On Explaining Existence 9783110320442, 9783110320138

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Nicholas Rescher On Explaining Existence

Nicholas Rescher

On Explaining Existence

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On Explaining Existence Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1: Existence Explanation and the Hume-Edwards Principle

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Chapter 2: The Metaphysics of Possibility Actualization

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Chapter 3: Optimalism and the Axiological Turn

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Chapter 4: The Pivotal Role of Intelligence

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Chapter 5: Defending Optimalism

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Chapter 6: On the Improvability of the World

95

Chapter 7: Optimalism and Theism

123

Chapter 8: Unknowable Facts and the Descriptive Intractability of the Real

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Name Index

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Preface

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o short book on the explanation of existence can afford the hubris of claiming to accomplish this task. And certainly no such claim can be or is being made here. What is at issue is not—and cannot be— an actual explanation. Rather, what is attempted here is at the very most a rough sketch of the conceptual architecture that an adequate explanation can be expected to exhibit. No more is achieved then rough and general indication of the direction in which a satisfactory explanation can unfold. A vast amount of detail will have to be filled in to provide a tenable explanation. Only the rough shape that the explanation will have to take is something that one can map out on the basis of considerations of general principles, giving reasons why alternative directions are less promising, and how objection to the indicated direction can be removed or mitigated. But the move from a general direction to a specific and detailed pathway calls for more than is—or can be—attempted here. I am grateful to Estelle Burris for her ever-competent help in preparing this material for printing. Nicholas Rescher Pittsburgh PA January 2012

Chapter One EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE Synopsis (1)Though first prominent with Leibniz, the problem of explaining the nature of existence has a substantial pre-history. (2)The explanation of existence-as-a-whole cannot be handled in the same way as the existence of particular arrangements in the world. (3) The HumeEdwards Principle of reducing collectives to distributive explanation is predicated on the erroneous idea that we can explain the whole by explaining its individual components. (4) But there are many counterexamples to this idea. (5) The flaw of the principle lies in its neglect of consideration of issues of structure. Holistic explanation is simply irreducible. (6) The rationale of the Hume-Edwards Principle is simply unsustainable. If there is to be a synoptic explanation of existence, it will have to be something distinctive and different. (7) Here five alternatives present themselves: mystifications, arationalism, theism, monologicism, and necessitarianism. Whatever alternative we adopt will have to lie within this range. 1. THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE

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n December 3, 1697 (November 23, in the old style), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz sat late (for he was generally a night worker) in the large, book-filled workroom of his apartment in the large timbered house of the patrician widow von Anderten in the fashionable Leinstraße in Hannover, close to the old ducal palace whose library was now housed under his charge in these quarters. Pausing occasionally to glance at the fire that kept the chill of the winter’s night at bay, he

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composed a short Latin tract “On the Ultimate Origination of Things,” (De rerum origionatione radicali).1 In this essay, Leibniz addressed the ramifications of a metaphysical issue that occupied him on many occasions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are there physical (contingent) existents at all? Why does anything whatsoever exist in the world? Leibniz realized that the existence of a world is pretty much inevitable—that if one is prepared to count even the “empty world” as a world, then the existence of a world is categorically necessary.2 But of course it does not follow (save by a wholly illicit process of reasoning) that a particular world (this world) necessarily exists.3 Specifically, the existence of a world with things in it, a nonempty world, remains an open problem. Moreover, Leibniz realized that this issue of the existence of a nonempty world is more fundamental than and conceptually prior to the issue of its nature. The question “Why is there a world with things in it at all?” is conceptually prior to the questions “Why is the world as it is—why do its things have the character they do?” Leibniz also recognized that it is not creation that is at issue. Whether the world is eternal (as Aristotle had taught) or created (as Christian theology had argued against him) is immaterial. The question of the character of the world—why it contains “things”—will arise either way. For a long time after Leibniz, philosophers turned their back on this “riddle of existence.” They inclined to construe it as a request for an explanation for everything-all-at-once, and followed Hume and Kant in thinking it is not rationally appropriate to ask for such global explanations. But the question has refused to go away. In the manner typical of deep philosophical issues, it resists burial and keeps springing back to life. It was Henri Bergson who revived the issue as a topic of 20th century philosophy. In his classic L’Évolution créatrice he wrote: I want to know why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe to a Principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or creates it, my thought rests on this principle only a few moments, for the same prob-

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lem recurs, this time in its full breadth and generality: Whence comes it, and how can it be understood, that anything exists? … Now, if I push these questions aside and go straight to what hides behind them, this is what I find:—Existence appears to me like a conquest over nought … If I ask myself why bodies or minds exist rather than nothing, I find no answer; but that a logical principle, such as A = A, should have the power of creating itself, triumphing over the nought throughout eternity, seems to me natural … Suppose, then, that the principle on which all things rest, and which all things manifest, possesses an existence of the same nature as that of the definition of the circle, or as that of the axiom A = A: the mystery of existence vanishes …4

Clearly, however, this idea of a “conquest over nothingness” along essentially logical lines is highly problematic. The “principle on which all things rest” simply cannot “possess an existence of the same nature” as that of a definition or logical axiom because (on the modern conception of the matter, at any rate) these are purely conceptual truths of reason (“analytic” truths) from which no factual juice can be extracted. Getting real existents from pure logic is just too much of a conjuring trick. That sort of hat cannot contain rabbits. Martin Heidegger held that the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is actually the most fundamental question of metaphysics, characterizing the entire subject as the “exfoliation” of this problem.5 Heidegger, however, was much less concerned to find a solution to the problem than to explain why the desire for an answer is part of the human condition and in examining its implications for the nature of man. Heidegger’s interest was not in answering the question, but in considering its significance for us as a creature who, in the (inevitable?) absence of understanding, confronts nothingness in the existential phenomenon of Angst. As one recent commentator observes: “So daunting is the question [of existence] that even a recent exponent of it, Heidegger, who terms it ‘the fundamental question of metaphysics,’ proposes no answer and does nothing towards showing how it might be answered.”6 Ludwig Wittgenstein was also fascinated by the issue. He maintained that “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”7 He told Norman Malcom that he sometimes experienced “certain feelings of amazement that anything should exist at all.”8 In A Lecture on Ethics, he returns to this theme: “it always hap-

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pens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me … [and] the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist’.”9 Relegating the issue to the limbo of mysteries conveniently provided Wittgenstein with a plausible reason for not dealing with it seriously. He dismissed those aforementioned locutions he was “inclined to use” as nonsense, because “It is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine its not existing.”10 The difficulty here lies in the ambiguity of “the world,” which might just mean some world or other, possibly including the empty world (in which case the wonder should indeed diminish—and the interest of the issue with it), or this particular world (in which case Wittgenstein would emerge as very unimaginative indeed). In recent days the problem has been the topic of an erudite but obscure book by Anna-Teresa Tymeniecka,11 which grapples valiantly with the issues without any single success in rendering them intelligible. It is also the subject of a long chapter in Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations. But this interesting and many-faceted discussion culminates in a recourse to a mystical understanding of nothingness that cannot, even on kindest interpretation, be said to throw much light on the subject. In fact, one usually good-natured reviewer was provoked by the tenor of Nozick’s discussion to protest against its lack of restraint. By the time one has struggled through this wild and woolly attempt to find a category beyond existence and non-existence, and marveled at such things as the graph showing “the amount of Nothingness Force it takes to nothing some more of the Nothingness Force being exerted,” one is ready to turn logical positivist on the Spot.12

One recent writer contemplates the prospect of making short shrift of the issue: “Why is there something rather nothing?”—“If there were nothing, you wouldn’t be here to ask the question.” Ask a silly question, get a silly

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answer … [W]hat makes the answer silly is that it tells the questioner no more than he must have known already.13

Actually, what makes the answer silly is that it answers the wrong question. It’s like responding “Because he’s now in the room” to the question “Why did Smith go through the door?” We know that Smith went through the door because he’s in the room, and we know that there’s something in the world because here we are. These answers are perfectly good responses to “How do you know that … T”-questions. But they are miserably inept answers to “Why is it the case that … T”questions. They reflect a posture that ignores the traditional and very useful distinction between knowledge-oriented rationes cognoscendi and fact-oriented rationes essendi. In general, it might be said that those philosophers who do not evade the problem by rejecting it as meaningless or intractable are profoundly intimidated by it. Whatever good sense they may display in other contexts deserts them on this occasion. With the notable exception of Leibniz, philosophers who have struggled with this riddle of existence have always found it difficult to keep their discussion of the issue on this side of nonsense. And yet, this issue of the existence of things is to all appearances, as fundamental, profound, and serious a problem as any that philosophy affords. Given that only one among alternative possible worlds exists—possibilities among which an empty world also figures—why should it be that the actually existing world is one of the nonempty ones—one with things in it? More generally, why should this world be actualized rather than that one? Such a question is not lightly got rid of. Certainly it is not resolved by the fact of being embarrassingly awkward to deal with. To be sure, the question of why anything whatsoever exists in the world has its problematic side. The global, universalistic character of such a question is bound to be a source of difficulty. When we try to develop an answer by the usual device of explaining one thing in terms of another, the former immediately expands to swallow the latter up. The question of existence-in-general cannot be dealt with as one of the standard generative sort that asks for the existence of one thing to be explained in terms of the existence of another. We cannot

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say “Well there’s X in the world, and X explains the existence of things” because this simply shifts the issue to X, which after all is itself an existent. If we want global explanations of existence of things in the world, we are going to have difficulty in getting them from existential premisses pertaining to what the world is like. Does this mean we cannot get them at all? Clearly what is wanted represents a very tall order. If we cannot use existential inputs, then we are asking for a great deal—an account that explains the emergence from an existentially empty realm of a nonempty world, a domain of existents. The explanation has to pull off a very neat trick: it has to account for a “change of phase” of certain items from the condition of mere possibility to the condition of actuality. 2. EXPLAINING PARTICULAR EXISTENCE Explaining is storytelling—the explanation of existence included. To explain the existence of something is to weave an account that makes it possible to understand how it is that this item has come into being— how it is that it is a part of prevailing reality and exists rather than not. The standard way of explaining the existence of something in the world is to proceed productively, which involves showing how its antecedents have functioned causally under the aegis of nature’s laws to bring this item into being. In this way we account for the existence of this item in terms of the causal operation of other, pre-existing items. Granted that the existence of a thing or the realization of a state of things can certainly be explained productively and retrospectively with reference to the causes that engendered the question arise: could it also be explained prospectively by casting as a necessary sine qua non condition for the realization of some actually realized subsequent state of affairs? Not really—unless that state of things were seen as somehow inevitable. For otherwise such a connective account would only show epistemically WHY WE SAY that it exists and not explain ontologically WHY it exists. Here we explain not the thing itself but our claims about it. Standardly existence explanations will therefore be productive in nature.

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Now this idea that whatever actually exists is somehow caused to do so may well hold within the spatiotemporal realm of real-worlds existence. (Within this domain the “Law of Causality” doubtless obtains in some form.) However, it does not hold elsewhere and, in particular, not for that real-world domain itself, in its comprehensive totality. For the standardly productive approach to explaining the existence of particular items simply will not work for explaining the existence of the whole. Here the idea of explaining one existent in terms of another will not work because the totality of existence is at issue. If the explanation of existence is to be addressed in a global and synoptic basis, some proceeding fundamentally different from the standard causal/productive approach will have to be employed, and explanation will have to proceed in different and, as it were, nonstandard terms. But perhaps existence need not be explained in a global and synoptic basis at all? Perhaps an explanation of the parts will suffice to explain the whole? 3. PROBLEMS OF THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE As this classic quip indicates, the question “Have you stopped beating your wife?” rests on the critical presupposition—viz. that you have a wife and have been beating her. And indeed every question involves some presupposition—viz. that there indeed is an answer to it. This also holds for our present questions about explaining the nature of existence, and it is hard to evade the assurance of the “Principle of Sufficient Reason” that with this—as with any other facts about reality— there indeed is an explanation of some sort for why the matter stands as is and not otherwise. In formulating a version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, Samuel Clarke and Leibniz shared the conviction that accounting for existence of the universe-as-a-whole requires explanatory resort to something above and beyond the universe itself.14 In reacting against this line of thought, David Hume wrote: Did I show you the particular cause of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think that it very unreasonable,

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should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts.15

This Humean position holds that if we are in a position to explain any and every member of a series of events (even an infinite one) we are thereby in a position to explain the series as a whole. The underlying idea of a distributive, piece-meal explanation is far older, however. Thus William of Ockham wrote in ca. 1320: The whole multitude of … causes is indeed caused, but neither by any one thing that is part of this multitude nor by something outside this multitude, but rather one part is caused by one thing which is part of this multitude, and another by another thing, and so on ad infinitum.16

And later traces of this line of thinking can be found in many critics of the Cosmological Argument from Immanuel Kant17 down to such 20th century writers as Paul Edwards.18 In reviewing the literature of the problem, William R. Rowe dubbed the idea of distributive explanation at issue the “Hume-Edwards Principle,” formulating it as follows: If the existence of every member of a set is explained the existence of that set is thereby explained.19

In unison with this line of thought, philosophers of positivist inclinations often maintain that we should forget about general explanations for reality-at-large and pursue our efforts at understanding the world in a disaggregated, piece-meal manner. They insist that in matters of ontology we simply need not try to account for existence-at-large in one all-encompassing collective explanation, but simply to account for the reality’s several constituent elements in a way that proceeds in a disaggregated, seriatim manner. And on the basis of this perspective they tend to eschew the global and synoptic perspective of the accustomed “big questions” of the philosophical tradition. The thinkers of this tendency (Hume and Edwards themselves included) have seen the principle as an instrument of ontological simplification (or indeed even purification) and have viewed its salient lesson as lying in the implicit injunction: “Don’t trouble to ask for a collective explanation of existence-at-large, a comprehensive distributive

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explanation of the particular existents will provide you everything you need and want.” Yet notwithstanding its widespread acceptance and influential impact, the principle is deeply problematic, nay simply wrong. 4. COUNTEREXAMPLES It is not hard to find plausible counter-examples to the Hume-Edwards thesis: • If the existence of each book in its collection is explained, the existence of the library-as-a-whole is thereby explained. • If the existence of each part of the car is explained, the existence of the vehicle-as-a-whole is thereby explained. • If the existence of each composition in our symphony’s evening program is explained, the existence of the program-as-a-whole is thereby explained. Such examples cast a deep shadow of doubt over the Hume-Edwards thesis. For it is only too obvious that to explain and account for the existence of the words does little to explain or account for the existence of the sentence. To do the latter we would have to account not merely for the existence of those individual words but for their collective copresence in that particular context. Constituent oriented existence explanations that do not account for contextual co-presence within a prespecified entirety cannot explain its existence. Explaining the parts may achieve nothing whatever towards explaining the existence of wholes. For those wholes must, as such, have a unifying identity and an explanation of their constituents viewed separately and individually does not suffice to explain it. Nor does explaining each event in a series explain its entire course, much as someone’s understanding each sentence may well fail to explain their understanding the whole book. In other words, the Hume-Edwards thesis suffers from a critical flaw of omission. For where the parts of wholes are concerned, context makes for structure. It does not suffice to note that we are dealing

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with a three letter word in which the letters D, G, and O figure copresently, seeing that there yet remains the massive difference between GOD and DOG. Moreover, the aspect of explanation and understanding can be put aside and the principle viewed ontologically rather than epistemically to in the form: If every part of a whole exists, then so does the whole itself. or If every member of a collectivity exists, then so does that collectivity itself. The preceding examples of libraries, automobiles, and symphony programs show that this ontological version of the Hume-Edwards Principle also does not work. Only within totally unstructured collectivities (such as the mathematicians’ set) will the envisioned relationships obtain. So if—contrary to fact—our sole concern were with the abstract rudimentary “sets” of the set theory (Mengenlehre) of pure mathematics, the problem would not arise. Those mathematical “sets” are defined purely extensionally on the basis of their membership alone: they have no form or structure whatsoever. But this circumstance is realized only in abstractions and never concretely. And in any other setting—even that of the “ordered sets” of pure mathematics—what the principle claims just is not so. In general, the world’s wholes always have a characteristic structure and could not be what they are without it. The inherent problem of the Hume-Edwards Principle accordingly emerges when one steps back to consider just what it would take to fix it. And this comes to light in considering a reformulation of the thesis by the addition of a few crucial and critical words: If the existence of each part of a whole is explained in conjunction with an account that also explains their mutual coordination within the larger overarching setting of that whole, then the existence of that whole is thereby explained.

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As this amplification shows, that which is missing from the HumeEdwards thesis—and engenders the flaw from which all of those counterexamples—is the lack of an account of the co-existence of those several constituents as parts of the whole in question. For only an explanation of the existence of the parts of a whole is their role as constituting parts of that specific whole will explain the existence of that whole. It is this holistic demand—a factor which most exponents of the Hume-Edwards Principle deem anathema—that is indispensably required for the viability of the principle.20 Without this factor the Principle cannot do its intended work. The long and short of it is that the Hume-Edwards thesis radically oversimplifies the actual situation. For it rides roughshod over the consideration that over and above items or objects there are structures (patterns, forms of order) that can organize those items into different sorts of wholes, and that throughout our concerns with collectivities these structures matter. And it does not matter whether the structure is processual/temporal rather than physical/geometric. (To explain the existence of each issue of a complex menu does not account for the meal-as-a-whole.) The Hume-Edwards Principle radically oversimplifies the actual situation by failing to reckon with the holistic aspect of the situation. Explaining the parts severally and distributively simply does not account for the collective unity at issue with their coordinate co-existence as part of one single whole. The inherent logic of the situation is such that in asking for a collective explanation of existence one is stating a demand that no merely distributive explanation— however extensive and elaborate—is able to meet. In explanatory contexts the move from parts to whole is highly problematic. Consider an example. We can explain for any time t of his lifespan why Kant never left Prussia roughly as follows. For every such t, there is a timespan e such that at the time t-minus-e he was at such-and-such a location in Prussia, and there simply was not enough time, given the available means of locomotion, for him to reach the boundary within the timespan e. That achieves an explanation of sorts. But would anyone hold that this yields an adequate explanation of why, throughout his lifetime, Kant never left Prussia?21We must not

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be misled into thinking that we have explained the whole as such when we are in a position to account for its membership seriatim. When we ask an explanatory question about a whole, we don’t just want to know about it as a collection of parts, but want to know about it holistically qua whole. A seriatim explanation of why each and every dodo died is not thereby an explanation of why this type of bird died out as a species. When we know why each particular day was rain-free (there were no rain clouds about at that point) we still have not explained the occurrence of a drought. Here we need something deeper—something that accounts for the entire Gestalt. The Hume-Edwards Principle fails to heed certain critical conceptual distinctions that are readily brought to light by means of a bit of symbolic machinery. Specifically, let us adopt the following abbreviations: p @ q for “p [is true and] provides an adequate explanatory account for q,” where the variables p and q range over factual claims. E!x for “x exists,”\ where the variable x ranges over existing objects.

Since the variable x ranges over existents, we have it that (∀x)E!x. On this basis it is readily brought to view that the form of the statement “Everything has an explanation” or “There is an explanation for everything” admits of two very different constructions: Distributive explanation: “There is some case-specific explanation to account for each and any existential fact.” (1)

(∀x)(∃p)(p @ E!x)

Collective explanation: “There is one single generic explanation that accounts for all existential facts—each and every one of them.” (2)

(∃p)(∀x)(p @ E!x)22

As these specifications indicate, two decidedly different questions can be at issue, namely:

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• Does every existent have its own (individual) existenceexplanation? • Is the one overarching single explanation that suffices to account for existence at large, encompassing each of the things that exists? To be sure, we have it that (2) → (1), but of course the converse does not hold. The Hume-Edwards thesis proceeds on the mistaken idea that it does. With distinctive and collective explanations different questions are at issue and different matters are at stake. And in posing different questions we must be prepared for the possibility of different answers. 5. SOME CONTEMPLATED ACCOMMODATION But just how is it that those considerations regarding the role of structure actually invalidate the Hume-Edwards Principle? In most cases, objects are like children’s play-blocks—items that can be assembled in various ways, and their own existence thereby nowise explains the existence of the whole of which they can be components. The same components, in sum, can in principle conjoin differently to make up different wholes. But it would seem on first thought that the universe-as-a-whole is going to be an exception here. After all there is—and (ex hypothesis) only can be—just one of these, so that irrespective of how the components get assembled there will be only one single all-embracing totality. The idea of there actually being different universes is highly problematic.23 And in consequence the issue of structure becomes irrelevant and the preceding objections to the Hume-Edwards thesis fall aside. On this basis the Hume-Edwards aficionados might argue as follows in endeavoring to meet the thrust of the preceding strictures: In resorting to the Hume-Edwards Principle we have one very special application in mind. For our aim is to dismiss the request for one single comprehensive explanation of existence-at-large. And it is here that we want to insist on the need for distributive rather than collective explana-

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tion. Our concern is not with such micro-collectivities as words or books or cars or symphony programs. Our concern is with Reality-as-awhole. The trouble with all those proposed counter-examples—books in a collection, part of an automobile, musical pieces in a program—is that in each case those items could be assembled otherwise than as-is, and could in principle belong to different wholes. But this is not so with the physical constitution of the actual universe—the totality of existents. All of those counter-examples rest on a misleading analogy. The world’s constituents cannot be differently assembled into different universes. There is and can be only one universe. To think of it as possibly different is to ignore the inherent necessity of things. Once we have (and have explained) the existence of these constituents there is nothing left to explain.

However, this defense will not do. For even if it is acknowledged that there is only one single all-embracing universe, this Principle of Universe Uniqueness will actually leave the real issue untouched. The reality of it is that even if we abandon the idea of different (possible) universes, we still have at our beck and call the idea of different possibilities for the constitution of this universe—the one and only actual one. And this factor of different possibilities suffices to keep the structure-oriented objection in play. For the requisite uniqueness could be achieved only by reducing to one not just the number of universes, but even the number of possibilities for a universe. Only at the price of commitment to a block-universe of the necessitarian dismissal of alternative possibilities could the Hume-Edwards Principle be maintained in the face of structural considerations to the effect that the given contents of a manifold can be differently organized. 6. A LAST-DITCH STAND In endeavoring something of a last-ditch stand, Hume-Edwards partisans might propose taking a very different line as follows: You misunderstand us. We are actually not trying to enunciate an explanatory principle at all. Rather, our concern is with a procedural policy; we want to urge a certain line of approach to the global explanation of existence. Our position is not that of the structure: “Don’t bother to

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ask for a collective explanation of existence at large because a distributive explanation will give you everything you want.” Our position is, rather: “Don’t go so far as to ask for a collective explanation for existence at large because this is asking for too much. For global explanation is something inherently unrealizable. A distributive explanation of existence is the best and the most that one can ever hope to get.”

However, to endorse this policy-recommendation is—clearly!— something quite different from accepting the Hume-Edwards Principle as a factual thesis, and any victory that could be gained by this particular defense is Pyrrhic. For in taking this line one does not support—or even invoke—the Hume-Edwards thesis as generally understood, but actually abandons it. Moreover, once the idea is abandoned that the policy rests on a correct and cogent principle, then justifying that policy emerges to saddle its exponent with a heavy burden of proof—one that goes counter to much of the philosophic tradition and requires its exponents to embark on a large and deeply problematic project. What does all of this mean for the issue of holistically synoptic explanation? It serves to indicate that Leibniz and Clarke were right at least in this, that explaining the existence of the universe-as-a-whole is something that encompasses a distinctive demand over and above a putative explanation of existence of the individual components involved. That mega-issue is not to be sidelined by a disintegrative principle of the sort envisioned by Hume and Edwards. In the final analysis their thesis fails in its aspiration to provide a small instrument for sidelining a big issue. But of course when the issue of existence-explanation is posed with respect to the decidedly unusual issue of existence-as-a-whole we must expect that with what clearly is an unusual question, there will also have to be an unusual answer. The rationale of the HumeEdwards Principle is simply unsustainable. The problem of over-all explanation simply cannot be resolved substantively on a secular, piece by piece basis. If there is to be a synoptic explanation of existence, it will have to be something distinctive and different that faces the explanatory problem in its totality.

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Table I I.

The question is illegitimate and improper. [Rejectionism]

II.

The question is legitimate 1) but unanswerable: it represents a mystery. [Mystificationism] 2) and answerable a) though only by the via negativa of an insistence that there really is no “answer” in the ordinary sense—no sort of explanatory rationale at all. The existence of things in the world is simply a brute fact. [The a-rational or no-reason approach.] b) via a substantial route of roughly the following sort: “There is a substance [viz. God] whose position in the scheme of things is one that lies outside the world, and whose activity explains the existence of things in the world.” [The theological approach.] c) via a nonsubstantival route of roughly the following sort: “There is a principle of creativity that obtains in abstracto (i.e., without being embedded in the characteristics of any substance and thus without a basis in any preexisting thing), and the operation of this principle accounts for the existence of things.” [The nomological approach.] d) via the quasi-logical route of considerations of absolute necessity. [The necessitarian approach.]

7. ALTERNATIVE RESPONSES The explanation of existence can, in theory, be addressed by any of the various lines of response set out in Table 1. This inventory pretty well exhausts the range of available alternatives. We may refer to these six approaches as the rejectionist, mystificational, arational, theological, nomological, and necessitarian solutions, respectively. Let us examine the assets and liabilities of these various positions.

