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And why ours may be the best of all possible worlds.

Gottfried Leibniz

Why does the world exist? In other words, why is there something rather than nothing? This ultimate mystery in philosophy and physics has been called the “Fundamental Question of Metaphysics”.

First, it might that the question itself is flawed. “Nothing” is a human abstraction used to describe the absence of specific entities. The concept cannot be extended to all reality. If there truly was “nothing”, then nothing could ever exist, which contradicts the brute fact that we are here to pose the question.

Already in the fifth century BCE, the pre-Socratic Parmenides of Elea argued that one cannot speak or think of “nothing”. To think of anything at all, it must in some sense exist or pre-exist. Logically, something cannot come out of nothing, or nothing out of something. If there is something, there cannot have been nothing, and vice versa.

Quantum Physics and the Multiverse

When we try to imagine nothingness, we find that we cannot. In our mind’s eye, there is still, for example, light and space. “Nothing” could be a non-descript state, lacking the laws and properties enabling it to maintain itself. Thus, “nothing” would be an unstable state, and bound to collapse into “something.” Existence, perhaps, is more stable than non-existence.

Many physicists tell us that an absolute vacuum is likely impossible. Quantum fields constantly fluctuate, creating energy and particles out of what we perceive as empty space. What we perceive as empty space is really a bubbling “foam” in which virtual particles and fields constantly flicker in and out of existence. Some theories go so far as to suggest a multiverse in which every possible world naturally exists, making our universe just one of many. It so happens that our universe is one that is full of interesting things, like moons, roses, starfish, and talking monkeys like me.

Still, a quantum field is something. Quantum physics merely explains how to get “something from something,” rather than “something from absolute nothing.” Also, quantum physics presupposes the laws of quantum physics, without being able to account for their origin.

Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) built his entire metaphysical system of monads on just two fundamental principles of reasoning, namely, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.

  • The principle of non-contradiction states that a proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true; therefore, if the one is true, the other must be false, and vice versa.
  • The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or cause, even when those reasons cannot be known to us. There are no brute facts.

Leibniz thought that the ontological argument for the existence of God, according to which the very concept of God as a supremely perfect being entails his existence, is incomplete, since it proves only that the perfect being exists if he is possible.

In 1697, he wrote a short treatise, On the Ultimate Origin of Things, in which he supplements the ontological argument with a “cosmological argument” founded on the principle of sufficient reason, according to which the cause of the cosmos, which consists in a contingent series of dependent causes, can only be a first, necessary, or uncaused cause.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

That there is a God or first cause does not explain why he created the world. Thus, in On the Ultimate Origin of Things, Leibniz also asks why there is something rather than nothing, and replies, rather poetically: because good and beautiful things demand to exist.

…since something rather than nothing exists, there is a certain urge for existence or (so to speak) a straining toward existence in possible things or in possibility or essence itself; in a word, essence in and of itself strives for existence. Furthermore, it follows from this that all possibles, that is, everything that expresses essence or possible reality, strive with equal right for existence in proportion to the amount of essence or reality or the degree of perfection they contain, for perfection is nothing but the amount of essence. From this it is obvious that of the infinite combinations of possibilities and possible series, the one that exists is the one through which the most essence or possibility is brought into existence…

Leibniz used this line of thought to bolster his argument that ours is the best of all possible worlds, with moons, roses, starfish, and talking monkeys like you.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Theodicy: Leibniz’s Answer to the Problem of Evil.

Many people who have heard of Leibniz first heard of him through Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759), in which Leibniz is caricatured as the deluded Dr Pangloss, “the greatest philosopher of the Holy Empire”—a parody that is a hard to get past. In so far as Leibniz is remembered, it is for holding, in the words of Voltaire, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.

Unlike his predecessors Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz received a university education in philosophy, even though, in his day, university philosophy amounted to little more than Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism. In April 1661, at the age of fourteen, he enrolled at Leipzig University to study liberal arts. Five years later, in 1666, Altdorf University granted him a doctorate in law, along with the offer of a professorship. However, he declined the professorship, deeming, perhaps, that a university might not be the best place for an original thinker.

Still, Leibniz now had a licence to practise law. Later, in the Theodicy (1710), he would pose as God’s own attorney—to defend God against the charge of having introduced evil into the world. “Theodicy”, a word that he himself coined, derives from the Greek for “vindication of God”.

The Problem of Evil

In 1755, nearly forty years after Leibniz’s death, Lisbon suffered a magnitude 9 earthquake, sparking fires that led to greater devastation than the earthquake itself. Voltaire has Candide crawling through charred ruins, saying to himself, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be like?”

This so-called problem, or paradox, of evil has the pedigree of antiquity, having been attributed by Lactantius (d. 325 CE) to Epicurus (d. 270 BCE): God either wishes to take away evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not wish to. In the first instance, he is less than omnipotent; in the second, less than benevolent.

