8. Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz
In one of his comedies, Richard Sheridan, the great Irish dramatist of the eighteenth century, makes one of his characters, an inveterate gambler, say: “I never lose at cards – or, at least, I never feel that I am losing, which is the same thing.” Of course, we know that it is not the same thing, just as it is not the same thing to think one has a million pounds, compared to actually possessing that amount of money. That thought and being are two different things is self-evident to most people. But what is the precise nature of thought? And what exactly is its relation to being? These were difficult philosophical questions, which exercised some of the most brilliant brains of the period.
Thought itself is immaterial, despite the efforts of some mechanical materialists to prove that it is a material substance, secreted by the brain, as bile is secreted from the liver. Thought is the property of matter organised in a particular way, but it is not itself matter. Once thought begins to develop, it takes on a certain life of its own, which proceeds more rapidly with the development of the division of labour and the growth of civilisation, which coincides with the division of society into classes. Thought itself becomes an object of study. Its material origins are lost sight of. It appears as something mystical, separate and apart from matter, a divine substance, linked to God, an immortal soul, independent of our body, which will not perish when we die.
The question arises, if thought and material reality are completely different, how does it happen that they are so often found to be in agreement? The exact relation between thought and being was the source of all the main philosophical disputes for two-and-a-half years, and was only resolved satisfactorily by dialectical materialism. The rise of a new kind of materialism in the period of the Renaissance was the prior condition for the rebirth of science on a qualitatively higher level. But, as we have seen, it suffered from a one-sidedness, in the form of empiricism, which had extremely negative consequences. Man was seen as a mere observer, and his thoughts as isolated from his life as well as the external world.
The denial of the validity of anything which did not come from immediate observation, the rejection of theory and broad generalisations (“I do not make hypotheses”, as Newton said) doomed this kind of materialism to sterility. The main result was that the representatives of this school could not rise above the limitations of the outlook of the science of the day, which was fundamentally mechanical and static in character. This defect applies not only to the English empiricists, but even to the French materialists, despite their far broader outlook and occasionally brilliant forays into dialectics.
To the old materialism, human thought appeared one-sided and was considered in a static, passive and contemplative way. Man was merely observing nature, taking note of ‘the facts’. Setting out from a correct idea, this narrow conception of materialism ended up in a blind alley, incapable of further development. In fact, until the revolution effected by Marx and Engels, with their theory of materialist dialectics, no further development of materialism took place. Even Feuerbach really went no further than the French materialists of the eighteenth century.
We therefore come face to face with one of the greatest paradoxes in the history of philosophy – that the really significant advances in thought in the period after Locke were made, not by the materialists, but by the idealists. Unrestricted by the self-imposed limits of empiricism, they arrived at a whole series of brilliant theoretical generalisations, although, setting out from false hypotheses, they invariably had a fantastic character to them. This peculiar phenomenon reached its most extreme expression in the philosophy of Hegel, the most “colossal miscarriage”[1] in history, where all the main elements of dialectics appear in a systematic form, but standing on their head, as Marx put it.
The question of the relation of thought to being was posed by the French philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) in a different way to the English empiricists. Born into a moderately wealthy family, he had studied with the Jesuits. This taste of arid orthodoxy produced in him a lifetime’s aversion for dogmatism of any kind, and an impatience with received ideas. His scepticism, in contrast with the jaundiced pessimism of Hume, had a lively and positive character. He began to doubt, not the possibility of knowledge in general, but only the existing opinions put forward as infallible truths. From an early age, his motto was: ‘Doubt everything’.
…and, as I made it my business in each matter to reflect particularly upon what might fairly be doubted and prove a source of error, I gradually rooted out from my mind all the errors which had hitherto crept into it. Not that in this I imitated the sceptics who doubt only that they may doubt, and seek nothing beyond uncertainty itself; for, on the contrary, my design was singly to find ground of assurance, and cast aside the loose earth and sand, that I might reach the rock or the clay.[2]
For these reasons, as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.[3]
In order to gain knowledge and expand his horizons he enlisted, first in the Dutch, and then the Bavarian army, at the start of the Thirty Years War. While still in the army, he wrote a book on philosophy, but, on hearing of the trial of Galileo, he decided to withhold publication for fear of provoking the anger of the Church. Later on, his writings appear liberally sprinkled with references aimed at placating the religious authorities and averting the dreadful charge of godlessness. Even so, like Locke, he felt obliged to move to the Netherlands, the only country in Europe where there existed a relatively free atmosphere to speak and write. Even here he faced the attacks of religious bigots (in this case, Protestants), who accused him of atheism. Only the personal intervention of the Prince of Orange saved him from prosecution. Even then, the authorities of the University of Leiden placed him under a total ban, forbidding the very mention of his name. Eventually, he had to move to Sweden, where he died, partly because of the effects of the climate on his weak constitution.
