Real Alternatives, Leibniz’s Metaphysics of Choice (Philosophical Studies Series)

REAL ALTERNATIVES, LEIBNIZ'S METAPHYSICS OF CHOICE

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES VOLUME 74

Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer

Editor

Keith Lehrer, University ofArizona, Tucson

Associate Editor

Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe

Board of Consulting Editors

Lynne Rudder Baker, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Radu Bogdan, Tulane University, New Orleans Allan Gibbard, University of Michigan Denise Meyerson, University of Cape Town Fran~ois Recanati, Ecole Poly technique, Paris

Stuart Silvers, Clemson University Nicholas D. Smith, Michigan State University

REAL ALTERNATIVES, LEIBNIZ'S METAPHYSICS OF CHOICE REGINALD OSBURN SAVAGE North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A.

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 0-7923-5057-X

Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A.

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This is my Mother's book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

IX

Introduction 1 Notes to introduction 16 Chapter One: Complete Concepts and Counterfactuals 20 I. Iintroduction 20 II. Complete Concepts: Purpose, Objections, and Replies 20 III. Complete Concepts and Counterfactuals 27 IV. Complete Concepts and Leibniz's Metaphysics of Substance 29 V. What Makes Accidents Essential? 33 VI. Counterfactual Semantics, Roughly Speaking 38 Notes to Chapter One 45 Chapter Two: Deliberation and Counterfactuals 50 I. Introduction 50 II. Choice and Deliberation 50 III. Counterfactual Identity and Creaturely Deliberation 54 IV. The Freedom of Creatures and God's Ideas 62 V. Private Miracles? 65 VI. Limited Privacy 72 Notes to Chapter Two 73 Chapter Three: Personal and Metaphysical Identity 78 I. Introduction One: Theological Background 78 II. Introduction Two: Counterfactual Identity and Indiscernibility 83 III. The Identity of Indiscernibles 84 IV. Personhoods and Identity 91 Notes to Chapter Three 96 Chapter Four: Compossibility and Creation 99 I. Introduction 99 II. Leibniz and Creatio ex Nihilo 103 III. An Alternative reading of Leibniz on Creatio ex Nihilo 108 IV. Potential Beings as Eternal Truths 111 V. The Dependence of Potential Beings on God's Mind 118 VI. Perception and Relative Creation 123 Notes to Chapter Four 127

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Chapter Five: Perceptual Incompossibility 132 I. Introduction 132 II. Moral Incompatibility 132 III. Perceptual Incompatibility 137 IV. Specific Perceptual Incompatibility 142 Notes to Chapter Five 147 Chapter Six: Infinite Analysis and Counterfactuals 149 I. Introduction 149 II. Hypothetical Necessity and the Principle of Sufficient Reason 150 III. Infinite Analysis And Counterfactual Truth 160 Notes to Chapter Six 172 Conclusion 175 Abbreviations 183 Bibliography 185

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A grant from the Ford Foundation supported a yearlong reasearch sabbatical at the University of Massachussets at Amherst during which I read a lot of philosophy and theology that otherwise I would not have read. While at Amherst I took advantage of the opportunity to discuss philosophy with a number of outstanding philosophers. Vere Chappell and Robert Sleigh were then and still are very special inspirations. I greatly admire the work of Margaret Wilson and have used her writings as a model of philosophical competence. Besides that, she has been extraordinarily supportive of my work and career. My graduate advisor William H. Hay taught me the importance of being tough, as tough as he was, by my lights he is the toughest of all. Margaret Wilson, Robert Sleigh, Catherine Wilson, David Blumenfeld, Richard Watson, Glenn Hartz, Alan Nelson, Benson Mates, and Jeffrey Tlumak commented on different parts of the book. Donald Rutherford commented on all of an early version of it. I thank Robert Hambourger, Chris Pierce, Dean Margaret Zahn, Nicholas Smith and Keith Lehrer for showing interest in my work and supporting it.

INTRODUCTION

Leibniz reports in his Theodicy that a number of Augustinian theologians, one among them dubbed the "torturer of infants,,,1 espoused the view that infants who have not actually sinned are nevertheless damned. [T 92; T 97] In rough outline, their reasoning for the view was as follows. Original sin suffices for damnation, and infants have no more nor no less a share in original sin than adults. Infants, therefore, are damnable and will be damned unless they repent, accept Christ, and merit salvation. However, infants die without having repented, accepted Christ, or accumulated merit sufficient to deserve salvation. Ergo, they are damned. Leibniz was not persuaded. He considered the opinion that infants are damned and the reasoning offered for it an embarrassment to Christianity generally and rejected it: 2 I believe that God always gives sufficient aid and grace to those who have good wiII, that is to say who do not reject this grace by a new sin. Thus I do not admit the damnation of children dying unbaptized or outside the church, or the damnation of adult persons who have acted according to the light that God has given them. And I believe that, if anyone has followed the light he had, he wiII undoubtedly receive thereof in greater measure as he has need ... [T p. 385]

Leibniz also offered that the Evangelicals spoke with "fair moderation" on the issue of the damnation of infants. [T 93] This is how they spoke: Original sin is forgiven infants, not in such a way as a total sickness is immediately healed, but it is forgiven them in such a way that they are not considered guilty of that sin, or as the ancients say, as long as we live in this flesh, the residue of the sickness remains but its guilt is destroyed. For children are received into grace and are sanctified by God .... For although they do not yet employ reason, nevertheless God impeIIs them in a way of their own. For neither does reason work Christian righteousness in old men, but God inspires them with true fear and reveals sin to those whom he has caIIed into repentance and through faith arouses them again and justifies them. The Holy Spirit brought it about that John, though not yet born, felt the precense of Christ. In such a manner other elect infants also can be sanctified by the Holy Spirit without the aid of reason. 3

Evangelicals confessed that original sin is not a sufficient c,?ndition for damnation, but must be complemented by moral evil or the evil of guilt which presupposes a misuse of reason and freewill, both of which infants lack. [T 265 - 266; T 65; T 273; CD 36;T 288] By misusing reason, men come to misunderstand and hate

1 R. O. Savage, Real Alternatives, Leibniz’s Metaphysics of Choice © Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998

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INTRODUCTION

God and the hate of God is the essence of damnation. 4 Infants cannot misuse a reason they do not possess. They therefore cannot form an opinion of God that would cause them to hate him. Hence the opinion that infants are damned is absurd. It is fairly obvious that Leibniz intended his discussion of the question of the damnation of infants in his Theodicy to put Roman Catholicism on the defensive if not on the ropes. It might seem that no matter what else is deemed right about Roman Catholicism, its teachings on God's punishment of children - as Leibniz represented those teachings - proves that its fundamental doctrine of salvation by works is unreasonable. A doctrine is unreasonable if it entails unreasonable consequences, for example, the damnation of innocent infants or their necessary exclusion from the bliss of beatific vision. It is no less unreasonable, Leibniz suggested, that God punish in a gentle way infants who do not hate him and have intended no evil by placing them in an endlessly boring "Limbo" rather than incinerating them eternally. [T 92] Pressing his agenda, Leibniz observed that even with this option available: Many prelates and theologians of France ... [who] join with St. Augustine seem to incline towards the opinion of this great doctor, who condemns to eternal flames children that die in the age of innocence before having received baptism ... But it must be confessed that this opinion has not sufficient foundation either in reason or in Scripture, and that it is outrageously harsh. [T 93]

The afterlife of infants was part of a more general problematic that Leibniz has a critic pose in his Confessio: [W]hat is the source of that partition of souls, in virtue of which some are aflame with the love of God, while others are driven to a hatred that is fatal to them? What is this point of separation, and, if I may put it in this way, center of divergence, given that often it is believable on the basis of external appearances that those to be damned are so similar to those to be blessed that it is not uncommon for us to take one for the other[?} [CP 86-87]

In the above passage, Leibniz's critic points up the main difficulty for Chrisitian theologians who do not subscribe to Origen's heretical theory of salvation. God saves some men and permits the damnation of others even though there appears to be little difference between them. The Roman Catholics confessed that the appearance is false. They maintained that the self-initiated performance of good works engenders differences of worth between men that God, at least, is able to discern. Given that God in fact saves some men and damns others, these differences are evidently sufficient to justify God's salvation of some men but not others. The Evangelicals rejected this solution to the difficulty. In the following passage, Leibniz states the rationale behind the rejection:

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1 have expounded sufficiently elsewhere that in relation to matters of salvation unregenerate man is to be considered as dead, and 1 greatly approve the manner wherein the theologians of the Augsburg Confession declare themselves on this subject. [T 170]

The position Leibniz takes in the above passages conforms to German Lutheran orthodoxy, as did most of his theological views. That orthodoxy is formulated in the writings comprised in The Book of Concord. We read in Article XVIII of one of those writings, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession: Our churches teach that man's will has some liberty for the attainment of civil righteousness and for the choice of things subject to reason. However, it does not have that power, without the Holy Spirit, to attain the righteousness of God - that is, spiritual righteousness - because natural man does not perceive the gifts of the Spirit of God (I Cor. 2:14); but this righteousness is wrought in the heart when the Holy Spirit is received through the Word. s

The theologians of the Augsburg Confession declared themselves on the subject of unregenerate man's relation to matters of salvation as Leibniz did. Man, according to those theologians, is thoroughly corrupted by original sin and unable, on his own, to convert himself to God, even though God is perfectly loving and trustworthy.6 Conversion, they held, is nonetheless necessary for salvation and is accomplished only by a gift of good will or grace 7 which God dispenses absolutely freely. The theologians of the Augsburg Confession asseverated, and Leibniz affirmed them, that man cooperates in matters of salvation only with his resistance. s Leibniz stated that his study of the "opponents" of the theologians of the Augsburg Confession did not "disturb" him but served to strengthen him in their "moderate opinions.,,9 His theodicy, as I understand it, is an attempt to interpret, uphold, promulgate, and provide a philosophical foundation for these moderate opinions, especially as they pertain to original sin and justification. It is not a "modem response to the ancient problem of evil"JQ as Epicurus, to cite Rutherford's example, represented that problem. I I Epicurus's philosophical/theological problem of evil did not involve original sin or a God who elects a few souls for salvation and allows the remainder to be eternally damned and "tormented by the devil." Leibniz's and Evangelicalism's problem of evil is a hybrid of the philosophical/theological problem of the "origin of evil" and the Christian problems of "original sin, of grace, and of predestination." [T p. 59] It concerns especially the issue of divine justice, that is, the reasonableness of God's distribution of "blessings and afflictions" among spirits. [T p. 403] It is a problem of philosophical/Christian theology. Leibniz frames this problem as follows: The original corruption of the human race, coming from the first sin, appears to us to have imposed a natural necessity to sin without the succor of divine grace: but necessity being incompatible with punishment, it will be inferred that a sufficient grace ought to have been given to all men; which does not appear to be in conformity with experience.

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INTRODUCTION

But the difficulty is great, above all, in relation to God's dispositions for the salvation of men. There are few saved or chosen; therefore the choice of many is not God's decreed will. And since it is admitted that those whom he has chosen deserve it no more than the rest, and are not even fundamentally less evil, the goodness they have coming only from the gift of God, the difficulty is increased. Where is, then, his justice (people will say), or at the least, where is his goodness? Partiality, or respect of persons, goes against justice, and he who without cause sets bounds to his goodness cannot have it in sufficient measure. [T p. 59-60; Cf. T 5] 12

According to Leibniz, the Theodicy, even though it addresses problems of revealed theology, was written from the point of view of natural theology, [T p. 98] and he thought that the difficulties concecerning revealed theology that he raises in the above passage could be resolved, if not dissolved, using natural reason. That thought, he recognized was highly controversial in his day, [T p. 73 ff.] and the Calvinistlfideist Pierre Bayle, Leibniz's main foil in his Theodicy, controverted it. Bayle and the Calvinists confessed with the Evangelicals that souls are predestined to salvation. However, they rejected the Evangelicals' doctrine that predestination is reasonable in the sense of its being grounded in the qualities of created things. They denied, in particular, that God's election of souls is determined by his knowledge or counterfactual knowledge of spiritual creatures' responses to his offers of saving grace. The Evangelicals maintained that God has knowledge that a soul would not respond to an offer of grace with a "lively faith" even if he never makes the offer and that he decides to not make the offer based on that counterfactual knowledge. Evangelical theologians argued that if there is no such basis for God's non-election of souls God's election of souls would be absurd.l3 The basis of God's actions, according to the Evangelicals, is a will determined by moral principles and knowledge, including counterfactual knowledge, that is, a good will. The Calvinists, on the other hand, distancing themselves further from the Pelagian alternative, confessesd that God elected souls for salvation before the foundation of the world. For the Calvinist, the nature of the world and its rational creatures does not in any way "cause" or explain their election or nonelection. God does not base his election of souls, according to the Calvinist, on his knowledge that they will accept his offer of grace with a lively faith, nor does he abandon souls on the basis of counterfactual knowledge that they would reject his offer of grace. The gist of Bayle's polemic, as I understand it, is that the Evangelicals and other liberal protestants should not reject the Calvinist's "nonfoundational" theory of predestination on the grounds that according to it God's election of souls is absurd. The liberal protestants, according to Bayle, in allowing that God permitted the fall of man from grace themselves embraced an absurd doctrine of election. If there had been no fall there would be no need for election. But, surely, man's fall

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from grace makes no sense. According to reason an absolutely perfect being cannot be malicious. Yet reason must conclude that God is malicious if he placed his human creatures in circumstances wherein he foresaw that Satan, for whom they were no match, would dominate and humiliate them. His malice, according to reason, is heightened by the fact that he refused to rescue them and then punished not only them, but their posterity as well, for their incompetence and deprived them of any power whatsoever to redeem themselves. It is absurd that the natures of things that a perfect God created be a basis for their fall and for his treatment of them. It is also absurd that the first parents be responsible for their actions that are consequences of their natures. The first parents should be responsible only for their choices and they did not choose their natures. It is unreasonable that God should hold them accountable for a mistake that was due to what they were, namely, humans. It is human to err. However, if one allows that God's permission of the fall has no basis in nature and reason, but is, indeed, contrary to both, it cannot be necessary that his election of souls be based on reason. If no sense can be made of the fall its senselessness infects whatever is consequent upon it. Bayle considered the Calvinists' absurd account of election preferable to that of the Evangelicals (even if it too is absurd) because, although it dispenses with God's moral rationality, it preserves his power, whereas Evangelicalism, perhaps unwittingly, dispenses with both. For Bayle, it was no big loss to lose reason but it was to lose power. Following Tertullian, he proclaimed that the very absurdity of God was the basis of his faith. [T p. 101] For Bayle, the successfully demonstrated objections brought against faith by reason do not undercut it, but underscore the worthlessness, depravity, and perniciousness of human reason. [T p.99100] The fact that reason can prove that truths of faith are false is symptomatic of original sin. Before the fall reason was an image of God. After the fall, reason is an image of Satan, or some other evil principle, and corrupt. [T 61-62 p. 107] 14 If reason, as we know it, is on the side of the Roman Catholic Pope and Arminius that only goes to show that they, too, are images and agents of Satan. Leibniz's stated aim in the Theodicy is to show that the purported demonstrations of the objections raised by Bayle - at least as they are directed against those of the Augsburg Confession - cannot be reasonable but are either formally or materially tainted and motivated by false appearances. [T 25 p. 89] Leibniz insisted that both faith and reason are gifts of God; that if reason is set against faith, this means, per impossible, that God is set against God. [T 39 p. 96] He thus answers Bayle that if reason in fact shows that a purported precept of faith is false, then that precept is surely counterfeit, dangerous, and ought to be repudiated. [T 65 p. 110; T 41 p. 97] Leibniz responded coolly to Bayle and others of his ilk:

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INTRODUCTION

There are diverse persons who speak much of piety, of religion, who are even busied with the teaching of such things, and who yet prove to be by no means versed in the divine perfections. They ill understand the goodness and the justice of the Sovereign of the universe; they imagine a God who deserves neither to be imitated nor to be loved .. .! have observed that these opinions, apt to do harm, rested especially on confused notions which had been formed concerning freedom, necessity and destiny. [T p. 53] Our end is to banish from men the false ideas that represent God to them as an absolute prince employing a despotic power, unfitted to be loved and unworthy of being loved. [T 6]

Leibniz sought to "banish from men" false and derogatory ideas of God, not by discrediting reason as Bayle did, but by employing reason to clarify their confused notions of freedom, necessity and destiny which he believed foster them. 15 Among the more dangerous - and also perhaps the most fundamental - of these confused notions, by Leibniz's lights, is that God is free only if he acts without being determined by anything, including rational motives. 16 Nothing determines a free agent to behave as he does, Bayle maintained, because the determination, contra hypothesis, would usurp his control of his actions. 17 For Bayle, determination and necessitation are not different. He concluded that God's freedom is an absolutely unlimited, unconditioned autonomy. Such an autonomy, Bayle acknowledged, is contrary to human reason, more particularly, to the principle of sufficient reason. So much the worse for the principle of sufficient reason, Bayle thought, as the alternative was deplorable. According to Bayle, it follows from the assumption that principles of goodness determine God's actions that: There is therefore no freedom in God; he is compelled by his wisdom to create, and then to create precisely such a work, and then to create it precisely in such ways. These are three servitudes, which form a more than Stoic fatum, and which render impossible all that is not within their sphere. It seems that, according to this system, God could have said, even before shaping his decrees: I cannot save such and such a man, nor condemn such and such another, quippe vetor fatis, my wisdom permits it not. [T 227] 18

Bayle considered a will determined by anything other than its associated power a weak and subservient will. He was among those philosopher/theologians who viewed God, as Leibniz stated it, "metaphysically" rather than among those who viewed him "morally." [T 77] Leibniz thought that the members of both these parties were prone to excesses that left God powerful but not good or good but not powerful: Theologians of excessive rigor have taken into account [God's] greatness at the expense of his goodness, while those of of greater laxity have done the opposite. True orthodoxy would consist in paying equal respect to both perfections. One may designate as anthropomorphism the error of those who neglect his greatness, and as depotism the error of those who disregard his goodness. [CD 2; Cf. T 135]

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Leibniz diagnosed Bayle as being inclined to disregard God's goodness, if "goodness" is understood as a tendency to submit to moral rules. He agreed with Bayle and the despotists that God's power is prior to his other attributes, [T 150] but he also insisted that it was compatible with them. Indeed, Leibniz's main disagreement with Bayle was over the issue of whether God's goodness and wisdom could determine his power without rendering God less than omnipotent. He did not believe, as Bayle did, that the hypothesis that moral rules determine God's will leads ultimately to a repudiation or refutation of the Protestant doctrine of free election. Leibniz surmised that Bayle's and the despotists' views that God's freedom is a freedom of equipoise, and that any form of determination is tantamount to a slavish necessitation were due to misconceptions of freedom, determinism, and destiny. He argued that if there is no such determination, God would be, though not the weakling God of the moralists, a despotic GOd. 19 That is why his project to banish the idea that God is a despot consisted in his clarifying ideas of freedom, necessity, and destiny. His familiar clarifications were these. A free action is an action that involves deliberation and spontaneity and the opposite of a free action is possible even though free actions are determined. [T 291] A necessary action, if there is any such thing for Leibniz, on the other hand, is one whose opposite is impossible, inconceivable, or involves a contradiction. [T 288fo Freedom, Leibniz held, is opposed not to determination but to absolute necessitation. Leibniz agreed with the moralists that a free agent is one who is predisposed to being determined to act by good reasons: The decrees of God are always free, even though God be always prompted thereto by reasons which lie in the intention towards good: for to be morally compelled by wisdom, to be bound by the consideration of good is to be free; it is not compulsion in the metaphysical sense. And metaphysical necessity alone, as I have observed so many times, is opposed to freedom. [T 236; cf. T 387]

Leibniz acknowledged that there is a freedom of indifference, but only in the sense of an agent's not being necessitated to one course or the other. [T p. 61, T 46] He agreed with Bayle that God is perfectly spontaneous, but denied that this entails that he is not determined: God is never moved by anything outside himself, nor is he subject to inward passions, and he is never led to that which can cause him offence. It appears, therefore, that M. Bayle gives odious names to the best things in the world, and turns our ideas upsidedown, applying the term slavery to the state of the greatest and most perfect freedom. [T 228; Cf. T 369; T 36; T 37]

In this response to Bayle, Leibniz assures his reader that God's actions, even though they are determined, are spontaneous or self-determined. The representa-

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INTRODUCTION

tions of good that prompt God to create what he does, and as he creates it, are not distinct from him. Rather, they are his ideas. They constitute his understanding. 21 According to Leibniz the best of reasons determined God to create the world as he did, allowing for sin and the consequential "problematic" salvation and damnation of spirits. Leibniz argued that that does not mean God knew of no reasons at all to create the world otherwise. If it did, God could not deliberate concerning whether to create the world as he did and his act of creation would be slavish. Free actions require deliberation, and deliberation involves, according to Leibniz, reflection upon reasons or arguments both for and against a proposed course of action. 22 Leibniz maintained that under the assumption that God has decided to create something rather than nothing, the creation of the actual world would be necessary if the actual world were the only possible world God could create. 23 As a consequence, God's creation of the world could not be free: "There would be neither choice nor liberty, if there were only one course possible." [T 235; CD 21] If there were only one course available, even if God's creative act were spontaneous, it could not be deliberate. God would have no reason or cause not to create the world he created, and such competing reasons or causes are the basis of deliberation. The actual world would therefore, like God, exist simply in virtue of its being possible. [T p. 395; C 5301L 169]24 Leibniz's compatibilism, with respect to divine actions, is an attempted reconciliation of the ideas that God is omnipotent, that he deliberates concerning how he will act, and that there is a determinate reason for each of his actions. Leibniz invokes his fundamental hypothesis that there are nonactual, purely possible worlds, that is worlds that will never exist, to achieve this reconciliation. [G VII 390-391; T 273; T 123; T 288; T 302] Possible worlds compete for existence, and furnish God with options to deliberate upon. All possible worlds make claims for existence that are accompanied by reasons why God should create them. The best possible world complements its demand for existence with the greatest reasons for God to create it. The reasons for creating inferior possible worlds "seriously and strongly" inclined God to create them, [T 281] but the best possible world inclined him more. More importantly, the world that inclined God the most is a world wherein salvation does not depend on merit or good works and wherein God cooperates in morally and physically evil actions, even the greatest of physical evils, namely, the eternal damnation of souls. Bayle argued that if this were so the cooperation was unreasonable because, according to the Evangelicals, God places souls in circumstances that make them reject God's saving grace, and in which they cannot act otherwise than to reject it. [T 233] The theologians of the Augsburg Confession, however, rejected Bayle's

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premise that men cannot act otherwise than they actually behave. They rejected and condemned: The mad dream of the so-called Stoic philosophers and of Manichaeans who taught that whatever happens must so happen and could not happen otherwise, that man always acts only under compulsion, even in his external acts, and that he commits evil deeds and acts like fornication, robbery, murder, theft, and similar sins under compulsion. 25

These remarks are from the pen of Melanchthon whom Leibniz praised as a "man of sound and moderate ideas." [T p. 81] Melanchthon also was the principal theologian of the Augsburg Confession to which Leibniz, who admitted that he had been "charmed" by the writings of Luther against Erasmus, [T p. 67] subscribed26 • Leibniz no doubt recognized that his fellow confessors, and, indeed, most readers with good sense, would dismiss summarily and with ridicule any theory of freedom that ruled out the possibility of conceiving of actual individuals behaving otherwise as heretical, blasphemous, and dangerous. Leibniz sought, in the Theodicy, to vindicate the Evangelicals' theory of election. For this reason the Theodicy would be a poor choice of venue for Leibniz to deny that God can conceive of individuals behaving otherwise than they actually behave. The denial would pave a short and virtually frictionless path to the suspicion that the God of the Evangelicals is, in fact, an unthinking, unjust, and unlovable despot. Surely, a God who punishes and rewards individuals whom he nor they can conceive of acting otherwise is no better than an "absolute prince employing a despotic power, unfitted to be loved and unworthy of being loved." [T 6]27 Yet, Leibniz, in keeping with his Evangelicalism, held that God rewards good and punishes evil. [Grua 373; Grua 174; G II 57ILA 64] Indeed, he stated that reward and punishment are "essential" in God's republic, [DM 36] and that an evil action must bring upon itself chastisement. [T 74] Furthermore: God has established in the universe a connection between punishment or reward and bad or good action, in accordance wherewith the first should always be attracted by the second, and virtue and vice obtain their reward and punishment in consequence of the natural sequence of things which contains still another kind of preestablished harmony than that which appears in the communication between the soul and body. [T 74]

