Nicholas Rescher

On Explaining Existence
 Nicholas Rescher

On Explaining Existence
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On Explaining Existence

Table of Contents
Preface

Chapter 1: Existence Explanation and the Hume-Edwards

Principle 1

Chapter 2: The Metaphysics of Possibility Actualization 31

Chapter 3: Optimalism and the Axiological Turn 49

Chapter 4: The Pivotal Role of Intelligence 65

Chapter 5: Defending Optimalism 79

Chapter 6: On the Improvability of the World 95

Chapter 7: Optimalism and Theism 123

Chapter 8: Unknowable Facts and the Descriptive

Intractability of the Real 127

Name Index 131

Preface

N o short book on the explanation of existence can afford the hubris

of claiming to accomplish this task. And certainly no such claim
can be or is being made here. What is at issue is not—and cannot be—
an actual explanation. Rather, what is attempted here is at the very
most a rough sketch of the conceptual architecture that an adequate
explanation can be expected to exhibit. No more is achieved then
rough and general indication of the direction in which a satisfactory
explanation can unfold. A vast amount of detail will have to be filled
in to provide a tenable explanation. Only the rough shape that the ex-
planation will have to take is something that one can map out on the
basis of considerations of general principles, giving reasons why al-
ternative directions are less promising, and how objection to the indi-
cated direction can be removed or mitigated. But the move from a
general direction to a specific and detailed pathway calls for more
than is—or can be—attempted here.
I am grateful to Estelle Burris for her ever-competent help in pre-
paring this material for printing.

Nicholas Rescher
Pittsburgh PA
January 2012
Chapter One

EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE

HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

Synopsis

(1)Though first prominent with Leibniz, the problem of explaining the

nature of existence has a substantial pre-history. (2)The explanation
of existence-as-a-whole cannot be handled in the same way as the ex-
istence of particular arrangements in the world. (3) The Hume-
Edwards Principle of reducing collectives to distributive explanation
is predicated on the erroneous idea that we can explain the whole by
explaining its individual components. (4) But there are many counter-
examples to this idea. (5) The flaw of the principle lies in its neglect of
consideration of issues of structure. Holistic explanation is simply ir-
reducible. (6) The rationale of the Hume-Edwards Principle is simply
unsustainable. If there is to be a synoptic explanation of existence, it
will have to be something distinctive and different. (7) Here five alter-
natives present themselves: mystifications, arationalism, theism, mon-
ologicism, and necessitarianism. Whatever alternative we adopt will
have to lie within this range.

1. THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE

O n December 3, 1697 (November 23, in the old style), Gottfried

Wilhelm Leibniz sat late (for he was generally a night worker) in
the large, book-filled workroom of his apartment in the large timbered
house of the patrician widow von Anderten in the fashionable Lein-
straße in Hannover, close to the old ducal palace whose library was
now housed under his charge in these quarters. Pausing occasionally
to glance at the fire that kept the chill of the winter’s night at bay, he
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 2

composed a short Latin tract “On the Ultimate Origination of Things,”

(De rerum origionatione radicali).1 In this essay, Leibniz addressed
the ramifications of a metaphysical issue that occupied him on many
occasions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are there
physical (contingent) existents at all? Why does anything whatsoever
exist in the world?
Leibniz realized that the existence of a world is pretty much inevi-
table—that if one is prepared to count even the “empty world” as a
world, then the existence of a world is categorically necessary.2 But of
course it does not follow (save by a wholly illicit process of reason-
ing) that a particular world (this world) necessarily exists.3 Specifical-
ly, the existence of a world with things in it, a nonempty world, re-
mains an open problem.
Moreover, Leibniz realized that this issue of the existence of a
nonempty world is more fundamental than and conceptually prior to
the issue of its nature. The question “Why is there a world with things
in it at all?” is conceptually prior to the questions “Why is the world
as it is—why do its things have the character they do?”
Leibniz also recognized that it is not creation that is at issue.
Whether the world is eternal (as Aristotle had taught) or created (as
Christian theology had argued against him) is immaterial. The ques-
tion of the character of the world—why it contains “things”—will
arise either way.
For a long time after Leibniz, philosophers turned their back on this
“riddle of existence.” They inclined to construe it as a request for an
explanation for everything-all-at-once, and followed Hume and Kant
in thinking it is not rationally appropriate to ask for such global expla-
nations.
But the question has refused to go away. In the manner typical of
deep philosophical issues, it resists burial and keeps springing back to
life.
It was Henri Bergson who revived the issue as a topic of 20th centu-
ry philosophy. In his classic L’Évolution créatrice he wrote:

I want to know why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe to a
Principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or creates it, my
thought rests on this principle only a few moments, for the same prob-
3 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

lem recurs, this time in its full breadth and generality: Whence comes it,
and how can it be understood, that anything exists? … Now, if I push
these questions aside and go straight to what hides behind them, this is
what I find:—Existence appears to me like a conquest over nought … If
I ask myself why bodies or minds exist rather than nothing, I find no an-
swer; but that a logical principle, such as A = A, should have the power
of creating itself, triumphing over the nought throughout eternity, seems
to me natural … Suppose, then, that the principle on which all things
rest, and which all things manifest, possesses an existence of the same
nature as that of the definition of the circle, or as that of the axiom
A = A: the mystery of existence vanishes …4

Clearly, however, this idea of a “conquest over nothingness” along es-

sentially logical lines is highly problematic. The “principle on which
all things rest” simply cannot “possess an existence of the same na-
ture” as that of a definition or logical axiom because (on the modern
conception of the matter, at any rate) these are purely conceptual
truths of reason (“analytic” truths) from which no factual juice can be
extracted. Getting real existents from pure logic is just too much of a
conjuring trick. That sort of hat cannot contain rabbits.
Martin Heidegger held that the question of “Why is there some-
thing rather than nothing?” is actually the most fundamental question
of metaphysics, characterizing the entire subject as the “exfoliation”
of this problem.5 Heidegger, however, was much less concerned to
find a solution to the problem than to explain why the desire for an an-
swer is part of the human condition and in examining its implications
for the nature of man. Heidegger’s interest was not in answering the
question, but in considering its significance for us as a creature who,
in the (inevitable?) absence of understanding, confronts nothingness in
the existential phenomenon of Angst. As one recent commentator ob-
serves: “So daunting is the question [of existence] that even a recent
exponent of it, Heidegger, who terms it ‘the fundamental question of
metaphysics,’ proposes no answer and does nothing towards showing
how it might be answered.”6 Ludwig Wittgenstein was also fascinated
by the issue. He maintained that “Not how the world is, is the mysti-
cal, but that it is.”7 He told Norman Malcom that he sometimes expe-
rienced “certain feelings of amazement that anything should exist at
all.”8 In A Lecture on Ethics, he returns to this theme: “it always hap-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 4

pens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me …

[and] the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I won-
der at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such
phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how ex-
traordinary that the world should exist’.”9 Relegating the issue to the
limbo of mysteries conveniently provided Wittgenstein with a plausi-
ble reason for not dealing with it seriously. He dismissed those afore-
mentioned locutions he was “inclined to use” as nonsense, because “It
is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because
I cannot imagine its not existing.”10 The difficulty here lies in the am-
biguity of “the world,” which might just mean some world or other,
possibly including the empty world (in which case the wonder should
indeed diminish—and the interest of the issue with it), or this particu-
lar world (in which case Wittgenstein would emerge as very unimagi-
native indeed).
In recent days the problem has been the topic of an erudite but ob-
scure book by Anna-Teresa Tymeniecka,11 which grapples valiantly
with the issues without any single success in rendering them intelligi-
ble. It is also the subject of a long chapter in Robert Nozick’s Philo-
sophical Explanations. But this interesting and many-faceted discus-
sion culminates in a recourse to a mystical understanding of nothing-
ness that cannot, even on kindest interpretation, be said to throw much
light on the subject. In fact, one usually good-natured reviewer was
provoked by the tenor of Nozick’s discussion to protest against

its lack of restraint. By the time one has struggled through this wild and
woolly attempt to find a category beyond existence and non-existence,
and marveled at such things as the graph showing “the amount of Noth-
ingness Force it takes to nothing some more of the Nothingness Force
being exerted,” one is ready to turn logical positivist on the Spot.12

One recent writer contemplates the prospect of making short shrift of

the issue:

“Why is there something rather nothing?”—“If there were nothing, you

wouldn’t be here to ask the question.” Ask a silly question, get a silly
5 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

answer … [W]hat makes the answer silly is that it tells the questioner no
more than he must have known already.13

Actually, what makes the answer silly is that it answers the wrong
question. It’s like responding “Because he’s now in the room” to the
question “Why did Smith go through the door?” We know that Smith
went through the door because he’s in the room, and we know that
there’s something in the world because here we are. These answers are
perfectly good responses to “How do you know that … T”-questions.
But they are miserably inept answers to “Why is it the case that … T”-
questions. They reflect a posture that ignores the traditional and very
useful distinction between knowledge-oriented rationes cognoscendi
and fact-oriented rationes essendi.
In general, it might be said that those philosophers who do not
evade the problem by rejecting it as meaningless or intractable are
profoundly intimidated by it. Whatever good sense they may display
in other contexts deserts them on this occasion. With the notable ex-
ception of Leibniz, philosophers who have struggled with this riddle
of existence have always found it difficult to keep their discussion of
the issue on this side of nonsense.
And yet, this issue of the existence of things is to all appearances,
as fundamental, profound, and serious a problem as any that philoso-
phy affords. Given that only one among alternative possible worlds
exists—possibilities among which an empty world also figures—why
should it be that the actually existing world is one of the nonempty
ones—one with things in it? More generally, why should this world be
actualized rather than that one? Such a question is not lightly got rid
of. Certainly it is not resolved by the fact of being embarrassingly
awkward to deal with.
To be sure, the question of why anything whatsoever exists in the
world has its problematic side. The global, universalistic character of
such a question is bound to be a source of difficulty. When we try to
develop an answer by the usual device of explaining one thing in
terms of another, the former immediately expands to swallow the lat-
ter up. The question of existence-in-general cannot be dealt with as
one of the standard generative sort that asks for the existence of one
thing to be explained in terms of the existence of another. We cannot
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 6

say “Well there’s X in the world, and X explains the existence of

things” because this simply shifts the issue to X, which after all is it-
self an existent. If we want global explanations of existence of things
in the world, we are going to have difficulty in getting them from exis-
tential premisses pertaining to what the world is like. Does this mean
we cannot get them at all?
Clearly what is wanted represents a very tall order. If we cannot use
existential inputs, then we are asking for a great deal—an account that
explains the emergence from an existentially empty realm of a
nonempty world, a domain of existents. The explanation has to pull off
a very neat trick: it has to account for a “change of phase” of certain
items from the condition of mere possibility to the condition of actual-
ity.