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The Mystificational Approach The mystificational position sees the “problem of existence” as genuine but unsolvable. It classifies the question as an authentic insolubile to which no satisfactory answer can be found. This approach recognizes the problem of the existence of things in the world as legitimate and acknowledges that we have a real and pressing interest in this issue. But it insists that we cannot profitably pursue this interest. With skeptical philosophers and Barthian theologians, it poses the question: Have we a right to demand a reason for things? Can we avoid recognizing that this question is simply beyond the powers of human intelligence? Is it not untenably presumptuous to demand that reality should satisfy our intellect’s demand for “natural explanations”? And can we suppose that an explanation so accessible that we would deem it plausible actually gets at the real truth of things? Mystificationism insists that, while the question is indeed appropriate, the attainment of any satisfactory solution to it nevertheless lies beyond our reach. The clear advantage of such a noncommittal approach is that it spares us the daunting and difficult task of framing a serious proposal for answering the riddle—of trying to arrive at some definite resolution. But its obvious disadvantage is its leaving us in a state of suspended animation with regard to this challenging and intriguing problem. To see all prospect of solution as unattainable is to leave matters unresolved. It means that we can only contemplate possibilities for resolution but cannot settle the matter of deciding among them. Now it is perfectly conceivable that this condition of indecision and suspension of judgment as between the alternatives (of indecisive isostheneia, as the ancient sceptics called it) is a position in which we will eventually find ourselves. It is altogether possible that, after determined but vain attempts at finding a satisfactory answer, we might be led to conclude in the end that no such answer can be validated. We may even eventually convince ourselves, Fox and Grapes fashion, that further effort is not worthwhile—that the game is not worth the candle. But this sort of thing is clearly a position of last resort. To speak of an intrinsic mystery here serves rather to highlight the difficulty than to remove it. We may conceivably find ourselves driven there

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eventually, but it is hardly the place to start. Indeed it seems plausible to clutch at any straw to avoid this result. Given the interest of the issue and its importance for the project of achieving a rational grasp on our place in the scheme of things, if there is any reasonable way to avoid agnosticism here, it seems well advised to avail ourselves of it. The key point is this: The existence of the world is contingent— given that other alternative modes of world-arrangement are theoretically possible (in particular an empty world) we want to know why the world exists as it does (and in particular why it contains things). The recognition of this world’s contingency—of its being one alternative among others—cries out for explanation so urgently that in its absence we cannot rest intellectually satisfied.24 What is at issue here is not a metaphysical Principle of Sufficient Reason maintaining on grounds of general principle that every phenomena has an effective explanation, but a methodological principle to the effect that we should always do our utmost to find sensible explanations of phenomena so long as any hope of doing so remains. Admittedly, we cannot preestablish that reality will indulge our demands for intelligibility. But we have no sensible alternative to proceeding on the supposition that our explanatory guest can prove successful—that there indeed is an explanation which might be found. We cannot win the race if we do not enter it—and one price of entry is the supposition that a finish line exists. The Arational Approach The arational resolution in effect maintains that things exist “just because.” It takes the stance that there simply is no particular reason for existence. This well-stocked universe of ours has somehow just happened into being—its existence is simply an irrationalizable brute fact. There really is no explanation for the world’s nonemptiness: “That’s just the way it is”—take it with no further questions asked. (Recall Carlyle’s remark on being informed that some lady said she had learned to accept the world—“By G-d, she’d better!”) The world’s existence, as is, is simply a “brute fact.” But this is surely no more than a solution of last resort. It is like the explanation “on impulse” offered to account for someone’s action. It

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is not so much an answer to the question of explanation as a concession of defeat—an indication that our efforts at finding a more adequate solution have failed. The arational approach verges on mystificationism. Perhaps the world’s existence is not a matter of brute (i.e., inexplicable) fact, but simply needs no explanation. Perhaps the request for an explanation of things-in-general rests on a mistaken basis. Perhaps only particular items need be explained and it is a sort of categorymistake to ask for explanations at the level of generality. This seems to be what Bertrand Russell argued against Father Copleston in their celebrated B.B.C. debate on God as a first cause: I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists has a mother. And it seems to me that your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother. But obviously the human race hasn’t a mother—that’s a different logical sphere.25

On such a view, there is—indeed there can be—no appropriate explanation of the world’s existence or fundamental nature. But Russell’s reasoning is flawed. Granted, the fact that every individual member of the class C (humans) has a cause of type X (i.e. has parents) of course does not mean that the totality of the class C will have a cause of this particular type. But this does not imply that we should not look for a cause of C-as-a-whole—for example that once we know that children are born of parents we should cease trying to account for homo sapiens at large within the framework of evolutionary explanation. Russell’s counterexample does not show that we should not ask for an explanation at all, just that we should not ask for one of a particular sort. To reject the arational approach we need not maintain a substantive Principle of Sufficient Reason—we need not preestablish that there indeed always is some sort of explanation for any fact about the world. It suffices to take the methodological line: proceed on the assumption that there always is an explanation; hew to this working hypothesis through thick and thin. For the issue is an important one, and as rational beings we would like to settle it to our rational satisfaction. It makes good sense to operate on the principle that even when our

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best efforts at finding an explanation bear no fruit, this is so simply because we haven’t looked far enough. From the methodological perspective, the no-reason approach appears not as a resolution of the issue, but as an excuse for not dealing with it with sufficient determination. One could properly take the arational line only if there were good reasons based on appropriate positive information for holding that there cannot be an answer—that the line of “no possible explanation” is appropriate. (We can, for example, take this line in quantum theory: asked why this atom of a transuranic element disintegrated just when it did the response is to say that no causal explanation is in principle possible.) But this approach is not available to us in the case at hand. There is no earthly reason to think that this sort of situation obtains. Nobody had produced a good argument why the arational approach should be endorsed. Its sole recommendation is that it affords a convenient exit from difficulty. The Theological Approach The ancient tradition of “the cosmological argument” resolves the question of world’s existence (and nature) by recourse to the productive agency of a creator God.26 This theological approach is so familiar that little need be said about it. It grounds the existence of the world’s things in the machinations of a world-external creative being—a necessarily existing agent who is self-subsisting and, in turn, serves as causal ground of the existence of the things of this world. God is thus seen as creator (causa mundi), and as himself as uncaused (or self-caused, causa sui) to avert the regress threatened by the question: Why is there a Supreme Being rather than nothing? For a long time in the history of human inquiry, people inclined to answer ultimate questions about the world with the response: God made it that way. Yet this approach to the issue has its problems. The presence of things in the world is a matter of natural fact, and the explanation of natural facts by theological means is hardly a satisfactory option. The point is not simply that the odium theologicum is too strong at this time of day for a supernatural grounding of natural existence to be deemed acceptable. It is that questions about the natural or-

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der should be addressed in nature-correlative terms of reference wherever this is at all possible. Kant’s formulation of the point cannot be improved upon: To have recourse to God as the Creator of all things in explaining the arrangements of nature and their changes is at any rate not a scientific explanation, but a complete confession that one has come to the end of his philosophy, since he is compelled to assume something [supernatural] … to account for something he sees before his very eyes.27

The drawback of the theological solution to the problem of existence is that it uses a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It is unsatisfying to try to answer such questions, with Descartes, through recourse to the mere will or, with Leibniz, through recourse to the good will of the divine creator, because of the rational proprieties implicit in the scholastic dictum that scientific deliberations are not entitled to an explanatory recourse to God (non in philosophia recurrere est ad deum). Whatever be God’s proper role in the scheme of things, it is not to solve our philosophical or scientific difficulties. Invoking a supernatural agency to solve our problems in understanding nature is inherently questionable etiquette. No doubt a principle that can explain the existence of things in the world will have to invoke circumstances that are in some degree extraordinary and preternatural in being outside nature’s common course, but it need not go so far as to invoke something supernatural—something as much “above” or remote from nature as the omnipotent deity of traditional monotheism. What is at issue here is simply a point of methodology, of explanatory economy, of accomplishing desired ends by the least complex means. If there is any prospect of resolving a question in a more straightforward way, we should avail ourselves of it. The Necessitarian Approach The necessitarian approach has it that the world exists as a matter of strict (or “logical”) necessity. It takes Spinoza’s line of maintaining that the world’s very nature requires its existence: like the God of tra-

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ditional theology, it is something that cannot but exist. This approach was already encountered in the Bergson passage quoted above. It proposes to explain existence as somehow a matter of “logical principle.” We are called on to take the stance that “the principle on which all things rest, and which all things manifest, possesses an existence of the same nature as that of the definition of the circle, or as that of the axiom A = A.” But such a way of addressing the problem of existence is simply too peremptory. Given that alternatives can readily be conceived, how can one possibly establish necessitarian inevitability? How could the constraints of logic alone possibly engender the arrangements of fact? Even to consider this alternative is to become persuaded of its unmanageability. The Rejectionist Approach Questions like “Why is there anything at all?”, “Why are things-ingeneral as they actually are?”, and “Why is the law structure of the world as it is?” cannot be answered within the standard causal framework. For causal explanations need inputs: they are essentially transformational (rather than formational pure and simple). They can address themselves to specific issues distributively and seriatim, but not collectively and holistically. If we persist in posing the sorts of global questions at issue, we cannot hope to resolve them in orthodox causal terms. Does this mean that such questions are improper? On the rejectionist approach, the entire question of obtaining the (or a) reason for the existence of things is simply dismissed as illegitimate. Even to inquire into the existence of the entire universe is held to be somehow illegitimate. It is just a mistake to ask for a causal explanation of existence per se; the question should be abandoned as improper—as not representing a legitimate issue. We are assured that in the light of closer scrutiny the explanatory “problem” vanishes as meaningless. Dismissal of the problem as illegitimate is generally based on the idea that the question at issue involves an illicit presupposition. It looks to answers of the form “Z is the (or an) explanation for the existence of things.” Committed to this response-schema, the question has the thesis “There is a ground for the existence of things—

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existence-in-general is the sort of thing that has an explanation.” And this presumption—we are told—might well be false. In principle its falsity could emerge in two ways: 1. on grounds of deep general principle inherent in the conceptual “logic” of the situation; or 2. on grounds of a concrete doctrine of substantive metaphysics or science that precludes the prospect of an answer—even as quantum theory precludes the prospect of an answer to “Why did that atom of Californium decay at that particular time?” Let us begin by considering if the question of existence might be invalidated by considerations of the first sort and root in circumstances that lie deep in the conceptual nature of things. Consider the following discussion by C. G. Hempel: Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? … But what kind of an answer could be appropriate? What seems to be wanted is an explanatory account which does not assume the existence of something or other. But such an account, I would submit, is a logical impossibility. For generally, the question “Why is it the case that A? is answered by “Because B is the case” … [A]n answer to our riddle which made no assumptions about the existence of anything cannot possibly provide adequate grounds … The riddle has been constructed in a manner that makes an answer logically impossible …28

But this plausible line of argumentation has shortcomings. The most serious of these is that it fails to distinguish appropriately between the existence of things on the one hand and the obtaining of facts on the other,29 and supplementarily also between specifically substantival facts regarding existing things, and nonsubstantival facts regarding states of affairs that are not dependent on the operation of preexisting things. We are confronted here with a principle of hypostatization to the effect that the reason for anything must ultimately always inhere in the operations of things. And at this point we come to a prejudice as deep-

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rooted as any in Western philosophy: the idea that things can only originate from things, that nothing can come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit) in the sense that no thing can emerge from a thingless condition.30 Now, this somewhat ambiguous principle is perfectly unproblematic when construed as saying that if the existence of something real has a correct explanation at all, then this explanation must pivot on something that is really and truly so. Clearly, we cannot explain one fact without involving other facts to do the explaining. But the principle becomes highly problematic when construed in the manner of the precept that “things must come from things,” that substances must inevitably be invoked to explain the existence of substances. For we then become committed to the thesis that everything in nature has an efficient cause in some other natural thing that is its causal source, its reason for being. This stance is implicit in Hempel’s argument. And it is explicit in much of the philosophical tradition. Hume, for one, insists that there is no feasible way in which an existential conclusion can be obtained from nonexistential premisses.31 And the principle is also supported by philosophers of a very different ilk on the other side of the channel—including Leibniz himself, who writes: [T]he sufficient reason [of contingent existence] … must be outside this series of contingent things, and must reside in a substance which is the cause of this series …32

Such a view amounts to a thesis of genetic homogeneity which says (on analogy with the old but now rather obsolete principle that “life must come from life”) that “things must come from things,” or “stuff must come from stuff,” or “substance must come from substance.” What, after all, could be more plausible than the precept that only real (existing) causes can have real (existing) effects? But despite its appeal, this principle has its problems. It presupposes that there must be a type-homogeneity between cause and effect on the lines of the ancient Greek principle that “like must come from like.” This highly dubious principle of genetic homogeneity has taken hard knocks in the course of modern science. Matter can come from energy, and living organisms from complexes of inorganic molecules.

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If the principle fails with matter and life, need it hold for substance as such? The claim that it does so would need a very cogent defense. None has been forthcoming to date. Is it indeed true that only things can engender things? Why need a ground of change always inhere in a thing rather than in a nonsubstantival “condition of things-in-general?” Must substance inevitably arise from substance? Even to state such a principle is in effect to challenge its credentials. For why must the explanation of facts rest in the operation of things? To be sure, fact-explanations must have inputs (all explanations must). Facts must root in facts. But why thing-existential ones? A highly problematic bit of metaphysics is involved here. Dogmas about explanatory homogeneity aside, there is no discernible reason why an existential fact cannot be grounded in nonexistential ones, and why the existence of substantial things cannot be explained on the basis of some nonsubstantival circumstance or principle whose operations can constrain existence in something of the way in which equations can constrain nonzero solutions. Once we give up the principle of genetic homogeneity and abandon the idea that existing things must originate in existing things, we remove the key prop of the idea that asking for an explanation of things in general is a logically inappropriate demand. The footing of the rejectionist approach is gravely undermined. There are, of course, other routes to rejectionism. One of them turns on the doctrine of Kant’s Antinomy that it is illegitimate to try to account for the phenomenal universe as a whole (the entire Erscheinungswelt). Explanation on this view is inherently partitive: phenomena can only be accounted for in terms of other phenomena, so that it is in principle improper to ask for an account of phenomena-as-a-whole. The very idea of an explanatory science of nature-as-a-whole is illegitimate. Yet this view is deeply problematic. To all intents and purposes, science strives to explain the age of the universe-as-a-whole, its structure, its volume, its laws, its composition, etc. Why not then its existence as well? The decree that explanatory discussion is by nature necessarily partial and incapable of dealing with the whole lacks plausibility. It seems a mere device for sidestepping embarrassingly difficult questions.

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Rejectionism is not a particularly appealing course. Any alternative to rejectionism has the significant merit of retaining for rational inquiry and investigation a question that would otherwise be abandoned. The question of “the reason why” behind existence is surely important. If there is any possibility of getting an adequate answer—by hook or by crook—it seems reasonable that we would very much like to have it. There is nothing patently meaningless about this “riddle of existence.” And it does not seem to rest in any obvious way on any particularly problematic presupposition—apart from the epistemically optimistic yet methodologically inevitable idea that there are always reasons why things are as they are (the “principle of sufficient reason”). To dismiss the question as improper or illegitimate is fruitless. Try as we will to put the question away, it comes back to haunt us.33 And so we would do well to look for the most promising possibility. For here as elsewhere we have no rational alternative but to accept the best of the available options, whatever may be its shortcomings or defects. NOTES 1

The tract is published in Gerhardt, Phil., Vol. VII, pp. 302–08. An English translation is given in Loemker, pp. 486–91. For a useful recent study see Diogenes Allen, “Mechanical explanations and the Ultimate Origin of the Universe Accordingly to Leibniz,” Studia Leibnitiana, Sonderheft 11 (Wiesbaden, 1983).

2

To be sure, it could be maintained that there is a difference between an “empty world” and “no world at all” in that even an empty world can have a nature of sorts qua world—by way of characterizing hypotheticals like “If there were things here, they would have to have such-and-such a nature.” (Cf. sect. 9 below.)

3

One cannot, that is, move from N(∃w)E!w to (∃w)NE!w.

4

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. by A. Mitchell (New York, 1944 [Modern Library]), pp. 299–301.

5

Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt, 1967); 2 tr., Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, 1959), Chap I. Also tr. by D. F. Krell in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York, 1977), pp. 95–112.

6

Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 115. As Heidegger sees it, such a metaphysical concern roots in Seinsvergessenheit and is accordingly etwas, des überwundern werden muss, although it is counterproductive

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NOTES

to strive to overcome metaphysical worries instead of waiting, gelassen, for das Geschick des Seins to come to our aid. 7

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922), sect. 6.44 (p. 186).

8

Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 1958), p. 20.

9

Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in J. H. Gill (ed.), Philosophy Today, No. 1 (New York and London, 1968), pp. 4–14. Wittgenstein here describes a particularly profound experience as having the character “that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world.” Gill’s anthology also contains notes by Fredrich Waismann on a conversation with Wittgenstein on the same subject. Cf. also G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus London, 1955), p. 173.

10

Op. cit., P. 10.

11

Anna-Teresa Tyrneniecka, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (Assen, 1966).

12

Myles Burnyeat in the Times Literary Supplement, October 15, 1982, p. 1136.

13

David Lewis, Philosophical Papers (New York and Oxford, 1983), p. 23.

14

See Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attribute of God (London, 1705), and G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, sect’s 37–38.

15

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Edinburgh: 1779), Part IX. See also Joseph K. Campbell, “Hume’s Refutation of the Cosmological Argument,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 40 (1996), pp. 159–73.

16

William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, ed. by P. Boehner (Edinburg: Nelson, 1957), p. 124.

17

A deep distrust of aggregative totalization pervades the whole first section of “The Antinomy of Pure Reason” in the Critique of Pure Reason.

18

Paul Edwards, “The Cosmological Argument,” The Rationalist Annual for the Year 1959 (London: Pemberton, 1960 [??]), reprinted in Donald R. Burrell (ed.), The Cosmological Argument (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

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NOTES 19

William R. Rowe, “Two Criticism of the Cosmological Argument,” The Monist, vol. 54 (1970); reprinted in W. L. Rowe and W. Wainwright (eds.) Philosophy of Religion: Selective Readings, 2nd edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanavich, 1989), pp. 142–56. (See p. 153.) On this principle see also Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Alexander R. Pruss, “The Hume-Edwards Principle and the Cosmological Argument,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 434 (1988), pp. 149– 65.

20

Note that the cognate thesis “If every member of a collection has a certain property then so does the collection as a whole” is obviously in trouble. It works just fine with arguments like “If every part of a machine is made of iron, then the machineas-a-whole is made of iron.” Or “If every part of a field is in Pennsylvania then so is the field as a whole.” But it fails grievously to obtain in general, seeing that it commits the so-called Fallacy of Composition. Every member of the collection may well fit in this box without this being true of the entire collection. Or consider a mathematical example. Every member of the series {1}, {1,2}, {1, 2 3} etc. is a finite set, but the series-as-a-whole certainly is not. As Patterson Brown has rightly observed, with inference by composition “each such proof must be considered on its own merits”. See his “Infinite Causal Regression” in Anthony Kenny (ed.), Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), pp. 214–236. (See p. 230.)

21

A strange object springs into being as of t0; it does not exist at t0 but does exist at any subsequent time. Now for any time t after t0 we can explain its existence at t by noting that it existed at the prior time t-minus-epsilon and (so we may suppose) is self-preserving. But would anyone suppose that this explains its existence at large? (I owe this example to Michael B. Burke.) Cf. also the discussions of Chapter III of William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, 1975).

22

Note that neither of these is the same as (∃p)(p @ (∀x)E!x) which obtains trivially given the symbolic conventions adopted here.

23

Actually this is an exaggeration in the face of multiverse theory in quantum cosmology. Here the issue has to be kicked upstairs, subject to the idea that it is the multiverse rather than the universe that is of necessity unique.

24

Regarding the “experience of contingency,” see Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (Chicago, 1958), pp. 110–13,163–64, and 186.

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NOTES 25

Reprinted in John Hick (ed.), Classical and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, 1970), pp. 288–289. Cf. also Diogenes Allen in Studia Leibnitiana, op. cit., p 34.

26

See William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (London, 1980), and William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, 1975). Some relevant texts are anthologized in Donald R. Burrill (ed.), The Cosmological Argument (Garden City, 1967).

27

Immanuel Kant, C.Pr.R., p. 138 (Akad.).

28

Carl G. Hempel, “Science Unlimited,” The Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science, vol. 14 (1973), pp. 187–202. (See p. 200). Our italics.

29

Note too that the question of the existence of facts is a horse of a very different color from that of the existence of things. There being no things is undoubtedly a possible situation, there being no facts is not (since if the situation were realized, this would itself constitute a fact).

30

Aristotle taught that every change must emanate from a “mover,” i.e., a substance whose machinations provide the cause of change. This commitment to causal reification is at work in much of the history of Western thought. That its pervasiveness is manifest at virtually every juncture is clear from William Lane Craig’s interesting study of The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (London, 1980)

31

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (ed. N. K. Smith; London, 1922), p. 189.

32

G. W. Leibniz, “Principles of Nature and of Grace,” sect. 8, italics supplied. Compare St. Thomas: Of necessity, herefore, anything in process of change is being changed by something else. (S.T., IA 2,3). The idea that only substances can produce changes goes back to Thomas’ master, Aristotle. In Plato and the Presocratics, the causal efficacy of principles is recognized (e.g., the love and strife of Empedocles).

33

For criticisms of ways of avoiding the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” see Chap. III of William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, 1975). Cf. also Donald R. Burrill (ed.), The Cosmological Argument (Garden City, 1967), esp. “The Cosmological Argument” by Paul Edwards.

Chapter Two THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION SYNOPSIS (1) The explanation of existence-as-a-whole must ultimately reach outside the causal order of existential domain (2) it will have to lie in considerations regarding how matters work in the domain of possibility. (3) The phase transaction from possibility to actuality is governed by proto-physical laws that canalize the emergence of the actual from the manifold of possibility. (4) This process will have to proceed by elimination rather than production. 1. ABANDONING CAUSALITY

E

xistence-at-large cannot be accounted for in the order of causality—of standard cause-and-effect explanation. For in this mode of explanation we must have existing inputs to achieve existing outputs: if the effect is to exist, the cause must do so as well. If we persist in posing those global questions, some extraordinary mechanism must be invoked because we cannot hope to resolve them in terms of ordinary efficient causality. For causal explanations require existential inputs to act as causes. And this vitiates their utility in the present context. As David Lewis has rightly noted, the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” in the specifically causal sense invites the dismissive response of telling the questioner “that his explanandum is so global a feature of the world that it leaves no room for causes distinct from itself, and hence it cannot have any causal history.”1 This circumstance means that an adequate explanation of existenceas-a-whole must reach outside the existential realm: it will have to lie

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in considerations regarding how matters work in the domain of possibility. We will thus have to take explanatory recourse to a hylarchic principle of some sort whose range of operation is critically the (proto-existential) sphere of what is possible but (as yet) nonexistent. Accordingly, the idea of a hylarchic principle that grounds the existence of things not in preexisting things but rather in a functional principle of some sort—a specifically nonsubstantival state of affairs—becomes something that one has to entertain. The justification for resorting to this explanatory strategy is hypothetical in structure: “If you are going to explain existence at all, then you can do no better than to explain it along the lines of such a hylarchic principle.” The justificatory rationale is not one of alternative-elimination (“this or nothing”), but of comparative optimization (“this or nothing better”). And just here roots the idea of a nomological approach that proceeds outside the order of efficient causality and sees the existence of the world as constrained by (proto) lawful principles of constraint within the manifold of possibility rather than produced by efficient causes operative within the existential domain’s realm of natural law. The shortcomings of all available alternatives renders an approach made in terms of a non-causal reduction principle worthy of close and sympathetic attention. 2. THE MANIFOLD OF POSSIBILITY AND ITS LAWFUL STRUCTURE The classic “Hempelian” model of explanation2 has it that explanation standardly proceeds by deriving the fact-to-be-explained [E] deductively from a body of relevant background fact [F] together with the body of applicable laws [L]. • Background facts [F] explanans • Laws [L] ∴ Fact-to-be explained [E]: explanandum To account for an existential fact this model of explanation pivots the issue on laws: X exists because the world’s causal lawfulness requires it.

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Now if the argument is to be deductively valid, then it comes to the inconsistency of F, L, not-E, so that we have: F, not-E ├ not L. On this basis, in the presence of the facts (F) a denial of the conclusion C would cause a rent in the fabric of lawfulness L. It means, in sum, that the obtaining of C is essential to maintaining the world’s fabric of lawfulness: X exists because the world’s lawfulness demands it inconsistency with lawfulness is a prime pathway to possibility-elimination. Now if this mode of explanatory argumentation is to be valid, then the world’s orderly lawfulness is predicated as fundamental presupposition. How/why is it that X exists? Because it is produced under the productive exigency of law: it is there so that the world’s fabric of lawfulness can be maintained intact. But if this is how things look from the angle of particular-factexplanation, something rather analogous will also have to be said for holistic and synoptic explanation as well. For here too the issue of lawfulness can be seen to be paramount—albeit that it will not be nature’s lawfulness but possibility’s proto-lawfulness that will have to be at issue. Let us consider how this can come to be. In explaining existence-as-a-whole four basic approaches present themselves: • Unintelligibility: There just is no explanation for existence. • Surd spontaneity: Some spontaneous but fundamentally surd (random, anarchic, arbitrary) process is at work in engendering existence. • Nomic naturalism: A lawful hylarchic process so functions as to extract existence from mere possibility. • Purposive agency (deism): A pre-existing (as it were) creative agent acts so as to bring existence into being. The first approach can be set aside because it rejects this entire explanatory project. The second pushes the bounds of intelligibility. The last carries us into the realm of theology. Only the third can afford an explanation that is at once intelligible and not supra-natural.

