August 18, 2025 • 40 mins
He may be the most learned man of all time, but most people have never heard of him. A true polymath and Renaissance man. Who was this philosopher, scientist, historian, diplomat, and scholar? What did he believe and why is it important to understand his system? Get ready to be blown away by how much smarter he is than we are.
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0:00 Exploring Leibniz's Genius and Philosophical Contributions7:58 Philosophical Dilemmas of Substance Interaction and Existence10:02 Leibniz's Monads and Pre-Established Harmony Explained13:26 Pre-Programmed Harmony and Causality in the Universe15:30 Leibniz's Monadology Explains Reality Through Immaterial, Windowless Substances21:29 Leibniz's Belief in Innate Ideas and Rationalism26:15 Leibniz's Philosophy: The Best of All Possible Worlds32:18 Leibniz's Philosophy, Monads, And The Challenges Of Free Will
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Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Hello, and welcome to another edition of everyone's favorite
podcast, Ideological Today. Before you switch channels or or
watch another video, you're like, who's this Leibniz guy?
This seems really boring. I don't know who this is.
Today we're going to be learningabout Godfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
And let me tell you why he's a big deal.
(00:28):
When you think of the most learned, most intelligent people
of all time, this guy is a contender for that.
So you, you might have not heardof him.
He hasn't heard of you either, but he's a big deal.
The problem is with you if you haven't heard of him.
So today we're going to be talking about Leibnitz and his
philosophy and who is this just powerhouse intellectual figure.
(00:51):
And so it should be a a ton of fun.
Today's episode is brought to you by Cheese Wiz.
Cheese Wiz. It's like cheese but with cancer
in it. OK, so let me tell you why he's
a big deal. He is an absolute polymath, OK?
He's good at everything. He does history and he does
science and he does physics and he does philosophy and he does
theology and he does, you know, he he works as like he does law.
(01:14):
He works as, you know, like a legal official.
He's good at everything. He's a true Polly Histora, true
Renaissance man, a true man of letters, and what he's trying to
do is 3 things. And then I'll tell you a little
bit about his life and we will have a ton of fun.
By the way, it's morning here, so ha ha, got a little, little
energy here. I can't tell you what it is
(01:34):
because I just have to turn it. You can't know what this is,
even though you can tell for legal reasons.
Cut my life into pieces. This is he's trying to harmonize
a bunch of different groups together.
He wants to harmonize Catholics and Protestants.
So there's even this thing that he's going to add to his his
metaphysics to try to make a case for Catholic communion,
(01:56):
even though he's a Protestant, because he's trying to bring
them together. He's trying to fit the new
science that's going on during the Enlightenment with some
traditional metaphysics, and he's trying to give an answer to
Spinoza's monism and Descartes dualism.
What does that mean? We will get into it.
It's going to be a ton of fun. Ideological.
(02:17):
Are you ready? Are you ready to to be less
dumb? Let's do it.
Who is Leibnitz? I'll say it in that little
Germany. Anyway, he was born in July of
1646 in Leipzig, Germany. His dad was a professor of moral
philosophy at the University of Leipzig.
So he already has a very smart dad that can teach him.
I do this as a philosopher with my kids.
(02:37):
They'll say something and I'm like, well, wait a second, if
you hold this, then you also have to hold this, and you can't
hold that, so you don't hold that.
And they're like, I just want some Cheetos or whatever.
So he taught himself Latin at the age of seven.
It's. My last resort suffocation?
Nope. Remember, he's better than you.
People in the past were not Dumber than us.
They're less technological, but they're smarter.
(02:59):
At the age of eight, he was allowed to use his father's
library, where he read at 8. He's reading the classical
authors, he's reading the ChurchFathers, he's reading the
scholastics at 8 after he taughthimself Latin at the age of 7.
Why? Why is Leibniz also a big deal?
He invented calculus. It's probably better to say he
(03:20):
discovered calculus, right? It's a you know, Benjamin
Franklin didn't invent lightning, although I always say
that he discovered some things about it with kites, I guess.
I don't know. In 1675, he discovered
differential calculus independently of Isaac Newton.
So you've got these powerhouses,you've got Leibniz and you've
got Newton, and they both discover calculus independently
(03:43):
of one another. What an age of intelligence.
So they discover calculus, differential calculus separately
from one another, and then they fight the rest of their lives
really over who invented it first and who did somebody
plagiarize the other one or, or what it might be.
Newton was awarded the credit, although scholars today,
(04:04):
generally, the consensus is thatthey did discover it
independently of each other. They didn't RIP each other off.
But Isaac Newton was kind of given the credit, although
Leibnitz came up with it withoutNewton.
And Leibnitz's version is the one that was more accurate.
It's the one closer to what we use today.
So being the the better inventor, his notations closer
(04:24):
to what we use today, he got to meet Peter the Great.
He was elected a member of the Royal Society in England.
He also founded the founded and was the 1st president of the
Prussian Academy of Sciences. He knew a bunch of languages,
what he wrote in in in what he wrote.
He wrote in Latin, German and French.
His most famous influential philosophical works were written
(04:44):
in French. He put a lot of energy into
creating a universal philosophical language to
replace natural language so everyone could communicate
again. When I say he's incredible I am
not over exaggerating. He is the man when it whether
you love him or hate him, he is an absolute genius.
(05:05):
Like absolute literal, off the charts genius.
The idea was maybe we could comeup with a perfect philosophical
language. Wittgenstein and and Russell
would would toy with this idea later only to find that they
couldn't do it. But maybe we could find a
universal philosophical languagethat would solve confusion and
help people communicate. He influenced philosophers as
(05:26):
diverse as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger.
He seems to have been a pretty faithful Lutheran from his
theological writings, although he refused communion on his
deathbed and he didn't regularlyattend church.
So he's generally considered though to be Lutheran.
So he's a Protestant. He died, unfortunately, he is
not immortal. He died on November 14th, 1716
(05:47):
in Hanover in Germany. OK, let me give you 2 fantastic
quotes by Denis Diderot. Denis Diderot, right?
The, the, the, the major and thebiggest contributor probably
there's a bunch of contributors to the encyclopaedie, the the
Enlightenment encyclopedia that comes out of France that tries
to classify like all human knowledge.
So Diderot is a genius and here is what he says about Leibniz.
(06:13):
OK, listen to these quotes. Remember also Leibniz is a
theist and Diderot is an atheist, so he doesn't even
care. He's like Leibniz is a genius.
Listen to what he says. He says this Perhaps never has a
man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and
written more than Leibniz. What he has composed on the
world, God, nature and the soul is of the most sublime
(06:34):
eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed
with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig, that's
Leibniz would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.
Man, what the actual? That's incredible.
All right, when he's like, yeah,he's like Plato.
But he's got another one, an even better quote.
This is also from Diderot about Leibniz.
(06:54):
He says this when one compares the talents one has with those
of Leibnitz. 1 is tempted to throw away one's books and go
die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.
Cheers to that. Ditero's a genius and he's like,
Leibnitz is so smart that when you read him, you should just go
(07:17):
kill yourself. I mean, it's it's amazing.
All right. OK, what did Leibniz believe?
Why is he a big deal? Let's go over a few major ideas
in his thought. The first one is his view of
metaphysics. And.
What are called monads? Gross monads sounds like like
you're going to kick somebody inthe monads.
(07:38):
Let me tell you what he's tryingto do.
There is a problem in philosophythat's bedeviled philosophers
forever and it's the question of1 of what is everything made?
And two, how can different substances interact?
It's these are metaphysical questions.
Meaning if you say, for example,Zach, I think everything is made
of matter. I'll say cool, what about a
(07:59):
vacuum? What about empty space?
Is that made of matter? What about the concept of a
triangle? I don't mean an actual triangle
that you see like a, a yield sign.
The concept of a triangle is that made of matter.
What about time? Is time made of matter?
Is time a thing that exists? Like Newton would say, there's
all these kind of things, propositions.
There are all these things that seem to exist that are not made
(08:19):
of matter. Cool.
The other problem is how can different things interact like
this? So think back to our friend
Casper the Friendly Ghost. OK, with Casper the Friendly
ghost, we believe he can walk through walls.
We don't really believe in the ghost, but just follow me with
this analogy here. We believe that he can walk
through walls. Why?
Because he's immaterial. The wall is material.
(08:40):
Casper's immaterial. So he can, you know, go through
the wall because they're different substances.
Well, the question is, how can different substances interact?
How can your mind and your thoughts, which seem to be
immaterial, for example, move your hand which is material?
And so this is a problem that philosophers are trying to deal
with. Now there's several different
solutions. 1 is the solution of someone like Spinoza who just
(09:02):
says everything is the same substance.
He's a monist, everything is Godor nature.
So now things can interact, problem solved.
There are others though, like Descartes that are going to say,
no, there's really two substances.
There's what is, there's mind, what's immaterial and it's, it's
essence is thinking. And then there's, you know
what's physical, That its essence is extension.
