Matthew Stewart. The Courtier and the Heretic

Modernity dethrones humankind. It reduces all our thoughts, purposes, and hopes to the object of scientific inquiry. It makes laboratory rats of us all. Spinoza actively embraces this collapse of the human into mere nature. Leibniz abhors it. Even more than he wants to convince us that God is good, Leibniz intends to demonstrate that we are the most special of all beings in nature. In the entire universe, he says, there is nothing more real or more permanent or more worthy of love than the individual human soul. We belong to the innermost reality of things. The human being is the new God, he announces: Each of us is "a small divinity and eminently a universe: God in ectype and the universe in prototype." This is the idea that defines Leibniz's philosophy, and that explains the enormous, if often unacknowledged, influence that his thought has wielded in the past three centuries of human history.

The greatest obstacle Leibniz confronts in his quest to deify the human being is Spinoza's theory of mind. In Spinoza's view, the mind is nothing real; it is merely an abstraction over the material processes of the body. But, counters Leibniz, in the material world, nothing lasts forever; everything is at the mercy of impersonal forces; what passes for "unity" is merely temporary aggregation; and "identity" is a chimera in the never-ending flux of becoming and passing away. If Spinoza is correct, Leibniz concludes, then the human being, too, is merely chaff blowing in the silent winds of nature (Matthew Stewart. The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, p. 241).