and speaking of Leibniz…

I was thinking on the plane that I may reconsider my demotion of Leibniz to number 5 on the all-time great philosophers list.

That demotion, you may recall, was partly an attempt to correct my own ardent personal enthusiasm for Leibniz, and partly a concession that his major works are too short and leave too many important issues outside the discussion.

However…

On the plane I was thinking, what if someone asked me to teach a sort of metaphysics “boot camp” for graduate students. What would I do?

And I have to say, I think I would just drill them through a whole semester of Leibniz. He can teach you everything you need to know, and with such wonderful brevity. He also teaches the most important lesson, which is the combination of absolute respect for the ancients and medievals *and* the need for a gutsy speculative independence that doesn’t just suck up to Aristotle. I’m not sure who does a better job of that.

The other advantage of Leibniz is that he allows you to practice metaphysics at several different speeds. The great pedagogical dogma of our time is the overestimation of “close reading” as a method. Anyone who write a 500-page monograph on some tiny text of a major thinker is supposed to gain our respect as thorough and painstaking. And I would agree that this deserves respect, but it’s only one of the needed scales.

Imagine that you asked to buy a world map, but the cartographer answered that you are very superficial for wanting such a map. After all, each part of the world is filled with so many details… You really want Turkey, China, Japan, Brazil, etc., on ONE map? Hahahaha. Aren’t you being a bit overambitious? A true cartographer would devote an entire career to just one country, or even just one province of one country, etc. etc.

Perhaps you get my point. The dogma that students should be forced to master one tiny problem in one classic thinker and waste 3 years reading 40 secondary sources related to that tiny topic is about as benighted as claiming that world maps should not be allowed.

In fact, we obviously need both. And in or time, students do not get enough “big picture” overviews. Which is precisely why I enjoyed compressing all of Heidegger’s career into 170 large-print pages. For it CAN be done. I did it. That’s not the whole story on Heidegger, of course. You can write detailed books on specific aspects of Heidegger, just as you can draw up detailed maps of individual Japanese cities. But if there were a ban on “superficial” national maps of Japan as a whole, don’t we all agree that this would be an idiotic stipulation?

The relevance to Leibniz is that you *really can* read most of his major works by spending half a day in a coffee shop and picking 5 or 6 of his key mini-texts out of Hackett or some other anthology. I do it from time to time, for the sheer pleasure of it. No one, and I mean no one, can teach you more metaphysics in 5 hours than Leibniz.

And then, of course, you can go into specific issues in more detail. Leibniz is a peerless crossroads in the history of philosophy… Go back to Aristotle, to Suarez, to Descartes, or forward to Kant or even Whitehead, Deleuze, etc., and Leibniz can provide outstanding access to certain aspects of nay of these thinkers.

By contrast, if you want to approach the key problems of philosophy through Aristotle or Hegel or Kant or Heidegger, you won’t get very far in 5 hours as an overview. Only Leibniz allows you the 5-hour plan, the weekend plan, the month-long plan, the summer plan, the semester plan, and the lifetime career plan to choose from.

I won’t revise my top 20 list right now (it’s a long-term project anyway– one still guided largely mostly by gut instinct and waiting for principles to emerge from lengthier reflection). But I’m starting to wonder if I wasn’t too quick to dock him a spot below Hegel, even though I still agree that “Leibniz is the greatest philosopher of all time” is still slightly shakier than saying “Hegel is the greatest philosopher of all time”.