Spinoza?

Spinoza was a guest star in one of my classes today, the first time in decades. The long maligned and now endlessly celebrated Dutch Jewish philosopher is central to the modern history of "pantheism," and so plays an important part in Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies, focus of one of my classes this semester. Students are required to trace some of Rubenstein's important sources, and so we had two back-to-back presentations on Spinoza today, one on the Ethics and one on the Theological-Political Tractatus. One presentation started with this image, which was new to me, and which I took for something recent and second rate. Rediscovered less than a decade ago, it turns out it may be the only portrait for which Spinoza sat, though the evidence for it is circumstantial. It's dated to 1666 and probably by one Barend Graat, known to have known people Spinoza knew, but the pagan Roman background is improbable. Still, it looks like a graduate student in philosophy and that was enough for my students. 

I've long resisted Spinoza's charms, since he was he has so often been contrasted (always favorably!) with Leibniz, my dissertation subject, but there is a nerdy "charisma" to him, as one student presenter put it today. Pantheologies gives pride of place to Spinoza, too. In what she calls a "faithful betrayal," Rubenstein argues that the pantheistic view Spinoza lays out is more pluralistic than he could imagine, given 17th century science. I'm (so far) resisting the temptation to say that if you want a pluralist Spinoza you need look no farther than Leibniz. 

But isn't Leibniz in the American philosophical canon in part because William James - another star of Pantheologies - thought he offered a pluralistic alternative to the Spinozan monism of Josiah Royce? (That claim, made in an essay by Bruce Kuklick called "Seven thinkers and how they grew," was the basis of the last class I taught in which Spinoza came up, "Spinoza, Leibniz, Royce and James," in a different life long ago.) I'm not quite ready to trot out the "Monadology," but Leibniz' - quite Spinozan - theory of the "striving possibles" seems like something Rubenstein's "hypothetical pluralist pantheist" might like.

Missed your birthday

Yesterday was Leibniz' 372nd... it took a Google Doodle to remind me!

Kant we all just get along?

My second date with Leibnizian destiny has come and gone: the panel of the Philosophy of Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion. (My talk: "Posthumous Sins: Lessing and the Legacies of Leibniz.")This was this group's first panel devoted to our Universalgenie and I suspect it will be the last. Not because the papers weren't good (though I dare say mine was the only one written for the occasion and to the question of the panel), but it's just not a group which gets the interest of the history of philosophy. The discussion, like the other papers, was about already canonical philosophers: Spinoza, Kant, Schleiermacher. Silly me, trying to historicize the way we subordinate Leibniz to these other thinkers' agendas! (I heard discussion more germane to the sorts of ideas I was hoping to provoke in the Popular Culture and Religion Group's session on medieval religion before the printing press!)

In a strange way, I felt protective for Leibniz, and even proprietary - strange because, of course, I have not occupied myself with Leibniz at all these several years. Do I need to find a way to write up what these two reunions with the old flame have produced - a sense (and argument!) that Leibniz is someone from whose intellectual practice we can learn? My Leibniz was a situated, engaged thinker whose Theodicy was intended to support lived religion, and who never published his own system because maintaining the larger, open-ended conversation was more important to him? Even if I were right about that (I'm not sure I am) would anyone care? It's been fun, though, reliving the old thrill...

More or Lessing

My second Leibniz gig is upon me - well, a week off. This one is a panel of the Philosophy of Religion Group at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Chicago, and our topic is "Leibniz and his Legacy in the Philosophy of Religion." My paper is called "Posthumous Sins: Lessing and the Legacies of Leibniz." It focuses on a sneaky little essay Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published in 1773 called "Leibniz von den ewigen Strafen" challenging the widely held view that Leibniz only pretended to support the doctrine of eternal punishment but really believed in universal salvation. Leibniz was not a hypocrite, argues Lessing. But he also didn't mean what the orthodox meant by eternal punishment. I'm introducing the debate but my main concern, like Lessing's, is with a broader question - how to read Leibniz - and an even broader one opening out from that one - how to be a philosopher of religion.

