Perhaps the Only Possible World

Leibniz, Classical Theism, and the Problem of Evil - Chapter 4 (1 of 4)

Greetings, subscribers. As followers of Theological Letters know, I’m feverishly working to finish my forthcoming book on Leibniz and the problem of evil, and I have promised to post fresh installments of my progress every Sunday.

To date, I have posted the Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3. Today, I post the first installment of Chapter 4, Perhaps the Only Possible World.

If you have yet to read all that comes before, I recommend you do so for context. Links to all prior sections are below. Be watching for the second installment of Chapter 4 next Sunday. Enjoy!

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Chapter 4

Perhaps the Only Possible World

…[A]ccording to an ancient but by no means forgotten tradition, the idea of freedom is said to be entirely consistent with the idea of system, and every philosophy which makes claim to unity and completeness is said to end in denying freedom.

— F. W. J. Schelling¹

This question of contingence is a crucial issue for Leibniz’s metaphysic, and lies at the very heart of his philosophy, for there is one group of occurrences in nature whose contingency is a life and death matter for Leibniz: man’s choices, decisions, and free actions. If contingence goes by the board in Leibniz’s system, so does free will, thus sounding the deathknell to the project of reconciliation, which was a central motive for Leibniz’ construction of a philosophic system he regarded as capable of meeting all the rational exigencies of the world-view of contemporary science on the one hand and of Christian doctrine on the other.

— Nicholas Rescher²

Much of Leibniz’s defense of God hangs on the concept of freedom. When the philosopher washes God’s hands of evil, he does so with the lather of freedom, arguing that rational beings are self-determining agents. If they go wrong, the wrongdoing belongs to them, not their Maker. When discussing God’s antecedent and consequent will, Leibniz speaks as if God discovers which evils attach to our world as it unfolds. The picture leaves the clear impression that evil originates with us, not God, because we have the capacity to choose for ourselves which road to take, as it were. And though God would have us choose the good, we retain a power of choice by which we might resist God. Hence, Leibniz continually places the onus on the creature to obey, insisting that God has supplied whatever is needed for us to go right, which is why God is not to blame if we go wrong. 

For my part, I dare say that Leibniz’s talk of God’s antecedent hatred for evil and love of good and his efforts to absolve God of moral evil (and of the physical evil that follows on its heels) is only cogent if one grants the reality of free will. That is to say, Leibniz’s defense unravels unless the creature who chooses evil could have chosen good, making evil truly the work of the creature, not its Creator.³ 

The difficulty, however, is that much of what Leibniz says about God and creatures seems utterly incompatible with freedom of this kind. Consider Leibniz’s theory of the best. When declaring that God always does the best, we face a thorny question: Does God have free choice? Recall that the theory is based on several necessary truths, drawn a priori from the very idea of God, of intellect, and of will. God exists. God’s intellect necessarily knows the best. God’s will necessarily favors the best. Thus follows the hypothetical necessity, If God acts, he does the best. The natural consequence seems to be that God can do none other than what he has, in fact, done. Whatever “choice” might mean in this context, it cannot mean that God might have done otherwise. For any other act would be incompatible with the divine nature. But in what sense, then, is God free? 

The question of divine freedom naturally spills over into creaturely freedom. As we saw in our discussion of the principle of sufficient reason, Leibniz argues that every being and every event in our world is ultimately traceable to God and his “choice” to make the best. In a word, every inch of our cosmos and every moment of its history is such because it belongs to the best of all worlds. The point is no less true of “free” events. But if God chooses which world is real, and this selection includes which choices come to be, then how are my choices or yours our own? Are these happenings not more accurately God’s choices? For in what sense could you or I have done otherwise? In what sense are we free?

Matters grow worse when considering Leibniz’s more idiosyncratic views. We saw, in his discussion of necessary and contingent truths, that he understands a true proposition to be one in which the predicate is in the subject. In the case of Julius Caesar, for example, crossing the Rubicon in 49 B.C. is in Caesar as part of his very identity. To know Caesar as God knows Caesar is to know this fact. In what sense, then, could Caesar’s choice be otherwise? Leibniz answers that its negation is possible without contradiction, so the contrary is logically possible. But is there any basis for this “possibility”? If there is a sufficient reason (in both God and in Caesar) for crossing the Rubicon, then in what sense is the opposite more than a semantic possibility?