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The approach of this present discussion will accordingly focus on the third, nomic and naturalistic approach. (It does not assume, but yet cannot and will not rule out, the possibility that the lawful order at issue was itself the purposive product of a creator-deity.) The (Hempelian) model of particularity explanation is predicated on the overall coordination and harmonization of phenomena and laws of nature. And at the synoptic/holistic level this same basic principle can be carried over to the overall coordination and harmonization of the phenomena, laws, and proto-(or meta-)laws that govern the extraction of an existential domain from the manifold of possibility. In both cases alike, harmonic coordination with higher level law is the crux, and even as the Hempelian model makes law conformity the crux for concrete actualities, so our hylarchic proto-law model makes principle-harmonization the determinative crux for lawful generalities. In implementing this explanatory approach it is helpful to introduce a distinction between a more narrowly construed actual existence in the world, and a more broadly construed reality. At the most basic level, existence encompasses: • the manifold of physical existence consisting of all those things that have their ontological foothold in the real-world realm of space and time. But going beyond this there are also other modes of reality, preeminently including: • the manifold of mental subsistence comprising the “things of thought” (entia rationis) projected into being (but not existence) by the mind-operations of intelligent beings (this constitutes the manifold of thought-reality), • the manifold of mere possibility comprising all possibilities can coherently be articulated on logico-conceptual principles, • the manifold of real possibility comprising the pre (sub-, or proto-)existential possibilities that subsist independently of the mental operations of existing beings.

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Display 1 THE MANIFOLD OF POSSIBILITY actual existence optimal possibility evaluative possibility physical possibility

real possibility

proto-physical possibility metaphysical possibility logical possibility NOTE: The shaded area represents the region of contingency, which includes those states that are physically possible but not in general actual. The distinction between a purely theoretical (merely logical) possibility of self-consistency [possibilitas interna] goes back to Leibniz and was also drawn in the 1730 Philosophia prima sive Ontologia of Christian Wolff. On these issues see Ingetrud Pape, Tradition und Transformation der Modalität, Vol. I (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966).

So conceived, the overall domain of reality transcends the physical realm of space and time to encompass also a manifold of real (rather than merely imaginable) possibility—is a vast but highly structured manifold of being with laws and processes of its own. It has a hierarchical order of successive stages or phases, each of them encompassed within its predecessors as a smaller component or subsector thereof. Display 1 depicts this situation as a way-station ascent in a conical manifold: logical possibility, metaphysical possibility, proto-physical possibility, physical possibility, evaluative possibility and finally at the pinnacle an ultimately realized optimal possibility. The ultimate apex of possibility marks the point of phase-transition at which the manifold of mere possibility makes its transit into actual existence. There is nothing all that new about the conception of actuality as the result of eliminating possibilities to a classic expression of this idea of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”3 And what holds here at the epistemological level of proposi-

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tions will also hold at the ontological level of states of affairs where once again possibility-limitation will afford a pathway to actuality. The manifold of possibility requires no originative explanation. These possibilities are not somehow engendered: they are simply there. Unlike the multiverses of physical theory they are not existential status. It makes no more sense to ask how they are to be then to ask this about numbers. So category mistakes must be awarded in this regard. We can ask about the location of possibilities no more than we can ask about the location of justice. Moreover, each level of the overall manifold of ontological possibility has its own characteristic laws and principles, with each level comprising of those possibilities that are logico-conceptually compatible with the characteristic laws of that level. Accordingly, “compatibility theory” of possibility is at work here, albeit it in a multi-staged way. As usual, mere logical possibility is a matter of compatibility with the laws of logic, and physical possibility is a matter of compatibility with the laws of nature. There are further prospects additional to these such as compatibility with the protophysical laws for nature that set the norms that condition the laws of nature themselves. The situation in this regard is as per Display 2, where, in particular, the distinction between the “scientific” or physical laws OF nature and the supra- or proto-physical laws FOR nature become graphically explicit. The ideas of laws of logic and of laws of nature are too familiar to need commentary here. The laws of metaphysics include principles of proto-physical normativity relating to such cognitive-value features as regularity, uniformity, conservation, simplicity, symmetry, economy. And while the physical laws provide for a systemic coordination of causal process within a spatiotemporal structure, the laws of evaluative possibility provide for a rational order of intelligent design. Finally the principle of optimality is evaluatively geared to the factors that conduce to the development and thriving of intelligent beings.

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Display 2 THE NOMIC STRUCTURE OF THE MANIFOLD OF POSSIBILITY

Nomic Requisites (Operative Laws)

Ontological Level

Laws of logic

Logical

Metaphysical Possibility

Principles of metaphysics

Metaphysical

Proto-physical Possibility

Proto-physical norms of natural lawfulness

Supra- or Protophysical

Physical Possibility

Laws of nature

Natural

Evaluative Possibility

Principles of cognitive value Axiological

Possibility Level MERE POSSIBILITY Logical Possibility REAL POSSIBILITY

ULTIMATE POSSIBILITY (=EXISTENCE) Optimal Possibility (Actuality)

Principles of optimality

Existential

3. EXISTENCE AS A PHASE TRANSITION VIA A HYLARCHIC PRINCIPLE: GROUNDING ACTUALITY IN PROTOPHYSICAL LAWS As observed above, actual existence pivots on the phase transition transpiring through which possibility is transmuted into a different mode of ontological engagement—actual existence. But how might the existence of things possibly arise through the operation of laws and principles that function wholly outside the existential arena? How can ontological processuality ever move from mere possibility to actuality? To address this question, it is necessary to make a yet more extensive excursus into the theory of possibility. For on the present perspec-

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tive, the move from mere possibility to actual existence is mediated by a series of hylarchic principles lawful order that provide for ever more stringent of existential requirements. Such principles are pre-existential in that they are preliminarily determinative for rather than consequently following from the actual constitution of existing things. They ongoingly circumscribe certain of the abstractly available possibilities as alone potentially “real,” regulating the rest to the status of the unreal, remote, merely hypothetical, or the like. Such hylarchic principles set the possibility-restricting conditions that ultimately narrow the range of eligible cases down to one single outcome. Independently of, and, as it were, “prior” to the origination of existents there can be (and presumably is) a nomically qualified framework of possibility-delimiting laws that set the conditions, the “rules of the game” as it were, within which the actualization of things comes to pass. Such proto-physical laws will reflect the substance of our science in terms of its ability to implement the distinction between mere and real possibilities. They should be understood as laying down conditions of real possibility, ruling certain theoretical (logical) possibilities out as outside the realm of realizability. They “precede” nature and delineate among all the abstractly available possibilities certain ones as alone “real,” ruling out the rest as unreal, remote, merely hypothetical or the like. The root idea of this approach goes back to Leibniz, who—in distinguishing between “logical” and “metaphysical” necessity—first took explanatory recourse to a modality intermediate between physical and absolute (“logical”) necessity. As he saw it, the arrangements of the world are neither absolutely nor logically necessary (à la Spinoza) nor wholly fortuitous (à la Epicurus) nor arbitrary (à la Descartes). Rather, they are necessary by a distinct mode of “metaphysical” necessity. Leibniz accordingly held that only by introducing a mode of necessity intermediate between absolute necessity and mere contingency can we cut the Gordian knot of reconciling the contingent with the necessary, seeing that that whose sufficient reason is absolutely necessary will itself be absolutely necessary. The net effect of delineating such a range of “real possibility” is just this establishment of a new correlative mode of necessity. And

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this is the crux from the standpoint of our present discussion. For precisely this sort of necessity can furnish the answer to our question “Why does the world have such-and-such a feature—specifically, why is it nonempty?” For any feature that all the “really possible” worlds have is a feature that the existing world “has to” have—that it must necessarily have (in the “real” mode of necessity). The reasoning is simple and straightforward: the real world has a certain feature because it has to, since all “really” possible worlds do so. A proto-law which imposes conditions to which possibilities must answer to become real possibilities need not (and cannot always) root in the operations of real things. It can be thought of as relational— specifically, as invoking relations of requirement and exclusion between the subordinate elements of which possibilities are composed. Thus if there are three such elements, A, B, C, of which A requires B, and C precludes B, then certain “merely” possibilities would thereby become unreal, to wit those that have been starred in the following enumeration * * * *

A + + + + -

B + + + + -

C + + + + -

The proto-laws at issue can thus be thought of as principles of possibility-foreclosure. They represent constraints which simply exclude certain theoretically conceivable possibilities from the domain of real possibility. They are possibilities alright, but not “actualizationqualified” ones. They impute to the realm of real possibility a certain delimitative character—a structure that precludes some “theoretically available” possibilities from being accommodated within it. Of course, every natural law rules out possibilities. (“Copper conducts electricity” means that we cannot have it both that something is

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made of copper and that it is a nonconductor.) The difference lies not in the common result, but in its variant rationale. A natural law is grounded in the make-up and dispositions of things; its electricityconductivity roots in the make-up of copper. With proto-laws the situation is different. That certain possibilities are “unreal”—that they are protolawfully unrealizable—lies not in the make-up of actual things but in “the nature of things.” It is not a facet of actuality at all, but a feature of the realm of possibility itself. On the present conception of proto-laws they do not represent the behavioral dispositions of existents, but rather the preconditions to which something must conform if it is to come into existence at all. They represent constraints which simply exclude certain theoretically conceivable possibilities from the domain of real possibility. They are possibilities alright, but not “actualization-qualified” ones. Such a position has it that there is a field of possibility that is prior to and grounds any physical field—that there must be “laws of possibility” before there can be the powers and dispositions that encapsulate the “laws of things,” the “laws of nature” as ordinarily understood. The “possibility-space” that encompasses the realm of the possible is seen as having a particular character in view of which certain conditions must be met by any real possibility that it can accommodate—a character which is encapsulated in the proto-laws. To put it very figuratively, these proto-laws brood over the realm of the possible like the primal logos over the waters, and they serve to determine how things eventuate. Thus on such an approach, there is a perexistential realm of proto-existence out of which existence proper emerges by a process of selective elimination. To be sure, one might think of various laws of nature (“Copper conducts electricity”) as entirely inherent in the make-up of the actual—that is, as merely representing the behavioral disposition of existing things. But the proto-laws are not like that—they do not represent the behavioral dispositions of existents, but rather the preconditions to which something must conform if it is to become an existent at all. Such laws are not immanent in things but transcend their particular nature. They are “laws of nature” alright, but in the rather special way of being laws for nature—laws that set preconditions upon the realizability of possibilities. Such possibility-restrictive principles have an

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ontological footing that is independent of (because “prior” to) existing things. (If we are to explain the existence of things in terms of laws, we must of course refrain from thinking of laws as representing the dispositions of existing things.) Thus proto-physical laws are—to reemphasize—not so much laws of nature as laws for nature—laws that impose preconditions upon the realizability of possibilities. And these possibility-restrictive principles have an ontological footing that is independent of (because “prior” to) existing things. (After all, if we are to explain the existence of things in terms of laws, we must of course refrain from thinking of laws as representing the dispositions of existing things.) Thus viewed, the domain of real possibility constitutes a “receptacle” (in the manner of Plato’s Timaeus)—a framework of potentiality within which actuality ultimately finds its definitive accommodation. But this framework is not, of course, one composed of physical or quasi-physical dimensions on the order of space and time, but one composed of lawful principles—a nomic manifold of “laws of possibility.” Accordingly, we can and should reject the thesis of genetic homogeneity with its insistence on the principle that: All facts about the world’s actualities must be grounded in existing things (or in their properties). This thesis insists that every fact has a substantival embodiment—that facts must always root in the make-up of existents; that existence inevitably precedes essence. The nomological approach emphatically rejects this radical mode of metaphysical existentialism. It accounts for the real or actual (for “existence,” that is), through a lawful principle which operates without being itself embodied in some existing thing or things. It denies that existence inevitably precedes essence. It is prepared to see some facts about the real world grounded in the nature of possibility rather than having to emerge from the operation of preexisting substances. These nomic principles that define the problems of the realm of the possible need not have an existential footing—an ontological basis in some preexisting thing or collection of things. They need not—nay, must not—be hypostatized into features of things or into causal products of the operations of things. Our theory contemplates a mode of “being” independent of and prior to the existence of “things”—a nomic field which fixes the structure of possibility. This idea of a do-

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main of “proto-laws” rests on a firm refusal to locate the ground of the distinction between “mere” and “real” possibilities in the nature or the activities of things or existents of some sort. Such principles can and should be thought of as lacking a substantial basis—as conditioning possibilities without any foothold in the modus operandi of prior actualities. In accounting for actual existence in this way, one can in principle explain a “change of phase” from the level of mere possibility to the level of actuality, maintaining that certain things are the case because they must be so that their being otherwise lies beyond the reach of actualization. The “field of possibility” has a structure of such a sort that the existence of things of a certain sort is effectively necessitated. On the here-envisioned approach, an explanation of the nature of existence will begin by examining the meta- or praeter- physical structure of the realm of possibility. And that calls for looking to the fundamental rules—the “field equations,” as it were—that delineate the operation of forces in nature: those which define the structures of the space-time continuum, say the basic laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity, and some fundamental structural principles of physical interaction. Principles of this sort characterizing the electromagnetic, gravitational and metric fields provide the basic proto-laws under whose aegis the drama of natural events will have to play itself out. But now they are seen not as ordinary laws of nature that can be construed as describing the modus operandi of real things that are already present in the world, but rather as preconditions for the real—as delimiting the sorts of possibilities that might substantively be realized. Explaining the nature of existence via hylarchic principles of protolaw governed machinations in the realm of possibility turns on a distinction between substantial explanations in terms of the operations of entities and process explanations in terms of primordial operational principles—principles that underlie rather than merely reflect the nature of the real. It is predicated on acknowledging that explanation in the case of existence-at-large cannot operate in the orthodox order of the efficient causation of preexisting things. In resorting to a hylarchic principle one can thus abandon altogether the hoary dogma that things can only come from things.

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This position does not, however, require us to reject the principle ex nihilo nihil fit totally and unqualifiedly. For one can distinguish between nonexistence and nothingness. The realm of mere possibility, as such, is a sphere of nonexistence in which no thing whatever exists. But it itself is not nothing—not totally devoid of character or structure. There is, after all, no reason why even the realm of mere possibility cannot have a structure of some sort. The fact that nothing exists within this realm does not preclude it from having a nature—indeed a nature such that a certain sort of possibility (and only a certain sort of possibility) is destined to emerge from it as actualized. Such a nomic “receptacle” realm is not a matter of mere nothingness; it can and must have a character of some sort (as per the old precept that nihil sunt nullae proprietates). We need to adopt the idea that existence precedes essence. The domain of the possible represents a state of affairs in which no things exist, but in which various conditions can certainly obtain—conditions that can, in particular, endow this realm with a possibility-restrictive nature. Possibilities can, as such, be subject to various laws, including those which separate them into “real” and “merely hypothetical” and thus provide for the operations of a hylarchic principle. Real possibility accordingly need not—and should not—be rooted in the machinations of things. We must not attribute it to the inner nature or outer impetus of substances of some sort, or see it as the fruit of the productive efficacy of some existent or other. We must avoid taking the stance that the structure of possibility must root in an actuality of some type, that there is something that exerts a determinative agency in consequence of which real possibility is as it is. We can reject the “existentialist” thesis that possibility must be grounded in an actuality of some sort—or else modify it by taking the stance that the realm of possibility itself constitutes a (self-subsistent) actuality of sorts. There is, after all, no reason why even the domain of mere possibility cannot have content with a structure of some sort. The fact that nothing exists within this realm does not preclude it from having a nature—indeed a nature such that a certain sort of possibility (and only a certain sort of possibility) is destined to emerge from it as actualized. The domain of the possible represents a state of affairs in which no

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things exist, but in which various conditions can certainly obtain— conditions that can, in particular, endow this realm with a possibilityrestrictive nature. Mere possibilities can, as such, be subject to various laws, including those which separate them into “real” and “merely hypothetical” and thus provide for the operations of a hylarchic principle. Such an explanation of existence as a phase transition emanating from the manifold’s possibility is unquestionably unorthodox—as it must be in the very nature of the issue. But there is nothing about it that is inherently unviable or somehow “unscientific.” And it does have the substantial merit of enabling us to resolve the riddle of existence, answering Leibniz’s fundamental questions in a way that is conceptually cogent and wholly consonant with science as we know it. All the same, a fundamental shift in explanatory methodology is at issue with this hylarchic approach—the shift to a fundamentally nomological mode of explanation that operates in terms of laws which lack any and all “prior” embedding in an order of things. The world’s constitution is now accounted for as the consequence of a constraint by principles rather than as the product of the operation of causal forces which, after all, only existing things can exert. This account brings to view the Leibnizian picture of a nomically structured manifold of preor sub-existential possibility from which the realm of real existence emerges via considerations of value-optimization. For in the end an explanation of affairs in the domain of fact requires us to stop beyond that realm itself—and when we leave the realm of fact we cannot but enter into that of value. 4. EXPLAINING EXISTENCE BY MEANS OF A HYLARCHIC PRINCIPLE A hylarchic principle explains the nonemptiness of the world by exploiting the distinction between mere possibilities (“merely logical” or “wholly hypothetical and imaginary” possibilities) and real possibilities based in suitable nomic principles. The underlying line of reasoning provides a scheme by which various conditions of the real (specifically, here, its being nonempty) can be explained in terms of an extremely simple necessitarian format: The existing world has feature F

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because this feature is R-necessary in that every R-possible world has feature F. It implements this generic scheme in the specific mode. Only such worlds as are nonempty—that contain something or other, and have some sort of membership—can qualify as real possibilities. The salient idea is the principle that the necessary must be actual (a necesse ad esse valet consequentia). The reasoning proceeds via the standard idea of all ontological arguments since Anselm—that the shift from possibility to actuality can be effected with the aid of a suitable mode of necessity. But—with Leibniz—it rejects the idea that the necessity at issue must be absolute (logical) necessity. The role of a hylarchic principle is now clear. As a proto-physical law of a characteristically preexistential kind, it reduces the range of real possibility so as to exclude from it (inter alia) those worlds that are existentially empty. A hylarchic principle is simply a particular sort of possibility-restricting condition—a rather special one that narrows the range of eligible cases down to nonempty worlds. And so the task of explaining why there is something rather than nothing can be discharged by relatively orthodox, direct and unproblematic means, since what is necessary must be actual. On such an approach it is not by chance that things exist in the world (that there is something rather than nothing) but by a natural (or, better, proto-natural) necessity. In accounting for a feature of the actual in this way, one can in principle explain a “change of phase” from the level of mere possibility to the level of actuality, maintaining that certain things are the case because they must be so that their being otherwise lies outside the realm of (real) possibility. The “field of possibility” has a structure of such a sort that the existence of things of a certain sort is effectively necessitated. Such a field itself requires literally nothing for its “existence”: like the God of scholastic demonstration, it is such that nulla re indiget ad existendum. The overall explanation of existence is thus fundamentally nomological. It pivots on the consideration that the proto-laws require the existence of things—that they are in themselves such as to constrain an existential world. But what manner of considerations could put flesh on the skeletal structure of this argument? The most plausible candidates for protolaws that could constrain the existence of things are the fundamental

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principles of physical nature—the basic cosmic equations (say the field equations of general relativity). For this sort of explanation to work, it would have to transpire that all of the possible (or all of the “available”—in some appropriate sense) solutions to these cosmic equations will accord to the key parameters values different from 0 (i.e., values which are existence-requiring). The only possible solution to the fundamental equation which satisfies certain systemic requirements will have to be solutions that represent nonempty worlds.4 On such an approach, we would accordingly begin by looking to the fundamental field equations that delineate the operation of forces in nature: those which define the structures of the space-time continuum, say the basic laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity, and some fundamental structural principles of physical interaction. Principles of this sort characterizing the electromagnetic, gravitational and metric fields provide the basic proto-laws under whose aegis the drama of natural events will have to play itself out. And the existence of things would then be explained by noting that the fundamental equations themselves admit of no empty solutions—that any solution that satisfies them must incorporate the sorts of singularities we call “things.”5The cosmic equations would be such as to constrain existence in nature: they admit of no empty states and only allow nonvacuous solutions. As it were, they represent functions that take a nonzero value for every value of the variables—even when those “input” parameters themselves are set at zero.6 For such an approach to work, it would have to transpire that the only ultimately viable solutions to those cosmic equations are existential solutions.7 This explanatory strategy casts those “fundamental field equations” in a rather special light. They are not seen as ordinary laws of nature that can be construed as describing the modus operandi of real things that are already present in the world, but rather as preconditions for the real—as delimiting the sorts of possibilities that can be realized. We thus have an account of the following structure: The fundamental field equations, seen to function not merely as laws OF nature, but as laws FOR nature, as proto-laws in present terminology, delineate the domain of real possibility. And the nature of this domain is then, in its turn, such as to constrain the existence of things.

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Such an explanation of existence is no doubt somewhat unorthodox. But there is nothing about it that is inherently inappropriate or somehow “unscientific.” And it does have the substantial merit of enabling us to resolve the riddle of existence, answering Leibniz’s question in a way that is conceptually cogent and wholly consonant with science as we know it. To be sure, one big problem remains: How is one to account for the working of these proto-laws themselves? (And so—just what are the ultimate grounds of real possibility?) This question obviously presents a large nettle which our overall explanatory program must eventually grasp if it is to do its job in a satisfactory way. NOTES 1

David Lewis, Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (New York and Oxford, 1983), p. 24.

2

See Wesley Salmon, Four Decades of Explanation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1989).

3

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Sign of Four,” 1885.

4

It should be noted that empty should here be understood in the logical or settheoretical sense, not just in the somewhat specialized physical sense in which physicists speak of empty-world solutions to the field equations of General Relativity—meaning worlds devoid of ordinary matter and all forms of non-gravitational energy, but which can be (and in non-trivial cases are) filled with sourceless gravitational waves carrying gravitational energy. One would not regard such worlds as metaphysically empty.

5

The emergence of an “existential” state is thus entirely independent of the initial boundary-value conditions—for any way of fixing these parameters, an existential state emerges.

6

A (clearly superable) complexity enters at this point through the fact that vacuity may be reflected in parameter-values other than zero. For example, consider the trivial empty-world solution of the field equations of General Relativity, i.e. the Minkowski metric. In its standard form it consists of sixteen real-valued functions of the coordinates, twelve of which vanish everywhere, while the other four “take a nonzero value for every value of the variables” (namely, the constant values -1, 1, 1, 1, respectively).

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NOTES 7

Or perhaps, even should “empty solutions” exist, they might be highly unstable; the proto-laws would then be such that, under their aegis, an existentially empty state of things is inherently liable to undergo a phase transition, having a natural inclination to slip over into an “occupied” condition.

Chapter Three OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN SYNOPSIS (1) Optimalism is a matter of selection based on value. (2)It works by elimination. (3)The standard of value roots in the interests of intelligence. (4) Intelligence-geared optimalism—noophelia—can be seen as a natural rather than supernatural process. It need not be operated through the purposive action of a benevolent creator. (4) Optimalism is self-substantiating. (5) Historically this doctrine finds significant antecedence in neo-Platonism. 1. THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN: OPTIMALISM

A

ccustomed as we are to explanations in the mode of efficient causality, the idea of an axiological explanation of existence on the basis of an evaluative optimalism has a decidedly strange and unfamiliar air about it. Let us consider more closely how it is supposed to work. The approach at hand is based on adopting what might be called an axiogenetic optimality principle to the effect that value represents a decisive advantage in regard to realization because in the virtual competition for existence among possible alternatives it is the comparatively best that is bound to prevail.1 Thus whenever there is a plurality of alternative possibilities competing for realization in point of truth or of existence, it will be the (or an) optimal possibility that wins out. (An alternative is optimal when no better one exists, although it can have equals.) On such an approach it will transpire that things exist, and exist as they do, because this is for the (metaphysically) best.

