NATURE-PHILOSOPHY AND WORLD-VIEW IN
SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ
Spinoza’s attempt to reach an optimistic-ethical nature-philosophy
JUST when Kant is beginning to influence men’s minds, the entirely
different ideas of a thinker who had now been dead for a century,
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677),_(_40_)_ begin to interest those who are
searching for a world-view. The _Critique of Pure Reason_ appears in
1781. In 1785 F. H. Jacobi in his letters addressed to Moses
Mendelssohn, _Concerning the Teaching of Spinoza_, draws attention
once more to the philosopher whom hitherto everyone had attacked
without making any effort to understand him.
Spinoza desires to obtain an ethic from a real nature-philosophy. He
makes no attempt to give an optimistic-ethical interpretation of the
universe, or to refashion it with any theory of knowledge. He accepts
it just as it is in every respect. His philosophy is therefore
elementary nature-philosophy, but his method of expounding it is by no
means elementary. Acquiescing in the way Descartes puts the problem
and the language he uses, he makes his own thought about the universe
proceed “in geometrical fashion” in a series of axioms, definitions,
precepts, and proofs. Nature-philosophy is embodied in his
philosophizing in a magnificent way, but it is as stiff as an
ice-bound landscape.
His chief work—published after his death, because he could not venture
to publish it himself—he entitles _Ethics_. The [pg 117] title is
confusing, because the nature-philosophy in it is developed almost as
completely as the ethics. It is only when the reader has shaken
himself free of all naïve conceptions in his thought about the
universe that he can be permitted, according to Spinoza, to begin upon
ethics. The fact that ethics too are broken up into precepts which are
given as proved is very prejudicial to their exposition.
In his attempt to found ethics upon nature-philosophy, Spinoza
proceeds as follows. Everything that exists, he says, is given in that
infinite Being, which may be called either God or Nature. For us, and
to us, it presents itself in two forms: as thought (spirit) and as
corporeity (matter). Within this divine nature everything, human
activity included, is determined by necessity. There is no such thing
as doing, there are only happenings. The meaning of human life,
therefore, cannot consist in action, but only in coming to an ever
clearer understanding of man’s relation to the universe. Man becomes
happy when besides belonging to the universe naturally, he also
surrenders himself to it consciously and willingly, and loses himself
spiritually within it.
Spinoza demands therefore a higher experience of life. With the Stoics
and the thinkers of India and China, he belongs to the great family of
the monistic and pantheistic nature-philosophers. Like them, he
conceives of God merely as the sum-total of nature, and accepts as
valid only the notion of God which makes him in this way an
independent unity. The attempts, made in the interests of the ethical
world-view, to allow God to be at the same time an ethical personality
standing outside the universe, are to him an offence against thought.
Their only object is, of course, to obtain with the help of a
confessed or unconfessed dualism a starting-point for an
optimistic-ethical world-view. They are striving to reach along
naïve-religious by-roads the goal for which the rationalistic
optimistic-ethical interpretation of the universe is making along the
direct, but not less naïve, main-road.
[pg 118]
The tragic result of monistic thinking in the Stoic, the Indian, and
the Chinese philosophies is that nature-philosophy, when consistent,
arrives only at resignation, not at ethics. Has Spinoza escaped this
fate?
Like Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, Lie-tse, and the Chinese thinkers as a body,
Spinoza champions an optimistic monism without suspecting that under a
far-away heaven and in a far-off age, he had such great
predecessors._(_41_)_ His resignation is of a world- and
life-affirming character. He conceives of infinite Being not as
something devoid of qualities, as the Indians do, but as life with a
full content. The self-perfecting, therefore, for which man is to
strive is not for him, as it is for them, in any way an anticipation
of a state of death, but a living out of life which is guided by deep
reflexion. An elegantly egoistic world- and life-affirmation speaks
through him, as through Chwang-tse.
The efforts of the man who refuses to deceive himself about himself
are not directed, therefore, to any sort of action which is recognized
as serviceable, but are concerned with maintaining his own Being and
giving it the fullest possible experience of life. Whatever good he
does to others he never does for their sakes, but always for his own.
Spinoza rejects the achievement of modern ethics as influenced by
Christianity, viz. the regarding of altruism as something that belongs
to the essence of ethics, and confines himself to the thought that in
the last resort all ethical action aims at our own interests, though
it may be at our highest spiritual ones. In order to avoid thinking
anything which is not a necessity of thought, he goes back of his own
free will into the captivity in which ancient ethics lived.
