Annotations
Optimism is, after all, by its nature delusional; ‘realism’ or outright pessimism might seem more justifiable given the troubles of the present and the uncertainties of the future.
Leibniz, on the other hand, argued that God could have chosen from many laws and ingredients when making the world, but some combinations would not be internally consistent. So God, in His wisdom, chose the particular combination that led to a world that was both ‘simplest in hypotheses and richest in phenomena’.
While there might be many possible ways to make a world, there’s only one optimal way. And this view of the world came to be known as optimism.
This intellectual respectability has turned into cultural ubiquity: the idea that there are many possible worlds is intuitively appealing in a time when ever fewer people accept the idea of a divine plan.
Besides the renewed relevance of its central metaphor, Leibnizian optimism reminds us that we cannot see or understand the whole design of the world. And if we attempt to fix one problem at one time and place, there will likely be consequences elsewhere that we can’t anticipate.
That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to improve the world: it means we should expect perfection to remain perpetually out of reach.
The key to making Leibniz’s version of optimism relevant to a secular, 21st-century worldview is to make ‘the best of all possible worlds’ an aspiration, not a statement of belief.
But when it comes to how we think about the world we live in, and the challenges we all face, Leibnizian optimism – the original optimism – provides a fertile way to evaluate our options and shake off our feelings of fatalism.