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It may well prove to be a complicated matter to appraise from a metaphysical/ontological standpoint that condition X is better (inherently more meritorious) than condition Y. But—so optimalism maintains—once this evaluative hurdle is overcome, the question “Why should it be that X rather than Y exists?” is automatically settled by this very fact. In sum, a Law of Optimality prevails: value (of a suitable—as yet unspecified—sort) enjoys an existential impetus so that it lies in the nature of things that (one of) the best of available alternatives is realized.2 On such an approach, Christian Wollf’s question of the complementum possibilitatis—of what must be added to possibility to realize actuality3—received the straightforward answer that was already contemplated throughout the Platonic tradition, viz.: evaluative-optimality. For this tradition, which stretched from Plato via the Greek NeoPlatonists and medieval scholasticism to Leibniz—and which has survived vestigially in the twentieth century thought of Einstein and Gödel—takes the line that the actual is exactly that one among the possibilities which maximizes value (suitably understood). As regards the possibility-field itself, it requires literally nothing else for its own “existence” (like the God of the scholastic theoreticians scholastic demonstration, it is such that with it nulla re indiget ad existendum). But the determination of that very special possibility distinguished by actualization in a matter is the work of hylarchic principle of value operative over the possibilistic domain. The root idea of this approach goes back to Leibniz, who—in distinguishing between “logical” and “metaphysical” necessity—first took explanatory recourse to a modality intermediate between physical and absolute (“logical”) necessity. As he saw it, the arrangements of the actual world are neither absolutely nor logically necessary (à la Spinoza) nor wholly fortuitous (à la Epicurus) or arbitrary (à la Descartes). Rather, they are determined by a distinct mode of axiologically controlled metaphysical necessity. Leibniz accordingly held that only by introducing such a mode of necessity intermediate between absolute necessity and mere contingency can we cut the Gordian knot of reconciling the contingent with the necessary, seeing that while that whose sufficient reason is absolutely necessary will itself be absolutely necessary. The reasoning is starkly straightforward: the real world

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has a certain feature because evaluative considerations indicate that it has to. But this “has to” is not absolute or logical necessitation, but rather a distinctive mode of axiological necessitation on whose basis there will ideally be only one uniquely qualified, metaphysically viable solution to the reality-design problem. 2. HOW OPTIMALISM WORKS On the approach at issue, the emergence of actuality from possibility can best be conceptualized as a matter of realization under constraints. An illustration will be instructive. Thus for the sake of an example, let it be that the ontological stage is set by a proto-existential 3 x 3 tictac-toe gridwork which is to be filled in by Os and Xs. Further, let it be that the constraints of physical possibility set by the proto-laws of nature have it that the number of Os and Xs cannot differ by more than one (i.e., that at most five of either can be used.) And finally let it be that the axiological/evaluative constraints are the following two: (1) that Os have preferential priority over Xs, (2) that symmetry is a positivity which should be maximized. On this axiological basis in process of elimination is set in train in whose wake there is now but one unique solution to the issue of the nature of actual existence: O

X

O

X

O

X

O

X

O

The example illustrates (in a wildly oversimple way) how the descriptive nature of existence can be determined by normative principles that operate with respect to possibilities. And so the main point is clear, viz., that a series of laws and principles of nomic and axiologi-

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cal constraint can perfectly well conspire to determine a single metaphysically viable result to “the problem of world realization.” A much oversimplified analogy to the sort of deliberations at issue may nevertheless help to render the idea of world optimization more graphic and show how this sort of issue can be addressed. Let us adopt the general line of approach suggested by Leibniz, and assess the merit—the comparative optimality—of possible worlds in terms of two factors: the orderliness of their law structure (what is clearly needed to possibilize the developmental emergence of intelligent beings) and the variety of discernible phenomena (which is clearly needed to afford such beings the material of stimulus and interest requisite for cognitive developments).4 To concretize this line of thought, suppose a world with two predicates F and G each of which can vary in intensity over a spectrum of Small, Medium, and Large. (For example, F might be the footprint area of a building and G its height—each of which can be Small, Medium, and Large!) The result is a spectrum of possibilities of the following 3 x 3 format: G S M L S F

M L

Each of the descriptive compartments of this manifold can either be instantiated or uninstantiated amongst the membership of a particular architectural “world.” And this can be indicated by filling in that compartment with O (non-instantiated) or X instantiated, yielding the result that there are 29 = 1,024 possibilities overall.5 For every X within the diagram, there is a corresponding exclusion law of the generic format An item that is in point of F must not be in point of G.

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Lawfulness will now be a matter of how many such laws there are (with a maximum of 9 (= 3 x 3) in the present sort of case). Returning now to the Leibnizian formula: M = lawfulness x variety = #X x #O It will be noted that since #X x #O = 9, this quantity is going to be #X x (9 – #X). And in the circumstances, with the possibility-range of #X ranging from 0 to 9 this will be greatest when #X is 4 or 5.6 Then this is requisite for M-maximization. This, of course, still leaves open various different possibilities. Accordingly, ontological merit—as we have construed it to this point in terms of order and variety—proves to be underdeterminative, with some further, yet unacknowledged factor required to established uniqueness. To address this problem, let it be that one takes the standpoint that there is yet another variety-related factor that turns on minimizing imbalance and thus avoiding the corner positions. Then this would narrow matters down to a single result, namely O

X

O

X

X

X

O

X

O

On this basis, then, there will be but one single, uniquely optimal outcome for the descriptive constituting of a world within the propertyspectrum at our disposal under the indicated conditions. Such an oversimple analogy illustrates how, at least in principle, a suitable survey across the spectrum of available alternatives can provide a basis for assessing the ontological aesthetics of world order. And so, while the analogy is imperfect—as analogies are bound to be7—it does go some way toward illustrating the basic idea at issue with the sort of world optimization under constraints that is at issue in these deliberations. Oversimple though they are, the illustrative analogies do at least illustrate how a Leibnizian optimalism can operate in principle.

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3. BACKGROUND: BY WHAT STANDARD? If possibility-elimination on the basis of evaluation is to serve as the avenue to actuality then we must, of course, confront the question of what is it that is to effect such limitations. And since—by hypothesis—the answer cannot lie in the realm of actual fact, we do well to turn to that of normative value. But just what is to be the standard of value at issue with an optimality principle? What is it that will decide the superiority of one alternative over another? What rhyme or reason is to be determinative in effecting such a discrimination in an intelligible and intelligent way? The answer is, in a way, implicit in the very question itself, in that it lies in the very factors of intelligibility and intelligence. For by its own reckoning we cannot but judge those alternatives as superior to those which best serve the interest of intelligence and intelligibility itself. To be sure, the law’s operation here presupposes a manifold of suitable value parameters, invoking certain physically relevant features (symmetry, economy, or the like) as merit-manifesting factors. The optimization at issue is—and should be—geared to a “scientifically reputable” theory of some suitable kind, coordinate with a complex of physically relevant factors of a suitable kind. And it is this presumed gearing to a positive value which like elegance is plausibly identifiable as physically relevant—contingently identifiable as such subject to scientific inquiry—that establishes optimalism as a reasonable proposition and ultimately prevents the thesis “optimalism obtains because that’s for the best” from declining into vacuity. Without a lawful order of a decidedly complex and sophisticated sort, the processes of cosmic and biological evolution could not bring intelligent beings onto the scene. But when such a lawful order also has to accommodate the vagaries of chance and choice required for the developmental emergence of intelligence, anomalies are going to be unavoidable. For situations are now bound to arise, where the wellbeing of intelligence-endowed organisms and the axiological demands of overall systemic advantage come into conflict. Rational optimalism now becomes complicated.

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Noophelia among the demands of intelligibility and intelligence— should be seen as a perfectly “natural” process at work in the realm of possibility and actuality alike. Those intelligibility-facilitation values—simplicity, regularity, economy, symmetry, harmony, etc.—are not mattes of the personal preferences of individuals, but reflect impersonal features of the objective conditions of things. Even as plants can exhibit a heliotropism without engaging in purpose considerations, so nature can exhibit an intelligence-geared nootropism without any overt purposes. To be sure the former process can be explained in terms of the laws of nature operative within the realm of physical existence. But so too can the latter be explained in terms of the laws of metaphysics operative within the realms of possibility. 4. NOOPHELIC NATURALISM The axiology at issue should nevertheless be seen as naturalistic. The values involved encompass factors like stability, symmetry, continuity, complexity, order and even a dynamic impetus to the development of “higher” forms possessed of more sophisticated capabilities— perhaps even a sort of Hegelian impetus toward the evolutionary emergence of a creature possessed of an intelligence able to comprehend and appreciate the universe itself, creating a conscious reduplication model of the universe in the realm of thought through the artifice of intelligence. And so the metaphysical values at issue make for an altogether “naturalistic” axiology that can be postulated on the basis of the world’s observable features.8 After all, whatever values may be discerned in the operations of nature can and should still be something natural—there need be nothing supra-natural (let alone supernatural!) about it. Since it is values rather than purposes that function in axiological explanation, these explanations can and should be seen as entirely impersonal. Granted, people can adopt and endorse various values (or can fail to do so). But a value as such need not be anybody’s purpose. Things and conditions of things can be valuable without being valued, desirable without being desired. We need not commit the pathetic fallacy in personalizing matters here by invoking the mediation of agents. To reemphasize: when its modus operandi establishes com-

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mitment to a certain value, nature need not “seek” value any more than water need “seek” its own level. A claim to end-direct transactions in the world (“Nature abhors a vacuum”) is without any presuppositions or implications with regard to a purposively operating mind. To implement the principle of axiology by way of personification would be self-defeating, since we ideally want to explain existence in a way that is self-sustaining (self-contained, “ultimate”). A system can be goal directed through its inherent natural “programming” (e.g., heliotropism or homeostasis) without any admixture of overt purpose—even as a conservation of energy principle need not be held on the basis of nature’s “seeking” to conserve energy. Accordingly our axiological approach can take the form of a valuenaturalism—predicated on the idea that the operational system in question is by nature value-tropic in that it inherently tends to realize certain value-endowed conditions (maintaining stability, achieving symmetry, prolonging longevity, operating efficiently, etc.) Of course, the system that comports itself in this way need not overtly hold such a value—like a physical system that pursues the path of least resistance, it may well be the sort of thing for which the conscious adoption of values is simply not at issue. Accordingly, optimalism need not necessarily be operated through the purposive agency of a benevolent creator. The salient point is that the regress of explanatory principles must have a stop, and that it is here—with axiology—that we reach a natural terminus by way of self-explanation. With axiogenetic explanation the world is, in a certain sense “constrained by value.” But this is nowise a matter of absolute necessitation but merely one of axiological delimitation and thereby a constraint freed from all the negativities to which the block universe doctrine of necessitarian deliberation is subject. 5. ISSUES OF OPTIMALITY “But why should it be that optimalism obtains? What sort of plausible argument can be given on this position’s behalf? Why should what is for the best exist?” The answer to these questions lies in the very nature of the principle itself. It is self-substantiating, seeing it is auto-

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matically for the best that the best alternative should exist rather than an inferior rival.9 But this self-sufficiency is just one of its assets; it also offers significant systemic advantages. After all, we must expect that any ultimate principle should explain itself, since it cannot, in the very nature of things, admit of an external explanation in terms of something altogether different. And the impetus to realization inherent in authentic value lies in the very nature of value itself. A rational person would not favor the inferior alternative; and there is no reason to think that a rational reality would do so either. To be sure, for rational closure some explanation is required for why nature so operates as to implement a particular value V. But as we have seen the prospect of self-invoking explanations is available here. For example: nature favors economy (simplicity, harmony, etc.) exactly because that is the most economical of things for it to do. Or again: why do its laws exist as they do? Because that’s for the axiological best in optimizing the systemic operations that obtain. And why does what’s for the best obtain—just exactly because that itself is for the best. The explanation of the operation of laws is axiological (value-referential). And the explanation of the obtaining of values is self-referential—i.e., is also axiological. The possibility of providing an explanation on its own basis—a reflexive explanation that is literally a self-explanation—is now before us. Value is, or can be, regressstopping: it can be “final” by way of being self-explanatory in a manner that purpose cannot be. To be sure, could one ask: “Why should it be that reality is rational?” But this is a problematic proceeding. For even to ask this question is to ask for a reason. It is already to presume or presuppose the rationality of things, taking the stance that what is so is and must be so for a reason. In advancing that question the matter at issue has already been tacitly conceded. Anyone who troubles to ask for a reason why nature should have a certain feature is thereby proceeding within a framework of thought where nature’s rationality—the amenability of its features to rational explanation—is already presumed. But what is to be the epistemic status of a Law of Optimality to the effect that “whatever possibility is for the best is thereby what is actualized.” It is certainly not a logico-conceptually necessary truth; from the angle of abstract logic it has to be seen as a contingent fact—albeit

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one not about nature as such, but rather one about the manifold of real possibility that underlies it. Insofar as necessary at all it obtains as a matter of ontological rather than logico-conceptual necessity.10 And the division of this former realm into real vs. merely speculative possibilities can hinge on contingent considerations: there can be logically contingent laws of possibility even as there are logically contingent laws of nature (i.e., of reality). “But if it is contingent, then surely it must itself rest on some further explanation.” Granted. It itself presumably has an explanation, seeing that one can and should maintain the Leibnizian Principle of Sufficient Reason to the effect that for every contingent fact there is a reason why it is so rather than otherwise. But there is no decisive reason why the prospect of self-explanation has to be excluded at this fundamental level.11 After all, we cannot go on putting the explanatory elephant on the back of the tortoise on the back of the alligator ad infinitum: as Aristotle already saw, the explanatory regress has to stop somewhere at a “final” theory—one that is literally “self-sustaining.” And in the end, what better candidate could there be than the Law of Optimality itself with the result that the division between real and merely theoretical possibilities is as it is (i.e., value based) because that itself is for the best? Ontological optimalism is closely related to optimism. The optimist holds that “Whatever exists is for the best,” the optimalist maintains the converse that “Whatever is for the best exists.” But in the end these two theses come to the same thing. For if what is realized is for the best it follows automatically that the best is realized. Optimalism has many theoretical advantages. Here is just one of them. It is conceivable, one might contend, that the existence of the world (i.e., of a world) is a necessary fact while nevertheless its nature—and thereby the existence of which world—is something contingent. And this would mean that separate and potentially different answers would have to be provided for the questions “Why is there anything at all?” and “Why is the character of existence as is—why is it that this particular world exists?” However, an axiogenetic approach enjoys the advantage of rational economy in that it proceeds uniformly here. It provides a single uniform rationale for both answers—namely that “this is for the best.” It accordingly also enjoys the significant merit of providing for the rational economy of explana-

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tory principles. But—really!—how can sensible people possibly embrace the conception that the inherently best alternative is thereby automatically the actual (true) one. Does not the world’s all too evident imperfection stand decisively in the way here? The matter is not all that simple, however. For the issue is going to pivot on the question of what “inherently best” means. If it means “best” from that angle of your desires, or of my interests, or even of the advantage of homo-sapiens in general, then clearly the thesis loses its strong appeal. For here that “best” must be construed as looking to the condition of existence-as-a-whole rather than to the benefit of one particular privileged individual or group. Optimality in this context is clearly not going to be a matter of the affective welfare or standard of living of some particular sector of existence; it is going to have to be a metaphysical good of some synoptic and rather abstract sort that looks to the condition of the whole. Accordingly the objection “is not optimalism simply too Pollyanna-ish to be plausible” can be met effectively. The optimalist need not simply shut his eyes to the world’s all too evident parochially considered imperfections. For we can and should stress that because of the intricate inherent interrelationships among value parameters an “imperfection” in this or that respect must be taken in stride because it is simply inevitable. (There is, in fact, a point of view from which optimalism is a position that is not so much optimistic as deeply pessimistic, seeing that it holds that even the best of possible arrangements is bound to exhibit very real imperfections from the angle of mankind’s parochial concerns or interests.) 6. NEO-PLATONIC ANTECEDENTS The standard explanatory approach with regard to existence proceeds in the descriptive order of consideration to address the question • How is it that realty is as it has come to be: what is it that leads reality to have the character that it actually has? However, there is also the finalistic order of consideration that pivots on the question

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• Why is it what reality is as it has come to be: for what reason has reality come to have the character that is actually has? This shift from the merely descriptive to the rational order of deliberation introduces new and additional issues. And the entry into the normative (axiological) evaluative realm serves to make it possible to address these additional issues as well. It thus brings larger and more elaborate issues into the domain of consideration and enables us to achieve a more deeply grounded level of understanding. And this line of consideration returns us to the antecedence of Neo-Platonism. With Plotinus prominent in the foreground, the Neo-Platonists of classical antiquity contemplated three fundamental principles of metaphysics: • Reality (“the One,” to on): the realm of being. • Rationality (“the intellect,” intelligible order, mind: nous) the realm of order. • Soul (“the comprehended,” understanding: psyche): the realm of cognition. In a rationally ordered universe whose nature as such is comprehensible to rational intelligences these three are fused into an indissoluble unity: a reality shaped by a rational order comprehensible to minds. Rational structure is the crux at once of the nature, the rational order, and the valuation of actual existence. The gap envisioned by later philosophers between actuality and normativity, between being and value, simply did not exist in NeoPlatonism. For here value—“the good” broadly construed—is the very crux and explanatory ground of being and the basis of its comprehensibility. Mainstream Neo-Platonism accordingly espoused the cardinal thesis of Plato’s Timaeus that reality is inherently optimific—a manifold of being arranged for a realization of the best. Its commitment here is

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to what might be called the Principle of Optimality to the following effect: Within any finite range of alternatives A1, A2, … An that which is optimal—which is for the best, everything considered—is the one that actually obtains in reality’s make-up.

This is a patently metaphysical thesis in its insistence upon the existential impetus efficacy of value, holding that evaluative optimality carries existential actuality in its wake. The basic idea here is that an optimality that pivots on rational intelligibility is a truth-maker in that it affords—of and by itself—a sufficient reason for existential realization. As regards optimalism, let us consider the Principle of Optimality as per OPTIMALISM: If X is optimal, then X is actually so,

in relation to its converse: OPTIMISM: If X is actually so, then X is optimal.

The former—optimalism—moves from value dominance to actuality; the latter—optimism—moves from actuality to value dominance. It is readily seen that these two theses are interrelated and interconnected. After all, it is a virtual tautology that: • It is optimal that the actual be optimal. This being so, (2) will immediately follow from (1). And as regards the converse—(1)’s following from (2)—suppose that not-(1) so that something (Z) were optimal but not actual. Then not-Z is actual. But now if (2) held, then not-Z would be optimal, contrary to Z’s postulated optimality. So not-(1) entails not-(2), and thus by contraposition (2) entails (1). Q.E.D. And it follows from these considerations that optimalism and optimism—construed in the presently operative sense—are effectively equivalent positions.

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Finally, as regards self-sustainingness, consider the questions of why it should be that optimalism obtains. Philosophers have usually sought to separate issues of fact from issues of value. They generally note and emphasize the difference between the questions “Is it true that p?” and “Is it (or would it be) a good thing that p?” But with Plato and throughout the Neo-Platonic tradition there is an ongoing effort to fuse these factors that are so decidedly disjoined in otherwise mainstream thinking. For optimalism sees the final causation of benefit and value as productively efficatious. In the Platonic tradition it sees “the good” as existentially productive and views reality as value-determined. The Church Fathers were drawn to such a Neo-Platonism as a doctrine readily geared to theological considerations. For as regards theism, note that the optimality principle provides for a direct pathway to establishing the existence of God via the idea that it would, everything considered, clearly be for the best if the world were the well-designed product of a benevolent creator—that is, if God existed and functioned in this role. But it is also possible to set the Principle of Optimalism as selfsustaining. On its basis the question “Why is it that optimalism obtains?” is answered in the self-sustaining basis of the consideration that this itself is something that is for the best. NOTES 1

The prime spokesman for this line of thought within the Western philosophical tradition was G. W. Leibniz. A present-day exponent is John Leslie in his Value and Existence (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979). And also the present author’s The Riddle of Existence (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1984).

2

To make this work out, the value of a disjunction-alternative has to be fixed at the value of its optimal member, lest the disjunctive “bundling” of a good alternative with inferior rivals so operate as to eliminate it from competition.

3

See Julius Bergmann, “Wolff’s Lehre vom complementum possibilitatis,” Archiv für systematische Philosophie, vol. 2 (1896), pp. 449–76.

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NOTES 4

Any comprehensive exposition of the philosophy of Leibniz can be consulted on these matters, including the present author’s The Philosophy of Leibniz (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

5

The Leibnizian spirit of the sort of deliberations at issue here are manifest in his comparison of God’s creative choice with certain games in which all the space on a board are to be filled according to definite rules, but unless we do careful planning, we find ourselves at the end blocked from the difficult spaces and compelled to have more vacancies than we needed or wished to. Yet there is a definite rule by which a maximum number of spaces can be filled in the surest way. (C. I. Gerhardt, Die Philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, vol. VII (Berlin: Weidermann, 1890), p. 303; L. E. Loemker, G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), p. 487.)

6

If (contrary to fact) the quantity at issue were continuous with a range from 0 to 1, we would have it that merit (M) is given by M = variety x lawfulness = z x (1 – z) = z –z2 By elementary calculus this quantity is maximized when z = ½. In our example, having #(O) be 4 or 5 is thus as close as we can get to the maximum.

7

For one thing, our optimal resolution is not unique, since its variant with X and O interchanged will yield the same result as would a systematic row/column interchange that would result from looking at the box sideways. (Of course uniqueness could be assured by additional stipulations—e.g., that there must be a minimum of Xs.)

8

It might seem at first thought that a reality that emerges under the aegis of physicometaphysical values is cold-bloodedly indifferent to the welfare of its having population. But this is in fact unlikely. For such an existential manifold by its very nature is a manifold of (quasi-rational) order that is bound to be congenial to the creaturesand especially the intelligent creaturesthat evolve within it. (What we have here is a position that is a hybrid crossing of Leibniz and Darwin.)

9

Other principles can also be self-substantiating, seeing that, for example, the Principle of Pessimism (that the worst of possible alternatives is realized) also has this feature. However all of them same optimalism lack features essential for [resent purposes.

10

The operative perspective envisions a threefold order of necessity/possibility: the logico-conceptual, the ontological or proto-physical, and the physical. It accordingly resists the positivistic tendency of the times to dismiss or ignore that second, in-

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NOTES

termediate order of considerations. And this is only to be expected since people nowadays tend to see this intermediate realm as predicated on value considerations, a theme that is anathema to present-day scientism. 11

After all, there is no reason of logico-theoretical principle why propositions cannot be self-certifying. Nothing vicious need be involved in self-substantiation. Think of “Some statements are true” or “This statement stakes a particular rather than universal claim.”

Chapter Four THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE SYNOPSIS (1) Optimalism is a metaphysical theory of existence-explanation that pivots on an axiogenetic optimality principle. (2) By its very nature this doctrine is self-supportive. (3) Such an approach is part of a longstanding tradition of evaluative metaphysics. (4) The values at issue in optimalism center on intelligence and intelligibility. (5) The very course of cosmological history provides empirical evidentiation for this. (6) It is important, however, to distinguish between productive optimality and process optimality, and also to distinguish between optimality of process and optimality of product. Only a carefully constructed version of optimalism can lay claims to plausibility. 1. OPTIMALISM AS A SELF-SUBSTANTIATING PROJECT

A

s the deliberations of Chapter 1 have indicated, answering the ultimate questions about the world’s existence and nature transcends recourse to the actualities but requires dealing in possibilities. And Chapter 3 has argued that this transcendence demands a shift from fact to value, thereby accounting for what is in the reductive terms of what is existence-worthy among the possibilities. The resulting perspective has it that a workable account of existence lies in an optimalism which seeks to explain existence through a systematic elimination of possibilities on the basis of evaluative considerations— a procedure which ultimately accounts of existence on its being what is for the best within the range of the possible.

