Imitators of God: Leibniz on Human Freedom

Questions concerning divine and human freedom mattered to Leibniz. He found the problems surrounding these issues important and difficult to solve, at one point writing: “There are two labyrinths of the human mind: one concerns the composition of the continuum, and the other the nature of freedom” (FC 180 [MP 107]).¹ Although there is no unanimity among scholars about the details to his solution to the labyrinth of freedom, most have thought that Leibniz is a compatibilist.² Lately, however, some commentators have charged that, appearances to the contrary, Leibniz is actually an incompatibilist about freedom.³ This new reading is exciting and important because it emphasizes texts and themes that appear to run counter to the traditional reading of Leibniz on freedom, and so points to a serious gap in our understanding of Leibniz on this issue. Much of the evidence for this new view is based on a remarkable passage from a work called “Necessary and Contingent Truths” (NCT).⁴ In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Leibniz’s views on freedom that takes into account this and other problematic texts. I argue that NCT does indeed contain a central and overlooked element in Leibniz’s thinking about freedom, according to which human freedom is grounded in a kind of imitation of God’s nature. I then show that this feature of Leibniz’s theory, far from undermining compatibilism, requires it.

1. the recalcitrant passage of nct

The NCT text in which Leibniz seems to state that human freedom is not deterministic reads as follows:

But free or intelligent substances . . . in a kind of imitation of God . . . are not bound by any certain subordinate laws of the universe, but act as it were by a private miracle, on the sole initiative of their power, and by looking towards a final cause they interrupt the connection and course of the efficient causes that act on their will. . . . For just as the course of the universe is changed by the free will of God, so the course of the mind’s thoughts is changed by its free will: so that, in the case of minds, no subordinate universal laws can be established (as is possible in the case of bodies) which are sufficient for predicting a mind’s choice. . . . From this it can be understood what is that ‘indifference’ which accompanies freedom. Just as contingency is opposed to metaphysical necessity, so indifference excludes not only metaphysical but also physical necessity.

(C 20–21 [MP 100–101])

Leibniz’s stated aim in the above “private miracle” passage, is “to distinguish free substances from others” (C 20 [MP 100]). He does this with the help of the distinction between three levels of propositions describing three levels of laws God decrees at creation. Absolutely universal is the master set of propositions describing or encoding the entire, unique history of the world God actualizes. This set is variously called by Leibniz the “laws of general order,” “primary free decrees,” or “the first essential laws of the series—true without exception, and containing the entire purpose of God in choosing the universe, and so including even miracles” (C 19 [MP 99]).⁵ An important feature of the laws of general order is that “never, by any analysis, can one arrive at the absolutely universal laws nor at the perfect reasons for individual things; for that knowledge necessarily belongs to God alone” (C 19–20 [MP 99–100]). God, and God alone, can derive from the above the second level laws, which are “subordinate laws of nature, which have only physical necessity and which are not repealed except by a miracle, through consideration of some more powerful final cause” (C 19 [MP 99]).⁶ Least universal of all, and derivable from the above are the third set of laws which “God can reveal even to creatures . . . of which a part constitutes physical science” (C 19 [MP 99]).

Scholars debate about how the subordinate laws relate to the physical science laws. Because what matters for Leibniz in the quoted NCT passage is the line that separates the laws of general...