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume eloquently restated the problem:

Epicurus’ old questions remain unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Leibniz’s Response

In the Theodicy, Leibniz’s response to the Problem of Evil is that God, having created the best of all possible worlds, that is, the one that is simplest in theories while being richest in phenomena, does not cause evil but permits it for the greater good. Evil results indirectly or accidentally from the absence of good. Because God did not create evil, evil is not a substance and has no proper existence. What from our limited perspective appears to be evil in fact contributes to the greater goodness of Creation, like shadows in a painting which bring out its colours, or discordant notes in a piece of music which contribute to its richness.

Leibniz distinguishes between three forms of evil:

  • Metaphysical evil, which is the necessary imperfection or limitation in creation—since created things are not God, and if they could be perfect, would collapse back into God.
  • Natural evil, which is pain and suffering, and a consequence of metaphysical evil.
  • Moral evil, which arises from the poorly exercised free will of rational minds, and leads to natural evil.

God could have created a world without minds. But though such a world would have been free from moral and natural evil, it would not have been the best of possible worlds.

Man’s Role

What’s more, the world, in man, carries within itself the potential for its own optimization. We can work, first, to improve ourselves, and, then, to improve the world and reduce suffering. If asked, what is the meaning of life, Leibniz would reply, “To perfect God’s creation!”

Schopenhauer, that paradigm of a pessimist, riffing on Leibniz, would remark that ours is the worst of all possible worlds.

And if it were any worse, it wouldn’t exist at all—a hypothesis that humanity seems keen to test.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1542, when the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This work challenged the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth—and, more importantly, man—stood proud and unmoving at the centre of the universe.

It is arguably Newton who completed the Copernican Revolution, and put the nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian system, with the publication, in 1687, of his Principia mathematica. In this work, which is deemed impenetrable, he introduced his three laws of motion along with the Law of Universal Gravitation. In the mid-1660s, Newton kept a notebook with the title, Certain Philosophical Questions. Above this title, he inscribed the motto (which is a paraphrase of Aristotle): Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.

The Scientific Method

Also contradicting the Aristotelian worldview were William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood, published in his De motu cordis of 1628, and Galileo’s discovery that falling objects undergo uniform acceleration irrespective of their mass, published in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (i.e. the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and the Copernican) of 1632. Aristotle had held that heavier objects fall faster, and that blood is constantly produced in the liver and consumed in the body’s periphery.

More radically, both Harvey and Galileo privileged experiment and observation over the authority of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, and the Bible. Only a decade earlier, in 1620, Francis Bacon had formalised the modern scientific method in his Novum organum, which sought to undermine and replace Aristotle’s canonical treatise on logic, the Organon (hence the title, Novum organum, or New Organon). Galileo even published in Italian rather than the de rigueur Latin.

The Search for a New Metaphysical System

The demise of the Aristotelian system, for all its promises, left a void that needed filling, ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, therefore, heaven and hell?

The three seventeenth century philosophers who rose to the challenge of formulating a comprehensive metaphysics were René Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).

Leibniz and the Principles of Logic

Leibniz built his system of monads on just two fundamental principles, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason, which are rooted in Aristotle’s Organon. The principle of non-contradiction states that a proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true; therefore, if the one is true, the other must be false, and vice versa. The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or cause, even when those reasons cannot be known to us. There are no brute facts. Later philosophers, such as Hume, Kant, and Hegel, would not deviate an inch from these two sacrosanct principles of logic, established by Aristotle and Leibniz. Nietzsche, with his perspectivist theory of truth, would be the first to do so.

The Parable of the Madman

In The Gay Science (1882), which consists of 383 aphorisms, Nietzsche pulls the rug on the projects of his predecessors to rescue the old order, that is, to somehow reaffirm, through abstract logic and elaborate metaphysics, the place of God and the dignity of man. Nietzsche could not have been more categorical about this: God, he says, is dead.

The Gay Science is especially remembered for Aphorism 125, the so-called Parable of the Madman, announcing the death of God under the weight of reason and science. In the Parable of the Madman, a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours, runs into the marketplace, and cries incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” When the people laugh and jeer at him, he jumps into their midst and pierces them with his eyes: “Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the din of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. [Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!]

Later that same day, the madman forces his way into several churches to strike up a requiem for God. When dragged out and called to account, he always replies, “What after all are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?” 

Was sind denn diese Kirchen noch, wenn sie nicht die Gräber und Grabmäler Gottes sind?

In response to the death of God, Nietzsche advocates a so-called “gay science”: a skeptical, light-hearted, artistic approach to life.

What Nietzsche Meant by the Death of God

God is dead. And we have killed him. But who or what are we going to replace him with?