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Such an optimalistic explanation rests on adopting what might be called an axiogenetic optimality principle to the effect that value represents a decisive advantage in regard to realization: in the virtual competition for existence among alternatives it is the comparatively best that is bound to prevail.1 The upshot is an optimalistic doctrine according to which things exist, and exist as they do, because this is for the (metaphysically) best. Ontological optimalism is closely related to optimism. The optimist holds that “Whatever exists is for the best,” the optimalist maintains the converse that “Whatever is for the best exists.” The two combine to harmonize existence and optimality in recomposed equivalency.2 2. OPTIMALISM’S SELF-VALIDATION Optimalism is deeply rationalistic. It sees the optimal as being that for whose realization there is the best of reasons—that which would be actual if rationality had it is own way. What sorts of considerations can possibly provide for the justificatory validation of optimalism? Why should it be that the Principle of Optimality obtains? Why should what is for the best be actual? But consider! To ask this question is to ask for a reason. It is already to presume or presuppose the rationality of things, taking the stance that what is so is and must be so for a reason. Once one poses the question “Why should it be that nature has the feature F?” it is already too late to raise the issue of nature’s rationality. In advancing that question the matter at issue has already been tacitly conceded. Anyone who troubles to ask for a reason why nature should have a certain feature is thereby proceeding within a framework of thought where nature’s rationality—the amenability of its features to rational explanation—is already presumed. Ultimately the validation of optimalism lies in the very nature of the principle itself. It is self-substantiating, seeing it is automatically for the best that the best alternative should exist rather than an inferior rival for whose realization reason can devise no equally powerful case.3 But this is just one of its assets; it also offers significant systemic advantages. For of the various plausible existential principles, it

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transpires—in the end—that it is optimalism that offers the best available alternative. The principle being, as it were, self-explanatory, and for this very reason asking to ask for a different sort of explanation would be inappropriate. We must expect that any ultimate principle should explain itself and cannot, in the very nature of things, admit of an external explanation in terms of something altogether different. And the impetus to realization inherent in authentic value lies in the very nature of value itself. Yet what is to be the status of a Law of Optimality to the effect that “whatever possibility is for the best is ipso facto the possibility that is actualized.” It is certainly not a logico-conceptually necessary truth; from the angle of theoretical logic it has to be seen as a contingent fact—albeit one not about nature as such, but rather one about the manifold of real possibility that underlies it. Insofar as necessary at all it obtains as a matter of ontological rather than logico-conceptual necessity, while the realm of possibility as a whole is presumably constituted by considerations of logico-metaphysical necessity alone. But the division of this realm into real vs. merely speculative possibilities can hinge on contingent considerations: there can be logically contingent laws of possibility even as there are logically contingent laws of nature (i.e., of reality). “But if it is contingent, then surely it must itself rest on some further explanation.” Granted. It itself presumably has an explanation, seeing that one can and should maintain the Leibnizian Principle of Sufficient Reason to the effect that for every contingent fact there is a reason why it is so rather than otherwise. The Law of Optimality thus has a raison d’être alright. But one that lies in its own nature. For it is, in the final analysis, for the best that the Law of Optimality should obtain—that the best of reasons speak on its behalf. After all, there is no decisive reason why that explanation has to be “deeper and different”—that is, no decisive reason why the prospect of self-explanation has to be excluded at this fundamental level. After all, we cannot go on putting the explanatory elephant on the back of the tortoise on the back of the alligator ad infinitum: as Aristotle already saw, the explanatory regress has to stop somewhere at the “final” theoryone that is literally “self-explanatory.” And what

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better candidate could there be than the Law of Optimality itself with the result that the divisions between real and merely theoretical possibilities is as it is (i.e., value based) because that itself is for the best? We must expect that any ultimate principle should explain itself and cannot, in the very nature of things, admit of an external explanation in terms of something altogether different. And the impetus to realization inherent in authentic value lies in the very nature of value itself. A rational person would not favor the inferior alternative; and there is no reason to think that a rational reality would do so either. After all, to achieve an adequate resolution of our ultimate question the principle at work cannot rest on further extraneous considerations. For the question of why the truth of things is what it actually is will arise with respect to the principle itself, and if it is to resolve such matters it must do so with respect to itself as well. It must, in short, be self-sustaining and self-grounding. Otherwise the requisite ultimacy will thus be achieved. The question “Why optimalism?” splits into two decidedly distinct parts, namely (1) “Why is it that optimalism obtains?” and (2) “Why is it that we should accept optimalism’s obtaining?” These issues are, of course, every bit as distinct as “Why did Booth assassinate Lincoln?” and “Why should we accept that Booth assassinated Lincoln?” The former question seeks an existence for a fact, the latter asks for the evidentiation of a judgment. As already noted, the answer to the first question is straightforward. Optimalism obtains because it is self-potentiating. It is the case that what is for the best obtains because this itself is for the best. Optimalism, in sum, obtains on its own self-sufficient footing. Why should what is for the best exist? The answer lies in the very nature of the principle itself. It is self-substantiating, seeing it is automatically for the best that the best alternative should exist rather than an inferior rival. Value is, or can be, an explanatory terminus: it can be regress stopping and “final” by way of self-explanation in a way that causality or purposiveness can never manage to be.

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3. OPTIMALISM AND EVALUATIVE METAPHYSICS Optimalism has it that even as truly rational people will operform what they think is best (not only for themselves but ideally for everyone concerned), so a rationally functioning reality will act so as to realize what is actually for the best, everything considered that for whose realization the best reasons obtain. There can be no good reason for reality to function otherwise—a circumstance that, after all, is inherent in the very idea of what a “good reason” is. Optimalism has many theoretical advantages. For example, it is conceivable, so one might contend, that the existence of the world— that is to say, of a world—is a necessary fact while nevertheless its nature (i.e., of which world) is contingent. And this would mean that separate and potentially different answers would have to be provided for the questions “Why is there anything at all?” and “Why is the character of existence as is—why is it that this particular world exists?” However, an axiogenetic approach enjoys the advantage of rational economy in that it proceeds uniformly here. It provides a single uniform rationale for both answers—namely that “this is for the best.” It accordingly also enjoys the significant merit of providing for the rational economy of explanatory principles. For to ask for a different sort of explanation would be inappropriate. We must expect that any ultimate principle must explain itself and cannot, in the very nature of things, admit of an external explanation in terms of something altogether different. The impetus to realization inherent in authentic value lies in the very nature of value itself. To reemphasize: a rational person would not favor the inferior alternative and there is no good reason why a rational reality should do so either. But whence does the good obtain its creative impetus? Simply as part of the world’s pervasive lawfulness. What is at issue, however, is not a law not (as yet) of nature but rather a proto-law of naturizing. Whence does mass get its power to convert to energy, to deflect space so as to engender gravity. That’s just how things work. (And why should they work that way?—Just because that’s for the best.) There is nothing all that new and original in the idea that value (merit, being “for the best”) exerts on existential impetus. There are innumerable traces of this line of thought in Plato and Aristotle, in

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Neo-Platonism, in Christian scholasticism, and indeed in some contemporary thinkers as well (e.g., John Leslie). What is new in the present discussion is only the web of argumentation by which this ancient idea of axogenesis is being supported. From its earliest days, metaphysics has been understood also to include “axiology,” the evaluative and normative assessment of the things that exist. Already with Aristotle the aim of the enterprise was not just to describe or characterize, but to grade (appraise, rank) matters in point of their inherent value. Such metaphysical evaluation has two cardinal features: (i) it is genuine evaluation that involves some authentic concept of greater or lesser value and (ii) the mode of value involved is sui generis and thus not ethical, aesthetic, utilitarian, etc. Accordingly, it evaluates types of things or conditions of things existing in nature (not acts or artifacts) with a view to their intrinsic merit (not simply their “value-for” man or anything else). The very possibility of this axiological enterprise accordingly rests on the acceptance of distinctly metaphysical values—as opposed to ethical (right/wrong) or aesthetic (beautiful/ugly) or practical (useful/unuseful) ones. The paternity of evaluative metaphysics in philosophical practice can unhesitatingly be laid at Plato’s door, but as a conscious and deliberate philosophical method it can be ascribed to Aristotle. In the Physics and the De Anima we find him at work not merely at classifying the kinds of things there are in the world, but in ranking and grading them in terms of relative evaluations. Above all, his preoccupation in the Metaphysics with the ranking schematism of prior/posterior— for which see especially chap. 11 of Bk. 5 (Delta), and chap. 8 of Bk. 9 (Theta)—is indicative of Aristotle’s far-reaching concern with the evaluative dimension of metaphysical inquiry.4 It was thus a sound insight into the thought-framework of the great Stagirite that led the anti-Aristotelian writers of the Renaissance, and later preeminently Descartes and Spinoza, to attack the Platonic/Aristotelian conception of the embodiment of value in natural and the modern logical positivist opponents of metaphysics to attach the stigma of illegitimacy to all evaluative disciplines. Nevertheless, despite such attacks, evaluative metaphysics has continued as an ongoing part of the Western philosophical tradition as continued by such thinkers as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Whitehead, all of whom envision world-systems where some

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things have greater value than others. A prime example of this methodological approach in recent philosophy is G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica.5 For Moore taught that the realm of ethical values is not self-contained but rather roots in a manifold of metaphysical values. His celebrated “method of absolute isolation” invites us to make comparative evaluations of two hypothetical worlds supposed to be alike in all relevant respects except that in one of them some factor is exhibited which is lacking in the other. Thus Moore argues for the intrinsic value of natural beauty (i.e., its value even apart from human contemplation) by the argument: [A hypothetical] beautiful world would be better still, if there were human beings in it to contemplate and enjoy its beauty. But that admission makes nothing against my point. If it be once admitted that the beautiful world in itself is better than the ugly, then it follows, that however many beings may enjoy it, and however much better their enjoyment may be than it is itself, yet its mere existence adds something to the goodness of the whole: it is not only a means to our end, but also itself a part thereof. (Op. cit., § 50)

To espouse the project of evaluative metaphysics is thus to give Moore the right as against Henry Sidgwick’s thesis that: “If we consider carefully such permanent results as are commonly judged to be good, other than qualities of human beings, we find nothing that, on reflection, appears to possess this quality of goodness out of relation to human existence, or at least to some consciousness or feeling.”6 (There is of course the trivial fact if “we” do the considering, “we” do the evaluating. But the point to be borne in mind is that this need not be done from a humanly parochial let alone an idiosyncratically personal and “subjective” standpoint.) Sidgwick to the contrary notwithstanding, man is neither the measure nor necessarily even the measurer of all things in the evaluative domain. Things no more become valuable because we think them to be so than they are intelligible or efficacious because we deem them so. Along these lines, as Leibniz already saw, the value of an existential domain is determined by an optimal balance of rational desiderata such as procedural order (uniformity, symmetry) and phenomenal va-

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riety (richness, plenitude)—duly reflected in such cognitive features as intelligibility and interest. It is its (presumed) gearing to an inherently positive value which like economy or elegance, is plausibly identifiable as physically relevant and as such subject to scientific inquiry, that establishes optimalism as a reasonable proposition and ultimately prevents the thesis “optimalism obtains because that’s for the best” from declining into vacuity. To be sure, this means that optimalism is not so much a principle as a program. 4. THE ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE Optimalism obviously presupposes a manifold of suitable value parameters, invoking certain rationably-friendly and yet physically relevant features (symmetry, economy, uniformity, harmony, or the like) as merit-manifesting factors. And here optimization at issue is—and should be—geared to a “scientifically reputable” theory of some suitable kind, coordinate with a complex of physically relevant factors of a suitable kind. After all, many a possible world will maximize a strange “value” of some sort (confusion and nastiness included). It is its (presumed) gearing to a positive value which like economy symmetry, or stability is plausibly identifiable as physically relevant— contingently identifiable as such subject to scientific inquiry—that establishes optimalism as a reasonable proposition and ultimately prevents the thesis “optimalism obtains because that’s for the best” from declining into vacuity. But this essential factor can and should—as we have seen—be provided in terms of the rational order that is maximally beneficial to the interests of intelligence. In seeking to furnish an explanation of the why of the world’s state of things we presuppose that natural reality meets the salient demands of explanatory intelligence. So if success in this venture can be achieved at all—as inquiring intelligence demands it must—then we might as well assume from the outset that reality is so constituted as to meet this demand, and thereby so constituted as though it were the product of an intelligent agent or agency. This being so, it would seem that the most plausible consideration for a holistic explanatory will be one to which any such theory must, if adequate, have to commit itself,

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viz. that the real is rational in exactly the manner that an intelligencegeared optimalism envisions. In sum, intelligence-geared optimalism affords a promising prospect for the explanatory resolution of holistic/synoptic questions because if any adequate and cogent grand explanatory theory is available at all, this cannot but mean that reality is so constituted as to merit the needs of inquiring intelligence. In the end, then, there are basically two considerations that speak for the acceptance of optimalism: its ability to address ultimate questions positively in providing for a plausible explanatory transit form possibility to actuality; its ability to do this in a way that meets the actuality-abstractive demands of the situation, its capacity for selfsubstantiation. After all, in facing a choice among alternatives—be it in practical or in cognitive matters—we intelligent humans will, insofar as rational, opt for the best (most rationally cogent superior) of the alternatives. And an intelligence congenial reality is bound to do likewise. 5. EVIDENTIATING OPTIMALISM So much for the ontological side of why optimalism obtains. But there of course yet remains the epistemological matter of its evidentiation— of why it is that one would be well advised to accept optimalism. This, of course, is something else again. To obtain evidence for optimalism we will have to look at the world itself: the substantiation for optimalism will have to root in our knowledge of natural reality. And in this regard, optimalism, if tenable at all, will have to be tenable on at least roughly scientific grounds. And here the best evidence we could expect to have for optimalism is that emergence in the universe of intelligent beings able to understand the modus operandi of the universe itself: intelligent beings who can create thought-models of nature. For optimalism’s evidentiation, then we must look to a universe that is user-friendly to cogency (intelligent) being in affording an environment that is congenial to the best interest of intelligence.

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And so we confront the question “Is the world as we have it userfriendly for intelligence?” And the answer here would seem to be an emphatic affirmative with a view to the following considerations: • the fact that the world’s realities proceed and develop under the aegis of natural laws: that it is a manifold of lawful order whose doings exhibit a self-perpetuating stability of processual function; • the fact of a course of cosmic development that has seen an evergrowing scope for manifolds of lawful order providing step by step the materials for the development front of the laws of physics, their theme of chemistry, their biology, their sociology, etc.; • the fact that intelligent beings have in fact emerged—that nature’s modus operandi has possibilized and facilitated the emergence of intelligence; • the fact of an ever-deepening comprehension/penetration of nature’s ways on the part of intelligent beings—their ongoing expansion and deepening of their underlying of the world’s events and processes. In sum, a substantial body of facts regarding the nature of the universe speaks on behalf of an intelligence-geared optimalism. Evidence is certainly not lacking here. 6. COMPLICATIONS OF OPTIMALITY Optimality is something that can also be judged at two levels of deliberation, namely as regards the laws and processes at issue (nomic optimalism) and as regards the particular events that occur (phenomenal optimalism). And the results that ensue here need not necessarily coincide. In particular, in a world with certain systemically positive features—free will and contingency specifically above all—the series of actual occurrences need not themselves always be optimal. Even as in tennis the player with “the best game” need not win every point, so in the universe with the processually best game need not always produce

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the best possible result in the flow of occurrences. And from the angle of the present considerations, process trumps product. The optimalism being endorsed here is of the process-oriented variety. For a further important distinction must be drawn at this point, namely that between • product optimalism which looks to providing for realization of the best possible result and • process optimalism which looks to providing for a process that maximizes the chances of achieving the best possible result. A process optimalism is a doctrine to the effect not that what is best exists, but rather what is for the best exists. And this is—clearly— something quite different from product optimalism. In fact, an intelligence-geared optimalism with respect to a world containing free agents of finite and thereby imperfect capability in matters intellectual and moral represents an optimality of process that need not and will not involve an optimality of product. And in view of this the problem of how evil can enter into the best possible world becomes tractable, exactly because the best possible in point of process need not (and really cannot) involve absolute optimality in point of product. Intelligence-geared optimalism as here understood is directed to the condition that makes life for intelligent beings in the first instance possible, and in the second rewarding and pleasant. In principle, such a theory would admit two distinct versions: • Distributive (partitative) optimalism: Everything—every particular feature and facet of existing things—is for the best. • Collective (holistic) optimalism: The overall sum-total of existing things—taken comprehensively and synoptically all-in-all— is for the best. The presently envisioned version of optimalism takes the latter form because for rather obvious reasons the former is not really practicable—among them its essential unrealism. For a sensible optimalism

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has to focus upon the whole. It is not actually feasible to maximize the beauty of every square inch of a large canvas if one’s aim is the realization of the overall beauty of a large canvas. Not every sentence of a splendid story can or need itself be a thing of glory. And on this basis the presently envisioned optimalism sees the aim of the creative enterprise in terms of the utilitarian goal of the greatest good of the greatest number. On this perspective, reality is in the final instance concerned for the genus of intelligent beings, in the second instance its species (e. g., humans), and in the third and final instance its individuals. And it should be understood that in the larger scheme of things the greater good of the greater number overall may well require the realization of a lesser good for some—so that, in principle, realizing that larger good of the whole may well involve settling for a lesser benefit for some of its constituents. The point is that, in cosmology as in statecraft, where optimality is concerned, systemic considerations can trump anomalous negativities of detail. For example, a systemic whole that provides its agents with free choices will outrank one without these features even if it involves occasional negativities that would not otherwise exist. A superior result overall may well be available only when one tolerates some inferior details—some localized less-than-ideal negativities that must be taken in stride for the benefit of the greater good. As these deliberations indicate, optimalism is a complex doctrine that calls for a due heed of various distinctions and interpretations. For only a carefully constructed version of optimalism can lay a reasonable claim to plausibility. NOTES 1

The prime spokesman for this line of thought within the Western philosophical tradition was G. W. Leibniz and John Leslie is among its present-day exponents. See also the present author’s The Riddle of Existence (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1984).

2

Optimalism is closely related to optimism. The optimist holds that “Whatever exists is for the best,” the optimalist maintains the converse that “Whatever is for the best exists.” However, when we are dealing with exclusive and exhaustive alternatives the two theses come to the same thing. For if one of the alternatives A, A1, …

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NOTES

An must be the case, when if what is realized is for the best it follows automatically that the best is realized (and conversely). 3

As noted above, other principles can also be self-substantiating, albeit not in a way that meets present purpose.

4

His willingness to subscribe to teleological/axiological explanation is clearly attested by Aristotle’s account of the rationale of the continuity of organic existence: “For since some existing things are eternal … while others are capable both of being and of not being, and since the good … is always accordingly to its own nature a cause of the better in things … for these reasons there is generation of animals.” (De Generatione Animalium, 731b24–31).

5

Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1903. See in particular §§ 50, 55, 57, 112–113.

6

Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics (London and New York: Macmillan, 1874), Bk. I, Chap. ix, § 4.

Chapter Five DEFENDING OPTIMALISM SYNOPSIS (1) Optimalism does not require value to exercise a productive impetus. (2) The world’s imperfection is no objection to optimalism. (3) Optimalism is not defeated by the absence of maximality. (4) Optimalism is not a metaphysical necessitarianism. (5) Optimalism has a decidedly pessimistic side. 1. THE PROBLEM OF HOW VALUE CAN HAVE EXPLANATORY EFFICACY

A

seeming obstacle to optimalism looms in the question: “But how can value possibly exert a causally productive influence?” And the answer to this good question is that it does not do so. It has to be reemphasized that—as already noted above—the role of value must be seen not as operating productively within the sphere of actuality, but rather as functioning reductive within the realm of possibility. What value conditions do is not to create anything (i.e., productively engender its realization). Their modus operandi is not causal but normative: their role is to block or preclude certain theoretically available possibilities from realizability. They serve an entirely restrictive function and only manage to preclude certain theoretical possibilities from qualifying as ontological (potentially achievable) possibilities. At this stage we contemplate a tripartite hierarchy of (increasingly substantive) possibilities: logical, ontological and physical subject to the control of logic, of axiology and of physics, respectively. It is thus at the middle level of ontological possibilities that axiology does its work. The operative impetus of optimality thus does not express itself by way of causality in the realm of the real but rather by way of a deter-

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mination in the realm of the genuinely possible—that is, of the metaphysically rather than logically possible. And this metaphysical possibility should be seen as constraining the most fundamental laws of physics, the most basic of which would emerge as invariant with respect to those metaphysical possibilities. Optimalism accordingly represents a doctrine of “final causes” in Aristotle’s sense. But its axiotropism is emphatically not a causal theory in the nowadays standard sense of efficient causation. It proceeds not by production but by elimination. The overall account accoridngly runs as follows: Nature—physical reality as we have it—represents the actualization of certain possibilities. But underlying this existential condition of affairs is the operation of a prior sub- or metaphysical principle, operative within the wider domain of logical possibility, and dividing this domain into disjoint sectors of “real” and “purely theoretical” possibility. To put it very figuratively, logical possibilities are involved in a virtual struggle for existence in which the axiologically best win out so as to become real possibilities. Specifically, when there are (mutually exclusive) alternatives that are possible “in theory,” nevertheless none will be a “real” or “ontological” possibility for realization as actual or as true if some other alternative is superior to it. The availability of a better alternative disqualifies its inferiors from qualifying as ontologically available—as real—that is, metaphysical—possibilities. And so whenever there is a uniquely best alternative, then this alternative is ipso facto realized as actual or true. At this point a skeptical reader may well ask: “Given a spectrum of possibility with a tripartite structure such as (1) (2) (3), what would be the difference between an elimination that excludes the A of actuality from compartment 3 and thereby impels it to the two other compartments and a magnetic-style attraction that that causes A to move 1-or2-wise and thereby out of compartment 3? Is the effect not the same either way?” And this point is well taken—as far as it goes. But it overlooks something important. The fact is that an attractive force involves a causal agency of some sort. Possibility exclusions on the other hand canthe sheer unavailability of alternativessimply root in “the general modus operandi” of things without any reference to causal agen-

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cy. Consider an analogy. Suppose that a society exhibits a suicide rate of 1.2 per 1000 per annum during a certain era of its existence. No positive force is at work in constraining it to meet its quota of suicides—no identifiable cause engenders this aggregate result. And while it is effectively impossible to have a suicideless year, this lies in “the nature of things” generally and not in the potency of some suicide-impelling power or force. Again, more than 5 % of the letters on the first page of tomorrow’s Times newspaper will be E’s. But no force or power compels this effect. And while it is literally impossible for no E’s to occur there and “the nature of the situation” precludes this prospect, there is no force of attraction to constrain the presence of E’s. It is inevitable that there be more E’s than Z’s but this result is not the product of any power or force. This result is not produced by some ad hoc force or agency or power—it is simply a feature of how things work in this context. In explaining why physical objects and events exist we must indeed invoke causes and effects. But the fundamental laws of nature themselves do not “exist” as causally produced products—they just obtain. Now when laws obtain, there is, no doubt, a reason for their obtaining (an axiological reason, as we ourselves see it). But this reason can presumably be provided by an explanatory principle that need not carry us into the order of efficient causality through the motivations of an agent. To insist upon asking how values are able to function causally in law-realization is simply to adopt an inappropriate model for the processes involved. Value explanation just is not causal: values do not function in the order of efficient causality at all and so does not the Law of Optimality yield those results via the mysterious attractive power of optimal possibilities but because suboptimal possibilities are excluded through a displacement by their superior rivals which simply preempts their place in possibility space. Axiogenetic theory has it that even as the presence of light displaces darkness so does the availability of better alternatives preclude the very possibility of any inferior so-called alternatives and require the intervention of a productive agent or agency. And so in essence this line of reply concedes that value does not engender existence in the mode of efficient causations and that it would indeed be rather mysterious if values were asked to play a

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causal role in regard to laws. But this is to be seen as irrelevant. The real point is that while value does not efficiently cause existence, it nevertheless explains it, exactly because causal explanation is not the only sort of explanation there is. And so the fact that axiology does not provide such an explanation is not an occasion for appropriate complaint. It does not stop value explanations from being explanations. They present perfectly good answers to “Why is something-orother so?” type questions. It is just that in relation to laws, values play only an explanatory role though possibility elimination and not a causally productive role though actual creation. And this is no defect because a productive process is simply not called for. And so, while axiological explanations fail to address a question for which design explanations have an answer—namely the causal question “How do values operate productively so as to bring particular laws to actualization?”—this reflects no demerit. For as has been stressed repeatedly this question is simply inappropriate in the axiological setting. Values don’t “operate” in the causal order at all. They function only—and quite inefficiently—as delimiting constraints within the manifold of possibility. The issue of a specifically causal efficacy simply does not arise with axiological explanation. What we have here, then, is not the operation of some rather mysterious force or agency but the preclusion (or rarefaction) of certain (theoretical) possibilities owing to the operation of natural law: a combination of the space of possibility from a wider range of hypothetical possibility to a narrow range of mimic possibility under the aegis of lawful principles—and optimality principle in the present case. (Here “direct” preempts the prospect of a deeper explanation in terms of further principles relating to the operation of the powers or forces of some agent or agency.) The point is that the regress of explanatory principles must have a stop and that it is here—with axiology—that we reach a natural terminus by way of self-explanation. The long and short of it is that axio-ontology can be autonomous and nomically self-sufficient: it does not need to be seen as based in the operative power of some productive force or power or agency. However, if such an axiogenetic explanation is to work, then since there is only one real world the manifold of “real possibilities” must ultimately be reduced to one. That is, a series of successively operable

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value considerations must reduce the manifold of “theoretical possibilities” more and more restrictively until at last, as with the little Indians of the story, there remains but a single one. And that one is, in a very real sense, necessitated: it is, so to speak, “constrained by value.” The crux of the matter is that the Principle of Optimality functions in the domain of possibility and does so in a way that is not productive but eliminative. 2. THE IMPERFECT WORLD OR “POLLYANNA” OBJECTION IN THE LIGHT OF ARROW’S THEOREM Is optimalism not defeated by the objection: If it were the case that value explains existence, then why isn’t the world altogether perfect in every regard? Does not reality’s all too evident imperfection not constitute a decisive roadblock to optimalism? For if optimal alternatives were always realized would not the world be altogether perfect in every regard? Not at all! For what is at issue here is optimality on the whole and overall. And the best achievable result for a whole will, in various realistic conditions require a less-than-perfect outcome for the parts. A game with multiple participants cannot be won by every one of them. A society of many members cannot put each of them at the top of the heap. In an engaging and suspenseful plot things cannot go with unalloyed smoothness for everybody in every character. Moreover, an object that is of any value at all is subject to a complex of values. For it is the fundamental fact of axiology that every evaluation-admitting object has a plurality of evaluative features. Consider an automobile. Its parameters of merit clearly include such factors as speed, reliability, repair infrequency, safety, operating economy, aesthetic appearance, road-handle ability. But in actual practice such features are interrelated. It is unavoidable that they trade off against one another: more of A means less of B. It would be ridiculous to have a supersafe car with a maximum speed of two miles per hour. It would be ridiculous to have a car that is inexpensive to operate but spends three-fourths of the time in a repair shop. One of the most portentous developments of modern economics is Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem demonstrating that the indi-

