An early theory of contingency in Leibniz

(forthcoming in Studia Leibnitiana)

0. Introduction

Leibniz’s views on freedom divide, with relatively little controversy,

into at least two camps. The ‘early’ Leibniz was a compatibilist,

maintaining the truth of determinism while upholding the reality of

freedom. The ‘late’ Leibniz was a compatibilist of a different sort—

still maintaining the truth of determinism, though in a way that

allowed for some contingency. By 1686, Leibniz held that propositions

of the form ‘S does x at t1 in W’ are analytically true, though the

containment of the predicate in the subject could not be demonstrated

in a finite number of term substitutions. Because the proposition is

indemonstrable, it is only contingently true.

The specifics of Leibniz’s early and later views on freedom are well-

worn terrain. Little discussion, however, is given to the way in which

Leibniz’s early view develops into the later view of 1686. Some

material from Leibniz’s so-called ‘middle period’ (late 1670s-early

Thanks to Scott Ragland and Michael J. Murray for many helpful comments on multiple drafts of this paper. A version of this paper was read at the Southeast Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy at the University of South Florida in 2014. I want to thank the audience for many helpful questions, particularly Roger Ariew, DanGarber, Joseph Anderson, Doug Jesseph, and Thomas Feeney. Tom later corresponded with me about some material in section 2. His remarks helped me tighten up much of the material in that section.

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1680s) shows that Leibniz gets to his later theory of contingency by

way of entertaining a libertarian conception of freedom for divine

action. In the early 1680s Leibniz argued that God is perfectly free

because God’s volition to do the best rested on an infinite series of

higher-order volitions to do the best. I explore this early theory of

contingency and examine the role that it plays in the development of

Leibniz’s infinite analysis theory of contingency.1

My discussion has four parts. In section 1, I reconstruct Leibniz’s

early position on freedom and show how various problems motivated

significant changes in Leibniz’s views over a short period of time. In

section two, I outline a series of notes by Leibniz entitled “De

Libertate a Necessitate in Eligendo,”2 where Leibniz develops a

1 Contingency is a property of propositions, while freedom is a property of either actions or persons. A theory of contingency will explain why certain propositions are contingently true, while a theory of freedom will explain whycertain actions are free. Contingency and freedom, for Leibniz, mutually implyone another. Thus, to talk about Leibniz’s theory of contingency is to imply aspecific theory of freedom. That is why, in this essay, I will switch between talking about freedom and contingency somewhat freely. The reader should keep in mind that for Leibniz these two concepts are tightly interconnected.2 A.VI.iv.1450-55/Grua 298-302 (as Reflexions sur Bellarmin). In this paper, I will use the following abbreviations for standard collections of Leibniz’s work and influential scholarly work on Leibniz:

A = Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Brief, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (Darmstadt and Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923- ). Cited by series, volume, and page, e.g., A.VI.iv.1447.Adams = R. Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).AG = Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989).

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rudimentary theory of contingency that resembles the infinite analysis

theory developed around 1686. In section three, I consider some

reasons for why Leibniz dropped the “Eligendo” view. In section four,

I look at the link that Leibniz develops between an infinite series of

reasons and indemonstrability and suggest how the rudimentary theory

of “Eligendo” eventually became the infinite analysis theory of

contingency.

1. Necessitarianism and the role of the will

Leibniz was concerned for nearly the entirety of his career with

a particular puzzle about freedom and divine action. The puzzle

stems from the following basic argument (N):

N-1) (God does what is best)

N-2) (Actualizing this world is best)

G = Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C.I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Weidman, 1875-90. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965. Cited by volume and page, e.g., G III.10.Grua = Textes inédits d’après les manuscrits de la bibliothèque de Hanovre, 2 vols. ed. G. Grua(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948; reprint ed. New York: Garland,1985).Huggard = Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. A. Farrar, trans. E.M. Huggard (La Salle, IL.: Open Court, 1985). Cited by section number.Loemker = Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. L. Loemker, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1969).MP = Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, tr. M. Morris and G.H.R. Parkinson, London: Dent, 1973.Sleigh = G.W. Leibniz, Confessio philosophi: Papers Concerning the Problem of Evil, 1671-1678, trans. R.C. Sleigh, Jr. (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2005).

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N-3) Therefore, (God actualizes this world)

We should understand the necessity operators in the premises and

conclusion to signify absolute necessity, so that the denial of either (N-

1) or (N-2) would entail a contradiction.3 The puzzle is that this

argument seems to exclude any possibility of freedom in divine action.

God is compelled, as it were, to create this world. Let’s call this

the necessitarian dilemma, where it is logically impossible for God to do

otherwise than he has done (in this essay, I will assume this as the

meaning of necessitarianism).