In his 'New System' Leibniz states that the "mechanical revolutions of matter" are "arranged for the felicity of the good and the punishment of the wicked." [MP 118] Thus God wills physical evil as a punishment for the guilt of moral evil which he permits. [T 119; T 23; T 155] Leibniz also held, however, that praise, blame, rewards, and punishments cannot attach to necessary actions, [T 57] and that there can be no obligation to do what is impossible (= inconceivable). [T 57] By almost anyone's standards, including, I think, Leibniz's, a god who rewards those who do good yet cannot con-

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INTRODUCTION

ceivably behave otherwise is capricious; and a god who punishes those who do evil yet cannot do otherwise is a capricious and unjust despot. 28 Yet, Leibniz repeatedly stated that God is wise and good, not a capricious and unjust despot. Punishing Judas for betraying Christ is morally justified only if Judas can conceive himself behaving otherwise than he actually behaves. God is morally justified in having Judas "receive the wages" of his deeds, [T 30] only if Judas fails to do what he should have done. Judas should have done only what he could have considered himself doing and decided not to do after meaningful deliberation. 29 According to Leibniz, when rational beings make a choice, they do so upon the basis of a comparison of representations of goods and evils. [T 19 p. 425] They make a judgment regarding which representation is best and they choose what appears best to them. Moral evil, Leibniz stated, consists in making the wrong choice for the wrong reasons [T p. 416]30 for which "the harmony of things demands a satisfaction." [T p. 423] Did Leibniz also propose that the representation of a better choice that one spurns when committing a moral evil involves a contradiction? Did he hold that one cannot consistently suppose nor think of one's self doing what is morally good before one does what is morally evil? I have found no explicit affirmative answers to these questions in Leibniz's writings, and there is reason to think that a continued search for affirmative answers would be futile. It would be "hard," Leibniz maintains, to punish those "for having done that which they had no power to prevent themselves from doing." [T 95] He also denied that even God has the power to do what involves a contradiction, and he stated that only those things that we are able to do if we wish are in our power. [Grua 181] Clearly, if one enjoys the power to prevent oneself from acting as one does, one has the power to act otherwise than one acts, and if one has the power to act otherwise it is consistently conceivable that one act otherwise. Perhaps with thoughts such as these in mind, Broad writes: [For Leibniz] a truth is contingent if and only if there are real alternatives [my emphasis] to it which, though in fact false, are logically possible because internally consistent. Thus, e.g. it is a contingent singular truth that Julius Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon on a certain occasion. 31

And Blumenfeld offers that: [W]hen discussing the sense of contingency involved in freedom ... [it is] Leibniz's considered opinion [that] a free act is such that the agent could have done otherwise. 32

Broad and Blumenfeld are quite atypical, however. Leibniz's commentators are widely agreed that Leibniz denied, or should have denied, that God coherently considers giving to individuals properties other than their actual properties. And

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this is supposed to be because God cannot conceive consistently of them being otherwise. According to Parkinson: It seems evident, on the face of it, that one and the same Adam could have done many things that he did not do. He could, for example, have rejected the apple proffered by Eve; he could have had a different progeny, and so on. In considering these possibilities it seems obvious that one is referring to the same individual; or, putting the point in terms of possible worlds, one is talking about an individual who preserves his identity over a number of possible worlds ... Leibniz, however, would reject such a view ... [according to] Leibniz, we are not to think of one and the same individual as a member of a number of possible worlds. 33

Many others share Parkinson's assessments. Adams writes: Leibniz made it clear that he did not accept [the] assumption of counterfactual identity. He held that no actual individual creature would have existed if anything at all had gone differently from the way things go in the actual world - that if Arnauld, for example, had married he would not have been Arnauld. 34

And Mondadori: The interesting sense of contingency ... and the sense it cannot have within the framework of Leibniz's theory of complete concepts is that in which we say that a given individual should have existed without possessing a property he in fact possesses?5 [A]lthough Leibniz often makes claims which seem to imply that actual objects could have had other properties than they happen to have, he is not entitled to such claims?6

Commentators travel a number of routes to the conclusion that Leibnizian individuals cannot really, or in an "interesting" way, behave otherwise. Here are what seem to me to be the main and most traveled ones: (1) Leibniz held that a singular proposition is true if and only if the complete concept of its subject contains the concept of its predicate. This entails that true singular propositions are analytically true and that their denials are analytically false. It follows trivially that God has no consistent conceptions of actual individuals being otherwise and that these individuals exist only in the actual world. Since God cannot create what he cannot conceive, he cannot create actual individuals being otherwise than they actually are. (2) Leibniz stated that his criterion of truth implies his principle of the identity of indiscemibles. He also admitted that the principle entails that if a person were to have any properties other than its actual properties it would be a different person. It would be absurd to suppose that an individual could be a person other than the person that it actually is. Therefore there are no conceptions of Leibnizian individuals having any properties other than their actual properties.

12

INTRODUCTION

(3) According to Leibniz all perfections are compatible and all compatible perfections exist. Therefore there are no perfections that are not realized in the actual world. It follows that there are no nonexistent possibles, since a possible is just that which possesses perfections. Therefore there are no "ways otherwise" for God to create. (4) Leibniz propounded an infinite analysis account of contingency. According to this account a proposition is contingent if it cannot be reduced in a finite number of steps to an explicit identity or an explicit contradiction. The infinite analysis account appears to not involve the assumption of counterfactual identity. It appears therefore that Leibniz supposed that contingency does not involve counterfactual identity. Exponents of the thesis that Leibniz rejected the commonsense belief that God could have created actual things otherwise than he actually created them have not, to my knowledge, adduced any texts wherein Leibniz explicitly rejects it. Granted, there are texts that with ingenuity one may construe as evidence that he made the rejection. However, Leibniz also often makes statements, as Mondadori says he does, that one may without ingenuity construe as presupposing the possibility of God's creating things otherwise. In the Theodicy, for example, God is said by Leibniz to conceive consistently of Spinoza dying at Leyden and to conceive consistently of the very same Spinoza dying at the Hague. [T 173] He decides to create a world wherein Spinoza dies at the Hague, because it strikes him, all things considered, as the most fitting place for Spinoza to die. According to Leibniz, in the Theodicy, it was within God's power to have created a world wherein Spinoza dies at Leyden. He did not because his aim in creating a world was to communicate, to the greatest extent possible, his goodness. This aim could be accomplished only by creating the best of possible worlds, and the best possible world is a world wherein Spinoza dies at the Hague. God's goodness determined him to use his power to do what is best, that is, to create a world wherein Spinoza dies at the Hague, rather than to do anything less than the best, for example, to create a world wherein Spinoza dies at Leyden. However, Leibniz denied that this determination entails that the actual world exists absolutely necessarily or that it exists absolutely necessarily as it is rather than otherwise.

REAL ALTERNATIVES

13

******* In this book I examine arguments marshaled in support of the view that Leibniz denied or should have denied that God can conceive of individuals behaving otherwise and refute them. In my view, counterfactual identity of individuals and Mondadori's "interesting sense" of contingency are essential ingredients in Leibniz's metaphysics of choice. Their incorporation into his metaphysics, so far as I can determine, does not render that metaphysics incoherent. I find nothing to recommend Mondadori's pronouncement that Leibniz is not "entitled" to make the incorporation. Leibniz construed possible worlds as testing grounds for the separability of individuals from their actual properties and their being embued with other properties. For Leibniz, if there are no possible worlds wherein an individual does not possess a given property it is inseparable from that property, and that property belongs to it necessarily. On the other hand, according to Leibniz, if there are possible worlds wherein an individual possesses a property and others wherein it does not, the individual is separable from that property and the property belongs to it contingently.37 The keystone of my interpretation of Leibniz's treatment of counterfactuals is the proposition that an actualized Leibnizian individual is just one among infinitely many possible completions of that individual. 38 According to how I read Leibniz, a concept of an individual is a kind of function. 39 As numeric arguments complete numeric functions, concepts of laws, information about other individual subjects, and concepts of divine free decrees complete subject-functions. Completed "individual functions" are complete individual concepts. I maintain that Leibniz accounted for the truth of counterfactual propositions and the possibility that God knows them by stipulating that God completely, and consistently, conceives of individuals in many ways other than how they actually are. 40 Thus, for Leibniz, God cannot derive the proposition that Judas is a saved man by conceiving completely of Judas as he actually created him. Nevertheless God does derive that proposition from some counterfactual complete conception that he has of Judas, albeit, a complete concept that is comprised in an inferior possible sequence of things. In this way, Leibniz managed to remain faithful, in an unforced and uncontrived way, to his general doctrine of truth in formulating an account of counterfactual truth that is the bedrock of his metaphysics of choice. A counterfactual is true, for Leibniz, just in case some complete concept of its subject contains the concept of its predicate, and there are counterfactual identities of individuals because they have many complete concepts.

14

INTRODUCTION

I rely without unusual reservation on Leibniz's Theodicy and other of his exoteric works for textual evidence. With Sleigh, I find groundless the insinuation that Leibniz was insincere in his exoteric writings and presented his true beliefs in his esoteric writings.41 There are others who think differently. After alleging that Leibniz's "lack of candor in the Theodicy is evident,,,42 Adams cites this passage: Metaphysics should be written with accurate definitions and demonstrations, but nothing should be written in it that conflicts too much with received opinions. For thus this metaphysics will be able to be received. If it is once approved, then afterwards, if any examine it more profoundly, they will draw the necessary consequences themselves. [A 6 3 573]

With this "textual evidence" in hand Adams comments: One of the difficulties in the Theodicy, however, is that so many of Leibniz's "accurate definitions" are omitted that one must turn to other works to find the material necessary for a more profound examination 43

In his Nicomachaean Ethics, Aristotle remarks on Plato's distinction between working towards and working from first principles. 44 Philosophers of Leibniz's day made roughly the same distinction in terms of proceeding "analytically" or "synthetically." Proceeding synthetically, one sets down one's definitions, axioms, postulates, etc. reflects on them and deduces from them theorems. Proceeding analytically one begins with a problem, reflects on data relaevant to the problem and reduces the problem to principles. Descartes discusses these two approaches in his Second Set of Replies: [Synthesis) is not as satisfying as the method of analysis nor does it engage the minds of those who are eager to learn, since it does not show how the thing in question was discovered ... (analysis) is the best and truest method of instruction, and it is this method alone that I used in my Meditations. [CSM II Ill] In metaphysics ... there is nothing which causes so much effort as making our perception of the primary notions clear and distinct. Admittedly they are by their nature as evident as, or more even more evident than, the primary notions which geometers study; but they conflict with preconceived opinions derived from the senses which we have gotten into the habit of holding from our earliest years, and so only those who really concentrate and meditate and withdraw their minds from corporeal things, so far as possible, will achieve perfect knowledge of them. Indeed, if they were put forward in isolation, they could easily be denied by those who like to contradict just for the sake of it...For the very fact that someone braces himself to attack the truth makes him less suited to perceive it, since he will be withdrawing his consideration from the convincing arguments which support the truth in order to find counterarguments to it. [CSM II 111-112]

Descartes's remarks may help to illuminate Leibniz's caveat that "Metaphysics should be written with accurate definitions and demonstrations, but nothing should be written in it that conflicts too much with received opinions." The "received opinion" that Leibniz mentions as a reason why not to present one's metaphysics in

REAL ALTERNATIVES

15

a synthetic format echoes Descartes's "preconceived opinions." Leibniz does not withhold his definitions and principles from the Theodicy. Rather, in order to have those who are "braced for attacking the truth" let down their guards, he does not proceed synthetically and without tact. By my lights, Leibniz's "truth" is more fully and clearly propounded in his Theodicy than in any of his other works. One does not need "to turn to other works" than the Theodicy "to find the material necessary for a more profound examination." One needs merely to pay close and unbiased attention to the extraordinarily profound and penetrating arguments of the Theodicy, and one should find that they are guided by the principles and definitions that are found in other of Leibniz's works and do not conflict with them. I say this even acknowledging my familiarity with these remarks by Leibniz: It may occur, however, that in a matter of small moment a wise man acts irregularly and against his own interest in order to thwart another who tries to restrain him or direct him, or that he may disconcert those who watch his steps. It is even well at times to imitate Brutus by concealing one's wit, and even to feign madness, as David did before the King of the Philistines. [T 315]45

Leibniz here sanctions deliberately deceiving one's adversaries in order to defeat their purposes or to achieve one's own. Leibniz is clearly writing against opponents in the Theodicy and it is not unreasonable to presume that he follows his own advice in small matters therein. In my judgment, the question of whether God conceives consistently actual individuals behaving otherwise than they actually behave is no small matter. Those who disagree, and see Leibniz instead as surreptitiously rejecting the idea that God conceives of actual individuals behaving in ways otherwise before he creates them, should heed these remarks by Rutherford: The details of Leibniz's metaphysics are sufficiently difficult, and in many cases sufficiently obscure, that it is easy to lose track of the central thread of his thou gilt - the basic idea that motivates his metaphysical inquiries and justifies us in regarding them as offering answers to some of philosophy's deepest perennial concerns. For this we must see Leibniz's metaphysics as an intellectual project guided by a moral vision. 46

Leibniz stated that his principal goal was to discover the truth, [G III 62] not to realize a moral vision, and my sense is that Leibniz saw himself guided ultimately by faith or revealed truth rather than by intellect. 47 Still, his theodicy is guided at least proximately by the desideratum to prove that the central doctrines of Evangelicalism as set forth in the Augsburg Confession are consistent with a reasonable morality. Any reasonable moral theory ought to provide a means to model propositions concerning how individuals capable of making choices should behave even if they do not so behave. If Leibniz's theodicy involves a "moral vision," his dispensing with what Broad called "real alternatives" would amount to donning a

16

INTRODUCTION

theodicean blindfold. And, if a reading of Leibniz leads to the conclusion that he so impaired himself, a re-thinking of the interpretation is called for. I answer that call in this book.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1 Gregory

ofRimini. argued that a world containing damned innocents is absurd. [Grua 300] 3 Melanchthon, Selections: liS 4 To the question of what the reason for the damnation of Judas is, Leibniz's spokesman in his Confessio responds: "I believe that it is the state of the dying man. Namely his burning hatred of God in which state he died and in which consists the nature of despair. Moreover, this suffices for damnation. For since, at the moment of death, the soul is not open to new external sensations until its body is restored to it, it concentrates its attention only on its last thoughts, so that it does not change, but rather augments the condition it was in at death. But from this hatred of God, that is, of the most happy being, the greatest sadness follows, for to hate is to be sad concerning the happiness of the one hated ... and therefore the greatest sadness arises in the case of the hatred of the greatest hapiness. The greatest sadness is misery, or damnation. Hence, the one who dies hating God damns himself." [CP 36 - 37] 5 Augsburg Confession: p. 39. 6 "Original sin is the complete lack or absence of the original concreated righteousness of paradise or of the image of God according to which man was originally created ... Original sin in human nature is not only a total lack of good in spiritual divine things, but at the same time it replaces the lost image of God in man with a deep, wicked, abominable, bottomless inscrutable, and inexpressible corruption of his entire nature in all its powers, especially of the highest and foremost powers of the soul in mind heart and will." Formula of Concord: 510. 7 DSR 31: "The grace of God consists in the gift of will; for happiness is in the power of a person who has good will." In the notes to his introduction to DSR Parkinson comments on this statement by Leibniz: "Leibniz does not say that God's grace consists in endowing us with a good will He seems to mean that God endows us with a will- a will that is free." DSR 125 - 126 n. 138. This is not what Leibniz seems to me to mean. In numerous texts, Leibniz states that the will naturally inclines towards good, and in the Theodicy he states that a rational creature will pursue an evil thing only if it is "masked" by good. [T 154] Furthermore, in the Theodicy he states that the essence of the will is an effort to pursue a thing in proportion to the good that it is perceived to contain. [T 22] I do not maintain here that Leibniz's understanding of what will is in the Theodicy should be used without reservation to interpret earlier statements that he makes about the will. At any rate, a free will according to Leibniz, is a will that is determined by the good or apparent good, indeed, by the best or what appears best. In so far as a will is determined by something other than what is good it is not free. xTp.69. ~ T p. 97. Among the principal opponents of the Churches of the Augsburg Confession were the papists or "New Pelagians," the renegade followers of Zwingli, and Calvinists of "excessive rigor" such as Bayle. 10 Rutherford, Leibniz: 9. 11 "God either wishes to take away evils and is unable; or he is able, and is unwilling, or he is neither willing nor able; or he is both willing and able. If he is willing and unable, he is feeble, which does not agree with the character of God; if he is able and unwilling, he is malicious, which is equally at odds with God; if he is neither willing nor able, he is both malicious and feeble and therefore not God; if he is both willing and able, which is alone suitable to God, from what source come evils? Or 2 Leibniz

REAL ALTERNATIVES

17

why does he not remove them?" This passage is cited from Rutherford's Leibniz: 9. Rutherford's source was Lactantius's, De ira dei 13: 20-21. 12 Cf.: "[O]ne must return to the same conclusion that God is the final reason of faith and of election in Jesus Christ. And be the election the cause or the results of God's design to give faith, it still remains true that he gives faith or salvation to whom he pleases, without any discernible reason for his choice, which falls upon but few men ... So it is a terrible judgement that God, giving his only Son for the whole human race and being the sole author and master of the salvation of men, yet saves so few of them and abandons the rest of them to the devil his enemy, who torments them eternally and makes them curse their creator, though they have all been created to diffuse and show forth his goodness, his justice, and his other perfections. And this outcome inspires all the more horror, as the sole cause why all these men are wretched to all eternity is God's having exposed them to a temptation that he knew they could not resist. .. " [T p. 126] 13 Leibniz propounds his understanding of the Evangelical theory of election at CD 126-121. 14 Bayle states that there are ideas implanted in us by "a general providence or nature" that are contrary to religion, that is, opposed to God. [Selections: 18] Leibniz held, against Bayle, that reason can never deceive us since it is nothing other than a "linking together of truths." [T p. 110; T p. 109] Leibniz distinguished between this "right reason" and "corrupt reason" which is "mixed with prejudices and passions." [T p. 107] Right reason cannot lodge irrefutable objections against faith, [T p. 10 I] is at the service of faith, [T I] and is the ground of all revealed faith [N 497] or Christianity. [T p. 102] Bayle was skeptical regarding all of this, holding that it is difficult to grant faith and reason their respective rights, [Selections: 29] and that one cannot prove that faith conforms to reason. [Selections: 31] 15 T 367: "Indeed, confusion springs, more often than not, from ambiguity in terms, and from one's failure to take trouble over gaining clear ideas about them. That gives rise to these eternal, and usually mistaken, contentions on necessity and contingency, on the possible and the impossible. But provided that it is understood that necessity and possibility, taken metaphysically and strictly, depend only upon this question, whether the object in itself or that which is opposed to it implies contradiction or not; and that one takes into account that contingency is consistent with the inclinations ... " 16 Among the dangerous consequences of this view is that God is unloveable and despotic. But by far the most dangerous consequence is that, in so far as it involves a rejection of the principle of sufficient reason, it takes away the possibility of proving God's existence. [T 44] However, if that were to happen, according to Leibniz, the principle of contradiction would go with it since he states that the principle of sufficient reason is a consequence of the principle of contradiction. [See Leibniz's 'On the Unitarian Metaphysics of Christoph Stegmann,' in the Appendix to Jolly, Leibniz & Locke: 196] 17 This view is obviously self-serving. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, as Bayle interpreted it, requires that God be indifferent to anything other than his will or essence. 18 Leibniz associated this doctrine of freedom with Descartes. [T p. 111-112; T 365] 19 According to Leibniz, a despot is a person who does not intend the good by his actions. [T 166] 20 Leibniz focuses in the Theodicy on Spinoza and Hobbes as examples of absolute necessitarians: "I have not neglected to examine the most rigorous authors, who have extended furthest the doctrine of the necessity of things, as for instance Hobbes and Spinoza, of whom the former advocated this absolute necessity not only in his Physical Elements and elsewhere, but also in a special book against Bishop Bramhall. And Spinoza insists more or less (like an ancient Peripatetic philosopher named Strato) that all has come from the first cause or from primitive Nature by a blind and geometrical necessity, with a complete absence for capacity for choice, for goodness and for understanding in the first source of things." [T p. 67] In the order I have mentioned them, he says of their views: "It is therefore the doctrine of blind power (Spinoza) or arbitrary power that destroys piety. The one

18

INTRODUCTION

destroys the intelligent principle of the providence of God; the other attributes to him characteristics that are appropriate to the evil principle." [T 403] 21 T p. 427: "Even though an active substance is determined only by itself, it does not follow that it is not moved by objects: for it is the representation of the object within it which contributes towards the determination. Now the representation does not come from without, and consequently there is complete spontanaiety." [Cf. T 428] 22 C 498: "Deliberation is a consideration of contrary arguments concerning practical good and evil." 23 Leibniz cites as reasons that God would have for creating nothing that it would be simpler and easier than creating something. [L 639; L 487] 24 Leibniz maintained that only God's essence involves his existence. [Grua 386; Grua 539] 25 Book of Concord: 471. Leibniz suggests in the Theodicy that Bayle was intent upon reviving Manichaeism. [T 136] 26 Leibniz says of Luther's book On the Servitude of the Will that it is an "excellent work." [Grua 369] 27 The punishments and rewards are for worldly deeds. 28 According to Leibniz, God is "perfectly and entirely just." [L 563] Parkinson points out [Leibniz on Human Freedom: 64] that Leibniz admitted that" even if there were an absolute necessity about our actions, rewards and punishments would still be just and reasonable." However, Parkinson goes on to add that there is a moral and punitive element to punishment for Leibniz. [Leibniz and Human Freedom: 66]. It is this moral element that prevents God, according to Leibniz, from punishing innocent infants. [L 563] 29 Of course, a fundamental moral principle is that one ought to deliberate before acting, that is, one ought to consider alternative ways of acting and their likely consequences. If a creature cannot meet this moral requirement he cannot behave morally since moral actions are free and: "When we act freely we are not being forced, as would happen if we were pushed on to a precipice and thrown from top to bottom; and we are not prevented from having the mind free when we deliberate, as would happen if we were given a draught to deprive us of discernment. There is contingency in a thousand actions of nature; but when there is no judgment in him who acts there is no freedom." [T 34] 30 According to Leibniz, men are not accountable for consequences of their actions which they do not foresee when they do their duty. [T 120] It is, he says, the intention behind the action that counts "For as to the future, we do not have to be quietists and wait ridicu;ously with folded arms for what God will do ... but we must act according to the presumptive will of God, as far as we can judge of it, trying with all our power to contribute to the general good ... For if the event may perhaps show that God did not in this instance wish our good will to have its effect, it does not follow from this that he did not wish us to do what we did. On the contrary, as he is the best of all masters, all that he ever asks is a right intention, and it is for him to know the time and place for letting good designs prosper." [DM 3] 31 Broad, 'Leibniz's Last Controversy With The Newtonians': 61 32 David Blumenfeld, 'Things Possible in Themselves': 304. 33 Parkinson, 'Philosophy and logic': 215-216. 34 Adams Leibniz: 53., 35 Mondadori, 'Leibniz and the Doctrine ofInter-World Identity': 44. 36 Ibid.,: 22. 37 Descartes in his Fifth Meditation also speaks of properties that belong to a thing essentially and necessarily as properties that are "inseparable" from it, [CSM II 46] a description that matches well Leibniz's distinction between hypothetical and absolute necessity. An absolutely necessary proposition, for Leibniz, is true under every hypothesis. [See: Grua 386; C 405; Grua 387; Grua 273; Grua 271; Grua 362; Grua 379; Grua 373; Grua 358; T 53; G VI 504/L 550.] For very useful discussions of Leibniz's notion of hypothetical necessity see Adam's 'Leibniz's Theories of Contingency': sec. 1.3; and David Blumenfeld's, 'Leibniz on Contingency and Infinite Analysis': 495ff.]