As it happens neither Lessing nor those he is criticizing think that Leibniz actually believed in eternal damnation in hell. All of them offer reasons why the arguments clearly in support of orthodox views of hell in Theodicy should not be taken at face value. But why the apparent endorsements at all? One Eberhard thinks Leibniz can't help himself, craving the approbation of all and so thinking of crafty ways of marketing his system as compatible even with the most errant views. Lessing thinks this sells Leibniz short. What Leibniz is really doing is what ancient philosophers did: meeting their interlocutors where they were, finding the grain of truth in their otherwise erroneous systems (for there is no view actually held be someone which doesn't have some truth to it), and guiding them with its help towards more truth.

Leibniz's own view, Lessing argues, is that the doctrine of eternal punishment contains a valuable truth: everything is connected, and so every act has infinite consequences. Since God has so arranged nature that evil is punished (the agent's perfection is diminished), every sinful act produces its own infinite series of punishments. That's it! No need for a hell at all, just immortality. And for all we know the infinite duration of punishment is compatible with, even constitutive of, a kind of restoration too. So you can have your universalism without giving up philosophical rigor if you work with rather than reject tradition. What's not to like?

Lessing's larger point, which is also mine, is the approach to religious ideas at work here. It is not sufficient to work out a philosophy of religion. You must engage with religious traditions, turning and turning them until you see the truth concealed in them - for every perspective contains a truth to be found nowhere else. We may wonder if Leibniz or Lessing really lived out this preachment in practice (Leibniz "struck fire from stones," Lessing concedes, "but he did not conceal his own fire in them") but the idea is appealing, compatible with dialogic understandings of knowledge and even of truth.

In God's hands

At the Prado today, José Ribera's "La Trinidad" (1635) - this is the upper half, taken from the generous image on the museum website - took me back to Lisbon, which I realize I haven't told you much about. This isn't the occasion for a full report, but at least a swatch...

I remember being blown away the last time I saw this work, especially the contrast between the Caravaggiesque world of the dead Christ and the cool pastel world of his father (except for his hands). This time I was struck anew by the shattered look on God's face - it's more than impassive, especially when you put it together with the infinite tenderness of those hands.

This painting took me back to our conference in Lisbon because most of the people there were philosophers doing theodicy; I was one of the few who think the doing of theodicy by human beings an offense to the dead of Lisbon, and to God. Central to my account of Leibniz (hermeneutics of charity or retrieval gone amuck?) was that he wouldn't have us think that any evil could be permitted without the profoundest regret, even in God. Since then I've also become grateful that the dry philosophical theodicies of those days have given way to responses more deeply rooted in Christian resources, including non-verbal ones. And the Trinity, which allows God to suffer with us, and attend our suffering with something like the shattered expression of this depiction, not the triumphalism of most theodicies (and many depictions of the Trinity).

Now I don't know what Ribera meant here. It'd be interesting to find out. But I have no doubt: there's an authentic theodicy in those hands.

Ferment

The Templeton-funded Leibniz conference in Lisbon has ended. This is a picture of some of the detritus of the final port tasting which capped three days of often very opulent feasting. Or is it a representation of the "multiverse" the final two papers discussed as ways Leibniz' ideas about the best possible world and about the incarnation (!) might be extended or amplified by today's discussions? I didn't know about multiverses before this, to my shame, and the six varieties of port have erased most of what I thought I learned. "Spatio-temporally but not causally related, issuing from the same God" is all I remember.

Worldly wisdom

Between preparation for classes, running the First Year Program and ensuring the Buddhism and the Future of the Liberal Arts roundtable was a hit, I have been finding little bits of time to reflect on the paper I'm giving in Lisbon paper just over a fortnight hence. (!) For the last week or so it’s been in my #1 back burner space, and this weekend I was able to give it some relatively undivided attention.