Early in his career, Leibniz was comfortable with N and accepted (N-

3). Despite the necessitarian dilemma implied by N, he thought that

(N-3) was compatible with freedom.4 During the late 1670s and early

1680s, however, Leibniz’s confidence in the compatibility of these two

began to wane. In some notes on Spinoza’s Ethics written around 1678,

Leibniz recognized that Spinoza’s necessitarianism led to some absurd

conclusions that left no room for choice in God’s activity.5 Between

3 Cf. Grua 270-71; MP 96.4 A.II.i.117-18/Loemker 146-47/Sleigh 2-5: “Whatever has happened, is happening, or will happen is the best and, accordingly, necessary. But…it has a necessity that takes nothing away from freedom.” See also Adams, pp. 11-12. Adams cites another text, written in 1677, that reads: “God necessarily and yet freely chooses the most perfect,” on p. 38n56.5 G I.148-49/Loemker 203-4. Leibniz was commenting on Spinoza’s Ethics Ip28, 29.

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1677 and 1681 Leibniz realized that choice implies the ability to

select from alternatives, so that freedom requires the ability to

choose (or choose otherwise).6 Leibniz certainly thought that God has

all perfections and, freedom being a perfection, that God is free.7

But, if the necessitarianism implied by (N-3) entails that God has no

logically possible alternatives to whatever he might in fact choose,

then (N-3) implies that God is not free.8 But God is free, so the

necessitarianism implied by (N-3) must not obtain. These

considerations led Leibniz to affirm both contingency and the reality

of choice in the production of God’s actions.

As Leibniz began to distance himself from his earlier

necessitarianism, he also began to assign a more active role to the

will in the process of choice. The maturation of Leibniz’s thought is

evident in the following development:

1) In 1671, before the composition of the Confessio philosophii, Leibniz

wrote that: “The ultimate basis of the divine will…[is] the divine

intellect…What, therefore, is the ultimate basis of the divine

intellect? The harmony of things. And what is the ultimate basis of

6 A.VI.iv.1353/Sleigh 140-417 A.VI.iv.1406/Sleigh 134-358 Loemker 263

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the harmony of things? Nothing…It is the highest form of freedom to

be forced to the best by right reason.”9 On this view, choice does

not seem to play any role in the production of action. The will is

just a passive response mechanism that is coerced by the intellect.

In the words of Robert Adams, the will here does not have a “real

and important role to play.”10

2) Sometime in the early 1680s, Leibniz maintains that: “God wills

freely because outside of His will there is no reason that can be

given why He wills.”11 Leibniz here makes the will out to be

explanatorily independent from the intellect in the production of

9 A.II.i.117/Sleigh 2-3. Emphasis mine. See also A.VI.i.542.10 See the section on “The Reality of Choice,” in Adams, pp. 20-21. Cf. M. Laerke, “Quod non omnia possibilia ad existentiam perveniant,” in The Leibniz Review 17, 2007, pp. 1-30 [at pp. 6-7]. As Laerke suggests (p. 16), Leibniz probably did not even have a sufficiently robust ontology of possibility that could accommodate the actionof choice until about 1677 (corresponding to Leibniz’s exchange with Steno in Hanover). Compare to J.D. Davidson’s “Leibniz on the Labyrinth of Freedom: Two EarlyTexts,” in The Leibniz Review 13, 2003, pp. 19-44 [at p. 30]. Davidson tries to construct an account of freedom from Leibniz’s early work that preserves the activity of the will as a crucial element in the production of action. Davidson seeschoice, belief, and rational reflection as irreducible elements within the action ofintelligent agents. The account fails to explain why Leibniz began to change his views in the late 1670s. On my view, Leibniz saw belief as the ground of choice and choice as the ground of reflection. But reflection, in the early 1670s, was determined by the structure of harmony in the Universe, so that belief and choice are ultimately grounded in items external to the agent [cf. p. 37, though Davidson’sremarks there are inadequate]. Thus, the psychological determinism of the early viewput enough pressure on Leibniz that his views began to shift. More would need to be said against Davidson’s account to be decisive, but the comments here are enough to motivate a strong separation between Leibniz’s early and later views on freedom.11 A.VI.iv.1453/Grua 301.

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action. This means that nothing external or antecedent to the will

determines the instancing of any particular volition.

3) Between 1686 and 1687 Leibniz writes: “We must say that contingent

truths result from a certain combination of the power, intellect,

and will of God.”12 Leibniz no longer hangs contingency solely on

the operation of the will as he did in the early 1680s. In fact, in

this later passage, he seems to adopt a kind of intellectualist

view like the one from the early 1670s. What is important, though,

is that Leibniz’s intellectualism leaves room for the operation of

the will as a real and irreducible principle of action. That is,

action does not follow mechanically from intellectual deliberation

as it does in the early position. The will is active in the process

of choosing even if it is not wholly independent of the promptings

of the intellect.