While we wait for the enormity of what we have done to sink in, God’s shadow lingers on, not only in our empty churches but in our groundless morals and values. But what are these towering edifices without their fount, reason, and justification? Merely the “tombs and sepulchres of God”.

Instead of facing up to this crisis, we linger in a state of denial and false hope, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, who lend their lives structure and meaning by waiting for Godot.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) had been the first openly atheistic philosopher. His response to the demise of the old world order had been a “passive nihilism” or “will to nothingness”. But for Nietzsche, it is only when the nihilism is overcome that life and culture can be reborn.

If Nietzsche sought to accelerate and precipitate a crisis of meaning, it was only to hasten humanity’s arrival into the sunlit uplands that lay beyond it.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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In a world without strong people, there cannot be strong leaders.

In 1885, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a high school teacher turned German nationalist and rabid antisemite. Nietzsche so disapproved that he did not attend the wedding.

In 1886, Förster and Elisabeth left for Paraguay with fourteen German families to establish a vegetarian and teetotal colony, Nueva Germania, that admitted only “racially pure” Germans. While Elisabeth played the princess, the heavily indebted Förster drank heavily and became depressed. In 1889, he committed suicide in a hotel room in San Bernardino.

Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the slave morality of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the “good European”, a cosmopolitan, supra-national individual who transcends petty national and religious prejudices and strives to unite Europe through a new, higher cultural synthesis. In 1886, the year that Elisabeth left for Paraguay, he wrote to his mother from the Swiss Alps, “Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.”

Beyond Good and Evil

In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, an antisemite who had been publishing antisemitic literature and propaganda while neglecting Nietzsche’s work.

In that year, Nietzsche also published a new work, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), which consists of 296 aphorisms organised into nine chapters. As the title suggests, this is not a work of normative ethics (what is good and evil) but of meta-ethics (what is meant by “good” and “evil”).

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche portrays the life-denying Western religion, morality, and philosophy as rooted in a “herd mentality”, and calls for the abandonment of binary morality. After the death of God, there can no longer be a universal perspective. Therefore, there can no longer be an objective truth. Although philosophical systems purport to be objective, they are no more than the “involuntary and unconscious memoirs” of their prejudiced authors. “Truth” is no more than “the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live”.

Master vs Slave Morality

Beyond Good and Evil also introduces the dichotomy between master morality and slave morality. Slave morality is often confused with herd mentality, but can be understood more precisely as a component and expression of herd mentality. If slave morality arises out of the resentment-driven inversion of values created by the weak in revenge against the strong, herd mentality is the broader mediocrity that enforces conformity and suppresses individuality.

For Nietzsche, modern society represents the triumph of Judeo-Christian slave morality over the older Greco-Roman master morality. Master morality originates in the strong, and is marked by values such as pride, nobility, courage, truthfulness, health, creativity, and joy. Slave morality, on the other hand, is the envious and vengeful reaction of the mild and mediocre to the oppression of the masters, to create an inverted morality by turning their weakness into virtue and the values of the masters into vice.

Thus, slave morality is marked by values such as humility, meekness, conformity, patience, compassion, and pity. Christianity is called the religion of pity, which deprives us of strength and makes suffering contagious. In master morality, the good is whatever is good for the masters; in slave morality, it is whatever constrains and emasculates the masters. By pretending that humility and docility are a moral choice, slave morality manufactures an ideal out of impotence and subjugation. Thus, pride becomes a vice or sin, humility is elevated into a supreme virtue, and the son of God washes the feet of his disciples and allows himself to be crucified like a common criminal.

What This Means for Us

Slave morality is a cynical and pessimistic inverse morality that involves the systematic subversion of the old, natural master morality. It seeks not to transcend master morality, but, through “priestly vindictiveness”, to emasculate and enslave the strong by persuading them that their strength is an evil. Democracy, with its fixation on equality, is in fact the heir to Christianity, even if most democrats would rather trace their lineage to Ancient Athens.

But for all that, the old Greco-Roman morality, because it reflects reality and the natural impulse, cannot be vanquished, and vies with the inverted Judeo-Christian morality. Modern man is confused because he has constantly to juggle their contradictions, while himself being neither Christian nor Ancient but drifting in an ill-defined no-man’s land.

For Nietzsche, “a people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men.” Therefore, a good and healthy aristocracy should not feel “that it is a function but rather an essence and highest justification”. If, on the other hand, we took slave morality and the herd mentality to their ultimate extravagance, “there would be no commanders or independent men at all…”

After the publication of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wintered in Nice. In February 1887, a powerful earthquake shook the Ligurian coast, killing over two thousand people. Nietzsche did not feel fear, but a sense of ironic detachment: the earth had shaken, but his book had failed to achieve his intended “earthquake of ideas”.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.