I think I’ve got not only an interesting argument but a very interesting one. I proposed the idea “Leibniz’ Theodicy as a Metaphysics for Lived Religion” originally because I could rehearse my favorite past argument about Leibniz (last presented at the International Leibniz Congress in Berlin in 2001!) and because I had “lived religion” on the brain. Perhaps I also thought it might give me an occasion - that is, force me - to reflect on what the study of lived religion has to say to the theodicy crowd to which I used to belong. In any case it has, and some things have emerged which are, at least to me, new and exciting.

What I knew I would say was that Leibniz’ Theodicy is meant not as a tome of philosophical theology, intended for the life of contemplation, but as a toolkit for helping people get over philosophical doubts which threaten to scuttle their active lives of ethics. This isn’t the way most people read Theodicy and it’ll be fun to try it out again. (Reception in Berlin was pretty enthusiastic; I take my invitation to the current conference to be related to it.) The infamous claim that this is "the best of all possible worlds" (BOAPW) is not prospective or even summary, but to be used only as we pick ourselves back up again after attempts to enact what we take to be God’s antecedent will meet with failure. It has no further content, since the status quo is no indication of what the future should be like.

BOAPW engages us not at the level of the contemplative philosopher, parsing arguments, but at the level of the agent, trying to work out “in his little world” what God calls him to do - a level at which, I argued, we are not trying to track this world but imagining possible worlds of good and striving to realize them. Say I try to help someone in distress, something God surely antecedently wants, but she is swept away by a wave before I can get to her. I am not to conclude that helping people in distress is wrong, or that God has no care for those in distress (including this unfortunate), but rather that in this case, and for reasons I may never know, other goods prevailed. We all know about such difficult choices from our own lives, and so we can understand – if only in a schematic way - what it means that God cannot promote every possible good but only the best combination. Leibniz thinks this recognition allows of a "Fatum Christianum," a resilience which is not just Stoic resignation at necessity but joyful acceptance as we recall that God is a "good master," whose perfect wisdom means that the better outcome will, in fact, emerge. Théodicée for Leibniz means not the justification of God (to and by humans) but the "justice of God," a justice congruent with ours; the experience of divine justice, if only schematically, reaffirms our capacity to make right judgments, and our power and responsibility to act on them.

The BOAPW argument in this way is in fact the opposite of what most people take a theodicy to be - a final closed account of the place and nature of evil in the world. I think it's really a prophylactic against just this, refusing us that closure now (even as we may hope to glimpse it in heaven) but without slipping into claims of mystery. It does this by turning us away from judging the world as a whole. We can't do that - it's not only infinite, but its "bestness" relative to others involves comparison among infinities (I §10) - but we also don't need to. Leibniz’ genius is to see in the common claim of BOAPW (he claims it's neither new nor rare, but implied by many stances) a way of domesticating the mystery, the infinity, of God in a way which affirms our grasp of the smaller world in which we live and work.

All of that is a dozen years old. In 2001, as in the dissertation I was riffing on, my argument was all about ethics. (The diss was called "The Ethics of Leibniz' Theodicy" and the Berlin talk "The Moral Import of Possible Worlds.") Now my topic is lived religion. Is it similar enough that the same argument can be made? I was drifting away from the philosophical theodicists and ethicists already, more interested in lived theodicy and ethics. But I'm happy to report it's more than that! You’ve been hearing about lived religion in its many forms all over this blog, from the course last Fall to the ERSEH project, from my presentations on everyday religion in India and on queer Christianities to my current first year seminar, so I don't need to say much. Just one thing, well two, okay three.

First, for the lived religion scholar "religious creativity" (Robert Orsi's term) is not the monopoly of geniuses and specialists, but something in which everyone engages. (Everyone, even religious geniuses and specialists!)
Leibniz, while he was doubtless partial to princesses and emperors, was really concerned for everyone. Unlike most of Leibniz' works the Theodicy was published, and published in French, to make it accessible to a wide reading public.

