Leibniz

Leibniz is presented as a rigorous but ultimately necessitarian theorist of freedom. His account recognizes that an act involves the whole person and that alternatives are conceivable, yet the argument contrasts this view with one in which a person’s existence and projected ends—not a prior, divinely given essence—define who that person is.

Freedom and the apple

The comparison begins with Adam taking the apple. For Leibniz, as for the opposing account, Adam could have refrained. But the implications of that different gesture would ramify through Adam’s attributes: ultimately, it would require another Adam. Leibniz’s freedom therefore includes rational self-determination, the intelligibility of an act through the nature of its agent, and contingency in the sense that other people acting differently in the same situation would have been possible.

That framework takes the connection between a person and an act seriously: Adam’s gesture engages his whole person, and an alternative gesture would be understood only through another personality in Adam. The difficulty lies in how Leibniz establishes the person who acts. If Adam’s substance is the premise from which his act follows, the apparent chronological sequence becomes an expression of logical order. The act then derives necessarily from Adam’s essence, while that essence itself is not Adam’s choice but God’s. Adam may be responsible for acting from himself, but he did not choose to be Adam and therefore does not bear responsibility for the given being on which the act depends.

Essence, existence, and responsibility

The alternative account rejects the idea that Adam is defined by an essence preceding his existence. Adam is defined by his choice of ends: by an unfolding, future-directed way of being that is not reducible to logical deduction. His contingency expresses the finite choice he has made of himself. What makes him intelligible to himself is consequently not an already settled past essence, but the future ends toward which he projects himself and the organized pattern of his tastes, likes, and hates.

This contrast relocates the problem of freedom. The objection to Leibniz is not simply that Adam performs a necessary act; it is that Adam’s own being has already been supplied as a premise he could not choose. By making existence prior to essence, the opposing view places responsibility at the level of Adam’s choice of himself, rather than treating his act as a partial consequence of a nature chosen for him by God.

Possible worlds and the future

The two accounts also differ over what it means to imagine another Adam in another world. Leibniz’s other Adam belongs to another possible world, an organization of co-possibles in which that alternative person has a place. The opposing view uses “another world” differently: another gesture would disclose another face of the world because it would arise from another way of being-in-the-world. The alternative is not simply a prearranged world containing a pre-existing possible person.

For Leibniz, the possible gesture of the other Adam exists eternally as a possibility before the actual Adam’s gesture. This preserves the priority of essence and makes chronological succession dependent on an eternal logical order. By contrast, a possibility in the opposing account is initially unformed and comes into view through a new project directed toward new possibilities. It announces what Adam may be rather than waiting as an abstract alternative in advance. Accordingly, interpretation proceeds from the standpoint of the future, not by reducing time to logical concatenation or to a sequence of causes.

The limits of the comparison

The argument cautions that this comparison is theoretical. In theory, another gesture by Adam is possible only alongside a total overturning of the ends through which he chooses himself as Adam. The comparison has been simplified to make the contrast legible, and that simplicity can make the alternative position appear closer to Leibniz than it is.

In actual interpretation, a particular act is not deduced from an original end as a theorem follows from a premise. The relation between a fundamental possibility and a derived one is instead that of a totality to a partial structure: the larger project makes a particular possibility intelligible without mechanically determining every detail. A figure can acquire or lose some lines without ceasing to be that figure; other changes would make it disappear and another figure appear. The same distinction qualifies how far an alternative act can vary while remaining intelligible as an expression of the person’s fundamental project.