While in all probability Descartes was a believer, when reading his works, one has the impression of a man all the time looking over his shoulder. In order to get round the Church, Descartes accepts the existence of God, but then says that religion is too lofty a subject to be “submitted to the impotency of our reason.” When dealing with natural history, he accepts that God created the world, but then adds, as if hypothetically:
[I]t may be believed, without discredit to the miracle of creation, that, in this way alone, things purely material might, in course of time, have become such as we observe them at present; and their nature is much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming in this manner gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state.[4]
To such subterfuges did the greatest French philosopher have to resort in order to publish his ideas.
DESCARTES AND SCIENCE
Descartes is one of the main protagonists in the struggle between rationalism and empiricism, between the method of deduction as opposed to that of induction. The Englishman Roger Bacon was the father of empiricism and the method of inductive reasoning, which attempts to derive theories from observed facts alone. In Bacon’s case, the obsession with observation proved fatal; he died of bronchitis as a result of an early experiment in refrigeration, involving stuffing a chicken with snow.
The rationalists approached science from a diametrically opposite standpoint, and Descartes was more concerned with general principles than the detailed work of observation. Taking Euclid’s geometry as his model, he attempted to develop consistent and coherent theorems derived from pure reason, without recourse to the unreliable evidence of the senses. Rationalism became the main tradition in France, whereas Bacon’s empiricism triumphed on the other side of the Channel. Both men, in different ways, advanced the cause of science, and both made important discoveries.
Descartes’ contribution to science was outstanding, especially in the field of mathematics, where he may be considered one of the founders of analytical geometry. His great contribution was the invention of ‘coordinate geometry’, which determines the position of a point in a plane by its distance from two fixed lines. In physics, he was a materialist, as Marx and Engels point out:
Descartes in his physics endowed matter with self-creative power and conceived mechanical motion as the manifestation of its life. He completely separated his physics from his metaphysics. Within his physics, matter is the sole substance, the sole basis of being and of knowledge.[5]
Yet Descartes was unable to resolve the fundamental question of the relation between thought and being. In his celebrated Discourse on Method, he searches for a truth which everyone can accept as unquestionable. He comes up with the famous phrase: “I think, therefore I am.”[6] This is the cornerstone of his philosophy. And yet, it does not follow. At most he could assert, “I think, therefore thought exists.” What is this ‘I’? Evidently, a human nervous system, a brain, a body, and so on. Gassendi, the French materialist, objected that existence may equally well be inferred from every other human function. Idealists replied that none of these functions can be perceived without thought. But it is also necessary to say what thought is.
Thought, from a consistent materialist position, is matter that thinks. It does not and cannot exist by itself, separate from matter. On this decisive question, Descartes adopted an unsatisfactory and inconsistent position, which ended up in all kinds of contradictions. The fundamental difference between thought and matter, he said, was that matter had extension, whereas thought, spirit and soul had none. This leads us straight to a dualist position. According to Descartes, there is nothing in common between thought and matter. They are not only different, but diametrically opposed. The union of soul and body is, therefore, an entirely mechanical one. The soul inhabits the body as an alien thing, a mechanical and entirely artificial relationship. Without the soul, the body is like a lifeless machine or automaton. Even the best-constructed robot cannot acquire a human consciousness, even if it is programmed to speak (this was written in 1637, but the subject matter is very modern).