(09:25):
But he doesn't really know how to solve the problem of how they
can interact, right? So like, think about when you
feel pain. The pain in the experience of
subjective pain is different than the brain chemistry going
on in your mind. Like if you burn your hand, you
feel it in your hand even thoughthe chemicals are going on in
your brain. It's not the same.
Anyway, Leibnitz is going to come up with a solution to that.
(09:46):
And here is his solution. OK, so his major ideas, I'm
going to give you 2 of them together, monads and
metaphysics. And then what is called pre
established harmony. Here is Leibniz's idea.
Follow me because this is a little technical for Leibniz.
Everything is made-up of what are called monads.
I'll describe those in a second.They're all technically though
different substances and they don't interact.
(10:09):
What they do is they follow their own path that God has pre
programmed into them, what's called pre established harmony
or into leki. They have these purposes within
them. And though it looks like when
you hit a billiard ball and it hits another billiard ball, it
looks like it's just hitting it.What's really happening is the
billiard ball monads are going here, and then the billiard
ball. Monads here are going, but they
(10:31):
are separate monads and separatecollections of monads.
What does that mean? Let's back up again.
This is very strange and it seems very not common sense.
It seems very counterintuitive. First of all, they're called
monads, which again is hilariousbecause of the Greek word monos
which means one. What what Liveness is trying to
say is he's trying to say what makes something a substance is
(10:53):
its unity. So monads are immaterial soul
like entities that stand in relation to all the other monads
in the universe, but they don't causally interact.
The only monad that interacts onother ones is God, who's like a
super monad. OK, this is so confusing.
(11:17):
Let me let me give you a weird illustration that's not perfect.
None of these are going to be perfect illustrations because
nothing's like monads. But let me let me follow me
imagine that everything is made-up of, let's call it tiny
metal spheres or tiny spheres that are mirrored.
OK, those spheres all over the universe would stand in relation
(11:38):
to one another. And because they have a shiny
surface, they would be reflectedin all the other monads, all the
other shiny spheres. So they're they're if you had a
bunch of mirrors, they would allreflect and see each other.
And some of them would be super far away, but some of them would
be close. But technically, if you could
analyze any one of them, you could know everything else about
(12:01):
the universe because it stands in relation to everything else.
Now, you can't know everything about a monad, Only God can do
that, but to Leibnitz. But if you could, because it is
one big system, you could technically know everything
about the universe. So God is at the top.
He's the Super monad because he sees everything perfectly
(12:22):
clearly. Humans are below that.
And why? Because we have reason and we
have self consciousness. We can say I as as Leibniz would
say, but our perception of the world is way more confused
obviously than God's is. And our soul is like a dominant
monad over the rest of the the monads in our body.
Then there are bare monads, which are basically everything
else, right? My phone has bare monads, and
(12:44):
this microphone has bare monads,and this shirt has bare monads.
Whatever it is. They don't reason like we do.
Don't think that everything is like a little human.
That's not what he's saying. But he does think that monads
have perception and appetite. What does that mean?
It means that they stand in relation to everything else in
the universe. And by appetite, it doesn't mean
they're hungry. We're thirsty.
(13:08):
What it means is that they are self moved nerd stuff.
Let's stuff Leibniz in a locker.Let me say it way simpler.
If two people get into a fight, they're causal in our mind.
They're causally interacting. This is not live nuts, but just
follow me with this example. It's a crass example in crude,
but I think it's really helpful.If I get into a fight, someone
throws a punch and I see it and I react and I block and then I
(13:31):
throw a punch and they see it and they block and we're
causally interacting with each other.
What Leibniz thinks is more likely the case of what's going
on with everything in the universe is this.
Imagine that there is a movie someone's producing.
He wouldn't use this example 'cause they didn't have movies.
But they're you're trying to get2 robots to fight.
As you are having these two robots fight, are they actually
(13:53):
fighting? Like are they remembering their
robot Kung Fu training? SO1 robot tries to karate chop
and the other one sees it and blocks it and then the other one
throws a punch and it sees it and blocks it.
No. What happens?
Are these programmers? Pre program into the robots the
sequence that they're supposed to do.
They're not actually reacting tothe other one.
They're just following their owninternal mechanism.
(14:15):
So this one at 2nd 3 throws a punch.
This one at second four blocks apunch.
This one at second five in the video ducks.
This one at 2nd 6 throws a punchover his head.
But they're they're different from each other.
They already have pre programmedinto them everything that
they're going to do in the fightsequence.
They're not actually rememberingtheir Kung Fu training and
fighting now. What if everything in the
(14:38):
universe was like that? What if everything God just pre
programmed in everything? That is what it would do and it
is, it looks like it's effect, it's causing these effects on
other things, but really it's following its own sequence
that's pre programmed into it, pre established harmony and that
is in harmony with everything else that also has its entire
(14:58):
history pre programmed into it. That is the idea of Leibniz.
He thinks that for every subject.
Something of which you can say something, all of its predicates
are already built into it, right?
So little baby Hitler is going to be this terrible dictator
that's already pregnant in him. It's going to happen and he's
(15:22):
not being affected by other monads.
That is just the pre programmed thing that is in him and that is
going to happen. Well, Zach, what if Hitler
didn't become a terrible dictator?
Well then it wouldn't be Hitler,it would be somebody else.
So anyway, let me give you some some quotes that might make this
helpful. He says this.
This is from discourse on metaphysics.
Each substance is like a whole world and like a mirror of God,
(15:43):
or indeed of the whole universe,which each substance expresses
in its own fashion, rather as the same town looks different
according to the position from which it is viewed.
In a way, then, the universe is multiplied as many times as
there are substances, and in thesame way the glory of God is
magnified by so many quite different representations of His
work. It can even be said that each
substance carries within it, in a certain way, the imprint of
(16:06):
God's infinite wisdom and omnipotence, and imitates Him as
far as it can. OK, this is a very strange way
of thinking of the world. Essentially what Leibniz is
trying to say is this. Everything that we think that
looks physical. He toys with Aristotelian views
(16:27):
of substance in his middle period, but then eventually,
eventually he moves to a fuller view of idealism.
We'll talk about that in anotherlecture.
OK, clear your mind. That's too much.
Let's back up. For Leibniz, everything is not
made of what is physical. That's how it appears to us.
That's just the appearance. That's the phenomena.
But it's it's, it's actually made-up of things that are
immaterial. Why, Zach, why can't it be
(16:50):
made-up of matter? It makes more sense to say
things are made-up of matter because matter has extension,
which means that everything is just an aggregate.
So my phone. It it it.
Is is just If it's just material, it's just made-up of
an aggregate of things. It's a group of things.
It's not a single individual thing, which is what he wants
with a monad. He thinks a substance has to be
its own singular thing. Everything that's physical has
(17:10):
extension, meaning you can cut it and cut it and cut it and cut
it. Which is why to Leibnitz, the
idea of an atom, a physical atom, makes no sense.
The word atom, by the way, atomos, it means uncuttable.
In Greek, you'd say that makes no sense.
Even an atom, if it's matter, could still, at least in your
mind, to be cut, even if we don't have the tools to do it.
And atoms made of two half atomsand a half atom is made-up of
two quarter atoms. And you could cut it forever if
(17:33):
you could cut material forever. There is no smallest thing.
And talking about matter like that doesn't make sense.
You need something that is not material that stands behind
that, and that is what monads are.
Now that sounds really, really strange, but it's actually
really genius and let me tell you why.
He solves for the problem of what everything is made of or of
(17:54):
what is everything made. He solves the problem of how
things can interact. He gives a proof for the
existence of God. He gives a proof for the
existence of soul, which is whathe wants to do in his
philosophy. Other philosophers obviously
don't care about that. And he has a system that works.
So it's very hard to disprove his system, even though it seems
very strange. OK, so that is the idea of
(18:16):
monads, his metaphysics and thenintellect in this pre
established harmony. He has a famous phrase where he
says that monads are windowless.What he means is that they don't
share attributes. It's not like they have open
windows and some of their accidents or properties go out
and flow into another monad and vice versa.
Everything is within its own little compact monad and they,
(18:37):
they do their own thing. God is the only monad that cause
the acts on others by conservingthem.
Let me give you a quote and thenwe are going to get into some
things that are a little easier.That's the hardest part.
So you made it. Give yourself.
Go reward yourself, you know? It's go go get you a.
Cadbury cream egg, which I've heard in England that they have
all year round and we don't. We didn't fight them to not have
(18:59):
this, so we should have it all year round.
Let me give you a quote from Discourse on Metaphysics.
God produces various substances according to the different views
he has of the universe, and through God's intervention, the
proper nature of each substance brings it about.
That what happens to 1 corresponds with what happens to
all the others without their acting upon one another
(19:21):
directly. OK number 3A subject is is
always pregnant. A subject is always pregnant
with all of its predicates. If you could know the
predicates, that's just anythingyou say about something as a
predicate, you're predicating it.