2. EXPLAINING PARTICULAR EXISTENCE

Explaining is storytelling—the explanation of existence included. To

explain the existence of something is to weave an account that makes
it possible to understand how it is that this item has come into being—
how it is that it is a part of prevailing reality and exists rather than not.
The standard way of explaining the existence of something in the
world is to proceed productively, which involves showing how its an-
tecedents have functioned causally under the aegis of nature’s laws to
bring this item into being. In this way we account for the existence of
this item in terms of the causal operation of other, pre-existing items.
Granted that the existence of a thing or the realization of a state of
things can certainly be explained productively and retrospectively with
reference to the causes that engendered the question arise: could it al-
so be explained prospectively by casting as a necessary sine qua non
condition for the realization of some actually realized subsequent state
of affairs? Not really—unless that state of things were seen as some-
how inevitable. For otherwise such a connective account would only
show epistemically WHY WE SAY that it exists and not explain onto-
logically WHY it exists. Here we explain not the thing itself but our
claims about it. Standardly existence explanations will therefore be
productive in nature.
7 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

Now this idea that whatever actually exists is somehow caused to

do so may well hold within the spatiotemporal realm of real-worlds
existence. (Within this domain the “Law of Causality” doubtless ob-
tains in some form.) However, it does not hold elsewhere and, in par-
ticular, not for that real-world domain itself, in its comprehensive to-
tality. For the standardly productive approach to explaining the exist-
ence of particular items simply will not work for explaining the
existence of the whole. Here the idea of explaining one existent in
terms of another will not work because the totality of existence is at
issue. If the explanation of existence is to be addressed in a global and
synoptic basis, some proceeding fundamentally different from the
standard causal/productive approach will have to be employed, and
explanation will have to proceed in different and, as it were, non-
standard terms.
But perhaps existence need not be explained in a global and synop-
tic basis at all? Perhaps an explanation of the parts will suffice to ex-
plain the whole?

3. PROBLEMS OF THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

As this classic quip indicates, the question “Have you stopped beating
your wife?” rests on the critical presupposition—viz. that you have a
wife and have been beating her. And indeed every question involves
some presupposition—viz. that there indeed is an answer to it. This al-
so holds for our present questions about explaining the nature of exist-
ence, and it is hard to evade the assurance of the “Principle of Suffi-
cient Reason” that with this—as with any other facts about reality—
there indeed is an explanation of some sort for why the matter stands
as is and not otherwise.
In formulating a version of the Cosmological Argument for the ex-
istence of God, Samuel Clarke and Leibniz shared the conviction that
accounting for existence of the universe-as-a-whole requires explana-
tory resort to something above and beyond the universe itself.14 In re-
acting against this line of thought, David Hume wrote:

Did I show you the particular cause of each individual in a collection of

twenty particles of matter, I should think that it very unreasonable,
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 8

should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty.
This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts.15

This Humean position holds that if we are in a position to explain any

and every member of a series of events (even an infinite one) we are
thereby in a position to explain the series as a whole.
The underlying idea of a distributive, piece-meal explanation is far
older, however. Thus William of Ockham wrote in ca. 1320:

The whole multitude of … causes is indeed caused, but neither by any

one thing that is part of this multitude nor by something outside this
multitude, but rather one part is caused by one thing which is part of
this multitude, and another by another thing, and so on ad infinitum.16

And later traces of this line of thinking can be found in many critics of
the Cosmological Argument from Immanuel Kant17 down to such 20th
century writers as Paul Edwards.18 In reviewing the literature of the
problem, William R. Rowe dubbed the idea of distributive explanation
at issue the “Hume-Edwards Principle,” formulating it as follows:

If the existence of every member of a set is explained the existence of

that set is thereby explained.19

In unison with this line of thought, philosophers of positivist inclina-

tions often maintain that we should forget about general explanations
for reality-at-large and pursue our efforts at understanding the world
in a disaggregated, piece-meal manner. They insist that in matters of
ontology we simply need not try to account for existence-at-large in
one all-encompassing collective explanation, but simply to account for
the reality’s several constituent elements in a way that proceeds in a
disaggregated, seriatim manner. And on the basis of this perspective
they tend to eschew the global and synoptic perspective of the accus-
tomed “big questions” of the philosophical tradition.
The thinkers of this tendency (Hume and Edwards themselves in-
cluded) have seen the principle as an instrument of ontological simpli-
fication (or indeed even purification) and have viewed its salient les-
son as lying in the implicit injunction: “Don’t trouble to ask for a col-
lective explanation of existence-at-large, a comprehensive distributive
9 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

explanation of the particular existents will provide you everything you

need and want.” Yet notwithstanding its widespread acceptance and
influential impact, the principle is deeply problematic, nay simply
wrong.

4. COUNTEREXAMPLES

It is not hard to find plausible counter-examples to the Hume-Edwards

thesis:

• If the existence of each book in its collection is explained, the

existence of the library-as-a-whole is thereby explained.

• If the existence of each part of the car is explained, the existence

of the vehicle-as-a-whole is thereby explained.

• If the existence of each composition in our symphony’s evening

program is explained, the existence of the program-as-a-whole is
thereby explained.

Such examples cast a deep shadow of doubt over the Hume-Edwards

thesis. For it is only too obvious that to explain and account for the ex-
istence of the words does little to explain or account for the existence
of the sentence. To do the latter we would have to account not merely
for the existence of those individual words but for their collective co-
presence in that particular context. Constituent oriented existence ex-
planations that do not account for contextual co-presence within a pre-
specified entirety cannot explain its existence. Explaining the parts
may achieve nothing whatever towards explaining the existence of
wholes. For those wholes must, as such, have a unifying identity and
an explanation of their constituents viewed separately and individually
does not suffice to explain it. Nor does explaining each event in a se-
ries explain its entire course, much as someone’s understanding each
sentence may well fail to explain their understanding the whole book.
In other words, the Hume-Edwards thesis suffers from a critical
flaw of omission. For where the parts of wholes are concerned, con-
text makes for structure. It does not suffice to note that we are dealing
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 10

with a three letter word in which the letters D, G, and O figure co-
presently, seeing that there yet remains the massive difference be-
tween GOD and DOG.
Moreover, the aspect of explanation and understanding can be put
aside and the principle viewed ontologically rather than epistemically
to in the form:

If every part of a whole exists, then so does the whole itself.

or

If every member of a collectivity exists, then so does that collec-

tivity itself.

The preceding examples of libraries, automobiles, and symphony pro-

grams show that this ontological version of the Hume-Edwards Prin-
ciple also does not work. Only within totally unstructured collectivi-
ties (such as the mathematicians’ set) will the envisioned relationships
obtain. So if—contrary to fact—our sole concern were with the ab-
stract rudimentary “sets” of the set theory (Mengenlehre) of pure
mathematics, the problem would not arise. Those mathematical “sets”
are defined purely extensionally on the basis of their membership
alone: they have no form or structure whatsoever. But this circum-
stance is realized only in abstractions and never concretely. And in
any other setting—even that of the “ordered sets” of pure mathemat-
ics—what the principle claims just is not so. In general, the world’s
wholes always have a characteristic structure and could not be what
they are without it.
The inherent problem of the Hume-Edwards Principle accordingly
emerges when one steps back to consider just what it would take to fix
it. And this comes to light in considering a reformulation of the thesis
by the addition of a few crucial and critical words:

If the existence of each part of a whole is explained in conjunction with

an account that also explains their mutual coordination within the larg-
er overarching setting of that whole, then the existence of that whole is
thereby explained.
11 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

As this amplification shows, that which is missing from the Hume-

Edwards thesis—and engenders the flaw from which all of those
counterexamples—is the lack of an account of the co-existence of
those several constituents as parts of the whole in question. For only
an explanation of the existence of the parts of a whole is their role as
constituting parts of that specific whole will explain the existence of
that whole.
It is this holistic demand—a factor which most exponents of the
Hume-Edwards Principle deem anathema—that is indispensably re-
quired for the viability of the principle.20 Without this factor the Prin-
ciple cannot do its intended work.
The long and short of it is that the Hume-Edwards thesis radically
oversimplifies the actual situation. For it rides roughshod over the
consideration that over and above items or objects there are structures
(patterns, forms of order) that can organize those items into different
sorts of wholes, and that throughout our concerns with collectivities
these structures matter. And it does not matter whether the structure is
processual/temporal rather than physical/geometric. (To explain the
existence of each issue of a complex menu does not account for the
meal-as-a-whole.) The Hume-Edwards Principle radically oversimpli-
fies the actual situation by failing to reckon with the holistic aspect of
the situation. Explaining the parts severally and distributively simply
does not account for the collective unity at issue with their coordinate
co-existence as part of one single whole. The inherent logic of the sit-
uation is such that in asking for a collective explanation of existence
one is stating a demand that no merely distributive explanation—
however extensive and elaborate—is able to meet.
In explanatory contexts the move from parts to whole is highly
problematic. Consider an example. We can explain for any time t of
his lifespan why Kant never left Prussia roughly as follows. For every
such t, there is a timespan e such that at the time t-minus-e he was at
such-and-such a location in Prussia, and there simply was not enough
time, given the available means of locomotion, for him to reach the
boundary within the timespan e. That achieves an explanation of sorts.
But would anyone hold that this yields an adequate explanation of
why, throughout his lifetime, Kant never left Prussia?21We must not
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 12

be misled into thinking that we have explained the whole as such

when we are in a position to account for its membership seriatim.
When we ask an explanatory question about a whole, we don’t just
want to know about it as a collection of parts, but want to know about
it holistically qua whole. A seriatim explanation of why each and eve-
ry dodo died is not thereby an explanation of why this type of bird
died out as a species. When we know why each particular day was
rain-free (there were no rain clouds about at that point) we still have
not explained the occurrence of a drought. Here we need something
deeper—something that accounts for the entire Gestalt.
The Hume-Edwards Principle fails to heed certain critical concep-
tual distinctions that are readily brought to light by means of a bit of
symbolic machinery. Specifically, let us adopt the following abbrevia-
tions:

p @ q for “p [is true and] provides an adequate explanatory account for

q,” where the variables p and q range over factual claims.

E!x for “x exists,”\ where the variable x ranges over existing objects.

Since the variable x ranges over existents, we have it that (∀x)E!x.

On this basis it is readily brought to view that the form of the
statement “Everything has an explanation” or “There is an explanation
for everything” admits of two very different constructions:

Distributive explanation: “There is some case-specific explanation

to account for each and any existential fact.”

