Leibniz’s Conception of Natural Explanation

Abstract

In his preface to the New Essays, Leibniz refers to the “distinction between what is natural and explicable and what is inexplicable and miraculous”, considering this distinction to be a necessary requisite of the exercise of philosophy and reason: To reject it would be equivalent to opening “the refuges of ignorance and laziness” to the incomprehensible qualities for created spirits, no matter how great they be (GP 5 59). In this way, the concept of the natural is presented as one of the fields – probably the largest – of the exercising of human reason and, in general, as the specific field of created intelligibility.1 We can say that anything that does not respond to the criteria of the concept of the natural is, therefore, unintelligible or inexplicable and miraculous.2 On the other hand, if we bear in mind the Leibnizian distinction so many times reiterated in Theodicy,3 between what is above reason and what is against reason (and is thus impossible), the opposition between natural and miraculous characterizes the concept of natural as the precise domain of reason: All that is natural is rational, and what is not natural is not rational, for it would be, should it be possible, supra rational or miraculous. This coextension of the concepts of natural and explicable transforms the Leibnizian approach to the concept of natural into a privileged access to the way in which he understands human rationality and the intelligibility of nature. But the introduction of the miraculous (or of its possibility) forces Leibniz to define more precisely the concepts of nature and natural: What kind of natural explanation can contemplate its exception, the unnatural, while still explaining it? The specific rationality of nature and natural places it, however, in such a domain that permits explaining what happens (and there is, therefore, a certain possibility of prevision) and, at the same time, leaves room for the exceptional which, if it occurs, cannot be explained by reasons of the same order. In this way, Leibniz discusses the difficulty of explaining what does not always happen but frequently happens, a