It's it's. Yeah.
If you could fully know all the predicates of any monad, you
could know everything in the entire universe.
(19:42):
OK, Caesar crossing the Rubicon is already within the monad of
Caesar. He hasn't expressed it yet, but
he's going to. OK.
He says this in the philosophical essays.
Every individual substance contains in its perfect notion,
the entire universe. Not distinctly, right, So God
(20:03):
knows all the things, but some bare monad in a table doesn't
know anything. It just stands.
A far away and confused in relation to the rest of the
universe, but it is somehow still reflected in the entire
universe, he says in the Monadology, one of his most
popular works. And since every present state of
a simple substance is a natural consequence of its preceding
(20:24):
state, the present is pregnant with the future.
That's where I get that phrase. I'll give you one more quote on
this, then we'll go to the some things that are a little bit
easier to understand, he says inDiscourse on Metaphysics.
This agrees with my principles. For nothing ever enters into our
mind naturally from the outside,and we have a bad habit of
thinking of our souls as if it received certain species as
(20:45):
messengers and as if it has doors and windows.
OK, That's the idea of it being windowless.
Everything is contained in the monad.
It doesn't share attributes withother monads going in and out.
OK, pat yourself on the back. You've made it through his
crazy, difficult to understand, but also really brilliant
system. Whether you love it or hate it,
it's not dumb. It solves a lot of problems.
(21:06):
It, even though it's very weird and it creates its own problems.
We'll see some of the problems at the end.
OK, another major philosophical point for Leibniz.
He believes in innate ideas. So there's a debate going on at
this time between what are called the rationalists and the
empiricists. OK, The rationalists are guys
like Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz.
And then the empiricists are guys like Hume and Locke and
(21:28):
Barkley. And the one of the big things
they're trying to debate is whether or not we have innate
ideas of everything we know doesthat.
All. Come from the outside in.
Are we a tabula rasa like Locke would say, where we're like this
blank slate and everything we learn, we learn through
experience. We learn through our senses.
We learn through sense perception, someone like Leibniz
(21:51):
is going to say, no, we have ideas within us that God has
placed there. All right, So for somebody like
Plato, you, your soul's eternal,you saw the forms and then when
you were human, you remembered all those things.
Well, Leibniz is a is a considers himself to be a
Christian. So he's going to say that like,
like Augustine did, that God creates when he creates you, he
(22:13):
has certain things already implanted in your mind that you
didn't experience. So, so think about how
interesting that is for a secondof everything that you know, did
you learn it all from experienceor are there certain things
within you that you were born with that are actual pieces of
knowledge? And so he believes that you're
born with actual pieces of knowledge.
(22:34):
He, he's a true rationalist and he believes that experience
unlocks them. He's not saying that you can go
to a A2 day old baby and, and somehow the baby actually knows
that 2 + 2 is 4. That's not what he's saying.
He's saying those mathematical concepts and stuff are already
there. They're unlocked throughout
life, but you didn't learn them through life.
So here here's a few examples hegives of things that he thinks
(22:54):
are innate. All right, these are these are
things you didn't experience andyet you somehow know being you
don't experience being. You experience beings,
individual things, but being substance.
So this can of nameless non namebrand Red Bull.
Just kidding, there it is. It's I, I don't actually
(23:15):
experience the substance of thiscan.
I experience shininess and kind of solidity and kind of a metal
feel? I don't actually get the
substance of Red Bull cannedness.
So where do I get that idea? Well, it's already in me.
The idea of action, the idea of identity, the idea of
mathematical truths, Right that you can go that.
(23:35):
There's a famous example in history of this is this is in
the ancient Greek world of a guythat goes to an uneducated slave
who doesn't know anything about math and teaches him a few
things about math, and then the slave can do all kinds of
mathematical propositions. How can he do that?
If you know that 2 + 2 is 4, youcan then say what?
Then 3 + 2 is five. You didn't learn that second
(23:57):
thing, you learned the 1st, and somehow all the rest of the
rules were already in you. According to Leibniz, the idea
of Infinity, you don't experience anything infinite,
Yet there's this concept of Infinity, right?
Necessary truths that that something cannot both be and not
be at the same time. That's not something that you
experience. That's something that you see
(24:18):
that is obviously logically likean axiom.
That's true. The soul, he thinks you have a
soul and that you know that 'cause you can say I you have a
self and others. OK.
So he does believe that we need our senses to bring out the
innate things in us, but that they are in there.
And he is a great example. They're like veins in a marble.
Like if a, if a sculptor is going to sculpt something out of
marble, there's already kind of some veins in the marble, like
(24:40):
some, you know, lines and shapesand stuff.
And that's what he thinks is going on in our mind.
He, he, you still need the sculptor to knock off those
other pieces. You still have to have this
experience to unlock him. But those veins, if you will,
are already there. He says in new essays on human
understanding this listen to this from this it.
Appears that necessary truths such as we find in pure
mathematics, and particularly inarithmetic and geometry, must
(25:04):
have principles whose proof doesn't depend on instances or
therefore on the testimony of the senses, even though without
the senses it would never occur to us to think of them.
OK, so the the the senses kind of trigger this and help us find
what's inside of us. He also says in the same same
thing, New essays on human understanding.
I deem all necessary truths to be innate.
(25:27):
OK, so he holds to monads. He holds to think of monads as
mental atoms. Think of them as spiritual
atoms. Don't think of them as actual
physical little balls or something like this.
They can't have shape. They're not material.
But that's kind of monads. He also thinks of innate ideas.
Let's do #5 two more here. He believes in a doctrine known
(25:48):
as the best of all possible worlds.
Let me say this to you and thinkabout how profound this is.
Do you agree? Do you disagree?
What do you think of our board? Leibnitz L.
How do you make Ali don't know which direction you're going to
be facing or the camera's going to face me?
Rather, he believes that the world in which we live now is
the best of all possible worlds that God could have created.
(26:15):
Wait a second, you say, Zach? That's absurd.
That's insane. We have mosquitoes.
We have cancer. We have tornadoes.
We have murder. We have rape.
This is the. Best of all possible worlds that
God could have created, Voltairemockingly writes against Leibniz
in his work Candide. And he says, well, if this is
(26:36):
the best of all possible worlds,I'd hate to see what the others
are meant look like, you know? If this is the best one and it's
pretty bad, then the other ones must be horrendous, right?
Here's what Leibniz means. If God is all powerful and if
God is all knowing, then by default this is the best
(26:57):
possible world to God. You say, I don't think it's the
best possible world. Think about how arrogant that
is. You don't see everything.
You don't see everything that's going on.
If you knew what God knew, you would make the exact same world,
because what lightness is tryingto say is you don't get to, as a
dumb human, say I don't like mosquitoes and I get sick.
Therefore God doesn't know what he's doing.
(27:19):
He's saying no, God has a reasonfor all these things.
God knows it by default. By default, God believes this is
the best of all possible worlds.If God is all powerful and if
he's all wise, would he create the 286th best world that he
could make? By world, he's meaning universe,
everything that exists, not justEarth.
Would God make the 36th best world that he could make, or
(27:42):
would he not make the world thatgave him the most glory?
Would he not make the world in which he could maximize
perfection to the highest degreepossible?
Now obviously God though, has several things that he wants to
accomplish. He's not.
His goal is not just to have human happiness.
If that was the case, he could have created a very different
kind of universe. He also wants to balance that
(28:02):
with physical perfection. He wants a thing that has
simplicity of laws and a beauty.God is using evil things for a
good purpose to live nuts right?So for the person that says this
is not the best of all possible world worlds, it sucks.
He's like cool. You sound like a child who
doesn't want to get a vaccine because the shot hurts instead
of realizing that the parent knows what's best and this is
(28:24):
best for the child. So when we say it's the best of
all possible worlds, we're saying if God wants to maintain
things like human freedom, if God wants to maintain things of
some human happiness, if God wants to have simplicity of laws
and these kind of things, this is the best of all possible
worlds. And the places you misperceive
it are because you misperceive it by default.
If God is who you think he is orwho he thinks he is Leibniz,
(28:46):
then this has to be the best of all possible worlds.
He's balancing human happiness with simplicity of laws, meaning
somebody who can write a 50. Page book and say the same thing
as someone who writes A500 page book is way smarter.
There's something to be said about brevity.
God wants to have this beautifulworld with a simplicity of laws
that also maximizes human happiness.
(29:06):
And so this is the world that you're going to get.
You can maximize one of those two poles, but he wants to have
both. Best of all possible worlds.
Number six, almost done intellectualism.
There's something called the Euthyphro dilemma, which is this
question Does God or the gods because it's originally posed by
(29:26):
the Greeks, does God or the gods?
Do they say that something is good because their intellect
already sees that it's good, or do they say that something's
good because their will just decides that it's good?
To say it another way, if rape is bad, which it is bad.
By the way, if rape is bad and God thinks rape is bad.
