{160} (cont’d)
II. Possibility and reality
Nevertheless, with this idea on hand Leibniz now has to tell us how he views real things. This is the second step1.
{161} In the first place, how does Leibniz regard existence? Leibniz recalls the ontological argument of Descartes. In the idea of infinite being existence is included. Leibniz attacks this argument, but after what we have just covered, it will not surprise us that what he attacks is the starting point. Is it true that we have an apt concept of God? To say that an entity is infinite is not to have an apt concept of God. Leibniz has to embark on the task of demonstrating that an apt concept of God is intrinsically possible. Here we perceive the decisive influence of the theology of Duns Scotus.
Scotus first proves God as possible and then he continues with a new form of the ontological argument. If God is possible, He is eo ipso real, existent. However, even in this case, we can see how Leibniz has conceived the res divina. It is not the case that God may have passed from possibility to existence, but that in the bosom of the divine entity His own possibility is the fundament of His existence. Leibniz is faithful to the anteriority, at least metaphysical, of the order of the possible over the order of the real.
The same occurs with Creation. Creation involves a moment of will, a fiat and it formally consists in that. But Leibniz will say that this fiat is pronounced precisely upon something that the intellect presents to the very divine will. That presented something is precisely the order of the possible, what classical theology had called the science of simple intelligence. Because of this, Creation is also seen from possibility. To create is to confer existence to something that preexists as possible, to confer existence to an essence; it is definitely, to realize a possible.
Something similar happens concerning man. Man —Leibniz tells us— is “rational animal” repeating the classical formula, insisting that reason is {162} what distinguishes him from the animals. What does Leibniz understand here by “reason”? He understands that reason consists in the capacity to resolve what things are essentially, the primary requisites that make them possible. This resolution is what he calls “analysis”; consequently, reason in Leibniz is constitutively an analytical reason. It consists in analyzing to its ultimate elements, until reaching its ultimate requisites, that which constitutes the complexity of what there is, and of everything that is. Hence, by virtue of that reason, man possesses what are called “eternal truths”. Actually, man in his resolution has discovered mathematical truths and another type of truths, all of them eternal truths; that is why, we say that man is a spirit.
The spirit is characterized by reflectivity. It consists not only of performing certain acts, for example, of knowledge, but also that when knowing it knows itself. It has that moment that Leibniz calls apperception since every human perception is apperceptive, and while perceiving everything else, perceives itself.
Since in intellection we find those eternal truths, this means that in one way or another the human spirit has something like an internal and constitutive movement towards those eternal truths, which are innate. Not precisely in the sense that man may be born thinking about them, but in the sense that to think about them is something that only proceeds from the internal development of his reason. Consequently, by virtue of the apperception, when thinking about myself and my own reason —in the I, which is reason—, I am thinking of everything objectively possible; I am thinking about being and all the necessary truths. The rational I is, in such fashion, the very possibility of the knowledge of being. With this, we again find possibility ahead of the real thing.
{163} But here we encounter two “reasons”, human reason and divine reason; the divine reason that has created, and human reason that, by means of that analytical resolution reaches eternal truths. How? Thinking about itself. What happens then, in the relationship of this human reason with divine reason? That is the problem of the transcendental order.
III. Structure of the transcendental order
Leibniz will severely criticize Descartes and will affirm that the transcendental order is not contingent, but intrinsically necessary. It is such “intrinsically” because it is not founded on the divine veracity; Leibniz will affirm that our thoughts about being and what divine intellection thinks cannot be separated, but are essentially conjoined, not through an act of divine veracity, but through an intrinsic condition. The transcendental order is intrinsically one since it is intrinsically necessary in itself. Why? Simply, because human reason is an image of divine reason.
Descartes had missed this idea. As a faithful heir of the philosophy of the XIV and XV centuries, Descartes had seen that human reason is a contingent effect of the divine will. For Leibniz, this is inadmissible; human reason is intrinsically an image of the divine. With this, the two orders —the order of transcendental truth concerning my intellect and the order of transcendental truth concerning the divine intellect— are one and the same intrinsically necessary order, as necessary as the very being of God. Therefore, this order is none other but the order of reason simpliciter.