For example, a machine may be taught to speak and even express ‘feelings’:
[B]ut not that it should arrange them variously so as appositely to reply to what is said in its presence, as men of the lowest grade of intellect can do. The second test is, that although such machines might execute many things with equal or perhaps greater perfection than any of us, they would, without doubt, fail in certain others from which it could be discovered that they did not act from knowledge, but solely from the disposition of their organs: for while reason is an universal instrument that is alike available on every occasion, these organs, on the contrary, need a particular arrangement for each particular action; whence it must be morally impossible that there should exist in any machine a diversity of organs sufficient to enable it to act in all the occurrences of like, in the way in which our reason enables us to act.[7]
The lower animals are classed as “automata” for the same reason. It is worth quoting this passage at some length because it shows a markedly materialist line of argument, and certainly is vastly superior to the mystical nonsense talked by some scientists today:
For it is highly deserving of remark, that there are no men so dull and stupid, not even idiots, as to be incapable of joining together different words, and thereby constructing a declaration by which to make their thoughts understood; and that on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect or happily circumstanced, which can do the like. Nor does this inability arise from want of organs: for we observe that magpies and parrots can utter words like ourselves, and are yet unable to speak as we do, that is, so as to show that they understand what they say: in place of which men born deaf and dumb, and thus not less, but rather more than the brutes, destitute of the organs which others use in speaking, are in the habit of spontaneously inventing certain signs by which they discover their thoughts to those who, being usually in their company, have leisure to learn their language.
And this proves not only that the brutes have less reason than man, but that they have none at all: for we see that very little is required to enable a person to speak; and since a certain inequality of capacity is observable among animals of the same species, as well as among men, and since some are more capable of being instructed than others, it is incredible that the most perfect ape or parrot of its species, should not in this be equal to the most stupid infant of its kind, or at least to one that was crack-brained, unless the soul of brutes were of a nature wholly different from ours.[8]
Descartes’ idealism led him into the trap of dividing mind from body, and regarding the body as a mere automaton, inside which the soul dwelt. This became a source of considerable confusion, and had a harmful effect on the scientific understanding of the real nature of the mind and its relation to the body, the brain and the nervous system.
Despite the generally idealist thrust of the Discourse, Descartes’ materialist physics and biology keep on intruding. He cannot, for example, conceal his enthusiasm for Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, to which he dedicates no fewer than six pages. Yet when he comes to the vexed question of the relationship of mind and body, he takes refuge in unscientific and metaphysical concepts. He locates the soul in the so-called ‘pineal gland’ in the centre of the brain, purely because all the other parts of the brain are double, and therefore disqualified from acting as the organ of the soul, which would thereby presumably end up with a bad case of double-vision!
The problem with all this is that, if thought and matter are considered as completely separate, by what means are they united and kept together? The only option open to Descartes was to bring in an external agent – divine intervention. Even so, it is impossible to see how they can have any effect upon each other. By what mechanism could they interpenetrate? For example, the mind can will that I lift my arm, but how can it actually lift it? Descartes’ disciple, Geulinx, answered with admirable frankness that it could not, that the fact that my arm rises at the same time as I will it to was mere coincidence. This brings out the contradiction of the Cartesian (referring to Descartes) philosophy, the unresolved dualism, which was its Achilles’ heel.
Despite its weaknesses, Descartes’ philosophy had a notably progressive side. Its advances in science stimulated the growth of natural science in France. Philosophically, Descartes’ idealism was overthrown by the prevailing materialist trend of the Enlightenment, though he influenced people like La Mettrie. But outside France his ideas were the starting point for two of the greatest philosophers of all, Spinoza and Leibniz.
SPINOZA
Benedictus (Baruch) Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, the son of a Jewish merchant, one of many who had fled from Portugal and Spain to escape from religious persecution. From his youth, Spinoza showed himself to be a fearless searcher after truth, prepared to defend his views regardless of the consequences to himself. It was intended that he should carry on the family business, but in 1656, despite having been a diligent student of the Bible and the Talmud, he fell foul of the orthodox rabbis. He was offered 1,000 florins a year to keep silent, but refused and was cursed and expelled from the Jewish community for his “wrong opinions” and “horrible heresies”. Fearing an attempt on his life, he had to flee from Amsterdam. He took up residence at Rijnsburg near Leiden, where he earned his living polishing lenses, while dedicating his spare time to his philosophical writings.
As an outcast himself, Spinoza became friendly with the members of some of the smaller Protestant sects, related to the Anabaptists, who were themselves the victims of persecution and who were open to discussions of new ideas. At this time, the ideas of Descartes were the subject of a raging controversy in the Netherlands. In 1656, university professors were required to take an oath that they would not propound Cartesian ideas which caused offence. To the little circle around Spinoza, Descartes was seen as a source of inspiration, as a brave soul who refused to base his opinions on mere tradition, and affirmed that all we know is known by the ‘natural light’ of reason. Descartes was an inspiration to Spinoza, but the latter had too keen an intellect to accept him uncritically.