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vidual preferences of a group cannot be satisfactorily combined to yield a coherently amalgamated collective preference measure for the community as a whole, all individuals duly included. This finding shattered a doctrine of the school of “welfare economics” and rocked the landscape of economics to an extent that earned its author a Nobel prize. But this argument is readily transposal to show that the several evaluatively preferential features of a single object cannot be satisfactorily combined to yield a coherently amalgamated collection preference measure for the item as a whole, with all value aspects duly considered. The long and short of it is that there just is no way in which the preferability situation for the community at large can be aligned to the preferences of its individuals. And so, if the best interests of the community—as-a-whole—are to be served satisfactorily, then some of its individuals must pay a price for it. And this generic situation that characterizes the economic situation of a society in relation to its individuals also is played out once more at the larger cosmological level. Here too it lies in the inexorable logic of the situation that some individuals must suffer in the interests of the general good. For optimizing the whole need not necessarily optimize the parts. But the converse holds as well. Optimizing the parts need not optimize the whole. Separately splendid ingredients need not bake conjointly into a splendid cake, nor separately splendid episodes combine into a superb story. Combining the nicest sentences in the grammatically most elegant structures will not produce a splendid story. The best-contrived local arrangements need not issue in the best overall result for the comprehensive whole. But what then of the victims who have drawn the short sticks in the lottery of existence and accordingly bear the brunt of those unavoidable negativities? What can be said of them? Is it fair, is it just? The answer here cannot be but a loud and resounding NO! But justice and fairness—important though they individually are— are simply two goods among many. The arrangements of life afford a good many assets and desiderata: not justice and fairness alone but also love and friendship, pleasure and hope, etc. One simply cannot have it all ways at once. In any such setting of competing and conflicting multiple desiderata some of these have to be traded off against

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others. The spaciousness of one’s house competes with the convenient accessibility of its rooms. We cannot eliminate the monotony of the road’s straightness save by making the journey longer. In any multicriterial setting, “absolute” perfection is simply an impossibility. Perfection—maximum realization of every value dimension all-at-once—is simply unrealizable because of the interaction of parameters: in designing a car you cannot maximize both safety and economy of operation. Analogously the world is not absolutely perfect—perfect in every respect—because this sort of absolute perfection is in principle impossible of realization. And of course it makes no sense to ask for the impossible. Accordingly, the objection “If value is the key to existence, the world would be perfect” collapses. All that will follow on axiogenetic principles is that the world will exemplify an optimal interactive balance of the relevant natural factors. An optimally realizable best need not be “perfect” in the naive sense of that term which unrealistically demands maximality in every relevant respect. Leibniz had the right approach here: optimalism does not maintain that the world is absolutely perfect but just that it be the best that is possible—that it outranks the available alternatives. It is an inherently inevitable feature of the nature of things—an inevitable “fact of life”—that value realization is always a matter of balance, of trade-offs, of compromise. The reality of it is that value factors always compete in matters of realization. A concurrent maximum in every dimension is simply unavoidable in this (or indeed any other realistically conceivable) world. All that one can ever reasonably ask for is an auspicious combination of values. “But—really!—how can sensible people possibly embrace the conception that the inherently best alternative is thereby automatically the actual (true) one. Does not the world’s all too evident imperfection stand decisively in the way here?” The matter is not all that simple, however. For the issue is going to pivot on the question of what “inherently best” means. If it means “best” from that angle of your desires, or of my interests, or even of the advantage of Homo sapiens in general, then clearly the thesis loses its strong appeal. For it to be plausible, that “best” had best be construed as looking to the condition of existence-as-a-whole rather than one particular privileged individual or group. Optimality in this con-

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text is clearly not going to be a matter of the affective welfare or standard of living of some particular sector of existence; it is going to have to be a metaphysical good of some synoptic and rather abstract sort that looks to the condition of the whole. Accordingly the objection “is not optimalism simply too Pollyanna-ish to be plausible” can be met effectively. The optimalist need not simply shut his eyes to the world’s all too evident parochially considered imperfections. For what the optimalist can and should do is to insist that because of the intricate inherent interrelationships among value parameters an “imperfection” in this or that respect must be taken in stride because they have to be there for an optimal overall combination of value to be realized. There is, in fact, a point of view from which optimalism is a position that is not so much optimistic as deeply pessimistic. For it holds that even the best of possible arrangements is bound to exhibit very real imperfections from the angle of narrowly parochial concerns or interests. And as regards the sort of value that indeed is at issue, this is something that will all be dealt with in some detail below. And this sets the stage for the handling of our present problem in terms of what might be called a desideratum compromise. For while justice and fairness are indeed prime desiderata, they are not the only ones. One could not—should not—want to insist that fiat justitia ruat caelum. The only reasonable approach is one that looks to a proper balance among desiderata—a rational economy of positivities. And if there is to be any reconciling this world’s injustices and unfairnesses with the idea that its existence should not be deemed a total misfortune will—seemingly—have to take the form not of denying its goal imperfections but in acknowledging that these too are part of the unavoidable costs requisite for the realization of a larger good. Moreover, there are generally multiple parameters of desirability that function competitively so that some can only be enhanced at the cost of other—even as to make a car speedier we must sacrifice operating cost. With an automobile, the parameters of merit clearly includes such factors as speed, reliability, repair infrequency, safety, operating economy, aesthetic appearance, road-handle ability. But in actual practice such features are interrelated. It is unavoidable that they trade off against one another: more of A means less of B. It would be ridicu-

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lous to have a supersafe car with a maximum speed of two miles per hour. It would be ridiculous to have a car that is inexpensive to operate but spends three-fourths of the time in a repair shop. Invariably, perfection—an all-at-once maximization of every value dimension—is inherently unrealizable because of the inherent interaction of evaluative parameters. In designing a car you cannot maximize both safety and economy of operation, and analogously, the world is not, and cannot possibly be, absolutely perfect—perfect in every respect—because this sort of absolute perfection is in principle impossible of realization. In such cases we have a teeter-totter, see-saw relationship that might be characterized as desideratum complementarity.1 What we have here is a relation of competition and tradeoff among modes of merit akin to the complementarity relation of quantum physics. The holistic and systemic optimality of a complex whole will require some of its constituent constituent comportments to fall short of what would be content for it if abstractly considered in detached isolation. This suffices to sideline the objection: “If optimalism obtains, why isn’t the world absolutely perfect?” Display 1 ARISTOTLE’S GOLDEN MEAN Virtue

Too little

Too much

proper self-esteem financial prudence bravery

self-contempt spend-thriftiness cowardice

self-aggrandizement miserliness foolhardiness

The phenomenon of desideratum complementarity is also illustrated by the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean. Display 1 illustrates Aristotle’s idea of virtue as a balance between vices. Here we have a situation of the following structure. There are two vices V1 and V2 that stand in conjugate opposition. And in “going to extremes” in avoiding one vice (self-contempt, say) too extensively we fall into the grasp of the other (self-aggrandizement, say). And so here the two virtues at issue with vice-avoidance are accordingly locked into a situation of desideratum complementarity as per

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feasible arrangements V1-avoidance V2-avoidance Too much of the one virtue means too little of the other, and the search for a “happy medium” to balance matters out between the two is exactly the Aristotelian quest for the golden mean. The interactive complexity of value is crucial here. For it is the fundamental fact of axiology that every object has a plurality of evaluative features some of which will in some respects stand in conflict. And consequently in any multicriterial setting “absolute” perfection is simply an impossibility. And of course it makes no sense to ask for the impossible. It is an inherently inevitable features of the nature of things—a logicoconceptually inevitable “fact of life”—that with the complexity of a world at issue, value realization will always be a matter of balance, of trade-offs, of compromise because value factors always compete in matters of realization. Concurrent maximization in every relevant positivity is simply unavailable in this or indeed any other realistically conceivable world. All that one can ever reasonably ask for is an auspicious combination of values—an overall optimal profile. Accordingly, the objection “If value is the key to existence, the world would be perfect” collapses. All that will follow on axiogenetic principles is that the world will exemplify an optimal interactive balance of the relevant natural factors. For thanks to the inevitable interconnections of things in a complex lawful manifold the only possible way to achieve a diminution of negativity at one point requires a more than compensatory argumentation of negativity at another. All manner of imperfections can indeed be there: it is just a matter of there being fewer of them, on balance, than is the case with any of the other available alternatives. And it is, after all, the best possible world that is to be at issue.

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3. THE POSSIBLE TOPLESSNESS OBJECTION Since Leibniz’s day two formalistic objections to the idea of a best possible world have been made. One, which might be called the Buridan’s Ass objection, turns on the idea of a tie among several distinct maximally equimeritorious alternatives. The other, which I shall dub the Possible Toplessness objection, turns on the prospect that any possible world might be surpassed by yet another more meritorious alternative, so that there just is no best possibility at all.2 However, among distinct maxima, the problem is not all that serious. For in the final analysis this does not invalidate optimalism exactly because there is no difference in point of merit here. With diverse maxima the specific outcome may well just not matter. The crucial point with optimization lies in securing an alternative that is as good as any and cannot be improved upon. A variant of the no-unique optimum objection turns on the multidimensionality of value—the prospect that since there are different types and aspects of merit it will transpire that alternative A1 is superior in point of merit m1 and A2 in point of m2 with no one alternative winning out overall. This potential difficulty has to be met through the considerations, already contemplated above, that while perfectionsuperiority in point of every applicable sort of merit—is indeed impossible, that what really matters for optimization is a balance an overall combination of features of merit that realized the best overall profile. Accordingly, the multidimensionality of values will not—or need not—stand in the way of realizing one particular alternative as best (or at least as not bettered by yet another) when considered on the whole, with all those value disparities taken into appropriate account. A further potential difficulty seems to arise in the form of a possibility range that is evaluatively “topless”—that is, which does not have any alternatives that are optimal of not being bettered by all-inall any other3 so that every alternative is surpassed by yet another that is better. Should this happen, then it would seem to be fatal for optimalism because with such a range there just is no optimum and therefore no possibility of optimization. Here optimalism must take the bull by the horns. Insofar as situations can be imagined which—like that of a “topless” infinite alterna-

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tive spectrum—could raise difficulties for the theory, it could and should simply be seen as part and parcel of optimalism to maintain that such situations will not actually arise: that a reality that is benign in this regard as in others will exclude such a problematic situation. As optimalism sees it, the very fact that toplessness conflicts with optimalism ejects this threat from the range of real possibilities. There is, moreover, another way of addressing the issue. For consider the pivotal question: Why cannot there be several different and distinct that are as as such a thing can possibly be? The answer is that to be a that is as as such a thing can possibly be is just exactly what it is to be a . There just are no different alternatives here because being • perfectly straight, • perfectly flat, • optimally meritorious is just exactly what leads a to qualify as constituting . With each of those features there is a natural terminus in a unique result with response to maximality/optimality. There thus are just no other possible worlds different from this one that answers to maximal merit just as there is no other surface other than the plane that answers to maximal flatness. To be sure, when a line is not altogether straight a yet straighter one can always be found. And when a surface is not altogether flat, a yet flatter one can always be found. This sort of toplessness has to be acknowledged: suboptimality can always be improved on. But that does not argue against the uniqueness of maximality. After all, certain

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sorts of descriptors—maximally straight curves or maximally flat surfaces—are such that by their very nature must issue in a single result. And—as Leibniz already insisted—“maximally meritorious possible world” stands with them in this regard. Accordingly, the Toplessness Objection to a world-optimality thesis is, in the final analysis, not really a telling objection at all. 4. THE BLOCK UNIVERSE OBJECTION Does optimalism not bespeak a Spinozistic determinism? Will it not engender a “block universe” whose every detail is deterministically necessitated? By no means. The necessitation at issue relates to the why of the universe and not to its what. It is not only conceivable but presumably actual that “the best possible world” whose existence is axiologically necessitated by value considerations is one which in its internal mode of functioning provides for the contingencies of chance and free agency. The necessitation at issue here must emphatically not be construed as a matter of occurrence-necessitation as this is standardly construed in metaphysical deliberations about causal determinism. The objection has long been made—especially in relation to the ideas of Leibniz—that an optimalistic approach is omni-deterministic and necessitarian in constraining the range of possibility to one single unique resolution that renders reality’s status quo unavoidably inevitable. This result, verging on fatalism, is something Leibniz himself strove valiantly to avert. Still, can any version of optimalism really avoid disintegrating into determinism of a block universe where everything is inexorably necessitated? After all, if the theory says that the optimum must be realized and only one among the possibilities is optimal, then that and that possibility alone becomes effectively inevitable. The first point to be made here is encompassed in Leibniz’s own insistence that there is a crucial different between the logical necessity of absolute constraint at issue with no possibly realizable alternatives at all and the metaphysical necessity having no realization-meriting alternatives that is at issue with axiological optimization. The former mode of possibility-reduction is the rigid necessitation of logical con-

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straint, the latter is only a matter of axiological elimination. Axiological selectivity is something quite different from absolute necessity. The second key point is less subtle. It is simply that by its very nature optimalism precludes rather than engenders a block universe of fallibilistic meritability—exactly because that just is not the best possible alternative. The very considerations that make the block universe unpalatable also militate decisively against its being the result of a sensible optimalism. After all, a block universe is not even in the running for an optimal prospect. Excluding contingency, eliminating free will, and generally engendering a necessitarian block universe are only too obviously optimality-precluding negativities. The doctrine itself automatically invalidates them. A critically important point must be made in this connection. The “necessitation” at issue with those possibility-eliminating axiological proto-laws is normative; it is emphatically neither an absolute (logicoconceptual) nor a causal necessity. And accordingly it is nondeterministic, since it is not only conceivable but presumably actual that “the best possible world” is one whose internal mode of functioning provides for the contingencies of chance and free agency. Even if there is only one successful candidate for an optimal world there is no deterministic constraint about it. There is, or need be, nothing forced about the choice of an optimum. And moreover, an optimal world may afford more than one possible history. Optimalism thus need not—must not—issue in a necessatarian determinism. After all, optimalism’s bearing on cosmic explanation is not akin to the totally scripted moves of a military ceremonial. If the idea is to be workable at all, it will have to be construed on the analogy of designing a safe playground where fractious children can find the excitement needed for having a good time. The result is not a block universe but a “playing field” of natural laws optimally user-friendly for finite free agents who make their way in the world by meeting their needs and wants not by instinct (let alone pre-programming) but by the use of intelligence. 5. OPTIMALISM’S PESSIMISTIC SIDE Is not optimalism merely a form of wishful thinking? Not necessarily! For even as in personal life what is best for us is all too often not at all

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what we individuals want, so in metaphysics what is abstractly for the best is very unlikely to bear any close relationship to what we would ideally want to have if we humans could have things our way. What prevents optimalism from being too Pollyanna-ish to be plausible is the deeply pessimistic acknowledgment that even the best of possible arrangements is bound to exhibit very real shortcomings. The optimalist need not simply shut his eyes to the world’s all too evident parochially considered imperfections. For what the optimalist can and should do is to insist that, owing to of the intricate inherent interrelationships among value parameters, an “imperfection” in this or that respect must be taken in stride because they have to be there for an optimal overall combination of value to be realized. Leibniz took the right approach here: optimalism does not maintain that the world is absolutely perfect but just that it be the best that is possible—that, all considered, it outranks the available alternatives. There is, in fact, a point of view from which optimalism looks to be not so much optimistic as deeply pessimistic. For it holds that even the best of possible arrangements is bound to exhibit very real imperfections from the angle of narrowly parochial concerns or interests. What we see as imperfections in the world—its unkindness to us and our interests as individuals and as a species—can (and personally is) part of the price that must be paid for the optimization of affairs at the level of the whole. Local imperfection is the collateral damage incurred in the process of achieving global optimization. And so optimalism need not shut its eyes to the world’s imperfection. It need not succumb to a wishful thinking that ignores reality’s failure to have things go as we would ideally wish. There is accordingly a world of difference between optimism and optimalism. For optimism maintains that things go well and optimalism maintains that things will go as well as possible. The difference is immense. It is one thing to say that there were many people in the canoe and another thing to say that there were as many as possible. For it would well turn out that in the latter case that there were only a few. In any case, the presently salient point is this, that as long as the prospect of a cogent rationale for the world’s all too evident moral and physical evil is available—as does indeed seem to be the case—the

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In any case, the presently salient point is this, that as long as the prospect of a cogent rationale for the world’s all too evident moral and physical evil is available—as does indeed seem to be the case—the charge that optimalism is clearly untenable in the face of the world’s realities cannot be sustained.4 Optimalism, in sum, has it not that the world is perfect but that it is as perfect as it is possible for an authentic world to be. And this is a view that is not necessarily all that optimistic. Approached from the angle of our want—rather than needs—it is a doctrine that can be regarded in a decidedly pessimistic light. NOTES 1

Consider the special case of an overall value that is simply the additive total of two individual value parameters: V = v1 + v2. Now in those cases where these two parameters of merit stand in a relation of desideratum complementarity with v1 X v2 = c, then the overall value that is realizable will (by elementary calculus) be maximized at v1 = v2 = c , with a maximal total value of 2 c . The broader lesson is simply that even with value-parameters of unlimited scope separately, the total value that can be realized in aggregative conjunction can be decidedly limited.

2

For a discussion of these issues in the Leibnizian setting see David Blumenfeld, “Is the Best Possible World Possible?,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 84 (1975), pp. 163–77; Nicholas Jolley, The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alvin Plantinga, “Which World Could God Have Created?,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 70 (1973), pp. 539–52; Nicholas Rescher, Leibniz: An Introduction to His Philosophy (New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979); and Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For technical reasons relating to the overall specifics of Leibnizian metaphysic, the solutions to these problems that are proposed here are unavailable to Leibniz. But there is no reason why this need give us pause.

3

Leibniz himself saw the existence of the actual world as a decisive argument against such toplessness since no alternative could be realized on grounds of superior merit so that a benevolent creator would be effectively paralyzed.

4

Among the other objections that may be made against noophelic optimalism (=axiogenesis) is “that it is just theology.” This issue will be addressed in the concluding chapter.

Chapter Six ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD SYNOPSIS (1) Is optimalism defeated by the world’s improvability? (2) After all, could the condition of intelligent beings not be vastly improved? (3) Almost certainly it could not be improved by “tinkering,” because (4) the so-called Butterfly Effect presents a decisive obstacle here, (5) as is vividly illustrated by the “Monkey’s Paw” story. (6) The world as we have it is a package deal where “improvement” in one regard is only possible through degradation elsewhere. (7) Nor is there reason to think that replacements would insure matters. (8) After all, the very idea of world replacement is deeply problematic. (9) And with appropriately construed worlds, improvement is simply not in prospect. (10) This does not, however, result in Spinozistic necessitarianism. (11) Not—as already noted—is it incompatible with a decidedly pessimistic stance. (12) The Leibnizian “best of all possible worlds” theory is not readily defeated, problematic though it may seem on first view. 1. THE IMPROVABILITY THESIS AND THE ISSUE OF “NATURAL EVIL”

U

ntil recently, no philosopher since Leibniz’s day has grappled seriously with the question of whether it is feasible to see the actual order of nature as the optimal resolution of the problem of worldrealization under plausible constraints—constraints, that is, which could reasonably be seen as appropriate requirements for a coherent universe.1 After all, the Leibnizian claim that this is the best possible world may seem to be absurd because so much patently appears to be

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amiss with the world. And yet the idea that the world is improvable is not without its problems. Since classical antiquity, theorists of an atheistic persuasion have deployed the argument that if this world indeed were the product of the productive agency of an intelligent creator, then it would be far better than it is. As they see it, the world’s imperfection in encompassing such “natural evils” as cataclysmic disasters, epidemic diseases, accidental injuries, and the like, mark it as improvable, and thereby countervail against the prospect of an intelligent creator. (The world’s moral imperfection rooting in the wicked misdeeds of its intelligent agents—that is, the “problem of natural evil”—poses separate and distinct issues.2) The imperfection of the natural world—it’s potential for improvement—is adduced as a decisive obstacle to divine creation. After all, if even we mere humans can envision ways to improving the world, then how can it possibly be the product of divine creation? And so the problem of how a perfect God can create an imperfect world looks to be a faith-defying paradox. The idea that the actual world as we have it is the best possible goes back to Plato’s Timaeus. Here we are told (29A) that the cosmos is “the best thing that has come into being” because: The divine being (theos) wished that everything should be good and nothing imperfect AS FAR AS POSSIBLE (kata dunamin) … since he judged that order (taxis) was better than disorder. For him who is the supremely good, it neither was nor is permissible to do anything other than what is the best [among the possibilities].3

Plato envisioned a world which, imperfections notwithstanding, is nevertheless “for the best” in being just as perfect as the conditions of a physically realized world will permit. And Leibniz effectively agreed with this position. Alfonso X, King of Castile (1221–84), known as “the learned” (el Sabio) and as “the Astronomer” (el Astrólogo), who wrote prolifically on astronomical matters, deserves the eternal gratitude of scholars for his efforts to ensure the transmission of Greco-Arabic scholarship to Latinate Europe. But he is nowadays known mainly for his audacious declaration—issued in wake of studying the Ptolemaic system of as-

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tronomy with its profusion cycles and epicycles—that “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on his creation, I would have recommended something simpler.” And many has been the theorist who, walking in Alfonzo’s footsteps, has thought that improvements could be made upon the Creator’s handiwork. Voltaire insisted that a benign Creator would certainty have averted the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that killed so many of his most dedicated devotees. And, predicating his reasoning on the doctrine of evolution, Bertrand Russell wrote: “If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment is, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of my efforts.”4 And in another place he writes “If God really thinks well of the human … why not proceed as in Genesis to create man at once?”5 Voltaire was certainly not alone in thinking it absurd of Leibniz to deem this vale of tears to be the best of possible worlds. And in just this vein, David Hume insisted that, if the world were indeed the product of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator its arrangements would be far better than they are: A being, therefore, who knows the secrets principles of the universe, might easily, by particular volitions, turn these accident to the good of mankind, and render the whole world happy, … Some small touches, given to Caligula’s brain in his infancy, might have converted him into a Trajan. One wave, a little higher than the rest, by burying Caesar and his fortune in the bottom of the ocean, might have restored liberty to a considerable part of mankind.6

And Hume went on to offer some helpful suggestions: The author of nature is inconceivably powerful: His force is supposed great, if not altogether inexhaustible. Nor is there any reason, as far as we can judge, to make him observe this strict frugality in his dealings with his creatures. It would have been better, were his power extremely limited, to have created fewer animals, and to have endowed these with more faculties for their happiness and preservation.7

And more recently, in his discussion of the Problem of Evil, Alvin Plantinga considers the idea that God could have improved upon this

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world by arranging for Hitler to die in his sleep prior to inaugurating the Holocaust genocide of European Jewry.8 The idea that a divinely created world would have to be a good deal better than this one has long intrigued philosophers—and not philosophers alone. And so, over the centuries, optimalism has faced the charge of emulating Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss who will acknowledge no evil in the world—much like that familiar trio of monkeys who “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” And what principally gives people pause here is that they see this world as imperfect on grounds of potential remediation. One theorists after another has maintained that, given the chance, he could readily improve on the natural world’s arrangements by this, that, or the other modification. And from there it is only one short and easy step to the conclusion that a benevolent creative deity does not exist.9 Thus Bertrand Russell bolsters this anti-theistic argument with the acid comment that “An omnipotent Being who created a world containing evil not due to sin must Himself be at least partially evil.”10 After all, it seems only plausible to suppose that if there indeed is a deity acting as the intelligent contriver of the universe, he/she/it would have prevented all sorts of misfortunes and disasters.11 2. THE TURN TO OPTIMALISM The present deliberations will try to cast doubt upon this idea of the world’s prospective amelioration. They endeavor to rebut the seemingly plausible Improvability Thesis that a better world might be obtained by fixing some of the many things that are wrong with the world as it stands. One important preliminary must be noted. Both improvementists and their optimalist opponents must be in agreement on one fundamental point, namely that there is a cogent and objective standard for world assessment. Claiming that the world is improvable and claiming that it is optimal both alike require a standard for merit-assessment. Now for present purposes we will take this standard to be the best condition for the real interests of the world’s intelligent beings. However, the idea of “best conditions” can here be construed in two decidedly different ways: either via the actualities relating to their welfare

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and wellbeing, or via the possibilities at their disposal—with the open prospect that they may well mess them up. On the surface, this second alternative doubtless appears more plausible. It is, to be sure, theoretically possible to contemplate a different standard of world-merit, one which looked, for example, to the proliferation of the different varieties of organic life. But this is not the sort of thing that those who complain about the world’s imperfection have in mind. They tend to be much more parochial about it and see our human condition as pivotal. The shift from humans to intelligent creatures at large is doubtless as far as they would be prepared to go, and for dialectical purposes this is the stance to be adopted here.12 3. ON THE INFEASIBILITY OF LOCAL TINKERING: BURLEY’S PRINCIPLE AS A LOGICAL OBSTACLE Now on to improvement. For starters, one key obstacle that stands in the way of the Improvability Thesis is the pervasive interconnectedness of things. Man is, as the ancients have it, by nature an intelligent animal, and this automatically carries with it the inherent limitation of the frailties of the flesh. If you want animals you must provide them with organic food. And a food chain brings with it a Nature rough in tooth and claw. All worldly arrangements have a down-side that involves imperfection. Imperfections of various sorts accompany any class of items, so that a world cannot be devoid of imperfections—if imperfection indeed is, as it must be, an involvement with limitations of some sort. But consider a somewhat more drastic alternative. What if we lived in a Berkeleyan world whose “nature” is not material and whose intelligences are disembodied spirits? Such a world would of course dispense with physical evils and injuries (and with physical pleasures as well). All the same, affective anguish and psychic distress would certainly remain. Alienation of affection can cause greater anguish than physical injury. And who is to say that in a psychical world spiritual injuries are not felt even more acutely, and that disembodiment would do finite beings a disfavor.

