Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz enters the discussion not through biography but as the source of a model of choice and historical time. In the book’s account, the Leibnizian God surveys possible worlds and chooses the best; possibility therefore precedes decision. This model gives a precise contrast for a different kind of act, one that does not choose from a settled field of options but opens that field retroactively.

The Leibnizian Model of Choice

The book presents the creation of the best possible world as the supreme case of an agent acting within ordinary historical time. Before creation, all the possible worlds are available to the Leibnizian God; the decision selects the best among them. Choice is consequential, but it does not create the possibilities from which it chooses. The sequence runs from a prior range of alternatives to a selection and then to actuality.

This arrangement distinguishes the model from a decision whose freedom would consist merely in a gap in causal determination. A choice among already available options leaves the structure of possibility intact. Leibniz’s role in the argument is thus conceptual: his God makes visible a conception of agency in which the alternatives precede the act.

Contrast with Retroactive Possibility

The book sets this model against John Anderton’s negative act. Anderton does not simply select a possibility already waiting to be realized; his act breaks the closed circle that supports deterministic preemptive arrests and introduces ontological openness. Its consequence reaches backward as well as forward: in the account of time associated with Henri Bergson, the act changes the future by inserting a new possibility into the past.

The contrast is not between a choice and an absence of choice. It is between choosing among pre-existing possibilities and an act that changes what can count as possible. In the first model, possibility precedes the decision. In the second, a possibility becomes legible as having been possible only when the new reality emerges. Leibniz therefore supplies the counterpoint that makes the force of Anderton’s act intelligible: the act does not merely pick an outcome but alters the horizon against which outcomes can be understood.

Place in the Book’s Account of Time

This distinction belongs to the book’s wider challenge to a linear picture of historical development. The past is not treated as a fixed storehouse of options whose future simply awaits selection. An unpredictable act can change how its own antecedents are understood, making its possibility appear to have preceded it even though it did not exist in that form before its emergence.

The book’s discussion of Hegel likewise rejects the idea that a division must be overcome by reaching a higher reconciliation: the division itself can be recognized as the condition through which the relation becomes intelligible. That argument is not attributed to Leibniz. It helps clarify the broader stakes of his appearance, however: the Leibnizian model represents a world in which possibilities are already constituted, while the book’s alternative emphasizes that reality’s field of possibility can itself be altered. Leibniz is consequently a carefully delimited philosophical foil, not a biographical subject or a character with a narrated life.