Best of All Possible Worlds

← Encyclopedia

Before anything is made, everything that could be made already stands complete in the mind of God — not one world but an infinity of them, each a fully specified arrangement of every creature and every event it would contain, each internally consistent, each competing for the single grant of existence that creation confers. Only one can receive it; two complete worlds cannot both be actual. The doctrine of the best of all possible worlds, advanced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, is the claim that a being at once all-knowing, all-powerful, and wholly good would survey that infinite catalog and choose, of necessity, the finest member of it — and that this world, the one in which the question is being asked, is that member. The evils in it are not lapses in the choosing. They are features of the thing chosen.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who advanced the doctrine of the best of all possible worlds; portrait by Christoph Bernhard Francke, c. 1700 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The position turns on a particular picture of how the divine will operates. God’s omnipotence ranges over the whole field of the possible; his omniscience holds every world distinctly before him, down to the last contingent detail; his goodness inclines him toward the best. Put those three together and the selection ceases to be free in the sense of arbitrary. A perfect chooser confronted with a uniquely best option is not at liberty to take a worse one — not because anything compels him from outside, but because to choose the lesser would contradict the goodness that defines him. Leibniz called this a moral necessity rather than an absolute one: God could, without logical contradiction, have made some other world, but his own perfection guarantees that he would not. The created order is thus the deliverance of a reasoned divine election, the output of a deliberation in which wisdom weighed the candidates and goodness crowned the winner.

The Theodicy and the justice of God

Leibniz set the argument out most fully in the Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal — the Theodicy — published at Amsterdam in 1710, the only book-length philosophical work he released in his lifetime. The title itself was a coinage, assembled from the Greek theos, god, and dikē, justice: the enterprise of vindicating the justice of God before the court of reason. The book had a concrete occasion. It grew largely out of Leibniz’s long exchange with Pierre Bayle, whose Dictionnaire historique et critique had pressed the case that the existence of evil cannot be reconciled with a good and capable deity by argument, and that the believer must finally fall back on faith against reason. Leibniz wrote to deny exactly that retreat. He held that reason and revelation could not truly conflict, and that the problem of evil — old and blunt in its statement, that a good and omnipotent God should have abolished suffering and did not — admits a fully rational answer.

That answer refuses to be drawn into a piece-by-piece audit. The mistake, on Leibniz’s diagnosis, is to imagine that each item in the world could be improved in isolation — this disease removed, that war prevented, this loss spared — as though the whole were a sum of independent parts. It is not. The world is a single integrated system in which the parts are bound together by laws and mutual dependence, so that to alter one strand is to unravel and re-weave the entire fabric into a different world altogether. Goodness, therefore, is measured not locally but across the totality. A world purged of every suffering and every error might be describable in fragments, yet not constructable as a coherent whole that also contains free creatures, lawful nature, and the abundance of distinct beings that genuine richness requires. The best world is the one in which these competing demands are jointly maximized; its dark places are the cost of that joint maximum — local shadows in a composition that, taken entire, is the most perfect available.

Richness and economy: the criterion of the best

What makes one world better than another, on this account, is not the absence of pain or the comfort of its inhabitants but a balance of two formal excellences that ordinarily pull against each other. A world should be as rich as possible — crowded with the greatest variety and quantity of beings, each a finite imitation of the divine plenitude, so that the maximum of essence and perfection is actually realized rather than left as a bare possibility. And a world should be as economical as possible — governed by the fewest and simplest laws, ordered, continuous, and intelligible, so that the greatest abundance of phenomena flows from the smallest stock of principles. Maximize richness alone and order collapses into chaos; maximize simplicity alone and the world goes barren. The best is the unique world that achieves the optimal ratio: greatest variety of phenomena from greatest simplicity of laws. Leibniz reached habitually for the mathematical and the architectural — the optimal world as the elegant solution, the most that can be drawn from the least, the design a perfect geometer would sign.

Within that frame evil is sorted into three kinds, and the sorting carries the weight of the defense. Metaphysical evil is finitude itself — the simple limitation that belongs to any creature for the reason that it is not God; to be created is to be bounded, and bounded being is, by comparison with the infinite, a kind of imperfection that no possible world could be without. Physical evil is suffering, the pain and frustration of sentient creatures. Moral evil is sin, the disorder of created wills. The crucial move is that none of these is a positive ingredient that God manufactured and inserted. Following a line that runs back through the Christian tradition, Leibniz treats evil as a privation — a lack, a shortfall, a hole where a good might have been — rather than a substance in its own right. God creates the reality in a sinful act; the sinfulness is the limitation, the missing measure, and limitation traces to the creature’s own finite nature, not to a divine authorship of evil. The shadows in the painting are not pigment added by the artist but the places he left unlit, and they make the lit places legible.