(29:48):
Or the gods, and they put in whatever book of revealed
religion you believe in, they put that you shouldn't rape, do
they? Is the reason that rape is wrong
merely because God or the gods has said it?
Is that the only thing that makes it wrong that it just goes
against God, or is it inherentlywrong?
God or the gods look ahead and see, oh, rape is bad.
(30:10):
That would be bad for humans, soI'm going to say that it's bad.
That's the question. Does does God think things are
good because he sees that they're good with his
intelligence, his intellect? Or are they good merely because
he declares? Them to be good.
Leibniz will follow Aquinas in being an intellectualist.
He's going to say if God just determines what's good, then God
(30:34):
is arbitrary. If God just says that rape is
bad, that means God could have just said rape is good and then
rape would be good and we shouldall be raping each other.
He doesn't. By the way, Leibniz doesn't use
that rape example. That sounds kind of extreme, but
that's the idea. What others guys like, you know,
Descartes, John Dunn, SCOTUS, they're going to say Nope, Nope.
(30:54):
God gets to decide what's good and bad.
It is just his will that decidesit.
God. God can't look and see that
something's inherently good or bad.
He made everything. He designed everything.
It's not like there's this standard above God that said the
called goodness to which God hasto conform.
And so anyway that that's that'sthat's something.
The reason that's important is because for Leibniz, everything
(31:15):
has to have a sufficient reason for why it is the way it is and
not otherwise the principle of sufficient reason.
So he'll ask questions like this.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
There's a reason for it. God wanted to create it for his
glory or something like that. Why do these laws work this way?
Well, because in his mind, God is always maximizing everything
that can be maximized to be the best and most perfect that it
(31:37):
can be, considering all things considered.
All things considered, you couldhave a world without evil, but
then you also have a world without the ability to grow in
character. You have a world without the
ability to be forgiven and know God's mercy.
You have it. You lose certain things, so take
another break, you know, go surfthe web.
No one ever says that, you know,go, go hop on Ask Jeeves or, you
(32:00):
know, something like this. Go, go to man.
What was it, Napster? Download some sweet music.
Illegal, illegally, whatever youwant to do.
OK, Those are the big thoughts for live Nets.
There's more. He's a genius, but we got to
keep this to some sort of lengththat is not ridiculous.
Recommended work. So he's written a bajillion
things. If you're like Zach, this guy's
interesting. I, I kind of want to know more
(32:20):
about live Nets. What works should I read?
Let me give you just a few, OK. And most of these are pretty
small. Some of them the, the the last
two are a bit longer, but the first three are pretty small.
Discourse on metaphysics. OK, That's if you read one thing
on live Nets, it should probablybe that.
It's very helpful. It's very clear.
It's, I don't know, 40 pages. It's tiny.
The monetology is like 10:00-ish, 10-15 pages.
(32:43):
Also very small, very helpful principles of nature and grace
based on reason. Also about 10 pages, very small
summaries of his brilliant philosophy, larger works, The
Odyssey, where he's trying to deal with the problem of evil
and such. And then one that's very thick.
I mean, you're talking 500 pagesand it's pretty rambling and
dense is new essays on human understanding.
(33:04):
So that's what you need to know.Leibnitz.
Let's end by talking about some problems with Godfried Wilhelm
Leibnitz. He's brilliant.
He has a system that works. That's very strange.
Let me mention just a few problems.
OK? But first, it's time to take a
little little break with this. You always know if I'm recording
(33:26):
in the morning, I'm drinking an energy drink, or if it's anytime
after 10:00 AM, it's alcohol. That's a joke.
I'm, I'm fine. Please don't.
Please don't set up an intervention #1.
He never really figured out a way to incorporate what seems to
be physical with these little immaterial soul like monads.
That's a pretty big flaw. He thinks that what we think of
(33:49):
as physical is just an appearance, it's not the
reality. That's strange though.
It's hard to say that these immaterial monads make up things
that appear to be physical. How do things with no extension
create what we seem to perceive as extension everywhere?
(34:12):
That's a problem for his system.His system works in theory.
Does it work in practice? So that's a problem for Leibniz.
His view of determinism and freewill, I think is just stupid.
I think it's absolutely contradictory what he's what he
does. You know, if every monad has its
entire history pre programmed into it by God, it seems like
(34:32):
there's no such thing as free will.
But Leibniz wants to keep the idea free will because he
believes in moral culpability. So what does he do?
He basically says the only things that are necessary are
like mathematical truths. You know, all bachelors are
unmarried men. Something can't both be and not
be at the same time. Those things are necessary.
It's not necessary that Hitler become this dictator.
(34:54):
God could have made Hitler not do that and have a different
kind of Hitler. And so because though it's going
to happen, it's built into baby Hitler.
And because God already has ordained or knows that Hitler's
going to be bad, it's going to happen.
It's not like it's not going to happen.
But he thinks that doesn't go against Hitler's free will
because it's not necessary like math.
I think that is him just taking his Christianity and his
(35:17):
theology and mixing that with his philosophy instead of just
being pure on his philosophy. I think, I think he's hedging
there because there are certain things he's not willing to
concede to because of his theology.
OK, right, wrong or different. I'm not, I'm not saying that's
right, wrong or we, we all take our biases and our
presuppositions and read them into our positions.
I think he does that in that area though, which doesn't allow
(35:39):
him to give a great answer on that.
That's my opinion. Someone like Spinoza would just
say, yeah, we don't have free will like that, right?
Our our freedom is found in realizing that we're determined
and embracing that. So who has, who has a more
consistent philosophical system is a different question than
who's right theologically or something like that.
(36:00):
Or maybe neither, because again,Spinoza has a theology of seeing
God as everything nature. And so he's also reading that
presupposition on to that. So anyway.
Philosophy. 'S hard, you know.
Read More OK #3 His view that this is the greatest of all
possible worlds doesn't work if volunteerism is true, and it
doesn't work if God is considering the happiness of
(36:21):
creatures such as humans. So let me say it another way.
If God doesn't need creation, could he not have created a
world where there's less suffering and still have gotten
the same glory and humans still be the same amount as happy?
Liveness is saying no Liveness is going to say no God.
The reason God designed the world the way he did the
(36:42):
universe is because his intellect, his genius saw this
is the best option. God.
God is somewhat restricted by the different goals God has in
trying to create a universe. Someone Like You know, Descartes
or even Martin Luther would say Nope.
God could have made a different world with his will and have
(37:03):
less of these kind of bad things.
I don't. Know if they'd say it that way,
but it it is the IT is where their position of volunteerism
would lead. Anyway, last problem with
lignets. He doesn't have a fully fledged
view of ethics like Spinoza. His view of morality and ethics
is really going to be birthed out of his metaphysics, birthed
out of his whole theory of monads and his metaphysics and
(37:24):
all these kind of things, substances.
And so the only reason I say that is if you're going to be a
renowned philosopher, which he is, again, he's a genius.
You also typically want like Aristotle had, like Kant had,
like Mill had, you want a systemof ethics that you can also give
people as you're doing big ticket deal with all the topics
kind of philosophy. So so why to Leibnitz does a
(37:48):
drunkard or a murderer or something?
Why do they do that? Is it because their will is
wicked and they see that being sober is better and they just
can't do it? For Leibnitz, he holds a very
old view, again, in Greek philosophy, that when we have a
moral misstep, it's not because we're just broken, it's because
(38:09):
we're misreasoning about what's best.
The person who goes and murders somebody to Leibniz thinks
they're wrong, but they think that is what's best.
They think that will make them happier than not murdering
somebody. Or their view is not vivid
enough to actually affect their actions.
So they think, yeah, maybe murder's bad, but they're not
really paying attention enough. So he thinks that moral defects
(38:29):
are based upon what you think isbest in your knowledge, your
intellect, versus just being a weakness of will.
OK, let's summarize that. That's a lot.
Geez. This is why you come to
ideological to get more smarter.What you need to know is you
have a guy who's an absolute polymath and genius who comes up
(38:52):
with a system that is unique in that every substance is
technically different in one sense that they're all the same
because they're monads, but all the monads are different.
And so technically every substance is different.
And the way they interact is by being pre programmed by God to
follow their own path. So they're not technically
interacting. They're not bumping into.
Each other or something like that.
This creates a system where in his mind there's a proof for
(39:14):
God, there's a proof for the immortality of the soul, there's
a proof for how substances can interact.
It solves all the problems, doesit?
But it solves a lot of the problems and so it's a brilliant
system. He's a brilliant thinker.
Again, and Vince differential ordiscovers differential calculus
independently of Newton. He's he's the man.
(39:35):
He has a weird system though. But should we dismiss a system
for being weird if it's more coherent than what he critiques
of what we think of as matter? Matter makes no sense.
Matter is just a group of stuff clumped.
Together that you can divide infinitely.