(1) (∀x)(∃p)(p @ E!x)

Collective explanation: “There is one single generic explanation

that accounts for all existential facts—each and every one of them.”

(2) (∃p)(∀x)(p @ E!x)22

As these specifications indicate, two decidedly different questions can

be at issue, namely:
13 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

• Does every existent have its own (individual) existence-

explanation?

• Is the one overarching single explanation that suffices to account

for existence at large, encompassing each of the things that ex-
ists?

To be sure, we have it that (2) → (1), but of course the converse does
not hold. The Hume-Edwards thesis proceeds on the mistaken idea
that it does. With distinctive and collective explanations different
questions are at issue and different matters are at stake. And in posing
different questions we must be prepared for the possibility of different
answers.

5. SOME CONTEMPLATED ACCOMMODATION

But just how is it that those considerations regarding the role of struc-
ture actually invalidate the Hume-Edwards Principle?
In most cases, objects are like children’s play-blocks—items that
can be assembled in various ways, and their own existence thereby
nowise explains the existence of the whole of which they can be com-
ponents. The same components, in sum, can in principle conjoin dif-
ferently to make up different wholes. But it would seem on first
thought that the universe-as-a-whole is going to be an exception here.
After all there is—and (ex hypothesis) only can be—just one of these,
so that irrespective of how the components get assembled there will be
only one single all-embracing totality. The idea of there actually being
different universes is highly problematic.23 And in consequence the is-
sue of structure becomes irrelevant and the preceding objections to the
Hume-Edwards thesis fall aside.
On this basis the Hume-Edwards aficionados might argue as fol-
lows in endeavoring to meet the thrust of the preceding strictures:

In resorting to the Hume-Edwards Principle we have one very special

application in mind. For our aim is to dismiss the request for one single
comprehensive explanation of existence-at-large. And it is here that we
want to insist on the need for distributive rather than collective explana-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 14

tion. Our concern is not with such micro-collectivities as words or

books or cars or symphony programs. Our concern is with Reality-as-a-
whole. The trouble with all those proposed counter-examples—books in
a collection, part of an automobile, musical pieces in a program—is that
in each case those items could be assembled otherwise than as-is, and
could in principle belong to different wholes. But this is not so with the
physical constitution of the actual universe—the totality of existents.
All of those counter-examples rest on a misleading analogy. The
world’s constituents cannot be differently assembled into different uni-
verses. There is and can be only one universe. To think of it as possibly
different is to ignore the inherent necessity of things. Once we have
(and have explained) the existence of these constituents there is nothing
left to explain.

However, this defense will not do. For even if it is acknowledged that
there is only one single all-embracing universe, this Principle of Uni-
verse Uniqueness will actually leave the real issue untouched. The re-
ality of it is that even if we abandon the idea of different (possible)
universes, we still have at our beck and call the idea of different possi-
bilities for the constitution of this universe—the one and only actual
one. And this factor of different possibilities suffices to keep the struc-
ture-oriented objection in play. For the requisite uniqueness could be
achieved only by reducing to one not just the number of universes, but
even the number of possibilities for a universe. Only at the price of
commitment to a block-universe of the necessitarian dismissal of al-
ternative possibilities could the Hume-Edwards Principle be main-
tained in the face of structural considerations to the effect that the giv-
en contents of a manifold can be differently organized.

6. A LAST-DITCH STAND

In endeavoring something of a last-ditch stand, Hume-Edwards parti-

sans might propose taking a very different line as follows:

You misunderstand us. We are actually not trying to enunciate an ex-

planatory principle at all. Rather, our concern is with a procedural poli-
cy; we want to urge a certain line of approach to the global explanation
of existence. Our position is not that of the structure: “Don’t bother to
15 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

ask for a collective explanation of existence at large because a distribu-

tive explanation will give you everything you want.” Our position is, ra-
ther: “Don’t go so far as to ask for a collective explanation for existence
at large because this is asking for too much. For global explanation is
something inherently unrealizable. A distributive explanation of exist-
ence is the best and the most that one can ever hope to get.”

However, to endorse this policy-recommendation is—clearly!—

something quite different from accepting the Hume-Edwards Principle
as a factual thesis, and any victory that could be gained by this par-
ticular defense is Pyrrhic. For in taking this line one does not sup-
port—or even invoke—the Hume-Edwards thesis as generally under-
stood, but actually abandons it. Moreover, once the idea is abandoned
that the policy rests on a correct and cogent principle, then justifying
that policy emerges to saddle its exponent with a heavy burden of
proof—one that goes counter to much of the philosophic tradition and
requires its exponents to embark on a large and deeply problematic
project.
What does all of this mean for the issue of holistically synoptic ex-
planation? It serves to indicate that Leibniz and Clarke were right at
least in this, that explaining the existence of the universe-as-a-whole is
something that encompasses a distinctive demand over and above a
putative explanation of existence of the individual components in-
volved. That mega-issue is not to be sidelined by a disintegrative prin-
ciple of the sort envisioned by Hume and Edwards. In the final analy-
sis their thesis fails in its aspiration to provide a small instrument for
sidelining a big issue.
But of course when the issue of existence-explanation is posed with
respect to the decidedly unusual issue of existence-as-a-whole we
must expect that with what clearly is an unusual question, there will
also have to be an unusual answer. The rationale of the Hume-
Edwards Principle is simply unsustainable.
The problem of over-all explanation simply cannot be resolved
substantively on a secular, piece by piece basis. If there is to be a syn-
optic explanation of existence, it will have to be something distinctive
and different that faces the explanatory problem in its totality.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 16

Table I

I. The question is illegitimate and improper. [Rejectionism]

II. The question is legitimate

1) but unanswerable: it represents a mystery.

[Mystificationism]

2) and answerable

a) though only by the via negativa of an insistence that there really is no “an-
swer” in the ordinary sense—no sort of explanatory rationale at all. The exist-
ence of things in the world is simply a brute fact. [The a-rational or no-reason
approach.]

b) via a substantial route of roughly the following sort: “There is a substance [viz.
God] whose position in the scheme of things is one that lies outside the world,
and whose activity explains the existence of things in the world.” [The theo-
logical approach.]

c) via a nonsubstantival route of roughly the following sort: “There is a principle

of creativity that obtains in abstracto (i.e., without being embedded in the
characteristics of any substance and thus without a basis in any preexisting
thing), and the operation of this principle accounts for the existence of things.”
[The nomological approach.]

d) via the quasi-logical route of considerations of absolute necessity. [The neces-

sitarian approach.]

7. ALTERNATIVE RESPONSES

The explanation of existence can, in theory, be addressed by any of

the various lines of response set out in Table 1. This inventory pretty
well exhausts the range of available alternatives. We may refer to the-
se six approaches as the rejectionist, mystificational, arational, theo-
logical, nomological, and necessitarian solutions, respectively. Let us
examine the assets and liabilities of these various positions.
17 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

The Mystificational Approach

The mystificational position sees the “problem of existence” as genu-

ine but unsolvable. It classifies the question as an authentic insolubile
to which no satisfactory answer can be found.
This approach recognizes the problem of the existence of things in
the world as legitimate and acknowledges that we have a real and
pressing interest in this issue. But it insists that we cannot profitably
pursue this interest. With skeptical philosophers and Barthian theolo-
gians, it poses the question: Have we a right to demand a reason for
things? Can we avoid recognizing that this question is simply beyond
the powers of human intelligence? Is it not untenably presumptuous to
demand that reality should satisfy our intellect’s demand for “natural
explanations”? And can we suppose that an explanation so accessible
that we would deem it plausible actually gets at the real truth of
things? Mystificationism insists that, while the question is indeed ap-
propriate, the attainment of any satisfactory solution to it nevertheless
lies beyond our reach.
The clear advantage of such a noncommittal approach is that it
spares us the daunting and difficult task of framing a serious proposal
for answering the riddle—of trying to arrive at some definite resolu-
tion. But its obvious disadvantage is its leaving us in a state of sus-
pended animation with regard to this challenging and intriguing prob-
lem. To see all prospect of solution as unattainable is to leave matters
unresolved. It means that we can only contemplate possibilities for
resolution but cannot settle the matter of deciding among them.
Now it is perfectly conceivable that this condition of indecision and
suspension of judgment as between the alternatives (of indecisive
isostheneia, as the ancient sceptics called it) is a position in which we
will eventually find ourselves. It is altogether possible that, after de-
termined but vain attempts at finding a satisfactory answer, we might
be led to conclude in the end that no such answer can be validated. We
may even eventually convince ourselves, Fox and Grapes fashion, that
further effort is not worthwhile—that the game is not worth the can-
dle. But this sort of thing is clearly a position of last resort. To speak
of an intrinsic mystery here serves rather to highlight the difficulty
than to remove it. We may conceivably find ourselves driven there
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 18

eventually, but it is hardly the place to start. Indeed it seems plausible

to clutch at any straw to avoid this result. Given the interest of the is-
sue and its importance for the project of achieving a rational grasp on
our place in the scheme of things, if there is any reasonable way to
avoid agnosticism here, it seems well advised to avail ourselves of it.
The key point is this: The existence of the world is contingent—
given that other alternative modes of world-arrangement are theoreti-
cally possible (in particular an empty world) we want to know why the
world exists as it does (and in particular why it contains things). The
recognition of this world’s contingency—of its being one alternative
among others—cries out for explanation so urgently that in its absence
we cannot rest intellectually satisfied.24 What is at issue here is not a
metaphysical Principle of Sufficient Reason maintaining on grounds
of general principle that every phenomena has an effective explana-
tion, but a methodological principle to the effect that we should al-
ways do our utmost to find sensible explanations of phenomena so
long as any hope of doing so remains.
Admittedly, we cannot preestablish that reality will indulge our
demands for intelligibility. But we have no sensible alternative to pro-
ceeding on the supposition that our explanatory guest can prove suc-
cessful—that there indeed is an explanation which might be found.
We cannot win the race if we do not enter it—and one price of entry is
the supposition that a finish line exists.

