The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil (Hardcover)

by Steven Nadler (Author)
Key Phrases: Mère Angélique, search after truth, divine voluntarism, Malebranche's God, Leibniz's God, Académie des Sciences (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The centerpiece of this intellectual history is a vicious late-17th-century debate between three unlikely combatants: Leibniz, an amateur metaphysicist and German secret agent; Malebranche, a gentle French priest and theologian; and Arnauld, an ill-tempered and opinionated monk. The differences in their positions were slight but important: at stake was the very concept of God with potential implications for the territorial wars between various Catholic Church sects. Although the three men were concentrating on questions that had long been the subject of philosophical inquiry, new scientific discoveries were beginning to challenge the power invested in church and monarchy in what became a watershed moment. Nadler (Rembrandt's Jews) demonstrates why the contentious discussions between the three intellectuals remain relevant: "To the extent that one believes that there is a universal rationality and objectivity to moral and other value judgments, and that the foundations of ethics have nothing to do with what God may or may not want, one has followed in certain seventeenth-century footsteps." Nadler's superb study makes for a larger space for Leibniz, Malebranche and Arnauld alongside such giants of the period as Descartes and Spinoza. (Nov.)
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda Many are likely to know just two facts about the great polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716): first, that he and Newton independently discovered calculus at roughly the same time, then argued over who should get the credit (Newton won); and, second, that he maintained that ours was "the best of all possible worlds," a phrase much mocked in Voltaire's sparkling philosophical satire Candide. If people know anything further about this German thinker, it's likely to be that he spent his life trying to effect a reconciliation between Protestantism and Catholicism and that he postulated the existence of invisible, atom-like "monads" as the metaphysical building blocks of the universe. Poor Leibniz! For all his genius, he seems destined to be overshadowed by others, whether Newton, Voltaire or Spinoza (whom he visited, admired and disputed with) or, as Steven Nadler shows in The Best of All Possible Worlds, even by half-forgotten French priests. Of course, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) weren't simple provincial curates; they were, at least for the generation following the death of Descartes, France's strongest theological thinkers (excepting perhaps Pascal, who strangely enough barely figures in Nadler's book). Both Frenchmen knew the young Leibniz during his long stay in Paris, and all three corresponded with one another for decades afterward. Their lifelong, and sometimes heated, arguments about the nature of God form the basis of this engrossing book. Nadler makes clear the importance of their debate: "What was at stake was nothing less than the meaning of existence, the understanding of why things are as they are. The choice was clear: either the universe is ultimately an arbitrary product, the effect of an indifferent will guided by no objective values and subject to no independent canons of reason or goodness; or it is the result of wisdom, intelligible to its core and informed by a rationality and a sense of value that are, in essence, not very different from our own; or (to mention the most terrifying possibility of all) it simply is, necessary through its causes and transparent to the investigations of metaphysics and science but essentially devoid of any meaning or value whatsoever." The attempt to justify the ways of God to men -- theodicy, a term coined by Leibniz -- lies at the heart of the matter: "Why is there any evil at all in God's creation?" Essentially, Leibniz's answer is: Consider the whole. Explains Nadler, "It is not that everything will turn out for the best for me or for anyone else in particular. Nor is it necessarily the case that any other possible world would have been worse for me or for anyone else. Rather, Leibniz claims that any other possible world is worse overall than this one, regardless of any single person's fortunes in it." What is good for the whole isn't necessarily good for every one of its individual parts or components. As Nadler emphasizes, summarizing Leibniz, "all things are connected and every single aspect of the world makes a contribution to its being the best world." That includes what we call evil. However, Leibniz offers no explanation of just how evil assists the overall goodness of things. (Sometimes he even seems to suggest that it serves to bring the good into greater relief.) We cannot penetrate so far into the Creator's mind or plan. Still "it is inconceivable . . . that an infinitely good and perfect God could choose anything less than the best." This conclusion may satisfy a devout Christian philosopher, but it offers scant consolation when we are in pain, or see the wicked succeed and the worthy fail, or when we face death. Malebranche refined Leibniz's view by imagining that God needed to establish a world that wouldn't require constant adjustment or interference, one that ran on its own, following what He had determined were the simplest, most efficient general principles. Thus, "the actual world is not the most perfect world absolutely speaking; rather, it is only the most perfect world possible relative to those maximally simple laws." In other words, even God compromises. Our world could be better "but only at the cost of the simplicity of the means." Instead, Malebranche's Creator "wills to accomplish as much justice and goodness as He possibly can, not absolutely but consistent with the simplest laws." As Nadler emphasizes, to Malebranche "God . . . is more committed to acting in a general way and to a nature governed by the simplest laws than He is to the well-being of individuals." His "general volitions," as Malebranche dubs these cosmic rules, take precedence over "particular volitions," which are essentially those infrequent violations of the natural order that we call miracles. So it is in the established nature of things for it to rain, and sometimes the parched land receives needed water and sometimes rivers overflow. God isn't going to spend all his time constantly adjusting the weather and a zillion other phenomena just because the results aren't what the locals want or like. What Arnauld objects to in Malebranche (and also in Leibniz) is the supposition that God's nature is like humankind's and that our human intellects can have access to the divine wisdom. God, Arnauld believes, is utterly alien to us -- "a hidden God," to use a Jansenist catchphrase -- and to imagine him making logical decisions, or weighing the pluses and minuses of contrasting worlds, is absurd, nothing but anthropomorphism. (As Spinoza once observed, "a triangle, if it could speak would . . . say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that God's nature is eminently circular.") In fact, men and women are by their lesser natures incapable of making sense of God or his mysterious ways, and all these presumptuous attempts at theodicy are doomed to failure. God wanted to make the world and so He did, and there's an end to it. In essence, Leibniz believes in God's goodness and wisdom, and Malebranche further emphasizes His rationality, but to Arnauld God is simply pure, omnipotent will. Which God you believe in matters: "Do we inhabit a cosmos that is fundamentally intelligible because its creation is grounded in a rational decision informed by certain absolute values? Is the world's existence the result of a reasonable act of creation and the expression of an infinite wisdom? Or, on the other hand, is the universe ultimately a nonrational, even arbitrary piece of work? . . . Does the origin of things lie in an indifferent action -- an apparently capricious exercise of causal power -- by a Creator who cannot possibly be motivated by reasons because His will finds no reasons independent of itself? In short, does the universe exist by ratio or by voluntas, by wisdom or power?" There's much more detail, and much greater subtlety, in Nadler's account of these differing theological views of God and His universe. (For instance, Spinoza contributes the further twist that "this is not the best of all possible worlds; it is the only possible world.") Of course, Leibniz, Malebranche and Arnauld all posit a Christian God of some sort, and their arguments may seem quaint to rationalists of a largely secular age. But to those who believe in, or simply wonder about, a God-governed universe, these three 17th-century thinkers raise serious and perennially fascinating questions: Is God moral and rational or completely arbitrary, even capricious? Is it wrong to kill only because God says so, or are there absolute moral values (as Kant would argue in establishing the categorical imperative, his variant on the Golden Rule)? And, to be almost bathetic, if God gives us grace to withstand temptation, why does he sometimes fail to give us enough? Besides this new book, Steven Nadler is the author of a magisterial biography of Spinoza, which I have read and recommend, and of impressive-sounding academic books on Arnauld and Malebranche, which I've only heard of. I can't imagine a better guide to 17th-century philosophical thought. Aimed at the general public, The Best of All Possible Worlds is written simply and clearly, without condescension, flashiness or over-simplification. But it's a demanding book nonetheless, and you need to pay attention. You'll be amply rewarded if you do.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374229988
• ISBN-13: 978-0374229986
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #257,518 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Erudite & Engaging, November 23, 2008