Well then there's no such thing as a human or a table or
whatever. There's just matter that gets
divided forever. If you can divide it infinitely,
(39:57):
there's no smallest thing so. Leibniz, impress your listen, if
you're a single guy, take a girlon a date and just be like, hey,
you know what? You need some more Leibniz in
your life. Let's talk about monads.
And she's like, I like when you talk about monads because it
sounds dirty. All right, thanks for joining
us, Ideological. We will see you next time.
Hello, and welcome to another edition of everyone's favorite
podcast, Ideological Today. Before you switch channels or or
watch another video, you're like, who's this Leibniz guy?
This seems really boring. I don't know who this is.
Today we're going to be learningabout Godfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
And let me tell you why he's a big deal.
(00:28):
When you think of the most learned, most intelligent people
of all time, this guy is a contender for that.
So you, you might have not heardof him.
He hasn't heard of you either, but he's a big deal.
The problem is with you if you haven't heard of him.
So today we're going to be talking about Leibnitz and his
philosophy and who is this just powerhouse intellectual figure.
(00:51):
And so it should be a a ton of fun.
Today's episode is brought to you by Cheese Wiz.
Cheese Wiz. It's like cheese but with cancer
in it. OK, so let me tell you why he's
a big deal. He is an absolute polymath, OK?
He's good at everything. He does history and he does
science and he does physics and he does philosophy and he does
theology and he does, you know, he he works as like he does law.
(01:14):
He works as, you know, like a legal official.
He's good at everything. He's a true Polly Histora, true
Renaissance man, a true man of letters, and what he's trying to
do is 3 things. And then I'll tell you a little
bit about his life and we will have a ton of fun.
By the way, it's morning here, so ha ha, got a little, little
energy here. I can't tell you what it is
(01:34):
because I just have to turn it. You can't know what this is,
even though you can tell for legal reasons.
Cut my life into pieces. This is he's trying to harmonize
a bunch of different groups together.
He wants to harmonize Catholics and Protestants.
So there's even this thing that he's going to add to his his
metaphysics to try to make a case for Catholic communion,
(01:56):
even though he's a Protestant, because he's trying to bring
them together. He's trying to fit the new
science that's going on during the Enlightenment with some
traditional metaphysics, and he's trying to give an answer to
Spinoza's monism and Descartes dualism.
What does that mean? We will get into it.
It's going to be a ton of fun. Ideological.
(02:17):
Are you ready? Are you ready to to be less
dumb? Let's do it.
Who is Leibnitz? I'll say it in that little
Germany. Anyway, he was born in July of
1646 in Leipzig, Germany. His dad was a professor of moral
philosophy at the University of Leipzig.
So he already has a very smart dad that can teach him.
I do this as a philosopher with my kids.
(02:37):
They'll say something and I'm like, well, wait a second, if
you hold this, then you also have to hold this, and you can't
hold that, so you don't hold that.
And they're like, I just want some Cheetos or whatever.
So he taught himself Latin at the age of seven.
It's. My last resort suffocation?
Nope. Remember, he's better than you.
People in the past were not Dumber than us.
They're less technological, but they're smarter.
(02:59):
At the age of eight, he was allowed to use his father's
library, where he read at 8. He's reading the classical
authors, he's reading the ChurchFathers, he's reading the
scholastics at 8 after he taughthimself Latin at the age of 7.
Why? Why is Leibniz also a big deal?
He invented calculus. It's probably better to say he
(03:20):
discovered calculus, right? It's a you know, Benjamin
Franklin didn't invent lightning, although I always say
that he discovered some things about it with kites, I guess.
I don't know. In 1675, he discovered
differential calculus independently of Isaac Newton.
So you've got these powerhouses,you've got Leibniz and you've
got Newton, and they both discover calculus independently
(03:43):
of one another. What an age of intelligence.
So they discover calculus, differential calculus separately
from one another, and then they fight the rest of their lives
really over who invented it first and who did somebody
plagiarize the other one or, or what it might be.
Newton was awarded the credit, although scholars today,
(04:04):
generally, the consensus is thatthey did discover it
independently of each other. They didn't RIP each other off.
But Isaac Newton was kind of given the credit, although
Leibnitz came up with it withoutNewton.
And Leibnitz's version is the one that was more accurate.
It's the one closer to what we use today.
So being the the better inventor, his notations closer
(04:24):
to what we use today, he got to meet Peter the Great.
He was elected a member of the Royal Society in England.
He also founded the founded and was the 1st president of the
Prussian Academy of Sciences. He knew a bunch of languages,
what he wrote in in in what he wrote.
He wrote in Latin, German and French.
His most famous influential philosophical works were written
(04:44):
in French. He put a lot of energy into
creating a universal philosophical language to
replace natural language so everyone could communicate
again. When I say he's incredible I am
not over exaggerating. He is the man when it whether
you love him or hate him, he is an absolute genius.
(05:05):
Like absolute literal, off the charts genius.
The idea was maybe we could comeup with a perfect philosophical
language. Wittgenstein and and Russell
would would toy with this idea later only to find that they
couldn't do it. But maybe we could find a
universal philosophical languagethat would solve confusion and
help people communicate. He influenced philosophers as
(05:26):
diverse as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger.
He seems to have been a pretty faithful Lutheran from his
theological writings, although he refused communion on his
deathbed and he didn't regularlyattend church.
So he's generally considered though to be Lutheran.
So he's a Protestant. He died, unfortunately, he is
not immortal. He died on November 14th, 1716
(05:47):
in Hanover in Germany. OK, let me give you 2 fantastic
quotes by Denis Diderot. Denis Diderot, right?
The, the, the, the major and thebiggest contributor probably
there's a bunch of contributors to the encyclopaedie, the the
Enlightenment encyclopedia that comes out of France that tries
to classify like all human knowledge.
So Diderot is a genius and here is what he says about Leibniz.
(06:13):
OK, listen to these quotes. Remember also Leibniz is a
theist and Diderot is an atheist, so he doesn't even
care. He's like Leibniz is a genius.
Listen to what he says. He says this Perhaps never has a
man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and
written more than Leibniz. What he has composed on the
world, God, nature and the soul is of the most sublime
(06:34):
eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed
with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig, that's
Leibniz would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.
Man, what the actual? That's incredible.
All right, when he's like, yeah,he's like Plato.
But he's got another one, an even better quote.
This is also from Diderot about Leibniz.
(06:54):
He says this when one compares the talents one has with those
of Leibnitz. 1 is tempted to throw away one's books and go
die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.
Cheers to that. Ditero's a genius and he's like,
Leibnitz is so smart that when you read him, you should just go
(07:17):
kill yourself. I mean, it's it's amazing.
All right. OK, what did Leibniz believe?
Why is he a big deal? Let's go over a few major ideas
in his thought. The first one is his view of
metaphysics. And.
What are called monads? Gross monads sounds like like
you're going to kick somebody inthe monads.
(07:38):
Let me tell you what he's tryingto do.
There is a problem in philosophythat's bedeviled philosophers
forever and it's the question of1 of what is everything made?
And two, how can different substances interact?
It's these are metaphysical questions.
Meaning if you say, for example,Zach, I think everything is made
of matter. I'll say cool, what about a
(07:59):
vacuum? What about empty space?
Is that made of matter? What about the concept of a
triangle? I don't mean an actual triangle
that you see like a, a yield sign.
The concept of a triangle is that made of matter.
What about time? Is time made of matter?
Is time a thing that exists? Like Newton would say, there's
all these kind of things, propositions.
There are all these things that seem to exist that are not made
(08:19):
of matter. Cool.
The other problem is how can different things interact like
this? So think back to our friend
Casper the Friendly Ghost. OK, with Casper the Friendly
ghost, we believe he can walk through walls.
We don't really believe in the ghost, but just follow me with
this analogy here. We believe that he can walk
through walls. Why?
Because he's immaterial. The wall is material.
(08:40):
Casper's immaterial. So he can, you know, go through
the wall because they're different substances.
Well, the question is, how can different substances interact?
How can your mind and your thoughts, which seem to be
immaterial, for example, move your hand which is material?
And so this is a problem that philosophers are trying to deal
with. Now there's several different
solutions. 1 is the solution of someone like Spinoza who just
(09:02):
says everything is the same substance.
He's a monist, everything is Godor nature.
So now things can interact, problem solved.
There are others though, like Descartes that are going to say,
no, there's really two substances.
There's what is, there's mind, what's immaterial and it's, it's
essence is thinking. And then there's, you know
what's physical, That its essence is extension.
(09:25):
But he doesn't really know how to solve the problem of how they
can interact, right? So like, think about when you
feel pain. The pain in the experience of
subjective pain is different than the brain chemistry going
on in your mind. Like if you burn your hand, you
feel it in your hand even thoughthe chemicals are going on in
your brain. It's not the same.
Anyway, Leibnitz is going to come up with a solution to that.
(09:46):
And here is his solution. OK, so his major ideas, I'm
going to give you 2 of them together, monads and
metaphysics. And then what is called pre
established harmony. Here is Leibniz's idea.