If he could let himself go, he would, like Chwang-tse, conduct a
campaign against the morality of love and duty. But since he already
has as thoroughgoing opponents the [pg 119] authorities, the
theologians, whether Jewish or Christian, and almost every
philosopher, he has to speak cautiously and offer mankind without
attracting notice the life-view which advocates profound and thinking
egoism.
Just as God, the totality of universal Being, acts not with any aim or
object but from an inner necessity, so also does the man who has
attained to insight. He does only what contributes to complete
experience of life, nothing else. Virtue is capacity for
self-maintenance at the highest level, and this self-maintenance is
attained to when reason is the highest motive to action, and efforts
after knowledge and freedom from passion take possession of the man
and make him free, that is, allow his conduct to be determined by
himself alone and on purely inward grounds. The ordinary man is
unstable, moved hither and thither in all sorts of ways by outward
causes, with no idea of his future fortune or his final fate, like a
ship that is tossed about, now here, now there, on a stormy sea.
Ethics, therefore, consists in living our life more in the form and
fashion given it by thought than in bodily actuality.
Acting, therefore, with a deep, enlightened egoism and purely from
intellectual impulses, a man behaves nobly in every relation of life.
He strives to requite hatred, indignation, and contempt with love and
noble feeling, because he knows that hatred causes him discomfort. He
seeks at any price to create around him an atmosphere of peace. He
never acts deceitfully, but always straightforwardly. He has no need
to feel sympathy. Since he lives entirely under the guidance of
reason, he does good whenever the opportunity offers, on principle,
and therefore does not need to be roused to noble feeling by any
experience of discomfort. In fact he avoids sympathy. Again and again
he makes it clear to himself that everything that happens is brought
about by some necessity in the divine nature and in obedience to
eternal laws. Just as he finds nothing in the world which deserves
hatred, mockery, and contempt, so he finds in it nothing to evoke
sympathy. [pg 120] Man must be ever striving to be virtuous and happy,
and if he is conscious of having done good within the limits of what
is commanded him, he can with an easy mind leave his fellow-men and
the world to their fate. Beyond the possibilities of his own immediate
activities he need have nothing to do with them.
The wise man who practises the higher life-affirmation possesses
power. He has power over himself, power over his fellow-men, and power
over circumstances. How very similar is the tone of Spinoza’s thought
to that of Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, and Lie-tse!
Spinoza lives out his own ethic. In contented independence he passes
his life, till consumption brings it to an early close. He declines an
invitation to be lecturer in philosophy at Heidelberg University. He
is strict with himself, but his resignation is lighted up by a mild
trait of considered humanity and friendliness. The persecutions to
which he is exposed fail to embitter him.
Intent though he is on thinking only in accordance with pure
nature-philosophy, Spinoza does not concern himself so exclusively
with the two natural entities, nature herself and the individual man,
as do many of his Chinese predecessors, but maintains an interest in
organized society. He is convinced that it betokens progress when men
change, from the “natural” stage of society to the “civic.” Being
formed for living with his fellows, man is freer if he settles by
general agreement what belongs to each, and what the relations are to
be between himself and society. The State must, therefore, have power
to issue general orders as to how people are to live, and to secure
respect for its laws by means of penalties.
A real devotion of oneself to the common weal appears, however, to
Spinoza not to be called for. According to him the perfect human
society appears of itself just in proportion as its individual members
live according to reason. In contrast, therefore, to his contemporary,
Hobbes, Spinoza looks for the progress of society not to the [pg 121]
measures taken by the authorities, but to a growth towards perfection
in the dispositions of their subjects. The State is to educate its
citizens not to submissiveness, but to the right use of freedom. In no
way must it do any injury to their sincerity, and it must therefore
tolerate all religious views.
Far as Spinoza goes to meet the spirit of the age, there is one point
on which he cannot agree with it, viz. that there are ethical aims and
objects, aims and objects practical and purposive, to be realized in
the world.
Advancing far ahead of his contemporaries, he reaches a universal
notion of ethics, and recognizes that from the standpoint of
consistent thinking, every ethical relation is nothing but an
expression of the relation of the individual to the universe. When,
however, ethics have in this way become universal, they are faced by
the question how the relation of the individual to the universe is
conceivable as producing an effect upon the universe. On the answer to
this question it depends whether a real activist ethic can be
established, or whether the ethical is only so far present as
resignation can be explained as ethical.
