> In such a way, Leibniz, to cite Milton, dared to “justify the ways of God to men.” Voltaire responded with a snarky misreading that exploited the undeniable empirical fact that evil was not balanced by good in the lives of every discreet individual. But Leibniz made no such claim. The best world was optimized as a whole, containing just as much good and evil as was required for the totality of creation.
I like this paragraph. I've never been a big fan of Voltaire's criticism (although I may have not understood it fully, not being a philosophy expert of any kind). To me it always seemed like Liebniz tried to explain why there was suffering on the whole, and Voltaire responding with "there is suffering!". Like you are not really arguing the point.
My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
"Their first child, Sofya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born in Geneva on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair"."
So Dostoevsky suffered the pain of losing a child.
Despite that, an argument about "tear of child" was put into antagonist's mouth.
> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase.
Is that better? it would also require not having all the good things from creation.
You don't know that the child wouldn't have grown up Hitler.
The argument seems similar - not exactly, but similar - to the question "if global warming is real, why is it snowing here". A function describing the maximum global integration over happiness could very well contain many local minima.
Yes, but an omnipotent God could presumably just make Hitlers not exist. The argument rests on the assumption that there are hidden dependencies in the laws of the universe, such that it was logically necessary that Hitler (or insert whatever other evil here) had to exist to make the best possible world. That's hard to swallow.
Consider that many people today, who live better than the kings of centuries past, are depressed. One could conclude that happiness is a state of improvement over past experiences, not necessarily an absolute scale. If this is true (and I personally believe that it is), then evil is in fact a necessary baseline against which happiness can be improved upon.
I think you and Voltaire are thinking along the same lines. Both are a rejection of a bloodless utility maximisation creed on the simple basis that human morality just doesn’t work that way.
> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
It is not really possible to answer these questions when one does not know the spiritual infrastructure. Eg, say reincarnation of the soul is real, and in a previous life a soul has been in the body of an industrialist on whose account cancer causing pollution was spewed out. In the next incarnation, it seems valid for that soul to experience the effect of the earlier incarnation's actions. If that is it, the soul may in fact be learning and growing, which may be the point of the exercise.
I know that this is all conjecture, but I hope I am relaying my point - that without understanding the spiritual domain, these sorts of moral appraisals are moot.
That is a really excellent point and in fact gets at the difficulty of arguing any rational point about religion. I'd guess that every rational argument that appeals to religion at all can be made to work or not work depending on this background "spiritual infrastructure". This is one reason why rationalists often feel like religious thinkers are moving the goalposts.
Maybe the 5-year-old who died of bone cancer was just playing Roy on the hardest difficulty.
However, this shiftiness also undermines every religious platitude as well. God loves you, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. etc. -- maybe, or maybe God is trapped in a human coma patient and Loki is just fucking with us. If you have degrees of freedom over this "spiritual infrastructure" then it's completely impossible to reach any conclusion.
> Leibniz challenged “humanity to participate in the work of striving toward perfection,”
> Because the world is the creation of a perfect being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine perfection.
That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
I find this a common theme for those who are struggling to marry religious beliefs with logic.
> That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
The Creator (First Mover) being perfect is not a presumption, but rather a conclusion; see Corollary 1.3:
This an important insight to this that I feel many people miss. Most of us consider "striving for perfection" to be equivalent to striving for the "absolute best". Real life often has no absolute best option. Real life is much more like an intricate web of interconnected rock-paper-scissors like relationships and choices, where "better" or "worse" is highly contextual and even conflicting. Aeon had a really nice essay about the problem[0].
Perhaps we tend to have a cultural blindness to this in cultures with European heritage due to the legacy of Plato's "perfect forms", and later how Christianity positions God.
Perfection for Leibniz might be considered more of a logical concept than an observable state. After all, he uses the same thing to argue (somehow) for the existence of god! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#ExiGod
This leads to some strange conclusions about perfection that aren't intuitive, and sometimes seem monstous.
I’m reminded of Pythagorean philosophies of harmony that quickly reveal the imperfections inherent to math, ie right triangle with two sides of one unit producing square root of two or Pythagorean tuning which is so perfect it is imperfect (eg the wolf fifth)
Meanwhile the realists found the world to be a combustion chamber from life that adapted itself to the combustion chamber and whorships the adaption process instincts.
And we all agreed that staying in the surplus valley of the combustion process is nice, as long as science can deliver. And now we have to jam machinery into our lifes so we can remain sentient, while at the same time speculating for another delivery of surplus coming down the line. Panopticon here, social networks there- and it does nothing yet, atrocities in wartime and civil unrest are still rampant.
It's actually deductive, application of logic: given some concept, develop the theory it generates (the set of its consequences). The "rationalist" way.
