'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again | Hacker News Reader

'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again

wsj.com

86 pointsdrdee62 comments

> 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?

> 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.

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.)

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.

This seems to be assuming omnipotence is not just a fantasy?

More likely they were operating under significant constraints…

> an omnipotent ... could

The Architect in Leibniz is not omnipotent, and can only make the best out of what is possible.

I think you are just restating what I said. Yes, Leibniz and any of his defenders must assume that there are hidden constraints to what is possible that lie beyond human understanding that made Hitler (just to use a very salient example, but insert whatever evil you like), necessary to achieve a greater good. It is ultimately an argument from faith (just trust in God, he had the best for the world at heart) that can only be accepted by those who already believe.

I meant that it is explicit, not just an assumption but the very metaphysics. A Logos is thought as predominant over the Agent that uses it. (Otherwise, it would be logical to have perfection and only perfection immediately.)

> an argument from faith

I think it remains (it was intended to be) a logical argument from the very definitions (not from devotional faith).

Edit: sorry, but I realize I misremembered a few important details, that could make the above quite misleading...

Leibniz speaks of full omnipotence. So, that Logos is not "above" Divinity in an ontological sense, but in a purely logical sense. I.e. it was impossible to do differently as this is "the best possible plan", not "the best achievable".

> we are not well enough acquainted with the general harmony of the universe and of the hidden reasons for his conduct; and that makes people recklessly judge that many things could have been improved [... // ...] to know in detail his reasons for ordering the universe as he has, allowing sin, and granting his saving grace in one way rather than another, is beyond the power of a finite mind

~~ Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics(1686)

Apologies, re-reading this - which is literally false -, in view of a quick re-read of some salient paragraphs:

the Architect in Leibniz is omnipotent, and his project is regarded as the best possible; only, the project involves a limited humanity that cannot understand it.

(In the original writing above I meant 'omnipotent' in an oblique way (including "clarity" and "satisfying all" as "perfections"), which is too stretched and rhetoric not to mislead.)

I might be misinterpreting Leibniz’s central argument, but doesn’t the idea of the best of all possible worlds not depend on how humans (or any kind of life really) perceive it? This is similar to the idea that an unaligned AI agent could get its own idea of “best world”.

Also, I get the impression that in modern times, people fall away from religion because they can’t explain why God allows evil in a satisfactory way. But in the distant historical past, they were more motivated to reason or figure out why God intentionally causes evil things to happen.

> "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.

Love that answer. its a really good analogy.

Of course plenty of people I (probably most people) do not understand it with regard to global warming....

Nah, just create the world at a state where modern medicine can cure cancer, like we're on the slow road to doing.

In the 1800s someone might have asked "if suffering is required and a child is going to die of a systemic infection, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase".

To me it's clear that human flourishing without much suffering is possible in this universe and it's more about knowledge and power to prevent suffering being hard to come by. The kind of knowledge that e.g. could have been written down in ancient religious books or whatever if we had a best possible world.

> Nah, just create the world at a state where modern medicine can cure cancer, like we're on the slow road to doing.

We would have cures for every illness if not for human selfishness and evil. Look at all the money and effort spent on war during the last 10,000 years, on legal fees and disputes for the last 5,000 years. Rather than love our neighbors as ourselves, too many of us in our hearts say, "This land is MINE! This money is MINE! This patent is MINE! The credit is MINE!" If all this effort went to instead cultivating gifted individuals to research and cure diseases we'd have all our cures.

> 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.

Couldn't that be a misreading of Voltaire though? I didn't interpret Candide as "there is suffering", I interpreted it as "this is obviously not the best possible world and no logical gymnastics can convince me it is"

(With the collorary that logic is pretty useless in moral philosophy if it's only used to find contrived justification for the status quo.)

Unsong has a pretty novel take on it.

> 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.

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.

> 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).

Yes, you must have assumptions to apply logic in the first place. I don’t mind it, even if I have different assumptions.

> [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-...

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.

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.

> * 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...

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)

> 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

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.

Very interesting read, Thanks!

If I'm reading that article correctly, the criticism to Gödel is the same criticism I had for Leibniz:

> A proof does not necessitate that the conclusion be correct, but rather that by accepting the axioms, the conclusion follows logically.

> Many philosophers have called the axioms into question.

> 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.

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..

  See Judaism, Gnosticism, Marxism, Positivism...

> 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?

I can't speak to Leibniz since I haven't studied his philosophy at all, but there seems to be at least a distinction between a fallen world (or a corrupted world) and a fallen man.

That is, you could take the view of some (so called) gnostic sects that see the world as a corrupted mess created by a demiurge. In such a view one could understand man as a divine spark that is imprisoned within this world, perhaps even maliciously tricked by that demiurge, and gnosis is the realization and means to escape. That is a kind of heresy that was argued against quite vehemently by the early church fathers (as well as Neo-Platonists like Plotinus for what it is worth).

That would be opposed to a view that the world is a good creation (or at least as good as was possible given the material available, in the vein of Plato's Timaeus) and man is the ambiguous thing, given free will and the choice to align itself with God. In that case, the fall of man is better seen as a rejection of a good that has been offered.

A theologist like Leibniz is concerned with dogmas, which are like axioms: They are assumed to be true and form the basis of a logical system, that is supposed to consistent.

Beside that Leibniz contributes to a thousands of years old discussion about theodicy, the righteousness of god.

Let's look at the historical context first, because your bible verse is fitting:

In many cultures of the ancient world, misfortunes and disasters are said to be the result of a divine punishment. This can be seen in the old testament on many occasions, but it's basically the same in Greek societies etc. Christian scholars read the book of Ijob as an instance, where this thought is challenged: Ijob is living a righteous live, why is he punished?

The book itself doesn't really give an answer to that, but in the ancient world view kin liability applies. So even when Ijob was sinless, he inherits the sin of his forefathers, going all the way back to Adam.

Your bible verse (Romans 5:12) is referring to that, but if you read a bit further, this world view of the old testament is contrasted with the new testament. To paraphrase: Where one man (Adam) brought sin into the life of many, now one man (Jesus) takes the sin from all.

So in the Christian doctrine the argument, that bad things happen to us due to inherited sin doesn't apply anymore.

Which leads us to the scholarly discussion, which Leibniz is part of. The central dogmas (axioms) of Christianity relevant for the theodicy question are the following:

* There is only one god

* God is almighty

* God is all-loving

* God is understandable, since God revealed himself through Jesus.

The job of philosopher/theologist is to resolve, the perceived contradiction, that bad things are happening to good people and a loving, almighty God wouldn't allow that.

The most common solution is to drop one of the axioms, e.g. "God wants to help us, but he can't" (not almighty) or "God works in mysterious ways" (not understandable).

Leibniz instead doesn't sidestep the problem and argues, that even the best possible world can't be free from sorrow. I, personally, really like his line of thought, but this comment is already to long to describe it further.

https://archive.ph/6V9km/again?url=https://www.wsj.com/arts-...

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.

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”.

I need to plug “why evil exists” [1] as it was where I first learned about Leibniz and how he framed the renascentist period as one where men got closer to God through progress, until shook by the Lisbon earthquake. It is in audiobook form and starts with Gilgamesh all the way to pope Benedict XVI.

[1] https://books.google.pl/books/about/Why_Evil_Exists.html?id=...

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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?

Final Fantasy VII and it’s remakes have done their part.

I don't know, can Leibniz answer the challenges of modernity? Paul Ricœur famously identified three masters of suspicion, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. What's Leibniz responses to their challenges?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com