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19

3R I mean by a "complete individual" an individual whose concept is complete and by an "incomplete individual" one whose concept is not complete but which, with sufticient addition, can be upgraded to a complete concept. Leibniz's God, in fact, would carry out necessarily such a transformation given his omniscience. Not all incomplete concepts are such that they can be upgraded to complete concepts, for example, the concept of the sphere on the grave of Archimedes cannot be. 39Loemker inspired this analogy. See his 'On Substance and Process in the Philosophy of Leibniz': 54. 40 The idea that Leibnizian subjects have many complete concepts was first proposed, to my knowledge, by Grimm in his 1971 article 'Individual Concepts and Contingent Truths.' The article has had negligible influence, at best, among Leibniz scholars. In her article 'Possible Gods': 720, Wilson suggests that Grimm would have perhaps not made his proposal had he given "due weight to passages cited by Mates, Mondadori, and Ishiguro" in support of their contention that there is no counterfactual identity of Leibnizian individuals. My view is that the passages in question refute the contention. 41 Sleigh, Leibniz, p. 5: "I see almost nothing to be said in favor of Russell's idea that Leibniz had two philosophical systems. Leibniz did employ various styles of presentation, although no useful distinction can be drawn in this regard between work that he published and work that he circulated P2rivately or n?t ~t all." Adams, LelbnlZ: p. 52. 43 Ibid .. 44 Nichomachean Ethics: 1095a30-1095b 10 45 Other remarks by Leibniz that might arouse suspicions are these: "As there are many people whose faith is rather small and shallow to withstand such dangerous tests, I think that one must not present them with that which might be poisonous for them." [T p. 97] "We must certainly distinguish what it is good to say from what it is correct to believe; but since most truths can be boldly upheld, there is some presumption against an opinion that must be concealed." [N 491] 46 Rutherford, Leibniz: 289. 47 I do not mean here that for Leibniz the ultimate truth is not a moral truth, though my sense is that for him it is not. God himself is Truth, according to scripture, and I believe that Leibniz followed scripture on this point. To the point that, for Leibniz, faith is the ultimate guide: "[I]f we were capable of understanding the universal harmony, we should see that what we are tempted to find fault with is connected with the plan most worthy of being chosen; in a word, we should see, and not believe only, that what God has done is best. I call 'seeing' here what one knows a priori by the causes; and 'believing' what one one judges only by the effects, even though the one is as certainly known as the other. And one can apply here too the saying of St. Paul (2 Cor. V. 7 ), that we walk by faith and not by sight." [T p. 98-99] And also "[D]ivine faith itself, when it is kindled in the soul, is something more than an opinion, and depends not upon occasions or motives that have given it birth; it advances beyond the intellect, and takes possession of the will and of the heart, to make us act with zeal and joyfully as the law of God commands. Then we have no further need to think of reasons or to pause over the difficulties of argument which the mind may anticipate." [T p. 91] Finally, "[R]eason cannot teach us the details of the great future, which are reserved for revelation." [MP202]

CHAPTER ONE COMPLETE CONCEPTS AND COUNTERFACTUALS I. INTRODUCTION

Rational beings act freely, Leibniz contended, in so far as clear and distinct perceptions determine them to act, and they act without freedom when confused conceptions determine them to act. [T 289] God, in particular, is perfectly free, according to Leibniz, because all of his perceptions are perfectly clear and distinct. [T 192; T 310; T 319] How does the claim that all of God's perceptions are perfectly clear and distinct bear on the question of whether Leibniz could have maintained coherently that God has clear and distinct conceptions of himself and his creatures acting otherwise? Many would hold that if God is free to act he not only has the power to act otherwise, but also the power to create his creatures otherwise. But if God has the power to act otherwise and the power to create his creatures otherwise he must clearly and distinctly conceive of counterfactual ways of acting on his part and on the part of those creatures. Is it possible that God have a perfectly clear and distinct knowledge of things as they actually are, a socalled "knowledge of vision," and also any knowledge at all of how actual things might be otherwise: A possible knowledge of vision? In this chapter, I briefly examine the motives behind Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts, a doctrine that embodies the idea that God is omniscient. I then examine arguments that seek to establish that that doctrine is incompatible with the view that actual individuals cannot be conceived to be otherwise. II. COMPLETE CONCEPTS: PURPOSE, OBJECTIONS, AND REPLIES

According to the stock and dominant Aristotelian epistemology of Leibniz's day, a mind knows universals by means of reason and perceives singulars by means of the senses. l It knows universals when it grasps their essences and this grasping is accomplished by defining or formulating them. Young Leibniz is to be counted among the exponents of this conception of knowledge. He along with most of the other adherents also maintained that there are definitions only of universals and

20 R. O. Savage, Real Alternatives, Leibniz’s Metaphysics of Choice © Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998

COMPLETE CONCEPTS AND COUNTERFACTUALS

21

that only universals are intelligible or susceptible of being understood. 2 To be sure, according to this view to which Leibniz subscribed, God knows singulars, but he does not know them, qua their singularity, through definitive concepts of them.' Leibniz eventually repudiated this conception of the knowledge of singulars. At least God, Leibniz came to aver, knows singulars as well as universals through definitive concepts. His change in mind may have been prompted by his creationism. 4 God could not have freely created the world, Leibniz later maintained, unless he was fully cognizant of what he was creating. [Grua 311] According to Leibniz,: " .. .it is because his [God's] knowledge is perfect that his voluntary actions are perfect," [T 192] and God's very ability to act depends on knowledge. [CD 27] God is not a free creator of anything, Leibniz opined, if his actions are not deliberate, and his actions cannot be deliberate if he acts out of ignorance. [T 302; cf. DM 1; CD: 20; T 192] But there is no ignorance in God: "God is omniscient, and so no intelligible proposition can be formed concerning which he does not know for certain whether it is true or false." [Grua 306] If singular propositions are intelligible it follows, for Leibniz, that God knows for certain whether they are true or false. By "intelligible" Leibniz meant "conceivable without contradiction." [DSR 103; G II 55/LA 62]5 Given this meaning of "intelligible," there is no doubt that Leibniz, a thoroughgoing nominalist,6 accepted that there are intelligible singular propositions and by consequence singular propositions that God knows and knows why they are true: [T]o know something is to know the truth of a proposition, and indeed to know the truth of a proposition is to know why it will be thus. Therefore, if God perfectly foresees a thing, he will foresee not only what will be, but why it will be.?

And here is the criterion of truth that Leibniz proposed: [I]n every true affirmative proposition, necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the concept of the predicate is in a sense included in that of the subject; the predicate is in the subject; or else 1 do not know what truth is. [G II 56ILA 63; Cf. FC 179] A true affirmation is one, the predicate of which is present in the subject. Thus in every true affirmative proposition, necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the notion of the predicate is in some way contained in the notion of the subject, in such a way that if anyone were to understand perfectly each of the two notions just as God understands it he would by that very fact perceive that the predicate is in the subject. [MP 96]

It follows from Leibniz's characterization of knowledge and his criterion of truth that if God has perfect knowledge of a singular thing he knows all true propositions about it and the reasons why they are true. That is, he knows all the reasons why the concept of the subject of a true singular proposition contains the concept of its predicate. These reasons must be contained in the concept itself, otherwise

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there would be truths about the particular that God could not derive from its concept. If so, the concept would not be definitive, and if a thing does not have a definitive concept it does not have an essence and it cannot be known per se. 8 Leibniz called the defining concepts of individuals, concepts that contain all the reasons for the truths about them, and upon which demonstrations of truths about them are based "complete concepts.,,9 Here are some characterizations that Leibniz provided of complete concepts: All the predicates of Adam either depend upon other predicates or they do not so depend. Putting aside, then, those that do depend on others, we have only to take together the primitive predicates in order to form the complete concept of Adam, which is sufficient to make it possible to deduce from it everything that must happen to him. [G II 41ILA 44] God in seeing the individual notion or haeccietas of Alexander, sees in it at the same time the basis and the reason for all the predicates which can be truly affirmed of him. It can be said that there are at all times in the soul of Alexander traces of all that has happened to him, and even traces of all that happens in the universe ... [DM 8] Whenever we find some quality in a subject, we ought to believe that if we understood the nature of both the subject and the quality, we would conceive how the quality could arise from it.[A 6 6 66] Since Julius Caesar is to become perpetual dictator and master of the republic and will destroy the liberty of the Romans, this action is contained in his concept, for we have assumed that it is the nature of such a perfect concept of a subject to include everything so that this predicate is included in it - ut passU inesse subjecta.[G IV 557IL 576] In the perfect concept of each individual substance is contained all its predicates, both necessary and contingent, past, present, and future ... [G VII 311] God, who decrees nothing without exact knowledge, has known perfectly, even before he decrees that here should exist this Peter who later denied Christ, what would happen to Peter were he to exist; or what is the same thing, he has in his intellect a perfect concept or idea of possible Peter, a concept that contains all the truths concerning Peter. .. [Grua 311] [T]he individual concept of each person includes once for all everything which can ever happen to him, one sees in it a priori proofs or reasons for the truths of each event and why one has happened rather than another. [G II 12ILA 5]

Leibniz held that if God did not have complete concepts of individuals, he would not know them perfectly and he could not freely create them. But it is not entirely obvious that God can be both free and omniscient according to Leibniz's standard of omniscience. The opposite of a free action must be possible in order for it to be a possible object of choice. This condition appears to conflict with the proposition that singular propositions are demonstrable: How can the opposite of a demonstrable proposition be possible? But if the opposite of a true singular proposition is impossible does not that true proposition lie outside of the scope of God's will? If it is impossible that Spinoza not die at the Hague does it not follow that God cannot deliberate about whether to create Spinoza not dying at the Hague? How can

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God deliberate about what is impossible? But if God does not deliberate about what properties to give Spinoza, his creation of Spinoza cannot be free. Thus the paradox: Leibniz imputes perfect knowledge to God because perfect knowledge is needed for perfect deliberation and perfect deliberation is needed for perfect freedom. \0 Divine knowledge of singulars, if it is demonstrable knowledge, seems, however, to entail that God cannot deliberate about anything because truths that are demonstrably true cannot be false. As Aristotle pointed out long before Leibniz, one cannot deliberate about what cannot be false or what cannot be true ll because what is necessarily true or false cannot be otherwise. 12 Leibniz noted that the Socinians, concerned to defend God's and humans' status as free moral agents, responded to this paradox by refusing singular contingent propositions the status of objects of knowledge, divine or human. [T p. 58; T 364; G II 23ILA 19; G II 19/LA 14] He also noted that Epicurus, following Aristotle, responded to the paradox by pronouncing that propositions about the future are neither true nor false. [T 169] However, the majority of philosophers and theologians of Leibniz's day, and those who preceded him, resisted, sometimes in ways that Leibniz did not condone, 13 the view that God does not know singular propositions. They were unwilling to surrender the article of faith that God is omniscient. An absolutely perfect being must be omniscient, and an omniscient being must have more than mere opinions about singular propositions. He must know them, and know them with absolute certainty. Leibniz also repudiated the epistemological retreats of the Socinians and Epicurus. In keeping with the traditional conceptions both of God and knowledge, Leibniz, at least for a significant span of his career, assimilated singular propositions to the status of knowable, demonstrable propositions. He stipulated that God knows singular propositions not only by an immediate vision of their subjects but also by means of a priori demonstrations. He held that God knows that a proposition is true if and only if he knows that the concept of the subject of the proposition contains the concept of its predicate. Yet it does not suffice, according to Leibniz, for God to have a "vision" of the containment. In order to know the proposition perfectly, God must also see why the concept of the subject contains the concept of the predicate. He must see all the reasons that connect the predicate of the proposition to its subject. But this is just to demonstrate the proposition. Most commentators acknowledge that Leibniz held fast to his convictions that God freely created the world, and that God's decision to create the world was deliberate. However, most also are convinced that he recognized (even if he did not openly admit) that his doctrine of complete concepts implies that the opposites of truths about actual individuals cannot be true. They maintain that according to Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts all singular propositions are analytic and

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this precludes God from "forming" or "finding" a counterfactual concept of any actual individual. 14 They mean by an "analytic" proposition what Kant meant, I 5 namely, one whose predicate concept is constitutive of its subject concept and can be elicited from the subject concept by decomposition and whose denial is a contradiction. 16 Here is their reasoning. If the proposition "S is pOI is analytically and necessarily true the proposition "S is not-POI is analytically and necessarily false. It follows that there is no consistent, counterfactual conception of S bearing not-Po But for Leibniz, all propositions, including singular propositions are analytic. Hence, for Leibniz, actual individuals cannot be consistently conceived to be otherwise. Based on this reasoning, and it is, essentially, their reasoning in full, commentators have concluded that Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts entails that individuals are "world bound," that is, that they belong to at most one possible world. They argue that if an actual individual belonged to other possible worlds, it would have properties other than its actual properties in those worlds. As Hunter argues: Given the notion of complete concepts, which entails that a possible individual's concept contains within it complete information about its world ... and the doctrine that worlds are maximal series of jointly possible (= compossible) individuals, it follows that a possible individual can belong to at most one world. For suppose it belonged to two worlds. Then its complete concept would contain contradictory information and hence the corresponding individual would not be possible, contrary to the hypothesis. I?

If Hunter is right, Leibniz cannot have maintained coherently that the proposition that Spinoza died at the Hague is contingently true because Spinoza, in some possible world, does not die at the Hague. Likewise, it was forbidden to Leibniz to maintain that the proposition that Spinoza did not die at the Hague is contingently false because in some possible world Spinoza does not die at the Hague. If that proposition is contingently false, it must be so for reasons other than God's conceiving of Spinoza dying otherwise. Mondadori, hurrying along this well-worn line of reasoning, concludes: [W]e should like to be able to say, e.g., that Eric Ambler should not have written The Intercom Conspiracy while still existing - but within the framework of Leibniz's theory of complete concepts, we just can't. All we are entitled to say is that it is possible that Eric Ambler should not have existed. IS

The arguments that commentators advance for the claim that Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts implies that Leibnizian individuals belong to only one possible world are borrowed from Arnauld who commented on Leibniz's claim that individuals have complete concepts:

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If this is so, God was free to create Adam, but supposing that he did decide to create him, all that has since happened to the human race or even what will happen to it has occurred and will occur with a necessity more than fatal... [G II 15ILA 9] I cannot think of myself without considering myself as a singular nature, so distinct from any other existing or possible that I can as little conceive of different varieties of myself as of a circle whose diameters are not of the same length ... The reason is that these different varieties of myself would be distinct one from another, otherwise there would not be many of them. Thus one of these varieties of myself would necessarily not be me, which is manifestly a contradiction. Let me, Sir, now transfer to this version of myself what you say about Adam, and judge yourself whether that could be maintained. Amongst possible beings God found in his ideas many versions of myself, one of which possesses the predicates of being a doctor, and another of living in celibacy and being a theologian. And having decided to create the latter, the version of myself which now exists contains in its individual concept the notion of living in celibacy and being a theologian, whereas the former would have contained in its individual concept that of being married and a doctor. Is it not clear that there would be no sense in this discourse: because since my self is necessarily a particular individual nature, which is the same thing as having a particular individual concept, it is as impossible to conceive of contradictory predicates in the individual concept of myself as to conceive of a variety of myself distinct from me ... since it is impossible that I should not have remained myself, whether I had married or lived in celibacy, the individual concept of myself contained neither of these two states .. .! must consider as contained in the individual concept of myself only that which is such that I should no longer be me if it were not in me. [G II 30ILA 29-30]

Arnauld challenged Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts on the grounds that that doctrine contradicts the article of faith that the world is God's free creation. He believed that God could not freely create a world unless it is possible that the individuals in it possess properties other than those they actually have. This requires that at least some of the properties of individuals belong to them accidentally. Accidental properties, according to Arnauld, merely embelish individuals and an individual can both be and be conceived without them. Arnauld concluded, after reading a summary of Article 13 of Leibniz's Discourse, that Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts implies that none of an individual's properties belong to it accidentally, but that all of them belong to it essentially. Essential properties, according to Arnauld, in some sense constitute individuals, and in both thought and reality are inseparable from them. God certainly cannot sensibly be said to decree that an individual have a property that, even in thought, is inseparable from it. According to Arnauld, God therefore cannot be perfectly knowledgeable - as Leibniz understood "perfectly knowledgeable" - and perfectly free. Since Arnauld had no doubt that God created the world freely and could have created it otherwise, he sought to reduce to absurdity Leibniz's claim that the complete concept of an individual contains its accidental predicates. His reduction proceeds as follows. Taking it for granted (or at least seeming to take it for granted) that Leibniz will agree with him, Arnauld assumes that it is possible for

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him to have predicates other than those he actually has. Since his actual complete concept is a consistent concept it cannot contain any counterfactual predicates (they would contradict his actual predicates). It follows that another complete concept of him must contain those counterfactual predicates. However, complete concepts are individual natures and individual natures determine distinct individuals. Hence, the (obviously true) assumption that he could have been otherwise combined with the assumption that his complete concept contains his accidental predicates leads to the absurd conclusion that he could have been someone other than himself, that is, that he could have been distinct from himself. It is therefore demonstrably false that his complete concept contains his accidental predicates, that is, those predicates he could have failed to have and that he can be conceived without. Arnauld's identification of complete concepts with individual natures, as he construed individual natures, is obviously crucial to his argument against them. If that identification is wrong his reductio ad absurdum is unsound. The most Arnauld proves is that if complete concepts are individual natures, as he understood individual natures, and if an individual has only one individual nature, then an individual cannot have any counterfactual properties or counterfactual identities. But Leibniz does not cede to Arnauld the antecedent of this conditional. To the contrary, Leibniz responds to Arnauld that the complete concepts of individuals comprise considerably more than their natures, as Arnauld construed "natures": I think it necessary to philosophize one way about the concept of an individual substance and another way about the specific concept of a sphere. It is because the concept of the species contains only eternal or necessary truths, whereas the concept of an individual contains, regarded as possible, what in fact exists or what is related to the existence of things and to time, and consequently it depends on some free decrees of God which are considered as possible: for the truths of fact or of existence depend on God's decrees. So the concept of the sphere in general is incomplete or abstract, that is to say, one considers only the essence of the sphere in general or in theory without regard to the particular circumstances, and consequently it does not in the least contain what is required for the existence of the individual sphere, but the concept of the sphere that Archimedes had placed on his tomb is complete and must contain all that pertains to the subject of that form. [G II 38-391LA 41] [T]he concept of an individual contains, regarded as possible, what in fact exists, or what is related to the existence of things and to time, and consequently it depends on some free decrees of God which are considered as possible: for truths of fact or of existence depend on God's decrees [G II 39ILA 41]. [P]ossib1e things are possible prior to all the actual decrees of God, but not without sometimes supposing the same decrees considered as possible. For the possibilities of individuals or of contingent things contain in their concepts the possibility of their causes, that is, of the free decrees of God. [G II 51ILA 56]

Leibniz also wrote around the time of his correspondence with Arnauld:

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If the concept of the [existence] of the essence of A itself involves this, or if this follows

from the possibility of A itself, that what is A is B, this proposition is necessary or eternal. If from the concept of the essence of A itself with the addition of the concept of time this

proposition follows: what is A is B, then this proposition is contingent. Therefore, in things that are not eternal, nothing is necessary, for they are able to be demonstrated not from the concept of the things themselves, but from the concept of time ... Time, however, involves the concept of the whole series of things and the will of God and of other free things. [Grua 537; cf. Grua 536-554] Leibniz defined time as an order of inconsistent phenomena or accidents [G II 253/L 531; GIl 268-69/L 536]. He distinguished between the "concept of the essence" of an individual thing itself and the concept that results from "adding" to such a concept the concept of time. One demonstrates truths of fact or existence, that is, contingent truths, not from the concepts of the essences of things themselves but from the concept of time. How an individual exists in time depends on divine free decrees not merely on its essence. There is nothing about Adam considered independently of his place in time and in the whole series of things that implies that he will exist with Eve or any other created thing, or that he will exist with them and behave towards them as he does: It is therefore true that I would be able to not take this journey, but it is certain that I shall. This event is not indubitably linked with my other predicates conceived of incompletely or in a general way; but it is indubitably linked with the complete concept of me, since I suppose that one can deduce from it all that is happening to me. [G II 46ILA 50-51. Cf. G II 52ILA 58] 19

III. COMPLETE CONCEPTS AND COUNTERFACTUALS In arguing that Leibnizian individuals are worldbound, contemporary commentators rehash without significant enhancement Arnauld's reasoning against Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts. However, they usually fail to note that Arnauld withdrew his objections after carefully considering Leibniz's defense of the doctrine: 20 I am satisfied by the way you explain what had at first shocked me regarding the concept of an individual nature. For a man of integrity must never find it difficult to yield to the truth as soon as he has made acquaintance with it. I was especially struck by the argument that in every true affirmative proposition, necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the concept of the attribute is in a sense included in that of the subject: the predicate is present in the subject.[G II 63- 64ILA 77] One reason that Arnauld capitulated was that Leibniz led him to appreciate the force of the view they shared that the concept of the subject of any true proposition contains the concept of its predicate. Leibniz pointed out to Arnauld that it

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follows from this criterion of truth that if contingent propositions are true the concepts of their subjects contain the concepts of their predicates,zl A Catholic theologian such as Arnauld likely would be loath to deny that there are true contingent (factual) propositions. Holy Scripture abounds with them, for example, that God took on human nature to redeem mankind and that Eve disobeyed God. But that obviously would be an effect of his maintaining both that the concepts of the subjects of all true propositions contain the concepts of their predicates and that the concepts of the subjects of contingent propositions do not contain the concepts of their predicates. Arnauld thus affirmed Leibniz's point that the complete concepts of individuals only in a sense contain their accidental, non-essential attributes, and that that sense is not the same sense in which the concepts of individuals contain their essential properties. Leibniz made it clear to Arnauld what that sense is: the accidental properties of an individual, according to Leibniz, belong to it in virtue of God's free decrees that are constitutive of its complete concept. The essential properties of an individual, on the other hand, belong to it independently of God's free decrees. God does not decree what an individual essentially is. He does decree what circumstances it will exist in, however, and when it will exist in them. It is important to note, also, that Arnauld approved Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts without renouncing his own conviction that there are counterfactual truths and counterfactual identities. This suggests, at least, that Arnauld concluded that Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts is consistent with there being true counterfactuals. It is equally important that Leibniz at no point sought to disabuse Arnauld of his conviction that there are counterfactual truths and counterfactual identity. The fact that he did not suggests that Leibniz found no fault with it or perhaps even agreed with it. There is reason to believe that he did agree with it. Recall that a proposition is true according to Leibniz if and only if the concept of the subject of the proposition contains the concept of its predicate, and if and only if there are sufficient reasons for its truth. He did not explicitly except counterfactual conditionals in his statements of his criterion of truth. Indeed, Leibniz wrote: [All] the knowledge which is in God, whether this is of simple intelligence, concerning the essence of things, or of vision concerning the existence of things, or mediate knowledge concerning conditioned existences, results immediately from the perfect understanding of each term which can be the subject or predicate of any proposition.[MP 96]

Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts entails, however, that the concepts of predicates of counterfactuals, if they are truly attributed to individual substances, are contained in complete concepts of their subjects. In Leibniz's metaphysics this would entail straightforwardly and in an obvious way the individuals' belonging to

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more than one possible world. It would entail counterfactual identity and counterfactual complete concepts. Complete concepts contain the foundations of derivative truths about individuals. In the following passage, Leibniz argues that if there is such a thing as counterfactual knowledge of actual individuals, there must also be a foundation for it: [Molina] considers that there are three objects of divine knowledge, the possibles, the actual events and the conditional events that would happen in consequence of a certain condition if it were translated into action ... there is a kind of mean between the merely possible and the pure and absolute event, to wit the conditional event...Instance is given of the famous example of David asking the divine oracle whether the inhabitants of the town of Keilah, where he designed to shut himself in, would deliver him to Saul,supposing that Saul should besiege the town. God answered yes; whereupon David took a different course ... the principle objection [against the doctrine of mediate knowledge] is aimed at the foundation of this knowledge. For what foundation can God have for seeing what the people of Keilah would do? [T 41]