This was an age of great discoveries. Science was beginning to stretch its wings, and the old Aristotelian world view was being replaced by the new scientific-mechanistic view of nature. Galileo himself had written that he believed that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics. Spinoza’s whole outlook was dominated by a passionate interest in nature and science. He conducted a correspondence with the English chemist Robert Boyle, discussed comets with Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, and commented on Descartes’ laws of motion and the theories of Huygens.
The Republic of the Netherlands was the freest country in Europe at this time. The Dutch bourgeoisie had succeeded in throwing off the yoke of Spanish domination by a revolutionary struggle in which it leaned for support on the lower middle class and semi-proletarian masses. In 1579, the Northern provinces of the Protestant Netherlands came together to form the Union of Utrecht, out of which the Dutch Republic emerged. Article Three of the Union proclaimed religious toleration as a basic principle. However, from the outset this was opposed by the powerful sect of ‘strict’ or ‘precise’ Calvinists, who wanted only one official Church in Holland – their own.
At the Synod of Dordrecht (1618-19) they succeeded in getting Calvinism recognised as the official religion. But the liberal Johan de Witt, who was the leader of the Netherlands from 1653 to 1672, stood firm against religious intolerance. Spinoza did not stand aloof from the political struggle. He set aside work on his Ethics in order to publish a book in defence of the freedom of speech and thought, the Treatise on Theology and Politics, which appeared in 1670. This earned him the bitter enmity of the strict Calvinists, who were scandalised by his attempts to show that the Bible is not to be seen as containing philosophical or scientific truths.
In July 1670, the Synod declared the Treatise an “evil and blasphemous book.” An anonymous pamphlet attacking de Witt described the book as “spawned in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil”, and that it was published “with the knowledge of Mr. Johan de Witt”.[9] In 1672, a French army invaded the Dutch Republic and de Witt was murdered by a mob in The Hague. For opportunist reasons, the stadtholder, William III of Orange, sided with the Calvinists. Two years later the Treatise was banned. For the rest of his short life, Spinoza was forced to keep his head down. Tragically, his masterpiece, the Ethics, was never published in his lifetime, for fear of the reaction of the Church. It only appeared in 1677, the year the great man died of consumption.
Spinoza was one of those true geniuses who carried out a real revolution in philosophy. Taking as his starting point the philosophy of Descartes, he completely transformed it, and in so doing, laid the basis for a genuinely scientific approach to nature. “It is therefore worthy of note”, wrote Hegel, “that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy.”[10] Not only Hegel, but Goethe, Schiller, Marx, and the young Schelling were much influenced by Spinoza. When Einstein was engaged in a philosophical dispute with Niels Bohr over the fundamental problems of quantum mechanics, he wrote that he would rather have ‘old Spinoza’ as a referee instead of Bertrand Russell or Rudolf Carnap.
Maybe that is why, with his customary arrogance, Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, writes that the whole of Spinoza’s “metaphysic” is:
[I]ncompatible with modern logic and with scientific method. Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning; when we successfully infer the future, we do so by means of principles which are not logically necessary, but are suggested by empirical data. And the concept of substance, upon which Spinoza relies, is one which neither science nor philosophy can nowadays accept.[11]
The whole point is that Spinoza, by not restricting himself to the narrow confines of empirical philosophy, was able to transcend the limits of the mechanistic science of the day. While Berkeley and Hume led philosophy into a blind alley (and they would have done the same to science, had it paid any attention to them, which fortunately it did not), Spinoza brilliantly showed the way forward. In spite of the ridiculous pretensions of Russell and his fellow logical positivists, who – without the slightest basis – put themselves forward as the supreme guardians of an alleged ‘scientific method’ arbitrarily defined by themselves, science proceeds in an entirely different way to that indicated in these lines.
In particular, the role of great hypotheses in pointing scientific research in the right direction has been fundamental. And, by definition, a hypothesis can only be based on a limited number of ‘facts’. It must involve reasoning, and also courage and imagination. How much time and effort would have been saved if scientists had paid attention to Kant’s nebular theory of the origin of the solar system, for example? On the other hand, how much time is now being wasted in the search for ‘cold, dark matter’, which is based upon no ‘observed facts’ whatsoever, and which is intended to support a cosmological hypothesis more fantastic than anything Spinoza ever thought of.