Follow me because this is a little technical for Leibniz.
Everything is made-up of what are called monads.
I'll describe those in a second.They're all technically though
different substances and they don't interact.
(10:09):
What they do is they follow their own path that God has pre
programmed into them, what's called pre established harmony
or into leki. They have these purposes within
them. And though it looks like when
you hit a billiard ball and it hits another billiard ball, it
looks like it's just hitting it.What's really happening is the
billiard ball monads are going here, and then the billiard
ball. Monads here are going, but they
(10:31):
are separate monads and separatecollections of monads.
What does that mean? Let's back up again.
This is very strange and it seems very not common sense.
It seems very counterintuitive. First of all, they're called
monads, which again is hilariousbecause of the Greek word monos
which means one. What what Liveness is trying to
say is he's trying to say what makes something a substance is
(10:53):
its unity. So monads are immaterial soul
like entities that stand in relation to all the other monads
in the universe, but they don't causally interact.
The only monad that interacts onother ones is God, who's like a
super monad. OK, this is so confusing.
(11:17):
Let me let me give you a weird illustration that's not perfect.
None of these are going to be perfect illustrations because
nothing's like monads. But let me let me follow me
imagine that everything is made-up of, let's call it tiny
metal spheres or tiny spheres that are mirrored.
OK, those spheres all over the universe would stand in relation
(11:38):
to one another. And because they have a shiny
surface, they would be reflectedin all the other monads, all the
other shiny spheres. So they're they're if you had a
bunch of mirrors, they would allreflect and see each other.
And some of them would be super far away, but some of them would
be close. But technically, if you could
analyze any one of them, you could know everything else about
(12:01):
the universe because it stands in relation to everything else.
Now, you can't know everything about a monad, Only God can do
that, but to Leibnitz. But if you could, because it is
one big system, you could technically know everything
about the universe. So God is at the top.
He's the Super monad because he sees everything perfectly
(12:22):
clearly. Humans are below that.
And why? Because we have reason and we
have self consciousness. We can say I as as Leibniz would
say, but our perception of the world is way more confused
obviously than God's is. And our soul is like a dominant
monad over the rest of the the monads in our body.
Then there are bare monads, which are basically everything
else, right? My phone has bare monads, and
(12:44):
this microphone has bare monads,and this shirt has bare monads.
Whatever it is. They don't reason like we do.
Don't think that everything is like a little human.
That's not what he's saying. But he does think that monads
have perception and appetite. What does that mean?
It means that they stand in relation to everything else in
the universe. And by appetite, it doesn't mean
they're hungry. We're thirsty.
(13:08):
What it means is that they are self moved nerd stuff.
Let's stuff Leibniz in a locker.Let me say it way simpler.
If two people get into a fight, they're causal in our mind.
They're causally interacting. This is not live nuts, but just
follow me with this example. It's a crass example in crude,
but I think it's really helpful.If I get into a fight, someone
throws a punch and I see it and I react and I block and then I
(13:31):
throw a punch and they see it and they block and we're
causally interacting with each other.
What Leibniz thinks is more likely the case of what's going
on with everything in the universe is this.
Imagine that there is a movie someone's producing.
He wouldn't use this example 'cause they didn't have movies.
But they're you're trying to get2 robots to fight.
As you are having these two robots fight, are they actually
(13:53):
fighting? Like are they remembering their
robot Kung Fu training? SO1 robot tries to karate chop
and the other one sees it and blocks it and then the other one
throws a punch and it sees it and blocks it.
No. What happens?
Are these programmers? Pre program into the robots the
sequence that they're supposed to do.
They're not actually reacting tothe other one.
They're just following their owninternal mechanism.
(14:15):
So this one at 2nd 3 throws a punch.
This one at second four blocks apunch.
This one at second five in the video ducks.
This one at 2nd 6 throws a punchover his head.
But they're they're different from each other.
They already have pre programmedinto them everything that
they're going to do in the fightsequence.
They're not actually rememberingtheir Kung Fu training and
fighting now. What if everything in the
(14:38):
universe was like that? What if everything God just pre
programmed in everything? That is what it would do and it
is, it looks like it's effect, it's causing these effects on
other things, but really it's following its own sequence
that's pre programmed into it, pre established harmony and that
is in harmony with everything else that also has its entire
(14:58):
history pre programmed into it. That is the idea of Leibniz.
He thinks that for every subject.
Something of which you can say something, all of its predicates
are already built into it, right?
So little baby Hitler is going to be this terrible dictator
that's already pregnant in him. It's going to happen and he's
(15:22):
not being affected by other monads.
That is just the pre programmed thing that is in him and that is
going to happen. Well, Zach, what if Hitler
didn't become a terrible dictator?
Well then it wouldn't be Hitler,it would be somebody else.
So anyway, let me give you some some quotes that might make this
helpful. He says this.
This is from discourse on metaphysics.
Each substance is like a whole world and like a mirror of God,
(15:43):
or indeed of the whole universe,which each substance expresses
in its own fashion, rather as the same town looks different
according to the position from which it is viewed.
In a way, then, the universe is multiplied as many times as
there are substances, and in thesame way the glory of God is
magnified by so many quite different representations of His
work. It can even be said that each
substance carries within it, in a certain way, the imprint of
(16:06):
God's infinite wisdom and omnipotence, and imitates Him as
far as it can. OK, this is a very strange way
of thinking of the world. Essentially what Leibniz is
trying to say is this. Everything that we think that
looks physical. He toys with Aristotelian views
(16:27):
of substance in his middle period, but then eventually,
eventually he moves to a fuller view of idealism.
We'll talk about that in anotherlecture.
OK, clear your mind. That's too much.
Let's back up. For Leibniz, everything is not
made of what is physical. That's how it appears to us.
That's just the appearance. That's the phenomena.
But it's it's, it's actually made-up of things that are
immaterial. Why, Zach, why can't it be
(16:50):
made-up of matter? It makes more sense to say
things are made-up of matter because matter has extension,
which means that everything is just an aggregate.
So my phone. It it it.
Is is just If it's just material, it's just made-up of
an aggregate of things. It's a group of things.
It's not a single individual thing, which is what he wants
with a monad. He thinks a substance has to be
its own singular thing. Everything that's physical has
(17:10):
extension, meaning you can cut it and cut it and cut it and cut
it. Which is why to Leibnitz, the
idea of an atom, a physical atom, makes no sense.
The word atom, by the way, atomos, it means uncuttable.
In Greek, you'd say that makes no sense.
Even an atom, if it's matter, could still, at least in your
mind, to be cut, even if we don't have the tools to do it.
And atoms made of two half atomsand a half atom is made-up of
two quarter atoms. And you could cut it forever if
(17:33):
you could cut material forever. There is no smallest thing.
And talking about matter like that doesn't make sense.
You need something that is not material that stands behind
that, and that is what monads are.
Now that sounds really, really strange, but it's actually
really genius and let me tell you why.
He solves for the problem of what everything is made of or of
(17:54):
what is everything made. He solves the problem of how
things can interact. He gives a proof for the
existence of God. He gives a proof for the
existence of soul, which is whathe wants to do in his
philosophy. Other philosophers obviously
don't care about that. And he has a system that works.
So it's very hard to disprove his system, even though it seems
very strange. OK, so that is the idea of
(18:16):
monads, his metaphysics and thenintellect in this pre
established harmony. He has a famous phrase where he
says that monads are windowless.What he means is that they don't
share attributes. It's not like they have open
windows and some of their accidents or properties go out
and flow into another monad and vice versa.
Everything is within its own little compact monad and they,
(18:37):
they do their own thing. God is the only monad that cause
the acts on others by conservingthem.
Let me give you a quote and thenwe are going to get into some
things that are a little easier.That's the hardest part.
So you made it. Give yourself.
Go reward yourself, you know? It's go go get you a.
Cadbury cream egg, which I've heard in England that they have
all year round and we don't. We didn't fight them to not have
(18:59):
this, so we should have it all year round.
Let me give you a quote from Discourse on Metaphysics.
God produces various substances according to the different views
he has of the universe, and through God's intervention, the
proper nature of each substance brings it about.
That what happens to 1 corresponds with what happens to
all the others without their acting upon one another
(19:21):
directly. OK number 3A subject is is
always pregnant. A subject is always pregnant
with all of its predicates. If you could know the
predicates, that's just anythingyou say about something as a
predicate, you're predicating it.
It's it's. Yeah.
If you could fully know all the predicates of any monad, you
could know everything in the entire universe.
(19:42):
OK, Caesar crossing the Rubicon is already within the monad of
Caesar. He hasn't expressed it yet, but
he's going to. OK.
He says this in the philosophical essays.
Every individual substance contains in its perfect notion,
the entire universe. Not distinctly, right, So God
(20:03):
knows all the things, but some bare monad in a table doesn't
know anything. It just stands.
