Comportamiento mecánico de mampostería en compresión diagonal

Mogens Lærke

1 i n t r o d u c t i o n

Spinoza famously concluded the preface of the Tractatus Theologico-

Politicus by requesting that “common people” should not read his book,

because they would only “make trouble by interpreting it perversely,” while insisting that its contents would be “extremely useful” for the “philosophi- cal reader” [philosophe lector].1The question concerning the intended or, as it were, ideal or potential reader of the TTP has been extensively discussed by numerous commentators since Leo Strauss.2 These discussions have been very helpful for clarifying the terms upon which Spinoza’s reason- ing relies and for understanding the motivations which led him to write the treatise. In order to complete such a historical, contextual approach to Spinoza’s text, I believe, however, that we must also take into account the actual readers. The reception of the TTP constitutes an integral part of its historical meaning, whether this reception corresponds to Spinoza’s intentions or not. This applies in particular when it comes to the reception of the book by readers that Spinoza would himself have found suitable. In the following, I will thus consider the question of how informed philo- sophical readers of Spinoza actually did understand him by examining one particular case, namely G. W. Leibniz.

One could object that Leibniz, who grew up in Leipzig in an intellectual milieu which was hardly open to modern philosophy but constituted one of the bastions of Lutheran orthodoxy, was not sufficiently free from such

The text is based on Part ii of my Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La gen`ese d’une opposition complexe. I use the following abbreviations for the works of Leibniz: A= S¨amtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Akademie Verlag. NB: the abbreviation A ii-12 _{refers to the new, improved edition of the}

volume A ii-1; GP = Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt; Dutens = Opera Omnia, ed. L. Dutens; Grua= G. W. Leibniz. Textes in´edits, ed. G. Grua. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.

1 _{Cf. TTP Preface; G iii12.}

2 _{Cf. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp.162–163; Smith, Spinoza, pp. 38–54.}

prejudices as would disqualify him as a true philosophe lector in Spinoza’s eyes. It is an objection easily countered. In fact, Spinoza himself explicitly admitted Leibniz into the circle of “philosophical readers.” Thus, in1671, he offered to send Leibniz a copy of the TTP (implying that he considered him fit to read it). Furthermore, in a letter to Hermann Schuller from1675, Spinoza qualified the German philosopher as “a person of a liberal mind and well versed in every science.”3 There can be no doubt that Spinoza considered Leibniz to be a qualified reader of his book.4

First, I consider in some detail the historical and biographical context of Leibniz’s reception of the TTP. He read the work twice, first around 1670 when he was living in Mainz, and then once again around the end of1675 in Paris. Next, I will turn to a discussion of how Leibniz situated Spinoza and the TTP in the intellectual landscape of the time. I examine how Leibniz interpreted Spinoza’s position in relation to the sect called Socinianism, in relation to the rationalistic biblical exegesis developed by Lodewijk Meyer and, finally, in relation to Thomas Hobbes’s theory of natural right. The objective of these analyses is not to give an exhaustive account of Leibniz’s own position on the issues discussed in the TTP. I have done that elsewhere.5The objective is only to see just how discerning a reader of Spinoza Leibniz was, i.e., to determine the extent to which he recognized the originality of Spinoza’s position.

2 t h e f i r s t r e a d i n g o f t h et t p

The TTP was published anonymously in1670. It did not take long before Leibniz heard the first rumors about the book. As early as October1670, he wrote from Mainz to his former professor in Leipzig, Jacob Thomasius:

3 _{Ep.72, G iv 305; Shirley 941.}

4 _{Spinoza did, however, refuse Schuller’s suggestion that Leibniz should be allowed to consult Tschirn-}

haus’s copy of the Ethics, arguing that it would be “imprudent,” because he did “not understand why he, a councilor of Frankfurt, has gone to France,” and that he would prefer to wait until Tschirnhaus had a “closer knowledge of his character” (Ep.72, G iv 305; Shirley 941). It is not clear what prompted this refusal. Did Spinoza suspect Leibniz of being a spy? Maybe, but Spinoza had also requested Tschirnhaus not to speak about the Ethics with Christian Huygens, which suggests that his cautious attitude towards Leibniz stemmed from worries of a more general nature (cf. Ep.70 and 72, G iv 301–302 and 304–305; Shirley 937–938 and 940–941). In fact, the change of the political situation in Holland in the years after the assassination of the brothers De Witt in1672 had forced Spinoza to become more prudent about the people to whom he vented his opinions. Only a few months before writing to Schuller, in July1675, he had been forced to abandon the publication of the Ethics because of rumors “that a certain book of mine about God was in the press, and in it I endeavour to show that there is no God” (Ep.68; Shirley 935).