Second, lived religion scholars find that people are eclectic in their religious lives, syncretic and pragmatic bricoleurs. They are unconcerned with consistency or the purity of systems. (Remember those 28% of American Catholics who reported believing in reincarnation.) This horrifies systematizers and those who make their livings running religious monopolies. To them it seems  unmoored and self-indulgent, but to lived religion scholars these feats of bricolage can come with the imprimatur of real life. (One need not define everyday life in secular terms.) It's not that anything goes, either, as - especially when understood in its social and intersubjective context - lived religion exhibits what Meredith McGuire has called a "practical coherence" (Lived Religion, 15), which is not quite what Bourdieu meant by the "logic of practice" but closer to Michel de Certeau.
Leibniz was a notorious eclectic.

Third, and this is where the dovetail with Leibniz is most exciting, lived religion is all about what Orsi calls "world-making." What makes lived religion more than just corner cutting, making do, little patches and fixes is that – at least at those moments which he calls moments of rupture – people are refashioning worlds. Worldmaking is a slippery term but fruitful. It's a little bit like what Weber in his theodicy theorizing meant by the intellectual's need to make the world a "meaningful cosmos," concerned with the "practical irrationality" of the world (you can't be an effective agent in it), but smaller of scale. The "sacred canopy" maintained by an entire society which Peter Berger made of Weber's ideas seems unnecessary; people get by with what Christian Smith has called "sacred umbrellas."  
The scene where a religious world is remade is, methinks, precisely where Leibniz thought the BOAPW argument had its place. BOAPW is not itself a picture of a livable world, but it helps us get from the ruins of one to a more promising new one. It explains that our efforts to imagine and act in worlds are well-grounded, but also why they encounter roadblocks. This is what I'm calling a metaphysics for lived religion - or shall I call it a metatheodicy?

This is plenty for a paper. It has interesting implications for reading Theodicy and for understanding Leibniz’ religion more generally, as well as his place in the history of the philosophy of religion. It shines light on an aspect of the BOAPW argument that is not often noted, and builds a bridge between "practical" and "theoretical theodicy" that is not itself - as many vindications of practical theodicy are - too general to be of practical use. In practice, consolation and encouragement are more important than explanation, and invocations of mystery are common, but this doesn't tell us a thing about what consoles or encourages in a particular case. There are best practices in practical theodicy, and theoretical concerns come to play here as well. A question I'll leave my Lisbon audience with: when and why - and how - is a religious world so shattered by calamity that people abandon theism altogether?

But there’s more, and this is the thing I wonder if I tasked myself with this topic to work my way through. I've been arguing for yonks that theodicy is a modern project, usually citing Odo Marquard, and have offered all sorts of explanations for its emergence. But only recently have I really started to come to terms with the fact that ours is now a post-theodicistic as well as a post-modern age. (Smith's sacred umbrellas were harbingers for me of this understanding.) This connects to the rise and fall of secularization theory, which I'm persuaded has something to do with the rise and fall of the nation state system. What would a sacred canopy for a pluralistic, syncretic and transnational family look like?

I recently happened on a talk by the sociologist Peter Beyer which has me thinking excited new thoughts about all of this. (I've assigned it as part of my first year seminar, a pendant to and upsetting of Weber's "Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions.") Beyer argues that the various institutions/spheres which became functionally differentiated as a result of modernization - the part of secularization theory everyone accepts - are contingent and might have taken on quite different characters. What determines the forms they take is what he calls the "mutual modeling" of different spheres, and what defines the period just ending is a mutual modeling of church and state whose emblem is the Treaty of Westphalia, birth certificate of the modern state system.

Beyer is interested in "post-Westphalian" things (now religion mutually models with media and economy, he suggests), but I'm drawn to the pre-Westphalian, too. And specifically to Leibniz, whose world was the Holy Roman Empire, a world not of self-defining states but an endless self-callibration of parts and parties. A model for what comes before the age of theodicy? BOAPW in action? Lived religion as politics? Stay tuned!

Mitteleuropa

Returning to Leibniz' early years with Antognazza's help, I'm encountering obscure sixteenth and seventeenth century figures I haven't seen in years - Ramus (above), Keckerman, Alsted (below),

Bisterfeld, Comenius, Jakob Thomasius, Calixt (below), etc. It's an unexpected pleasure! Antognazza's argument that Leibniz' concerns and approaches were rooted in specifically Central European traditions rings

true, probably because my view of Leibniz was shaped by Kurt Huber (below, better known as the patron of the White Rose in Hitler's Munich). I miss the non-modern messiness of early modern Mitteleuropa.