Leibniz notices that in order to secure the contingency in action that

is necessary for freedom, the will must have some active role to play

in the production of action. Action cannot simply follow mechanically

from one’s nature; the will must actively elect to act in accordance with

12 A.VI.iv.1600/Grua 311.

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the inclinations of one’s nature. This activity of the will became a

cornerstone of Leibniz’s philosophy.13

This, however, does not eliminate all necessity present in choice

and action; it only eliminates the necessitarian dilemma, or those

instances of absolute necessity in the production of action that might

jeopardize freedom. Leibniz retains necessity in choice and action

because of his commitment to the principle of sufficient reason, which

states that the occurrence of any event, e, has a set of requisites

that, once posited, make the occurrence of e inevitable. Since these

requisites are sufficient for the instancing of the consequent event,

the consequents will always in some sense be necessary given the

requisites. Because of this, Leibniz continued to think that all

events occur with necessity, though this need not always be the

absolute necessity entailed by N.14

Recall that N implies the necessitarian dilemma because (N-1) and

(N-2) are both absolutely necessary. For Leibniz to secure any kind of

contingency in his system, he needed to identify which of the premises

could be modified in order to deny the problematic conclusion. At

13 G I.150/Loemker 205; AG 277-78; Huggard 173, 374. See Laerke, p. 21.14 Cf. Huggard 371; Discourse on Metaphysics 13/AG 45; MP 103. Compare to Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles II.30

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different times in his career, Leibniz appears to try out different

strategies—each directed at a specific premise—to secure contingency

within his system. The two major strategies are as follows: 1) God’s

decision to do what is best is contingent, because it is possible that

God not decide to do what is best; thus N-1 is not absolutely necessary.

2) That which is best is contingent, so that God’s decision to create

this world is contingent because the superlative goodness of this world

is itself contingent; thus N-2 is not absolutely necessary.15 In (1),

contingency is rooted in the free will of God; in (2), contingency is

rooted in the possible objects of creation. Leibniz favored the second

strategy throughout the majority of his career, though important

developments in his theory of contingency were the result of pursuing

the first strategy.16 In what follows, I will examine a short paper by

Leibniz that attempts the first strategy.

2. The contingency of God’s optimization15 Martin Pickup makes a similar point in his “Leibniz and the necessity of the bestpossible world,” in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming), p. 5. Pickup thinks that the adoption of such a position comes at too high a cost for the Leibnizian. A full treatment of Pickup’s reading lies outside the scope of the present essay, though some elements of the “Eligendo” view (which Pickup does not consider) circumvent several of his concerns.16 Adams, p. 24. In several notes from the 1690s, Leibniz wrote that even though theproposition “God does what is best” is necessarily true, what is in fact best is notnecessarily so. See Grua 305/AG 30; Grua 336, 493-94.

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In section one, it was shown that Leibniz’s early views on

freedom ran into certain problems surrounding necessity and choice. To

fix these problems, Leibniz needed to both adjust one of the initially

plausible premises of N to block the necessitarian conclusion and

rethink the role of the will in the production of action. One of the

earliest attempts to accomplish these tasks is found in a series of

short notes (the aforementioned “Eligendo”) written sometime in the

early 1680s.17 “Eligendo” reflects one of Leibniz’s (many) efforts to

systematically rework his theory of freedom, particularly with respect

to divine action.

There are three major claims made in “Eligendo” that relate to the

issue of divine freedom. The first two are found in a general thesis

about the psychology of free and rational agents:

“It seems that this can be said: It is certain and infallible that the Mind determines itself to the greatest apparent good. No example of the contrary has ever been given where error, or, at any rate, thoughtlessness, does not precede sin, as is obvious in the sin of the first man, who believed that he would become likeGod in virtue of eating the apple.”18

17 Grua dates these pieces between 1680 and 1682 and notes the connection between these pieces and the harsher views on freedom from 1671 (298n116: “Trois textes..quiadoucissent les formules de mai 1671.”). Sleigh dates the pieces between 1680 and 1684, 18 A.VI.iv.1450/Grua 298.

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There are two notable claims in this passage. First, rational agents

that make intentional choices are determined by the greatest apparent

good, and second, the determination yields choices that are certain

and infallible (or inevitable).19 The curious phrase here is “certain

and infallible.” We might be inclined initially to see this as an

indirect way of saying that the determination of the mind is

necessary. But a few lines later in the same piece Leibniz asserts the

exact opposite: “Even if [something] is certain, nevertheless, it is not

necessary, but rather free.”20 This claim that the choices of the will are

certain and infallible but not necessary is not isolated and appears

in contemporary and later texts. For example, in the New Essays (ca.

1704),21 Leibniz writes:

“Choice, however much the will is determined to make it, should not be called absolutely and in the strict sense necessary: a predominance of goods of which one is aware

19 Leibniz uses the word “infallible,” though this is essentially equivalent to inevitable. What Leibniz means is that, were I to have perfect knowledge ofyour circumstances and your nature, I could infallibly predict what you would do in those circumstances. This means that your choices are inevitable.20 A.VI.iv.1451/Grua 298. Leibniz says almost exactly the same thing in a notewritten around the same time: “Even if it is certain that what is more perfectwill come to be, nevertheless, what is less perfect is nonetheless possible” (A.VI.iv.1449/C 405).21 Leibniz began reading and making notes on Locke’s Essays in the 1690s, though he only began working on the New Essays in the 1700s after the publication of Pierre Coste’s French translation in 1700. Remnant and Bennett note that Leibniz completed the first draft of the New Essays in May 1704 (New Essays on Human Understanding, tr. P. Remnant and J. Bennett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. viii).

