The Enlightenment’s “Best Of All Possible Worlds”
The time of Enlightenment was a reaction to the romantic era that preceded the rise of reason. However, the Enlightenment only romanticised reason and entailed that science and philosophy should be accepted at face value. Leibniz’s argument of “the best of all possible worlds” was a philosophical thought at the time of the Enlightenment.
Gottfried Leibniz, a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist, and diplomat, coined the phrase “the best of all possible worlds” in his 1710 work, ‘Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal’, also known as the Theodicy.
The claim that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds is the central argument of Leibniz’s Theodicy. Leibniz attempts to resolve the problem of evil through his argument which is broken down into three main points: the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil.
The Goodness of God
Leibniz aims to solve the problem of evil by reconciling the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God, who would seem required to prevent it to prove that this is the best of all possible worlds, no matter how it may intuitively appear to us from our limited point of view, any other world — such as, namely, one without the evils which trouble our lives — would have been worse than the current one, all things considered as examined in the following extract:
“Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and but one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another.” (Leibniz, The Monadology 8).
The Freedom of Man
God is the being with all perfections according to Leibniz’s argument, and free will is a perfection. This has important implications for Leibniz’s analysis of freedom because it implies that free will is a property that admits of degrees and is intrinsically good to have. Further, God instantiates freedom to the fullest degree. Therefore;
“It can hardly be doubted that in every human person there is the freedom to do what he wills to do. A volition is an attempt to act of which we are conscious. An act necessarily follows from a volition ·to do it· and the ability ·to do it·.” (Leibniz, Freedom and Possibility 1).
The Origin of Evil
Leibniz followed a metaphysical tradition that was long practised and dates back to Augustine to support that the best world is the one with the most remarkable “degree of reality”, the most significant “quantity of essence”, the most remarkable “perfection” and “intelligibility”. According to this tradition, “evil, though real, is not a ‘thing’, but rather a direction away from the goodness of the One”; evil is the absence of good, and accordingly, it is technically wrong to say that God created evil, properly speaking. Rather, he created an imperfectly good world.
All examples of sins are analysed as consisting in the absence of some good that ought to be there or is natural to a thing according to the privation theory of evil. For instance, disease is the absence of health, blindness is the absence of sight, and vice is the absence of virtue. Evil may exist in the same way the hole of a doughnut exists as the doughnut was created, but the hole itself was not made, it was just never filled in. In other words, it is an absence. Thus, just as the hole could not exist without the doughnut, evil is parasitic upon good. It is the corruption of good nature.
Therefore, “God is infinite, and the devil is limited; the good may and does go to infinity, while evil has its bounds.” (Leibniz, Philosophy of Religion: an Anthology 172–173).
Leibniz did, nevertheless, concede that God has created a world with evil in it, and could have created a world without it. However, the existence of evil does not necessarily mean a worse world so this is still the best world that God could have made. Leibniz believed that the presence of evil may make for a better world, insofar as “it may happen that the evil is accompanied by a greater good” — as he stated, “an imperfection in the part may be required for a perfection in the whole” (Leibniz, Philosophy of Religion: an Anthology 172–173).
Leibniz’s philosophical optimism and theodicy incurred considerable criticism both from his fellow Enlightenment philosophers and from Christian theologians, following the devastating Lisbon Earthquake that took place on 1 November 1755 and occurred decades after the publication of the Theodicy in 1710. Critics of Leibniz argue that the world contains an amount of suffering too great to permit belief in philosophical optimism.
The claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds drew scorn most notably from Voltaire. Voltaire lampooned it in his comic novella, Candide, by having the character Dr Pangloss, which is a parody of Leibniz, repeat it like a mantra when great catastrophes keep happening to him and Candide, the protagonist. Derived from this character, the adjective “Panglossian” describes a person who believes that the actual world is the best possible one, or is otherwise excessively optimistic.
Yeah, sure we could hope for the best of all possible worlds, but it does not necessarily mean that what is happening is always ‘thee best in all possible worlds.’ This was Leibniz’s and Voltaire's endless point of debate.