By	S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Applying reason to the world's most perplexing questions -- the nature of God, the problem of evil in the world, the meaning of our own existence -- isn't easy. That hasn't stopped philosphers from pondering those conundrums from the earliest days of recorded history, however. In the 17th century, the questions were well-known, but the evolution of scientific knowledge was starting to transform the ways in which they were addressed. Meanwhile, the conclusions philospohers reached could literally result in matters of life and death in the midst of a violent century where the conflict between Catholic and Protestant theologians reached a violent climax.
Writing about philosophical concepts is, perhaps, even less simple; perhaps that is one reason that much of such work has been penned by scholars and directed at other scholars. Thankfully, Steven Nadler, already the author of several books devoted to Spinoza and other 17th century thinkers, has decided to target this book at a more general audience, and succeeds in making it just accessible enough (although it remains a challenging read).
The focus of the book is the effort by German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz to tackle one of those key questions: why does a world designed by God contain so much apparently random evil and misfortune? Why do virtuous and pious people fall victim to these woes? In the final decades of pre-Englightenment philosophy, such theological quandaries established a framework for moral reasoning that exists to this day. And Leibniz's reasoning that God had indeed created the best of all possible worlds (if not the world that best suited each of its inhabitants) was one that shook up the 17th century philosophical landscape.
But Nadler's real contribution isn't just rehashing Leibniz's thinking, but showing how such philosophical breakthroughs are reached. The popular conception of a philosopher locking himself in a room and isolating himself and his brain from the rest of the world could not be further from the truth. Instead, Nadler shows how Leibniz reacted to traditional Aristotlean thinking, to the Cartesian revolution and to Spinoza's radical arguments. In particular, he focuses on the ways in which two French Catholic religious figures -- Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche -- first encountered during a four-year sojurn in Paris in the 1670s played an ongoing role in the shaping of Leibniz's own contributions to the philsophical debate. Through letters among the trio, the ways in which they responded to each others' ideas in their published works and other documentary records, Nadler has managed to capture the flavor of the intellectual environment of the time and shown the reader how such cross-fertilization can prove vital to the philosphical as well as the creative process.
It's a compelling narrative, especially for those with a thorough grounding in Western philosphical history. I am not, alas, among that group and did find myself having to pause and retrace some of the details of the philosophical arguments that Nadler details and analyzes. But careful re-reading was productive, and this reader, at least, emerged after a week of solid reading with a far greater comprehension of not only the tenets of Leibniz's thinking but an understanding of their implications.
This isn't an easy read, by any means (for a still more accessible approach to Leibniz, in my view at least, try [[ASIN:0393329178 The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World]. But for those with time to invest and the interest in following the ways these great minds worked and formed their theories, it's a book that repays the effort it requires to read it.
Perhaps more effort will be made, in the wake of this and other evaluations of this group of philsophers (including Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reasonto blend history and philosophy for popular readers in other eras or geographies? I'm not aware of a similar approach to the work of Hobbes, Locke and Newston in England at roughly the same point in history, for instance.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars very good history, January 6, 2009

By	a reader (Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews

I read many of these primary sources many years ago as a philosophy major. Nadler has done a superb job of weaving philosophy, history, biography into an immensely good read. He shows relations among the philosphers he covers and their arguments that I never noticed before. I sell most of the books I buy on Amazon after I read them, but this one is a keeper.