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inclines without necessitating, although, all things considered, this inclination is determining and never fails to have its effect.”22

The promptings of the intellect constitute an inclination toward

certain courses of action, but they never necessitate any movement of

the will on their own.23 Of course, it is curious that choices that

follow from the judgments of the intellect with certainty and

infallibility can also be contingent and free. There are a variety of

ways in which Leibniz could navigate the different positions that he

has laid down here, but one way is to hold that this relationship

between intellect and will obtains because God wills that that relationship

obtain. In that way, God remains in control of his choices, and those

choices are contingent because God willed that his will be subject to

the constraints laid down by the judgments of the intellect. The

reason, then, why God wills in a particular way is ultimately grounded

in this first free decree of God, namely to act in accordance with

22 New Essays, p. 199.23 Consider the following, written around the same time (1680-84): “For no inclination is ever given in a mind acting freely that is so great that an act follows necessarily from it” (A.VI.iv.1456/Grua 385).

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what is perceived to be best.24 All explanations of God’s actions

terminate in the will, and it is because of this that God is free.

This is, in fact, just what Leibniz later affirms in “Eligendo”:

“No reason can be given for why God chooses the most perfectother than because He so wills, i.e., because this is the first divine volition, to choose the most perfect. That is, this does not follow from things themselves, but purely fromthe fact that God so wills. And, in any case, He wills freely, because outside of His will there is no reason that can be given why He wills. For I define the free as that forwhich no other reason can be given than the will itself…the reason is intrinsic to the will.”25

Freedom, here, is rooted in states intrinsic to the will rather than

in the obtaining of a certain relation between the intellect and

will.26 The will is free just in case it is the source of action

(i.e., not determined by anything outside itself). This, again, seems

to tie in with the general thesis about the will that opens

“Eligendo,” namely that the will is responsive to the intellect

because the will elects that it will be so responsive.

24 A.VI.iv.1451/Grua 298: “Hence from various possible free creatures God chooses that sort that determines itself on the basis of reasons concerning the good, because this conformed to the first free decree of God concerning choosing what is the most perfect” (emphasis mine).25 A.VI.iv.1453/Grua 300.26 Compare what Leibniz says here to what he says around the same time (ca. 1680-84 for Sleigh, 1680-82 for Grua): “Freedom must be explained so that it has its root inthe nature of the mind because only minds are free…Therefore the root of freedom consists in this—that the Mind chooses, not in virtue of reasons that necessitate, but in virtue of true or apparent reasons concerning goodness by which it is inclined” (A.VI.iv.1455-56/Grua 384; emphasis mine).

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Leibniz goes so far as to say that true spontaneity “consists in this—

that [the will] itself is its own principle, not something external.”

We see, then, why Leibniz considers the will free on this view: not

only does nothing external to the will determine its responsiveness to

the judgments of the intellect, but nothing causally or explanatorily

antecedent to the will determines it either.

Leibniz goes on to explicate this connection between God’s willing the

best and some antecedent act of will as follows:

“But can’t this proposition be demonstrated from the nature of God; namely, the proposition—God chooses the most perfect? I say it can be demonstrated, given knowledge of His will. But can’t it be demonstrated that He has such a will? I deny that this can be demonstrated a priori. Rather,it is a primary proposition; that is, an identical.”27

This is the basis for Leibniz’s claim that the truth of the

proposition ‘God chooses the most perfect’ is indemonstrable. Before

we can examine this view in detail, we must rehearse the basics of

Leibniz’s theory of truth.

For Leibniz, any proposition of the form ‘S is p’ is true if p is

contained in S. That is, the concept of S yields the predicate p in a way

that makes the truth of ‘S is p’ analytic. Around 1686, Leibniz began

to distinguish between cases where predicates can be shown to follow 27 A.VI.iv.1454/Grua 301.

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in a finite number of steps from their concepts and cases where they

cannot be shown to follow in a finite number of steps. Contingent

propositions are those where an infinite number of steps are required.

This comes to be known as the infinite analysis account and it serves

as an explanation for the difference between contingent and necessary

truths. We will come back to truth and infinite analysis in the final

section.

This mature theory of infinite analysis is not present in the

early 1680s, but certain elements of the mature theory are glimpsed

here. In saying that the proposition ‘God chooses the most perfect’ is

an identical, Leibniz means that the proposition is an indemonstrable

identity similar to ‘A = A’ or ‘A thing is equal to itself’. In terms

of the concept containment view sketched above, we can say that it is

self-evident that the concept yields the predicate, though we cannot

demonstrate that the connection obtains. This is what Leibniz affirms

explicitly later in “Eligendo”:

“The first principle concerning Existences is this proposition: God wills to choose the most perfect. This proposition cannot be demonstrated; it is the first proposition of all the propositions of fact, i.e., the origin of all contingentexistence. To assert the proposition—God is free—is entirely the same as to assert that this proposition is an indemonstrable principle. For if some reason can be given for this first

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divine decree, by that very fact God would not have decreed it freely. Hence, I say that this proposition can be compared to identicals.”28

A proposition is demonstrable if it can be reduced to an identity

statement in a finite number of steps. In the case of an identical,

the proposition cannot be reduced to an identity statement because it

already is an identical.29

In the specific case of the proposition ‘God wills the best’,30

indemonstrability comes down to the following. Take x to be the

proposition ‘God wills the best’. For Leibniz, to provide reasons for

the proposition just is to offer premises that conjointly offer

deductive evidential support for their conclusion. On this view, then,

a toy version of analysis might look like this:

1) The good will the best.2) God is good.3) Therefore, x.