A far away and confused in relation to the rest of the
universe, but it is somehow still reflected in the entire
universe, he says in the Monadology, one of his most
popular works. And since every present state of
a simple substance is a natural consequence of its preceding
(20:24):
state, the present is pregnant with the future.
That's where I get that phrase. I'll give you one more quote on
this, then we'll go to the some things that are a little bit
easier to understand, he says inDiscourse on Metaphysics.
This agrees with my principles. For nothing ever enters into our
mind naturally from the outside,and we have a bad habit of
thinking of our souls as if it received certain species as
(20:45):
messengers and as if it has doors and windows.
OK, That's the idea of it being windowless.
Everything is contained in the monad.
It doesn't share attributes withother monads going in and out.
OK, pat yourself on the back. You've made it through his
crazy, difficult to understand, but also really brilliant
system. Whether you love it or hate it,
it's not dumb. It solves a lot of problems.
(21:06):
It, even though it's very weird and it creates its own problems.
We'll see some of the problems at the end.
OK, another major philosophical point for Leibniz.
He believes in innate ideas. So there's a debate going on at
this time between what are called the rationalists and the
empiricists. OK, The rationalists are guys
like Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz.
And then the empiricists are guys like Hume and Locke and
(21:28):
Barkley. And the one of the big things
they're trying to debate is whether or not we have innate
ideas of everything we know doesthat.
All. Come from the outside in.
Are we a tabula rasa like Locke would say, where we're like this
blank slate and everything we learn, we learn through
experience. We learn through our senses.
We learn through sense perception, someone like Leibniz
(21:51):
is going to say, no, we have ideas within us that God has
placed there. All right, So for somebody like
Plato, you, your soul's eternal,you saw the forms and then when
you were human, you remembered all those things.
Well, Leibniz is a is a considers himself to be a
Christian. So he's going to say that like,
like Augustine did, that God creates when he creates you, he
(22:13):
has certain things already implanted in your mind that you
didn't experience. So, so think about how
interesting that is for a secondof everything that you know, did
you learn it all from experienceor are there certain things
within you that you were born with that are actual pieces of
knowledge? And so he believes that you're
born with actual pieces of knowledge.
(22:34):
He, he's a true rationalist and he believes that experience
unlocks them. He's not saying that you can go
to a A2 day old baby and, and somehow the baby actually knows
that 2 + 2 is 4. That's not what he's saying.
He's saying those mathematical concepts and stuff are already
there. They're unlocked throughout
life, but you didn't learn them through life.
So here here's a few examples hegives of things that he thinks
(22:54):
are innate. All right, these are these are
things you didn't experience andyet you somehow know being you
don't experience being. You experience beings,
individual things, but being substance.
So this can of nameless non namebrand Red Bull.
Just kidding, there it is. It's I, I don't actually
(23:15):
experience the substance of thiscan.
I experience shininess and kind of solidity and kind of a metal
feel? I don't actually get the
substance of Red Bull cannedness.
So where do I get that idea? Well, it's already in me.
The idea of action, the idea of identity, the idea of
mathematical truths, Right that you can go that.
(23:35):
There's a famous example in history of this is this is in
the ancient Greek world of a guythat goes to an uneducated slave
who doesn't know anything about math and teaches him a few
things about math, and then the slave can do all kinds of
mathematical propositions. How can he do that?
If you know that 2 + 2 is 4, youcan then say what?
Then 3 + 2 is five. You didn't learn that second
(23:57):
thing, you learned the 1st, and somehow all the rest of the
rules were already in you. According to Leibniz, the idea
of Infinity, you don't experience anything infinite,
Yet there's this concept of Infinity, right?
Necessary truths that that something cannot both be and not
be at the same time. That's not something that you
experience. That's something that you see
(24:18):
that is obviously logically likean axiom.
That's true. The soul, he thinks you have a
soul and that you know that 'cause you can say I you have a
self and others. OK.
So he does believe that we need our senses to bring out the
innate things in us, but that they are in there.
And he is a great example. They're like veins in a marble.
Like if a, if a sculptor is going to sculpt something out of
marble, there's already kind of some veins in the marble, like
(24:40):
some, you know, lines and shapesand stuff.
And that's what he thinks is going on in our mind.
He, he, you still need the sculptor to knock off those
other pieces. You still have to have this
experience to unlock him. But those veins, if you will,
are already there. He says in new essays on human
understanding this listen to this from this it.
Appears that necessary truths such as we find in pure
mathematics, and particularly inarithmetic and geometry, must
(25:04):
have principles whose proof doesn't depend on instances or
therefore on the testimony of the senses, even though without
the senses it would never occur to us to think of them.
OK, so the the the senses kind of trigger this and help us find
what's inside of us. He also says in the same same
thing, New essays on human understanding.
I deem all necessary truths to be innate.
(25:27):
OK, so he holds to monads. He holds to think of monads as
mental atoms. Think of them as spiritual
atoms. Don't think of them as actual
physical little balls or something like this.
They can't have shape. They're not material.
But that's kind of monads. He also thinks of innate ideas.
Let's do #5 two more here. He believes in a doctrine known
(25:48):
as the best of all possible worlds.
Let me say this to you and thinkabout how profound this is.
Do you agree? Do you disagree?
What do you think of our board? Leibnitz L.
How do you make Ali don't know which direction you're going to
be facing or the camera's going to face me?
Rather, he believes that the world in which we live now is
the best of all possible worlds that God could have created.
(26:15):
Wait a second, you say, Zach? That's absurd.
That's insane. We have mosquitoes.
We have cancer. We have tornadoes.
We have murder. We have rape.
This is the. Best of all possible worlds that
God could have created, Voltairemockingly writes against Leibniz
in his work Candide. And he says, well, if this is
(26:36):
the best of all possible worlds,I'd hate to see what the others
are meant look like, you know? If this is the best one and it's
pretty bad, then the other ones must be horrendous, right?
Here's what Leibniz means. If God is all powerful and if
God is all knowing, then by default this is the best
(26:57):
possible world to God. You say, I don't think it's the
best possible world. Think about how arrogant that
is. You don't see everything.
You don't see everything that's going on.
If you knew what God knew, you would make the exact same world,
because what lightness is tryingto say is you don't get to, as a
dumb human, say I don't like mosquitoes and I get sick.
Therefore God doesn't know what he's doing.
(27:19):
He's saying no, God has a reasonfor all these things.
God knows it by default. By default, God believes this is
the best of all possible worlds.If God is all powerful and if
he's all wise, would he create the 286th best world that he
could make? By world, he's meaning universe,
everything that exists, not justEarth.
Would God make the 36th best world that he could make, or
(27:42):
would he not make the world thatgave him the most glory?
Would he not make the world in which he could maximize
perfection to the highest degreepossible?
Now obviously God though, has several things that he wants to
accomplish. He's not.
His goal is not just to have human happiness.
If that was the case, he could have created a very different
kind of universe. He also wants to balance that
(28:02):
with physical perfection. He wants a thing that has
simplicity of laws and a beauty.God is using evil things for a
good purpose to live nuts right?So for the person that says this
is not the best of all possible world worlds, it sucks.
He's like cool. You sound like a child who
doesn't want to get a vaccine because the shot hurts instead
of realizing that the parent knows what's best and this is
(28:24):
best for the child. So when we say it's the best of
all possible worlds, we're saying if God wants to maintain
things like human freedom, if God wants to maintain things of
some human happiness, if God wants to have simplicity of laws
and these kind of things, this is the best of all possible
worlds. And the places you misperceive
it are because you misperceive it by default.
If God is who you think he is orwho he thinks he is Leibniz,
(28:46):
then this has to be the best of all possible worlds.
He's balancing human happiness with simplicity of laws, meaning
somebody who can write a 50. Page book and say the same thing
as someone who writes A500 page book is way smarter.
There's something to be said about brevity.
God wants to have this beautifulworld with a simplicity of laws
that also maximizes human happiness.
(29:06):
And so this is the world that you're going to get.
You can maximize one of those two poles, but he wants to have
both. Best of all possible worlds.
Number six, almost done intellectualism.
There's something called the Euthyphro dilemma, which is this
question Does God or the gods because it's originally posed by
(29:26):
the Greeks, does God or the gods?
Do they say that something is good because their intellect
already sees that it's good, or do they say that something's
good because their will just decides that it's good?
To say it another way, if rape is bad, which it is bad.
By the way, if rape is bad and God thinks rape is bad.
(29:48):
Or the gods, and they put in whatever book of revealed
religion you believe in, they put that you shouldn't rape, do
they? Is the reason that rape is wrong
merely because God or the gods has said it?
Is that the only thing that makes it wrong that it just goes
against God, or is it inherentlywrong?
God or the gods look ahead and see, oh, rape is bad.
(30:10):
That would be bad for humans, soI'm going to say that it's bad.
That's the question. Does does God think things are
good because he sees that they're good with his
intelligence, his intellect? Or are they good merely because
he declares? Them to be good.