It is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that – from Spinoza down to the great French materialists – it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and left the justification in detail to the natural science of the future.[12]
Spinoza, by the strength of reason, and with the very limited scientific results available to him, arrived at one of the greatest hypotheses of all time. Breaking with Descartes, with his notion of a body without a soul and a soul without a body, he advanced the idea that body and mind are two attributes of one and the same thing. The universe is not composed of mind and matter, as alleged by Descartes’ dualism. There is only a single Substance, which contains within itself all the attributes of thought and being. It is infinite and eternal, and possesses all the potential to give rise to the abundance of phenomena we see in the universe.
Spinoza gives this Substance the name of “God”. But in reality, to make God equal to nature is to abolish God – a fact which was not lost on Spinoza’s enemies when they accused him of atheism. In Spinoza’s universe, infinite and eternal, and therefore uncreated and unbounded by heaven or hell, there is no room for a separate deity. Indeed, there is no room for anything whatsoever except Substance, which is just another way of saying nature.
Thus, in a strange way, the philosophy of Spinoza, despite its idealist appearance, is the real point of departure for materialism in the dialectical, that is, non-mechanical sense of the word. All that is necessary is to substitute the word ‘matter’ for ‘God’ and we get a perfectly consistent materialist position. As Marx wrote in a letter to Lassalle on 31 May 1858:
Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.[13]
The great admiration of Marx and Engels for Spinoza was revealed by Plekhanov, who recalls a conversation he had with Engels, by then an old man, in 1889:
“So do you think”, I asked, “old Spinoza was right when he said that thought and extent are nothing but two attributes of one and the same substance?” “Of course,” Engels replied, “old Spinoza was quite right.”[14]
The existence of the material universe is taken as an axiom. The model for Spinoza was geometry, which sets out with axioms: ‘self-evident’ assertions which require no proof. Yet the same people who are prepared to accept on trust the axioms of Euclid (which, incidentally, far from being self-evident truths, are open to serious objections) nevertheless display extreme reluctance to admit the reality of the material world, declaring this to be beyond our knowledge to assert. However, this same material world is the starting point of all our experience and knowledge. “God or a substance consisting of attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists”, proclaims Spinoza.[15] Moreover, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed:
Matter is the same everywhere, and its parts are not distinguished one from the other except in so far as we conceive matter to be affected in various ways, whence its parts are distinguished one from the other modally but not in reality. E.g., we can conceive water, in so far as it is water, to be divided and its parts separated one from the other: but not in so far as it is corporeal substance, for then it is neither separated nor divided. Again, water, in so far as it is water, can be made and destroyed, but in so far as it is substance it can neither be made nor destroyed.[16]
God thus has no existence separate and apart from the material world, which has not been created because it has always existed. He is ‘free’ – to obey the laws of nature, and so on. In other words, ‘God’ is only nature. This pantheism of Spinoza is really a thinly-disguised materialism. Despite its peculiar form (probably an unsuccessful attempt to ward off accusations of atheism), this is head and shoulders above the mechanistic outlook of contemporary scientists. Instead of the mechanical conception of matter being moved by an external force, here we have matter which moves according to its own inherent laws, it is ‘its own cause’.
Thought can have no existence apart from Substance (matter). It is an attribute of matter organised in a certain way, “consequently thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, which is comprehended through this and now through that attribute.” In other words, thought and matter are “one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways”.[17] This is a real breakthrough. In essence, we have here a correct assessment of the relation between thought and being; not, as in Descartes, a radical separation of the two, but their dialectical unity. Not thought opposed to matter, but matter that thinks. Here, Spinoza comes close to an overtly materialist position: “The mind”, he says, “has no knowledge of itself save in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of the body”.[18] And again: “For the human body … is affected by external bodies in many ways and disposed to affect external bodies in many ways. But the human mind … must perceive all things which happen in the human body.”[19]
This presentation was far superior to the crude conception of mechanical materialism which saw thought as a material substance secreted from the brain, like sweat from the sweat glands. Spinoza, following Descartes, says that thought differs from matter in that it has no extension. It is not a material thing, but the very function of the brain itself, its essential property. Thought is not merely an abstract contemplative activity, but the way in which thinking beings react to their environment at the conscious level. It is not possible to separate thought from all other human activities. Thought, as Spinoza understood, is one of the attributes of highly organised matter, nature that thinks, and not something opposed to nature:
If this were so, it must seem most odd that consciousness and nature, thinking and being, the laws of thought and the laws of nature, should so closely correspond. But if we then ask what thought and consciousness are and whence they come, we find that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature, who has developed in and along with his environment; whence it is self-evident that the products of the human brain, which in the last analysis are also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature’s interconnections but correspond to them.[20]
Here thought and matter are different but not mechanically opposed, mutually exclusive opposites. Spinoza understood that matter (“Substance”) contains within itself all that is necessary to give rise to thought. Given the right concatenation of factors, organic matter arises out of inorganic matter. And even the most primitive life forms can evolve to produce thinking beings. There is not, as Descartes thought, an absolute dividing line separating organic from inorganic matter, or man from the animals. In all these ideas, Spinoza showed himself to be far in advance of his times.