Here, (1) and (2) offer deductive evidential support for (3), hence, a

necessary relation obtains between the premises and the conclusion. 28 A.VI.iv.1454/Grua 301.29 Some might think that my conclusion here is weaker than the one warranted by the quotation above; Leibniz says the proposition ‘God wills the best’ is comparable to an identical, not that it is an identical. That does not affect the argument. The crucial point is that the proposition ‘God wills the best’ bears the property of being indemonstrable. Even if this is the only similarity between the proposition and identicals, it is enough for the argument below to go through30 Here I omit the copula, though one should read “God wills the best” as shorthand for “God is the being that wills the best.”

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But there is a problem lurking here. If we can provide sufficient

reasons for God’s willing that x, then the reasons would necessitate

divine action. If the reasons are not sufficient, then the proposition

‘God wills the best’ is not analytically true. Leibniz solves the

dilemma by saying that the sufficient reason for God’s volition to x

is grounded only in prior, higher-order volitions to x. God’s will

alone, then, is the ground for the analyticity of ‘God wills the

best’. Because God’s decision to do what is best is grounded in an

infinite series of prior volitions, God is perfectly free:

“God wills to will to choose the most perfect, and He wills the willing of the willing, and so on to infinity, because infinitely many reflections occur in God’s case, but not in the case of creatures. Therefore the total secret consists in the fact that God not only decrees to bring about the most perfect, but He also decrees to decree it. And, accordingly, no sign can be imagined with respect to which another sign, prior in nature, is not given in which it is already decreed. For, in general, it must be held that thereis no decree that God has not decreed by virtue of another decree, which is prior in nature. This is based on the nature of perfect freedom; aside from this account, there isno explanation.”31

Why, then, does Leibniz take x to be indemonstrable given that x has a

sufficient reason? The argument he has in mind looks like this:

A = ‘God wills to will His willing of the best’B = ‘God wills to will the best’

31A.VI.iv.1454/Grua 302.

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1) A2) B3) (For all ƒ, if God wills that ƒ, then ƒ)4) Therefore, x [1, 2]

But (1) and (2) here do not offer deductive evidential support because

(1) is supported by an infinite series of prior, higher-order

volitions. That is, ‘A’ is itself the conclusion of a deductive

argument with an infinite number of premises.

To see this, let’s return briefly to an “Eligendo” passage

mentioned earlier. Above, I noted that Leibniz says: “No reason can be

given for why God chooses the most perfect other than because He so

wills.” We can understand ‘the best’ in either a de re or de dicto sense.

That is, either we seek a reason why God chooses some x (where x

happens to be the best) or a reason why God chooses whatever meets the

description ‘the best’. The de re sense is plainly wrong, because there

is a reason available for why God chooses x. He chooses x because it is

the best. So we should understand ‘the best’ in the de dicto sense. This

means that God chooses whatever falls under the description ‘best’ for

no other reason than because God so wills. That is, the only reason

why God chooses whatever falls under the description ‘the best’ is

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that God wills to choose whatever falls under the description

‘best’.32

So there are two acts of will at this point. First, God wills x

and x is most perfect. Second, God wills whatever falls under the description

‘the best’. This second act of will is explanatorily prior to the first act of

will. Why, though, does God choose whatever falls under the description ‘the best’?

God wills thus because willing whatever falls under the description

‘the best’ is the most perfect course of action. So, God wills

whatever falls under the description ‘the best’ because willing this

falls under the description ‘the best’. If God wills whatever falls

under the description ‘the best’ then God must will to will whatever

falls under the description ‘the best’.

Now we have three acts of will:

1) God wills x and x is best.2) God wills whatever falls under the description ‘the best’

and willing this is the most perfect course of action.3) God wills to will whatever falls under the description ‘the

best’.

Again, (2) explains (1). Surprisingly, however, (2) also explains (3).

This is the key point in the argument. The series of volitions

obviously proceeds to infinity, because at each step, the previous 32 Much of the material in this and the following paragraph came out of conversations with Thomas Feeney.

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volition would constitute the most perfect course of action available.

Each of these higher order volitions (from step 3 on up) would be mere

‘reflections’, as Leibniz puts it, but none of these reflections are

prior in explanation to (2). (2) is an act of will not grounded in

some prior act of reflection. It is thus that Leibniz writes that

God’s willing the best is: “the first proposition of all propositions

of fact.”