Leibniz argues against the Molinist doctrine that God's knowledge of future contingents and counterfactual conditionals is merely a scientia media, that is, a "vision" of future and conditional contingents that is not founded on a knowledge of their causes. Knowledge by vision of future and counterfactual contingents, for Leibniz, does not by itself amount to perfect knowledge of them. There also must be a knowledge of the preestablished causes of future and counterfactual contingents since everything must be explained by its cause. [G II 40ILA 43] Thus, if there are "intelligible" ways of being otherwise of actual individuals, e.g., "the people of Keilah," God, according to Leibniz, not only knows these ways by "seeing" them, but he also knows what would cause or dispose the people of Keilah to be otherwise and why.22 It is true that Leibniz stated that God does not need to know the connection of causes and effects to know states of affairs that are the effects of causes. [T 360] Nevertheless, there are such connections and the perfection of God's knowledge entails that he knows them, and through the connections he knows effects by knowing their causes. [T p. 419] This view conforms to the Aristotelian tenet that the definitions of things specify their causes. 23 Leibniz rejected Molina's middle knowledge because it did not. But he did not reject Molina's view that God knows counterfactual truths about actual individuals. IV. COMPLETE CONCEPTS AND LEIBNIZ'S METAPHYSICS OF SUBSTANCE

One might cite Leibniz's so-called "mirroring principle," as Mates does in the following passage, as evidence that Leibniz did make the rejection, or at least should have:

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[I]n the actual world, and in every other possible world, each concept "mirrors" or "expresses" all the other individual concepts in that world. Each individual of the actual world is related to all the others, and every relation is "grounded" in simple attributes of the things related; the same is true of the other possible worlds as well...Adam's concept involves those of all of his progeny, including those of Cain, Abel, Seth,and even ourselves. If Adam had not existed, none of us would have existed, and, what is more surprising, if any of us had not existed, Adam would not have existed. Thus if two individual concepts belong to a single possible world, then they are present or absent together in every possible world. 24

As Mates points out, complete concepts of individuals contain information about other individuals they would coexist with if they existed, not just information about themselves. The information is a reflection or expression of other individuals. These individuals, presumably, would be present to be reflected if the complete concept were realized since the "reflective properties" are well-founded according to preestablished harmony - on the properties of those other individuals. Moreover, by implication, if the reflective properties of an individual S are not in fact grounded in the attributes of some other possible individual T, Sand T cannot coexist because coexistence is effected only by means of such grounding. The following passage especially appears to bear out Mates's reading of Leibniz's "mirroring principle": In the perfect concept of an individual substance in a pure estate of possibility, considered by God, everything is contained that would happen to him if he existed, indeed, the whole series of things of which he is a part.[G VII 311]

In this passage Leibniz states that "the whole series of things" to which an individual would belong if it existed is contained in its perfect concept. This statement might appear to corroborate the contention that Leibnizian individuals cannot belong to more than one possible world. Complete concepts therefore might appear to preclude counterfactual identity, or to entail that if individuals have individuating non-complete concepts or essences, those concepts or essences are no less "worldbound" than complete concepts. Notwithstanding this appearance, Leibniz makes statements that suggest more strongly that he believed that God conceives of substances without conceiving of the individuals with which they actually exist, and also conceives of them existing in diverse ways with individuals other than those with which they actually exist: Contingent possibles can be considered either separately or as all correlated in an infinity of possible worlds, each of which is perfectly understood to God, though only one among them has been produced into existence. [CD 15] The Wisdom of God, not content with embracing all the possibles, penetrates them, compares them, weighs them one against the other ... By this means the divine Wisdom divides all the possibles it had already considered separately [my emphasis] into so many universal systems which it further compares the one with the other. [T 225]

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One can conceive of a mean between an antecedent will altogether pure and primitive and a consequent and final will. The primitive antecedent will has as its object each good and each evil in itself detached from all combination [emphasis added], and tends to advance the good and prevent the evil. The mediate will relates to combinations as when one attaches a good to an evil: then the will will have some tendency towards this combination, when the good exceeds the evil therein, but the final and decisive will results from the consideration of all the goods and evils that enter into our deliberation, it results from a total combination. [T 119] God foreknew and predetermined, from the beginning, not only the infinite series of things, but also the infinite series of possible combinations of actions, passions, and changes of those things. [AG 102] God had knowledge of possible things, not only as separate, but as coordinated in innumerable possible worlds, from which, by his most wise decision, he chose one. [G III 30]

Leibniz distinguished between "contingent possibles," "possibles," and "possible things," on the one hand, and "worlds of possibles" and "systems of contingent possibles" on the other. He states that God might conceive a given possible combined in different ways in different systems. My reading of AG 102, in particular, is that Leibniz's God foreknew not only the actual combination of actions, passions, and changes of the things he created, but also infinitely many alternative possible combinations of actions, passions and changes of those things. My reading of AG 102 comports with Grua 285: [S]uppose that there are the possible beings ABC D E F G, equally perfect and tending to existence, of which there are some incompatibles A with Band B with D and D with G, and G with C, and C with F and F with E, I say that one would be able to make two things to exist in fifteen ways, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, BC, BE, BF, BG, CD, CE, DE, DF, EG, FG, or three together in the following ways ACD, ACE, ADE, ADF, AGE, AFG, BCE, BEG, BFG, or four together in just one manner ACDE,which would be chosen from among all the others because by it we obtain the most that we are able to obtain. [Grua 285; Cf. G VII 194]

Leibniz clearly intends the "possible beings" he refers to in this passage to be understood as individuals, for he says that they are tending to exist, and "tending to exist" is a property of Leibnizian individuals. 25 All of the combinations of compatible possible individuals are representations of possible worlds. Leibniz assumes that it is possible for two possible individuals A and C to be compatible yet there be a third individual B with which A is incompatible and with which C is compatible (compatibility is intransitive). The result is that there are possible worlds that contain both C and B, e.g., BCE, and other possible worlds that contain only one of them, e.g., ACDE. If there is a complete concept of C as C "exists" in the possible world BCE, that complete concept obviously is distinct from the complete concept of C as C exists in the possible world ACDE. A complete concept of C contains information about all of the other individuals with which C coexists. There can be no com-

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plete concept of C that contains the information that C coexists (in the same possible world) with both A and B. However the complete concept Q of Cas C exists in BCE does contain the information that C coexists with B and the complete concept R of Cas C exists in ACDE contains the information that C coexists with B. Clearly, R has to be distinct from Q. Hence, Leibniz appears to be committed to the proposition that individuals have more than one complete concept by his remarks at Grua 285. The view that there is no counterfactual identity in Leibniz, on the other hand, in so far as that view appeals to his doctrine of complete concepts, presupposes that Leibnizian individuals have at most one complete concept. As Mates rightly observes, a complete concept of a possible substance contains information about every state of an entire world. Hence, Leibniz should not have had in mind complete individual concepts when he spoke of whatever it is that is considered "prior" to being considered as belonging to various universal systems. Obviously, God cannot conceive of a complete concept that involves a world or universal system without also conceiving of that world. Since Leibnizian substances relate by representing one another, if God conceives of a substance not representing other substances he conceives of it not related to those other substances. The concept of a substance not representing a world is not a complete concept. Nevertheless it is the concept of a substance. Leibniz offers the following example of such a concept: I had said that the assumption from which all human events can be deduced is not simply one of creating an indeterminate Adam, but of creating a particular Adam, determined to all these circumstances, and chosen from among an infinite number of possible Adams. That gave M. Aranuld the opportunity to object that it is as impossible to conceive of many Adams, taking Adam as an individual nature, as to conceive of many varieties of myself. I agree, but then in speaking of many Adams I was not taking Adam as one determinate individual. I must explain myself. This is how I understood it. When one considers in Adam a part of his predicates, for instance, that he is the first man, placed in a garden of pleasure, from whose rib God draws forth a woman, and similar things conceived of in a general way (that is to say, without mentioning Eve, Eden, and other circumstances which complete his individuality), and that the person to whom all these predicates are attributed is called Adam, all this is not enough to determine the individual, for there can be an infinite number of Adams, that is to say of possible people differing from one another, who fit that description. [G II 41- 42ILA 45]

In this passage, Leibniz specifies a set of determinate or definite descriptions, such as "the man from whose rib God drew forth Eve," and "the first man who lived in the Garden of Eden." Our Adam, and no other actual individual substance, is supposed to fit these descriptions. To generate an indeterminate, indefinite, or general description of Adam that presents Adam as an indeterminate or vaguely apprehended subject, Leibniz proposes that we think of these descriptions "in a general way." He proposes that we

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can do this by disregarding circumstances that determine Adam's individuality. For example, that we think of "the first man who lived in the Garden of Eden" in a general way by not "mentioning" Eden. This abstraction yields "the first man who lived in a garden of pleasure." Similarly, we can think of "the man from whose side God took Eve" in a general way, by not "mentioning" Eve and we obtain "the man from whose side God took a woman." According to Leibniz, the general descriptions that constitute an incomplete or general concept of Adam can function within the confines of the actual world to pick him out from among all other actual individuals since no other actual complete individual substance satisfies them. But ranging over possible worlds, the same descriptions pick out many possible complete substances that cannot, generally conceived, be distinguished from Adam. V. WHAT MAKES ACCIDENTS ESSENTIAL?

Leibniz did not deny that God is able to conceive substances without conceiving of all of the freely decreed accidental details of their existence. To be sure, Leibniz held that existent substances "need" their accidents to exist, [G IV 364] and that if substances exist they must express all things. [G IV 523; G IV 518] Leibnizian substances involve the perfections or attributes of other substances, [L 526] and also the phenomena of other substances. [G II 58ILA 66] Indeed, the representations of their relations to other things complete Leibnizian subjects. More precisely, the very first state that God bestows on a subject completes it, since, according to Leibniz: Everything occurs in every substance as a consequence of the first state which God bestowed upon it,and extraordinary concourse excepted, his ordinary concourse consists only of preserving the substance itself in conformity with its preceding state and the changes that it bears. [G II 91-921LA 115]

Yet one must ask here what Leibniz meant by a "first state" and what he meant by a "subject" on which it is imposed. I understand Leibniz to have meant by the "first state" that God imposes on an individual the first temporal/representational state that he imposes on it. A temporal/representational state is just a state that is "pregnant with a future" and that unfolds sequentially according to laws of time and other laws of final and efficient causes. By the "subject" on which God bestows a "first state" I think it fairly obvious that Leibniz meant a subject lacking the state, a subject that would not have the state unless it so pleased God to bestow the state upon it. I concur with Russell who wrote: We must not say, therefore, as is often loosely done, that Leibniz identified substance with activity (=an attribute); activity is the essence of substances, but substances themselves are

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not essences, but the subjects of essence and other predicates. Thus a substance is not, for Leibniz, identical with the sum of its states; on the contrary, these states cannot exist without a substance to inhere in. 26

God, according to Leibniz, imposes a first state on a substance whereof Russell speaks, and the first state inheres in it. A concept of a stateless substance does not involve a concept of time and God cannot derive truths of fact or existence from it. It is not the concept of a substance that is a member of a universal system. A stateless substance is a substance without a view or point of view. A complete individual concept of a substance, on the other hand, is the concept of an entire world or universal system from a particular point of view. 27 It involves not only the individual essence of the substance that occupies the point of view but also its "other" accidental predicates. These accidental predicates express the relations of their subject to other substances in its world and also the laws that govern those relationships. A complete concept is therefore the concept of what I call a "substantialized," "concretized," or, more barbarously, "worldified" subject, that is, a subject that acts and suffers. In more systematic language: [W]e need to seek no other concept of power or force than that it is the attribute from which change arise, and whose subject is substance itself [emphasis added]. [G II 1701L 516] [A]ctive force, life, and antitypy are something essential and at the same time primitive, and one can conceive of them independently of other concepts, even of their subjects, by means of abstractions. Subjects, on the contrary, are conceived by means of such attributes. Yet these attributes are differentfrom the substances of which they are the attributes [emphasis added]. [G VI 5821L 620] [No] one could object if the substance in abstracto is taken to be the primitive force which always remains the same in the same body and brings about, successively, accidental forces, and particular actions, which are all nothing but the nature or primitive subsisting force applied to things. Nevertheless, it is true that the substance in concreto is something other than force, [emphasis added] for it is the subject taken with this force. [A 1 7248-249]

It does not appear that Leibniz has mere distinctions of reason in mind when he distinguishes subjects from their attribute of primitive active power. Distinctions of reason do not imply a real difference between the items distinguished. They also do not involve independent conceptions of attributes. Leibniz designated primitive active forces "individual laws." [L 155] According to him, one way to conceive an individual law in abstracto [N 216; N 222] is to conceive it not being applied, in conception, to possible data, that is, to its correlated primitive passive force: When I said that primary matter is that which is merely passive and separated from [my emphasis] forms, I said the same thing twice, for it would be the same if! had said that it is

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passive and separate from all activity. Forms are for me nothing but activities or entelechies, and substantial forms are the primary entelechies. [G III 5511L 511] I have preferred to say that the active is incomplete without the passive, and the passive without the active, rather than to speak of matter without form and form without matter ... [G III 5511L 511]

Leibniz identified primitive active force with the law of the monad [L 155; G II 264/L 535] and primitive passive force with confused perceptions. [G III 637 (4)/L 659; G IV565/L 581] Both types of primitive force are essential constituents of complete beings. It is "essential," according to Leibniz, for created beings to act and to suffer. [G IV 508-509/L 502] Both primitive active force and primitive passive force are essence in the sense that both are that without which there would be no existent subjects. A substance is passive, according to Leibniz, insofar as it is receives and is modified by representations of things external to it. [C 514; N 168] The modifications of a substance are its accidents and it is separable, according to Leibniz, from them. [T 391; T 393; L 537; T 88] Thus: W]e see that there is a real (reete) distinction between the substance and its modifications or accidents, contrary to the opinion of some moderns ... [T 32]

Leibniz states not only that a substance is "distinct" from its accidents, he adds the qualification that the distinction is "real." It is not a foregone conclusion that he did not, or should not, have in mind a real distinction very much like the Cartesian variety, especially not since he states that accidents are beings "added to" substance, [N 333-4] and that they are modifications of the substance that do not augment it. [L 532] The qualification "very much" in the preceding sentence is called for because Leibniz would deny that a substance can exist without any accidents at all. That is, Leibniz would deny that a substance could exist without suffering or there being other things that act on it. Indeed, existence itself would be at least one accidental property of any created being. However the question is not whether a substance can exist without accidents. The question is whether an actual substance can exist without the accidents that it actually has. This would require conceiving of it without those accidents, not conceiving of it existing without accidents. A concept of a substance separate or distinct from its accidents or modifications is an incomplete concept, as a concept of Judas neither being loyal to nor betraying Christ is an incomplete concept of Judas. "Betraying Christ" is a temporal accident of Judas that God freely decrees, likewise for Judas receiving payment for his betrayal. These properties do not belong to Judas simply because of who he is, but also because of what other things are, and because of what is required to harmonize Judas with them in a world, that is, because of what Leibniz called

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"universal harmony." This harmony, according to Leibniz, is preestablished in the first state that God bestowed on Judas. The first state that God imposes on a subject does not depend on its later states but its later states depend on and are derived from its first state. A perfect conception of this state fits Leibniz's description of a complete concept. A nature, broadly understood, is the source or cause of the derivative properties of a thing. Since a substance's later states originate in its first state, that first state is a nature according to this criterion. However, not all properties of a Leibnizian subject are consequences of its first state. A subject obviously must have properties "before" God imposes a first state on it, otherwise it would not be an entity: "Nothing has no attributes." Arnauld would say that such properties are such as his being a man and being less than omniscient. These properties constitute the nature of the subject more narrowly construed. In the following remarks from a paper thought to have been written around the time of Leibniz's correspondence with Arnauld, Leibniz makes a point that is based on the same idea as the one presently under discussion: [From] the first essential laws of the series - true without exception, and containing the entire purpose of God in choosing the universe, and so including even miracles - there can be derived subordinate laws of nature .. .It should not disturb anyone that I have just said that there are certain essential laws for this series of things, though I said above that these same laws are not necessary and essential, but are contingent and existential. For since the fact that the series itself exists is contingent and depends on the free decrees of God, its laws will also be contingent in the absolute sense; but they will be hypothetically necessary and will be essential given the series. [MP 99-100]

The "first laws" of the series are essential because they are inseparable from the series or "true without exception" of the series and also because all of the other properties of the series "flow" from them. However, they are merely hypothetically essential rather than absolutely essential because they are separable from the concept of a world generally considered. In other words, they are not true of a world simply in virtue of its being a world. The laws are therefore essential relative to this series but accidental relative to series simpliciter. In a similar way, Adam's environment is both essential and not essential: It is essential relative to this Adam but not essential to Adam considered simpliciter or sub ratione generalitis, our Adam's environment is not essential to every possible Adam. Aquinas anticipated Leibniz's extended sense of the terms "essence" and "nature": [A] nature or essence can be considered in two ways. First absolutely, according to its proper meaning. In this sense nothing is true of it except what belongs to it as such .. .In a second way a nature or essence can be considered according to the being it has in this or that individual. In this way something is attributed to it accidentally, because of the subject

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in which it exists, as we say that man is white because Socrates is white, though this does not belong to man insofar as he is man. This nature has a twofold being: one in individual things and the other in the soul, and accidents follow upon the nature because of both beings. In individuals, moreover, the nature has a multiple being corresponding to the diversity of individuals. [On Being and Essence: 46- 47]

Aquinas understood the body that a soul informs as a sort of circumstance for it, and so does Leibniz, as he interprets the notion of a soul having a body within the framework of his doctrine of preestablished harmony. Aquinas surely would affirm also, with Leibniz, that the accidental condition of a body is determined by the body's environment. Thus, that Socrates is white is an accident that he has because he is an embodied soul and also because he is usually indoors. The, environment then, by Aquinas's logic, would belong to Socrates's nature or essence understood in the "second way." Along with the body, it would constitute Socrates's individuality. Leibniz, it appears, was familiar with Aquinas's On Being and Essence. 28 Arnauld was speaking of a nature in Aquinas's first and proper sense of "nature" when he objected to Leibniz's doctrine of complete concepts. Having studied Leibniz's clarification of what Leibniz meant by "nature," it was easy enough for Arnauld to glean that his dispute with Leibniz was verbal, that is, based on the ambiguity of the word "nature." Taking note of that ambiguity should help to make sense of these remarks by Leibniz: [A]llthough there cannot be marks which distinguish it [an existent individual] perfectly from every other possible individual, there are however marks which distinguish it from other individuals which we meet. [C 360]

In his correspondence with Arnauld, Leibniz states that the complete concept of an individual provides a basis for distinguishing it from every other possible individual. What he states here appears to conflict with that statement. However, the appearance is weakened by the consideration that he does not state in his correspondence with Arnauld that a complete concept serves as a basis for distinguishing individuals perfectly from every other possible individual. I take Leibniz to have meant by a "perfect distinction" a distinction not only at the level of properties that "follow from the concept of time" but also those that are independent of time, namely, those properties that a subject possesses qua being an individual subject. This "remote" and absolute subject has a nature that no other existent subject has. However, the same nature is exemplified in other possible worlds, that is, the subject of the nature is exemplified in other possible worlds. An actual individual subject cannot be perfectly distinguished from individuals in other possible worlds that share its absolute nature. It cannot be distinguished from individuals that are it.

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The "other individuals which we meet," of which Leibniz speaks, are individuals with which we coexist. An individual's predicates, considered in the general way that Leibniz described to Arnauld ["the man from whose side God took a woman," "the first man," "a garden of pleasure," etc.] are sufficient to serve as a basis for distinguishing him from other existent individuals. However, not even God would be able to distinguish one Adam from another possible Adam using these general predicates as marks which, as I understand Leibniz, are rough indicators for whatever the absolute individual nature of Adam is. VI. COUNTERFACTUAL SEMANTICS, ROUGHLY SPEAKING

There is a further interesting consequence of this conclusion. Take the description "the man from whose side God took a woman" and mention "Lilith" instead of "Eve," and the description "the first man in some world" and mention "Neptune" rather than "Earth." Alternatively reconstituting the descriptions in this way would apparently culminate in mentioning individual substances other than the actual Adam, albeit, in other possible worlds. Nevertheless, the general descriptions designate the same vaguely conceived subject that the actual Adam is. This warrants naming all of the completely described individuals in question "Adam." They differ from our Adam only with respect to the freely decreed determinations of certain relatively abstract properties such as "the first man." In essence, we would be naming or referring to the subject, not the composite. Corresponding to each complete description of Adam is a complete concept. Hence, God forms many different complete concepts that involve the substance Adam. Although Sleigh gives a different answer than I do, he also recognizes that it is a legitimate and intelligible question to ask whether Leibniz's system incorporates individuals that have many complete concepts: Since no two worlds are exactly the same, it is natural to assume that each substance in a world will have some properties reflecting that particular world. Given these assumptions, no complete individual substance is a member of distinct collections constituting possible worlds .. .in other words, each complete concept is in exactly one world. This is a totally innocent claim. For example, it is independent of the thesis that no possible object exists in more than one possible world. Thus, consider the concept that contains all and only the primitive properties that Arnauld has in the actual world. Suppose that this concept is in the actual world and no other. This is consistent with the claim that Arnauld exists in other worlds. For each such world there will be a distinct concept containing all and only the primitive properties Arnauld has in that world. Clearly, if we think that Arnauld exists in worlds other than the actual world, we will regard the expression "the complete concept of Arnauld" as elliptical - short for "the complete concept of Arnauld in the actual world" or, more generally, "the complete concept of Arnauld in possible world W." 29

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Leibniz wrote often of "the" complete concept of an individual, perhaps giving the impression that he was committed to the view that individuals have only one complete concept. Sleigh has supplied grounds for doubting that impression and for at least considering whether Leibniz's manner of speaking is elliptical. Certainly, if one contends that Leibniz is speaking elliptically, one must advance arguments in support of that thought. However, if one contends that he is not, one must also advance arguments in support of that thought. Sleigh advances an argument, namely, that Leibniz is a superintrinsicalist. Perhaps, however, Sleigh's superintrinsicalism is consistent with the idea that individuals have more than one complete concept. Sleigh has convinced me by his arguments that Leibniz is a superintrinsicalist. Yet, I do not think, as Sleigh does, that Leibniz's superintrinsicalism forces him to eschew counterfactual identity, and I will explain why I do not in Chapter Three. Sleigh does see Leibniz as seeking a way to preserve the distinction between essential and accidental properties. In my estimation, however, if a distinction between essential and accidental properties does not clear the way for the possibility of consistently conceiving of individuals behaving otherwise than they actually behave, and does yield an account of counterfactual truth, Leibniz would view that distinction as too feeble for his purposes. Leibniz regards the distinction between essential and accidental properties primarily as a conceptual tool for forging moral and eschatological distinctions. It is supposed to help make sense of the moral concepts of praiseworthy and blameworthy actions, of punishments and rewards, salvation and damnation. If God cannot conceive an individual not behaving as it actually does, that individual very simply is not responsible for his behavior. As Mondadori points out, Leibniz makes numerous statements that appear to entail that individuals possibly behave otherwise than they actually behave and that they belong to more than one possible world. Here is a modest sampling of such statements: Let us imagine twin Polish children, the one taken by the Tartars, sold to the Turks, brought to apostasy, plunged in impiety, dying in despair; the other saved by some chance ... Someone will perchance say that God foresaw by mediate knowledge that the former would have been wicked and damned even if he had remained in Poland. There are perhaps conjunctures wherein something of this sort takes place. But will it therefore be said that this is a general rule, and that not one of those who were damned amongst the pagans would have been saved if he had been amongst Christians? Would that not be to contradict our Lord, who said that Tyre and Sidon would have profited better by his preaching, if they had had the good fortune to hear it, than Capernaum? But were one to admit even here this use of mediate knowledge against all appearances, this knowledge still implies that God considers what a man would do in such and such circumstances; and it always remains true that God could have placed him in other circumstances more favorable, and given him inward or outward succour capable of vanquishing the most abysmal wickedness existing in the world. [T 101-103]

