Leibniz on Middle Knowledge and the Best (2 of 2)

Theological Letters

My friend and colleague, “Herman,” came across my work on Leibniz. He noticed two claims that stood out as odd, given his (rather standard) understanding of Leibniz. First, he noticed that I deny that Leibniz advocates middle knowledge (i.e., the medieval theory that God has knowledge of hypothetical futurities that would be under certain conditions). “Herman” didn’t see how I could say this, given that Leibniz talks about God’s knowledge of possible worlds that never come to be. Is this not middle knowledge? The second claim “Herman” noticed is that I advocate the (extreme minority) reading of Leibniz that says he is a libertarian, as opposed to a hard determinist or a compatibilist. “Herman” was curious about my application to Leibniz’s theory of the best. Leibniz famously advocates that, given what God is, God inevitably knows and wills the best. Hence our world, being willed by God, must be the best of all possible worlds. “Herman” noticed that, on my reading, Leibniz believes God freely creates our world, such that he could have not created it. “Herman” didn’t see how this was possible, given Leibniz’s commitments. In a previous letter, I address these questions. “Herman” than followed up with some additional questions: You say that, for Leibniz, the divine will generates possibles that the intellect then judges. But isn’t envisioning possibilities an act of intellect, not will? How could the will do this without the intellect? If God always knows and does the best, how can he generate possibles that are less than the best? Doesn’t he infallibly know all that was, is, and will be, including what he will do or neglect to do? The following is my reply. Please subscribe and support my work!

Dear “Herman,”

Your questions are good ones, as I would expect. I think beginning with a couple of clarifications may help.

Let’s begin by focusing in on your talk of the will envisioning possibles “without” the intellect. Neither intellectualists nor voluntarists see the will as insulated from the intellect or as operating independent of it. Both agree that the will is blind without the intellect. So you are correct to identify “envisioning” as an act of intellect. The question is whether the will or intellect is driving the car, as it were. Does the intellect or the will initiate this envisioning? I’ll return to the generation of possibles in a bit, but this particular clarification may be most easily grasped in the context of judgments about means and ends.¹

Central to faculty psychology, which Leibniz presumes, is the idea that choice involves a chain of reasoning concerning means and ends. Human beings all have a chief or governing end (happiness) that is innate to us as humans. We then make judgments about subordinate ends, which are means to the governing end, and we make further judgments about the means to these subordinate ends. For example, I may judge pleasure to be the best subordinate end (or means) to happiness and then judge sex as the best means to maximizing pleasure. The judgments about means to subordinate ends and about subordinate ends to the chief end is the job of the intellect, according to this model. The question is whether the intellect drives the car and the will, as blind, is along for the ride, bound to follow the judgment of the intellect, or whether the will is in the driver’s seat and can pause, slow, and redirect the activities of the intellect. In neither model does the will do anything without the intellect involved. Intellect and will are not insulated from one another, both being aspects of mind. But the faculty psychology question is whether the intellect initiates the process, makes judgments, and then presents judgments to the will that the will must enact (because it is a blind follower) or whether the will initiates the activities of the intellect and retains some control over those intellective processes along the way. The “intellectualist” opts for the former position while the “voluntarist” opts for the latter. 

An analogy that I find helpful in envisioning the voluntarist position is this. Below is a game in which you drop a metal ball in a maze, and you use the knobs to tilt the maze in various directions in order to steer the movements of the metal ball through the labyrinth. 

I find that the description of the intellect-will interplay amongst voluntarists generally and Leibniz specifically is very similar to this game. The maze represents the pathways of the intellect: i.e., judgments concerning means and ends. The ball represents the movements of those processes. The knob controls represent the acts of will by which the will controls the intellectual process, but the directions of the will must work within the parameters of the intellect. Hence, if the will sees a chain of reasoning heading down a certain pathway, the will can slow that chain of reasoning, pause it, redirect it down a new pathway, and so on. But for all of this control, the will must still work within the confines of the intellect. It cannot just pick the ball up and move it.  

Now, applying the point to the generation of possibles, the same applies. For the voluntarist, the will initiates the act of generating possibles — as well as oversees the act, since it can halt it, redirect it, and so on. This is why the possibles are not pre-volitional fixtures of the divine mind. As contingent, these possibles are not part of God’s necessary knowledge. For they depend on something else for their possibility. The first and primary point of dependence is God himself — that is, whether he would even consider producing such things. Hence, possibles proceed from God’s will and must, therefore, be freely generated by God before they are truly possible. — Here, as a brief aside, it is crucial that we recognize a difference between classical metaphysics of the kind we are presently discussing and contemporary analytic philosophy. Classical metaphysics does not treat mere semantic coherence as the bar for metaphysical possibility. Real possibles are metaphysically grounded, be it in God or matter or some combination thereof.² Hence, in the model I am here describing, unless God is willing to consider producing a certain logical possibility, it is not truly (i.e., ontologically) possible in any meaningful way. — Now, once the divine will determines to generate a set of real possibles, these possibles reside in the divine intellect and may be judged by the divine intellect as to whether they serve the chief or governing end of God. But the act of generating them begins with the divine choice to do so. In this light, it is more accurate to say that God wills to generate possibles within his intellect, not that his will generates possibles without the intellect, as you put it in your letter.