There is an important difference between this view and the mature

infinite analysis theory. We will revisit this difference in the final

section of the paper. Roughly, the difference is that here the

proposition ‘God wills the best’ is indemonstrable in virtue of its

being an identical. If, as Robert Sleigh suggests, we think of

identicals as an ordered pair {S, x} where the terms are sets of

properties and x is a subset of S,33 then the argument of “Eligendo” is

as follows. It is not the case that the possession of x by S can be

deduced from a consideration of S’s complete concept because any set

of reasons provided that might function as premises in the deduction

will not offer the requisite evidential support for the conclusion. It

is in this way that any identical is indemonstrable. In the infinite 33 R.C. Sleigh, Jr., Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentary on their Correspondence, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 85.

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analysis view, contingent propositions are just those that cannot be

reduced to an identical through a finite number of term substitutions.

In any case, contingency in both views is tied to the infinite.

This ties in with the earlier claims about indemonstrability because

any attempt to demonstrate that God is the being that bears the

predicate ‘chooses the best’ would require an appeal to an infinite

number of premises that do not conjointly offer deductive evidential

support for the purported conclusion of the demonstration.

The above quotation should not be taken as an indication that Leibniz

maintained the reality of uncaused events. That every event has some

sufficient determining cause or reason is at all times a foundational

claim in the Leibnizian system. Rather, Leibniz is pressing the point

that the promptings of the intellect only incline the will toward

certain courses of action because the will has elected to allow such

inclinations to be efficacious.34 The will is only responsive to

34 Rescher noted this a long time ago, though not in connection with this passage: “It is only because God has chosen to subscribe to the standard of perfection in selecting a possible world for actualization that possible substances come to have (figurative) ‘claim’ to existence” (The Philosophy of Leibniz, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 29). Perhaps this view is also contained, implicitly, in Ed Curley’s remarks in his “Root of Contingency,” in Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. H.G. Frankfurt, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972, pp. 69-97 [at p. 90]: “There isalways some basis in the nature of the thing for the correct predication of existence, a basis which consists of the fact that the thing enters into the best possible world. Still, existence does not follow from that fact simpliciter. It followsonly given the further fact that God chooses to create the best possible world.”

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reasons concerning perceptions of value because the will has decided in

some sense to be responsive to such perceptions (and that decision was

grounded in a prior act of the will that was grounded in a prior act

of the will and so on ad infinitum).

The three major points of “Eligendo,” then, are as follows:

1) In general, the intellect merely inclines the will toward certain courses of action.

2) God’s will is only responsive to perceptions of value because it decides to be so responsive.

3) The decision to be responsive to perceptions of value is based on an infinite series of prior volitions, so that an infinite number of volitions ground the decision to be responsive to perceptions of value.

Roughly, we have a libertarian view of freedom here, as the action to

do the best is determined by the volition to choose to do what is

perceived by the intellect to be best. Choices of the will need to be

preceded by judgment of the intellect since that is what makes choice

intentional. Those choices are contingent, though, because they follow

from an infinite regress of prior contingent choices. These joint

conditions make the choice free.

The strategy in “Eligendo” is to attack N-1 mentioned in section

one, which stated that: (God does what is best). Before proceeding,

we should note that Leibniz, at this stage in his career, did not

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pursue a strategy that attacked the second premise of N. This is

because essences (or possibilia),35 for Leibniz, are the objects of God’s

understanding and independent of His will. As independent of God’s

will, the nature of the essences, and thus the value of the essences,

will be independent of God’s will (though dependent on God’s

intellect), so that the value of each essence is a necessary fact.36

This view, in a way, was taken by Leibniz to be a major improvement

over the views of Spinoza and Descartes, both of whom took the nature

of essences to depend on God’s will. Leibniz would later come to

reject this view of essences, though his acceptance of it in the early

stages of his thinking led to some decisive developments in his views

on freedom, some of which I will explore in the last section.37

35 See A.VI.iv.1391 (ca. 1678-79 for Sleigh): “For the essence of each thing is the same as the possibility of its existence” and A.II.i.117/Sleigh 2-3 (ca. 1671): “Foressences of things are just like numbers, and they contain the very possibility of entities.”36 A.VI.iv.2320: “What is good, perfect, just, i.e., worthy of a wise person, does not depend on the will of God, but rather on His essence or the ideas that are in His intellect just as does what is possible or impossible.” See E.M. Curley, “The Root of Contingency,” in Leibniz: A Critical Collection of Essays, ed. Harry G. Frankfurt, New York: Anchor, 1972, pp. 69-98 [at pp. 94-95] and Rescher, Philosophy of Leibniz, p. 45.37 Leibniz rejected his earlier view of essences for two reasons: 1) Leibniz came tosee that the value of an essence can only be determined on the basis of an infinite comparative analysis, making the value of that essence contingent, and; 2) Leibniz came to see that there could be contingent connections between states of a substanceconsidered as possible. Both of these contributed to Leibniz’s mature view that it is a contingent fact whether this world is best. See Adams, pp. 27-30.