The Arational Approach

The arational resolution in effect maintains that things exist “just be-
cause.” It takes the stance that there simply is no particular reason for
existence. This well-stocked universe of ours has somehow just hap-
pened into being—its existence is simply an irrationalizable brute fact.
There really is no explanation for the world’s nonemptiness: “That’s
just the way it is”—take it with no further questions asked. (Recall
Carlyle’s remark on being informed that some lady said she had
learned to accept the world—“By G-d, she’d better!”) The world’s ex-
istence, as is, is simply a “brute fact.”
But this is surely no more than a solution of last resort. It is like the
explanation “on impulse” offered to account for someone’s action. It
19 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

is not so much an answer to the question of explanation as a conces-

sion of defeat—an indication that our efforts at finding a more ade-
quate solution have failed. The arational approach verges on mystifi-
cationism.
Perhaps the world’s existence is not a matter of brute (i.e., inexpli-
cable) fact, but simply needs no explanation. Perhaps the request for
an explanation of things-in-general rests on a mistaken basis. Perhaps
only particular items need be explained and it is a sort of category-
mistake to ask for explanations at the level of generality. This seems
to be what Bertrand Russell argued against Father Copleston in their
celebrated B.B.C. debate on God as a first cause:

I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists
has a mother. And it seems to me that your argument is that therefore
the human race must have a mother. But obviously the human race
hasn’t a mother—that’s a different logical sphere.25

On such a view, there is—indeed there can be—no appropriate expla-

nation of the world’s existence or fundamental nature.
But Russell’s reasoning is flawed. Granted, the fact that every indi-
vidual member of the class C (humans) has a cause of type X (i.e. has
parents) of course does not mean that the totality of the class C will
have a cause of this particular type. But this does not imply that we
should not look for a cause of C-as-a-whole—for example that once
we know that children are born of parents we should cease trying to
account for homo sapiens at large within the framework of evolution-
ary explanation. Russell’s counterexample does not show that we
should not ask for an explanation at all, just that we should not ask for
one of a particular sort.
To reject the arational approach we need not maintain a substantive
Principle of Sufficient Reason—we need not preestablish that there
indeed always is some sort of explanation for any fact about the
world. It suffices to take the methodological line: proceed on the as-
sumption that there always is an explanation; hew to this working hy-
pothesis through thick and thin. For the issue is an important one, and
as rational beings we would like to settle it to our rational satisfaction.
It makes good sense to operate on the principle that even when our
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 20

best efforts at finding an explanation bear no fruit, this is so simply

because we haven’t looked far enough. From the methodological per-
spective, the no-reason approach appears not as a resolution of the is-
sue, but as an excuse for not dealing with it with sufficient determina-
tion.
One could properly take the arational line only if there were good
reasons based on appropriate positive information for holding that
there cannot be an answer—that the line of “no possible explanation”
is appropriate. (We can, for example, take this line in quantum theory:
asked why this atom of a transuranic element disintegrated just when
it did the response is to say that no causal explanation is in principle
possible.) But this approach is not available to us in the case at hand.
There is no earthly reason to think that this sort of situation obtains.
Nobody had produced a good argument why the arational approach
should be endorsed. Its sole recommendation is that it affords a con-
venient exit from difficulty.

The Theological Approach

The ancient tradition of “the cosmological argument” resolves the

question of world’s existence (and nature) by recourse to the produc-
tive agency of a creator God.26 This theological approach is so famil-
iar that little need be said about it. It grounds the existence of the
world’s things in the machinations of a world-external creative be-
ing—a necessarily existing agent who is self-subsisting and, in turn,
serves as causal ground of the existence of the things of this world.
God is thus seen as creator (causa mundi), and as himself as uncaused
(or self-caused, causa sui) to avert the regress threatened by the ques-
tion: Why is there a Supreme Being rather than nothing?
For a long time in the history of human inquiry, people inclined to
answer ultimate questions about the world with the response: God
made it that way. Yet this approach to the issue has its problems. The
presence of things in the world is a matter of natural fact, and the ex-
planation of natural facts by theological means is hardly a satisfactory
option. The point is not simply that the odium theologicum is too
strong at this time of day for a supernatural grounding of natural exist-
ence to be deemed acceptable. It is that questions about the natural or-
21 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

der should be addressed in nature-correlative terms of reference wher-

ever this is at all possible. Kant’s formulation of the point cannot be
improved upon:

To have recourse to God as the Creator of all things in explaining the

arrangements of nature and their changes is at any rate not a scientific
explanation, but a complete confession that one has come to the end of
his philosophy, since he is compelled to assume something [supernatu-
ral] … to account for something he sees before his very eyes.27

The drawback of the theological solution to the problem of existence

is that it uses a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It is unsatisfying to try to
answer such questions, with Descartes, through recourse to the mere
will or, with Leibniz, through recourse to the good will of the divine
creator, because of the rational proprieties implicit in the scholastic
dictum that scientific deliberations are not entitled to an explanatory
recourse to God (non in philosophia recurrere est ad deum). Whatever
be God’s proper role in the scheme of things, it is not to solve our
philosophical or scientific difficulties. Invoking a supernatural agency
to solve our problems in understanding nature is inherently questiona-
ble etiquette.
No doubt a principle that can explain the existence of things in the
world will have to invoke circumstances that are in some degree ex-
traordinary and preternatural in being outside nature’s common
course, but it need not go so far as to invoke something supernatu-
ral—something as much “above” or remote from nature as the omni-
potent deity of traditional monotheism. What is at issue here is simply
a point of methodology, of explanatory economy, of accomplishing
desired ends by the least complex means. If there is any prospect of
resolving a question in a more straightforward way, we should avail
ourselves of it.

The Necessitarian Approach

The necessitarian approach has it that the world exists as a matter of

strict (or “logical”) necessity. It takes Spinoza’s line of maintaining
that the world’s very nature requires its existence: like the God of tra-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 22

ditional theology, it is something that cannot but exist. This approach

was already encountered in the Bergson passage quoted above. It pro-
poses to explain existence as somehow a matter of “logical principle.”
We are called on to take the stance that “the principle on which all
things rest, and which all things manifest, possesses an existence of
the same nature as that of the definition of the circle, or as that of the
axiom A = A.”
But such a way of addressing the problem of existence is simply
too peremptory. Given that alternatives can readily be conceived, how
can one possibly establish necessitarian inevitability? How could the
constraints of logic alone possibly engender the arrangements of fact?
Even to consider this alternative is to become persuaded of its unman-
ageability.
The Rejectionist Approach

Questions like “Why is there anything at all?”, “Why are things-in-

general as they actually are?”, and “Why is the law structure of the
world as it is?” cannot be answered within the standard causal frame-
work. For causal explanations need inputs: they are essentially trans-
formational (rather than formational pure and simple). They can ad-
dress themselves to specific issues distributively and seriatim, but not
collectively and holistically. If we persist in posing the sorts of global
questions at issue, we cannot hope to resolve them in orthodox causal
terms. Does this mean that such questions are improper?
On the rejectionist approach, the entire question of obtaining the (or
a) reason for the existence of things is simply dismissed as illegiti-
mate. Even to inquire into the existence of the entire universe is held
to be somehow illegitimate. It is just a mistake to ask for a causal ex-
planation of existence per se; the question should be abandoned as
improper—as not representing a legitimate issue. We are assured that
in the light of closer scrutiny the explanatory “problem” vanishes as
meaningless.
Dismissal of the problem as illegitimate is generally based on the
idea that the question at issue involves an illicit presupposition. It
looks to answers of the form “Z is the (or an) explanation for the ex-
istence of things.” Committed to this response-schema, the question
has the thesis “There is a ground for the existence of things—
23 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

existence-in-general is the sort of thing that has an explanation.” And

this presumption—we are told—might well be false. In principle its
falsity could emerge in two ways:

1. on grounds of deep general principle inherent in the conceptual

“logic” of the situation; or

2. on grounds of a concrete doctrine of substantive metaphysics or

science that precludes the prospect of an answer—even as
quantum theory precludes the prospect of an answer to “Why
did that atom of Californium decay at that particular time?”

Let us begin by considering if the question of existence might be in-

validated by considerations of the first sort and root in circumstances
that lie deep in the conceptual nature of things. Consider the following
discussion by C. G. Hempel:

Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? … But what kind of
an answer could be appropriate? What seems to be wanted is an explan-
atory account which does not assume the existence of something or oth-
er. But such an account, I would submit, is a logical impossibility. For
generally, the question “Why is it the case that A? is answered by “Be-
cause B is the case” … [A]n answer to our riddle which made no as-
sumptions about the existence of anything cannot possibly provide ade-
quate grounds … The riddle has been constructed in a manner that
makes an answer logically impossible …28

But this plausible line of argumentation has shortcomings. The most

serious of these is that it fails to distinguish appropriately between the
existence of things on the one hand and the obtaining of facts on the
other,29 and supplementarily also between specifically substantival
facts regarding existing things, and nonsubstantival facts regarding
states of affairs that are not dependent on the operation of preexisting
things.
We are confronted here with a principle of hypostatization to the
effect that the reason for anything must ultimately always inhere in the
operations of things. And at this point we come to a prejudice as deep-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 24

rooted as any in Western philosophy: the idea that things can only
originate from things, that nothing can come from nothing (ex nihilo
nihil fit) in the sense that no thing can emerge from a thingless condi-
tion.30 Now, this somewhat ambiguous principle is perfectly unprob-
lematic when construed as saying that if the existence of something
real has a correct explanation at all, then this explanation must pivot
on something that is really and truly so. Clearly, we cannot explain
one fact without involving other facts to do the explaining. But the
principle becomes highly problematic when construed in the manner
of the precept that “things must come from things,” that substances
must inevitably be invoked to explain the existence of substances. For
we then become committed to the thesis that everything in nature has
an efficient cause in some other natural thing that is its causal source,
its reason for being.
This stance is implicit in Hempel’s argument. And it is explicit in
much of the philosophical tradition. Hume, for one, insists that there is
no feasible way in which an existential conclusion can be obtained
from nonexistential premisses.31 And the principle is also supported
by philosophers of a very different ilk on the other side of the chan-
nel—including Leibniz himself, who writes:

[T]he sufficient reason [of contingent existence] … must be outside this

series of contingent things, and must reside in a substance which is the
cause of this series …32

Such a view amounts to a thesis of genetic homogeneity which says

(on analogy with the old but now rather obsolete principle that “life
must come from life”) that “things must come from things,” or “stuff
must come from stuff,” or “substance must come from substance.”
What, after all, could be more plausible than the precept that only real
(existing) causes can have real (existing) effects?
But despite its appeal, this principle has its problems. It presuppos-
es that there must be a type-homogeneity between cause and effect on
the lines of the ancient Greek principle that “like must come from
like.” This highly dubious principle of genetic homogeneity has taken
hard knocks in the course of modern science. Matter can come from
energy, and living organisms from complexes of inorganic molecules.
25 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