I have recently seen a tract from Leipzig, no doubt written by you, where you have dealt with the intolerably licentious book on the liberty to philosophize in the way it deserved. It seems that the author follows closely not only the politics, but also the religion of Hobbes, as it has been sufficiently outlined in his Leviathan, a book as monstrous as the title suggests. For there is nothing in the wonderful critique of the Sacred Scripture put into effect by this audacious man [homo audax], the seeds of which have not been sowed by Hobbes in an entire chapter of the Leviathan.6 The “tract” [programma] in question was a dissertation by Thomasius entitled Adversus anonymum de libertate philosophandi which had been published on the occasion of a lecture he had delivered on May8, 1670.7 In this text, Thomasius rejected the “liberty to philosophize” defended by the anonymous author. He denounced him as a “naturalist” nourished by the “two most pestilential movements of the century,” namely “libertin- ism” and “contractualism,” and argued that, by eliminating the speculative elements of religion, Spinoza’s conception of faith was, in fact, atheist. Furthermore, he compared Spinoza’s position to the political philosophy contained in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and his conception of religion to the deism developed by Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury in the De veritate (1624).

Leibniz himself had acquired the TTP around the end of1670, quite probably before he knew the identity of the author. The marginal notes in his copy of the TTP indicate that he was interested in Spinoza’s biblical exegesis, and in particular the question of the authorship of the Pentateuch.8 In a letter to Lambert van Velthuysen written in June1671, Leibniz criticizes Spinoza’s hypothesis according to which it was Ezra who gathered and wrote down the books of the Old Testament: “I am not going to be easily persuaded that the sacred books of the Israelites are by Ezra alone.”9 Furthermore, Ursula Goldenbaum has argued that a text written by Leibniz around1670 entitled Commentatiuncula de judice controversiarum contains traces of a refutation of Spinoza.10This text does indeed discuss questions similar to the ones addressed in the TTP, such as interpretive authority in relation to Scripture and the use of reason and history for biblical exegesis.

6 _{A ii-1}2_,106.

7 _{Incidentally, this text is also the first known public refutation of the TTP. See the commentary by}

R. Bod´e¨us in Leibniz-Thomasius, pp.265–269.

8 _{Cf. Leibniz, “Leibniz’ Marginalien.”}

9 _{A ii-1}2_{,196. For Spinoza, see TTP Ch. 8; G iii 125–126: “If now we attend to the connection}

and theme of all these books, we shall easily infer that they were all written by one and the same Historian [ . . . ] Who he was, I cannot show so clearly, but I suspect that he was Ezra.”

10 _{Cf. Goldenbaum, “Die Commentatiuncula.” On the Commentatiuncula, see also Antognazza, Leib-}

It is indubitably a crucial text for understanding Leibniz’s position vis- `a-vis rationalist theology. It mentions both Lodewijk Meyer and Ludwig Wolzogen. It does not, however, mention Spinoza at all and, in my view, it is not certain that Leibniz wrote the text with the TTP in mind (although I agree that it might be the case).11

It is not entirely clear when Leibniz identified Spinoza as the author of the pernicious treaty. It may have been very shortly after he acquired the work in1670. We do know, however, that Johann Georg Graevius, a Cartesian professor in Holland, gave Spinoza away in a letter to Leibniz written in April 1671, explaining that the author of this “pestilential book” was an excommunicated Jew named Spinoza.12 Shortly after, Graevius wrote Leibniz once again, informing him that Voetius’s successor in Utrecht, Regnerus Van Mansvelt, was working on a refutation of Spinoza’s “horrible book.”13

During the same period, Leibniz was exchanging letters with Jacob Thomasius. It is therefore somewhat surprising that it is only nine months after Graevius had informed him about the identity of the author of the

TTP, namely in January1672, that Leibniz passes on this important piece

of information to his professor.14 Why did Leibniz not disclose Spinoza’s identity before, for example in the letter he wrote in the summer of1671? My guess is that Leibniz was not yet sure that Graevius’s information was reliable. In October 1671, Leibniz had, however, taken the initiative to contact Spinoza himself. He sent him a letter which did not mention the TTP, but only asked questions concerning optics. Leibniz also offered to send Spinoza a copy of the Hypothesis physica nova, a treatise that he