Leibniz will follow Aquinas in being an intellectualist.
He's going to say if God just determines what's good, then God
(30:34):
is arbitrary. If God just says that rape is
bad, that means God could have just said rape is good and then
rape would be good and we shouldall be raping each other.
He doesn't. By the way, Leibniz doesn't use
that rape example. That sounds kind of extreme, but
that's the idea. What others guys like, you know,
Descartes, John Dunn, SCOTUS, they're going to say Nope, Nope.
(30:54):
God gets to decide what's good and bad.
It is just his will that decidesit.
God. God can't look and see that
something's inherently good or bad.
He made everything. He designed everything.
It's not like there's this standard above God that said the
called goodness to which God hasto conform.
And so anyway that that's that'sthat's something.
The reason that's important is because for Leibniz, everything
(31:15):
has to have a sufficient reason for why it is the way it is and
not otherwise the principle of sufficient reason.
So he'll ask questions like this.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
There's a reason for it. God wanted to create it for his
glory or something like that. Why do these laws work this way?
Well, because in his mind, God is always maximizing everything
that can be maximized to be the best and most perfect that it
(31:37):
can be, considering all things considered.
All things considered, you couldhave a world without evil, but
then you also have a world without the ability to grow in
character. You have a world without the
ability to be forgiven and know God's mercy.
You have it. You lose certain things, so take
another break, you know, go surfthe web.
No one ever says that, you know,go, go hop on Ask Jeeves or, you
(32:00):
know, something like this. Go, go to man.
What was it, Napster? Download some sweet music.
Illegal, illegally, whatever youwant to do.
OK, Those are the big thoughts for live Nets.
There's more. He's a genius, but we got to
keep this to some sort of lengththat is not ridiculous.
Recommended work. So he's written a bajillion
things. If you're like Zach, this guy's
interesting. I, I kind of want to know more
(32:20):
about live Nets. What works should I read?
Let me give you just a few, OK. And most of these are pretty
small. Some of them the, the the last
two are a bit longer, but the first three are pretty small.
Discourse on metaphysics. OK, That's if you read one thing
on live Nets, it should probablybe that.
It's very helpful. It's very clear.
It's, I don't know, 40 pages. It's tiny.
The monetology is like 10:00-ish, 10-15 pages.
(32:43):
Also very small, very helpful principles of nature and grace
based on reason. Also about 10 pages, very small
summaries of his brilliant philosophy, larger works, The
Odyssey, where he's trying to deal with the problem of evil
and such. And then one that's very thick.
I mean, you're talking 500 pagesand it's pretty rambling and
dense is new essays on human understanding.
(33:04):
So that's what you need to know.Leibnitz.
Let's end by talking about some problems with Godfried Wilhelm
Leibnitz. He's brilliant.
He has a system that works. That's very strange.
Let me mention just a few problems.
OK? But first, it's time to take a
little little break with this. You always know if I'm recording
(33:26):
in the morning, I'm drinking an energy drink, or if it's anytime
after 10:00 AM, it's alcohol. That's a joke.
I'm, I'm fine. Please don't.
Please don't set up an intervention #1.
He never really figured out a way to incorporate what seems to
be physical with these little immaterial soul like monads.
That's a pretty big flaw. He thinks that what we think of
(33:49):
as physical is just an appearance, it's not the
reality. That's strange though.
It's hard to say that these immaterial monads make up things
that appear to be physical. How do things with no extension
create what we seem to perceive as extension everywhere?
(34:12):
That's a problem for his system.His system works in theory.
Does it work in practice? So that's a problem for Leibniz.
His view of determinism and freewill, I think is just stupid.
I think it's absolutely contradictory what he's what he
does. You know, if every monad has its
entire history pre programmed into it by God, it seems like
(34:32):
there's no such thing as free will.
But Leibniz wants to keep the idea free will because he
believes in moral culpability. So what does he do?
He basically says the only things that are necessary are
like mathematical truths. You know, all bachelors are
unmarried men. Something can't both be and not
be at the same time. Those things are necessary.
It's not necessary that Hitler become this dictator.
(34:54):
God could have made Hitler not do that and have a different
kind of Hitler. And so because though it's going
to happen, it's built into baby Hitler.
And because God already has ordained or knows that Hitler's
going to be bad, it's going to happen.
It's not like it's not going to happen.
But he thinks that doesn't go against Hitler's free will
because it's not necessary like math.
I think that is him just taking his Christianity and his
(35:17):
theology and mixing that with his philosophy instead of just
being pure on his philosophy. I think, I think he's hedging
there because there are certain things he's not willing to
concede to because of his theology.
OK, right, wrong or different. I'm not, I'm not saying that's
right, wrong or we, we all take our biases and our
presuppositions and read them into our positions.
I think he does that in that area though, which doesn't allow
(35:39):
him to give a great answer on that.
That's my opinion. Someone like Spinoza would just
say, yeah, we don't have free will like that, right?
Our our freedom is found in realizing that we're determined
and embracing that. So who has, who has a more
consistent philosophical system is a different question than
who's right theologically or something like that.
(36:00):
Or maybe neither, because again,Spinoza has a theology of seeing
God as everything nature. And so he's also reading that
presupposition on to that. So anyway.
Philosophy. 'S hard, you know.
Read More OK #3 His view that this is the greatest of all
possible worlds doesn't work if volunteerism is true, and it
doesn't work if God is considering the happiness of
(36:21):
creatures such as humans. So let me say it another way.
If God doesn't need creation, could he not have created a
world where there's less suffering and still have gotten
the same glory and humans still be the same amount as happy?
Liveness is saying no Liveness is going to say no God.
The reason God designed the world the way he did the
(36:42):
universe is because his intellect, his genius saw this
is the best option. God.
God is somewhat restricted by the different goals God has in
trying to create a universe. Someone Like You know, Descartes
or even Martin Luther would say Nope.
God could have made a different world with his will and have
(37:03):
less of these kind of bad things.
I don't. Know if they'd say it that way,
but it it is the IT is where their position of volunteerism
would lead. Anyway, last problem with
lignets. He doesn't have a fully fledged
view of ethics like Spinoza. His view of morality and ethics
is really going to be birthed out of his metaphysics, birthed
out of his whole theory of monads and his metaphysics and
(37:24):
all these kind of things, substances.
And so the only reason I say that is if you're going to be a
renowned philosopher, which he is, again, he's a genius.
You also typically want like Aristotle had, like Kant had,
like Mill had, you want a systemof ethics that you can also give
people as you're doing big ticket deal with all the topics
kind of philosophy. So so why to Leibnitz does a
(37:48):
drunkard or a murderer or something?
Why do they do that? Is it because their will is
wicked and they see that being sober is better and they just
can't do it? For Leibnitz, he holds a very
old view, again, in Greek philosophy, that when we have a
moral misstep, it's not because we're just broken, it's because
(38:09):
we're misreasoning about what's best.
The person who goes and murders somebody to Leibniz thinks
they're wrong, but they think that is what's best.
They think that will make them happier than not murdering
somebody. Or their view is not vivid
enough to actually affect their actions.
So they think, yeah, maybe murder's bad, but they're not
really paying attention enough. So he thinks that moral defects
(38:29):
are based upon what you think isbest in your knowledge, your
intellect, versus just being a weakness of will.
OK, let's summarize that. That's a lot.
Geez. This is why you come to
ideological to get more smarter.What you need to know is you
have a guy who's an absolute polymath and genius who comes up
(38:52):
with a system that is unique in that every substance is
technically different in one sense that they're all the same
because they're monads, but all the monads are different.
And so technically every substance is different.
And the way they interact is by being pre programmed by God to
follow their own path. So they're not technically
interacting. They're not bumping into.
Each other or something like that.
This creates a system where in his mind there's a proof for
(39:14):
God, there's a proof for the immortality of the soul, there's
a proof for how substances can interact.
It solves all the problems, doesit?
But it solves a lot of the problems and so it's a brilliant
system. He's a brilliant thinker.
Again, and Vince differential ordiscovers differential calculus
independently of Newton. He's he's the man.
(39:35):
He has a weird system though. But should we dismiss a system
for being weird if it's more coherent than what he critiques
of what we think of as matter? Matter makes no sense.
Matter is just a group of stuff clumped.
Together that you can divide infinitely.
Well then there's no such thing as a human or a table or
whatever. There's just matter that gets
divided forever. If you can divide it infinitely,
(39:57):
there's no smallest thing so. Leibniz, impress your listen, if
you're a single guy, take a girlon a date and just be like, hey,
you know what? You need some more Leibniz in
your life. Let's talk about monads.
And she's like, I like when you talk about monads because it
sounds dirty. All right, thanks for joining
us, Ideological. We will see you next time.
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Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Herd with Colin Cowherd
The Herd with Colin Cowherd is a thought-provoking, opinionated, and topic-driven journey through the top sports stories of the day.