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With the view outlined here, Leibniz will simply deny N-1: God’s

decision to do the best is not absolutely necessary. This is tied to

the indemonstrability of the proposition ‘God chooses the best’,

because necessity (or lack thereof) is correlated with demonstrability

for Leibniz.38 We have already seen why the proposition is

indemonstrable: no finite number of premises conjointly offers

deductive evidential support for the conclusion that God wills the

best. If there is no such evidential support, then there is no

necessary connection between the premises and the conclusion. Hence, there

is only a contingent connection, and this contingent connection

signifies a contingent connection between the action in question and

the actor. It is on this basis that Leibniz will say that God’s

decision to do what is best is merely contingent.

3. Leibniz the libertarian?

Before going on to trace the development of this view into the

infinite analysis view, I want to discuss briefly why the “Eligendo”

view drops out of Leibniz’s philosophy. Robert Adams has offered

several independent reasons for why the “Eligendo” view is 38 See A.I.viii.158; G VII.200, 309; MP 75, 97, 110; Grua 303-304; and also Adams, p. 29.

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incompatible with other foundational elements in Leibniz’s system.39

While I think that many of these reasons do not constitute defeaters

for the view (and can, in fact, be shown to be compatible with much of

Leibniz’s conceptual machinery in the 1680s), one reason does seem to

thwart the introduction of the “Eligendo” view into Leibniz’s system.

Adams’s point can be summarized as follows: It is impossible for

God to do the unjust. It is conceptually impossible for God to do what

is less than the best, since everything less than the best is a

relative evil. Thus, the only alternative choice to the best is not

available to God, and so the choice of the best is not contingent.40

Adams cites several notes from the 1690s where Leibniz maintained that

it could be demonstrated of God that it is impossible for Him to do

something evil (e.g., damning the innocent).41 This being the case,

God’s doing what is best is a conceptual matter, a consequence of

Leibniz maintaining that one can know that God will not damn the

innocent through a finite analysis, and thus a matter of absolute

necessity.42 If any alternative to the best is logically impossible

39 See Adams, pp. 38-42. Even Grua (at Grua 259) glosses the “Eligendo” pieces as fantastical exceptions to the general tenor of Leibniz’s thought.40 Grua 494; Huggard 8, 194; Adams, pp. 38-39.41 See Grua 16, 300, 360, 494.42 Cf. Adams, p. 38.

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for God to achieve, then the decision to do the best will be

absolutely necessary, not contingent.

Though I think there are resources available to Leibniz to avoid

this objection, it is clear that Adams’s point is revealing. While it

is undeniably correct that the “Eligendo” view is not part of

Leibniz’s mature philosophy, Adams is too quick to dismiss “Eligendo”

as a slip of the pen.43 In the final section, I hope to show that

certain elements from “Eligendo” were essential for Leibniz’s

formulation of the infinite analysis theory of contingency.

4. Indemonstrability, infinite analysis, and the autonomy of the will

While the “Eligendo” view is compatible with the general tenor of

Leibniz’s thought in the early 1680s, we again must note that the view

has a remarkably short shelf life for Leibniz. We want to know two

things here: 1) Why does the view drop out? 2) What does Leibniz’s

mature philosophy gain from the positions of the early 1680s?

As to the first, the shift in Leibniz’s thinking is most likely

due to the formulation of a more mature moral psychology in the mid-

1680s. When Leibniz began to overhaul his views on freedom in the late

43 Similarly in Davidson, “Leibniz on the Labyrinth,” p. 42n19.

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1670s, one consequence, as I noted above, was the increasing autonomy

of the will in Leibniz’s theory of choice. The “Eligendo” view most

likely grew out of Leibniz’s inability to see how the will could

maintain the requisite independence from the intellect while being

subordinate to the deliberations of the intellect. Thus, Leibniz makes

the will antecedent to the intellect, in a sense, in an attempt to

formulate the right kind of autonomy for the will.

We have already seen, however, that Leibniz backs off of this

view rather quickly. The will remains an active part of the decision-

making process in Leibniz’s moral psychology, though it is not

considered to be antecedent to the intellect in that process. It is my

belief that Leibniz was able to scale back this initial degree of

autonomy through the discovery of a more robust moral psychology. In

the mid-1680s, Leibniz found a way for the intellect to be prior to

the will without that priority jeopardizing the autonomy of the

latter. This is the famous “inclination without necessitation”

doctrine, first iterated in the following passage:

“Because it is an impossible condition that a creature operates without God’s concurrence, it is impossible that God foresees what the creature would do in virtue of its ownpower of free choice alone. Therefore God can only foresee to what a creature is more inclined. Therefore the matter

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reduces in the end to the doctrine of things inclining without necessitating.”44

The view, developed in the mid-1680s, is that the intellect can supply

a set of inclinations to the will based on various apprehensions of

what is good under certain descriptions for the agent in a given set

of circumstances without these inclinations violating the autonomy of

the will. The will, however, is constituted as a rational appetite for

the good, so that it inevitably (or certainly) chooses the strongest

inclination, which amounts to pursuing that which appears to be best.