The whole structure rests on the deepest principle of Leibniz’s metaphysics: that nothing is so without a sufficient reason, that for everything that is the case there is an explanation why it is so and not otherwise. Applied to existence as such, the principle asks why there is this world rather than another, or rather than none — and the only terminating answer is the choice of a perfect being for the maximal good. The best-world doctrine is what the principle of sufficient reason yields when it is turned on the act of creation itself. It is also why the doctrine sits so close to divine providence: the world is not merely governed well after the fact but selected well in advance, providence reaching back into the divine intellect before a single thing exists. Genuine free will survives in this scheme precisely because the free acts of creatures are among the contingent facts that distinguish one possible world from another; God, foreseeing them, includes them in his choice rather than overriding them, so that human freedom is woven into the best world rather than abolished by it.

Candide and the fortunes of optimism

Voltaire, whose 1759 satire Candide turned the best-of-all-possible-worlds doctrine into a comic target; portrait after Nicolas de Largillière — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The doctrine drew fire almost at once, and its most famous answer was not an argument but a story. Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’Optimisme, published in 1759 and slyly presented as a translation from the German of one Doctor Ralph, follows its guileless hero through earthquake, war, rape, slavery, disease, shipwreck, and betrayal in the company of his tutor Pangloss, who greets each fresh catastrophe by reasoning that things cannot be otherwise than they are, that all was created for an end and so all is for the best, and that this remains the best of all possible worlds. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 — which killed tens of thousands on a holy day and shook the confidence of educated Europe — stands behind the book; Voltaire had already turned it against facile optimism in verse before he turned it into the engine of a comic novel. Against Pangloss’s serene deductions the narrative simply piles the evidence, and the doctrine drowns in it. The book ends not with a counter-system but with a shrug and a resolve: that one must tend one’s own garden.

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which killed tens of thousands and shook Europe’s confidence in optimism; contemporary copper engraving, 1755 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The satire has shadowed the phrase ever since. Panglossian entered the language as a name for reflexive, evidence-proof cheerfulness — an optimism that explains away every disaster instead of facing it — which is very nearly the reverse of the careful metaphysical claim Leibniz actually made. Leibniz never held that each particular evil is good, or that suffering should be welcomed, or that the present arrangement of any human institution is beyond reproach; he held the far narrower thesis that the total system, evils and all, is the optimal total system a perfect God could have chosen. Whether Voltaire’s lance even touched that thesis is a standing dispute among readers. Many hold that his real target was the diluted optimism then in popular circulation — the systematized Leibnizianism of Christian Wolff and, in a different key, the verse of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man with its insistence that whatever is, is right — rather than the intricate machinery of the Theodicy itself, which the comic form was in no position to engage. Others answer that the popular optimism was a fair descendant of Leibniz’s own and that the lived weight of the objection — the distance between a sufferer’s experience and any system that pronounces the whole good — lands whatever its precise address. The quarrel between the argument and the joke has never been settled in the joke’s favor among philosophers, however thoroughly the joke won the language.

The older lineage: being, goodness, and the privation of evil

For all its early-Enlightenment dress — its appeal to argument over revelation, its rationalist confidence that the justice of God could be demonstrated — the doctrine reaches far back. Its deepest root is the conviction that being and goodness coincide: that to exist, to be ordered, to be fully what one is, is already to be good, and that goodness is not a value laid over reality from outside but the very perfection of reality itself. That equation is Platonic at the source. In Plato the Good is the highest principle, the sun of the intelligible realm that lends both being and knowability to everything beneath it, and the cosmos of the Timaeus is the work of a maker who, being without envy, fashions the world as fine as a generated thing can be — an ancestor of the best-world thought a full two millennia before Leibniz named it. Neoplatonism sharpened the metaphysics: from the One all things flow by emanation, descending through diminishing grades of perfection, and evil is located at the far, thinnest edge of that procession — not a rival power but the shadow cast where being runs out, privation rather than presence.

