[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build community intellectual community.]

Dear Gavin,

I enjoyed your rumination on the difference between traditionalists and rationalists. As you know, these terms are so fuzzy, inexact, and frequently misleading. Yet for me, despite their vagueness, both referents remain deeply important. I don’t know how much I can add to your already well-vibed dichotomy, but perhaps somewhere in our separate approaches we can find a delta in our understanding out of which new insights might emerge.

Robinson Jeffers wrote: “The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.”

And given that I’ve been on a deep Leibniz kick these past two months, I see him as a man with no pack, and thus relevant to our conversation. The reason is this: Leibniz models the rare ability to amalgamate traditional paradigmatic questions with modern lines of inquiry. He never stops seeing the old as useful, even when it is no longer correct. He can see what remains fruitful in a method even when large portions of doctrine prove inadequate to the task at hand. Yet, his love and recognition of the new does not yield to infatuation; he is constant and incessant critic as well as devotee. He is not afraid to posit replacements to the old or the new. I think it is precisely his ability to navigate multiple paradigms that yields his dozens (scores?) of right insights — insights on space relativity, binary arithmetic, the necessity of grounding metaphysics in more than mathematical objects, the consciousness of animals, to name but a few against the many currents of his times. Not only that, but Leibniz had the rage of youth — and you know how much I love the rage of youth. Who doesn’t want to solve all philosophical problems with a clear and distinct logical system built atop universally accessible intuitive primitives? I know I do.

And then there are his world-shaking quotes, like (to paraphrase): “I judge the man more worthy of esteem and honors who has cured a single disease than he who has found the area under a curve.” (Written before he himself did the latter.) Also, his mathematical explanations are actually lucid to me — a shocking feat for clarity. His letters display this same clarity of expression.

By my Fermi estimate, he wrote for four to five hours a day, every day of his life. And yet, no one is a real “Leibnizian” in the way that someone can be an Aristotelian, a Cartesian, or a Kantian.

On the one hand, I find this quite sad. How can someone who wrote ten times more than any of his contemporaries create such diffuse influence without founding a true school of thought? He didn’t cultivate disciples, teach formally, or publish didactic works. He didn’t build charisma. He just built content and followed his many methods. He developed methods that others took on and extended: a huge influencer through sheer quantity of insights and correspondence (nevertheless it never seems like he has the right correspondents).

Perhaps this is just as well. A Leibniz doesn’t need an “-ism” named after him. The key to rigorous and right thinking is using all tools at one’s disposal to understand the many facets of reality. Maybe Leibniz’s “hedgehog in a fox mech suit” approach to intellectual life is non-reproducible—or, as I sometimes worry, even anti-mimetic.

You’ve taught more workshops on rationality than I have. Is it teachable? I think so, but it is hard without good contextual questions. Tradition can be taught and can be lived, but can innovation and “the new life of the mind” be taught in quite the same way (though Matt Clancy has made me more bullish that useful innovation can be its own sort of tradition)? Nonetheless, only through a community of practice can one build the synthesis of approaches that you and I both want to see in the world.

In Maria Rosa Antognazza’s intellectual biography of Leibniz, I hear her philosopher groans: that Gottfried spent so much time on practical matters, on inconsequential Germanic politics, on his practical schemes, political projects, and writings on the esoterica of binary were distractions from his true calling—the development of the Monadology and his other dozen philosophical projects. The terrifying object here is the implicit assumption that the intellectual life is defined by the questions treated by academic philosophy. There is a real sense in her writing that he squandered his gifts as a philosopher by pursuing so many interests outside it. But is philosophy the only game in town?

I think Leibniz believed—or at least what I like to believe myself—is that philosophy is a way of life, a habit of mind, and a set of all sets of inquiry, not a distinct discipline. To make it into its own discipline is to turn it into a Glass Bead Game. The whole Great Books and Classics ecosystem might prepare some of the best Glass Bead Game players around—and I honor the game! But does it prepare one for discovery, action, and becoming one of those lights that supplies the beads for the game? For that, one needs practical wisdom, the art of rationality, applied history and economics, and of course, the philosophical disposition.

As I wrote recently, the classical quest for virtue is greatly complemented by modern tools, and the modern context is sufficiently different that the intellectual demands of prudence and justice are much greater than before. An analogy that might resonate with the traditional ethicist is that of extraordinary medical care. In the Thomistic tradition of medical ethics, providing medical care is obligatory if it is ordinary, but not if it is extraordinary — and the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is circumstantial. The generic heart pill we might have a moral duty to supply in the USA in 2025 was utterly beyond society’s capacity in 1905. Moral duties are contextually realized, not imposed by synthetic a priori reasoning upon the universal kingdom of ends. In the same way, the demands of prudence and justice shift with context. Prudence and justice are more demanding now than in the past for the demands rise as our capacity does.

Thus I expect today’s great leaders to have a firm grasp of economics, probability, game theory, transaction costs, coordinating mechanisms, elasticity, and incidence, not to mention several fields of science, history, and philosophy. I think the standards simply must be higher.

Furthermore, the seduction of the world of ideas is that we might come to confuse the clear and distinct ideas of philosophers for the world itself. The most important things in history, and the most important things in our lives, are not necessarily those that are easily talked about in didactic treatises or rigorous formalizations. (And yet those rigorous formalizations come from somewhere.) They emerge from wading into the algae-filled pool of history and embodied, carbon-based stuff, and trying to pull out abstractions and generalizations and statistics and causal explanations that work.

So far I am in full agreement of temperament with you, and yet. And yet. And yet.

Perhaps there is a weird quirk here being underplayed, and that is the importance of being a bearer of a tradition. (This goes back to my writings on identity and politics). The iconoclast by temperament might not like the stodgy and inflexible bearers of a dead or dying intellectual tradition, yet it seems to me very terrible not to have them around. The majority of people will be establishment people by nature, preferring convention and authority, not desiring to exploit a good intellectual arbitrage or find contradictions in Torah or respond to thirteen objections to a proposition. So I think it is very important that the majority of education is about passing along the Burke-processed fundamentals with their priorities, paradoxes, and unanswered questions, but most of all that sincere belief in the study of authorities as a useful scaffold to knowledge of Divine things and human benefit. As a matter of temperament, I cherish exploration and think new tools and their development is necessary for a good and successful vita activa, but as a matter of principle, we are well below the point of saturating our world enough with either the “traditionalist” Way of Wisdom or the “rationalist” Way of Calibrations approach to the intellectual life.