Unseeded?

So I'm trying to figure out what to say about "Leibniz' Theodicy as a Metaphysics for Lived Religion." When I proposed the topic, I vaguely had in mind the presentation I gave at the International Leibniz Congress in 2001 on the Theodicy as ethics - but also, of course, "lived religion," buzzword of the year. The thought was that Leibniz' idea of possible worlds encourages and emboldens a situated experimental and resilient practical engagement with the world, one which refuses to accept that things must stay the way they are, avoids grand narratives, and absorbing the failure of some of our world-improving projects with deference to divine wisdom.

Not a bad argument, and probably what I'll wind up making in Lisbon, with a quick resume of my Theodicy interpretation, an overview of the project of "lived religion," and some telling examples, perhaps some from Leibniz and some from religion (sociologist David Smilde's concept of "imaginative rationality" is promising).

But today I was reading in Maria Rosa Antognazza's big intellectual biography of Leibniz (2009), which claims to provide a synoptic and coherent narrative of the polymath's life and work which no earlier generation could achieve - and some critical assessments of it. Antognazza distinguishes her project from that of earlier biographers stumped by the sheer variety of Leibniz' theoretical and practical projects, starting with Fontenelle in 1717, and the generally accepted response - focusing on only one or two strands of his oeuvre, ignoring or even deploring the others. Recent scholarship allows us to see that 

Throughout his life Leibniz nursed essentially the same dream: the dream of recalling the multiplicity of human knowledge to a logical, metaphysical, and pedagogical unity, centred on the theistic vision of the Christian tradition and aimed at the common good. (6)

On the basis of a broad and deep reading of Leibniz' work and the latest scholarship in and beyond the history of philosophy she promises to stitch back together the man dismembered by Fontenelle and his successors by emphasizing the organic development of a generally harmonious system of thought and action within a particular historical context (10). Even his philosophical works can't be understood without awareness of his non-philosophical projects. That fits my understanding of the man - but then I focused on his philosophical theology (as Antognazza did in her first book), not his work in mathematics, law, history, physics, metaphysics, etc. (Intriguingly she argues also that Leibniz only makes sense if understood as a German, a thinker of the Holy Roman Empire: more, doubtless, anon on that.)

One scholar whose work I admire has serious "methodological" concerns about Antognazza's project, though. In order to make of Leibniz' life and work a whole, he alleges, she claims that the seeds of all of Leibniz' mature work were there at the start of his career - just as the late "Monadology" would predict: it almost seems as if the most basic features of Leibniz's intellectual system were implicit from the beginning (9). He assails her for the vagueness of the claim, and challenges her specific accounts of alleged early anticipations of mature views on monads, sufficient reason, etc. There's no consensus among scholars about the relationship of Leibniz' early, middle and mature thought. Few believe that Leibniz did not correct and even replace many of his ideas along the way, and everyone knows that his Nachlass is full of semi-serious experiments.

I can't get into the details - I don't know them! But this disagreement got me thinking about Leibniz and "lived religion," and biography. A biography of the whole man clearly makes him more three-dimensional, and will surely help us understand his thought better. (Not everyone would agree with this claim, actually. I remember the rather pained introduction to a biography of Kant, where the biographer had to come to terms with Kant's own apparent contempt for the irrelevance of merely biographical stuff - a contempt I imbibed as an undergraduate in Oxford. Who cares if someone figured something out as a result of love or loss; if it's worth anything it makes philosophical sense, and that's the only reason we could possibly be asked to care about it.)

But the narrative of a whole life inevitably irons out some of the larger and most of the smaller contingencies of a life. (We've seen Margaret Urban Walker's objections to the ideal of the "career self.") Even without the help of the "Monadology," a biographer will plant seeds in her account of her subject's early life to give us something to follow, continuity, tension, tragedy, triumph. I'm not sure you could write a satisfying biography without doing something like that.

