Leibniz on Apperception, Consciousness, and Reflection (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ~39 with Dutch and English Millenarians in preparing for the Messianic Age. The most important development for the community in the seventeenth century was its most active role in supporting the Messianic pretensions of Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed himself the Messiah in 1666. This led to tremendous internal strife and argument. It was years before the community recovered its balance. In view of this picture, Spinoza's case was a side issue. Mrchoulan stresses how deeply Spinoza's father, a rich Jewish merchant, was involved in community affairs. L'Affaire Sp/noza is put at the end of the book, out of chronological order. Mdchoulan follows Rrvah's and Kaplan's account of how Spinoza's case developed out his involvement with Juan de Prado, an older Spanish intellectual trained at the University of Alcala, who turned up in Amsterdam in 1655 with deistic ideas and radical views about the Bible. Spinoza and others seem to have gotten caught up with Prado's views. Prado, threatened with excommunication, recanted, while Spinoza refused, and hence the notorious excommunication order (which H. P. Salomon has shown is the same text as was used against David Farrar, supplied by rabbis in Venice in 1617)- I have argued elsewhere that this was not a big event from either the community's point of view, since they were deluged with refugees problems at the time, nor from Spinoza's point of view, since he had already left the community and entered the world of the radical Protestants. Perhaps the most remarkable, and most debatable part of the book is Mdchoulan's extremely critical presentation of the view of Judaism offered by Spinoza in the Tractatus. Readers may cry out that these passages have to be seen in context. But what context? I think M~choulan's reading is that of a member of the Jewish community of the seventeenth century, steeped in the martyrology of the Marranos, a survivor of the Inquisition and in exile from his beloved Iberia. For such a person, the claim that Judaism has no special meaning or importance in the scheme of things was outrageous nonsense. Part of what it meant to be a Jew in Amsterdam in Spinoza's time was that one had regained a crucial heritage, and the regaining of it was part of the Divine Drama that was taking place. Spinoza, seen from this perspective, was tone-deaf to the sounds of the Jewish experience of his time, as very well presented by M~choulan. It may be that what we take to be Spinoza's great originality in part results from his ignorance of a good deal of both Jewish and Christian apologetics and theology and his deafness regarding the Messianic and Millenarian messages of his time. This enabled him to offer a new world-view unconnected with that of many of his contemporaries. RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University University of California, Los Angeles Mark Kulstad. Leibniz on Apperception, Consciousness,and Reflection. Analytica: Investigations in Logic, Ontology and the Philosophy of Language. Munich: Philosophia, a991. Pp. 183. Cloth, DM 98.o0. The related topics of consciousness, reflection, and apperception are of central importance to Leibniz's philosophy of mind, and Kulstad's book, sections of which have i4o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31"1 JANUARY ~993 already appeared in journals, is a welcome addition to the body of literature on the topic. Kulstad studies in detail Leibniz's complex and often quite confusing pronouncemenus on these aspects of mental life by linking them to his views on beasts and by comparing them to Locke's. Chapter 1 ("Leibniz, Animals, and Apperception") sets out to show that Leibniz's mature ideas on whether animals apperceive are actually in conflict. The usually adopted view is that they do not and that only spirits can apperceive. This view, Kulstad notes, is supported both by textual evidence, e.g., section 4 of the Principles of Nature and Grace, and systematic evidence (t 7- x8; 41-51). However, he points out how passages from the New Essays, e.g., the "boar passage" at II, ~l, 5, clearly state or imply that animals do apperceive. Given the...