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It is true that there is no contradiction in the supposition that Spinoza died in Leyden and not at the Hague; there would have been nothing so possible: the matter was therefore indifferent in respect of the power of God. But one must not suppose that any event, however small it may be, can be regarded as indifferent in respect of his wisdom and his goodness. [T 103] [R]easons for contingent truths incline without necessitating. It is therefore true that I would be able not to take this journey, but it is certain that I shall. [G II 46\LA 50-51] God, having considered the sequence of things that he established, found it fitting, for superior reasons, to permit that Pharaoh, for example, should be in such circumstances as should increase his wickedness. [T 99] Thus it all often comes down to circumstances, which form a part of the combination of things. There are countless examples of small circumstances serving to convert or to pervert. [T 100] [A]ll the internal and external causes taken together bring it about that the soul is determined certainly, but not of necessity: for no contradiction would be implied if it were to be determined differently, it being possible for the will to be inclined, but not possible for it to be inclined of necessity. [T 371] God punishes man ... God justly punishes whomever he punishes so God punishes man justly ... so Man is punished justly... so Man is guilty ... so Man could have acted otherwise ... [N 482] [T]ime, space, and, matter, united and uniform in themselves, and entirely indifferent to everything, might have received entirely other motions and shapes and in another order. [T 34] [T]here is an infinity of orders which the totality of matter might have received in place of these particular changes which it [my emphasis] has actually taken on. For it is clear that the stars could have moved quite differently, since space and time are quite indifferent to every.kind of motion and figure. [G VI 506- 5071L 552] [T]he certain determination to sin which exists in man does not deprive him of the power to avoid sinning (speaking generally) or, since he does sin, prevent him from being guilty and deserving punishment. [T 369; cf. G IV 509\L 502: "a power which can never be exercised is meaningless."] [A]bsolutely speaking, our will, considered as contrasted with necessity, is in a state of indifference, and it has the power to do otherwise or to suspend its action altogether, the one and the other alternative being and remaining possible. [DM 30] [A]fter this life ... there is always in the man who sins, even when he is damned, a freedom which renders him culpable, a power, albeit remote, of recovering himself, even though it should never pass into action.[T 269] [T]he effect being certain, the cause that shall produce it is certain also; and the if effect comes about if will be by virtue of the proportionate cause. Thus your laziness perchance will bring it about that you will obtain naught of what you desire, and that you will fall into those misfortunes which you would by acting with care have avoided. [emphasis added]. [T 55] [T]he necessity contrary to morality, which must be avoided and which would render punishment unjust, is an insuperable necessity, which render all opposition unavailing, even

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though one should wish with all one's heart to avoid the necessary action, and even though one should make all possible efforts to that end. Now it is plain that this is not applicable to voluntary actions, since one would not do them if one did not so desire [emphasis added]. [Tp. 381] God considers what a man would do in such and such circumstances; and it always remains true that God could have placed (emphasis added) him in other circumstances more favorable, and given him inward or outward succour capable of vanquishing the most abysmal wickedness existing in the world. [T 103] [S]pace time and matter, in which nothing is considered other than extension and resistance, that is bare, is clearly indifferent to what ever magnitudes, figures, and motions you please, nor accordingly is a determinate reason able to be found, either why the world exists in such a way and is not produced under any other not less possible form. [C 13]

These passages do not square, at least not smoothly, with the view that Leibniz conceded that his doctrine of complete individual concepts implies that there is no counterfactual identity of individuals. To the contrary, they strongly suggest that Leibniz supposed that individuals belong to more than one possible world and that different laws and different relations to things determine them differently in those worlds than they are determined in the actual world. It is no wonder that Mates responds to the passage quoted from C 13: If this means that literally the same world could have existed in some other form, we have an inconsistency that I do not know how to explain.3o

I agree with Mates that there is an inconsistency. However, the inconsistency is not found in Leibniz's system. The inconsistency is generated by faulty interpretations of his principles and illustrations that Leibniz provides of those principles. According to Mates, if Leibniz's God conceives of "bare" matter under a given form he cannot conceive of it under any other form. Leibniz, however, states that God can conceive of matter under many different forms because matter is "indifferent" to particular forms. Evidently, either Leibniz misunderstood his principles and transgressed them, or Mates has misunderstood them. I am inclined to think that the former alternative is most likely. I have no reason to not take Leibniz seriously when he insinuates that one would be denying Christ's teachings were one to maintain that there are no counterfactual truths. Christ assserts that Tyre and Sidon would have profited better from his preaching if they had heard it under different circumstances. Leibniz seems to be reluctant to contradict Christ. Leibniz, himself, states that God could have placed individuals in circumstances other than their actual circumstances, and that individuals have the power to behave in ways that they will never behave. He asserts at Theodicy 173 that whether Spinoza dies at the Hague or at Leyden is "indifferent in respect of

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the power of God." Especially in light of other of the passages that I have quoted, I understand him to have meant by this assertion that God has the power to realize either alternative. If that is what Leibniz meant, and if he also considered the conception of Spinoza dying at Leyden contradictory, he was committed to the view that contradictory conceptions are objects of God's power. Clearly, however, Leibniz did not, and would never allow that God can create contradictions. He would not endorse the view that Adam could exist both married to Eve and not married to Eve at the same time. He denies in the Theodicy that God can create contradictions without explicitly excepting contradictions that are not finitely demonstrably contradictions: Is it possible that the enjoyment of doubt can have such influence upon a gifted man [Bayle] as to make him wish and hope for the power to believe that two contradictories never exist together for the sole reason that God forbade them to, and, moreover, that God could have issued them an order to ensure that they always walked together? I cannot even imagine that M. Descartes can have been of this opinion, although he had adherents who found this easy to believe ... [T 186; cf. T 242]

Leibniz's message in this passage is evident: God cannot will that contradictory states of affairs exist. According to Leibniz, God cannot even will that they don't exist. He ridicules Bayle for hoping that God can. Leibniz also wrote concerning God's power: God is omnipotent. That is, God can do anything that does not imply a contradiction; indeed, the notions of possibility and impossibility consist precisely in this. Hence, the power of God extends not only to what has been and what will be, but also to what is at least capable of being clearly and distinctly perceived. And in this sense the sacred scripture says: without doubt there is no word which is able to be understood that is impossible to God. [Grua 307]

Following Descartes, [CSM II 50] Leibniz states that God's power extends to that which "is at least capable of being clearly and distinctly perceived." Leibniz, therefore, should not have meant by his statement that the supposition that Spinoza died at Leyden is implicitly contradictory in a way that cannot be detected logically by a finite analysis of the terms of the supposition. If a proposition is clearly and distinctly perceived, surely, it does not harbor a contradiction. As Mondadori acknowledges, "Leibniz often makes claims" that imply that God could have given to actual objects, say Spinoza, Pharoh, Tyre, or Sidon, properties other than those they happened to have, claims to which Mondadori declares Leibniz is not entitled. Mondadori's acknowledgment, but not his declaration, is warranted also by the following text: [T]he celebrated Mr. Hobbes supported (the) opinion, that all that what does not happen is impossible. He proves it by the statement that all the conditions requisite for a thing that

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shall not exist...shall never be found together, and that the thing cannot exist otherwise. But who does not see that that only proves a hypothetical impossibility? It is true that a thing cannot exist when a requisite condition for it is lacking. But as we claim to be able to say that the thing can exist although it does not exist, we claim in the same way that the requisite conditions can exist although they do not exist. [T 172]

Leibniz challenges Hobbes's claim that a "thing cannot exist otherwise," not the "claim that a thing that exists cannot fail to exist, or the claim that other things cannot exist. He concedes that conditions for his acting otherwise must exist if he is to act otherwise. He then goes on to assert that conditions requisite for a thing's existing otherwise can also exist. Leibniz also wrote: T]hat which is certain is not always necessary, or altogether impossible; the thing might have gone otherwise, but that did not happen and with good reason. God chose between different courses all possible: thus, metaphysically speaking, he could have chosen or done what was not the best, but he could not morally speaking have done so. Let us make use of a comparison from geometry. The best way from one point to another (leaving out of account obstacles and other considerations accidental to the medium) is one only: it is that one which passes by the shortest line, which is the straight line. Yet there are innumerable ways from one point to another. There is therefore no necessity which binds me to go by the straight line, but as soon as I choose the best, I am determined to go that way, although this is only a moral necessity in the wise. That is why the following conclusions fail: 'Therefore he could only do that which he did. Therefore that which has not happened or will never happen is absolutely impossible.' (These conclusions fail, I say: for since there are many things which never will happen and which nevertheless are clearly conceivable and imply no contradiction, how can one say that they are altogether impossible? [T 234; Cf. Grua 300]

Leibniz rejects the "conclusion" that "he could only do that which he did." He states that his acting otherwise is among "many things which never will happen, and which nevertheless are clearly conceivable." Again, according to Leibniz, God's power extends to all that is clearly and distinctly conceivable, [Grua 307] and he included among things clearly and distinctly conceivable, actings otherwise, and by implication, the requisites for them. In this connection, Leibniz wrote in his New Essays: [I]deas (of modes) are real just so long as the modes are possible, or - to say the same thing - distinctly conceivable, and that requires that its constituent ideas be compossible, that is, to be able to be in mutual agreement. [N 265]

"Existing otherwise," is a way or "mode" of existing other than how one actually exists. Leibniz states that a sufficient condition ("just so long as") for a "mode" being possible is that it be clearly conceivable. He then states that the distinct conceivability of a conception consists in its constituent concepts being "compossible" or "able to be in mutual agreement." Leibniz nowhere, to my knowledge, states that ideas are in "mutual agreement" just in case their combination, even if it involves a contradiction, cannot be reduced in a finite number of steps to an ex-

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plicit contradiction. The notion of agreement is much stronger than that. To say that two ideas "mutually agree" is to say that they are jointly consistent and compatible. Leibniz states that God could have placed an individual in circumstances other than those in which he actually placed him; that the stars could have moved otherwise; and that the totality of matter could have taken on different shapes and motions because it is "entirely indifferent to everything." A naive reader, who has no idea that Leibniz is supposed to be a superessentialist, would likely interpret Leibniz as holding that God could have placed one and the same man in circumstances other than he actually placed him. A similar reading likely would be made of Leibniz's remark that the stars in the sky could move differently, and that matter, which exists, could take on different shapes. If I am correct, Leibniz would have affirmed this naive reading of his "claims which seem to imply that actual objects could have had other properties than they happen to have." I also think that the arguments for the contention that he is not "entitled" to them, because Leibnizian individuals are worldbound, are, at best, not fully thought out. There are reasons, therefore, to doubt the conclusion of the arguments, and reasons to believe that Leibniz is speaking of Adam and Eve not sinning in another "possible sequence," rather than simply not existing, in this "exchange" between he and Bayle in his Theodicy: Bayle: If God is not determined to create the world by a free motion of his goodness, but by the interests of his glory .. .if the love he has for himself has compelled him to show forth his glory through the most fitting means, and if the fall of man was this same means, it is evident that this fall happened entirely by necessity and that the obedience of Eve and Adam to God's command was impossible. Leibniz: Still the same error. The love that God bears to himself is essential to him, but the love for his glory, or the will to acquire this glory is not so by any means: the love he has for himself did not impel him by necessity to actions without; they were free; and since there were possible plans whereby the first parents should not sin, their sin was therefore not necessary. [T 233]

It is important to note Leibniz's statement that the first parents sinned freely not merely that they sinned contingently. The first parents' possible nonexistence entails that their act of sinning was contingent. That contingency, however, does not entail that their sinning was free, that is, that they deliberated before sinning. If it did, then the possible nonexistence of any creatures, including non-deliberating creatures, would imply that they act freely. For Leibniz, the fact that there are possible plans wherein the first parents are conceptually present and do not sin renders their act of sinning in the best planned world free.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1 Leibniz wrote: "There are two kinds of knowledge, that of facts, <which is called perception> and that of reason, which is called intelligence. Perception is of singular things, intelligence has for its object universals or eternal truths." [Grua 583] 2 In setting out his "Art of Combinations," which is a system for thinking about things or representing things in such a way so as to facilitate thinking about them, Leibniz issued this caveat: "Finally, warning must be given that the whole of this art of complications is directed to theorems, or, to propositions which are eternal truths, i.e. which exist, not by the will of God, but by their own nature. But as all singular propositions which might be called historical (e.g. 'Augustus was emperor of Rome'), or as for observations (i.e. propositions such as 'All European adults have a knowledge of God' - propositions which are universal, but whose truth has its basis in experience, not in essence, and which are true as if by chance, i.e. by the will of God) - of these propositions there is no demonstration, but only induction; except that sometimes an observation can be demonstrated through an observation through the mediation of a theorem." [LP 5-6]. 3 Aquinas provides an excellent sample of the view that God knows singulars because he knows them. In answering the objections to the thesis that God knows singulars he wrote: "God knows singular things. For all perfection found in creatures pre-exist in God in a higher way ... Now to know a singular thing is part of our perfection. Hence God must know singular things ... Now some, wishing to know how this can be, said that God knows singular things through universal causes. For nothing exists in a singular thing that does not arise from a universal cause ... This, however, is not enough; for from universal causes singular things acquire certain forms and powers which, however they may be joined together, are not individuated except by individual matter. Hence he who knows Socrates because he is white ... or because of something of that kind, would not know him in so far as he is this particular man. Hence, following the above explanation, God would not know singular things in their singularity .... Therefore we must propose another explanation. Since God is the cause of things by His knowledge ... His knowledge extends as far as His causality extends. Hence, as the active power of God extends not only to forms, which are the source of universality, but also to matter, as we shall prove further on, the knowledge of God must extend to singular things, which are individuated by matter. " [ST Part I Q 14 Art. 11]. Note that this is not an account of how God knows singular things but of why he must know them. It should be noted also that Aquinas, in answer to the question "Whether our Intellect Knows Singulars," answers, "Our intellect cannot know the singular in material things directly and primarily. The reason for this is that the principle of singularity in material things is individual matter; whereas our intellect.. .understands by abstracting the intelligible species from such matter." [ST Part I Q 86 Article I] 4 Leibniz's nominalism might also explain his change of mind. See N 145: "indeed knowledge of concrete things is always prior to that of knowledge of abstract ones - hot things are better known than heat." See also Chapter X of Mates's Leibniz. 5 Leibniz stated that the criterion of truth is being able to be conceived clearly and distinctly without contradiction, and the criterion of conceiving something clearly and distinctly is being able to give a rroof. [NE 219] Leibniz wrote in his "Preface to an Edition of Nizolius": "[l]n philosophising accurately, only concrete terms should be used.. .it appears that this passion for devising abstract words has obfuscated philosophy for us entirely; we can well enough dispense completely with the procedure in our philosophising. For concretes are really things; abstractions are not things but modes of things. But modes are usually nothing but the relations of a thing to the understanding or phenomenal capacities." [L 126] Leibniz also wrote "... the nominalists have deduced the rule that everything in

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the world can be explained without reference to universals or real forms. Nothing is truer than this opinion, and nothing is more worthy of a philosopher in our time." [L 128] It is interesting that Leibniz later came to regard supposed concrete things as modes of God. See Introduction I of Chapter Three of this book. 7 Cited from Sleigh, 'Leibniz on Divine Foreknowledge': 48. 8 In a paper titled 'A Meditation on the Principle of the Individual' Leibniz wrote: "We say that the effect involves its cause; that is, in such a way that whoever understands some effect perfectly will arrive at a knowledge of its cause. For it is necessary that there is some connection between complete cause and the effect...unless we admit that it is impossible that there should be two things which are perfectly similar, it will follow that the principle of individuation is outside the thing in its cause. It will also follow that the effect does not involve the cause in accordance with its specific reason, but in accordance with its individual reason, and therefore that one thing does not differ from another in itself. But if we admit that two different things always differ in themselves in some respect as well, it follows that there is present in any matter something which retains the effect of what precedes it, namely a mind. And from this it is also proved that the effect involves the cause." [DSR 51] I think that Leibniz meant by an "individual reason" a reason that is located in the matter of a thing and by "specific reason" a reason that is located in its form. His claim is that distinct individuals must differ not only with respect to their matter but also with respect to their form, so that, in effect, each individual will belong to a species that is unique to it, that is, it will constitute an infima species. A thing, according to Leibniz, must have within itself the cause of its being what it is, if it is to have an identity. In a paper written later, but in the same year (1676), he wrote: "In my view, a substance, or, a complete being, is that which by itself involves all things, or, for the perfect understanding of which the understanding of nothing else is required. A shape is not of this kind; for in order to understand what a shape of such and such a kind has arisen, we need to have recourse to motion ... Each complete being can be produced in only one way; the fact that figures can be produced in many ways is a sufficient indication that they are not complete things." [DSR 115] Leibniz comes very close, in this passage to stating his doctrine of complete concepts. He certainly is anticipating it, and he is clearly being inspired by Spinoza's understanding of a substance as that which is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that which is a causa sui. As it turned out, Leibniz admitted that only God could fit his description of a substance, I think that this led him to his Spinozist conception of creatures that I discuss in Chapter Three. He weakened the conditions for being a substance later. The weakening was achieved by Leibniz's ruling out any being other than God acting on any other being in a transeunt fashion. Leibniz saw that Spinoza had reduced creatures to modes on the basis of the assumption that there are efficient causes that are finite. 9 Leibniz distinguished "complete" concepts from "full" concepts. [G II 49/LA 54 n. 3] The former concepts, he stated, differ from the latter in that they involve, while the latter do not involve information concerning the matter and spatial/temporal characteristics of their subjects: "I shall say a word about the reason for the difference there is in this between the concepts of species and those of individual substances, in relation to the divine will rather than to simple understanding. It is that the most abstract specific concepts contain only necessary or eternal truths, which do not depend on God's decrees (whatever the Cartesians may say of them in this matter); but the concepts of individual substances which are complete and capable of wholly characterizing their subject, and which consequently embrace truths of contingency or of fact, and the individual circumstances of time, the place, etc., must also embrace in their concept, considered as possible, the free decrees of God, also considered as possible, because these free decrees are the principle sources of existences or facts; whereas essences exist in the divine understanding before one considers will." [LA 54-55/G II 49] Complete concepts are concepts of entities that are able to have spatial/temporal or material characteristics; to have "circumstances of time, the place, etc.". They are the concepts of entities to which events can happen, which can have experiences, which can act and suffer, which can perceive. Not all entities in the Leibnizian realm of possibles, God's mind, are of these sorts. As I have already

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pointed out, Leibniz, speaking in metaphysical rigor, in a way consistent with his nominalism, denies that species, for example, are of this sort. For Leibniz, there are full concepts of species but there are no complete concepts of them. 10 The most clearly and powerfully articulated statement and discussion of this paradox I have examined is due to Boethius in Book V of his The Consolation of Philosophy. 11 Nichomachean Ethics Book III Chapter 4 19-31 and Chapter 5 18-30. 12 Aristotle wrote for example: "We must either say this or else lay it down as a principle that demonstration is of what is necessary and what is demonstrated cannot be otherwise." [Posterior Analytics: Book I Chapter 6 74blO-15] also "Demonstrative knowledge is what we have by having a demonstration; hence a demonstration is a deduction from things that are necessary." [Posterior Analytics: Book I Chapter 4 73a25-27] 13 The Molinists, Hobbes, Spinoza, for example. 14 Leibniz wrote in some "remarks" on Arnauld's criticisms of his doctrine of complete concepts: "[O]ne must attribute to him [Adam] a concept so complete that everything that can be attributed to him can be deduced from it; now, there is no reason for doubting that God can form such a concept of him, or rather that he may find it already formed in the domain of possible things, that is to say in his understanding." [G II 42/LA 46]. He wrote later in a letter to Arnauld: "Certainly, since God can form and in fact does form this complete concept ... " [G II 53/LA 59] In his Discourse, Leibniz, more closely in keeping with the statement in his letter to Arnauld, wrote "I also find it altogether strange the expression of certain other philosophers who say that the eternal truths of metaphysics and of geometry and consequently also the rules of goodness, of justice and of perfection, are only effects of God's will, whereas it seems to me that they are only consequences of his understanding, which assuredly no more depends on his will than does his essence." [DM 2] To say the least, the fact that Leibniz dropped the qualification "or rather that he may find it already formed ... " from his explanation of complete concepts is intriguing. Complete concepts, it would seem, for Leibniz, although they are not formed voluntarily by God, are nevertheless formed by him and therefore are "consequences" of his understanding. What, one should ask, is God thinking about when he forms these concepts? I address this question in Chapter Four. 15 See, for example, Jarrett, 'Leibniz on truth and Contingency': 103. The view that Leibniz held that all truths are analytic is too widely held to have to cite more adherents. However, for an interesting argument against the view see Grimm's 'Individual Concepts and Contingent Truths.' Kant wrote: "In all judgments in which the relation of a subject to the predicate is thought.. .this relation is possible in two different ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A; or B lies outside the concept A, although it does indeed stand in connection with it. In the one case I entitle the judgment analytic, in the other synthetic. Analytic judgments (affirmative) are therefore those in which the subject is thought through identity; those in which this connectionis thought without identity should be entitled synthetic. The former, as adding nothing through the predicate to the concept of the subject, but merely breaking it up into those constituent concepts that have all along been thought in it, although confusedly, can be called explicative. The latter, on the other hand, add to the concept of the subject a predicate which has not been in any wise thought in it, and which no analysis could possibly extract from it." Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: 48. As should become apparent, my view is that Leibniz had before Kant made the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. In particular, I think it fairly obvious that when Leibniz's God forms the complete concept of an individual he forms it by "adding" to the individual what Leibniz calls a "concept of time," and also, perhaps derivatively, a "concept of space." Given the formation of this complete concept, Leibniz states that it is possible to "de-form" or analyse it, but the analysis is certainly not the same as an analysis of a concept that is not formed by adding concepts of space and time to it. Thus Leibniz wrote that: "... some forms are essential or constitutive, others are accidental." [G II 471] The essential forms, I think Leibniz would say, are forms that, because they

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constitute a subject, are identical with the subject. Leibniz clearly indicates that accidental forms are not constitutive of subjects and, thus, are not identical with them. 16 This was also Descartes's charactreization of a "logical" truth or a "contradictoria." [CSM III 365] 17 Hunter, 'The Superessentialist Misunderstanding': 129 18 Mondadori, 'Leibniz and the Doctrine ofInter-Worid Identity': 22 19 Curley responds to this remark: "This misses the point. The question is not what follows from my being a man, but what follows from my being myself. And to that question Leibniz must, to be consistent, answer "everything". ['Leibniz on Locke on Personal Identity': 320.] Contra Curley, I submit that everything does not follow simply from one's being oneself, according to Leibniz, but from one's being oneself in certain circumstances that God decrees. There are infinitely many divinely decreed "particular" circumstances that contribute towards the production of an individual's accidental properties. I do not believe that one's circumstances, for Leibniz, are derivable from a concept of one's "self." Rather, according to Leibniz, God combines the concept of a "self' with a concept of freely decreed circumstances to form a complete concept of it. Everything true of an individual in the world that the concept pertains to does follow from this concept 20 Sleigh is an exception. In his book Leibniz and Arnauld, Sleigh refutes decisively the conjectures of other commentators that Leibniz forced Arnauld to admit that the doctrine of complete concepts conformed to the criterion of truth Arnauld and Nicole state in the Port Royal Logic. Sleigh then argues that Arnauld conceded because he misunderstood Leibniz. Sleigh writes [Leibniz and Arnauld: 94]: " Consider: 6. For any individual x and property f, if x has f, then for any y, were y to lack f, then y would not be x. 7. For any individual x and property f, if x has f, then, for any y, if Y lacks f, then y is not x. The passage from RL 39 ... would have tempted Arnauld to suppose that Leibniz read no more into unacceptable (6) than was in innocent (7) - that Leibniz had squeezed all the juice out of the idea of an intrinsic connection. When Arnauld applauded Leibniz's truth definition, noting that "the concept of the attribute is in a sense included in that of the subject: the predicate is in the subject," he took the clause preceding the the colon to have no content other than the content of the clause following the colon." Contrary to Sleigh, I think Arnauld found (6), properly understood, quite acceptable. What Leibniz forced Arnauld to recognize was that it makes a great deal of difference what the x's and y's range over. Arnauld initially took them to range over the subjects of accidents, thus his resistance. He later, and correctly, took them to range over the composites of subjects and accidents, that is, individual substances, thus his concession. 21 "I have given a decisive argument which in my view has the force of a demonstration; that always, in every true affirmative proposition, necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the concept of the predicate is in a senseincluded in that of the subject; the predicate is present in the subject; or else I do not know what truth is." [G II 56/LA 63]. If Arnauld did not assume that complete concepts of Leibnizian individuals do not involve "counterfactual information" about them, he might have surmised that, for Leibniz, a counterfactual is true just in case its predicate or consequent is contained in a complete concept of it. I must emphasize, here, that I do not maintain that Leibnizian complete concepts belong to more than one possible world. My position, instead, is that complete concepts of a Leibnizian substance contain data about different possible worlds. Cover and Hawthorne, in 'Essentialism, Transworld Identity, and Counterparts,' argue that Leibnizian complete concepts do belong to more than one possible world. They base their argument on the premise that complete concepts do not contain the relational properties of individuals. This premise is patently false. No concept of an individual that does not contain the relational properties of an individual is a complete conept.