What's this got to do with lived religion? Well, one of the emphases of scholars of lived religion is that life is messy, people's religious lives are less coherent than philosophers and theologians demand, and folks are less bothered by that than one might think they should be. They're characterized by a "logic of practices" quite unlike the logic of concepts. It's more like a habitus, a pragmatic social habitus, a process, a modus vivendi and operandi too, savoir faire as well as vivre. And one of my emphases is that this is true not only of lay people but of religious specialists and professionals, too.

Would I dare claim that part of Leibniz' appeal is that his life was so shaggy - and not held back by its prolific messiness but driven by it? Would it be heavy-handed to suggest that this is the form of engaged living the Theodicy was written to promote?

Is the best good enough?

I'm easing myself back into the world of Leibniz' Theodicy with the help of Steven Nadler's The Best of All Possible Worlds, one of a good many books which have appeared since I last occupied myself with these subjects. Nadler comes to Leibniz from Arnauld, Malebranche and Spinoza, so is able to evoke a whole philosophical world convincingly and engagingly. He's also not a Leibnizolater (as I was when I was doing the Leibniz thing), so it's a helpful wake up call to my old reflexes... To tell the truth it's also a reminder of just how weird the history of philosophy can be. Nadler does a remarkable job of making late 17th century debate exciting. At least until that world becomes more real to me again, however, I can't imagine devoting a career to it.

Old friend

It's been years, but I'm about to start keeping company with Leibniz again. Not one but two gigs in the Fall will bring me back to the community of Leibniz scholars of which I was briefly a member through my dissertation work: a conference on the effective history of the Theodicy in Lisbon in October (my slightly crazy topic: "Leibniz' Theodicy as a metaphysics for 'lived religion'"), and a panel on the reception of Leibniz at AAR in November (on Lessing's "Leibniz und die ewigen Strafen"). When my visiting Australian relatives head home, I'll head to the UCSD library to reconnect with the German Universalgenie. This reunion is unexpected - I didn't seek it out - but certainly not unwelcome. And there's something nice about its coming soon after my visit to China, a land from which he felt the West could learn much. (Indeed my only real publication on Leibniz is an extended review of a book on Leibniz and China.)

Fred!

A wise woman I met in Wolfenbüttel half an age ago told me that the secret to scholarly success was being able to return with enthusiasm to something you did a decade before: that's the minimum time it takes for some research you've proposed to get done, written up, accepted for publication, actually published, read, and then finally translated into an invitation. (Needless to say, each of these hurdles is a winnow.) Even in the highly unlikely case where everything works, your work will - like the light from a distant star - seem to your inviter contemporary! And your best chance as a contemporary is to play along. So welcome back, Leibnizian Mark! In the Fall of this year I'll be giving two invited papers on my old flame (my dissertation flame, no less), one reviving an old question - Lessing's "Leibniz von den ewigen Strafen" - and one trying to connect to my current interests - Leibniz as a metaphysics for lived religion.

Possible worlds

I'm usually the person who notices anniversaries when nobody else does. Long before New School at Ninety and Lang @ 25 I embarrassed the folks at the Ethics Department of Tokyo University by showing up there in 1992 saying, "I'm so excited to be here during your centenary year!" (They weren't really all that keen to remember the first half of that history.) So it's interesting when I forget an anniversary. The bicentenary of Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone passed me by entirely in 1993-4, which was sort of a relief. It's a little more awkward to realize that I've not noticed that this year is the tercentenary of Leibniz' Essais de Théodicée, the book on which I wrote my dissertation! Turns out the sneaky Templeton Foundation is making a big deal of it, sponsoring several conferences (here's one), and a new translation - I learned about it when one of the translators came to see me in New York last month, telling me he'd found my work valuable. My work on Leibniz? I could hardly remember it! Indeed, I can't imagine what would make all these people interested in Theodicy in 2010. I've lost the philosophical habit - though not so much of Leibniz that I can't concede there's a possible world in which I'd be all over this anniversary, but still be sure it would not have been as good a world as this one, in which I've moved on.