Plato (left), whose identification of being with goodness underlies the best-world thought; detail of Raphael’s The School of Athens, 1509–1511 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

It is through Augustine of Hippo that this inheritance entered Christian theology and reached Leibniz. Augustine, breaking with the Manichaean dualism that made evil a substance warring against good, argued instead that everything God made is good insofar as it has being, and that evil is privatio boni — the privation of a good that ought to be present, a corruption or absence rather than a created thing. On that account God remains the author of all that is without being the author of evil, because evil, strictly, is not a thing to author. The medieval synthesis carried the same conviction forward; Thomas Aquinas made the convertibility of being and goodness a formal doctrine and treated evil as privation in the Augustinian manner. Leibniz inherited all of this and gave the long intuition a new, almost computational precision: the cosmos is not merely good but optimal, the single best selection from a determinate infinity of candidates, its goodness a quantity in principle comparable across worlds.

Augustine of Hippo, whose treatment of evil as privatio boni — the privation of a good — carried the doctrine’s deepest root into Christian thought; Sandro Botticelli, c. 1480 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The thesis also marks itself off sharply from the systems it is most often set beside. Pessimism, the metaphysical conviction — given its fullest form a century later by Schopenhauer — that non-existence would be preferable to existence and that suffering predominates over its opposite, is the exact counterpole: where Leibniz audits creation and pronounces it the best, the pessimist audits it and pronounces it the worst, or worse than nothing, the two reading the same ledger to opposite totals. And the best-world doctrine is not acosmism, the denial that the finite world has any ultimate reality at all — the charge Hegel laid at the door of Spinoza. Leibniz’s world is emphatically real, a plenum of genuine individual substances; his quarrel was never with the world’s reality but with the suspicion that its reality might be a defect. The necessity by which God chooses the best, too, had to be guarded carefully against collapse into Spinozist fatalism: Leibniz insisted the choice was morally rather than absolutely necessary precisely so that the world would not become the only metaphysically possible one, which would have dissolved both divine freedom and the contingency of creatures into a single rigid necessity.

Texts and scholarship

The argument lives in a single book. The Theodicy of 1710 is the canonical source, and the standard English version — E. M. Huggard’s translation, prefaced by Austin Farrer’s substantial editorial introduction — is freely available in the public domain through Project Gutenberg, where the threefold analysis of metaphysical, physical, and moral evil and the defense of the divine choice can be read in full. The phrase it coined is set out in compact form in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the best of all possible worlds, which fixes the doctrine in the Théodicée and frames Voltaire’s reply as its classic foil. The modern scholarly literature has concentrated on two pressure points. The first is the logical status of the divine choice: whether the claim that God necessarily creates the best collapses into the necessitarianism Leibniz was so anxious to avoid, the worry tracked in detail in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s treatment of Leibniz on the problem of evil. The second is the criterion of optimality itself — what it means for one world to be better than another — reconstructed in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account of Leibniz’s metaphysics as the world that yields the greatest variety of phenomena from the simplest stock of laws. The Augustinian and Platonic background — the convertibility of being and goodness, evil as the privation of a good — is documented across the patristic and Neoplatonic corpus, and the relevant primary texts of Plato and the Neoplatonists are hosted in the site Library.

The wager of the doctrine

What gives the best of all possible worlds its peculiar audacity is not the comfort it offers but the demand it makes of reason. To say that this is the best of all possible worlds is to claim that the human mind, reasoning from the attributes of God, can pronounce on the design of creation as a whole — can stand, in thought, at the vantage of the maker and certify that the work could not have been bettered. The objection that any sufferer can raise, that the cost looks unpayable from where the suffering is felt, is met not with a denial of the cost but with an appeal to a sum no finite mind can actually compute: the value of the whole, in which this loss is a term whose sign reverses once the total is taken. The doctrine, in the end, is reason’s wager that creation will balance — that there exists a divine accounting in which every shadow is entered against a greater light, and that the books, could they be opened, would close in the black. Leibniz never claimed to have opened them. He claimed only that a being who could would find them so, and that this is enough to acquit the goodness of God.

→ Related: Hexameron · Ontologism · Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · Divine Providence · Augustine Of Hippo · Plato · Neoplatonism · Free Will · Metaphysics · Emanation · Pessimism · Acosmism · Thomas Aquinas · Benedictus De Spinoza