Human Freedom

Leibniz basically has two defenses of the thesis that human freedom is real. These respond to two distinct challenges to the idea that we have free will. One is in my opinion highly successful, which rests upon the distinction between necessary and contingent truths (see types of truth). It responds to the idea that if God created the best possible world, in which everything is what it is due to his will, this takes the choice out of human activity, since our actions are events that God has predetermined. The other idea of his responds to the materialism that many in Leibniz's day were embracing, which says the only thing that can determine the motion of matter is physical law such as Newton's gravitation. If the only thing that can determine any motion of matter is other matter, and the laws that determine such motion, then even the matter in our bodies and brains cannot move but in the way that these laws determine them. His response to this is his idea of the pre-established harmony between minds and matter.

Let us begin with his response to the challenge that if God decides what every event in the cosmos will be, before ever creating it, this takes the human will out of the picture.

Leibniz makes very convincing arguments that a given event, or truth, such as "Ratcliff decides to make a site on Leibniz" can be both known beforehand by God and freely chosen by the agent, in this case me. It was certain that I would make a site on Leibniz from the beginning of time, but it was not necessitated.

Suppose I know that next Christmas my mother will cook dinner for me. I am certain of it, and in fact I know it. Knowledge has three requisites—belief, reason for belief, and correctness of belief. Very few would deny that I in fact know that my mother will cook dinner for me next Christmas. Perhaps it could be argued that I do not know this absolutely, but if we should make the rules for knowledge that strict we are arguing epistemology. In order to avoid a digression that will probably not bear real fruit to our discussion and make us either solipsists or bring us right back to where we are, let us grant that I know my mother will cook dinner for me next Christmas. For the point is this: that the fact that I know this does not take the freedom from my mother, who freely chooses to cook me that dinner. We may argue till the cows come home whether I can actually know the future; but the point is that, should we suppose I do know this, my knowledge does not take the freedom from my mother and her free choice. Thus, a given event can be true and certain, without being determined. God too was certain from the beginning of time that my mother would cook me dinner last Christmas; but the mere fact of his knowledge did not take the freedom from my mother's choice to cook me dinner, any more than my own knowledge of this event takes the freedom from my mother's choice.

This ties into Leibniz's distinction between contingent and necessary truths. A given contingent truth is certain without being necessitated; it could have been otherwise, and both before the fact and after the fact, it is possible for it to be otherwise. It was possible for my mother to choose not to cook me dinner last Christmas; though it was certain she would. Just like it is certain I am typing right now, but it was always possible that I should be doing something else. Recall the proposition "Fred is running, and possibly Fred is not running." (From the Types of Truth section.) This is perfectly coherent; while I know Fred is running, it is not impossible for him not to be running. If Fred was running yesterday, I am certain he was running yesterday, but the mere fact of my knowledge does not take the freedom of his choice to run yesterday from him. And just like, looking back, I am certain he was running, I may look two days into the future and know that he will run then. My mere knowledge of a given fact, whether it is in the future or the past, does not take that event out of the realm of the freely chosen act. God was certain Fred would run yesterday, but did not determine Fred to run; rather, he created a Fred who would freely choose to run.

This is the type of argumentation that depends much upon the intellectual temperament of the one who hears it. I myself see it as perfectly coherent that God could create a Fred who would freely choose to run, while some would say that pushes the choice back from Fred onto God, who determined Fred's nature. I also see no reason why, even if God is certain a given event will take place, this means the event was predetermined by God and not by the agent of the act. But I'm sure others will disagree. It is difficult to prove this position; it is something that, I believe, if properly understood, will convince most, but not all. How my own knowledge that my mother will cook me dinner takes the freedom from her choice I cannot understand; and I see nothing wrong with applying the same reasoning to God's knowledge that she would. In the same way, my knowledge that when I drop a pencil it will fall is not what determines the path of the pencil. My knowledge that it will fall is completely irrelevant to what determines the event. Thus, God can be certain of particular facts about us, while giving us the agency that determines them. Thus I am convinced a fact can be certain and true, while neither being necessitated nor predetermined. But not all will agree.

But I'll allow the reader to come to his or her own conclusions, and get to the second challenge to Leibniz's idea that we are free—that of the laws of the motion of matter being determined on purely physical grounds, right down to the matter in our brains.