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22 Leibniz notes, in this connection, that those of the Augsburg Confession hold that prevision of the cause is prevision of the effect: T 83. 23 According to Leibniz, it also conforms to the view of the Churches of the Augsburg Confession: T 83 who held also that God knows everything Formula of Concord: 593. 24 Mates, 'Individuals and Modality in the Philosophy of Leibniz': 91. 25 Recall Leibniz's nominalism. 26 Russell, The Philosophy of Leibniz: 49. 27 "For as God turns the universal system of phenomena which he sees fit to produce in order to manifest his glory, on all sides and in all ways, so to speak, and examines every aspect of the world in every possible manner, there is no relation which escapes his omniscience, and there thus results from each perspective of the universe, as it is seen from a certain position, a substance which expresses the universe in conformity to that perspective, if God sees fit to render his thought effective and to produce that substance." [DM 14] 28 Leibniz refers to On Being and Essence in Article 15 of his Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation. 29 Sleigh, Leibniz & Arnauld: 50-51. 30 Mates, Leibniz: 71.

CHAPTER TWO DELIBERATION AND COUNTERFACTUALS I. INTRODUCTION

Wilson, in her article 'Possible Gods,' observes that Leibniz frequently described God as possibly creating worlds other than the best possible world. The main point in the article is that the thesis that Leibniz is some sort of counterpart theorist is untenable because there cannot be any such thing as a counterpart God.) A collateral result of her argument is that if God really can act otherwise then there obviously are counterfactual identities of God. It would also appear that Wilson's argument stands to undermine the contention that there are no counterfactual identities of creatures. It is hardly obvious why there would be counterfactual identities of God but not of other individuals whom Leibniz stated differ from him only in degree. 2 In this chapter, I argue that the concession that there are counterfactual identities of Leibniz's God is also a concession that his God's creatures have counterfactual identities. I develop the argument within the context of an examination of Leibniz's understanding of a free action as one that involves deliberation. I also offer an explanation of why Leibniz referred to certain actions of rational creatures as "sort of" miraculous. II. CHOICE AND DELIBERATION

Adams writes in his article "Theories of Actuality": It is evidently also a part of (Leibniz's) theory that God (who exists necessarily, according to Leibniz) chooses freely and could have chosen another possible world instead of the one he has chosen. I doubt that Leibniz or anybody else has held the alternative version of the divine choice theory, according to which the actual world is the only one God could have chosen?

And in his book Leibniz:

50 R. O. Savage, Real Alternatives, Leibniz’s Metaphysics of Choice © Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998

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Leibniz holds that there are infinitely many possible worlds that God could have possibly created, and he never speaks of alternative "possible Gods" who could have created the different worlds. He seems to be committed not only by this silence but also by the doctrine of God's necessary existence to the view that it would have been the same God that created whatever possible world was created. In other words, Leibniz seems to have accepted trans world identity for God while rejecting it for every other creature. [Leibniz] is prepared to say that the same individual God could have been the creator of different possible worlds because the sense in which God "could" have is that were it not for God's wisdom and goodness, or were it not for these worlds' inferiority, God could have - not that God's creating them would have been perfectly consistent with the divine nature. 4

Adams's acknowledgment that Leibniz held that God could have created possible worlds other than the best possible world is surely just, but his interpretation of Leibniz's view is not. There are not for Leibniz degrees of consistency. Either God's creation of inferior possible worlds would be perfectly "consistent with divine nature" or perfectly inconsistent with it. A middling consistency is not struck by God's bartering his goodness and wisdom for creative license. For Leibniz, God is identical with his goodness and his wisdom. He states that "God is essentially as good and wise as he is powerful," and that it is contrary to natural reason to say that God is not good. [T 177] The propositions "God is not wise" and "God is not good," therefore, are no less contradictory and contrary to reason than "God is not powerful." Thus, according to Leibniz, it is not consistent with God's freedom and goodness to do less than the best. [T 201] Indeed, Leibniz claimed that God would "destroy divinity," a feat that is absolutely impossible, were he to violate the principle of the best [T 158; CD 67]: [I]f God had not selected for creation the best series of the universe (in which sin does occur), he would have admitted something worse than all sin committed by creatures. For, in this case, he would have acted contrary to his own perfections, and thereby also all other perfection. For divine perfection can never fail to select the most perfect, since what is less perfect implies some evil. God himself and with him all things would be abolished if God either lacked power, or erred in his intellect, or failed in his will. [CD. 67; Cf. CD 123 125]

So far as Leibniz was concerned, Adams's explanation of what it means for God to possibly create inferior possible worlds amounts to this. If God were not God then God could create the inferior possible worlds. However, this explanation explains too much. Insofar as the proposition that God is not good and wise is absurd, it implies both that God can create other possible worlds and that he cannot create other possible worlds. Adams's explanation does not work but, clearly, the proposition that God could have created inferior possible worlds stands in need of explanation in light of the above quote. I think that Leibniz offered one. Responding to Bayle's remark that:

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Adam's perseverance in innocence was always impossible; therefore his fall was altogether inevitable, and even antecedently to God's decree, for it implied contradiction that God should be able to will a thing opposed to his wisdom; it is, after all, the same thing to say, that it is impossible for God, as to say, God could do it, if he so willed, but he cannot will it. [T 234]

Leibniz wrote: It is misusing terms in a sense to say here: one can will, one will will; 'can' here concerns the actions that one does will. Nevertheless it implies no contradiction that God should will - directly or permissively - a thing not implying a contradiction, and in this sense it is permitted to say that God can will it. [T 234]

Leibniz's point is that it is perverse to think that God consequently wills everything that he is capable of willing. He agrees that the possibility of the best possible world of things guarantees that God will decide to create it, and, in fact, create it. Yet, he insists that there remain possible things that God can will that he will never will consequently. Indeed, Leibniz states that God does will inferior possible worlds, albeit, antecedently. For Leibniz, God antecedently wills whatever is not impossible in itself even if he will not consequently will it: [T]hat which is certain is not always necessary, or altogether impossible; the thing might have gone otherwise, but that did not happen and with good reason. God chose between different courses all possible: thus, metaphysically speaking, he could have chosen or done what was not the best, but he could not morally speaking have done so. [T 234]

Leibniz invokes his distinction between moral necessity and metaphysical necessity to establish the possibility of God's choosing to create what he does not create. For Leibniz, it is not logically impossible that God conceive of himself creating an inferior possible world. He admits only that the supposition is morally impossible, while insisting that it is metaphysically possible. By "metaphysically possible" he meant what he usually meant, namely, consistently conceivable. God can and does conceive of himself acting in ways that are morally impossible, and his so conceiving himself is constitutive of his antecedent willings. God, according to Leibniz, consequently wills only that which is morally possible but he antecedently wills that which is morally impossible. What would "destroy divinity" is God's consequently willing an inferior possible world. Divinity survives, however, God's merely thinking of himself behaving less than perfectly. It is only "after" God compares his different conceived of ways of acting that they take on the denominations "better" and "worse." The antecedent willings, Leibniz says, occur before comparing them, where "before" must be understood in signa rationis. 5 God's antecedent willings are not governed or limited by the principle of the best. Leibniz's God has intelligence sufficient to conceive of himself creating an inferior possible world - he knows how to create an inferior possible world - and

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he enjoys the power necessary to create the world, if he so wishes. God simply, in the end, according to Leibniz, does not wish to create inferior possible worlds as much as he wishes to create only the best possible world. However, what God wishes to do, in the end, does not limit what he can conceive of himself doing and consider doing antecedently, "before" he makes up his mind. Again, it is necessary that God conceive of himself acting in a variety of ways if he is to make a decision as to how to act. If God could only conceive of himself creating the best possible world there would be nothing to decide, and if there were nothing to decide, there would be neither choice nor deliberation: there would be no freedom. Thus, Leibniz states repeatedly that God wills antecedently to create all good, but wills consequently to create only the best. 6 He states also that God is inclined antecedently to create all possibles, but that the result of all his antecedent inclinations and deliberations 7 is that he consequently wills the best. 8 Surely, if God is inclined to create all possibles he can conceive of himself creating them. Otherwise, God would be inclined towards, and have an "earnest"and "serious intention" [T p. 402; T p. 21] to do the inconceivable. 9 Adams will grant, I think, that, for Leibniz, the possibility of God's acting otherwise is a necessary condition for his acting freely. Leibniz did not trace this possibility to the possibility of God's somehow shedding his wisdom and goodness. It is a wise and good God, for Leibniz, who could have acted otherwise. But I will be more specific, here. According to Leibniz, it is a perfectly good and wise God who could have saved those he permits to be damned, and who could have permitted to be damned those he saves. Leibniz wrote in his Theodicy: Abelard admits that it may very well be said that...that which God does not can be done. He could therefore have spoken with the rest, who mean nothing different when they say that God can save this man, and that he can do that which he does not. [T 171]

Given the context within which Leibniz makes his criticism of Abelard, the statements that he makes at Theodicy 234, and the following text, it is clear that he counts himself among "the rest": It is true also that God could produce in each human soul all the thoughts that he approves: but this would be to act by miracles, more than his most perfectly conceived plan admits. [T 114]

The denial that God can conceive of himself saving a damned soul trivially entails a denial of the dogma that his dispensation of saving graces is absolutely free and that he wills to save all men on account of his universal philanthropy. [T 21; T 127] That Leibniz sought to avoid this result is evident from a consideration of the following passages in the Theodicy:

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Bayle: He offers grace to people he knows are destined not to accept it, and so destined by this refusal to make themselves more criminal than they would be if he had not offered them the grace; he assures them that it is his ardent wish that they accept it, and he does not give them the grace which he knows they would accept. Leibniz: It is true that these people become more criminal through their refusal than if one had offered them nothing, and that God knows this. Yet it is better to permit their crime than to act in a way which would render God himself blameworthy, and provide the criminals with some justification for the complaint that it is not possible for them to do better even though they had or might have wished it. God desires that they receive such grace from him as they are fit to receive, and that they accept it; and he desires to give them in particular that grace whose acceptance by them he foresees: but it is always by a will antecedent, detached or particular. [T 115]

Were Leibniz's God to behave in a blameworthy way, he would destroy divinity, that is, he would not be God. Thus, there would be "some justification," albeit very slight and metaphysical, for criminals' complaints that they could do no better: everything, including "some justification" for the criminals' complaints, follows from the absurd supposition that God is blameworthy. Yet, Leibniz allows that God desires to give to criminals graces that he does not in fact give to them, and God must be able to do, and think of himself doing, that which he desires to do, otherwise his desires would be foolish. More than this, God foresees the criminals' acceptance of the graces, and his foresight is conditioned (or foundational) not visionary. God, unless it is the God of the Socinians or others of their theological bent, cannot antecedently desire that whose consequences he does not foresee. The reason that God does not give graces to the criminals is that he foresees the consequences of his doing so and judges that it is better that he not indulge his antecedent inclination. Of course, Leibniz does not have in mind the scientia media of Molina. Rather his God foresees, by means of foundations that would be in place, the existence or conditioned existences of things. I see no foundation whatsoever for the claim that Leibniz is not committed to the counterfactual identity of both God and his criminal creatures in the passages under discussion. To dismiss them as proof of Leibniz's lack of candor would be, as Leibniz would put it, "halting in every respect." III. COUNTERFACTUAL IDENTITY AND CREATURELY DELIBERATION

In the preceding section, I focused on the role that Leibniz's God's counterfactual identitities play in his deliberative activities and antecedent willings. Leibniz insisted upon such a counterfactual identity of God primarily because he was interested in proving that God's act of creating the world he created was not arbitrary and that God made the best choice that he could have made and should be praised for it. A consequence of God's deliberations and counterfactual antecedent activities,1O however, is the counterfactual identity of the creatures that are involved

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in those deliberations and activities. If God can conceive of himself saving a soul he will permit to damn itself, he can conceive of that soul he will permit to damn itself being saved, that is, not damning itself. This is not, for Evangelical Leibniz, an unwelcome consequence. Counterfactual identities of rational creatures are required to justify God's punishment of them. II That is, the counterfactual identities of creatures are a condition for their being held accountable for their actions. Rational creatures are responsible for their actions because they are capable of deliberating about their actions before they act. They are responsible because they can either misuse or use properly the will and reason with which God graced them. 12 Leibniz certainly did not shy away from making statements that would tend to give the impression that he believed that rational creatures are able to think of themselves acting in conditions other than their actual conditions. For example, he writes in his Theodicy of a young man who has been: [D]elighted by the applause which has been showered upon him after some successful public action; the impression of this great pleasure will have made him remarkably sensitive to reputation; he will think day and night of nothing save what nourishes this passion, and that will cause him to scorn death itself in order to attain his end. For although he may know very well that he will not feel what is said of him after his death, the representation he makes of it for himself beforehand creates a strong impression on his mind. [T p. 435]

Leibniz seems to take it for granted that a young man could conceive himself receiving great fame even if he never will. However, if the received wisdom in Leibniz scholarship is correct, Leibniz cannot have consistently supposed that it is possible for the young man to conceive or imagine himself behaving in ways he will never behave. He cannot picture himself standing before an audience being applauded if he will never leave his home and never pursue his career. He cannot prepare for a concert by imagining himself performing beforehand. The fact that God knows that the young man will soon lose his voice rules out such preparation. Generally, the young man cannot think of himself otherwise than how God knows him. Not even God can know what the young man will do and think of the man otherwise. The price that Leibniz's God pays for omniscience is lack of imagination. The assumption that there is an assignment of only one complete concept to each Leibnizian substance is a very easy and cheap way to severely restrict the Leibnizian God's ability to think about individuals. It is evident that if Leibniz's God is to think counterfactually of individuals he must have many complete concepts of them. However, Leibniz's manner of formulating his doctrine of complete concepts does not by itself entail that individuals have only one complete concept. At least, I have been unable to see how that doctrine implies that God has only one complete concept of any given individual.

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If Leibniz allowed that rational beings in fact deliberate before they act, and that their choices are based on the deliberations, he needed either to allow also that the deliberations involve inconsistent counterfactual conceptions or that they involve consistent ones. Leibniz, I maintain, in fact denied that practical reasoning based on inconsistent counterfactuals issues in free choices. He did maintain, however, that all of the actions of God and some of the actions of spirits are free. My view conflicts with the following reflections of Frankel: Granting that moral good or evil does, as Leibniz claims, follow upon metaphysical good or evil, what can be done about moral responsibility? [For Leibniz] We are morally responsible because it is our nature to act as we do, whether we could have done otherwise or not. The very act of willing, no matter how one has come to will an action, renders one morally responsible for that action. 13

Frankel adds that Leibniz considered an action free even if "there is no real sense in which the agent could have done otherwise.,,14 A less than "real" sense of acting otherwise she says Leibniz would countenance is the sense in which acting otherwise is what she calls "epistemically possible." The epistemic possibility of acting otherwise, according to Frankel, does not involve a real ability or power to act otherwise but only the "conceivability" of doing otherwise. 15 Frankel seems to be imputing to Leibniz the view that an agent can conceive of himself performing an action without having the power to perform it. However, for Leibniz, an action or a "doing" just is a determination of power. He wrote in his Theodicy: Now the Philosopher of the Stagira supposes that there are also two kinds of Act, the permanent act and the successive act. The permanent or lasting act is nothing but the Substantial or Accidental Form: the substantial form (as for example the soul) is altogether permanent, at least according to my judgment, and the accidental is only so for a time. But the altogether momentary act, whose nature is transitory, consists in action itself. I have shown elsewhere that the notion of Entelechy is not altogether to be scorned, and that, being permanent, it carries with it not only a mere faculty for action, but also that which is called 'force', 'effort', 'conatus', from which action itself must follow if nothing prevents it. Faculty is only an attribute or rather sometimes a mode; but force, when it is not an ingredient of substance itself (that is, force which is not primitive but derivative), is a quality, which is distinct and separable from the substance. I have shown also how one may suppose that the soul is a primitive force that is modified and varied by derivative forces or qualities, and exercised in actions. [T 87]

If an agent clearly conceives of himself doing something that conception must be, according to what Leibniz states in the above passage, the conception of a derivative force modifying or varying a primitive active force. An action, for Leibniz, presupposes a power to act, since, for him, an act is the realization of a power. [T 87; DSR 109]16 Thus, Leibniz could maintain only incoherently that an agent clearly conceives of himself acting without also clearly conceiving of himself

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having the power to act. The agent is, according to Leibniz, a power to act or a substantial form. Therefore, to maintain that an agent does not have a power to act otherwise is simply to maintain that the agent cannot be otherwise, especially since Leibniz held that there is no acting before being. [T 387] Frankel's proposal also conflicts with the following remarks made to De Voider by Leibniz: [Y]ou say that substance is that which is conceived in itself, an opinion to which I have opposed the proposition that an effect cannot be conceived better than through its cause, but that all substances but the first have a cause. You reply that we need a cause to conceive the existence of a substance but not to conceive its essence. But to this I answer that the concept of a possible cause is needed to conceive its essence, but to conceive its existence the concept of an actual cause is needed. [L 524]

What Leibniz states here applies to actions as well as to substances. If an action is possible, there must be a possible cause of that action. But a possible cause of an action is nothing other than a power. I do not know what it could mean to say that an agent "possibly has a power." If he possibly has the power, he actually has the power. At any rate, Leibniz asserts that determined individuals do retain the power to act otherwise: It is true that Adam was determined to sin in consequence of certain prevailing inclinations: but this determination destroys neither contingency nor freedom. Moreover, the certain determination to sin which exists in man daes nat deprive him af the pawer ta avaid sinning [emphasis added] (generally speaking) or, since he does sin, prevent him from being guilty and deserving punishment. [T 399; Cf. T 269]

The following remarks by Leibniz also indicate that it is doubtful that he would resort to the notion of epistemic possibility to make sense of the intuition that it is "possible" to act otherwise: Now it is obvious that we have no idea of a concept when it is impossible. [DM 25] [O]ne can boast of having an idea only when one is assured of its possibility. [DM 23]

For Leibniz, the idea of a thing must specify its cause or the means for producing it, [DM 24; L 293] a specification that proves the possibility of the thing. [G II 63/LA 72] Thus, if it is possible that Caesar act otherwise there must be a possible cause of his possibly acting otherwise, a cause that obviously would be Caesar or God acting through Caesar. I take this to mean that Caesar has the power to act otherwise, if it is possible that he act otherwise. Conversely, if there is no specifiable cause for Caesar's acting otherwise, it is impossible that he act otherwise. Again, I take this to mean that Caesar does not have the power to act otherwise, and that there therefore is no conception of him acting otherwise. Hence, if Cae-

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sar, nor anything else, can cause Caesar to act otherwise, it is impossible that he act otherwise Frankel's "epistemically possible" yet really impossible conception is not what Leibniz called an "idea." It also is not real because it is not a conception of which one can be certain that it is possible. [T p. 410] Furthermore, it is at odds with Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason. If Caesar does not have the ability to cross the Rubicon, and if there is no other power to get him across it, then his crossing of the Rubicon does not have a possible cause. But the principle of sufficient reason requires that anything that can happen has a possible cause, that is, there must be a power that can bring it about. If there is no possible cause that can render a conception actual, that conception is impossible and must harbor a contradiction. [G II 63ILA 72; DSR 109; DSR 7] Thus, Frankel's "epistemically possible" conception is nothing more than an inconsistent conception, a chimera, to which is attached a supposition of unproven and unprovable possibility. Such a conception is useless for the purposes of deliberation that can lead to severe punishment or lavish reward at the hands of a perfectly wise and benevolent God. Nevertheless, in his book Leibniz, Adams offers a weakened version of Frankel's notion of Leibnizian epistemic possibility.17 He uses his version to interpret the following remarks by Leibniz in a way that is consistent with his conjecture that Leibniz denied that there is a counterfactual identity of creatures: It is more exact even to say that the good actions of God, the Angels confirmed [in good],

and the glorified Saints are not necessary, although they are assured; and the reason is because they are done by choice, whereas there is necessity where there is no choice to make. When there are several paths, one has the freedom to choose, and although one may be better than another, that's just what makes the choice ... [I]t is not indifference of equilibrium, so to speak, that constitutes freedom, but the faculty of choosing among several p.ossibles, even though they are not all equally feasible or convenient for the one who acts. 18

There is nothing new in this passage. Leibniz repeats his standard line that although the actions of God and his blessed creatures are assuredly going to be righteous and for the best, they are not absolutely necessarily so. The fact that an action is determined to occur eliminates doubt in a sufficiently intelligent mind, not choices or options for an agent. A saint might have several paths open to him, and will consider himself taking each of them. The saint will choose the best path, after due deliberation, because he is confirmed in good. God knows this. Still, it is conceivable that the saint choose otherwise. That is how I read the passage, and it seems to me the obvious reading to make. According to Adams, however, the reading is well off the mark. Adams conjectures that Leibniz "must probably" have meant that there are "several paths that may be taken" but not "several paths that a saint might take." Generally, Adams maintains that the predicates of false singular propositions (whose subjects

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are beings other than God) are possible or consistent but never the propositions themselves: [T]he alternatives among which creatures choose must probably be regarded as somewhat general, rather than as completely individual, actions. Caesar's alternatives on the bank of the Rubicon, for example j must be crossing and not crossing, rather than Caesar's crossing and Caesar's not crossing. 9

Adams's speculation straightforwardly implies that God cannot think of Caesar's not crossing the Rubicon, but can merely juxtapose "not crossing" and "Caesar" and somehow construe, given the juxtaposition, "not crossing" as an "alternative" for Caesar. There should be more to this proposal, however. Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason requires that there be some explanation based in Caesar's nature, in the nature of crossing, and in the nature of being an alternative [N 382] of why "not crossing" is an alternative for Caesar. There must be reasons that make the proposition "Not crossing is an alternative for Caesar as he stands on the banks of the Rubicon" true. There must be some connection between the predicate of this proposition "is an alternative for Caesar as he stands on the banks of the Rubicon" and its subject, namely, "Not crossing." The explanatory reason cannot be simply that "not crossing" is possible in itself or consistently conceivable. "Being God," "is a creator," and "perceives infinities of infinities perfectly clearly and distinctly" are also possible in themselves or consistently conceivable. They also are predicates that Caesar does not have, but they are not thereby alternatives for Caesar. Nor are they thereby creative alternatives for God with regard to Caesar simply in virtue of their being possible in themselves or consistently conceivable alongside consistent thoughts of Caesar. Likewise, God can think consistently of "being the fastest," "possible," and "the wheels on Caesar's chariot." However, "being the fastest possible" is not an alternative for the wheels on Caesar's chariot or for any wheel. 20 If Adams maintains that Leibniz counted "not crossing" as an alternative for Caesar merely because "not crossing" is consistently conceivable, why should he deny that, for Leibniz, "creating" is an alternative for Caesar or "being the fastest possible" is an alternative for the wheels on his chariot? Yet Leibniz surely would assert that "crossing the Rubicon" is an alternative for Caesar while "creating" is not. [T p.75] We need to ask, then, why, for Leibniz, "creating" is not an alternative for Caesar while "not crossing" is. I think that Leibniz would answer that God cannot conceive of Caesar creating but he can conceive him "not crossing," of course not just "not crossing" but not crossing something or other, say, the Rubicon. In addition, God knows an explanation for why Caesar does not cross the Rubicon. However, there can be no explanation of any finite being creating a thing or of any wheel being the fastest possible wheel.

