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.