The real context may not necessarily be that of "beliefs" (of doctrinal beliefs as an object... Possibly as a subject, instead).
> A key to Leibniz’s view is symmetry of creation. The best only emerges against the worst, the beautiful against the ugly, the harmonious against the dissonant.
Leibniz's surviving corpus is massive and sprawling (far larger than any other member of the Republic of Letters) so it could be that i haven't read whatever this is a reference to, but I don't recognise this sense of balance. For Leibniz as i understand him ours is the best of possible worlds because God created it to be this way, in his infinite benevolence and wisdom, and whatever the calamities occur must be part of some kind of plan of which we can only be ken (apperceptive) to a fraction thereof.
Reading Leibniz is like standing at the gate of modern and medieval thought. He didn't so much 'ransack' ideas, as this piece says he does, as try to reconcile even the most contradictory of positions. It's odd but exquisite.
If anyone wants to jump in I would recommend Lloyd Strickland's annotated translation of the Monadology (Leibniz's Monadology). Or really anything by Strickland, including his book on Leibniz on binary. See Strickland's website: http://www.leibniz-translations.com/
The balance idea sounds like misremembered Hegel. I think the best of all possible worlds theory should be seen for what it is: an attempt to reconcile the idea that a perfect god made the world with its observable imperfections. It’s intellectually more satisfying than the “fallen world” idea which just leads to more questions, and it remains compatible with mainstream Christian doctrine.
If you want to reject mainstream Christian doctrine that’s fine, but it’s not what Leibniz was trying to do.
In any event, his most lasting influence isn’t even in the realm of philosophy. Dude was a genius.
> intellectually more satisfying than the “fallen world” idea which just leads to more questions, and it remains compatible with mainstream Christian doctrine.
Doesn't mainstream Christian doctrine say that we're in a fallen world? Isn't that bit about "by Adam's sin we all sinned" (I'm forgetting the rhyme) a pretty central part of the catechism? (basically Romans 5:12)
Now as to God creating a universe in which a fall like that could occur (one that emphasizes free will), is that perhaps what Leibniz was addressing?
Pretty hard considering Hegel would not even be born a few decades after Leibniz died. Agreed that it is preferable to the "fallen world" starting point of so many other philosophies. Once you think the world is fallen or broken, the only remaining thing is trying (and waiting ;) ) to bring about some kind of Utopia by changing humankind, nature, etc..
I have to say it's confusing as hell that there's ANOTHER nonfiction book titled "The Best of All Possible Worlds", also about Leibniz, but centered on his friendships with other intellectuals (by Nadler). This seems close enough that people will get them mixed up when searching and ordering.
In Ideas That Created the Future [1], a curated and edited set of influential computer science papers, the Leibniz contribution is "The True Method" [2], which I read more or less as "if we could formalize everything, we could use mathematical methods to find answers to all questions".
In the collection of papers, it's picked because of its ideas later formalized in Boolean logic, and logic programming in general.
And I only read the Monadology. But apparently its the only thing by Leibniz one really has to read, unless they intend to become a scholar of his work.
Leibniz independently invented calculus, including the notation for the derivative that is most common today.
He also basically invented computer science -- he did pioneering work in binary arithmetic, designed a mechanical calculator, and came up with the concept of a "universal language", which was an early attempt at codifying the rules of logic and reason into a form that could be operated upon mechanically.
> In such a way, Leibniz, to cite Milton, dared to “justify the ways of God to men.” Voltaire responded with a snarky misreading that exploited the undeniable empirical fact that evil was not balanced by good in the lives of every discreet individual. But Leibniz made no such claim. The best world was optimized as a whole, containing just as much good and evil as was required for the totality of creation.
I like this paragraph. I've never been a big fan of Voltaire's criticism (although I may have not understood it fully, not being a philosophy expert of any kind). To me it always seemed like Liebniz tried to explain why there was suffering on the whole, and Voltaire responding with "there is suffering!". Like you are not really arguing the point.
My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
> maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase.
This is an argument made by one of the Dostoevsky characters, a famous "tear of a child" argument.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoevsky
"Their first child, Sofya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born in Geneva on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair"."
So Dostoevsky suffered the pain of losing a child.
Despite that, an argument about "tear of child" was put into antagonist's mouth.
> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase.
Is that better? it would also require not having all the good things from creation.
I can’t see the good being contingent on a five year old getting bone cancer.
In that case you have rejected Leibniz's argument anyway so the argument in the comment I was replying to does not arise.
You don't know that the child wouldn't have grown up Hitler.
The argument seems similar - not exactly, but similar - to the question "if global warming is real, why is it snowing here". A function describing the maximum global integration over happiness could very well contain many local minima.
