The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (20 page)

Such was Leibniz’ own most general attempt to make sense of things, in its broadest outline. If it was a success, then it was as great a success as any such attempt could be. For to show that things are how they are because there is, cosmically, no better way for them to be is a kind of apotheosis of making sense of things.
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And if that is the prospect afforded by the most general attempt to make sense of things, then this gives further fillip to the idea that there is intrinsic value in its pursuit.

For Leibniz, then, the significance of metaphysics lay not in its subserving some further purpose, nor yet in its providing a solution to any independent problem. Its significance lay, at least in part, in its capacity to achieve, at the highest possible level, the very thing that it was an attempt to achieve. But only in part. There was a price to be paid. And here we come to the real irony of Leibniz’ system. For, granted the general sense he made of things, the significance of metaphysics had to be seen as lying also, and in even greater part, not in its providing a solution to any independent problem, certainly, but in its providing a great problem of its own.

2. The Problem of Theodicy

The problem, to put it baldly, is that this does not appear to be the best of all possible worlds.
¹⁰
The existence of better possible worlds seems itself to
be a basic datum, impinging on us every bit as forcefully as any principle to the effect that things always make sense – nay, through our various trials and afflictions, altogether more forcefully. To reject that datum is not merely to invite scepticism about whatever reasoning has brought us to do so. It is to invite accusations of intellectualist insensibility. It is to risk making a mockery of our very real, very unmockable suffering. To be sure, the conclusion that this is the best of all possible worlds has scope for profound consolation. For while uncompensated suffering is one thing, suffering with an acknowledged purpose, to avoid what would otherwise be yet worse, is quite different.
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But the depth of the consolation will be proportional to our ability to understand it. Even if we can dispel the scepticism about whatever reasoning has brought us to the conclusion that this is the best of all possible worlds, such scepticism is liable to give way to scepticism about our capacity to see what the conclusion really means. The consolation will be minimal unless our recognition that things somehow make sense is not itself the limit of our ability to make sense of them; or, if it is the limit, unless we at least have a grip on why it is. One way or another Leibniz needs to confront the problem that his metaphysical story seems to be a repellent lie about what our lives are really like.

This problem is of course a variation on the classic problem that confronts anyone who believes in an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God. It is a harsh fact that such a belief appears incompatible with how the world appears, which is to say, improvable. It is the task of
theodicy
to address this problem.
¹²
Typically, this task is discharged by rejecting the first of the two appearances, the appearance of incompatibility. Leibniz, however, in insisting that this is the best of all possible worlds, needs to discharge it by rejecting the second of the two appearances, the appearance of improvability. In order to do this he needs to expand on the metaphysical story that he has already told and to provide some account of the illusion. To the extent that he can do this, metaphysics will after all be in the service of some other undertaking for him. It will be in the service of theodicy.

But this is somewhat different from the way in which it was in the service of other undertakings for Descartes and Spinoza. It is different because the very
raison d’être
of theodicy, for Leibniz, is metaphysical. Metaphysics is in the service of an attempt to deal with its own fallout.

I referred in §7 of the Introduction to the way in which good metaphysics can fulfil the function of rectifying bad metaphysics. The function that I am suggesting it has for Leibniz is somewhat different from that too. It is
the function of addressing a problem created by metaphysics that is itself good, but importantly incomplete. However, this function shares with the function to which I referred in the Introduction that it needs to involve a general attempt to make sense of our original general attempt to make sense of things. We shall see in the development of Leibniz’ metaphysical story how clearly he has this need in view.

3. Leibniz’ System

The story proceeds as follows. The ultimate constituents of the world are individual substances, what Leibniz calls monads. These are minds, or mind-like. Each of them represents the world in some way. They include God,
¹³
you, next-door’s cat, and countless much less sophisticated monads corresponding to various material features of the world. But none of them is itself, strictly speaking, material.
¹⁴
For neither space nor time is an ultimate feature of reality. (The infinite divisibility of space and time means that they have parts whose existence is parasitic on the wholes, which, in Leibniz’ view, flouts a basic metaphysical principle of what is real (III, 622).) Rather, space and time are features of how reality appears to certain of these monads. Leibniz is an idealist.
¹⁵

Already we see a striking divergence between the reaction of Spinoza to Descartes’ complex pluralism about substance and that of Leibniz. Spinoza reacted by acknowledging only one substance. Leibniz takes the opposite but equally simplifying step of acknowledging an infinity of substances, each of the same basic kind. But despite this divergence, there are important respects in which Spinoza and Leibniz are closer to each other than either is to Descartes. Each of them believes that that which merits the title of ‘substance’ is without parts – yet also such as to contain within itself all the complexity and diversity of nature. We shall see shortly the form that such containment takes in Leibniz.