{164} We have seen, in the first place, what the order of the possible is as such. In the second place, that the possible is just the order of concept. Hence, to affirm that the order of my reason is identical with the order of divine intelligence means to affirm purely and simply that the single and unitary order —which the order of being is— is intrinsically an order of rationality. Here the entity remains inscribed in rationality. Because of this, while in Descartes we are present before a rationalism that is voluntaristic —in Descartes it is the “will to reason”—, in Leibniz we still have a deeper effort from the point of view of rationalism; it is an attempt towards a rationalist rationalism. It is a reason that rests intrinsically and necessarily upon itself insofar as reason.
However, this is nothing but a general affirmation. It is necessary to analyze more carefully how Leibniz understands this transcendental order of rationality. The answer to this question can be articulated in three points.
1. Transcendentality as such
That transcendental order is the order about the truth of things, about the truth of entity. Apparently, here Leibniz follows the way of Descartes and incorporates the field of entity into that of truth. Things are just what their intrinsic truth is.
But in a second moment there appears a profound and radical difference. Because, towards what is Descartes orienting truth? Simply orienting it towards evidence, towards manifestation. Leibniz —here we have the great difference with Descartes— is going to turn towards something completely different. Indeed, what is understood by truth? For Leibniz a judgment is true {165} when in the predicate are contained all the requisites of the subject. In that case —Leibniz will tell us— every truth is an identity, not in the sense of an empty identity like A = A, but in the sense of an intrinsic and necessary implication. By virtue of this implication what is enunciated in the subject is pre-contained in the requisites that constitute the very character of the subject. It is not the case, therefore, of a formal identity, but of something much more radical and profound. It is the case of the intrinsic unity of the object upon which the judgment is made.
This is precisely what the thought of Leibniz decides. Descartes has oriented truth towards evidence and has found the evidence in an aliquid that —as we saw in the previous chapter— by being an aliquid is convertible with ens. Now we find a different solution. Leibniz turns truth towards unity and precisely recalls that the unum is convertible with ens. This is what constitutes the great novelty of the metaphysics of Leibniz. Entity has been incorporated into rationality in a very concrete form because the rational order is the order of unity. Ens is incorporated to the verum, but the verum is incorporated to the unum, here is where truth acquires its transcendental characteristic.
By virtue of this, Leibniz finds himself constrained to a more rigorous precision with respect to what he understands by reason. What is that particular rationality that constitutes the transcendental order? If it were only the case of simple things, as Aristotle said, what has been said would be sufficient; but things are enormously complex and Leibniz does not recoil when facing that complexity. Faithful to his idea that the possible is always anterior to the existent, he tells us that nothing that is real would be real if it were not because the possible, insofar as possible, is determined to be in existence such as it is and in no other {166} way. This is precisely what Leibniz calls sufficient reason. Here “sufficient reason” does not mean that given a certain thing there may be a sufficient reason for this thing to exist. For Leibniz, it is something much more profound, namely, that the possible qua possible —the essence qua essence— is from itself determined to have a certain form of existence.
This principle of sufficient reason is principle, but in a most special way. For Aristotle, principle is that “from where” the thing is presented to us as intelligible. Here “principle” is something different; it is a series of first truths of reason, unbreakable true judgments because they refer to the most simple ultimate elements in which the whole complex of the things that exist are analytically resolved. This is taken up by Leibniz to such a degree that he has consummated the absorption of the principle of causality into the principle of reason; the primary is the principial2 characteristic of rationality and causality is a mode of reason.
However, this is essentially problematic. Is it possible to think that causality can be subsumed under an order of rational principiality? The question is left floating.
By virtue of the three characteristics we have indicated —the transcendental order is an order of truth; this truth is constituted by an unum; this unum is the order of sufficient reason—, the complete transcendental order is, for Leibniz, an order of strict rationality, of strict rational fundamentality.
