'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#2Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#3[deleted]
Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#4> 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?
Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#5> 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/
Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#6> 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…
> 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.
Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#7https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide
Only thing I’ve read by Voltaire but it slapped.
Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#8> 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.
Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#9> 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 c…
Replace "perfect" with "likely optimal" and you get the general thrust of it without the deus ex machina.
Re: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' Review: Leibniz Lives Again
#10> 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 c…
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.