza's God in hopes of some alternative outcome of events. Inasmuch as everything a monad ever does is already contained within its concept, furthermore, then it would take a legalistic mind of tremendous power to demonstrate that monads commit sins of their own free will. Russell goes so far as to accuse Leibniz of"discreditable subterfuges" in his efforts to conceal the fact that all sin for him is "original sin, the inherent finitude of every created monad." Leibniz attempts to finesse the issue by suggesting, for example, that monads can choose to do good by guiding their efforts according to the "presumptive will" of God. Exactly how one goes about presuming God's will Leibniz leaves somewhat unclear; but a Spin-ozist would undoubtedly infer that the "presumptive will" of God is a metaphorical way of alluding to the realization of our own essential and inherently finite natures, for that is what forms our contribu-tion to the realization of God's plan for the universe. But this maximization of the individual conatus, of course, is precisely the path Spinoza proposes to take in his Ethics. Leibniz's tendency toward a Spinozism in ethics extends beyond his commitment to some form of determinism and penetrates into his very idea of self-realization, or happiness. Because it has a conatus of sorts, each monad wants to "become what it is," as it were; and any-thing that contributes to this project of perfecting the self counts as pleasure, whereas whatever detracts from it is pain. "Pleasure is nothing but the feeling of an increase in perfection," explains Leibniz. But these words could easily have been lifted from Spinoza's Ethics. The more "active" a monad is—which is to say, the more it realizes its own nature, as opposed to submitting passively to the domination of other monads—the happier it is. "We will be happier the clearer our comprehension of things and the more we act in accordance with our proper nature, namely, reason," Leibniz clarifies. "Only to the extent that our reasonings are correct are we free and exempt from the passions which are impressed upon us by surrounding bodies." It is pas-sages like this one—which, again, could simply have been cribbed from the Ethics—that lead Russell to suggest that, in his ethical philosophy, "Leibniz no longer shows great originality, but tends, with slight alterations of phraseology, to adopt (without acknowledgment) the views of the decried Spinoza." In fact, Leibniz's unswerving commitment to the guidance of reason leads him inexorably toward the identification of freedom and happiness that is the defining feature of Spinoza's ethics.
IN THEIR REPORTS on their travels into the very heart of things, Leibniz and Spinoza seem at first glance to describe radically different universes. One discovers a numberless horde of animated substances, the other a singular mass of undifferentiated substance; one finds souls that never die, the other no souls at all; one sees a world in which everything happens for a reason, the other a world in which everything just happens. Yet, when we look for observable effects and practical conse-quences that might serve to distinguish the two worlds in question, the discrepancies seem to evaporate upon inspection. The world according to Leibniz is a reasonable one; it is a law-abiding, all-determining cosmos that is the proper subject of scientific investiga-tion, a world unencumbered with inscrutable• deities, where the individual remains for all practical purposes at the mercy of external forces, and in which we have the responsibility to seek happiness by realizing ourselves. The world Leibniz describes, in brief, is the one first properly observed by Spinoza. Ultimately, the differences between the two philosophers have to do not with the nature of the world as each sees it, but with the mean-ing or value each ascribes to it. Spinoza identifies the law-abiding, all-determining nature that serves as the object of scientific investigation with God. Leibniz does not. Indeed, Leibniz's philosophy is at its clear-est and most sincere in the negative. Its founding principle remains: Nature is not God; that is to say, a Being that makes no choices and cannot be called good does not deserve the name of God. The mon-ads exist for no other purpose than to make this negation, which remains standing even as the rest of Leibniz's philosophy collapses into something observationally indistinguishable from Spinozism. In this there is revealed something essential about the nature of Leibniz's philosophy and its peculiar relationship with that of Spinoza. The monadology is best understood as an attempt to show that one may grant the existence of a universe in every way indistinguishable from the one Spinoza describes and still cling to old hopes about God and immortality on the basis that these matters lie beyond the limits of anything that can be observed or proved by Spinoza and his ilk. Leibniz's avowed proof of the immateriality of the mind is really just an argument that Spinoza's materialism does not rule out the possibil-ity of an undetectable spiritual force behind all apparently mechanical actions; his proof of the pre-established harmony is just an argument that the parallelism Spinoza observes can never be definitively shown to be the result of an identity, rather than mere coincidence; his proof that the world has a designer is just an argument that Spinoza fails to prove absolutely that there is none; and his proof of the existence of a transcendent God is really just an argument that an immanent God is not a God. Leibniz's philosophy as a whole follows the pattern he established as a young man in his early defense of transubstantiation. In the final analysis, he does not leave us with a set of positive doc-trines, but with a series of negations. His work amounts to a decon-struction of modern philosophy in general and of Spinozism in particular. It is defined by—and cannot exist without—that to which it is opposed. It is, in essence, a reactive philosophy. Perhaps the best way to summarize Leibniz's problematically self-subverting position is to say that he was a Spinozist who did not believe in Spinoza's God. One logical outcome of such a position, of course, is precisely that toward which Leibniz tended whenever he attempted to distinguish himself from Spinoza: namely, that there is no God at all. The author of the system of the pre-established harmony spent a lifetime branding the author of the Ethics as an atheist; but it was Leibniz who sailed much closer to the winds of unbelief. All of which puts us in a better position to understand in general terms what transpired on those windy days in November 1676—even if the details of the event must remain forever beyond our knowledge. In a philosophical as well as a literal sense, Spinoza opened a door for Leibniz. He revealed to his visitor a reality that, for all practical purposes, the young man recognized as the world within which he situated his own philosophy. In frank and sometimes bru-tal language, he showed Leibniz what it means to be a modern philosopher. Yet Leibniz did not behold this reality in the same way that Spinoza did. When he 1poked into the black opal eyes of his host, he did not find a new divinity. He saw instead the death of God. His philosophy was in many respects an attempt to shut the door that he wished he had never opened. But it was too late: he was already standing on the other side.
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