That is the reef which threatens danger to all nature-philosophy, and
whenever a thinker imagines that with clever seamanship and a
favourable wind he can sail round it without coming to grief upon it,
he is nevertheless finally driven upon it, as by submarine currents,
and suffers the same fate as his predecessors. Like Lao-tse and
Chwang-tse, like the Indians, the Stoics, and all self-consistent
thinkers before him, Spinoza is unable to furnish what ethics demand,
viz. that the relation of man to the universe shall be conceived of as
not merely a spiritual relation, but as active devotion to it in the
world of sense. The opponents of this solitary thinker are
instinctively conscious that with the re-establishment of an
independent nature-philosophy there appears something which means
danger to the optimism and the ethics of their world-view. Hence [pg
122] we find in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries everyone
uniting to suppress Spinoza’s philosophy.
It is on behalf of optimism that the age is most troubled. The
terrible earthquake which in 1755 destroyed Lisbon, sets the mass of
men asking whether the world is really ruled by a wise and kindly
Creator. Voltaire, Kant, and many other thinkers of the age seize on
the occurrence as a topic for discussion, partly confessing their
perplexity, partly seeking new ways out of the difficulty for their
optimism.
Leibniz’s optimistic-ethical world-view side by side with
nature-philosophy
How little optimism and ethics have to expect from a real
nature-philosophy is shown not only in Spinoza, but also in Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)._(_42_)_ In his _Theodicée_ (1710) he
tries to be fair to the optimistic world-view. He is helped in this by
the fact that his nature-philosophy is much more living and adaptable
than Spinoza’s. He is also determined to employ every possible device
to attach an optimistic meaning to reality. He nevertheless gets no
further than a laborious establishment of the conclusion that the
actually existing world is the best of all possible ones.
Moreover, so much of optimism as he rescues is useless for his
world-view because it contains no energies which can be directed to
ethical action upon the world. When he is consistent with himself he
remains, like Spinoza, a prisoner within nature-philosophy. All the
difficulties for ethics which Spinoza’s deterministic
nature-philosophy contains within itself, are to be found also in his.
Owing to the fact that he does not put the union of thought (spirit)
and extension (matter) far away in the Absolute, but allows it to be
realized in countless tiny individualities [pg 123] which in their
totality constitute the universe—he calls them monads—his
nature-philosophy corresponds to the multiform character of reality
much better than Spinoza’s does. He anticipates to a considerable
extent the modern nature-philosophy which is based on the cell-theory
of matter. Yet he, too, remains under the spell of the way the problem
is put by Descartes. He does not allow the individualities in which
thought and extension are united, to enter into living relations with
each other, but limits their existence to being merely forces with
powers of conception. Their being consists in being conscious of the
universe, more clearly some, more confusedly others, but each
independent of the rest.
In Spinoza there is a possibility of reaching an ethic, inasmuch as an
attempt can be made to give an ethical interpretation to the mystical
relation between man and the Absolute. Leibniz bars this path against
himself in that he does not recognize such an abstract Absolute as the
content of the universe. It is, therefore, not the result of chance
that he nowhere philosophizes searchingly about ethics. In no way can
an ethic be deduced from his nature-philosophy.
Instead of admitting to himself this result and unfolding the problem
of the relation between ethics and nature-philosophy, he weaves into
his philosophy traditional dicta about ethics, and defines the Good as
love to God and man.
In nature-philosophy Leibniz is greater than Spinoza, because he deals
with living reality more thoroughly than the latter does. In the
struggle for a correct world-view, however, he is far behind him,
because Spinoza, a man with a simpler mental endowment than his,
recognizes the reconciliation of ethics and nature-philosophy as the
central problem of world-view, and proceeds to deal with it.
If Leibniz had remained consistent, he would have ended in atheism, as
does the Indian Samkhya philosophy, which similarly makes the world
consist of a multiplicity of [pg 124] eternal individualities. Instead
of that, he introduces into his nature-philosophy, in order to rescue
for himself a satisfactory world-view, a theistic notion of God, and
by giving it an optimistic, ethical, and theistic expression, he makes
it acceptable to the eighteenth century. His philosophy, popularized
till it is almost unrecognizable by Christian Wolff (1679-1754), helps
to lay the foundations of German rationalism.
But in spite of the treason of which he is thus, though with the best
intentions, guilty against nature-philosophy, Leibniz cannot undo the
fact that thinking on nature-philosophy lines awoke at that time to
activity through him. Without wishing it, he too contributes to making
Spinoza an influence.
But to let oneself be mixed up with nature-philosophy is for the
spirit of the time to step into the dangerous unknown. It therefore
resists as long as possible. At last, however, since Kant and Spinoza
together are undermining the optimistic-ethical world-view of
rationalism which has been built upon the real world and so
conveniently fitted up, it has to make up its mind to rebuild, and
attempt the process of arriving at a conception of optimism and ethics
by direct thinking on the essential nature of the world. For the
carrying out of this undertaking the German speculative philosophy
offers its services.
[pg 125]