Leibniz did his work in the generation that saw Newton's famous theory of universal gravitation, and this generation gained a second challenge to free will added to the "will of God" and abstract "causal chain" determinism arguments that occupied the Scholastics. Descartes began the modern period declaring that minds were more certain than matter—proof that non-material things existed, or so he thought. But the problems with the non-material interacting and even controlling the motion of the material became apparent, and the materialists gained new ground when we started discovering the laws of motion that matter could not but obey. If Newton was right—or even if he was wrong on the specifics—certainly there were laws that determined the motion of matter, universal laws, which all matter must obey to the letter. It was no longer a question of mere causes going back infinitely; a cause for an act may well be the act's motivation or reason, and thus perhaps signify freedom in itself. But matter—the stuff in our brains and bodies—if it cannot vary to the slightest degree from the path prescribed by its trajectory, mass, momentum, etc.—how, then, does a mind determine anything? How can a mind—something non-material, with no material properties—alter the motion of the material to the slightest degree at all, even supposing that non-material minds exist?

It was convenient for Leibniz that God figured so heavily into his system. Sometimes the idea of God in philosophy can solve more problems than it presents. With the idea that the cosmos was the perfect creation of God, Leibniz was able to present his idea of a pre-established harmony between the mental and the physical. When I decide to lift my arm, my arm would lift on its own were there no minds in the cosmos at all; it is simply following its purely physical laws of motion. Likewise, given who I am and what my temperament is, it was certain from the beginning of time that I would decide at this time to raise my arm, certain though not necessitated; certain but freely chosen. Were there no matter, the minds would be no wiser; everything would be the same. Were there no minds, the matter of our physical bodies would move in just the motion they do. The two—minds and matter—are preset to be in harmony, though standing entirely independent of each other. When I lift my arm, it doesn't cause the matter in my arm to be moved; other matter was its cause, but the mental and the physical are in sync. My decision to move my arm did not cause my arm to move, but rather it was a type of coincidence, or harmony between the mental and the physical such that they would always be matched.

Of course, such a scheme would be impossible if there were no God; but Leibniz here is more using God to solve a sticky problem, than showing reason to believe he exists. God established this harmony when he made the physical laws; God made each mind with its own properties, and the decisions it would freely make, coincide with the laws of matter, and how it would move even if there were no minds.

You might look at the pre-established harmony between the mental and the physical in the following way. It is like two dancers on stage who are blindfolded and unable to see each other. And yet they each know their proper motion and steps, completely blind to each other and each acting independently. To the audience their movements are so synchronized we would make the mistake that there is a causal link from one to the other. But really each is going through completely independent sequences of movements, with no causal link between them: take one or the other out of the picture, and her partner would not change a step. This harmony between them, that appears to the audience to be perfectly synchronized, is really a trick of the choreographer, who dictated the plan for their movements such that they would always appear harmonious one to the other, while really each is completely independent of the other, and following her own private sequence.

There may be the objection that, given a set of laws for the motion of matter, the possible choices I have that can be harmonized with such completely independent laws are quite limited. We might put the problem to Leibniz this way: given the material side, which would be determined just the same were the mental side non-existent, the mental side is the one that seems confined by the ways in which the material side is determined to move. When we human beings consider the possibilities for our choices, they are vast; but should we suppose that these choices must be harmonized, by God, with a matter that adheres to brute forces of nature, the physical side seems to limit the possible mental choices that can be harmonized with it.

Of course, Leibniz would appeal to the absolute wisdom of God, who can create universal laws of nature that could pay as much attention to a sparrow falling as to the motion of the Earth around the sun. Certainly he is right, but the pre-established harmony idea seems a solution that we have little positive reason to believe to be true, as much as it solves. Leibniz could not prove his pre-established harmony; he merely proposed it as a solution to an apparent difficulty. I suppose it is easy to claim ignorance in these matters, but where we truly are ignorant it is probably better to admit it.

Leibniz was an old man by the time Berkeley came out with the idealism that would occupy philosophy for a generation; but could he be a young man when he read it, I think he would see that perhaps it is a neater solution to the problem of mind/matter than his. If minds are truly independent, albeit harmonized with matter, there is little need to have both; God would probably consider it easier to create only minds. But Leibniz's solution is one that was perhaps a precursor to the radical denial of the material side of things that came after him. (See the section on The Monadology for Leibniz's version of a "world of minds".)

Angelhaunt.net: Because earth's madness is heaven's sense.