If the principle fails with matter and life, need it hold for substance as
such? The claim that it does so would need a very cogent defense.
None has been forthcoming to date.
Is it indeed true that only things can engender things? Why need a
ground of change always inhere in a thing rather than in a nonsubstan-
tival “condition of things-in-general?” Must substance inevitably arise
from substance? Even to state such a principle is in effect to challenge
its credentials. For why must the explanation of facts rest in the opera-
tion of things? To be sure, fact-explanations must have inputs (all ex-
planations must). Facts must root in facts. But why thing-existential
ones? A highly problematic bit of metaphysics is involved here. Dog-
mas about explanatory homogeneity aside, there is no discernible rea-
son why an existential fact cannot be grounded in nonexistential ones,
and why the existence of substantial things cannot be explained on the
basis of some nonsubstantival circumstance or principle whose opera-
tions can constrain existence in something of the way in which equa-
tions can constrain nonzero solutions. Once we give up the principle
of genetic homogeneity and abandon the idea that existing things must
originate in existing things, we remove the key prop of the idea that
asking for an explanation of things in general is a logically inappro-
priate demand. The footing of the rejectionist approach is gravely un-
dermined.
There are, of course, other routes to rejectionism. One of them turns
on the doctrine of Kant’s Antinomy that it is illegitimate to try to ac-
count for the phenomenal universe as a whole (the entire Erschein-
ungswelt). Explanation on this view is inherently partitive: phenomena
can only be accounted for in terms of other phenomena, so that it is in
principle improper to ask for an account of phenomena-as-a-whole.
The very idea of an explanatory science of nature-as-a-whole is illegit-
imate. Yet this view is deeply problematic. To all intents and purpos-
es, science strives to explain the age of the universe-as-a-whole, its
structure, its volume, its laws, its composition, etc. Why not then its
existence as well? The decree that explanatory discussion is by nature
necessarily partial and incapable of dealing with the whole lacks plau-
sibility. It seems a mere device for sidestepping embarrassingly diffi-
cult questions.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 26

Rejectionism is not a particularly appealing course. Any alternative

to rejectionism has the significant merit of retaining for rational in-
quiry and investigation a question that would otherwise be abandoned.
The question of “the reason why” behind existence is surely im-
portant. If there is any possibility of getting an adequate answer—by
hook or by crook—it seems reasonable that we would very much like
to have it. There is nothing patently meaningless about this “riddle of
existence.” And it does not seem to rest in any obvious way on any
particularly problematic presupposition—apart from the epistemically
optimistic yet methodologically inevitable idea that there are always
reasons why things are as they are (the “principle of sufficient rea-
son”). To dismiss the question as improper or illegitimate is fruitless.
Try as we will to put the question away, it comes back to haunt
us.33 And so we would do well to look for the most promising possi-
bility. For here as elsewhere we have no rational alternative but to ac-
cept the best of the available options, whatever may be its shortcom-
ings or defects.
NOTES
1
The tract is published in Gerhardt, Phil., Vol. VII, pp. 302–08. An English transla-
tion is given in Loemker, pp. 486–91. For a useful recent study see Diogenes Allen,
“Mechanical explanations and the Ultimate Origin of the Universe Accordingly to
Leibniz,” Studia Leibnitiana, Sonderheft 11 (Wiesbaden, 1983).
2
To be sure, it could be maintained that there is a difference between an “empty
world” and “no world at all” in that even an empty world can have a nature of sorts
qua world—by way of characterizing hypotheticals like “If there were things here,
they would have to have such-and-such a nature.” (Cf. sect. 9 below.)
3
One cannot, that is, move from N(∃w)E!w to (∃w)NE!w.
4
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. by A. Mitchell (New York, 1944 [Modern
Library]), pp. 299–301.
5
Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt, 1967); 2 tr., Introduction to
Metaphysics (New Haven, 1959), Chap I. Also tr. by D. F. Krell in Martin
Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York, 1977), pp. 95–112.
6
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 115. As
Heidegger sees it, such a metaphysical concern roots in Seinsvergessenheit and is
accordingly etwas, des überwundern werden muss, although it is counterproductive
27 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

NOTES

to strive to overcome metaphysical worries instead of waiting, gelassen, for das

Geschick des Seins to come to our aid.
7
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922), sect. 6.44
(p. 186).
8
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 1958), p. 20.
9
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in J. H. Gill (ed.), Philosophy Today,
No. 1 (New York and London, 1968), pp. 4–14. Wittgenstein here describes a par-
ticularly profound experience as having the character “that when I have it I wonder
at the existence of the world.” Gill’s anthology also contains notes by Fredrich
Waismann on a conversation with Wittgenstein on the same subject. Cf. also G. E.
M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus London, 1955), p. 173.
10
Op. cit., P. 10.
11
Anna-Teresa Tyrneniecka, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (Assen,
1966).
12
Myles Burnyeat in the Times Literary Supplement, October 15, 1982, p. 1136.
13
David Lewis, Philosophical Papers (New York and Oxford, 1983), p. 23.
14
See Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attribute of God (London,
1705), and G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, sect’s 37–38.
15
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Edinburgh: 1779), Part IX.
See also Joseph K. Campbell, “Hume’s Refutation of the Cosmological Argu-
ment,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 40 (1996),
pp. 159–73.
16
William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, ed. by P. Boehner (Edinburg: Nelson,
1957), p. 124.
17
A deep distrust of aggregative totalization pervades the whole first section of “The
Antinomy of Pure Reason” in the Critique of Pure Reason.
18
Paul Edwards, “The Cosmological Argument,” The Rationalist Annual for the Year
1959 (London: Pemberton, 1960 [??]), reprinted in Donald R. Burrell (ed.), The
Cosmological Argument (New York: Doubleday, 1967).
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 28

NOTES
19
William R. Rowe, “Two Criticism of the Cosmological Argument,” The Monist,
vol. 54 (1970); reprinted in W. L. Rowe and W. Wainwright (eds.) Philosophy of
Religion: Selective Readings, 2nd edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanavich,
1989), pp. 142–56. (See p. 153.) On this principle see also Richard M. Gale, On the
Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and
Alexander R. Pruss, “The Hume-Edwards Principle and the Cosmological Argu-
ment,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 434 (1988), pp. 149–
65.
20
Note that the cognate thesis “If every member of a collection has a certain property
then so does the collection as a whole” is obviously in trouble. It works just fine
with arguments like “If every part of a machine is made of iron, then the machine-
as-a-whole is made of iron.” Or “If every part of a field is in Pennsylvania then so
is the field as a whole.” But it fails grievously to obtain in general, seeing that it
commits the so-called Fallacy of Composition. Every member of the collection
may well fit in this box without this being true of the entire collection. Or consider
a mathematical example. Every member of the series {1}, {1,2}, {1, 2 3} etc. is a
finite set, but the series-as-a-whole certainly is not. As Patterson Brown has rightly
observed, with inference by composition “each such proof must be considered on
its own merits”. See his “Infinite Causal Regression” in Anthony Kenny (ed.),
Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1976), pp. 214–236. (See p. 230.)
21
A strange object springs into being as of t0; it does not exist at t0 but does exist at
any subsequent time. Now for any time t after t0 we can explain its existence at t
by noting that it existed at the prior time t-minus-epsilon and (so we may suppose)
is self-preserving. But would anyone suppose that this explains its existence at
large? (I owe this example to Michael B. Burke.) Cf. also the discussions of Chap-
ter III of William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, 1975).
22
Note that neither of these is the same as (∃p)(p @ (∀x)E!x) which obtains trivially
given the symbolic conventions adopted here.
23
Actually this is an exaggeration in the face of multiverse theory in quantum cos-
mology. Here the issue has to be kicked upstairs, subject to the idea that it is the
multiverse rather than the universe that is of necessity unique.
24
Regarding the “experience of contingency,” see Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology,
Vol. I (Chicago, 1958), pp. 110–13,163–64, and 186.
29 EXISTENCE EXPLANATION AND THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE

NOTES
25
Reprinted in John Hick (ed.), Classical and Contemporary Readings in the Philos-
ophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, 1970), pp. 288–289. Cf. also Diogenes
Allen in Studia Leibnitiana, op. cit., p 34.
26
See William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (Lon-
don, 1980), and William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, 1975).
Some relevant texts are anthologized in Donald R. Burrill (ed.), The Cosmological
Argument (Garden City, 1967).
27
Immanuel Kant, [Link].R., p. 138 (Akad.).
28
Carl G. Hempel, “Science Unlimited,” The Annals of the Japan Association for
Philosophy of Science, vol. 14 (1973), pp. 187–202. (See p. 200). Our italics.
29
Note too that the question of the existence of facts is a horse of a very different
color from that of the existence of things. There being no things is undoubtedly a
possible situation, there being no facts is not (since if the situation were realized,
this would itself constitute a fact).
30
Aristotle taught that every change must emanate from a “mover,” i.e., a substance
whose machinations provide the cause of change. This commitment to causal reifi-
cation is at work in much of the history of Western thought. That its pervasiveness
is manifest at virtually every juncture is clear from William Lane Craig’s interest-
ing study of The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (London, 1980)
31
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (ed. N. K. Smith; London,
1922), p. 189.
32
G. W. Leibniz, “Principles of Nature and of Grace,” sect. 8, italics supplied. Com-
pare St. Thomas:

Of necessity, herefore, anything in process of change is being changed by

something else. (S.T., IA 2,3).

The idea that only substances can produce changes goes back to Thomas’ master,
Aristotle. In Plato and the Presocratics, the causal efficacy of principles is recog-
nized (e.g., the love and strife of Empedocles).
33
For criticisms of ways of avoiding the question “Why is there something rather
than nothing?” see Chap. III of William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument
(Princeton, 1975). Cf. also Donald R. Burrill (ed.), The Cosmological Argument
(Garden City, 1967), esp. “The Cosmological Argument” by Paul Edwards.
Chapter Two

THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY

ACTUALIZATION

SYNOPSIS

(1) The explanation of existence-as-a-whole must ultimately reach

outside the causal order of existential domain (2) it will have to lie in
considerations regarding how matters work in the domain of possibil-
ity. (3) The phase transaction from possibility to actuality is governed
by proto-physical laws that canalize the emergence of the actual from
the manifold of possibility. (4) This process will have to proceed by
elimination rather than production.