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Display 1 THE GIST OF BURLEY’S PRINCIPLE (1)

Let p and q two be arbitrary truths, with p ∈ T and q ∈ T.

(2)

(p v ~q) ∈ T by (1)

(3)

And let us now suppose p to be false, so that ~p by supposition

(4)

~q from (2), (3). Q.E.D.

Note: T is the manifold of all truths.

There just is no real prospect of local tinkering with the world without wider ramifications. In this world—and indeed in any possible world—states of affairs are interconnected and local changes always have pervasive consequences. Any local “fix” always has involvements throughout, and in consequences no tweaking or tinkering may be able to effect an improvement. This very important fact can be seen from two points of view—the logico-theoretical and the empiricosubstantive. Let us begin with the former. As Walter Burley already observed in the 14th century, any and every change of one truth can potentially destabilize any other.13 Thus let T be the set of all truths and now consider the situation of Display No. 1, which sets out the idea of Burley’s Principle: The logic of the situation is such that the introduction of any falsehood whatever into the set of all truths destabilizes everything: any other truth must then be abandoned. The systematic integrity of fact means that the idea of changing one item while leaning all the real alone is simply impracticable. The structure of fact is an intricately woven fabric. One cannot sever one part of it without unraveling other parts of the real. Facts engender a dense structure, as the mathematicians use this term. Every determinable fact is so drastically hemmed in by others that even when we erase it, it can always be restored on the basis of what remains. The logical fabric of fact is woven tight. Facts are so closely intermeshed with each other as to form a connected network.

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As far as the logic of the situation goes, any change anywhere in the manifold of truth has reverberations everywhere.14 Once you embark on a reality-modifying assumption, then as far as pure logic is concerned all bets are off. At the level of abstract logic, the introduction of belief-contravening hypotheses puts everything at risk: nothing is safe anymore. When supposition postulates falsehood, then to maintain consistency one must revamp the entire fabric of fact. And this is a task of Sisyphusian proportions: something that those who make glib use of the idea of other possible worlds all too easily forget. The world is something too complex to be remade in our thought. Reality’s reach has a grip that it will never entirely relax: it is a tight-woven web where the cutting of any single thread can lead to an unraveling of the whole. Yet there are, of course, other important aspects of improvability that lie beyond the logic of the situation. And they too require attention. 4. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT AS A SUBSTANTIVE OBSTACLE TO TINKERING Consider the following objection: “How can one possibly claim the world to be all that meritorious and benignly contrived. Surely, envisioning a better world would not be all that hard. After all, it wouldn’t have taken much to arrange some small accident that would have removed a Hitler or a Stalin from the scene. To figure out how this sort of thing could be arranged—to the world’s vast improvement!—is not Rocket Science!” Alas, dear objector, even Rocket Science is not good enough. For what stands in the way here is the massive obstacle of what is known as the Butterfly Effect. This phenomenon roots in the sensitive dependence of outcomes on initial conditions in chaos theory, where a tiny variation in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can issue in immense variations in the long term behavior of the system. E. N. Lorenz first analyzed the effect in a pioneering 1963 paper, leading to the comment of one meteorologist that “if the theory were correct, one flap of a butterfly’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.”15 With this process—changing even one tiny aspect

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of nature—one single butterfly flutter could have the most massive repercussions: tsunamis, droughts, ice ages, there is no limit. With this phenomenology in play, re-writing the course of the cosmos in the wake of even the smallest hypothetic change is an utter impracticability.16 A chaotic condition, as natural scientists nowadays use this term, obtains when we have a situation that is tenable or viable in certain circumstances but where a change in these circumstanceseven one that is extremely minutewill unravel and destabilize the overall situation with imponderable consequences, producing results that cannot be foreseen in informative detail. Every hypothetical change in the physical make-up of such a worldhowever smallsets in motion a vast cascade of further such changes either in regard to the world’s furnishings or in the laws of nature. And for all we can tell, reality is just like that. Suppose that we make only a very small alteration in the descriptive composition of the real, say by adding one pebble to the river bank. But which pebble? Where are we to get it and what are we to put in its place? And where are we to put the air or the water that this new pebble displaces? And when we put that material in a new spot, just how are we to make room for it. And how are we to make room to the so-displaced material. Moreover, the region within six inches of the new pebble used to hold N pebbles. It now holds N + 1. Of which region are we to say that it holds N – 1. If it is that region yonder, then how did the pebble get here from there? By a miraculous instantaneous transport? By a little boy picking it up and throwing it. But then, which little boy? And how did he get there? And if he threw it, then what happened to the air that his throw displaced which would otherwise have gone undisturbed? Here problems arise without end. As we conjure with those pebbles, what about the structure of the envisioning electromagnetic, thermal, and gravitational fields? Just how are these to be preserved as was given the removal and/or shift of the pebbles? How is matter to be readjusted to preserve consistency here? Or are we to do so by changing the fundamental laws of physics? Limits of necessity can root not only in the fundamental principles of logic (logical impossibility) but also in the laws of nature (physical impossibility). For every scientific law is in effect a specification of

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impossibility. Thus it indeed is a law that “Iron conducts electricity,” then a piece of nonconducting iron thereby becomes unrealizable. Accordingly, limits of necessity are instantiated by such aspirations as squaring the circle or accelerating spaceships into hyperdrive at transluminal speed. Many things that we might like to do—to avoid ageing, to erase the errors of the past, to transmute lead into gold—are just not practicable. Nature’s modus operandi precludes the realization of such aspirations. We finite creatures had best abandon them because the iron necessity of natural law stands in the way of their realization. “But is the Butterfly Effect not an artifact of the ‘laws of nature’— the rules by which Nature plays the game is the production of phenomena: And would not omnipotent God alter those rules so that the world’s occurrences are no longer inextricably intertwined?” This is a tricky question that requires some conceptual unraveling. An omnipotent creator could ex hypothesi create a chaos. But he could not create a Cosmos that affords a user-friendly home for intelligent beings without thereby creating the sort of coordinated fabric of intelligible lawfulness that carries a Butterfly Effect in its wake. For how else could those intelligent agents make their way in the world? An existential manifold could possibly dispense with the lawful coordination that underpins the Butterfly Effect, but an intelligence-supportive (“noophelic”) Nature could not possibly do so. We then have to reckon with the prospect that the lawful order inherent in the Butterfly Effect could not be abandoned without massive collateral damage to the intelligent and thereby intelligible order of things. 5. MONKEY’S PAW ISSUES “But could not the amount of human suffering that there is in the world be reduced in some different dispensation?” For sure it could. But the question is: At what cost? At the price of there being no world at all? At the price of there being no humans in the world? At the price of having all humans be ignorant, dull, and unintelligent? At the price of having only humans without empathy, sympathy, and care for one another? The proper response to all of these questions is simply: Who

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knows? No-one can say with any assurance that the cost of such an “improvement” would be acceptable. The idea of collateral damage has important ramifications here. It is—unfortunately—entirely possible for the removal of even a Hitler or Stalin from the world stage to be achievable only at the price of visiting upon mankind an even greater disaster. To render this idea graphic, one should consider W. W. Jacobs’ chilling story of The Monkey’s Paw, whose protagonist is miraculously granted wishes that thereupon actually come true—but always at a fearsome price.17 The salient point at issue here is straightforward. Granted, the world’s particular existing negativities are in theory remediable. But to arrange for this will likely require accepting an even larger array of negativities overall. (The Monkey’s Paw perplex.) The cost of avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of an even larger volume of misfortune. What the Monkey’s Paw Perplex means is that we can no longer be glibly facile about our ability to tinker with reality to effect improvements in the world by somehow removing this or that among its patent imperfections through well-intentioned readjustments. For what would need to be shown is that such a repair would not yield unintended and indeed altogether unforeseen consequences resulting in an overall inferior result. And this would be no easy task—and indeed could prove to be one far beyond our feeble powers. To “fix” some negative aspect of the world would involve a change of how things happen within it, i.e., altering the laws of nature under whose aegis things happen as they do. And the effects of this will prove imponderable. For as one recent writer has cogently argued: If water is to have the various properties in virtue of which it plays its beneficial part in the economy of the physical world and the life of mankind, it cannot at the same time lack its obnoxious capacity to drown us. The specific gravity of water is as much a necessary outcome of its ultimate constitution as its freezing point, or its thirst-quenching and cleansing functions. There cannot be assigned to any substance an arbitrarily selected group of qualities, from which all that ever may prove unfortunate to any sentient organism can be eliminated especially if … the world … is to be a calculable cosmos.18

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What is crucial in this regard is the operation of natural laws. Our universe is an orderly cosmos rather than an anarchic jumble. And only this can provide a home for beings whose actions are grounded by thought. Only through some degree of understanding of the orderly modus operandi of a world can an intelligent being whose actions are guided by beliefs come into operation. And in a realm in which what happens proceeds in accord with natural laws, a finite embodied is inevitably at risk of mishap. Bruce Reichenbach has it right: “Natural Evils are a consequence of natural objects acting according to natural laws upon sentient, natural creatures.”19 And the fact of it is that those natural laws make the world a package deal. But someone will now object as follows: “This reliance on the Butterfly Effect is problematic. For this effect is the result of the fact that, in certain respects, the laws of nature have yielded a system of the sort that mathematicians characterize as chaotic. Surely one could change the laws of nature to avoid this result.” It is no doubt so. But now we have leapt from the frying pan into the fire. For in taking this line we propose to fiddle not merely with this or that specific occurrence in world history, but are engaged in conjuring with the very laws of nature themselves. And this embarks us on the uncharted waters of a monumental second-order Butterfly Effect—one whose implications and ramifications are incalculable for finite intelligences. The point is simple: Yes, the world’s particular existing negativities are indeed remediable in theory. But to avert them in practice might well require accepting an even larger array of negativities overall. The cost of avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of an even larger mass of misfortune. And the very possibility of this prospect shows that the Improvability Argument does not actually manage to accomplish its aim. 6. THE PACKAGE-DEAL PREDICAMENT: THE TEETER-TOTTER EFFECT “But surely if one effected this-or-that modification in the world without changing anything else one would improve matters thereby.” Alas, the difficulty here lies in that pivotal phrase “without changing any-

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thing else.” In anything worthy of the name “world” the constituent components are interrelated and interconnected. You cannot change one without changing innumerable others. The situation is not unlike that of language. Change the U of GUST to I and you do not leave the rest unchanged. Everything changes: shape, meaning, pronunciation. Granted, most of us would have little difficulty in conjuring up a few of our fellows without whom the world would be better off—or so we think. But the problem is that in a lawful world getting rid of them would have to be achieved in a way that effects broader changes— more virulent diseases, more enterprising murderers, stronger impetus to suicide—all of which have wider and potentially deleterious consequences. A world is an infinitely complex arrangement of interlocked features and interrelated factors. And it is bound to have these coordinated in a complexity interrelated harmony. Modify this and you disturb that. After all, changes to the existing order of things do not come costfree. Could homo sapiens be improved by yet another pair of eyes at the back of the head? Presumably not. The redesign of this bio-system could not be effected without incurring additional vulnerabilities. And the mechanisms for processing the additional information provided would involve added complications that would doubtless not be costeffective in added benefit. Nature has doubtless seen to it that we are as well adjusted to our bio-niche as the world’s fabric of natural law permits. And there is no reason to refrain from seeing this sort of situation replicated on a cosmic scale. The upshot of these considerations is thus clear. The idea that the world’s defects can be fixed by tinkering is decidedly implausible. And given the fact that re-engineering the world-as-a-whole lies beyond our feeble powers, we have to face up to the consideration that— for all we can tell—this is indeed the best of possible worlds, and that changing the existing condition of the universe in any way whatsoever—would diminish the sum-total of its positivities. We have to face the prospect that it is unrealistic to contemplate a “quick fix” for the negativities of this world. The world we actually have—and indeed any possible alternative to it—is a coordinated whole. Once starts to tinker with it, it disappears on us. For in seeking to change it, we create conditions where there is

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Display 2 CONTRASTING TINKERING WITH REPLACEMENT B A

no longer any anaphoric “it” to deal with. To tinker with a world is to annihilate it. 7. MOVING FROM IMPROVEMENT TO REPLACEMENT All the same, perhaps something else, something altogether different might take its place. Possibly! But this something else could readily prove to be worse overall. Consider the situation of the Display 2 diagram. Think of this as the cross-section of a mountainous terrain. Note that in whatever direction you move away from the peak of A, you go downhill. Small-scale tinkering never yields an improvement. But nevertheless A’s peak is no more than a local maximum. If you abandon A altogether and shift to B you can achieve a greater height. The situation that is now under considerations is analogous. For it can transpire that: When one “fiddles” with the description of the actual world (A) by changing some of its features in any direction, one indeed makes matters worse, but nevertheless matters improve by abandoning this world altogether and shifting over to some entirely different world (B). So even a world that cannot be improved by change might nevertheless be improved upon by all-out replacement. Thus the fact that this world may not be improvable though change does not automatically mean that it is “the best of all possible worlds.” Non-improvability is not the same as all-out optimality. To improve something is still to keep it, while to improve on it contemplates replacement. And so nonimprovability notwithstanding, one might nev-

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ertheless proceed to argue that another world—a replacement one radically different from ours—might be superior to it. However to bring this line of thought to a convincing conclusion would require initiating some world or other that could reasonably be seen as superior to ours. And this is a task that confronts the replacement theorist with impossible difficulties. For how could such a world possibly be put on the agenda of consideration? Improving upon the actual world calls for identifying some other, different and alternative nonexistent world that is demonstrably superior. And just this is a task which—as is not hard to see—cannot possibly be effected by finite intelligences. “But surely it is possible for there to be a world without earthquakes!” Indeed so. But the move from a descriptive possibility (no earthquakes) to an authentic world requires a lot of fleshing out. (For example—no earth no earthquakes.) The problem here lies in the move from possible states (no earthquakes) to possible worlds. But now to meet the dialectical needs of the situation it will not do to invoke the mere possibility of a superior world. The objector will have to make good his challenge by specifying one in detail. And herein lies an insuperable difficulty—the problem of getting rid of those earthquakes without causing imponderable systemic disruptions. 8. PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFYING POSSIBLE WORLDS At this juncture an important point comes into play with respect to actual vs. possible. With actuals there is a crucial difference between generic and specific knowledge—between knowing that something has a feature and knowing which item has that feature. Here K(∃x∈S)Fx—that is, knowing that some x in S has the property F—is possible without knowing of some specific x that it has F: (∃x∈S)KFx. But with mere possibilities the preceding distinction does not apply. The only way of knowing that some mere (nonexistent) possibility has a certain feature is by specifying the possibility that possesses this feature. Real objects have an identity apart from their specification. But mere possibilities do not. And this renders the task of specifying a superior world unachievable for us.

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“But surely some alternative world would be superior to ours— though I concede an inability to provide an illustrative example.” This sounds plausible enough. Surely some general officer is in the Pentagon right now—although I don’t have a clue as to who that individual might be. But this sort of response will not work, being based on a seriously flawed analogy. For one knows a great deal about the Pentagon and its general modus operandi. But there is nothing comparable going on with respect to merely possible worlds—no general principles of functioning that would lead to a comparable result. Granted, it is in a broad sense conceivable that optimalism fails and that some alternative world might be superior to this one. But this does not bear in the dialectical situation at issue. For the argumentation at issue here is that of the atheist who insists that this world cannot be a divine creation on grounds of its imperfection. “Even I, he says, with my imperfect intellect can come up with ways of improving upon this world.” And in this dialectical context the mere possibility invoked above will not do the job. As contemporary possible world theorists generally see it, we can and should be prepared to contemplate altogether different worlds, worlds removed from and indeed incompatible with our own in their make-up and their modus operandi.20 But what do such worlds involve? For one thing, they must be worlds. As such they will have to be manifolds of concrete reality. To qualify as such, its constituent individuals must also be concrete as regards the definiteness of its makeup. Specifically, a world must be descriptively definite completethat is, any descriptively specifiable feature either must hold of the world or fail to hold of it; there is no other alternative, no prospect of being indecisive with regard to its make-up.21 A world must be decisive about what to be like. In consequence the Law of Excluded Middle must apply: the world and its constituents must exhibit a definiteness of composition through which any particular sort of situation either definitely does or definitely does not obtain. A possible world must be decisive in its composition: its individuals cannot be “around 6 feet tall”—they have to commit to a definite size.22 After all, a world is not just some sketchily described state of affairs, but will have to be a “saturated” or “maximal” state of affairs-at-

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largea state that affairs-in-toto can assume, a synoptic totality that suffices to resolve if not everything then at least everything that is in theory resolvable.23 (Unlike the state of affairs that “A pen is writing this sentence” a world cannot leave unresolved whether that pen is writing with black ink or blue.) If an authentic world is to be at issue (be it existent or not) this entity must “make up its mind,” so to speak, about what features it does or does not have.24 Any assertion that purports to be about it must thus be either definitively true or definitively falsehowever difficult (or even impossible) a determination one way or the other may prove to be for particular inquirers, epistemologically speaking. Authentic worlds do and must accordingly have a wholly definite character.25 And just here lies the problem, for we can never manage to identify such a totality. Consider a state-of-affairs indicated by such a claim as “The pen on the table is red.” An item cannot just be red: it has to be a definite shade of redgeneric redness will not do. Nor is it a state of affairs that “There are two or three people in the room”that state of affairs has to make up its mind. Nor again is it a state of affairs that “The butler did not do it”its being the wicked gardener who did the sort of thing that a state of affairs requires. No matter how much we say, the reality of concrete particulars will go beyond it. As regards those merely possible worlds, we simply have no way to get there from here. The point is not that we could not obtain different universes if we altered the initial conditions of the world or even to laws of nature. Rather it is that the situation of “what would happen if” would become ultimately unproblematic with any universe sufficiently complex to be of interest in the present context. And this consideration is probatively crucial, for to provide a pervasive refutation of optimalism it will not do merely to insist that there might possibly be some alternative world superior to the actual. The opponent has to make good on his claim by presenting a cogent case for contending that some specifiable possibility would be superior. But world design is too big a job for us. Actually identifying alternative worlds is impracticable for us as a matter of basic principle.

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9. WITH WORLDS, PERFECTION IS NOT A PROSPECT And further difficulties lurk. Prominent among them is the salient consideration that with worlds, perfection is unattainable with respect to created worlds. One salient reason for this is the phenomenon of what might be called desideratum conflicts where in advancing with one positivity we automatically diminish another. What we have here is vividly manifested in the phenomenon of positivity complementarity that obtains when two parameters of merit are so interconnected that more of one automatically means less of the other, as per the following diagram: Positivity 1 feasible combinations Positivity 2

The crux here is that one aspect of merit can be augmented only at the price of diminishing another. We shall characterize as a Teeter-Totter Condition any arrangement where an improvement in regard to one aspect can only be achieved at the cost of worsening matters in another respect. And whenever two inherently positive factors are (like familiarity and novelty) locked into such a teeter-totter relationship we cannot have it both ways. Whenever this situation is in play, it stands decisively in the way of absolute perfection. Consider a simple example, the case of a domestic garden. On the one hand we want the garden of a house to be extensive—to provide privacy, attractive vistas, scope for diverse planting, and so on. But on the other hand we also want the garden to be small—affordable to install, convenient to manage, affordable to maintain. But of course we can’t have it both ways: the garden cannot be both large and small. The desiderata at issue are locked into a see-saw of conflict. Again, any criminal justice system realizable in this imperfect world is going to have inappropriate negatives through letting some of the guilty off while also admitting false positives by condemning some innocents. And the more we rearrange things to diminish one

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flaw, the greater scope we give to the other. And so it goes in other situations without number. The two types of errors are locked together in a see-saw balance of complementarity that keeps perfection at bay. Throughout such cases we have the situation where realizing more of one desideratum entails a correlative decrease in the other. We cannot have it both ways so that the ideal of an absolute perfection that maximizes every parameter of merit at one and the same time is out of reach. In the interest of viability some sort of compromise must be negotiated, seeing that the concurrent maximization of desiderata is now unavoidably unrealizable. Even an appeal to God will not help here. For as the medieval schoolmen already emphasized, God’s omnipotence consists in an ability to do anything that is possible. Doing the impossible is not as issue. Neither can God make one selfsame proposition both true and false, nor can he make 2 plus 2 come out 5, nor can he forget facts. Nor can God make lesser number exceed the larger, nor turn virtue into vice, nor make an inferior state of things into a superior. The truths of logic and mathematics, and the conceptual truths about the nature of things are not alterable and this holds for God as much as anyone. But—and this is crucial—the impossibility of God’s doing the impossible is not an obstacle to his omnipotence. God can certainly create a good world, and indeed an optimal one. But even He cannot make a manifold of finite being that is flawless and perfect. Given the inherent tension between various modes of merit, a natural world cannot be perfect and exhibit all possible possibilities in maximal degree. As Plato already insisted, the imperfectability of the natural universe is an inevitable aspect of its physical materiality, its embodiment (somatoeides, Politikos 273B).26 And was it followed in this view by the entire Neo-Platonic tradition.27 All this harks back to the discussion of the Ontological Argument with its familiar point that such a thing as “a perfect mountain” is simply not in the range of possibility. For world-imperfection is built into the very nature of things. Limitedness is unavoidable with finite beings. Humans cannot be super-human—if there at all they have to be there as the type of things they inherently are. In an organically complex world, the interests of some species may have to be subordinated to those of others (e.g., as providers of food). Moreover, the in-

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terest of particular individuals may have to be subordinated to those of the entire species as a fire that destroys some trees may nourish the soil for the ampler developments of others later on. World optimization is always maximization under various existential constraints imposed by the taxonomic nature of the things whose realization is being contemplated. And such constraints means that while the world may well be as good as it can be as a whole—i.e., is aggregatively merit-maximizing—nevertheless it is not correspondingly merit maximizing in its parts taken distributively. The condition of many of these parts is far from optimal and can certainly be improved. It is just that the merit of the parts is so interconnected and intertwined that improvement in one area is bound to carry with it diminution in another. The medieval schoolmen already had the correct take on the issue. They inclined to look on perfection as a matter of completeness. For them, “perfect” and “whole” were virtually identical concepts.28 However, they went on to insist that an optimal whole need not be perfect in each of its constituent aspects, and that increasing the perfection of some part of aspect will throw the whole out of balance. As St. Thomas put it “God permitted imperfections in creation when they are necessary for the greater good of the whole.”29 And so, as Leibniz insisted, optimality is one thing and perfection another. And our world can abandon any claims to the latter without compromise to its claims to the former. For things to be “as good as they can get” does not require the realization of perfection. 10. THE SPECTRE OF SPINOZISM At this point it might seem that the specter of Spinozism looms ominously before us. For the point of contenting that this is the best of possible words—that, for better or worse, this is as good as it gets—is clearly preempted by the Spinozistic idea that this is the only possible world. If this were so, then there just would be no alternatives to this world of ours: its existence and nature would become necessary, with the issue of its optimality thereby somewhere between trivial and immaterial.30 But this prospect is unraveled by the fact that the existence

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of this world is contingent—that there could, in theory, be some different order of existence (or indeed, perhaps no world at all). However, it is necessary also to draw a distinction that was already stressed by Leibniz between absolute (logico-metaphysical) necessity and normative (ethico-evaluative) necessity. For the world’s necessity is certainly not tenable if we look to absolute or logical necessity. Alternative world-manifolds are always logically possible, seeing that logic confines itself to generalities—all of its theses and structure being abstract and universal in nature—it cannot mandate the existence of something unique and concrete. However, a specific existent world that contains concreta lies beyond the reach of logically necessity on anything like the standard conception of logic.31 Particularity is always contingent, and any coherent manifold of particular truths is bound to have logically coherent alternatives.32 And so if necessity is to be realized in matters of existence, it cannot be of the strictly logico-conceptual mode, but rather of the presently contemplated axiological mode. And now necessity will have lost its sting. For what we now have is, in effect, a Leibnizian theory of the mitigated necessity of world optimization. For Spinoza the world as it is the one and only available possibility. For Leibniz it is the one and only optimal possibility. The difference turns on a single world. But it is one that is obviously far-reaching and portentous in import.33 11. OPTIMALISM DOES NOT DEMAND OPTIMISM The traditional approaches to natural or physical evils look to several alternative ways of addressing the problem, preeminently including the following: • An illusionism that dismisses natural evil as merely apparent and not real. This is the approach of Oriental mysticism and of the Panglossian unrealism which Voltaire mistakenly attributed to Leibniz. • A facilitationism that sees natural evil as part of the indispensable causal means to a greater good. (The melodrama must have

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its villain so that the persecuted heroine can fully appreciate the delights of a heroic rescue.) • A compensationism that sees natural evil as compensated for in the larger scheme of things—either in this world or in the next. (This, according to Kant, is the key rationale for belief in an after-life.) • A holism that sees natural evil as the collateral damage that is unavoidable in even the best of possible arrangements contrived with a view to the realization of salient positivities. (This is in essence the Leibnizian view of the universe that as a package deal that inextricably links the positive and the negative.) The present discussion’s optimalistic approach most closely approximates the last of these options. It takes the line that physical evil represents the price of an entry ticket into the best arrangement possible within the limits of inevitable constraints. The world’s physical evils are seen as the inescapable consequences that are bound to occur when intelligent beings of limited capacity come to be emplaced within a world-order whose lawfulness is on the one complex enough to permit their rational development but simple enough to afford them cognitive access for the management of their affairs. However—as has been stressed repeatedly—the idea that this is the best of possible worlds emphatically does not commit one to an overly rosy view of its merits. For what optimalism maintains is only that this world, however imperfect, is such that any other possible world (and thus an actively fleshed out world and not just some incomplete indefinite scenario) will involve a still greater balance of negativity over positivity. Accordingly, none of those traditional plaints about this world’s evils and deficiencies refute the prospect of its being the best of possible worlds. For it being the very best of the possibilities need not and will not require being perfect. Even the best of possible worlds can admit all manner of imperfections it is just a matter of there being fewer of them, on balance, than is the case with any of the other alternatives. Saying that this is the best of possible worlds is not necessarily to give it altogether unqualified praise.