As Jack Davidson notes: “Leibniz ‘psychologizes’ his sparse,

metaphysical account of monadic activity by adopting the language and

general framework of Thomas’ theory of human action.”45 As Leibniz’s

view becomes more Thomistic, the will assumes a position ‘posterior;,

as it were, to the intellect while retaining its active role in

rational choice-making.46 This explains why the “Eligendo” view fell

44 A.VI.iv.1460/Grua 388. Cf. M.J. Murray, “Spontaneity and Freedom in Leibniz,” in Rutherford and Cover, pp. 194-216 [at p. 212].45 “The Intellectual Source of Sin,” in Rutherford and Cover, pp. 234-253 [at p. 239].46 This is not to say that Leibniz is a libertarian. As I noted at the outset, Leibniz maintains throughout the entirety of his career that all events occur with akind of necessity. So Leibniz, due to his commitment to the principle of sufficient reason, maintains that everything that happens occurs with a kind of determination. He will also maintain that this determination is compatible with a certain class of human and divine actions being free, so that Leibniz here is best understood as a compatibilist.

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out of favor: the reformulation of his moral psychology led Leibniz to

abandon his more radical views on the will.47

Nevertheless, there is still something of value found in the

“Eligendo.” Most importantly, Leibniz seemed to hit on the connection

between contingency, indemonstrability and the infinite. Louis

Couturat observed in 1903 that Leibniz discovered the infinite

analysis theory of contingency in 1686.48 Grua notes that the elements

in the “Eligendo” piece were essential to this discovery of infinite

analysis.49 Here is how Leibniz describes infinite analysis:

Just as a larger number contains another which is incommensurable with it, though even if one continues to infinity with a resolution one will never arrive at a commonmeasure, so in the case of a contingent truth you will neverarrive at a demonstration, no matter how far you resolve thenotions…And so I think that I have disentangled a secret which had me perplexed for a long time; for I did not understand how a predicate could be in a subject, and yet the proposition would not be a necessary one. But the knowledge of geometry and the analysis of the infinite lit

47 There is another story to be told here suggested by Sleigh, Leibniz and Arnauld, p. 88, namely that the “Eligendo” view of contingency is, strictly speaking, circular. One reason why the infinite analysis view replaces the “Eligendo” view is that the former provides a non-circular, metaphysical basis for contingency that allows Leibniz to deny all of the same things as he could with the “Eligendo” view. This isdefinitely correct and fits with Leibniz’s implicit criticisms of the “Eligendo” view in other pieces written around the same time.48 Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz, Paris, 1903, pp. 356, 371-77, 387-89. Cf. G III.205.49 Grua 302-303n128.

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this light in me, so that I might understand that notions too can be resolved to infinity.50

For Leibniz, all true propositions are analytic. Thus, for any

proposition of the form ‘S is p’, it will be the case that the concept

of S contains the concept of p within it. To take a mundane example,

the proposition ‘I am the being that sits here in this chair’ is

analytic. What it is to be me is to be the being that sits here in

this chair at this moment. Infinite analysis provides a way to

preserve contingency within a class of conceptual truths. The idea, to

move back to the basic schema, is that even though the proposition ‘S

is p’ is analytic, one would need to substitute an infinite number of

terms in place of S and p to make the proposition explicitly analytic;

that is, there is no finite number of term substitutions that will

terminate in an explicit identical.51 Any such proposition that can

only be made explicitly analytic through an infinite substitution of

terms is contingent.52

This kind of view is not present in “Eligendo,” and there are

important differences between infinite analysis and the

50 MP 97.51 See C.D. Broad’s Leibniz: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 32.52 Grua 304/AG 29.

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indemonstrability of ‘God chooses the best’ in “Eligendo.” The most

significant difference is that in the 1686 view, Leibniz claims that

it would take an infinite number of term-substitutions to explicitly

demonstrate the identity of S and p in the proposition ‘S is p’. In

“Eligendo,” Leibniz states that the proposition ‘God chooses the best’

is already an identity, and thus indemonstrable.53 The contingency

enters in because any set of premises (or reasons) given to

demonstrate the identity would not conjointly offer deductive

evidential support for the conclusion, because each premise would

itself be the conclusion of a deductive argument with an infinite

number of premises.

So Leibniz does not discover infinite analysis in the early

1680s. He does, however, begin to notice the connection between

indemonstrability, infinity, and contingency. We see, then, that

“Eligendo” plays an important role in the development of Leibniz’s

thought toward his more mature theories of contingency.54 In

particular, his efforts to assign a more robust independence to the

will led him, I believe, to see the connection between contingency and

53 Cf. Loemker 264 for the indemonstrability of identicals. I owe this observation to C.P. Ragland.54 See R.C. Sleigh, Jr, Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentary on their Correspondence, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 67.

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the infinite. It is not too much to say that “Eligendo” helps Leibniz

to see that, to repeat an oft-cited phrase, radix contingentiae est infinitum.

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