1. ABANDONING CAUSALITY

E xistence-at-large cannot be accounted for in the order of causali-

ty—of standard cause-and-effect explanation. For in this mode of
explanation we must have existing inputs to achieve existing outputs:
if the effect is to exist, the cause must do so as well. If we persist in
posing those global questions, some extraordinary mechanism must be
invoked because we cannot hope to resolve them in terms of ordinary
efficient causality. For causal explanations require existential inputs to
act as causes. And this vitiates their utility in the present context. As
David Lewis has rightly noted, the question “Why is there something
rather than nothing?” in the specifically causal sense invites the dis-
missive response of telling the questioner “that his explanandum is so
global a feature of the world that it leaves no room for causes distinct
from itself, and hence it cannot have any causal history.”1
This circumstance means that an adequate explanation of existence-
as-a-whole must reach outside the existential realm: it will have to lie
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 32

in considerations regarding how matters work in the domain of possi-

bility. We will thus have to take explanatory recourse to a hylarchic
principle of some sort whose range of operation is critically the (pro-
to-existential) sphere of what is possible but (as yet) nonexistent. Ac-
cordingly, the idea of a hylarchic principle that grounds the existence
of things not in preexisting things but rather in a functional principle
of some sort—a specifically nonsubstantival state of affairs—becomes
something that one has to entertain. The justification for resorting to
this explanatory strategy is hypothetical in structure: “If you are going
to explain existence at all, then you can do no better than to explain it
along the lines of such a hylarchic principle.” The justificatory ra-
tionale is not one of alternative-elimination (“this or nothing”), but of
comparative optimization (“this or nothing better”).
And just here roots the idea of a nomological approach that pro-
ceeds outside the order of efficient causality and sees the existence of
the world as constrained by (proto) lawful principles of constraint
within the manifold of possibility rather than produced by efficient
causes operative within the existential domain’s realm of natural law.
The shortcomings of all available alternatives renders an approach
made in terms of a non-causal reduction principle worthy of close and
sympathetic attention.

2. THE MANIFOLD OF POSSIBILITY AND ITS LAWFUL

STRUCTURE

The classic “Hempelian” model of explanation2 has it that explanation

standardly proceeds by deriving the fact-to-be-explained [E] deduc-
tively from a body of relevant background fact [F] together with the
body of applicable laws [L].

• Background facts [F] explanans

• Laws [L]
∴ Fact-to-be explained [E]: explanandum

To account for an existential fact this model of explanation pivots the

issue on laws: X exists because the world’s causal lawfulness requires
it.
33 THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION

Now if the argument is to be deductively valid, then it comes to the

inconsistency of F, L, not-E, so that we have: F, not-E ├ not L. On
this basis, in the presence of the facts (F) a denial of the conclusion C
would cause a rent in the fabric of lawfulness L. It means, in sum, that
the obtaining of C is essential to maintaining the world’s fabric of
lawfulness: X exists because the world’s lawfulness demands it incon-
sistency with lawfulness is a prime pathway to possibility-elimination.
Now if this mode of explanatory argumentation is to be valid, then
the world’s orderly lawfulness is predicated as fundamental presuppo-
sition. How/why is it that X exists? Because it is produced under the
productive exigency of law: it is there so that the world’s fabric of
lawfulness can be maintained intact.
But if this is how things look from the angle of particular-fact-
explanation, something rather analogous will also have to be said for
holistic and synoptic explanation as well. For here too the issue of
lawfulness can be seen to be paramount—albeit that it will not be na-
ture’s lawfulness but possibility’s proto-lawfulness that will have to
be at issue. Let us consider how this can come to be.
In explaining existence-as-a-whole four basic approaches present
themselves:

• Unintelligibility: There just is no explanation for existence.

• Surd spontaneity: Some spontaneous but fundamentally surd

(random, anarchic, arbitrary) process is at work in engendering
existence.

• Nomic naturalism: A lawful hylarchic process so functions as to

extract existence from mere possibility.

• Purposive agency (deism): A pre-existing (as it were) creative

agent acts so as to bring existence into being.

The first approach can be set aside because it rejects this entire ex-
planatory project. The second pushes the bounds of intelligibility. The
last carries us into the realm of theology. Only the third can afford an
explanation that is at once intelligible and not supra-natural.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 34

The approach of this present discussion will accordingly focus on

the third, nomic and naturalistic approach. (It does not assume, but yet
cannot and will not rule out, the possibility that the lawful order at is-
sue was itself the purposive product of a creator-deity.)
The (Hempelian) model of particularity explanation is predicated
on the overall coordination and harmonization of phenomena and laws
of nature. And at the synoptic/holistic level this same basic principle
can be carried over to the overall coordination and harmonization of
the phenomena, laws, and proto-(or meta-)laws that govern the extrac-
tion of an existential domain from the manifold of possibility. In both
cases alike, harmonic coordination with higher level law is the crux,
and even as the Hempelian model makes law conformity the crux for
concrete actualities, so our hylarchic proto-law model makes princi-
ple-harmonization the determinative crux for lawful generalities.
In implementing this explanatory approach it is helpful to introduce
a distinction between a more narrowly construed actual existence in
the world, and a more broadly construed reality. At the most basic
level, existence encompasses:

• the manifold of physical existence consisting of all those things

that have their ontological foothold in the real-world realm of
space and time.

But going beyond this there are also other modes of reality, preemi-
nently including:

• the manifold of mental subsistence comprising the “things of

thought” (entia rationis) projected into being (but not existence)
by the mind-operations of intelligent beings (this constitutes the
manifold of thought-reality),

• the manifold of mere possibility comprising all possibilities can

coherently be articulated on logico-conceptual principles,

• the manifold of real possibility comprising the pre (sub-, or pro-

to-)existential possibilities that subsist independently of the men-
tal operations of existing beings.
35 THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION

Display 1

THE MANIFOLD OF POSSIBILITY

actual existence
optimal possibility
evaluative possibility real
physical possibility possibility
proto-physical possibility

metaphysical possibility

logical possibility

NOTE: The shaded area represents the region of contingency, which includes those states
that are physically possible but not in general actual. The distinction between a pure-
ly theoretical (merely logical) possibility of self-consistency [possibilitas interna]
goes back to Leibniz and was also drawn in the 1730 Philosophia prima sive Onto-
logia of Christian Wolff. On these issues see Ingetrud Pape, Tradition und Trans-
formation der Modalität, Vol. I (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966).

So conceived, the overall domain of reality transcends the physical

realm of space and time to encompass also a manifold of real (rather
than merely imaginable) possibility—is a vast but highly structured
manifold of being with laws and processes of its own. It has a hierar-
chical order of successive stages or phases, each of them encompassed
within its predecessors as a smaller component or subsector thereof.
Display 1 depicts this situation as a way-station ascent in a conical
manifold: logical possibility, metaphysical possibility, proto-physical
possibility, physical possibility, evaluative possibility and finally at
the pinnacle an ultimately realized optimal possibility. The ultimate
apex of possibility marks the point of phase-transition at which the
manifold of mere possibility makes its transit into actual existence.
There is nothing all that new about the conception of actuality as
the result of eliminating possibilities to a classic expression of this
idea of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated
the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
truth.”3 And what holds here at the epistemological level of proposi-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 36

tions will also hold at the ontological level of states of affairs where
once again possibility-limitation will afford a pathway to actuality.
The manifold of possibility requires no originative explanation.
These possibilities are not somehow engendered: they are simply
there. Unlike the multiverses of physical theory they are not existen-
tial status. It makes no more sense to ask how they are to be then to
ask this about numbers. So category mistakes must be awarded in this
regard. We can ask about the location of possibilities no more than we
can ask about the location of justice. Moreover, each level of the over-
all manifold of ontological possibility has its own characteristic laws
and principles, with each level comprising of those possibilities that
are logico-conceptually compatible with the characteristic laws of that
level.
Accordingly, “compatibility theory” of possibility is at work here,
albeit it in a multi-staged way. As usual, mere logical possibility is a
matter of compatibility with the laws of logic, and physical possibility
is a matter of compatibility with the laws of nature. There are further
prospects additional to these such as compatibility with the proto-
physical laws for nature that set the norms that condition the laws of
nature themselves. The situation in this regard is as per Display 2,
where, in particular, the distinction between the “scientific” or physi-
cal laws OF nature and the supra- or proto-physical laws FOR nature
become graphically explicit.
The ideas of laws of logic and of laws of nature are too familiar to
need commentary here. The laws of metaphysics include principles of
proto-physical normativity relating to such cognitive-value features as
regularity, uniformity, conservation, simplicity, symmetry, economy.
And while the physical laws provide for a systemic coordination of
causal process within a spatiotemporal structure, the laws of evalua-
tive possibility provide for a rational order of intelligent design. Final-
ly the principle of optimality is evaluatively geared to the factors that
conduce to the development and thriving of intelligent beings.
37 THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION

Display 2

THE NOMIC STRUCTURE OF THE MANIFOLD OF POSSIBILITY

Nomic Requisites
Possibility Level (Operative Laws) Ontological Level

MERE POSSIBILITY

Logical Possibility Laws of logic Logical

REAL POSSIBILITY

Metaphysical Possibility Principles of metaphysics Metaphysical

Proto-physical Possibility Proto-physical norms of Supra- or Proto-

natural lawfulness physical

Physical Possibility Laws of nature Natural

Evaluative Possibility Principles of cognitive value Axiological

ULTIMATE POSSIBILITY
(=EXISTENCE)

Optimal Possibility Principles of optimality Existential

(Actuality)

3. EXISTENCE AS A PHASE TRANSITION VIA A HYLARCHIC

PRINCIPLE: GROUNDING ACTUALITY IN PROTO-
PHYSICAL LAWS

As observed above, actual existence pivots on the phase transition

transpiring through which possibility is transmuted into a different
mode of ontological engagement—actual existence. But how might
the existence of things possibly arise through the operation of laws
and principles that function wholly outside the existential arena? How
can ontological processuality ever move from mere possibility to ac-
tuality?
To address this question, it is necessary to make a yet more exten-
sive excursus into the theory of possibility. For on the present perspec-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 38

tive, the move from mere possibility to actual existence is mediated by

a series of hylarchic principles lawful order that provide for ever more
stringent of existential requirements. Such principles are pre-existen-
tial in that they are preliminarily determinative for rather than conse-
quently following from the actual constitution of existing things. They
ongoingly circumscribe certain of the abstractly available possibilities
as alone potentially “real,” regulating the rest to the status of the unre-
al, remote, merely hypothetical, or the like.
Such hylarchic principles set the possibility-restricting conditions
that ultimately narrow the range of eligible cases down to one single
outcome. Independently of, and, as it were, “prior” to the origination
of existents there can be (and presumably is) a nomically qualified
framework of possibility-delimiting laws that set the conditions, the
“rules of the game” as it were, within which the actualization of things
comes to pass.
Such proto-physical laws will reflect the substance of our science in
terms of its ability to implement the distinction between mere and real
possibilities. They should be understood as laying down conditions of
real possibility, ruling certain theoretical (logical) possibilities out as
outside the realm of realizability. They “precede” nature and delineate
among all the abstractly available possibilities certain ones as alone
“real,” ruling out the rest as unreal, remote, merely hypothetical or the
like.
The root idea of this approach goes back to Leibniz, who—in dis-
tinguishing between “logical” and “metaphysical” necessity—first
took explanatory recourse to a modality intermediate between physical
and absolute (“logical”) necessity. As he saw it, the arrangements of
the world are neither absolutely nor logically necessary (à la Spinoza)
nor wholly fortuitous (à la Epicurus) nor arbitrary (à la Descartes). Ra-
ther, they are necessary by a distinct mode of “metaphysical” necessi-
ty. Leibniz accordingly held that only by introducing a mode of neces-
sity intermediate between absolute necessity and mere contingency
can we cut the Gordian knot of reconciling the contingent with the
necessary, seeing that that whose sufficient reason is absolutely neces-
sary will itself be absolutely necessary.
The net effect of delineating such a range of “real possibility” is
just this establishment of a new correlative mode of necessity. And
39 THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION

this is the crux from the standpoint of our present discussion. For pre-
cisely this sort of necessity can furnish the answer to our question
“Why does the world have such-and-such a feature—specifically, why
is it nonempty?” For any feature that all the “really possible” worlds
have is a feature that the existing world “has to” have—that it must
necessarily have (in the “real” mode of necessity). The reasoning is
simple and straightforward: the real world has a certain feature be-
cause it has to, since all “really” possible worlds do so.
A proto-law which imposes conditions to which possibilities must
answer to become real possibilities need not (and cannot always) root
in the operations of real things. It can be thought of as relational—
specifically, as invoking relations of requirement and exclusion be-
tween the subordinate elements of which possibilities are composed.
Thus if there are three such elements, A, B, C, of which A requires B,
and C precludes B, then certain “merely” possibilities would thereby
become unreal, to wit those that have been starred in the following
enumeration

A B C
* + + +
+ + -
* + - +
* + - -
* - + +
- + -
- - +
- - -

The proto-laws at issue can thus be thought of as principles of possi-

bility-foreclosure. They represent constraints which simply exclude
certain theoretically conceivable possibilities from the domain of real
possibility. They are possibilities alright, but not “actualization-
qualified” ones. They impute to the realm of real possibility a certain
delimitative character—a structure that precludes some “theoretically
available” possibilities from being accommodated within it.
Of course, every natural law rules out possibilities. (“Copper con-
ducts electricity” means that we cannot have it both that something is
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 40

made of copper and that it is a nonconductor.) The difference lies not

in the common result, but in its variant rationale. A natural law is
grounded in the make-up and dispositions of things; its electricity-
conductivity roots in the make-up of copper. With proto-laws the situ-
ation is different. That certain possibilities are “unreal”—that they are
protolawfully unrealizable—lies not in the make-up of actual things
but in “the nature of things.” It is not a facet of actuality at all, but a
feature of the realm of possibility itself.
On the present conception of proto-laws they do not represent the
behavioral dispositions of existents, but rather the preconditions to
which something must conform if it is to come into existence at all.
They represent constraints which simply exclude certain theoretically
conceivable possibilities from the domain of real possibility. They are
possibilities alright, but not “actualization-qualified” ones.
Such a position has it that there is a field of possibility that is prior
to and grounds any physical field—that there must be “laws of possi-
bility” before there can be the powers and dispositions that encapsu-
late the “laws of things,” the “laws of nature” as ordinarily under-
stood. The “possibility-space” that encompasses the realm of the pos-
sible is seen as having a particular character in view of which certain
conditions must be met by any real possibility that it can accommo-
date—a character which is encapsulated in the proto-laws. To put it
very figuratively, these proto-laws brood over the realm of the possi-
ble like the primal logos over the waters, and they serve to determine
how things eventuate. Thus on such an approach, there is a per-
existential realm of proto-existence out of which existence proper
emerges by a process of selective elimination.
To be sure, one might think of various laws of nature (“Copper
conducts electricity”) as entirely inherent in the make-up of the actu-
al—that is, as merely representing the behavioral disposition of exist-
ing things. But the proto-laws are not like that—they do not represent
the behavioral dispositions of existents, but rather the preconditions to
which something must conform if it is to become an existent at all.
Such laws are not immanent in things but transcend their particular
nature. They are “laws of nature” alright, but in the rather special way
of being laws for nature—laws that set preconditions upon the realiza-
bility of possibilities. Such possibility-restrictive principles have an
41 THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION

ontological footing that is independent of (because “prior” to) existing

things. (If we are to explain the existence of things in terms of laws,
we must of course refrain from thinking of laws as representing the
dispositions of existing things.)
Thus proto-physical laws are—to reemphasize—not so much laws
of nature as laws for nature—laws that impose preconditions upon the
realizability of possibilities. And these possibility-restrictive princi-
ples have an ontological footing that is independent of (because “pri-
or” to) existing things. (After all, if we are to explain the existence of
things in terms of laws, we must of course refrain from thinking of
laws as representing the dispositions of existing things.) Thus viewed,
the domain of real possibility constitutes a “receptacle” (in the manner
of Plato’s Timaeus)—a framework of potentiality within which actual-
ity ultimately finds its definitive accommodation. But this framework
is not, of course, one composed of physical or quasi-physical dimen-
sions on the order of space and time, but one composed of lawful
principles—a nomic manifold of “laws of possibility.”
Accordingly, we can and should reject the thesis of genetic homo-
geneity with its insistence on the principle that: All facts about the
world’s actualities must be grounded in existing things (or in their
properties). This thesis insists that every fact has a substantival em-
bodiment—that facts must always root in the make-up of existents;
that existence inevitably precedes essence. The nomological approach
emphatically rejects this radical mode of metaphysical existentialism.
It accounts for the real or actual (for “existence,” that is), through a
lawful principle which operates without being itself embodied in some
existing thing or things. It denies that existence inevitably precedes
essence. It is prepared to see some facts about the real world grounded
in the nature of possibility rather than having to emerge from the op-
eration of preexisting substances.
These nomic principles that define the problems of the realm of the
possible need not have an existential footing—an ontological basis in
some preexisting thing or collection of things. They need not—nay,
must not—be hypostatized into features of things or into causal prod-
ucts of the operations of things. Our theory contemplates a mode of
“being” independent of and prior to the existence of “things”—a
nomic field which fixes the structure of possibility. This idea of a do-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 42

main of “proto-laws” rests on a firm refusal to locate the ground of the

distinction between “mere” and “real” possibilities in the nature or the
activities of things or existents of some sort. Such principles can and
should be thought of as lacking a substantial basis—as conditioning
possibilities without any foothold in the modus operandi of prior actu-
alities.
In accounting for actual existence in this way, one can in principle
explain a “change of phase” from the level of mere possibility to the
level of actuality, maintaining that certain things are the case because
they must be so that their being otherwise lies beyond the reach of ac-
tualization. The “field of possibility” has a structure of such a sort that
the existence of things of a certain sort is effectively necessitated.
On the here-envisioned approach, an explanation of the nature of
existence will begin by examining the meta- or praeter- physical struc-
ture of the realm of possibility. And that calls for looking to the fun-
damental rules—the “field equations,” as it were—that delineate the
operation of forces in nature: those which define the structures of the
space-time continuum, say the basic laws of quantum mechanics and
general relativity, and some fundamental structural principles of phys-
ical interaction. Principles of this sort characterizing the electromag-
netic, gravitational and metric fields provide the basic proto-laws un-
der whose aegis the drama of natural events will have to play itself
out. But now they are seen not as ordinary laws of nature that can be
construed as describing the modus operandi of real things that are al-
ready present in the world, but rather as preconditions for the real—as
delimiting the sorts of possibilities that might substantively be real-
ized.
Explaining the nature of existence via hylarchic principles of proto-
law governed machinations in the realm of possibility turns on a dis-
tinction between substantial explanations in terms of the operations of
entities and process explanations in terms of primordial operational
principles—principles that underlie rather than merely reflect the na-
ture of the real. It is predicated on acknowledging that explanation in
the case of existence-at-large cannot operate in the orthodox order of
the efficient causation of preexisting things. In resorting to a hylarchic
principle one can thus abandon altogether the hoary dogma that things
can only come from things.
43 THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION

This position does not, however, require us to reject the principle ex

nihilo nihil fit totally and unqualifiedly. For one can distinguish be-
tween nonexistence and nothingness. The realm of mere possibility, as
such, is a sphere of nonexistence in which no thing whatever exists.
But it itself is not nothing—not totally devoid of character or struc-
ture. There is, after all, no reason why even the realm of mere possi-
bility cannot have a structure of some sort. The fact that nothing exists
within this realm does not preclude it from having a nature—indeed a
nature such that a certain sort of possibility (and only a certain sort of
possibility) is destined to emerge from it as actualized. Such a nomic
“receptacle” realm is not a matter of mere nothingness; it can and
must have a character of some sort (as per the old precept that nihil
sunt nullae proprietates). We need to adopt the idea that existence
precedes essence. The domain of the possible represents a state of af-
fairs in which no things exist, but in which various conditions can cer-
tainly obtain—conditions that can, in particular, endow this realm
with a possibility-restrictive nature. Possibilities can, as such, be sub-
ject to various laws, including those which separate them into “real”
and “merely hypothetical” and thus provide for the operations of a
hylarchic principle.
Real possibility accordingly need not—and should not—be rooted
in the machinations of things. We must not attribute it to the inner na-
ture or outer impetus of substances of some sort, or see it as the fruit
of the productive efficacy of some existent or other. We must avoid
taking the stance that the structure of possibility must root in an actu-
ality of some type, that there is something that exerts a determinative
agency in consequence of which real possibility is as it is. We can re-
ject the “existentialist” thesis that possibility must be grounded in an
actuality of some sort—or else modify it by taking the stance that the
realm of possibility itself constitutes a (self-subsistent) actuality of
sorts.
There is, after all, no reason why even the domain of mere possibil-
ity cannot have content with a structure of some sort. The fact that
nothing exists within this realm does not preclude it from having a na-
ture—indeed a nature such that a certain sort of possibility (and only a
certain sort of possibility) is destined to emerge from it as actualized.
The domain of the possible represents a state of affairs in which no
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 44

things exist, but in which various conditions can certainly obtain—

conditions that can, in particular, endow this realm with a possibility-
restrictive nature. Mere possibilities can, as such, be subject to various
laws, including those which separate them into “real” and “merely hy-
pothetical” and thus provide for the operations of a hylarchic princi-
ple.
Such an explanation of existence as a phase transition emanating
from the manifold’s possibility is unquestionably unorthodox—as it
must be in the very nature of the issue. But there is nothing about it
that is inherently unviable or somehow “unscientific.” And it does
have the substantial merit of enabling us to resolve the riddle of exist-
ence, answering Leibniz’s fundamental questions in a way that is con-
ceptually cogent and wholly consonant with science as we know it.
All the same, a fundamental shift in explanatory methodology is at is-
sue with this hylarchic approach—the shift to a fundamentally nomo-
logical mode of explanation that operates in terms of laws which lack
any and all “prior” embedding in an order of things. The world’s con-
stitution is now accounted for as the consequence of a constraint by
principles rather than as the product of the operation of causal forces
which, after all, only existing things can exert. This account brings to
view the Leibnizian picture of a nomically structured manifold of pre-
or sub-existential possibility from which the realm of real existence
emerges via considerations of value-optimization. For in the end an
explanation of affairs in the domain of fact requires us to stop beyond
that realm itself—and when we leave the realm of fact we cannot but
enter into that of value.