Now God, although He is just one monad among infinitely many, is different from all other monads in the following crucial respect. He exists necessarily, whereas they exist contingently. He exists necessarily for reasons
made clear by the proofs of His existence. They exist contingently because they depend for their existence on Him, and whatever He creates He could have refrained from creating. Given any non-Divine monad that exists in this world, there are therefore other possible worlds in which it does not exist. And there are other possible worlds in which non-Divine monads exist that do not exist in this world. We might put it like this: God’s creative act is to actualize some, but not all, ‘possible monads’.
¹⁶

Does this mean that there is nothing more to a possible world than the possible monads it contains, or again, that a possible world just
is
an arbitrary set of possible monads? We might think that there must be more to a possible world than that, namely how the possible monads are ‘arranged’. In fact, however, there is plenty in Leibniz to preclude his acknowledging any such notion of ‘arrangement’. Indeed, there is plenty to preclude his acknowledging any possible monad’s existing in more than one possible world.
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But if no possible monad exists in more than one possible world, then it immediately follows not only that there is never any more to a possible world than a set of possible monads, but that there is sometimes not that much – by which I mean that some such sets, indeed most such sets, do not correspond to any possible world. This is something to which Leibniz is in any case independently committed, because he recognizes a relation of compossibility among possible monads, a relation whose complement – incompossibility – holds between two possible monads precisely when there is no possible world in which they both exist (III, 572ff.). There are some extraordinarily delicate questions concerning how this and the arguments for it are to be interpreted.
¹⁸
I shall have a little more to say about these issues later. Suffice to observe, for the time being, that God’s creative act is in an important sense neither more nor less than His actualizing of some possible monads (cf. III, 573).
¹⁹

Each monad has two fundamental features for Leibniz. It is ‘windowless’ (‘Monadology’, §7) and it ‘mirrors’
the whole world (‘Monadology’, §56).

To say that it is
windowless
is to say that ‘neither substance nor accident can enter [it] from without’ (‘Monadology’, §7). That is, it is impervious to everything else, or rather, in the case of a created monad, it is impervious to everything else except God. This imperviousness is of a very radical kind. Each monad, Leibniz says, is like a world apart (‘Discourse’, §14). He also says that ‘whatever happens to each [monad] would flow from its nature and its notion even if the rest were supposed to be absent’ (‘A Specimen’, p. 79) and that ‘it is as if there were as many different universes [sc. as there are monads]’ (‘Monadology’, §57). In other words, it would
make no difference
to a created monad if ‘nothing else existed but only God and itself’ (‘New System’, p. 122). In particular it would make no difference to any of us. It follows that, for Leibniz, just as for Descartes (
Ch. 1
, §6), unless we can make sense of what is, in a very deep sense, transcendent, we cannot make sense of anything other than ourselves.

But Leibniz would think that it was unacceptably sceptical to deny that we can make sense of what is other than ourselves (‘Universal Synthesis’, pp. 15–16). He therefore needs, just as Descartes needed, some assurance that we
can
do this and some account of how. His response to this need is very similar to Descartes’. He appeals to God’s benevolent guarantee that what is other than us shall conform to the ideas that we form through the proper use of our various faculties of representation.
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And this connects with the second fundamental feature that each monad has. Each monad
mirrors the whole world
. That is, each monad comprises a full and (because of God’s benevolence) accurate representation of the world, which in effect means a full and accurate representation of every other monad. The second fundamental feature therefore serves as a kind of corrective to the first. Here is Leibniz:

God first created the soul, and every other real unity [i.e. monad], in such a way that everything in it must spring from within itself, by a perfect
spontaneity
with regard to itself, and yet in a perfect
conformity
with things outside…. It follows from this that, since each of these substances exactly represents the whole universe in its own way and from a certain point of view, and since the perceptions or expressions of external
things reach the soul at the proper time by virtue of its own laws…, there will be a perfect agreement between all these substances, producing the same effect as would occur if these communicated with one another by means of a transmission of species or qualities [i.e. the same effect as would occur if they were not windowless]. (‘New System’, pp. 122–123, emphasis in original)

But since, in a sense, there is nothing more to a monad than its representation of the world, there needs to be some difference between any two of these representations to distinguish the two corresponding monads. This difference is grounded in the fact that each representation is, as Leibniz puts it in the quotation above, from a certain point of view.
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That is to say, each representation is more distinct either the closer its subject matter is to the corresponding monad or the larger its subject matter is (in some metaphorical sense of closeness and some metaphorical sense of largeness
²²
). This is why, despite the fact that you carry a full and accurate representation of the world within you, you cannot always determine the answer to a question just by elementary introspection. If the question concerns something about which your representation is very indistinct, then you will need to apply effort of some appropriate kind to ‘reposition’ yourself and make it more distinct. And this may in practice, if not in principle, be beyond you. Leibniz summarizes these ideas as follows:

The nature of the monad is representative, and consequently nothing can limit it to representing a part of things only, although it is true that its representation is confused as regards the detail of the whole universe and can only be distinct as regards a small part of things; that is to say as regards those which are either the nearest or the largest in relation to each of the monads…. In a confused way [all monads] go towards the infinite, towards the whole; but they are limited and distinguished from one another by the degrees of their distinct perceptions…. [A] soul can read in itself only what is distinctly represented there; it is unable to develop all at once all the things that are folded within it, for they stretch to infinity. (‘Monadology’, §§60 and 61)

(Note that Leibniz uses the language of representation in this quotation. Elsewhere, for example in ‘Discourse’, §§9 and 35, he uses the language of
expression. This reflects the fact that he is talking about a relation that is in some ways like the representational relation that holds between a Cartesian mind and the radically independent world to which that mind’s thinking is answerable, but which is in other ways like the expressive relation that holds between a Spinozist attribute and the reality that finds corresponding articulation in every other attribute.)