Leibniz and the Stoics

In an essay dated to the late 1670s, Leibniz declares his allegiance to Socrates and to the Plato of the Phaedo against the modern revival of the Stoic and the Epicurean sects. The Epicurean materialism of Hobbes represents an obvious danger to piety, but Leibniz claims that the “sect of the new Stoics” led by Spinoza (and, by implication, Descartes) is no less dangerous. Although the new Stoics reject materialism, they nevertheless assert “a mechanical necessity in all things” that rules out final causes or purposes in the world. On such a view, God could not be a transcendent, wise governor who chooses what is best, but at most a “blind” power immanent within the world (G VII 333; AG 282). ¹ This complaint reflects an old worry about the Stoics, having appeared, for example, in late antiquity in Boethius and in modern times in Bramhall. ² Leibniz would have been familiar with a version of the worry as articulated by Jacob Thomasius (his former teacher in Leipzig). ³ Accordingly, in criticizing the advocates of predestination among his contemporaries, Leibniz complains that they speak “as the Stoics do about fate” insofar as they maintain an “absolute necessity” arising out of the nature of the world itself (ex natura rei) that thereby subjects even God to fate (A IV.vii 508).