Yes, but an omnipotent God could presumably just make Hitlers not exist. The argument rests on the assumption that there are hidden dependencies in the laws of the universe, such that it was logically necessary that Hitler (or insert whatever other evil here) had to exist to make the best possible world. That's hard to swallow.
Consider that many people today, who live better than the kings of centuries past, are depressed. One could conclude that happiness is a state of improvement over past experiences, not necessarily an absolute scale. If this is true (and I personally believe that it is), then evil is in fact a necessary baseline against which happiness can be improved upon.
I think you and Voltaire are thinking along the same lines. Both are a rejection of a bloodless utility maximisation creed on the simple basis that human morality just doesn’t work that way.
> and Voltaire responding with
Like a very long joke, which builds and builds and builds and builds, the punchline in the end arrives.
It's in the last sentence: "Yes, but you have to work for it". (I.e. he intended to stress an outer point.)
> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
It is not really possible to answer these questions when one does not know the spiritual infrastructure. Eg, say reincarnation of the soul is real, and in a previous life a soul has been in the body of an industrialist on whose account cancer causing pollution was spewed out. In the next incarnation, it seems valid for that soul to experience the effect of the earlier incarnation's actions. If that is it, the soul may in fact be learning and growing, which may be the point of the exercise.
I know that this is all conjecture, but I hope I am relaying my point - that without understanding the spiritual domain, these sorts of moral appraisals are moot.
That is a really excellent point and in fact gets at the difficulty of arguing any rational point about religion. I'd guess that every rational argument that appeals to religion at all can be made to work or not work depending on this background "spiritual infrastructure". This is one reason why rationalists often feel like religious thinkers are moving the goalposts.
Maybe the 5-year-old who died of bone cancer was just playing Roy on the hardest difficulty.
However, this shiftiness also undermines every religious platitude as well. God loves you, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. etc. -- maybe, or maybe God is trapped in a human coma patient and Loki is just fucking with us. If you have degrees of freedom over this "spiritual infrastructure" then it's completely impossible to reach any conclusion.
> Leibniz challenged “humanity to participate in the work of striving toward perfection,”
> Because the world is the creation of a perfect being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine perfection.
That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
I find this a common theme for those who are struggling to marry religious beliefs with logic.
I think you will be pleasantly amused by this marriage of logic and religious beliefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_pro...
It is formally proven that an entity that encompass all qualities of a God must exist.
> That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
The Creator (First Mover) being perfect is not a presumption, but rather a conclusion; see Corollary 1.3:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-way-part-iv-casca...
(You'll need to go through the series of weblog posts (they're not that long) to get the full logic of the argument.)
See also perhaps Aquinas, "Whether God is perfect?":
* https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1004.htm
> [that] there is even a "perfect"
This an important insight to this that I feel many people miss. Most of us consider "striving for perfection" to be equivalent to striving for the "absolute best". Real life often has no absolute best option. Real life is much more like an intricate web of interconnected rock-paper-scissors like relationships and choices, where "better" or "worse" is highly contextual and even conflicting. Aeon had a really nice essay about the problem[0].
Perhaps we tend to have a cultural blindness to this in cultures with European heritage due to the legacy of Plato's "perfect forms", and later how Christianity positions God.
[0] https://aeon.co/essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-...
Perfection for Leibniz might be considered more of a logical concept than an observable state. After all, he uses the same thing to argue (somehow) for the existence of god! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#ExiGod
This leads to some strange conclusions about perfection that aren't intuitive, and sometimes seem monstous.
Perfection might be imperfect.
I’m reminded of Pythagorean philosophies of harmony that quickly reveal the imperfections inherent to math, ie right triangle with two sides of one unit producing square root of two or Pythagorean tuning which is so perfect it is imperfect (eg the wolf fifth)
> * After all, he uses the same thing to argue (somehow) for the existence of god! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#ExiGod *
His argument from contingency is probably a better one:
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/02/avicenna-aquinas-an...
Replace "perfect" with "likely optimal" and you get the general thrust of it without the deus ex machina.
"Because the world is the creation of a likely optimal being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine likely optimisation"?
If understood in a very mystic transcending meaning of "creation" maybe, otherwise it reads still like dogma to me.
I’m also reminded of quantum probabilities and expected outcomes— how possibilities converge to create reality, like quantum Darwinism. https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-darwinism-an-idea-to-...
That is a new quantum thing to me, but looks interesting, thanks.
Meanwhile the realists found the world to be a combustion chamber from life that adapted itself to the combustion chamber and whorships the adaption process instincts.
And we all agreed that staying in the surplus valley of the combustion process is nice, as long as science can deliver. And now we have to jam machinery into our lifes so we can remain sentient, while at the same time speculating for another delivery of surplus coming down the line. Panopticon here, social networks there- and it does nothing yet, atrocities in wartime and civil unrest are still rampant.