11 _{Goldenbaum bases her argument on a passage where Leibniz explains that those who affirm the}

truth of the Christian mysteries without understanding their signification are like parrots who repeat words without grasping their meaning (cf. A vi-1, 551). According to her, Leibniz has taken up this argument from Chapter13 of the TTP, where Spinoza writes on the subject of our understanding of God’s attributes: “So someone who doesn’t have demonstrations doesn’t see anything at all in these matters. If they repeat something they have heard about such things, it no more touches or shows their mind than do the words of a parrot or an automaton, which speaks without a mind or without meaning” (TTP Ch.13; G iii 170). There exists another possible source for this “psittacist” argument. While discussing Leibniz’s use of the notion of “psittacism” in the Nouveaux

essais, the nineteenth-century French child psychologist Ludovic Dugas mentioned in a footnote of Le Psittacisme (1896) that the metaphor also exists in Girolamo Cardano’s De subtilitate libri XXI.

Thus, in a reflection concerning the simultaneity of thought and speech, Cardano writes: “And yet, if the force of language is developed first, since man is born with the ability to speak, what prevents that he refers to things as he heard them, but without understanding them, like the magpie and the parrot?” (orig.1550; I have consulted the 1559 Lyon edition, Book xviii, 677; cf. Dugas, Le

Psittacisme, pp.1–2, note). In the mid-seventeenth century, the De subtilitate was a commonly read philosophical treatise. Leibniz undoubtedly knew it. This is a good place to thank Andreas Blank for some stimulating discussions about parrots and Cardano.

had recently completed and that he used to introduce himself to other scholars (he also sent it to the Academy of Sciences in Paris and the Royal Society in London). Shortly after, in early November1671, Leibniz received a very friendly and open response from Spinoza. This reply explains the change of tone in Leibniz’s letter to Thomasius from January 1672: the “audacious man” [homo audax] that he was denouncing only a year before is now presented as “a very cultivated man” [homo omni literatura excultus] and a “distinguished optician” [insignis Opticus].15But Spinoza’s letter also confirmed Graevius’s information about the authorship of the TTP, for, in a postscript, Spinoza offered to send Leibniz a copy of the book.16Shortly after, now certain that Spinoza was in fact the author, Leibniz unveiled his identity to Thomasius.

In my view, this affair bears witness to Leibniz’s caution in these matters. He was keenly aware that identifying the author correctly was crucial, in so far as circulating incorrect information could have considerable conse- quences for the person thus wrongfully implicated in the affair. We will find further evidence of Leibniz’s prudence in his letter to Albert von Holten from February1672. Here he writes: “That Spinoza is the author of that book is, as far as I can see, not so certain. Therefore I prefer not to name him, especially in public.”17 In fact, at this point, Leibniz could no longer nurture any serious doubts about the identity of the author. So how should we interpret his secrecy? Must we consider it to be an expression of the “duplicity” that so many commentators have accused Leibniz of when it came to his relations with Spinoza?18There can be no doubt that we should interpret the reply to Von Holten as tactical. Leibniz always wrote – and not only when it concerned Spinoza – with great prudence, taking into account the nature of his interlocutors. But this does not necessarily have to be interpreted in terms of hypocrisy or duplicity. If we consider more closely Leibniz’s correspondent, we get a more nuanced response to the question. Only a few months earlier, in November1671, this same man, Albert von Holten, had written the following to Leibniz: “The Jew Spinoza, who bears a name which is a bad omen, and who has not been afraid to give the worst of examples, will be flogged by the learned as he deserves.”19 This letter, which refers to a well-known pun on Spinoza’s name – the Latin adjective “spinosa” means “thorny” – can hardly be considered a cool, intellectual reaction to the TTP. Indeed, given Von Holten’s violent reaction to the

15 _{Cf. A ii-1}2_,320. 16 _{Cf. Ep.46, G iv 234; Shirley 885.} 17 _{A ii-1}2_,325.

18 _{See, among other texts, Meinsma, Spinoza et son cercle, pp.291, 360–361; Verni`ere, Spinoza et la}

pens´ee franc¸aise, pp.99, 108, 254; Friedmann, Leibniz et Spinoza, pp. 250, 273.