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And so, as an argument against the Leibnizian view, the lucubrations of Voltaire’s Candide are a non-starter. Here Dr. Pangloss’ skeptical pupil pressed him with the question Si c’est ici le meilleur des mondes possibles, que sont donc les autres? (“If this be the best of possible worlds, than what in heaven’s name will the others be like?”)34 But a perfectly good answer was available to the good Doctor, which despite its cogency he was reluctant to give, namely the reply: “Even worse!” The facile optimism of Dr. Pangloss, the butt of Voltaire’s parody Candide, misses the mark if Leibniz (and not some naive and simple-minded Leibnizian) is intended as its target. A plausible objection to optimalism is the challenge of fairness, which effectively runs as follows: Even if one grants that the world as is represents the optimally achievable resolution to the problem of world creation, is it not deeply unfair that some of its members should, for no failing of their own making and responsibility, occupy a position inferior to that of others? The proper handling of this objection is not simple but requires recourse to some rather subtle distinctions. For fairness is a matter of proportioning outcomes to claims. And even as people come into the world without clothes, so they enter it without claims. It is incontestably lamentable that some of the denizens of even the best of possible worlds should fare badly. Their condition is unhappy and unfortunate. They deserve our sympathy in full measure. But victims of unfairness they are not. For unfairness only arises with preexisting claims. And in the context of realizing world-possibilities there simply are none. Those whose lot comes up short in possible worlds may be unfortunate, but they are not victims of unfairness. They have no preexisting claims upon reality—or upon God.

Yet is it not unjust that some should thrive and others suffer? Here it would seem that one can do no better than to revert to the previous consideration that perfect worlds—and in particular, worlds in which all individuals are treated with perfect justice—just are not on offer. There simply are no perfect worlds any more than there are perfect men. And we cannot ask it of anyone—not even of God—that they should do better than the best that is possible.

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12. CONCLUSION The upshot of these Neo-Leibnizian deliberations runs as follows: First, that in relation to natural evil there is no convincing reason for holding that the world can be improved by modification and tinkering. Second, that the variant complaint that the actual world could be improved upon by replacement confronts its proponents with the effectively unmeetable challenge that no such putatively superior replacement could ever be identified. Third, that the idea that this world’s manifest imperfection stands in the way of its optimality is quite erroneous since even the best is bound to be imperfect here. But is optimalism not by its very nature theological and thereby unscientific? Surely not! Water flows downwards; tumbleweeds follow the path of least resistance; entropy increases. All such processes exhibit a uniform directionality in respect of some factor. They act planconformably but without any explicit planning. They proceed regularly but without regulation. And axiotropism can be seen as just another such phenomenon—albeit one that functions at a more fundamental level. Nature dictates an optimal arrangement for stacking logs and for packaging cannon balls. The most efficient and effective means of reaching specified ends are often dictates by nature’s laws. In principle this sort of situation could prevail at the global level as well. In closing, it is advisable to return to the start and reemphasize the dialectical purport of the present deliberations. It has not been their object to argue that this clearly imperfect world of ours is indeed the best possible. Instead—and far more modestly—the discussion has tried to show that the standard objections to this idea just do not work. So if one is minded to take seriously the Leibnizian view that this is the best of possible worlds, there is no convincing obstacle of general principle to stand in the way.35 NOTES 1

Albert Einstein might perhaps be viewed as a thinker who sought to turn back the clock here.

2

Some of the classical texts on this issue are presented in Mark Larrimore (ed.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). The religious dimension of the prob-

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NOTES

lem is subject of a vast literature. On its history and (very extensive) bibliography see Friedrich Billicsich, Das Problem des Übels in der Philosophie des Abendlandes, 3 vols (Wien: Verlag S. Sexl, 1952–59). However, this classic study of the history of the Problem of Evil devotes only one somewhat perfunctory chapter (Vol. III, pp. 195–205) to the issue of evil in nature. And even here it is the negative aspect of the struggle of organic existence inherent in the Darwinian survival of the fittest that is its focus. The issue of the prospect of imperfect design is that physical order of nature does not figure in this otherwise monumental work. 3

Timaeus, 298 and also 29E–30B.

4

Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 222.

5

Bertrand Russell, ibid., pp. 194.

6

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 11.

7

Ibid. For a modern perspective on the issues see John R. Hick, Philosophy of Religion (4th ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990).

8

Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (New Haven: Harper Torch Books, 1974). See also Roderick M. Chisholm, “The Defeat of Good and Evil,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 42 (1968–69), pp. 26–38.

9

See, for example, R. K. Perkins, Jr., “An Atheistic Argument from the Improvability of the Universe,” Nous, vol. 17 (1983), pp. 239–50.

10

Bertrand Russell, loc.cit.

11

This also provides an objection to some versions of a doctrine of intelligent design. On Intelligent Design Theory see J. H. Davis and H. L. Poe, Chance and Dance: The Evolution of Design (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation, 2008); William A. Dembski, Intelligence Design (Downer’s Gove, Ill, 1999); Ernan McMullin (ed.), Evolution and Creation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Roger Penrose, Tower of Babel: Scientific Evidence and the New Creations (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998); Delvin Ratsch, Nature, Design, and Science (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001); Michael Ruse, The EvolutionCreation Struggle (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000); as well as Elliot Sober, Philosophy of Biology (2nd ed., Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2000).

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NOTES 12

Admittedly cashing in this loose reference to “the condition of intelligent beings” will need a good deal of fleshing out. Is one to be a Rawlsin maximin theorist for whom the standard is set by the condition of the worst (the least well-off). Is one to be an elitist from whom the standard is the condition of the best, the most able and highly developed? Or is one to be a democrat whose standard is the preponderant condition of the middle run? And is the standard—however otherwise construed— to be applies at the level of individuals or at the level of species? Clearly larger and deeper issues lurk behind these questions. But we need not pursue them here because the thrust of the considerations of the present deliberations will apply across the board—mutatis mutandis—no matter which specific standard is chosen.

13

See the author’s, Conditionals (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 77–83.

14

This condition of things is old news, already noted in his influential Treatise on Obligations by the medieval scholastic philosopher Walter Burley (ca. 1275–ca. 1345) laid down the rule: When a false contingent proposition is posited, one can prove any other false proposition that is compatible with it. Translated in part in N. Kretzman and E. Stump, The Cambridge Translation of Medieval Philosophical Texts, Vol. I: Logic and Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), see pp. 389–412. Burley’s reasoning proceeded by way of examples.

15

Lorenz’s discussion gave rise to New Line Cinema’s 2004 feature film The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart.

16

Think here of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of cosmic evolution that plays so prominent a role in the setting of the Anthropic Hypothesis.

17

An intriguing example of the adverse consequences of “improving” matters in the world is afforded in Kenneth Boulding’s intriguing study of the unhappy consequences of significant life prolongation: “The Menace of Methusalah” in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 55, no. 7 (March 1965), pp. 171– 179.

18

F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, 2 vol.’s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), vol. II, p. 201.

19

Bruce Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 106. I myself would amend the passage to read “the inevitable consequences.” The issue is one of the “collateral (damage)” that is (unavoidable) in pursuing the greatest achievable measure of the good.

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NOTES 20

On possible worlds in literary theory in their interrelationship with philosophical issues see Mihailesau and Hamarneh (eds.), Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.)

21

On this feature of concrete worlds see the author’s “Leibniz and Possible Worlds,” Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 28 (1995), pp. 129–62.

22

See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). An alternative perspective could be mereological: a possible world now being seen as simply the sum-total of the possible individuals that exist within it. (The two approaches come to the same thing if we adopt a theory of reductive particularismor “methodological individualism” as it is sometimes calledaccording to which every state-of-affairs regarding things-in-general reduces to a collection of facts about some set of individuals.)

23

“A possible world, then, is a possible state of affairsone that is possible in the broadly logical sense.” (Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974], p. 44).

24

Some logicians regard possible worlds as collections of statement rather than objects. But while there is much to be said for such an approach, it faces two big obstacles: (1) not every collection of (compatible) statements can plausibly be said to constitute a world, but rather (2) only those can do so those which satisfy an appropriate manifold of special conditions intending that any “word characterizing” set propositions must both inferentially closed and descriptively complete by way of assuring that any possible contention about an object is either true or false. And such macro-sets of statements lie beyond our grasp.

25

Authentic worlds thus differ from the schematic “worlds” often contemplated by model logicians. The latter are not possible worlds as all, but conceptual constructs, while, insofar as we can provide them, are inadequate to the needs of the situation.

26

See Plato’s Timaeus 28Cff, 35A, 50Dff.

27

Even—indeed especially—in the sunlight, will material objects cast a shadow. Cf. Plotinus, Enneads, III, 2.5.

28

Totum et perfectum sunt quasi idem Duns Scotus maintained. (Quoted from W. Tatarkiewicz, On Perfection (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1992), p. 47.) St. Thomas maintained that perfectum dicitur cui nihil deest secundum modum suae perfectionis (Summa Theologiae I 4.1 ad resp.). The substantial study of The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) by R.

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NOTES

N. Flew addresses the issue of human imperfection only; the idea of imperfection in physical reality is not considered. 29

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I. 4.1.

30

Some physicists hold that if the world’s lawful make-up is such that if things were even slightly different, there could be no world at all. And then this would be the only physically possible world. See Michael Heller, Ultimate Explanations of the Universe (Berlin: Springer, 2009), pp. 92–93). But this is a matter of necessitation by the physical laws as they stand—which could themselves be different. And this is not Spinozisism because he wants to trade in logical-theoretical possibility.

31

Even the Ontological Argument for God’s existence—controversial as it is—does not rest on considerations of mere logic, but involves a “creative definition” namely a substantively laden specification of the nature of the deity.

32

This line of objection to Spinoza’s argumentation is admittedly sketchy and in need of a great deal of development. But in any case, it’s potentially controversial nature inheres in the consideration that it is effectively identical with St. Anselm’s proof of God’s existence save only for the substitution of natura for deus.

33

See Sven K. Knebel, “Necessitas moralis ad optimum” in Studia Leibnitiana, vol. XXIII (1991), pp. 3–24 and 78–92, and Vol. XXIV (1992), pp. 182–251. See also Stefan Lorenz, De mundo optimo (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1997; Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa, Vol. XXXI).

34

“Discourse on Metaphysics,” § 6. Cf ibid, § 5, and also “The Principals of Nature and of Grace,” § 10; Theodicy, § 208.

35

This essay originated as a lecture prepared for the undergraduate philosophy club at the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 2010.

Chapter Seven OPTIMALISM AND THEISM SYNOPSIS (1) Both a naturalistic and a theistic version of optimalism are in theory available. (2) The former institutes optimality metaphysically, via the mere protolaws of possibility, whereas the latter institutes optimality theologically through the workings of a benevolent creator. (3) Neither alternative is a forced option mandated by optimalism itself. 1. THEOLOGICAL RAMIFICATIONS

C

learly, neither optimalism nor optimalism is something necessary. As far as the epistemology of the matter goes, if they hold good they will do so contingently. For the naturalistic optimalist, axiotropism would—as best we can tell—be an inherent feature of the manifold of possibility: a self-sustained metaphysical law of possibility analogous to physical reality’s laws of nature. For the theist, axiotropism would be a reflection of the creative intent of a benign deity. For the former viewer is its own engenderer, for the latter it forms part of the purposive agenda of a creative agent. For the naturalistic optimalist value is something ultimate—standing at the end of the explanatory road. For the theistic optimalist it is a descriptive consequence of the creative modus operandi of a benevolent creator. But either way a Principle of Optimality is seen as available as an explanatory instrumentality available for service in explaining the nature of things. 2. THEISTIC OPTIMALISM With theistic optimalism we have the following principle:

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(TO) What is optimal is actual because a benevolent God has it be so. God grounds (produces, engenders, causes, effects) the operation of optimalism. Letting G be the theistic doctrine of God’s existence, and O the thesis of optimalism we here have a justifactory argument whose structure is: G → O. However, there also lies before us the prospect of a converse reasoning of optimalistic explanation of God’s existence: (OT) God exists because his doing so is optimal. The principle of optimalism grounds the existence of God. The reason at issue here has the structure: O → G. There is, moreover, also a line of explanatory reasoning that contemplates the self-grounding of optimalism on its own basis: (SE) Optimalism actually obtains because its so doing is optimal. Structure O → O. However, grounding as such is not actually explanatory unless it proceeds by way of recourse to something else of a somehow more fundamental character. So it is clear that reasoning of the format O → X or O → O does not really explain optimalism, seeing that O is here the input rather than the output of explanatory reasoning. Only X → O (with X ≠ O) will serve here. All the same, in the hermeneutic order of deliberation the selfsustaining coordination of G and O can instructively be contemplated via the entire tripartite complex of principles as per the coordinative cycle: G

O

This, however, is the condition of things obtaining in the order of hermeneutic coordination rather than in that of productive explanation. As far as the later Neo-Platonists were concerned, Christianity was philosophically a god-send. In an era where self-explanation was

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no longer deemed as plausible, their commitment to optimalism’s efficient productivity of value as the ratio essendi of being required an explanatory underpinning which Christian theology was ready and able to supply. On this basis it is clear that what looks to be the most promising joins the Platonic (and Neo-Platonic and Leibnizian) tradition and, in the spirit of the Church Fathers, proposes to see optimalism functioning on essentially theological grounds. Such Neo-Platonism saw three inner factors as paramount in the ontological domain: • Fact (to on: existence reality). • Value (nous: rational order). • Spirit (psyche: understanding). The critical insight of the Church Fathers is the need for thematic heterogeneity in explanation. Absent circularity, we cannot explain fact in terms of fact without reaching the dead end of unexplained explainers. And the same holds for explanation in terms of values of in terms of supra-natural (i.e., theological) coordinators. But the systemic harmonization of all three domains is something else again. Fact

Value Spirit

And here the explanatory process is not a matter of linear, prior-toposterior considerations but one of coordinating and meshing the considerations operative in all three thematic domains. As the neoPlatonic tradition saw it, coordinative rather than reductive explanation provided the crucial instrumentality of metaphysical explanation.

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3. AN OPTION Naturalistic optimalism looks to a value tropism at work in the manifold of possibility and it sees this as inherently natural to this realm much as is a mundane context the tendency of water to descend to its own level is something altogether natural. Its advocates views the structure of the manifold of possibility as subject to restrictive conditions that determine things by a process of ongoing curtailment of the range of a natural restrictivity of value.1 The tendency to valuemaximization, so regarded, is a proto-law prevailing among possibilities even as energy conservation or action-minimization are initial laws within the realm of physical actuality. And it dispenses with any further or deeper exploration) value maximization because it sees this as self-explanatory, it being for the best that the best possibility is realized. And so, while theistic optimalism saw optimality as externally instituted through the creative agency of a benevolent deity whose purpose in the design of his creatures was to institute the best of possible arrangements, naturalistic optimalism would regard the position as self-sufficiently self-grounding. Optimalism as such is compatible with either of these approaches. Both axiological emergence and divine selection—can be contemplated. And either can in theory provide a pathway to the other. In principle, a naturalistic optimalism can regard the institution of an optimalistic mode of things as only natural and to be expected relative to the existence of a benign creator. NOTES 1

The creative self-sufficiency of the possible is sometimes mistakenly ascribed to Leibniz via his much-discussed idea of an exigentia existentiae. See Ingetrud Pape, Tradition und Transformation der Modalität (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966).

Chapter Eight ULTIMATE EXPLANATION

T

he “ultimate why question” is that which asks not just “why does the universe exist,” but rather “why does the universe exist as it is: why is it that the nature of physical reality is as we find it to be?” Now for better or for worse this is a question that cannot be answered solely on scientific principles. And there is a simple and decisive reason why this is so. For scientific explanations by their very constitution as such must make use of the laws of nature in their reasoning. But this strategy is simply unavailable in the present case. For those laws of nature required for scientific explanation are themselves a part—an essential and fundamental part—of the constitution of physical reality. And they are thereby a part of the problem and not instrumentalities available for its resolution. The reality of it is that that (revised) “ultimate why question” confronts us with a choice. Either we dismiss that question as being unavailable, inappropriate, and perhaps even “meaningless” (as logical positivists have always argued). Or we acknowledge that answering this question invites and indeed requires recourse to some sort of an extra-scientific, extra-factual mode of explanation—one that transcends the cognitive resources of natural science. And with this second alternative the options become very limited. For we here enter into the region of teleology, where there are just two available alternatives. On the one hand lies the teleology of purpose, which itself can in principle operate in two ways: either by the conscious purposiveness of an intelligent being (a creator deity), or by the unconscious finality of a natural impetus towards the creation of intelligent beings, given the survival-conclusiveness of intelligence. And on the other hand, yet another, decidedly different approach envisions a teleology of value which proceeds to account for the nature of the world in axiological, value-involving terms as being for the

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best (with respect to some yet to be specified mode of evaluative optimality). Accordingly, four different doctrinal approaches confront us with respect to issues which that (revised) ultimate why question puts before us: • dismissive positivism • theological creationism • anthropic evolutionism • evaluative optimalism Each option is available. And none is forced upon us by the inexorable necessity of reason itself. In the final analysis “You pays your money, and you takes your choice.” But is the resultant resolution simply a matter of unfettered preference based on personal taste and inclination? By no means! Here as elsewhere rational choice must be based on the available evidence — and thereby on deliverances of experience. So the question becomes: Given the sort of world that our overall experience indicates this one to be, what sort of explanatory proceeding seems best suited to account for this situation? At this stage, however, the experience at issue will no longer be only the observational experience of our (instrumentality augmented) human senses. Rather in matters of the sort now at issue this evidence will be a matter not just of observation, but of the cumulative evidence of the aggregate totality of one’s life experience. And of course this “experience” has to be construed in the broadest possible sense, including not only the observational but also the affective, not only the factual but also the imaginative, not only physical experimentation but also thought experimentation, not only the personal but the vicarious. The question is one of the extent to which one’s experience creates a role for speculative, observation-transcending factors in evidentiation (the story of the Doubting Thomas paradigmatic here). If there is little or no room for affectively guided conjecture, dismissive positiv-

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ism is the way to go. And as the scope of tolerance increases one can move on to anthropic evaluatism, evaluative optimalism, and theological creativism, in just about that order. The question in the end is one of epistemic proprieties and policies in relation to the admission and evaluation of evidence. At this point the distinction between relativism and contextualism becomes crucial. With relativism, the matter is one of arbitrariness and indifference—sheer groundless preference is the order of the day here. With contextualism person-to-person variation occurs once again, and not just because they differ in point of preference, but because they differ in point of circumstances and situation with regard to the available evidence. And while in the former case there is no requirement for evidential reason to go one way or the other, in the latter case there decidedly is. For the matter will in the end depend not on the individual’s preference but in the individual’s evidence as his experience determines it. And so while there will indeed be a lack of uniformity across the whole range of different individuals, nevertheless for given individuals, with their particular body of personal experience in place, there will, in all likelihood, be only one rationally acceptable and appropriate resolution in sight—only one “live option” to use William James’ instructive expression. So here there will be no unique one-size-fits-all resolution—since matter will depend crucially on the experiential evidence at one’s disposal. But this is apt to be a matter not of the arbitrariness of relativistic indifference but rather of the rationality of situation contextualism. In the end, then, a single, unique ultimate explanation will not emerge as the inexorable product of evidential reason in a way that is independent of individualized experience. Yet while there indeed are alternatives here, they will, by rational necessity, fall within a very narrow range with regard to their general strategy.1 Interestingly enough, however, consider the situation that results if mere dismissive positivism is itself dismissed. Then the resultant adjudication among the remaining alternatives is not really a forced choice at all. Each “alternative” is itself flexible that a complex combination of the three is possible and provides for further options.

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But be this as it may, the ironic fact remains that in the final analysis the rational individual’s resolution of the problem of ultimate explanation rests on something that is itself contingent—namely the structure and substance of this experience. NOTES 1

This chapter was originally published in the Journal of Cosmology in 2012.

NAME INDEX Alfonso X, King of Castile, 96-97 Allen, Diogenes, 26n1, 29n25 Anscombe, G. E. M., 27n9 Anselm, St. 45, 121n32 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 29n32, 113, 120n28, 121n29 Aristotle, 2, 29n30, 29n32, 67, 69-70, 77n4, 80, 87, 144 Arrow, Kenneth, 83 Bergmann, Julius, 62n3 Bergson, Henri, 2, 22, 26n4 Billicsich, Friedrich, 118n2 Blumenfeld, David, 94n2 Boulding, Kenneth, 119n17 Burke, Michael B., 28n21 Burley, Walter, 100, 119n14 Burnyeat, Myles, 27n12 Caesar, Julius, 97 Caligula, 97 Campbell, Joseph K., 27n15 Carlyle, Thomas,18 Chisholm, Roderick M., 118n8 Clarke, Samuel, 7, 15, 27n14 Copleston, Frederick C., 19 Craig, William Lane, 29n26, 29n30 Darwin, Charles, 63n8 Davis, J. H., 118n11 Dembski, William A., 118n11 Descartes, René, 21, 38, 50, 70 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 35, 47n3 Edwards, Paul, 1-26, 27n18, 29n33 Einstein, Albert, 50, 140, 147n9, 117n1

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Empedocles, 29n32 Epicurus, 38, 50 Flew, R. N., 120-21n28 Gale, Richard M., 28n19 Gerhardt, C. I., 26n1, 63n5 Gill, J. H., 27n9 Gödel, Kurt, 50 Hegel, G. W. F., 70 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 26n5, 26n6 Heller, Michael, 121n30 Hempel, Carl. G., 23-24, 29n28 Hick, John R., 118n7 Hitler, Adolf, 98, 101, 104 Hume, David, 1-26, 27n15, 29n32, 97, 118n6 Jacobs, W. W., 104 James, William, 129 Jolley, Nicholas, 94n2 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 8, 11, 21, 25, 29n27, 70, 115 Knebel, Sven K., 121n33 Krell, D. F., 26n5 Kretzman, Norman, 119n14 Kutcher, Ashton, 119n15 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1-2, 5, 7, 15, 21, 24, 27n14, 29n32, 35, 38, 44-45, 47, 50, 52, 62-63, 70-71, 76n1, 85, 89, 91, 93-97, 113114, 116, 126n1 Leslie John, 62n1, 70, 76n1 Lewis, David, 27n13, 31, 47n1 Loemker, L. E., 26n1, 63n5 Lorenz, E. N., 101, 119n15 Lorenz, Stefan, 121n33

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Malcom, Norman, 3, 27n8 Moore, G. E., 71 Nozick, Robert, 4, 26n6 Pape, Ingetrud, 35, 126n1 Penrose, Roger, 118n11 Perkins, R. K., Jr., 118n9 Plantinga, Alvin, 94n2, 97, 118n8, 120n22, 120n23 Plato, 29n32, 41, 50, 60, 62, 69-70, 96, 112, 120n26 Plotinus, 60, 120n27 Poe, H. L., 118n11 Pruss, Alexander R., 28n19 Ratzsch, Delvin, 118n11 Reichenbach, Bruce, 105, 119n19 Rescher, Nicholas, 94n2 Rowe, William R., 8, 28n21, 29n26, 29n33, 28n19 Ruse, Michael 118n11 Russell, Bertrand, 19, 97-98, 118n4, 118n5, 118n10 Rutherford, Donald, 94n2 Salmon, Wesley, 47n2 Scotus, Duns, 120n28 Sidgwick, Henry, 71, 77n6 Smart, Amy, 119n15 Sober, Elliot, 118n11 Spinoza, Baruch de, 21, 38, 50, 70, 114, 121n32 Stalin, Josef, 101, 104 Stump, Eleonore, 119n14 Tatarkiewicz, Władysław, 120n28 Tennant, F. R., 119n18 Tillich, Paul, 28n24 Tymeniecka, Anna-Teresa, 4, 27n11 Voltaire, 97-98, 114, 116

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Waismann, Fredrich, 27n9 Whitehead, A. N., 70 William of Ockham 8, 27n16 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3-4, 27n7, 27n9 Wolff, Christian, 35, 50

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