PROBABILITIES OF EXISTENCE

 

There is a connection of sorts between Leibniz’s published and esoteric philosophies. We shall enter it via his famous doctrine of many possible worlds. A world is possible if it does not contradict the laws of logic. In my understanding, any world can start with any kind of premise, or hypothesis, even the most fantastic one, as long as the logic of the development of this hypothesis is flawless, in which case, it is as perfectly viable as any other one. (In other words, which I have been using, as long as the creation is true within its properly defined boundaries.)

Now, according to Leibniz, an infinite number of possibilities of world creation existed to God, but, being good, He could only be satisfied with the creation of the best of all possible worlds, determined in this case by the greatest excess of good over evil within it. The existence of evil as such is necessitated within God’s creation by the presence within it of the goodness of free will, which, being a greater good than the fact of the collateral evil, wins over the alternative. In other words, a world with both free will and evil within it (the former cannot logically exist without the latter) is better than a world without evil, and, consequently, without freedom of the will. (The preceding discussion shows how much affinity my own thinking on this subject has with Leibniz’s. It is the more regrettable, for this reason, that Leibniz was a mean, unpleasant man, in which aspect of character we are worlds apart with him.)

And now comes the most philosophically interesting part of Leibniz’s philosophy, even more valuable for the fact that, looking back, it is unique to him in its complex wholeness. Rather than retelling it in my own words, which I may eventually end up doing, let me, once again, quote Bertrand Russell on it:

“There is… a point, which is very curious. At most times, Leibniz represents the Creation as a free act of God, requiring the exercise of His Will. According to this doctrine, the determination of what actually exists is not effected by observation, but must proceed by way of God’s Goodness. Apart from God’s Goodness, which leads him to create the best possible world, there is no a priori reason why one thing should exist, rather than another…

But… there is a quite different theory as to why some things exist and others, equally possible, do not. According to this view (laid out in Leibniz’s unpublished papers) , everything that does not exist struggles to exist, but not all possibles can exist, because they are not all ‘compossible.’ It may be possible for A or B to exist on their own but not together in which case A and B are not compossible. In other words, two or more things are only compossible when it is possible for all of them to exist together. Leibniz seems to have imagined a sort of war in the Limbo inhabited by essences all trying to exist; in this war, groups of compossibles combine, and the largest group of compossibles wins… Leibniz even uses this conception as a way of defining existence: “The existent may be defined as that which is compatible with more things than is anything incompatible with itself… The existent is the being which is compatible with the most things.”

In this account there is no mention of God, and apparently no act of creation. Nor is there need of anything but pure logic for determining what exists. The question whether A and B are compossible is for Leibniz a logical question: does the existence of both A and B involve a contradiction? It follows that in theory logic can decide what group of compossibles is the largest, and this group consequently will exist.

This is a breathtaking philosophical exercise on Leibniz’s part squarely putting him in a place of the highest honor among the pre-Socratics. Compare this to Empedocles’ ontology, for instance! Alas, poor Nietzsche missed the discovery and publication of Leibniz’s papers by a few decades; otherwise, he would have been eager to communicate with him, among those selected underworld shadows, either raising their number to nine, or at somebody else’s expense. I am particularly impressed by Leibniz’s leap off the beaten track, by his return to the noble pre-Socratic origins of philosophy, as well as grateful to him for providing me with ample intellectual fodder to further develop my truth-of-creation theory. In Leibniz’s bold and unorthodox cosmogony I see a clash of what I perceive as incompatible creations, which must coexist in separateness, as the basic ontological law of coexistence, but, somehow, got themselves embroiled in an internecine war, by unlawfully intruding into each other’s sovereign territory… What a supreme intellectual feast! Thank you, Leibniz!