TTP, I find it quite plausible to interpret Leibniz’s “lie” as an attempt to

protect his new acquaintance in Holland from the over-heated reactions of a member of the Republic of Letters quite clearly unwilling to partake in a serene debate.20

Leibniz thus received a great deal of information about the general reac- tions to Spinoza’s book in both Germany and Holland. All this epistolary activity testifies to the fact that Leibniz was highly interested in Spinoza’s work, and I fully agree with Paul Verni`ere when he states that “it is not exag- gerated to say that during these two years [i.e.,1670–71], the publication of the Tractatus was for Leibniz the greatest intellectual event in Europe.”21 After this, Leibniz recognized in the Dutch Jew an exceptionally erudite adversary. Before the publication of the TTP, he considered Spinoza with some contempt as just another Cartesian. Thus, in a letter to Thomasius from1669, he counted Spinoza as a member of a group of Cartesian “para- phrasers” which also included Johann Clauberg, Johannes de Raey, Claude Clerselier, Adrian Heereboord, Tobias Andreae, and Henry de Roy.22This changed after he had read the TTP and identified its author.

But how, in Leibniz’s view, should one deal with the work of a man who, at the same time, was “intolerably licentious” and “very cultivated”? To suppress the book through the available means of censorship was a solution that one should adopt only with the utmost prudence (although Leibniz was not as such against acts of censorship, and certainly not a partisan of the liberty to philosophize).23 The best would be to refute it effectively. Thus, Leibniz wrote to Von Holten: “as for the book itself, it should be refuted, and indeed I could wish for something more erudite and solid than vehement and harsh (for such a style renders even the best of causes suspect).”24

Leibniz never attempted to do this himself. Why not? According to Spinoza, in order to reconstruct correctly the meaning of the Bible, one must not only be in possession of extensive philological knowledge of the sacred text and its history, but one must first of all be intimately familiar with the language in which it was originally written, i.e., Hebrew.25 Now,

20 _{Even after he left Mainz to go to Paris in February1672, Leibniz continued to receive information}

concerning the reactions to Spinoza’s book. Cf. A i-1, 195, 200, 272.

21 _{Verni`ere, Spinoza et la pens´ee franc¸aise, p.100.}

22 _{A ii-1}2_{,24. It is somewhat unclear, however, just how familiar Leibniz was with Spinoza’s introduc-}

tion to Descartes. In a letter from June1671 to Velthuysen, he mentions that he has seen certain “Cartesian meditations” by Spinoza (cf. A ii-12_{,196). He thus had the volume in his hands as early}

as1671. But I have found no traces of any attentive reading of the work before 1677 (cf. A vi-4, 2197–2198; A i-6, 478).

23 _{Cf. Lærke, “Leibniz, la censure, et la libre pens´ee.”} 24 _{A ii-1}2_,325. 25 _{Cf. TTP Ch.7; G iii 99–100.}

what is true about an interpretation of the Bible is quite probably also true about any efficient refutation of this interpretation. Leibniz noted himself in 1677 in a letter to Johann Friedrich that “in order to examine [the

TTP], one would have to go into more detail than is needed here, and it

would require one to be exceptionally meticulous.”26Only someone with a superior knowledge of the Hebrew language and culture would be able to refute the TTP in any convincing fashion: “If only we could persuade a man as erudite as Spinoza but [illegible word] towards Christianity, who could refute his many paralogisms and abuse of Oriental writings.”27 Leibniz himself did not possess the required philological knowledge, for he did not really know Hebrew.28He therefore chose to appeal to experts in such matters. The first person he approached was Gottlieb Spitzel:

You have doubtlessly seen the book published in Holland entitled: The Freedom to Philosophize. . . . The author is said to be Jewish. It is in the interest of piety that he be refuted by some man thoroughly learned in oriental writings, like you or someone who has your qualifications.29

Spitzel had distinguished himself as a critic of atheism in1666 by publishing the open letter De atheismi radice.30 Moreover, he had shown himself favorable to Leibniz by publishing his Confessio natura atheistas in1669.31 Surely, Leibniz believed that he had a good chance of convincing this distinguished orientalist to pick up the glove. But Spitzel disappointed him: he showed no enthusiasm for the idea and simply referred Leibniz to the already existing refutations by Thomasius and Friedrich Rappolt.32 Some years later, in a book published in 1676, Spitzel did make a few remarks about Spinoza, denouncing him as a “fanatic” and an “impious” man. But he never wrote any serious refutation.33

3 t h e s e c o n d r e a d i n g o f t h e t t p

Probably towards the end of his stay in Paris, some time during the last two months of1675 or the first months of 1676, Leibniz read the TTP a second