Spinoza believed that mastery over nature and the improvement of man were the main purpose of the pursuit of knowledge. In the field of ethics and morality too, he defends very advanced ideas. He correctly understood that morality was relative:
As for the terms good and bad, they also mean nothing positive in things considered in themselves, nor are they anything else than modes of thought, or notions, which we form from the comparison of things with each other. For 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. Although this be so, these words must be retained by us.[21]
He rejected the idea of free will, and instead advocated a thoroughly determinist position. There are no ‘free’ actions, in the sense that all actions are caused by something, whether we are aware of it or not. Spinoza was the first one to give a dialectical appraisal of the relation between freedom and necessity, when he pointed out that real freedom consists in the understanding of necessity. True freedom does not consist in denying the existence of the objective laws of nature, but in striving to understand them in order to gain mastery over them.
He opposed prejudice and superstition wherever he found them and, long before the French Enlightenment, decided to summon all prejudices to the “court of reason”. For those who take refuge in the will of God, “the asylum of ignorance”, he has nothing but contempt. In the following passage, he was undoubtedly speaking from painful personal experience:
Thus again, when they see the human body they are amazed, and as they know not the cause of so much art, they conclude that it was made not by mechanical art, but divine or supernatural art, and constructed in such a manner that one part does not injure another. And hence it comes about that someone who wishes to seek out the true causes of miracles, and to understand the things of nature like a man of learning, and not stare at them in amazement like a fool, is widely deemed heretical and impious, and proclaimed such by those whom the mob adore as the interpreters of nature and the Gods.[22]
The basic idea of Spinoza’s philosophy is monism – the idea that all things are one. All the myriad forms of existence, the shapes, colours, forms of movement, are only different expressions of the same Substance, which can assume an infinite variety of forms. These accidental, temporary phenomena he calls ‘modi’ (singular, modus). They are the forms which matter assumes, continually coming into being and disappearing, like the restless waves on a mighty ocean. But these transitory forms of being can have no separate existence independent from Substance, which is unbounded and eternal, and which, operating according to its own laws, must give rise to an unlimited number of particular, finite forms. These forms, in turn, are not free agents, but subject to natural laws which determine the existence of all things. Through the agency of reason, it is possible to understand these laws and thereby achieve freedom consciously to determine our actions and comprehend our true place in the universe.
This imposing philosophy is in complete accord with the discoveries of modern science. All the endless forms of organic and inorganic matter we see in the universe can be reduced to the same substance – molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. According to modern physics, a small number of quarks are put together in different ways to make hundreds of hadrons, which combine to form the nuclei of a hundred or so chemical elements. Together with leptons, they then make up atoms, which then combine to make molecules, out of which everything else is built. The same material substance therefore underlies all the forms of being in the universe. Of course, this picture is much more complicated than the one painted by Spinoza, who had only the scantiest of information to go on. A long period of scientific advance was necessary before his picture of the universe could be properly corroborated. But his hypothesis that everything comes from a common substance has been substantially vindicated.
The principle of monism can be interpreted either in a materialist or an idealist sense. Plato and Hegel were also monists, because they considered that the universe and everything in it was ultimately an expression of the Absolute Idea. Marx and Engels were materialist monists. Spinoza’s case is peculiar. While formally he has to be considered an idealist, there is an element of ambiguity about his Substance which is certainly open to a materialist interpretation. This was quickly grasped by his contemporaries, Jews and Christians alike, who accused him of atheism. All kinds of heinous crimes and immoral ideas were attributed to him. For a long time after his death his name could hardly be mentioned in polite society. The German writer Lessing said that, in his day, a century later, people treated Spinoza ‘like a dead dog’.
