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57
E. Malyshkin (Saint-Petersburg)
MORAL CERTAINTY, VIRTUAL BEING AND THE THESIS ON BEING AS EMPTY PREDICATE (LEIBNIZ AND SCHELLING)
Schelling criticizes Leibniz’s concept of striving possibilities (dasein-streben theory). Or rather, he does not criticize it, but writes disparagingly: Leibniz tells tall tales. Schelling writes: „There are no results from general laws; rather, God, that is, the person of God, is the general law, and everything that happens, happens by virtue of the personality of God, not according to some abstract necessity that we in acting would not tolerate, to say nothing of God”.1 God, says Shelling, acts not according abstract, lifeless necessity, but according to moral necessity, „the notion remains of God’s deliberating with himself or of a choice among various possible worlds, a notion that is groundless and untenable”.2 God is free in that sense that no general ideas of the harmony of the world can precede the decision to create the world. To think for God is to create — old theologian thesis. But to be good is to admit to existence all possibilities, Leibniz could say in contrary. Namely daseinstreben theory demonstrates what possibility is.
We do can see that Leibniz and Shelling mean the same. Obviously, Leibniz’s Daseinstreben theory contradicts to Schelling’s notion of freedom. This aporia can be overcome (if it can be) through the clarifying the notion of possibility.
What is moral certainty? If we assume, that it is just an inclination (potius (lat.), as Leibniz calls it), then such definition will not demonstrate the difference between moral and metaphysical necessity, and the lack of the difference is common reproach to Leibniz (for example, M. Mamar-dashvily follows Schelling, when he characterize Leibniz’s metaphysics
1 http://www.scribd.com/doc/22355654/Schelling-Philosophical-Investigations-into-the-Essence-of-Human-Freedom.
2 Ibid.
as „ferroconcrete philosophy”). But inclination is the ultimate condition of description of moral necessity: inclination demonstrates the essence of those, who makes decision — that is the point, in which Leibniz and Schelling are in consent. Thus, both interpret the term possibility in broader sense: the possibility is not the possibility of something, and not the list of opportunities, the possibility has its own dignity, it is something positive in itself. All possibilities are attractive to God, who creates the world; the attractiveness of any possibilities shows itself in Schelling’s broader definition: the attractiveness of a possibility is the second point of consent of the thinkers.
So, this non-traditional interpretation of possibility in Shelling we can understand with the help of Leibniz theory of striving possibilities. In my analysis I rest upon Blumenfeld’s article „Libniz’s Theory of the Striving Possibles” 3. Blumenfeld says that the theory „can be expressed of six closed related thesis:
• every possible thing has an internal impetus to exist;
• this impetus is proportionate to its degree of perfection;
• the possibilities vie with one another for existence by combining forces with as many other essences as they are mutually compatible with;
• there is a unique series of compossible essences which has the greatest overall perfection and the greatest total thrust;
• the inevitable result of the struggle is that the maximally perfect series (i. e., the best possible world) realizes itself;
• unless possible things contained such an impetus and behaved as described, no actual world would exist at all”.4
Here we should point out that the 4th thesis does not express the necessity: we can suppose that the impetus of two difference worlds is the same, hence, the creation of the world is not inevitable. Also, the contingent (moral) nature of creation demonstrates 6th thesis. In the theory the creation is remains a secret. What is disclosed, it is the impetus to existence. Potentia here is interpreted as preference and existence — as
3 Blumenfeld D. Libniz’s Theory of the Striving Possibles // Studia Lebniziana. Jahrgang V. 1973. P. 163-177.
4 Ibid. P. 165.
a prize or reward. This interpretation is so perfect, that we have to ask Leibniz: does the best of possible world receive its prize by the conditions of the competition or is it God who performs the additional act to call world into existence?
Leibniz often writes on these two theories in one paragraph, as if there were no contradiction between the concept of God’s free will and das-einstreben theory. Bertrand Russell even supposes that Leibniz probably was aware of the conflict but, from motives of expediency, buried his real theory (the necessitarian one) in his so called esoteric writings.
Leibniz says that „any possible world would involve some degree of imperfection”5. If we take in account this principle of limitation, then in thesis (5) „inevitable” we should replace by „contingent”. And, thesis (4) with principle of limitation maintains that no one of possible worlds exists with necessity: inasmuch as the most perfect world has no sufficient impetus, we have to say the same about all other worlds. As Leibniz writes in the letter to Des Bosses: „In my opinion, if there were no best possible series, God would have certainly created nothing, since he cannot act without a reason, or prefer the less perfect to the more perfect”.6
Thus, although the perfection logically connected with impetus to exist, i.e. to fight for existence is to realize the perfection, nevertheless, if we keep in mind that no one world has no full degree of perfection, then existence is not victory, but grace.
There are three thesis followed from this conclusion:
1. To the thesis, which maintains that there is nothing in existence of the thing besides definitions of the thing (i. e. being is empty predicate), we should add: with the exception of the grace, i. e. existence itself.
2. Both thinkers Leibniz and Schelling abandon of Cusanus’ concept „posse-est”, unfastening the identity of possibility and being in God. For both of them the distance between possibility and existence as the attraction of possibility is essential. This distance is demonstrated in the concept of freedom as moral necessity.
5 GP VI, p. 613.
6 GP IV, 428.
3. The broader conception of possibility, which Schelling admits for his famous definition of freedom (a capacity for good and evil) can be clarified by the concept of virtual being, which we can find in Leibniz. This concept, as soon as we realize that virtuality is possibility, transfers the concept of possibility. The definition of virtual being (i. e. virtual world) is not the possibility of something that has ontological advantage, of something that exists; the only feature of this virtual being is pure attraction.
Virtual being has ambivalent status: from one side, it is in so far as God conceives it. From other side, it does not exist, because no one world had been created „yet”. Virtual being is the thinking of God about the perfect. For finite intellect this thinking is characterictica universalis, the search for full notion of being. Thus, the definition of God as „monad of all monads” we should understand in such a manner that God do the same as every finite monad while this „simple substance” choosing, counting, and composing.
Hence, the sample of virtual being is not a file, but rather lines of Ve-limir Khlebnikov, a „poet of poets”:
Glitter-letter wing-winker gossamer grasshopper packs his belly-basket with credo-meadow grass.
Zin! Zin! Zin! Sings the raucous racket-bird!
Swan-white wonder!
Brighter, brighter, bright!7
7 Translated by Paul Schmidt (Khlebnikov, Velimir. Collected Works, 3 vols. Trans. Paul Schmidt. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1987).