Yes, you must have assumptions to apply logic in the first place. I don’t mind it, even if I have different assumptions.
> with logic
It's actually deductive, application of logic: given some concept, develop the theory it generates (the set of its consequences). The "rationalist" way.
The real context may not necessarily be that of "beliefs" (of doctrinal beliefs as an object... Possibly as a subject, instead).
The real question is, would a perfect Being create an imperfect creation? While I don't proffer any, I think there are valid reasons to do so.
The Christian gnostics reasoned it must have been either a lesser evil god or blind fool who created the material world.
> A key to Leibniz’s view is symmetry of creation. The best only emerges against the worst, the beautiful against the ugly, the harmonious against the dissonant.
Leibniz's surviving corpus is massive and sprawling (far larger than any other member of the Republic of Letters) so it could be that i haven't read whatever this is a reference to, but I don't recognise this sense of balance. For Leibniz as i understand him ours is the best of possible worlds because God created it to be this way, in his infinite benevolence and wisdom, and whatever the calamities occur must be part of some kind of plan of which we can only be ken (apperceptive) to a fraction thereof.
Reading Leibniz is like standing at the gate of modern and medieval thought. He didn't so much 'ransack' ideas, as this piece says he does, as try to reconcile even the most contradictory of positions. It's odd but exquisite.
If anyone wants to jump in I would recommend Lloyd Strickland's annotated translation of the Monadology (Leibniz's Monadology). Or really anything by Strickland, including his book on Leibniz on binary. See Strickland's website: http://www.leibniz-translations.com/
The balance idea sounds like misremembered Hegel. I think the best of all possible worlds theory should be seen for what it is: an attempt to reconcile the idea that a perfect god made the world with its observable imperfections. It’s intellectually more satisfying than the “fallen world” idea which just leads to more questions, and it remains compatible with mainstream Christian doctrine.
If you want to reject mainstream Christian doctrine that’s fine, but it’s not what Leibniz was trying to do.
In any event, his most lasting influence isn’t even in the realm of philosophy. Dude was a genius.
> intellectually more satisfying than the “fallen world” idea which just leads to more questions, and it remains compatible with mainstream Christian doctrine.
Doesn't mainstream Christian doctrine say that we're in a fallen world? Isn't that bit about "by Adam's sin we all sinned" (I'm forgetting the rhyme) a pretty central part of the catechism? (basically Romans 5:12)
Now as to God creating a universe in which a fall like that could occur (one that emphasizes free will), is that perhaps what Leibniz was addressing?
Pretty hard considering Hegel would not even be born a few decades after Leibniz died. Agreed that it is preferable to the "fallen world" starting point of so many other philosophies. Once you think the world is fallen or broken, the only remaining thing is trying (and waiting ;) ) to bring about some kind of Utopia by changing humankind, nature, etc..
https://archive.ph/6V9km/again?url=https://www.wsj.com/arts-...
I have to say it's confusing as hell that there's ANOTHER nonfiction book titled "The Best of All Possible Worlds", also about Leibniz, but centered on his friendships with other intellectuals (by Nadler). This seems close enough that people will get them mixed up when searching and ordering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide
Only thing I’ve read by Voltaire but it slapped.
Same. Maybe this thread can lead a resurgence of the word “Panglossian”.
My understanding was that Leibnitz was a pivotal figure in the ideas behind early computing. Didn't see that mentioned in the article so much.
In Ideas That Created the Future [1], a curated and edited set of influential computer science papers, the Leibniz contribution is "The True Method" [2], which I read more or less as "if we could formalize everything, we could use mathematical methods to find answers to all questions".
In the collection of papers, it's picked because of its ideas later formalized in Boolean logic, and logic programming in general.
[1]: https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5003/Ideas-That-C...
[2]: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/624726/3/The%20true%20method.pdf
He was pivotal in a lot of stuff, so such not being mentioned in an article discussing his metaphysical ideas is not surprising.
Obligatory mention of the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle
And I only read the Monadology. But apparently its the only thing by Leibniz one really has to read, unless they intend to become a scholar of his work.
Try this: Discourse on Metaphysics https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz1686d.pd...
Leibniz independently invented calculus, including the notation for the derivative that is most common today.
He also basically invented computer science -- he did pioneering work in binary arithmetic, designed a mechanical calculator, and came up with the concept of a "universal language", which was an early attempt at codifying the rules of logic and reason into a form that could be operated upon mechanically.
history keeps repeating, so often that there is no tragedy left, just farce
i give it 5 more years till hegel becomes popular. 10 more years till dialectical materialism and dictatorship of proletariat
Or 2 years for Heidegger?