If we turn our attention to things and to God, this is what allows a more rigorous apprehension of what Leibniz understands by the transcendental of God and the transcendental of things. We had mentioned this subject above from the point of view of possibility, now we have to approach it in its {167} deepest stratum, in the constitutive unity of the transcendental order.
How much of this can be applied to God? We already saw that God is His own possibility, but now we know that possibility is the sufficient reason or at least, forms part of it. To say that God is His own possibility means, for Leibniz, that God is His own reason for being. The same way that in God His reality is based on His intrinsic possibility, likewise the reality of God is based on His intrinsic reason; His own being is His own reason, but it is “reason”. That man may not perceive the structure of that reason is no obstacle for God to be His own reason, according to Leibniz, to be His own reason for being.
2. The transcendental unity of the world. Optimism.
This God has created the world, but God has not created the world without reason, what kind of reason? We had insisted above that from the proper perspective it is necessary to highlight that the principle of sufficient reason does not consist in giving a reason for what existence is. It consists in knowing by virtue of what, the possible is determined to be real in one form rather than another. It is a characteristic that must be based on the intrinsic condition of the possible. Leibniz will tell us that the possible for the divine mind is not only a system of compatible notes among themselves because of non-contradiction, but also a kind of permanent candidate for existence. Every possible in its positive unity is an “attempt” to existence, a conatus existendi; precisely because of this Leibniz is going to be able to say that God does not create without reason. What kind of “reason” are we connecting with this concept of the possible?
{168} If Creation had not consisted in all but just one thing, the question would have been answered. But we have many things, an entire universe. Then Leibniz, by virtue of the principles he has established, places the possible ahead of the existent. He wants us to see that each one of the things that compose the universe is a realized possible, that is to say, the concession of existence to the candidacy, which constitutes the intrinsic condition of the possible. Precisely because of this, Leibniz can say something that, although it has become part of the history of metaphysics, to our ears it sounds like a monstrosity, Dum Deus calculat fit mundus (“God makes the world calculating”). Calculating... what? Precisely calculating these possibilities, the compatibility of the candidacies for existence. Every possible has a particular attempt, by virtue of which it is an essence capable of being realized, but that essence has to be compatible, not in its internal notes, but with other essences. Indeed, Leibniz realizes a theological-metaphysical operation that could only be realized by the founder of Analytical Mechanics. It is the case of considering that within the infinite number of the possibles present to the divine mind, there is only a very large number, but finite, of essences compatible among themselves. That is the existing world, the world that has the greatest possibility, and if God surely could have made many other poorer worlds, He could not have made any with a richer entity. For Leibniz, this is the world that has the greatest possible entity and God could not have made a world with a richer entity.
Nevertheless, since ens and bonum in traditional metaphysics are convertible, whatever has the greatest entity is what has the greatest goodness. This is the principle of metaphysical optimism in Leibniz, an optimism —properly understood— that is purely metaphysical3. {169} Leibniz gave to his optimism certain moral and psychological resonances that even from his own point of view would be difficult to maintain. A century later the Lisbon earthquake shocked the whole structure of the thought of Leibniz and forced Kant to write a pamphlet on optimism (Über den Optimismus). However, the optimism of Leibniz is purely this transcendental optimism. This world is the one that has the greatest possible entity. It is a world in which the greatest set of compatible essences among themselves is realized. If we consider that each essence is like a kind of force that tends to exist, this real world is the resulting maximum of the infinite forces involved. That is the reason why God has willed it. This is the “principle of the best”; God cannot will anyhting but the entity; among several entities He cannot but choose the one with the greatest entity, and when willing this greatest entity He has willed the best. Consequently, for Leibniz this world is the best world.
The transcendental order of the world, as seen from God is a unum constructed in such manner. This is the unum of rationality, that unum by which according to reason the greatest number of essences are compatible. Optimism is the structure of the transcendental unity of the world.
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1 Zubiri note on the margin: “At some point, refer to contingency, that whose contradiction is possible”.
2 [Tr. note: Zubiri neologism from “principle“]
3 Note of Zubiri on the margin: “VX,D nihil sunt quam possibilium optima”, etc. Cf. other important passages in H., Leibniz, p. 242.