Leibniz and Clarke : A Study of Their Correspondence

Is God the perfect clockmaker? Gottfried Leibniz is famous for his view that God has made a perfectly ordered world; indeed, an infinite collection of independent monads, perfectly mirroring each other's independent activity. Samuel Clarke finds the view to be reaching towards atheism: "it is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends, (under pretence of making God a supra-mundane intelligence), to exclude providence and God's government.... a sceptic will easily argue still farther backward, and suppose that things from eternity have gone on (as they now do) without any true creation or original author at all." Leibniz replies that Clarke's view suggests an imperfect creation: not only does Clarke's chronometer need periodic cleaning, but his position leads to the view that God "bethinks himself again [and] must want either wisdom to foresee things, or power to provide against them." We have a puzzle: what sort of a natural world is compatible with a divine presence?

From 1715 to 1716, Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke engaged in a debate by correspondence that Clarke collected and published in 1717, after the death of Leibniz. The correspondence primarily concerns physics and cosmogony, particularly the implications of the divine presence to both. The order seen in the physical world may suggest the possibility of an argument from design: a significance for theology of the study of nature. But both authors were rational theologians, which is to say, they did not attempt to argue for God's existence or character from the order that they observed in nature; rather, they attempted to establish the sort of structure for nature that would be compatible with an all-good, all-powerful God's presence, and the clockwork argument is a specimen of that debate. Vailati writes that his book "tries to disentangle the various strands of the debate and illustrate this internecine fight within the antinaturalist debates," and he concludes that the authors "ended up accusing each other of crypto-naturalism," because of their disagreements about the nature of God and the requirements for free will (vii, 192).

The great beauty of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence is that it presents a tight, brief debate of two positions that is quite accessible to the intellectual historian who is not deeply familiar with the vagaries of the literature from which it draws. A value of Vailati's book, as a follow-on to the correspondence, is that it takes the uninitiated directly into that literature and history. Vailati's book does not serve well to introduce the debates of Leibniz and Clarke, but that is no criticism, since the original correspondence does that better than any treatment is likely to do. Vailati presents us the first detailed, book-length treatment of the debate, which does help to explain further those positions, first, by looking to what the two authors have written in other contexts. Vailati does a service in bringing the less familiar figure of Clarke into clear relief, by frequently quoting his correspondence with many other English figures, and by citing his major treatise, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1717; edited by Vailati in an excellent edition from Cambridge University Press).

Second, Vailati encapsulates the past half-century of scholarship on the historical pretext of the correspondence, which includes the discussion of most of a decade of sniping between Leibniz and Isaac Newton over intellectual priority in calculus. In the clockwork example noted above, for instance, the final criticism from Leibniz is certainly not his final word. Further on, Leibniz echoes Clarke's italics with his own charge that Clarke would have God either interpose a hodge-podge of miracles or take up a continuing animating presence as the "soul of the world." The latter suggestion is hylozoism: it is rife with heresy, perhaps even allowing that the human soul may be subsumed at death into the world soul, and that, consequently, Christ stands to God in a relation similar to that of other men, echoing the historical movements of Arianism and Socinianism. Hylozoism reflects Newton's tentative musings in early editions of his Optice, and Arianism was explicitly defended by his close associate, William Whiston (39-49). Both Leibniz and Newton, and perhaps Clarke, have pushed well past the bounds of religious orthodoxy; the remaining question is, who is capable, and who dares to push the other into the light of day?

The correspondence, then, is a philosophical potboiler. Vailati's expansion upon it is somewhat less gripping, but it reflects the state of the discipline and the style of philosopher-historians such as Daniel Garber, Nicholas Jolley, and others of the past decade. Vailati's clear theses are that Clarke found Leibniz's view of God as having no successive thought in time to be incomprehensible, and that Leibniz found Clarke's tendency to characterize God as within space and time to be what Vailati calls "crypto-materialism" (a potboiler term if there ever was one). By contrast, Leibniz's God-determined by eternal truths, the properties of infinities, and the principle of the best-appeared not to have the appropriate characteristics for free action, in Clarke's eyes, and so seemed materialistic; and yet, Clarke's view of will as essentially uncaused was, by Leibniz's lights, "conducive to an irrational God whose motivations are essentially independent of his evaluations" (192). Thus, the two adversaries bat conceptions of God about like shuttlecocks, looking to score points with the umpire who facilitated the correspondence, Caroline, Princess of Wales.

Vailati's discussion is divided into chapters on God, the soul, free will, space and time, miracles and nature, and matter and force. The final three chapters have much more to do with the technicalities of physical theory, and the earlier three with the details of religion; all of them have much to say about scholarly politics for Leibniz and Clarke. Vailati also introduces an overarching theme, beyond the specific elucidation of the correspondence. He begins with a response to the familiar assumption that Clarke was primarily a mouthpiece of Newton (4). A small amount of text to be found in the correspondence exists in Newton's own hand, but Vailati tells us that Clarke-who was Newton's parish priest at St. James', Piccadilly and translator from Opticks to Optice-had his own ideas. Of course, his publications in theology suggest a mind of his own, and Vailati does show that a good deal of development in the correspondence may be credited to those writings. But following the introduction, Vailati does not return to the theme of Newton's role at all, and we are also treated to a rather extensive education in Newton's ideas, with Clarke frequently "towing the party line" (36, 74, 109, 173, and quote 186). Vailati does not refer to Henry Gavin Alexander's lengthy and useful introduction to the only readily available English edition of the correspondence, the edition which he himself draws the quotations of Leibniz from. Many places at which Newton may have contributed are pointed out in Alexander's introduction; an explicit update on Alexander's work would have been appropriate in Valiati's offering.