metonymy4u

One of the most difficult questions for enlightenment Europe was a choice between ideas of time as absolute and static or relative and dynamic. Newton believed in absolute time, kept by the ticking of a universal clock, against which all other events could be measured. Space also was absolute and unchanging, for what is space but the idea that an object has changed positions while time ticked away? Leibniz on the other hand had trouble endorsing fixed space-time. Because he was committed to the picture of a universe of harmony, a holistically and instantaneously evolving system of the best of all possible worlds, guaranteed by God’s omnipotence and omniscience. This of course is Leibniz’s version of the ontological proof, really just an assumption, that if God exists, she would create the best of all possible worlds, since, being all knowing and all powerful, she would surely know immediately if another more perfect world were possible and would create that instead. Time cannot be a fixed part of the universe in such a model, because if it were, it would be independent of God’s supreme power, and it would be possible for something, acting in time, to interfere with the creation of the most perfect universe.

So change for Leibniz is dynamic and systemic: involving the entire universe and subject to God’s infallible will. This includes our experience of time, which must be supposed malleable enough so as to be no impediment to divine harmony. In this sense, Leibniz is the forefather of modern systems theory and stochastic modeling, in which linear cause and effect relations are minimized in favor of holistic and probabilistic descriptions. So Newton and Leibniz, both towering examples of 17th century genius had their supporters and detractors, and one of the most famous intellectual controversies of the era was fought over allegiances to one or the other. The dialectic probably seemed, in their time, virtually insoluble.

Interestingly, in the early part of the 20th century, Einstein proposed another version of Leibnizian dynamism, which seems to be much more empirically valid, on some scales, than Newtonian models. In this case, Einsteinian time is relative to mass and movement. It’s almost like mass and movement are the dynamic harmony to which we all must dance. This has given modern science a way to synthesize the dialectic: at slow speeds and minimal gravitational potentials, Newton’s model can be used, however at high speeds and significant gravitational potentials, we must go with Einstein, and Leibniz.

Kant also proposed his own synthesis, long before Einstein. Kant’s model of moral duty rehabilitated the notion of a pre-established harmony, just relativized, in this case, to human language. He said that what we mean when we say someone “ought” to do something, is that the performance of the action is required no matter what contingencies might intervene in a world experienced through Newtonian time. To say, “I ought to save your life” translates without remainder to statements about saving your life even if I die myself, or my whole family dies in the process, or the whole planet is destroyed. There is no possibility of qualification for a true “ought.” If qualified, then we are talking about prudence, not duty. Contained within this assertion is the implied idea of an all-powerful and all-knowing God who knows with certainty why it is [good] for the entire planet to die to save your life, and who guarantees the goodness implied by my idea of ought. But the whole scheme is dependent on Kant’s famous acknowledgment (that he also got from Leibniz) of the fallibility of human reason, which often blocks us from knowing the absolute good, and which explains why we don’t always sacrifice the planet for the saving of one life. Not because it is [good] to sacrifice the individual life instead of the planet, but because we are ignorant.

In the end, all we can say is that we have a God like sense of [freedom] inescapably foisted upon us by a world subject to the absolute and inexorable ticking of time. But this “freedom” often also leads to inescapable dizziness and nausea, which is the sense that things could have been otherwise if only we had been smarter, and stronger.