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  • La question du mal chez Leibniz. Fondements et élaboration de la Théodicée
  • Steven Nadler
Paul Rateau . La question du mal chez Leibniz. Fondements et élaboration de la Théodicée. Travaux de Philosophie, 15. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. Pp. 755. €110.00.

One of the welcome features of Leibniz research over the past quarter century has been the abandonment of the old "chicken vs. egg" debate (in Russell, Couturat, et al.) about whether Leibniz's logic precedes and grounds his metaphysics or vice versa. Scholars such as Robert M. Adams, Daniel Garber, and Donald Rutherford, among others, have brought our attention to what might be called the systematic "holism" of Leibniz's thought and the way in which its various elements—logical, physical, metaphysical, and theological—reinforce each other. Rutherford, in particular, has argued persuasively that if anything is central to Leibniz's project and its systematicity, it is his philosophical theology, and especially his theodicy.

Paul Rateau's book is an important contribution to our understanding of Leibniz's thinking about the problem of evil and the way in which it relates to so many other aspects—philosophical, political, theological—of his system. It is, without question, the most thorough, careful, and philosophically astute study to date of Leibniz's theodicy and its ramifications. It is also an exceedingly well-written and fascinating book.

Rateau explicitly rejects the "what came first?" question as resting on a false and distorting vision hiérarchique, verticale, and opts for a "horizontal" point of view that shows how the various parts of Leibniz's system travaillent de concert et convergent (38). He also tries to steer a steady but narrow course between the view that Leibniz's theodicean strategy exhibits a strong diachronic continuity, with little change over four decades, and the view that the constituent elements of this strategy evolved in radical ways. According to Rateau, Leibniz [End Page 316] did not, in the 1660s, go through a voluntarist period in which his views on God's will and its relationship to truths and values resembled those of Luther. On the other hand, he shows how Leibniz not only flirted with the necessitarianism that seems to have perpetually haunted his philosophy, but seems to have given in to it—not only in the letter to Wedderkopf of 1671, but perhaps also (albeit less clearly) in the Confessio Philosophi from the Paris period. At this point for Leibniz, on Rateau's reading, God does not merely permit evil, He causes it and wills it.

Leibniz, then, still has some way to go before reaching his considered, or at least mature, solution to the various questions—about divine justice, about divine and human freedom, about necessity and contingency—that are bundled in the omnibus problem of evil. Still, Rateau insists, three elements are constant throughout Leibniz's career, from his early writings to the Essais de Théodicée: i) l'affirmation d'une volonté (divine comme humaine) determinée par la consideration du meilleur; ii) la proposition selon laquelle ce meilleur n'est pas crée par Dieu et arbitraire, mais l'expression d'un ordre éternel et immuable; iii) l'univocité des notions de justice, de bien et de mal qui assure la profonde unité des droits divin et humain (137). These elements do not always appear with the same emphasis, however, and sometimes one recedes so much into the background that it is barely visible.

This is particularly clear in Rateau's extended, subtle analysis of the Confessio. He distinguishes between two types of theodicean strategy in this early dialogue: one that relies on divine justice understood as "perfection" and expressed in God's desire for the best and love of harmony, and one that relies on divine justice understood in a legalistic sense, whereby the good are rewarded for their virtue and the wicked are punished for their viciousness. The former explains the presence of evil in the world as a result not of God's choice or will, but of God's nature as the supremely perfect Being, and the resulting theodicy is grounded in familiar aesthetic considerations. A world in which evil is present...

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