Leibniz's Order and the Problem of Free Will

October 2022 · Modern Philosophy, critical paper 1

In his writings on ontology, Leibniz has a modern Aristotelian understanding of the notion of god, where he combines Aristotle's definitions of individual substances and develops on it in the monadology added to the scholastic understanding for the nature of god's attributes. By that, a search for a modal order of representation is eminent in his writings, and for the order to exist in god, it must result that order has to exist in reality. As in the Aristotelian tradition, Leibniz's god is responsible for all the continuous change that happens in the universe, continuously transforming the forms from potentiality to actuality, being the only necessary existence (Leibniz 27). As a lemma, god must be pure actuality; however, in the Aristotelian definition, god is pure thought, a thought contemplating the only ultimate perfection that is only worthy of contemplation, making it the unmoved mover, a machine thinking itself and thinking the forms and the universals, which is itself (Aristotle 1073a4-7). Whereas in Leibniz's discourse, god is the sum of all perfections, possessing the best of all qualities, which is called The Principle of the Best. As god is the sum of all perfections, it must follow that they are the ultimate form of omnibenevolence and goodness (Leibniz 25). That, in the Leibnizian sense, eliminates the Problem of Evil, as god must always pick the best possible action from all possible futures to necessitate their perfection. That, from the perspective of god, means that this world must be the best possible world, and all outcomes that are decided are the best. Following that, god does nothing disorderly, which introduces us to four other laws in the Leibnizian tradition to complete the system of order for reality; the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), the Principle of Contradiction (PC), and the Predicate-in-Notion Principle (PIN).

For the best of all outcomes to be actualized, a reason for that best must be, and as god does nothing orderly, such reasons must always be absolute for a system to be established. With that idea in mind, causality is fully attributed to the necessity of god, and as finite, modally possible, and contingent humans, it is impossible for us to fundamentally understand the nature of all-sufficient reason (Leibniz 39). All what we can do is to empirically analyze the sciences and the natural world to understand as much as we can from god's sufficient reasons to be more close to understanding the nature of god. For that principle to stay consistent, Leibniz talks about the Predicate-in-Notion Principle, and it goes as follows: "In every true universal affirmative proposition, the predicate is in the subject, that is, there is a connection between predicate and subject" (Leibniz 30). For that principle to be modally and logically correct, it must follow that for all propositions, whether necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the notion of the predicate is in some way included in that of the subject. Therefore, even while it can be agreed that god must choose the best or that the best is necessary, it does not follow that what is chosen must also be necessary because there is no proof that it is the best. The difference between the necessity of the consequence (necessitas consequentialiae) and necessity of the consequent (necessitas consequentialis) is relevant here because, in the end, the proposition in question is a necessity of the consequence rather than of the consequent because it becomes necessary once we accept the hypothesis that we take it to be the best, assuming that the best is necessarily chosen, which goes in accordance with the Principle of Sufficient Reason as it must, in fact, result from the Predicate-in-Notion Principle, since, if there were a truth without a cause, there would be a proposition in which the subject did not contain the predicate, which is against Leibniz's definition of primary truths. Moreover, for the order to consistently precede, Leibniz follows Aristotle and the scholastic philosophers and theologians in affirming the necessity for the Principle of Contradiction to be an ultimate axiom where a proposition cannot be true and false at the same time and that, therefore, A is A and cannot be not A (Leibniz 19). For that, his understanding of miracles assumes no contradiction to the laws of physics and nature. However, it is just the lowly way that we understand it through is why we do not have a fully sufficient reason for why they did function in this maverick yet still an orderly way. In Primary Truths, Leibniz states that although the fundamental truths of his philosophical system are identities, all remaining truths are reduced to primary truths with the help of definitions, that is, by the resolution of concepts (Leibniz 31). This is an interesting combination of the Principle of Contradiction and the Predicate-in-Notion Principle. Additionally, as the predicate is always implicitly or explicitly embedded inside the subject of any true statement, this holds true for all affirmative truths, whether they are general or specific, necessary or contingent. With the help of this seemingly unimportant premise, Leibniz would come to some quite significant metaphysical conclusions regarding the nature of substance and modality.

Finally, for the system of order to be complete, Leibniz has to define the idealistic notions of individual substances, or Monads as he calls them later. Leibniz argued that if the idealistic mind-derived simple substances are the only truly actual substances, then bodies, motion, and everything else must come from or be derived from these simple substances and their perceptive states (Leibniz 42). That presents a problem of free will, which I deem to be the greatest problem in Leibniz's system of order. For everything to happen to be derived from simple substances, it must be that there is no freedom nor free will. He tries to solve this problem by arguing that one could interpret freedom as phenomenally unpredictable to indicate freedom as an act without cause (Leibniz 45). However, this is absurd because the choice is not random. One's free action, for instance, is motivated by oneself as its cause. Why should one be upset when everyone acts according to their own unique vision of themselves? If one is the origin of one's activity and nothing or no one else, then one cannot be said to be free. I reckon that here is where Leibniz follows in the same trap as the scholastics to be idealistically determinist.

Leibniz's system, as Heidegger would have put it, is following that of the moderns in pursuing a system of order and representations for ideas, perhaps with a bit more inspiration coming from the scholastics, where he assumes that we do not need the study of metaphysics to generalize an order for the universe, a representation is all what matter and such representation can be actualized using the mathematization of reality to be ordered in the mind according to the sufficient reasons we may possess that cannot reach the infinite mind of god despite his understanding of substantial forms just like Aristotle. However, his representations are better than those of the moderns as he allows for this representation to be used only epistemically outside the realms of metaphysics and essences, it still allows for them to exist and to be studied, where everything has its final cause telos that is god. Leibniz does argue, as mentioned before, that in his system, god is causality itself and that god is purely rational, having the best of all qualities, giving us the space to ontologically express being as derived necessarily from the only necessary, always actual existence, that is god, and to have the ability to disregard that and work within the realms of science in the search for what we can reach of sufficient reasons.