Despite all the calumnies, Spinoza’s philosophy stands as a monument to the great and noble spirit that conceived it. His philosophy, which came very close to materialism, inevitably led him to draw the most advanced social conclusions, in contrast to the reactionary misanthropy of Hume and Berkeley. This comes across clearly in the pages of his masterpiece, Ethics:
Man is a God to man. Yet it rarely happens that men live under the guidance of reason, but among them things are in such a state that they are usually envious of or a nuisance to each other. But nevertheless they are scarcely able to lead a solitary life, so that to many the definition of man as a social animal has been very attractive; and in truth things are so ordered that from the common society of men far more conveniences arise than the contrary. Let satirists therefore laugh to their hearts’ content at human affairs, let theologians revile them, and let the melancholy praise as much as they can the rude and uncultivated life: let them despise men and admire the brutes – despite all this, men will find by experience that they can procure with mutual aid far more easily what they need, and avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides, by united forces: to say nothing of how much better it is, and more worthy of our knowledge, to regard the deeds of men rather than those of the brutes.[23]
LEIBNIZ
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
(William Blake, Auguries of Innocence.)
The monist views of Spinoza were challenged by his great contemporary, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), yet another encyclopaedic mind. Leibniz was a mathematician, physicist, geologist, biologist, diplomat, librarian, and historian. He invented infinitesimal calculus, although Newton claimed to have done this earlier. In physics, he anticipated the law of preservation of energy. He is also considered to have been the founder of mathematical logic, although he did not publish his work on this subject.
An objective idealist, Leibniz nevertheless developed dialectics. In his Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin wrote that “Leibniz through theology arrived at the principle of the inseparable (and universal, absolute) connection of matter and motion.”[24] Marx also expressed his admiration for Leibniz.[25] The basis of Spinoza’s philosophy was the single universal substance. Leibniz also starts from the notion of substance but defines it differently. He sees it like living activity, internal motion, and energy. The fundamental difference with Spinoza is that, where he stressed the singleness of being, Leibniz lays all the emphasis on the multiplicity of the universe. For him, the entire universe is composed of an infinite number of substances which he calls ‘monads’. The monads of Leibniz are similar to the idea of atoms. Whilst in Paris, Leibniz met and was influenced by the materialist Gassendi, who had revived interest in the atomistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. For Leibniz, everything is made of monads, including ourselves. However, there are some peculiarities in this theory. To begin with, no monad is like another. Each is its own special world, impenetrable from without. Leibniz thought that no two things in the world were the same. Each monad (and there are an infinite number of them) is also a microcosm, which reflects the universe at large. It is a kind of embryo of the totality of things. Thus, the particular contains the universal.
The entire universe is only the sum total of all the monads. Everything is an aggregate of monads, even the human soul. Moreover, these monads are not dead matter, but centres of living activity, in constant movement and mutation. In many respects, this picture is a striking anticipation of the modern atomistic view of the universe. Leibniz most likely got his idea from observations through a microscope. Thus, he compares bodies to a fish pond in which the smallest drop of water is full of teeming life, although it cannot be said that the pond itself lives. Feuerbach compared Spinoza’s philosophy to a telescope which makes objects visible to the human eye that are otherwise invisible because of their remoteness, whereas that of Leibniz is like a microscope which makes objects visible that are unnoticeable because of their minuteness and fineness. A monad is like an individual cell which contains all the information required to construct an entire body. In the same way, in Capital, Marx derives all the contradictions of capitalism from a single cell, the commodity.