We saw something quite similar when considering incompossibility and concomitance in reference to monads. Each monad bears a nature that unfolds into everything that will ever happen to it, and this unfolding mirrors the entire cosmos from that monad’s unique perspective. The monad’s harmony with its world hangs on everything within that world being precisely as it is. If a single thing were otherwise, that monad would no longer be compossible with that world. How can such claims possibly yield anything but a world of necessities in which everything, from God’s will to the things he has made and every event, must be precisely as it is? 

The traditional reading of Leibniz is decidedly pessimistic about such matters. Common in the 18th century is the suspicion that Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony, paired with optimism, is a form of deism, offering a clockwork universe that leaves no room for either freedom or divine intervention. To name two examples, we find the suspicion (to no surprise) in the Royal Society via Newton,⁴ as well as by Louis Racine in response to the apparent optimism in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man.⁵ Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, expresses the common worry by suggesting that, under Leibniz’s scheme, to be upset with a thief for his thievery makes as much sense as being upset with your pocket watch for showing it is 9 o’clock.⁶ In other words, if the world is composed of “spiritual automatons” (d’automate spiritual) (e.g., G., 6, 131), which simply unfold in accord with their nature — a nature that contains all that will ever happen to them — then contrary choice ceases to be meaningful and liberty is destroyed, along with the moral culpability that Leibniz impugns to creatures.⁷ 

Such worries were only compounded by Leibniz’s oft-repeated contempt for “freedom of equipoise,” which he calls an impossible chimera (e.g., C 25; G 6:122-3, 126-30). — That is to say, no two options are truly identical, and if the will had no reason for preferring one to another, then no choice would be possible and the event would be without a reason, thereby violating the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). — Many in Leibniz’s day saw equipoise as a necessary condition for meaningful free choice, making its rejection by Leibniz an embrace of determinism. We see the sentiment in both advocates of equipoise, such as Voltaire and Thomas Reid,⁸ and in determinists, such as Anthony Collins, who praise Leibniz on the point.⁹ 

Such sentiments continued to echo in the 19th and 20th centuries,¹⁰ mingling with worries about Leibniz’s theory of truth, worries that gained prominence due to Bertrand Russell and Louis Courturat.¹¹ — Russell had presumed that Leibniz held the rather common position that contingent truths are synthetic and necessary truths are analytic, but Courturat’s work made undoubtedly clear that Leibniz believes all truths are analytic, be it “a square has four sides” or “Caesar crossed the Rubicon.”¹² — This theory of truth led Russell to the conclusion, voiced in the prior century by F. W. J. Schelling, that the sole difference between Leibniz and Spinoza is that Leibniz believes not all possibles are compossible. Hence, some possibles are excluded from God’s emanation of the world because they find no place in the optimal world, but there is no more freedom to be found in Leibniz than in Spinoza.¹³

The growth of modern scholarship on Leibniz has only solidified such assessments. Present scholarship is decidedly inclined to read Leibniz as a determinist.¹⁴ Precious few exceptions exist, and the majority of these still brand Leibniz a compatibilist — that is, as a determinist who believes that determinism is compatible with freedom, if properly defined.¹⁵ Virtually none argue that Leibniz can or would entertain libertarian freedom.¹⁶

As explained in the Introduction, I plan to make the case that the traditional reading is not without its flaws, and we have reasons to consider that Leibniz may have a more robust — and I dare say, libertarian — theory of freedom than typically supposed. Before making this case, however, we must look at the very real challenges it faces. For Leibniz provides ample fodder to fill up the determinist reading. Such material will occupy us here, as we close out Part I of this work. Before delving in, however, I think it is worth clarifying a number of terms that are indispensable to this discussion (many of which we have already encountered), lest we risk misunderstanding.¹⁷ The following concepts are no doubt rudimentary to the average philosopher with any familiarity with the free will discussion. But I dare say they are worthy of review to ensure our common meaning.