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Daily · Philosophy

Theodicy

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · philosophical essays, 1710·15 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • Leibniz opens by dismantling the 'Lazy Reason.' In the Preface he names the fatalist trap that follows from foreknowledge: if the future is already fixed, why act at all? He calls the Turkish version of this shrug Fatum Mahometanum, men who walk into plague-ridden towns because the outcome is supposedly sealed regardless.
  • The whole book answers two objections, not one. Part One opens by splitting the problem in half: one difficulty comes from human freedom looking incompatible with divine foreknowledge, the other from God apparently co-operating in evil by sustaining every creature's action. Leibniz names Bayle directly as the sharpest advocate of the second charge.
  • Evil gets a three-way legal definition. Section 21 splits it into metaphysical evil (mere imperfection), physical evil (suffering), and moral evil (sin), then argues God wills good 'antecedently' but the best 'consequently,' the way a compound force in mechanics resolves competing tendencies into one final motion.
  • He rules out 'God could have done better' as heresy. In section 168 Leibniz treats the claim that a better world was possible as worse than blind necessity: it would strip God of supreme perfection rather than merely his freedom. The whole theodicy stands or falls on this one line held absolute.
  • Apollo, not Jupiter, takes the blame for fate. At Delphi, Apollo tells Sextus Tarquinius he 'will be proud,' will 'commit adulteries,' and will be 'a traitor to your country.' When Sextus objects that the prophecy compels the crime, Valla's spokesman calls the objection absurd: foreknowledge only reports what will happen, it does not cause it.
  • The book ends inside an infinite pyramid of worlds. The high priest Theodorus dreams his way into Pallas's palace, where every possible Sextus lives in his own hall: one happy at Corinth, one a king in Thrace, one the Sextus who 'goes to Rome, bringing confusion everywhere, violating the wife of his friend.' The real world sits at the apex because the pyramid 'had a beginning, but one could not see its end,' and Jupiter could not have chosen otherwise without renouncing his own wisdom.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the book that coined "best of all possible worlds" and staged the argument as a dream sequence instead of a syllogism, ending not with a proof but with a priest weeping with joy inside an infinite palace of alternate lives.

Leibniz sets out to prove that a perfectly good, all-knowing God still had to create a world with evil in it, and ends the book inside a dream of an infinite palace holding every version of a man who could have existed.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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