Despite its idealistic form, there is here the germ of a profound idea and a dialectical concept of nature, based on movement, infinite connections, change and evolution from a lower to a higher stage. For example, he distinguishes between different levels of monads, from the lowest rank, analogous to the stage of inorganic nature, in which the life of the monads expresses itself only in the form of motion. There are higher stages, analogous to plants, animals, which culminates in the human soul. “Here is dialectics of a kind”, commented Lenin, “and very profound, despite the idealism and clericalism.”[26] What role does God have in relation to the monads? Not very much, it seems. Leibniz makes God the “sufficient reason” of all the monads. Feuerbach considered him to be only half a Christian, atheist, or a cross between a Christian and a naturalist. As Schwegler remarks: “It was a hard matter for Leibniz to bring – without abandoning the presuppositions of both – his monadology and his Theism into unison.”[27]
Leibniz’s theory of knowledge is in opposition to the empiricism of Locke from the standpoint of objective idealism. Leibniz may be considered the father of German idealism. He is best known for his famous doctrine of “the best of all possible worlds”, according to which it is impossible that there should be any more perfect a world than that which exists. This must have been a comforting thought for the wealthy aristocrats for whom Leibniz worked. But from a philosophical standpoint, their satisfaction would not really be justified. For Leibniz, there are an infinite number of possible worlds, but only one has been chosen by God. In other words, the world we live in at this particular moment is the “best” one because it is the only one. However, the same Leibniz writes in his Monadology number 22: “Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.”[28]
Leibniz’s dialectical philosophy, which echoes Heraclitus and anticipates Hegel, was far from defending the idea of an unchanging status quo, “because all bodies are in a state of perpetual flux like rivers, and the parts are continually entering in or passing out.”[29]
In the works of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, we see brilliant conclusions reached on the basis of the developments in science. These achievements, however, were held back by the fact that science at this stage remained subordinate to traditional philosophy. Feuerbach grasped this contradiction in the works of these men when he said that: “Leibniz and Descartes are idealists only in a general sense, but when it comes to particular things they are materialists.”[30] For science to advance – and with it philosophy – it had to release itself from what was known as Natural Philosophy and Metaphysics, so that thought could go from the realm of speculation to the realm of practice. Teodor Oizerman commented:
The rationalistic systems of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, for all their theological assumptions, were related to the positive sciences. Seventeenth-century metaphysics “made discoveries in mathematics, physics and other exact sciences which seemed to come within its scope. This semblance was done away with as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The positive sciences broke away from metaphysics and marked out their independent fields. The whole wealth of metaphysics now consisted only of beings of thought and heavenly things, at the very time when real beings and earthly things began to be the centre of all interest.”
So, the connection between the metaphysical (mainly idealistic) systems and the positive sciences did not at all spring from the nature of idealism but from the fact that the positive sciences had yet to separate from philosophy. But when this process was in the main complete, it transpired that the metaphysical systems, with their claim to knowledge of some super-physical reality and the establishment of a closed system of perfect knowledge, ran into conflict with the actual development of scientific knowledge, which increasingly concentrated on vital, terrestrial problems. The metaphysical systems were discredited and were vanquished by French eighteenth-century materialism.[31]
Endnotes
[1] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 35.
[2] R. Descartes, A Discourse on Method, p. 23.
[3] Ibid., p. 8.
[4] Ibid., p. 36.
[5] K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, MECW, Vol. 4, p. 125.
[6] R. Descartes, A Discourse on Method, p. 167.
[7] Ibid., pp. 44-5.
[8] Ibid., pp. 45-6.
[9] R. Scruton, Spinoza, p. 14.
[10] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 3, p. 257.
[11] B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 560.
[12] F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 25-26.
[13] K. Marx, ‘Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, 31 May 1858’, MECW, Vol. 40, p. 316.
[14] G. V. Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 2, p. 339.
[15] B. Spinoza, Ethics, p. 9.
[16] Ibid., p. 16.
[17] Ibid., p. 42.
[18] Ibid., p. 59.
[19] Ibid., p. 53.
[20] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 44.
[21] B. Spinoza, Ethics, p. 141.
[22] Ibid., pp. 34-5.
[23] Ibid., pp. 161-2.
[24] V. I. Lenin, ‘Conspectus of Feuerbach’s Exposition, Analysis and Critique of the Philosophy of Leibniz’, LCW, Vol. 38, p. 379.
[25] See ‘Letter to Engels, 10 May 1870’.
[26] V. I. Lenin, ‘Conspectus of Feuerbach’s Exposition, Analysis and Critique of the Philosophy of Leibniz’, LCW, Vol. 38, p. 383.
[27] A. Schwegler, History of Philosophy, p. 198.
[28] G. W. F. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics: Correspondence with Arnauld, and Monadology, p. 256.
[29] Ibid., p. 267.
[30] L. Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, The Fiery Brook, p. 185.
[31] T. Oizerman, The Making of the Marxist Philosophy, pp. 293-4.