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The last sentence of the passage Adams quotes places his speculations into deeper doubt. Leibniz speaks of "several possibles" being "not all equally feasible or convenient for the one who acts." How can a given path possibly be feasible or convenient to any degree for one who acts if it is inconceivable that the one who acts take the path? Certainly, if it is inconceivable that one take a path it is also inconceivable that the path be to any degree feasible or convenient for one. Nor is there any suggestion whatsoever in the passage that Leibniz denies that saints deliberate before deciding which of several paths to take. If he did, he would be denying, according to his own criteria of a free action, that the saints act freely. But if the saints do deliberate, in what would their deliberations consist? To the minds of the saints, are the various paths merely paths to an end that may be taken, or are they paths that they might take to an end? Do they attempt to determine whether the paths might be easy for them to take or do they attempt to determine, in the abstract, that the paths might be easy to take? Leibniz's general eschewal of abstractions would seem to count heavily against the latter alternative and heavily in favor of the former. Besides, the latter alternative, as Adams urges, is on its face explanatorily deeply inadequate and unsatisfactory. It also strikes me as somewhat ridiculous. If an interpretation reduces a great philosopher's position to the ridiculous, that is reason enough to warrant viewing it skeptically. So too, does the following passage from Theodicy [T 100]: Nothing is more widely known than the Tolle, lege (Take and read) cry which Saint Augustine heard in a neighboring house, when he was pondering on what side he should take among the Christians divided into sects, and saying to himself, Quod vitae sectabor iter?

This brought him to open at random the book of the Holy Scriptures which he had before him, and to read what came before his eyes: and these were the words which finally induced him to give up Manichaeism.

Here we find Leibniz explicitly speaking of Saint Augustine "pondering on" "what side he should take," not "what side should be taken," of asking what way of life he should follow, not "what way of life should be followed." He does not add that "strictly speaking" Saint Augustine could not have so pondered or so asked. Leibniz also spoke of himself as though he thought that he could consider himself acting otherwise: Those who write treatises on Duties (De Officis) as, for instance, Cicero St. Ambrose, Grotius, Opalenius, Sharrock, Rachekius, Pufendorf, as well as the Casuists, teach that there are cases where one is not obliged to return to the owner a thing deposited: for example, one will not give back a dagger when one knows that he who has deposited it is about to stab someone. Let us pretend that I have in my hands the fatal draught that Meleager's mother will make use of to kill him; the magic javelin that Cephalus will unwittingly em-

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ploy to kill his Procris; the horses of Theseus that will tear to pieces Hippolytus, his son: these things are demanded back from me, and I am right in refusing them. But how will it be if a competent judge orders me to restore them, when I cannot prove to him what I know of the evil consequences that restitution will have ... ? I should then be compelled to make restitution, having no alternative other than my own destruction. [T 121]

The important observation to make concerning these fantastic scenarios is that they all concern how Leibniz should act in a given type of circumstance. No matter how fantastic the imagined cases, Leibniz asserts with the ending sentence "/ should then be compelled to make restitution." How could he? Should we suppose that Leibniz intends to be understood to mean that there could be only a fIeshless making of a restitution? That there can be no destroying of Leibniz, but only, to his great fortune, and possible relief, a destroying in general if there is an equally etiolate resisting of orders? I think that Leibniz would answer here: "It would be much less shameful to admit that one does not have an answer to one's opponent than to give that answer." [T 169] Or, "These generalities are abstractions that cannot be found in the truth of individual things." [T 27] What Leibniz writes at T 100 and T 121 are not departures from his philosophical commitments. He assigns a crucial role to deliberation, and role playing, as it is commonly understood, in free choice making. Any effort to dismiss T 100 and T 121 and many other passages like them should involve adducing direct textual evidence that Leibniz denied that "The one who acts" cogitates upon what he will do and what the world will look like for him when and after he acts. Adams fails to do this. He does not come close to establishing his contention that, for Leibniz, God decides that the banks of the Rubicon will not be remained on rather than that Caesar will not remain on the banks of the Rubicon. There is a difference, of course, between the possibility of Caesar's merely remaining on the banks of the Rubicon and the possibility of his voluntarily and freely remaining on the banks of the Rubicon. For Leibniz, a voluntary action involves "proper" deliberation and such deliberation requires clear thinking. In spite of his view that most human reasoning is confused and "suppositive" [DM 24], Leibniz insisted that human freedom is possible and he held that knowledge is a possible basis for human freedom: [W]e must know and will what we are doing. It must be possible for us to abstain even from the sin which actually we are committing, if only a sufficiently strong effort were applied. [CD: 97-98]

Willfully abstaining from sin requires knowledge, judgment, and effort, according to Leibniz. [T 311] Caesar must understand what his not crossing the Rubicon is if he is to abstain freely from crossing it. Caesar cannot understand the impossible, however. Hence, if Caesar can properly deliberate on the question of whether to cross the Rubicon, Caesar's not crossing the Rubicon cannot be impossible; it

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must be consistently conceivable. Clearly, then, there must be an identity of Caesar across possible worlds if Caesar can coherently deliberate about what he is to do. There must also, it seems, be an identity of Jesus Christ across possible worlds if the following statement by Leibniz makes sense: And as for the dogmas of religion, we have no need for new revelations: if we are presented with rules which are conducive to salvation we are bound to obey them, even if the person presenting them performs no miracles And although Jesus Christ had the power, he nevertheless refused sometimes to exercise it for the gratification of 'this ... evil generation' which 'seeks a sign,' when he was preaching only virtue and what had already been taught by natural reason and the prophets. [N 510]

This passage, I think, is especially difficult to reconcile with the readings of Leibniz advanced by Frankel, Adams and other commentators. Frankel maintains that what Leibniz meant by the possibility of someone's acting otherwise is that the person may be conceived to act otherwise but lacks the power to act otherwise and Adams makes the more radical claim that there is no conception. In this passage, however, Leibniz states that Christ had the power to act otherwise, to perform miracles, but refused to use it. Christ could refuse to use a power only if he possessed it and could have used it. 21 That is, Christ cannot have refused to do what he was powerless to do. But suppose that he did exercise his power to perform miracles that he did not perform. Would he still be Christ? Would he still be God? Surely, Leibniz would say that we can conceive of Christ, that is God, performing miracles that he did not perform. But even though Christ is God, he is a creature. [CD 49] He is a man, and if he can conceive himself acting otherwise, so too, one would think, can he think of other men, e.g. Tyre and Sidon, acting otherwise. If Christ has counterfactual identities, so too do other men. So too does Leibniz because he, in some possible world, steals away with the magic Javelin, and saves the life of Procris. IV. THE FREEDOM OF CREATURES AND GOD'S IDEAS

According to Leibniz, the basis of the deliberation of rational creatures is their capacity to consider alternative courses of action, [Grua 300] even if they do not take advantage of it. I believe that for Leibniz this capacity is due to the fact that: [O]ur mind is affected immediately by the eternal ideas which are in God, since our mind has thoughts which are in correspondence with them and participate in them.[L 627] There remain in man some vestiges of the divine image, which furnish the reason why God may punish sinners without prejudice to his justice. The vestiges of the divine image consist in the innate light of reason as well as the innate freedom of will. [CD: 97-98] [O]ur soul is a certain expression, imitation, or image of the divine essence, thought and will and all the ideas which are comprised in God. [DM 28]

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Leibniz held that the light of reason can illuminate for spirits "all essences" as well as all existences. [DM 26] If God has an idea of Caesar acting otherwise, then Caesar has access to it, though he probably will not take advantage of that access owing to lassitude, or lack of time, or attachment to his senses. [N 186-187] Those "blessed substances" who are "confirmed in goodness," however, do take advantage, and they deliberate properly. [N 198; C 21f2 It is the fault of those who are not blessed that they do not deliberate properly: [People] speak and reason without explicit ideas - it is not that they cannot have the ideas, for they are there in their minds, but that they do not take the trouble to carry the analysis through ... [N 186]

Leibniz embraced the tenet that it is in principle possible for spirits to deliberate properly, with knowledge of alternative ways of acting available to them. They could achieve this knowledge if they took "the trouble to carry the analysis through." They do not take the trouble because they turn from God, who is the source of clear and distinct thoughts, to the imperfections of his creatures [T 284; CD 73; Grua 365] whose representations confuse them. [T 66] This turning from God to creatures, from clear and distinct ideas to confused ones,23 is due proximately to original sin, and it is due remotely to man's original and essential imperfection and natural incompleteness [Grua 436; Grua 362; Grua 365]: [I]t is not only after man's fall from innocence that original sin has got hold of the soul; even before, there was an original limitation or imperfection connatural to all creatures, which makes them capable of sin or failure. There is therefore no greater difficulty in supralapsarianism than in other views. And to this, I believe, the opinion of St. Augustine and other authors should be reduced who hold that the root of evil lies in nothingness, that is, in the privation or limitation of creatures, which God graciously corrects by that degree of perfection which it pleases him to give.[DM 30]

Leibniz wrote in this connection: Our knowledge is of two kinds, distinct or confused. Distinct knowledge or intelligence occurs in the actual use of reason; but the senses supply us with confused thoughts. And we may say that we are immune from bondage insofar as we act with a distinct knowledge, but that we are slaves of passion in so far as our perceptions are confused. In this sense we have not all the freedom of spirit that were to be desired, and we may say with St. Augustine that being subject to sin we have the freedom of a slave. Yet a slave, slave as he is, nevertheless has freedom to choose according to the state wherein he is, although more often than not he is under the stern necessity of choosing between two evils ... Nevertheless that evil state of the slave, which is also our own, does not prevent us of choosing that which pleases us most, in the state to which we are reduced, in proportion to our present strength and knowledge. [T 289]

We have been reduced to our present state of living in sin by our original and unavoidable metaphysical imperfection and by original sin which was preventable.

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[Grua 362] We are not clearly and distinctly aware of things themselves but have confused images of them. These images are a defective basis for deliberations and judgments. Nonetheless, the images are a basis for choice. Caesar does not conceive clearly and distinctly his crossing the Rubicon or his not crossing the Rubicon. Still, it is his crossing of the Rubicon and his not crossing of the Rubicon that he conceives. He conceives of his not crossing the Rubicon when he reflects, to the extent that his "present strength and knowledge" allows, on God's idea of his doing so. Again, this reflection, however short of perfection it might be, is what makes deliberation possible for Caesar. Proper deliberations require clearly apprehended, appropriate alternative complete concepts, not obscure apprehensions of a complete individual concept that is a concept of how one exists in the actual world. It is only by means of a counterfactual complete concept that an individual can think coherently of himself taking alternative courses of actions. Leibniz would agree that it would certainly be remarkable for created rational beings to light upon the right complete concepts when deliberating. However, with the concurrence of God it is at least possible that sometimes they get it right, as the saints and those confirmed in good often do. For, according to Leibniz: As a matter of fact, our soul always does have within it the disposition to represent to it any [emphasis added] nature or form whatever, when an occasion arises for thinking of it. I believe that this disposition of the soul, insofar as it expresses some nature, form, or essence, is properly the idea of the thing, which is in us and always in us whether we think of it or not. For our soul expresses God and the universe, and all [emphasis added] the essences as well as all the existences. [DM 26]

If there are many complete concepts of Caesar in the "Region of Ideas," then Caesar, however obscurely, expresses them. There is, then, according to Leibniz, a possibility of Caesar's thinking with the appropriate complete concepts when deliberating, if he chooses to, and if there are many complete concepts of him. If God is so pleased to give the perfection of being "confirmed in good and evil" to a spirit, then that spirit will "make good use of its advantages," that is, its participation in God's ideas, and "carry the analysis through" to "a knowledge of its true good." A spirit confirmed in good and evil will be "above passion" (at least to a very large measure) and thereby enabled to "will as one should, i.e., with proper deliberation." "Proper deliberation" is possible only with a proper or clear and distinct idea in mind. I submit that, for Leibniz, in order to have the proper idea in mind when deliberating, one must have in mind some complete concept other than one's actual world complete concept. Counterfactual thinking with one's actual world complete concept is inexorably inept.

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V. PRIVATE MIRACLES?

Members of the Augsburg Confession avowed that man has the power to choose earthly things and that he can act otherwise than he actually acts with regard to them. According to that Confession, man is unfree only with respect to spiritual things, in particular; he is unable to achieve love and fear of God on his own or to regenerate himself. Man, as Leibniz states in his Theodicy, is "dead to the works of God." Leibniz meant by this that man has no power with respect to the works of God. Where there is no power there is no freedom. If Leibniz approved of Article XVIII of the Apology for the Augsburg Confession, as he said he did, one would reasonably expect that he at least not seek to subvert those articles in his Theodicy. My view is that he did not and that he in fact affirmed and promoted them. According to Leibniz, man has power in the "external" world to choose between worldly goods and evils, and after he has chosen, it may be truly said of man that he could have chosen otherwise. That is why he chooses freely. In Leibniz's view, all of the actions of a creature are contingent. [G VII 108] But not all of them are free. When passions, desires, and inclinations determine the mind to act as it does it is, in a certain sense of the term "free," not free. [T 66; Grua 676] That sense of free is "self-mastery" as opposed to "servility" and subordination. [T 200; T 228; Grua 677] The mind "accommodates" the body when it is "sunk" in the passions and emotions that bodily representations give rise to or beget. [T 66; T 64; T 310] On the other hand, When a rational creature thinks clearly and distinctly it controls or moderates these passions, inclinations, and desires, and its body is thereby accommodated to it. [T 66; T 64; MP 173f4 The mind dominates the body, for example, when it uses the body to study the behavior of projectiles or, more generally, to discover laws of nature. In another sense of "free," the mind is free even when the body dominates it and it accommodates the body. For Leibniz, freewill and freewill in bondage are the same thing. [T 277] Though constrained by and in service to the body, the soul retains power over its actions. Its submission to the orders and demands of the body is due not to necessity but to desire, which governs the exercise of its power. [T p. 387; T p. 381] A rational soul serves the body because it wants to. [T 277 278] It thus serves the body freely. The actions of intelligent substances that are due to their "covetous" desires for the pleasures that they find in carnal evil [T 278] are free because the desires arise from their defective natures, not from elsewhere. Inclinations to act: [U]sually relate to objects; but there are some, notwithstanding, which arise variously a subjecto or from the soul itself, and which bring it about that the one object is more accept-

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able than the other, or that the same is more acceptable at one time than at another. [T p. 427]

Rational creatures have desires because they lack perfections and it is their nature to lack perfection. The lack of perfection is the "deficient cause" of desires. [T 289; T 33; T 384; T 20] Thus, in so far as the will of the intelligent creature is determined by its desires it is determined, indirectly, by its limitations. Since the limitations of the creature belong to it and are essential to it, in being determined by its desires the will of the creature is self-determined. The determination has to be an instance of self-determination precisely because the creature is its limitations. This analysis throws some light on Leibniz's remark that all that creatures contribute to their salvation is their resistance. What God has to "overcome" when he saves creatures are their sense based strivings and covetous desires. Creatures resist God by desiring things other than the bliss making grace God wills to bestow on them. Being saved involves the elimination of the desires, that is, the elimination of concupiscence: being freed from the bondage of "sweet" sensible pleasures. [T 289] Creatures contribute the desires that God overcomes when he, in a sense, detaches them from their bodies and unites them with reason. 25 The possibility of a rational creature's acting according to reason is due to God's endowing them with a power to discern alternative possibilities and a knowledge of moral principles by means of which to evaluate the alternatives. [Grua 300; T 201] The passions of intelligent creatures cloud their thinking or "thwart the practical judgment of the understanding." [T 310] They enable the agreeably good to make a greater impression on the creature than the morally good makes on it. [T 154] Nevertheless, God equipped spirits with moral and other principles that they could use to think clearly about what to do if they wish to. Clearly and distinctly perceived principles applied to clearly and distinctly perceived alternatives yield free actions and unconstrained actions. The judgments of an intelligent creature, even a saint or a blessed creature, are always to some extent influenced by passionate responses to obscure representations of things external to it. [N 490; T 314; T p. 407] A creature frees itself from the bondage of confused perceptions to the extent that it responds to them intelligently, with sound judgments, rather than passionately. The force of others and its passions - "sensual pleasure, avarice, ambition" - enslave the rational creature. [T p. 423; T 228] An intelligent response might be to withhold judgment concerning the confused perception. Leibniz, in fact, often states that such suspension of judgment is what human freedom consists in. [T 64; Grua 385; T p. 382] However, freedom, in Leibniz's view, is not entirely negative. Detachment from objects of sense prepares the intelligent mind for attachment to other objects

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that are proper to its nature and these are its innate ideas. In so far as those ideas are constitutive of its God given rational nature, a rational creature thinks itself in thinking them and is thus self-determined and free. Of course, Leibniz admitted that only God is perfectly independent [Grua 362] or determined "by himself alone" [G VII 169; T p. 428; Grua 676] and that the "self-determination" of intelligent creatures is not pure but involves God's nature. [N 210] Indeed, God provides the force by which they determine themselves. When man judges and chooses goods in a rational manner, and acts by his power to obtain them, his actions are determined by final rather than efficient causes. In a manner of speaking, efficient causes determine a man when the reasons for his actions reside not in his reason but in things that he does not judge in an objective way. Leibniz considers the determination to act based on a rational judgment of goods and evils as analogous to private miracles: Free or intelligent substances have something greater [than stones] and more marvelous in a kind of imitation of God, so that they are not bound by any certain subordinate laws of the universe, but act as if by a private miracle, on the sole spontaneity of their own power, and, in consideration of some final cause, they interrupt the nexus and course of efficient causes acting on their own will. So it is true that there is no creature that knows the heart who could predict with certainty how some mind will choose in accordance with the laws of nature ... From this it can be understood what is that indifference that goes with freedom. Just as contingency is opposed to metaphysical necessity, so indifference excludes not only metaphysical but also physical necessity. [C 20-21]

Adams comments on this passage: This is an exceptional text, in part because it also says that free agents "interrupt the connection and course of efficient causes operating on their will" - something that seems quite contrary to Leibniz's usual views, as expressed, for example, in his letter of April 1687 to Arnauld (LA 93f.). But even aside from that, which may be just a lapse, I know of no other text in which Leibniz assimilates free actions to miracles, and it may be that the assimilation did not usually seem welcome to him. 26

I agree with Adams that it is apparently contrary to Leibniz's usual views for him to state that free agents "interrupt the connection and course of efficient causes operating on their will," but I do not agree with the reasons for his statement. Leibniz was committed to the view that the only efficient cause that acts on creatures is God. All other causes that "operate" on the wills of creatures do so indirectly and only ideally through the mediation of God, and they are not efficient but moral or final causes. [T 66; T p. 427] They appear good or bad to a mind and they affect it by attracting or repelling it. The attraction or repulsion does not involve a physical influence. Leibniz stated explicitly that minds are independent of the physical influence of all other creatures. [T 59] What, then, could Leibniz have

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meant by intelligent creatures interrupting "efficient causes operating" on their wills? If there is no operation there is no interruption. My judgment is that Leibniz was not writing with metaphysical rigor when he wrote that intelligent creatures interrupt "the nexus and course" of efficient causes acting on their wills. But his meaning is clear enough. Leibniz treated final or moral causes, which can only be representations of good and evil, as virtually efficient causes when their effects on a mind are not accompanied by judgment. If the mind responds to a representation without making a value judgment concerning it, the goodness of that representation plays a negligible a role in producing the reponse. Hence, its action on the mind is virtually efficient or very much like the action of an efficient cause. This situation will occur when bodies produce passions and inclinations in a mind of which the mind is unaware, and to which it responds nevertheless. [T 36] Such a response is not willed because, according to Leibniz, will depends on knowledge. [Grua 725] For Leibniz, the mind when it acts without thought and will is like a body or a "bare monad" that responds mechanically to stimuli. On the other hand, when a mind takes stock of what is happening to it, and thinks (makes value judgments) before it acts, it is something appreciably more than a body and things external to it do not act upon it as if "efficiently." Perhaps most often a practical judgment of the understanding is not involved in action. [T 51] When it is not, the action, according to Leibniz, in a sense is not free. It is not, as it were, miraculous: "There is contingency in a thousand acts of nature," Leibniz wrote, "but when there is no judgment in him who acts there is no freedom." [T 34; cf. Grua 488] The "as it were," in the preceding sentence is crucial. Contrary to what Adams states, Leibniz does not expressly assimilate free actions to miracles, at least not in the sense that Adams uses the term "assimilate." In another sense of the term "assimilate," however, I do grant that Leibniz assimilates free actions of created substances to miracles. What he states is that created intelligent substances act by their own power as ifby a "private miracle." He does not state that they act "by" a private miracle. The difference in the two statements is obviously vast. Not taking note of it can lead to interpretive mistakes, and Adams is led to them and away from an understanding of what Leibniz meant by "as if by a private miracle." I say "them" because Adams suggests also that the position Leibniz takes in the "private miracle" passage conflicts with his principle of preestablished harmony. But that suggestion is based on the errant presumption that according to Leibniz's principle of preestablished harmony every act of a mind is an "effect" of its body "acting" "efficiently" upon it and vice-versa. Leibniz does not formulate the principle in those terms. With his principle of preestablished harmony Leibniz provides, among other things, an account of the phenomenon of mind/body inter-

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action. However, the principle does not entail that all that happens in a mind is due to mindlbody "causal" interaction. 27 To be sure, Leibniz stated that every state of the mind is in agreement with all else that happens in the universe to which it belongs and that there is a "perfect parallelism" between what happens in the mind and in the body [L 536; T 74]: God created the soul in the beginning in such a fashion that it must produce and represent to itself successively that which takes place in the body, and the body also in such a fashion that it must do to itself that which the soul ordains. Consequently the laws that connect the thoughts of the soul in the order of final causes and in accordance with the evolution of perceptions must produce pictures that meet and harmonize with the impressions of bodies on our organs; and likewise the laws of movements in the body, which follow one another in the order of efficient causes, meet and so harmonize with the thoughts of the soul that the body is induced to act at the same time when the soul wills it. [T 62] However, Leibniz does not assert in this passage or, to my knowledge, anywhere else, that there is a truly efficient causal connection between the soul and the body for the soul to interrupt. His view is that the appearance, or perhaps the vulgar belief, that the body acts upon the mind, that it produces pain in it, for example, can be accommodated by or interpreted away with the hypothesis that there is a concomitance between the states of the mind and the states of the body. This hypothesis of concomitance permits the abandonment of the hypothesis of physical influence without making an appeal to the hypothesis of occasional causes. More than this, concomitance or agreement is not always a rational reconstruction of the phenomenon or appearance of causal interaction. Leibniz states, for example, that a hyperbola expresses a circle, that what "takes place" in a circular curve "parallels" or maps what takes place in a hyperbolic curve, yet there is no causal interaction between the two curves [T 357] and the mapping does not represent a causal connection. The mind and body might be harmonized, sometimes, as circles and hyperbolas are harmonized. More to the point, the mind might sometimes be harmonized with a body in the way that a circle is harmonized with the smell of a rose. From another perspective, it appears to me that, for Leibniz, all sensible perceptual expression is a species of causal expression. However, he denied that all expression is sensible perceptual expression. According to Leibniz, minds express God's ideas when they reflect upon metaphysical, moral, and mathematical truths. [Grua 580-81] However, for Leibniz, they do not sensibly perceive these ideas. According to Leibniz, intelligent substances sensibly perceive singular things and apprehend intellectually universals. [Grua 583] In addition, he states that an object A acts on an object B just in case an increase in the perfection of A corresponds to a decrease in the perfection of B which is said to suffer on account of A. [DM 15] When a thinker thinks universals, universals do not suffer, that is, there is no de-

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crease in perfection in the universal even if there is an increase in the perfection of the thinker. Nor is there an increase in the perfection of a universal, when it is thought, that corresponds to a decrease in perfection of the thinker. The thinker expresses the universal, but there is no apparent efficient causal relation between the thinker and the universal. There is no reciprocal action and passion as there is in the case of perceptual expression. [T 66] There is a way to make good sense of Leibniz's talk of created intelligent substances acting as if by a private miracle, without casting him in the role of stumbling about in his carefully structured metaphysical scheme. Here is how. According to Leibniz, God's free actions emanate from his consideration of alternative possibilities. He states that the freedom of created minds is like this: The root of human freedom is in the image of God in man. Even if God always chooses the best, (and, if another omniscient being is supposed it would be able to predict what God would choose), nevertheless he chooses freely, since that which he does not choose remains possible by its own nature, therefore its opposite is not necessary. In the same way [emphasis added] man is free, so that it is allowed that from two things he always chooses what appears best, nevertheless he does not choose with necessity ... But in beasts there is not reflection or action in itself, therefore there is not a free decree concerning their actions [Grua 300]

Reflection, for Leibniz, is not always simply thinking about what one perceives sensibly. Reflection involves a consideration of possible courses of actions and the moral and other a priori rules that pertain to them. Reason "pure and simple," according to Leibniz, is concerned only with truths independent of the senses. [T p. 73] Man is capable of reflection because there is an image of God, more precisely, an image of God's understanding and wisdom, in him that involves these truths. Man freely chooses his actions when he reflects upon the courses of action that he can take and evaluates them. Presumably the more courses of actions he considers, and the more clearly and distinctly he perceives them, the more reasonable, free, and in control he is. He can always suspend his judgment regarding which possible action to take by taking into account other possibilities. Leibniz states, of course, that there must be motives for such suspensions of judgment. But the consideration that there is possibly something better is precisely such a motive. In acting in a quasi - miraculous manner a rational creature reflects on various ways in which it might act. It compares its ideas of possibilities that are purely possible. These possibilities, even though they are destined to remain eternally nonactual, nevertheless exert an influence on the rational soul. It is seemingly miraculous that a nonactual thing, something that is merely thought about can influence the behavior of an existing thing. One might say that it is the thought that does the influencing and the thought is actual. Granted. But suppose a man

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forms the conception of a perfect sphere and the conception of a perfect circle. He has time to study one or the other to determine its properties. He attempts to ascertain which of the two objects would be the best to study. As it is, the sphere is - to use Leibniz's words - "more worthy of observation." [GLW 163] In a sense, it is a more attractive object of study, there is more in the sphere to hold the man's attention. The man decides to study it rather than the circle. The contents of the man's thoughts when he thinks of a perfect sphere and a perfect circle are pure possibles. These are especially suitable examples of pure possibles because Leibniz stated that when minds engage in mathematical thinking they are thinking God's ideas. [T 242] At any rate, it is not clear to me that the contents of these thoughts do not figure, somehow, into the determination of the man's will. However, if the content of the thought is a pure possible, I believe that Leibniz would say that the determination is quasi-miraculous: it exceeds, or goes beyond, the natures of all creatures other than the self-determining creature whose nature comprises and "turns to" reflect upon the ideas. Indeed, the determinants of a freely chosen action, the objects of a free agent's antecedent acts of will, exceed, or go beyond, the existent sensible sequence of things to the region of pure possibles. The determination therefore is like a miraculous determination. It resembles the determination of God's will by his contemplation of pure possibles in his understanding. That, no doubt, is why Leibniz remarked that the souls action upon itself is as "great a difficulty" as the incarnation. 28 In his Theodicy Leibniz states also that the Mysteries of the Christian faith "contain truths that are not comprised in this sequence." [T 108] He meant by this that the determining reasons for the Mysteries, for example the virgin birth, are found outside of this sequence or world. Reasons for events that occur in this sequence that are found outside of the sequence are above human reason, but are in supreme reason, namely, God's understanding. For Leibniz, "private miracles" are minor mysteries, final causality and self-determination are minor mysteries. Leibniz was a great fan of Plato and there is little doubt that he did not fail to take note of Plato's remark in Book N of the Republic that "self-control" is a "ridiculous" term: Moderation is surely a kind of order, the mastery of certain kinds of pleasures and desires. People indicate as much when they use the phrase "self-control" and other similar phrases. I don't know just what they mean by them, but they are, so to speak, like tracks or clues that moderation has left behind in language. Isn't that so? Yet isn't the expression "self-control" ridiculous? The stronger self that does the controlling is the same as the weaker self that gets controlled, so that only one person is referred to in all such expressions. Nonetheless, the expression is trying to indicate that, in the soul of every person, there is a better part and a worse one and that whenever the naturally better part is in control of the

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worse, this is expressed by saying that the person is self- controlled or master of himself... But when, on the other hand, the smaller and better part is overpowered by the larger because of bad upbringing or bad company, this is called being self- defeated or licentious. [Republic Book IV 430e-431b]

Socrates's admission that he does not understand what "self-control" means and his description of the term as "ridiculous" indicate that Plato viewed the notion of self-control or self-determination as something of a mystery. In his Objections to Descartes's Meditations, Arnauld went further and claimed that the notion of being "self-caused" is flatly incoherent. [CSM IT 150] Descartes did not disagree with him, but maintained that a thing can be a formal cause of itself and that is "strongly analogous" to being an efficient cause of itself.[CSM IT 170-171; Cf. CSM ill 176] As Leibniz notes, [T 365] Descartes also confessed that humans cannot make any sense of their freedom of the will, and by "freedom of the will" Descartes meant self-determination of the will. Leibniz meant by "as if by a private miracle" what Plato meant by "ridiculous" and what Descartes meant by "free will" and the notion of self-causality being "strongly analogous" to efficient causality. VI. LIMITED PRIVACY

In the passage wherein Leibniz states that there are actions of intelligent substances that are neither physically nor metaphysically necessary, he does not add that they are also not morally necessary. They are in fact morally necessary. The action of the intelligent substance, even though it is free, and even when it is quasi - miraculous, conforms to the principle of the best and to the principle of sufficient reason. Thus, although "it is true that there is no creature that knows the heart who could predict with certainty how some mind will choose in accordance with the laws of nature," some creature, perhaps an angel, might predict how the mind will choose in accordance with the laws of final causality or laws of the will if it knew the motives of the mind. God, certainly, could predict how an intelligent substance will judge objects of choice [T 49] by means of laws that are not known to us. [G VIT 273] He knows which objects the intelligent substance will judge are good, which better, and which are best. Leibniz's point is that God's knowledge of how the intelligent substance will choose, how it will determine its will, is not founded entirely on a knowledge of efficient causes acting on the will according to laws of nature. It is founded also on a knowledge of final causes acting on the will, and the intelligent substance's actions on itself, its reflections. Reflections are not efficient causes. Hence, they are not subject to laws of nature and they are not causally connected to them even if they are in agreement (not in conflict) with them. They are quasi-miraculous.

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Strictly speaking, for Leibniz, every action of a mind is determined by a final cause. The mind always acts to achieve some good, even if it is virtually insensible of what it is doing, and therefore acting virtually in a mechanical fashion. But no matter how closely resembling to a mechanical action an action of a mind is that action is necessarily not mechanical. A mathematician's deduction of a theorem of geometry is less mechanical looking than a carpenter's hammering of a nail. In Leibniz's system the differences in appearance are due to the principle of pre-established harmony, a principle that governs how things appear. Strictly speaking, however, the actions of the carpenter are neither more nor less mechanical than the actions of the mathematician. In so far as both the mathematician and the carpenter are minds, none of their actions are really mechanical. Leibniz regarded rational, dispassionate self-determination as sort of miraculous because of the extent to which it is not an adjustment to things that behave without reason and mechanically, that is, bodies. To the extent that minds react mindlessly or without reason to representations they react like bodies, as if they are subject to efficient causes. Rational minds behave like bodies when they do not subsume particulars under universals, for that is what they can do that bodies cannot do. [N 142] And that is why there is freedom only in intelligent creatures.[T 65] Leibniz, speaking without metaphysical rigor, but not carelessly, and certainly for heuristic purposes, dropped the "like" in the "private miracles" passage. Another crucial difference between minds and bodies that is due to the former being able to apprehend universals while the latter is unable to is that minds are able to suspend their actions by reflecting and bodies cannot. The more a mind holds itself in suspense, by reflecting on possibilities, the less like a body it is. Its self-suspension might be construed as analogous to God's suspension of the influence of laws of nature. That no doubt, is why Leibniz stated that minds behave as if by a private miracle. In acting quasi-miraculously, a spirit harmonizes itself with God rather than with the universe. It achieves union with God, a deification, albeit, only by the grace of God. In following the lead of its body and senses, it foresakes that union, and sins.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO Hide Ishiguro sets forth the generic formulation of counterpart theory as ascribed to Leibniz: "Why are truths of fact contingent? Is it true as Russell claimed that no subject/predicate proposition could really be contingent for Leibniz? Leibniz gives as an example of a contingent truth, the truth that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. That this is true implies that the concept 'crossed the Rubicon' is included in the concept of Caesar. How then can the opposite, the proposition 'Caesar did not cross the Rubicon,' be possible? 1

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What Leibniz meant by saying that the opposite of 'Caesar crossed the Rubicon' is possible, is that there could have been in a different world a person like Caesar in all respects except that of crossing the Rubicon, with its attendant consequences. He could not, of course, be Caesar, that particular historical person in the world. So, strictly speaking, it is not the case that 'Caesar did not cross the Rubicon' could be true. But it is possible for there to be another complex concept which contains almost all the predicates of Caesar, but which contains 'did not cross the Rubicon' instead of 'crossed the Rubicon' ... "[T]he corresponding proposition which is true in other worlds would not be about Caesar but about someone like him. Thus there are contingent singular propositions ... within Leibniz's metaphysical system." According to Ishiguro, Leibniz's doctrine of complete individual concepts precludes Caesar, and any other actual individual, from possibly existing in any possible world other than the actual world. Hence, she asserts that Leibniz settled for an ersatz "as ir'-reference to Caesar across possible worlds. That is, Ishiguro holds that the name "Caesar" cannot really refer to our Caesar in other Leibnizian possible worlds but must, at best, refer to Caesar counterparts. Likewise Ishiguro maintains that Leibniz's doctrine of complete individual concepts and his principle of the identity of indiscemibles restricts him to speaking not "strictly" but only "loosely" of "Caesar did not cross the Rubicon" being possibly true. Ishiguro argues that Leibniz could do this loose speaking by denying by proxy, by way of a counterpart, the proposition, "Caesar crossed the Rubicon." "Caesar," in the contingently true proposition "Caesar did not cross the Rubicon," loosely refers to Caesar, according to Ishiguro, but strictly refers to a Caesar counterpart. Ishiguro's "counterparts" are analogs of samples of a substance that are used in experiments conducted under the aegis of the principle that similar causes will cause similar effects in similar objects: what happens to one sample of a substance under a given set of conditions would happen to any other sample of the same substance under the same conditions. Ishiguro envisages possible Caesars as samples of Caesar, as it were. Wilson points out that Leibniz often claims that God can act otherwise. She then raises the question of whether there are counterpart God's, that is, counterpart absolute perfect beings that differ from the actual God but are nonetheless similar to him. Wilson argues that the idea that there are is absurd. Here is the gist of her argument. If a being is absolutely perfect, the concept of that being implies its existence, that is, the essence of an absolutely perfect being is identical with its existence. This entails that if there are counterpart Gods these counterpart God's exist: according to the ontological argument one cannot consistently suppose an absolutely perfect non-existent being, since existence is counted among the perfections of such a being. At the same time, however, Leibniz insisted that there is necessarily only one God [Grua 354; Grua 267], so there cannot be counterpart existing Gods. It appears that the possibility of God's acting otherwise in Leibniz's system, therefore, cannot be made sense of by means of counterpart theory, even if that theory might be useful in accounting for the freedom of imperfect beings. David Blumenfeld forcefully criticizes counterpart theory on grounds that I believe Leibniz would affirm. He writes in his article 'Counterparts and Freedom': "We do normally take the fact that relevantly similar people have behaved differently from a given individual to support the claim that the latter person could have done otherwise. But isn't this because we normally take such data to be evidence that this person himself could have done otherwise? We believe, that is, that ... the world might have been such that the very person we are judging behaved differently. If we did not take the data to have this import, it seems to me that we would not find it relevant to the person's freedom." ['Superessentialism, Counterparts, Freedom': 114] If Leibniz took the "normal" approach to evaluating counterfactuals that Blumenfeld describes in the above passage, it would have been redundant for him to introduce counterparts of actual individuals into his metaphysical scheme. Counterparts are meant to compensate for the concession that actual individuals cannot be conceived consistently to behave otherwise. Why postulate

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counterparts if there are consistent conceptions of actual individuals behaving otherwise? On the other hand, if God cannot conceive consistently of actual individuals behaving otherwise what is the point of counterpart theory? According to Leibniz, if it is not consistently conceivable that an individual behave otherwise, then it is impossible that that individual behave otherwise and its having a counterpart cannot undo this condition. The interpreters of Leibniz as a counterpart theorist construe him, in effect, as proposing that if the complete concept of a counterpart of Caesar contains a predicate, then the complete concept of Caesar possibly contains that predicate. In other words, they maintain that what is true of a counterpart of Caesar is possibly true of Caesar. The following passage, however, poses a serious challenge to that proposal: "[I]t is required of a definition that there should be agreement that it is possible. That is, it is necessary that it should be proved that A is possible... But this can be known only by experience, if it is agreed that A exists, or has existed, and so is possible. (Or at least, if it is agreed that something like A has existed. However, perhaps this case cannot really arise, for two complete things are never similar and where incomplete things are concerned it is sufficient that one of two similar things should exist for the incomplete thing, i.e. the common denomination, to be possible)." [C 372 (1 686)/LP 62; cf. L 551, 524, 268] According to counterpart theory, the proposition that Adam did not take the fruit is possible if some counterpart that is similar to Adam does not take the fruit. The connection between what a counterpart does and what Adam can do is supposed to be established by their similarity. But Leibniz states in the above passage that no two complete things are similar and this fact, according to him, rules out inferring what is possible regarding one from what is the case regarding the other. To be sure, there are different kinds of similarity, and in the passage Leibniz no doubt has in mind perfect similarity. In other places he is more precise, he states that perfect similarity occurs only in incomplete things. His point, then, is that in order to draw legitimate inferences about what is possible for A from what is the case for B, A and B must be perfectly similar. Leibniz, therefore, would certainly hold that the so-called "counterparts" of an actual individual, because they are "complete," are not perfectly similar, and consequently useless for determining what is possibly true ofit. 2 A 6 2 288. According to Leibniz, God's wisdom differs from ours only in that it is infinitely more rerfect: T p. 75. Adams, 'Theories of Actuality': 192. 4 For Adams's discussion of Wilsons's refutation of the view that Leibniz is a counterpart theorist see his Leibniz: 54-57. 5 Leibniz refers to God's "separate decrees," as "antecedent acts of will:" T 196. 6 Leibniz states often that God wills antecedently to create all good, including the good that is the salvation of all men: [T 25, T 116, T p. 402, T 21, T 26, T 84.] 7 Leibniz regarded deliberations as acts of antecedent will. [T 225] R God is inclined to create all possib1es.[ T 201] 9 "The antecedent will is entirely serious and pure and ought not to be confused with velleity (which consists in this: that one would will if one were able, and would wish to be able), which does not exist in God; nor is it to be confused with conditional will ... The antecedent will of God tends towards actualizing all good and repelling all evil, as such, and in proportion to the degree of goodness and evil. How serious this will is, God himself confirmed when he so firmly asserted that he did not want the death of the sinner, that he wanted all men to be saved, and that he hated sin." [CD 25] 10 Leibniz refers to antecedent willings as acts: [T 201, T 325, T 84, T 383, T 82] II They are also required to make sense of the Evangelicals theory that God elects those who he sees will accept his graces with a lively faith and abandons those to themselves who would not so accept them.

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12 Bodies and nonspirits, that is creatures that perceive but that lack reason, [T 124] and are arranged according to time and space [T 200], are not responsible for their actions because God chooses for them. [N 179] 13 Frankel, 'Being Able to do Otherwise: Leibniz on Freedom and Contingency': 296. 14 Ibid., 299. 15 Ibid., 298. 16 According to Leibniz there is no act without a predetermination to act and predetermination is predisposition by causes.[CD 106] Leibniz also stated that all action must have its origin in disposition to act: [T 46, T p. 427, T p. 421] and that the predetermination to act is contained in the disposition to act. [T 47] I take it to be a trivial point that a predetermining cause is a power. 17 Adams, Leibniz: 33. 18 Cited from Adams, Leibniz: 53. 19 Ibid. 20 "[W]e cannot safely infer from definitions until we know that they are real or that they involve no contradiction. The reason for this is that from concepts which involve a contradiction, contradictory conclusions can be drawn simultaneously, and this is absurd. To explain this I usually make use of the example of the most rapid motion, which involves an absurdity. Suppose a wheel turns at a most rapid rate. Then anyone can see that if a spoke of the wheel is extended beyond its rim, its extremity will move more rapidly than a nail in the rim itself. The motion of the nail is therefore not the most rapid, contrary to hypothesis. Yet at first glance we may seem to have an idea of the most rapid motion, for we understand perfectly what we are saying." [L 293] 21 Even the damned have the power to act otherwise, according to Leibniz. [T 269] 22 The blessed are blessed with passions that always tend toward the good [T 310] because they are united to God [DSR 113] and they are also aided by circumstances [T 286] and good impressions. [T 298] 23 "I have learned something with certainty .. .it is this: if someone turns to God, or what is the same, withdraws from the senses and draws back unto his own mind, if he seeks the truth with sincere affection, then the darkness will be split as with some unexpected stroke of light, and through the dense fog in the middle of the night the way is shown." [CP 40] Leibniz perhaps learned this from Augustine: "Therefore the will, clinging to common and immutable goods, obtains the first and great goods of man ... The will, however, commits sin when it turns away from immutable and common goods, toward its private good, either something external to itself or lower than itself. It turns to its own private good when it desires to be its own master; it turns to external goods when it busies itself with the private affairs of others or with whatever is none of its concern; it turns to goods lower than itself when it loves pleasures of the bodies ... evil is turning away from immutable goods and a turning toward changeable goods." [On FreeChoice of the Will: 82] A careful reading of the Theodicy will reveal that Leibniz discusses each of the "turnings" that Augustine lists and describes in that work. 24 According to Leibniz, rational beings perceive bodies distinctly when they see the ideas of the bodies in God rather than by feeling.[MP 177] In understanding the reasons for material things the rational creature reflects God, and when it has confused thoughts it reflects the universe. [MP 175] 25 Leibniz stated that a thing resists that which endeavors to divide it. [DSR 60] If this is a general characterization of resistance that applies to souls' resistance to God's grace, I think that it is reasonable to believe that, for Leibniz, the souls are resisting detachment from their passions and their confused ideas. Consider, in this connection, Descartes's efforts in his Meditations to detach himself from his senses. See note 21, this ckapter. 26 Adams, Leibniz: 92. 27 Parkinson makes this point in his introduction to LA: "Leibniz ... seems to be saying that a monad or substance is 'dominant' over others if it represents or expresses these more distinctly than it expresses other substances ... one may ask why, in this case, the dominant monad should not be called the cause of the body. Leibniz might reply that, although causality is to be explained in terms of

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expression, it does not follow that every case of one substance's expressing another is also a case of causal relation," [LA xxxvi-xxxvii] 28 Cited from Loemker, 'Boyle and Leibniz,': 272,

CHAPTER THREE PERSONAL AND METAPHYSICAL IDENTITY I. INTRODUCTION ONE: THEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND

Adams and Yost) have conjectured that Leibniz proffered a "purely qualitative" universe. Their conjecture, if restricted to an early stage of Leibniz's career, agrees with Kulstad's claim that Leibniz, early in his career, shared Spinoza's view that there are no substances other than God and that what we typically regard as individuals are really modes or properties of God. 2 According to this brand of pantheism, modes are loci of relations "within" the one substance, God, and the relations differentiate the modes, not distinct selbst standen "substrata" on which the relations are founded. During the "Spinozist"stage of Leibniz's career, the question of whether a finite individual substance could have properties other than its actual properties is as inept for Leibniz as the question of whether a river could have a different depth would have been for Heraclitus. The texts appear to provide impressive support for Kulstad's reading of Leib3 niz. Consider, for example, the following: It can easily be demonstrated that all things are distinguished, not as substance (i.e., radically) but as modes. This can be demonstrated from the fact that, of those things which are radically distinct, one can be perfectly understood without the other; that is, all the requisites in one can be understood without another; that is, all the requisites of the one can be understood without all the requisites of the other being understood. But in the case of things, this is not so; for since the ultimate reason of things is unique, and contains by itself the aggregate of requisites of all things, it is evident that the requisites of all things are the same. So also is their essence, given that an essence is the aggregate of all primary requisites. Therefore the essence of all things is the same, and things differ only modally, just as a town seen from a high point differs from the town seen from a plain. If only those things are really different which can be separated, or of which one can be perfectly understood without the other, it follows that no thing really differs from another, but all things are one, just as Plato argues in the Parmenides. [DSR 93 - 95]

These pronouncements set Leibniz's early theory of finite creatures worlds apart from his later theory of individual substance.4 Yet, to its credit, Leibniz's early Spinozism is consistent with his Evangelicalism. At the heart of Evangelicalism is the precept that man, apart from God, is powerless, or, to say the same thing, that

78 R. O. Savage, Real Alternatives, Leibniz’s Metaphysics of Choice © Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998

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man is able to act only through his union with God or God's essence. As already discussed in the Introduction to this book, the Evangelicals maintained that no effort on the part of man can accomplish this union. According to them, only an absolutely free dispensation of grace by God can bring it about. Whereas man fell away from God's power by his freewill, he cannot tum again to God by his freewill because he has not the power to do so and his hate of God keeps him powerless. Leibniz's early views on creaturely action are in agreement with this precept, and my guess is that the agreement is by design. Leibniz's Spinozism, I think, is a rampart for the idea that man, apart from God is nothing. For Leibniz, for man to be nothing apart from God meant for man to have no substance, essence, or ability apart from God. As Augustine stated it, if God were to withdraw his sustaining grace from a man, that man would return to nothingness. Leibniz agreed with Augustine, and his agreement is evident in the following passage from a 1677 note on a conversation he had with Steno: 5 Properly and accurately speaking, the correct thing to say is not so much that God concurs in an action, but rather that he produces it. For let us suppose that God concurs in some action in such a way that it is produced not only by God, but also in part by a man; from this supposition it follows that this particular concurrence of the man does not require the cooperation of God, which is contrary to the hypothesis. For that particular concurrence is also an act; therefore it follows in the end that all acts are produced in full by God, in the same way as are all creatures in the universe. [Grua 275]

The conclusion that Leibniz draws in this passage is tantamount to the claim that creatures do not have essences, for an essence is precisely the source of action as God's essence is the source of God's action. His conclusion is also consistent with the idea that modes do not act, but only substances do. It is the nature of a Leibnizian substance to act. In Leibniz's early philosophy there is only one such substance. Hence, the following remarks by Russell are nearly accurate when referred to that philosophy: [Leibniz's] substance can only be defined as "this." Or rather - and this is where the doctrine of substance breaks down - the substance cannot be defined at all. To define is to point out the meaning, but a substance is, by its very nature, destitute of meaning, since it is only the predicates, which give a meaning to it. Even to say "this" is to indicate some part of space or time, or some distinctive quality; to explain in any way which substance we mean is to give our substance some predicate. But unless we already know which substance we are speaking of, our judgment has no definiteness, since it is another judgment to assert the same predicate of another substance. Thus we necessarily incur a vicious circle. 6

I say that Russell's remarks are only "nearly" accurate because Leibniz, during his Spinozist stage, would deny that what Russell says of his theory of substance betokens its breakdown. Rather, Spinozist Leibniz would have responded that if

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what Russell says of his theory of substance is true, it validates that theory from the point of view of his confession of faith. According to Leibniz's early theory of substance, the "identity," or "meaning" as Russell called it, of Leibnizian creatures is accomplished by their "entire being." [G N 18] The entire being of a creature includes its relations to other things. Indeed, for early Leibniz the identity of modes is constituted entirely by relations. In other words, different relations determine different "entire beings" or different modes. Leibniz develops this point in his Confessio: Th.: [S]ince souls are in themselves very similar to each other, or, as they say in the schools, they differ numerically or surely only in degree, and hence are differentiated solely by external impressions, what reason can there be in that universal harmony, why this soul rather than that soul is exposed to circumstances that will corrupt the will, or (what is the same) why is it assigned to this time to this place? [CP 104] Ph. [Leibniz's spokesman]: This question seems difficult, but more in virtue of the tortured manner of asking the question, than in the nature of the problem. It touches upon the very thorny consideration of the principle of individuation, that is, of the discrimination of things differing solely in number. Suppose that there are two eggs so similar to each other that not even an Angel