4. EXPLAINING EXISTENCE BY MEANS OF A HYLARCHIC

PRINCIPLE

A hylarchic principle explains the nonemptiness of the world by ex-

ploiting the distinction between mere possibilities (“merely logical” or
“wholly hypothetical and imaginary” possibilities) and real possibili-
ties based in suitable nomic principles. The underlying line of reason-
ing provides a scheme by which various conditions of the real (specif-
ically, here, its being nonempty) can be explained in terms of an ex-
tremely simple necessitarian format: The existing world has feature F
45 THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION

because this feature is R-necessary in that every R-possible world has

feature F. It implements this generic scheme in the specific mode. On-
ly such worlds as are nonempty—that contain something or other, and
have some sort of membership—can qualify as real possibilities. The
salient idea is the principle that the necessary must be actual (a
necesse ad esse valet consequentia). The reasoning proceeds via the
standard idea of all ontological arguments since Anselm—that the
shift from possibility to actuality can be effected with the aid of a suit-
able mode of necessity. But—with Leibniz—it rejects the idea that the
necessity at issue must be absolute (logical) necessity.
The role of a hylarchic principle is now clear. As a proto-physical
law of a characteristically preexistential kind, it reduces the range of
real possibility so as to exclude from it (inter alia) those worlds that
are existentially empty. A hylarchic principle is simply a particular
sort of possibility-restricting condition—a rather special one that nar-
rows the range of eligible cases down to nonempty worlds. And so the
task of explaining why there is something rather than nothing can be
discharged by relatively orthodox, direct and unproblematic means,
since what is necessary must be actual. On such an approach it is not
by chance that things exist in the world (that there is something rather
than nothing) but by a natural (or, better, proto-natural) necessity.
In accounting for a feature of the actual in this way, one can in
principle explain a “change of phase” from the level of mere possibil-
ity to the level of actuality, maintaining that certain things are the case
because they must be so that their being otherwise lies outside the
realm of (real) possibility. The “field of possibility” has a structure of
such a sort that the existence of things of a certain sort is effectively
necessitated. Such a field itself requires literally nothing for its “exist-
ence”: like the God of scholastic demonstration, it is such that nulla re
indiget ad existendum.
The overall explanation of existence is thus fundamentally nomo-
logical. It pivots on the consideration that the proto-laws require the
existence of things—that they are in themselves such as to constrain
an existential world.
But what manner of considerations could put flesh on the skeletal
structure of this argument? The most plausible candidates for proto-
laws that could constrain the existence of things are the fundamental
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 46

principles of physical nature—the basic cosmic equations (say the

field equations of general relativity). For this sort of explanation to
work, it would have to transpire that all of the possible (or all of the
“available”—in some appropriate sense) solutions to these cosmic
equations will accord to the key parameters values different from 0
(i.e., values which are existence-requiring). The only possible solution
to the fundamental equation which satisfies certain systemic require-
ments will have to be solutions that represent nonempty worlds.4
On such an approach, we would accordingly begin by looking to
the fundamental field equations that delineate the operation of forces
in nature: those which define the structures of the space-time continu-
um, say the basic laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity,
and some fundamental structural principles of physical interaction.
Principles of this sort characterizing the electromagnetic, gravitational
and metric fields provide the basic proto-laws under whose aegis the
drama of natural events will have to play itself out. And the existence
of things would then be explained by noting that the fundamental
equations themselves admit of no empty solutions—that any solution
that satisfies them must incorporate the sorts of singularities we call
“things.”5The cosmic equations would be such as to constrain exist-
ence in nature: they admit of no empty states and only allow non-
vacuous solutions. As it were, they represent functions that take a
nonzero value for every value of the variables—even when those “in-
put” parameters themselves are set at zero.6 For such an approach to
work, it would have to transpire that the only ultimately viable solu-
tions to those cosmic equations are existential solutions.7
This explanatory strategy casts those “fundamental field equations”
in a rather special light. They are not seen as ordinary laws of nature
that can be construed as describing the modus operandi of real things
that are already present in the world, but rather as preconditions for
the real—as delimiting the sorts of possibilities that can be realized.
We thus have an account of the following structure: The fundamental
field equations, seen to function not merely as laws OF nature, but as
laws FOR nature, as proto-laws in present terminology, delineate the
domain of real possibility. And the nature of this domain is then, in its
turn, such as to constrain the existence of things.
47 THE METAPHYSICS OF POSSIBILITY ACTUALIZATION

Such an explanation of existence is no doubt somewhat unortho-

dox. But there is nothing about it that is inherently inappropriate or
somehow “unscientific.” And it does have the substantial merit of en-
abling us to resolve the riddle of existence, answering Leibniz’s ques-
tion in a way that is conceptually cogent and wholly consonant with
science as we know it.
To be sure, one big problem remains: How is one to account for the
working of these proto-laws themselves? (And so—just what are the
ultimate grounds of real possibility?) This question obviously presents
a large nettle which our overall explanatory program must eventually
grasp if it is to do its job in a satisfactory way.

NOTES

1
David Lewis, Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (New York and Oxford, 1983), p. 24.
2
See Wesley Salmon, Four Decades of Explanation (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. 1989).
3
Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Sign of Four,” 1885.
4
It should be noted that empty should here be understood in the logical or set-
theoretical sense, not just in the somewhat specialized physical sense in which
physicists speak of empty-world solutions to the field equations of General Relativ-
ity—meaning worlds devoid of ordinary matter and all forms of non-gravitational
energy, but which can be (and in non-trivial cases are) filled with sourceless gravi-
tational waves carrying gravitational energy. One would not regard such worlds as
metaphysically empty.
5
The emergence of an “existential” state is thus entirely independent of the initial
boundary-value conditions—for any way of fixing these parameters, an existential
state emerges.
6
A (clearly superable) complexity enters at this point through the fact that vacuity
may be reflected in parameter-values other than zero. For example, consider the
trivial empty-world solution of the field equations of General Relativity, i.e. the
Minkowski metric. In its standard form it consists of sixteen real-valued functions
of the coordinates, twelve of which vanish everywhere, while the other four “take a
nonzero value for every value of the variables” (namely, the constant values -1, 1,
1, 1, respectively).
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 48

NOTES
7
Or perhaps, even should “empty solutions” exist, they might be highly unstable; the
proto-laws would then be such that, under their aegis, an existentially empty state
of things is inherently liable to undergo a phase transition, having a natural inclina-
tion to slip over into an “occupied” condition.
Chapter Three

OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL

TURN

SYNOPSIS

(1) Optimalism is a matter of selection based on value. (2)It works by

elimination. (3)The standard of value roots in the interests of intelli-
gence. (4) Intelligence-geared optimalism—noophelia—can be seen
as a natural rather than supernatural process. It need not be operated
through the purposive action of a benevolent creator. (4) Optimalism
is self-substantiating. (5) Historically this doctrine finds significant
antecedence in neo-Platonism.

1. THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN: OPTIMALISM

A ccustomed as we are to explanations in the mode of efficient cau-

sality, the idea of an axiological explanation of existence on the
basis of an evaluative optimalism has a decidedly strange and unfa-
miliar air about it. Let us consider more closely how it is supposed to
work.
The approach at hand is based on adopting what might be called an
axiogenetic optimality principle to the effect that value represents a
decisive advantage in regard to realization because in the virtual com-
petition for existence among possible alternatives it is the compara-
tively best that is bound to prevail.1 Thus whenever there is a plurality
of alternative possibilities competing for realization in point of truth
or of existence, it will be the (or an) optimal possibility that wins out.
(An alternative is optimal when no better one exists, although it can
have equals.) On such an approach it will transpire that things exist,
and exist as they do, because this is for the (metaphysically) best.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 50

It may well prove to be a complicated matter to appraise from a

metaphysical/ontological standpoint that condition X is better (inher-
ently more meritorious) than condition Y. But—so optimalism main-
tains—once this evaluative hurdle is overcome, the question “Why
should it be that X rather than Y exists?” is automatically settled by
this very fact. In sum, a Law of Optimality prevails: value (of a suita-
ble—as yet unspecified—sort) enjoys an existential impetus so that it
lies in the nature of things that (one of) the best of available alterna-
tives is realized.2
On such an approach, Christian Wollf’s question of the complemen-
tum possibilitatis—of what must be added to possibility to realize ac-
tuality3—received the straightforward answer that was already con-
templated throughout the Platonic tradition, viz.: evaluative-optimal-
ity. For this tradition, which stretched from Plato via the Greek Neo-
Platonists and medieval scholasticism to Leibniz—and which has sur-
vived vestigially in the twentieth century thought of Einstein and Gö-
del—takes the line that the actual is exactly that one among the possi-
bilities which maximizes value (suitably understood).
As regards the possibility-field itself, it requires literally nothing
else for its own “existence” (like the God of the scholastic theoreti-
cians scholastic demonstration, it is such that with it nulla re indiget
ad existendum). But the determination of that very special possibility
distinguished by actualization in a matter is the work of hylarchic
principle of value operative over the possibilistic domain.
The root idea of this approach goes back to Leibniz, who—in dis-
tinguishing between “logical” and “metaphysical” necessity—first
took explanatory recourse to a modality intermediate between physical
and absolute (“logical”) necessity. As he saw it, the arrangements of
the actual world are neither absolutely nor logically necessary (à la
Spinoza) nor wholly fortuitous (à la Epicurus) or arbitrary (à la Des-
cartes). Rather, they are determined by a distinct mode of axiological-
ly controlled metaphysical necessity. Leibniz accordingly held that
only by introducing such a mode of necessity intermediate between
absolute necessity and mere contingency can we cut the Gordian knot
of reconciling the contingent with the necessary, seeing that while that
whose sufficient reason is absolutely necessary will itself be absolute-
ly necessary. The reasoning is starkly straightforward: the real world
51 OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN

has a certain feature because evaluative considerations indicate that it

has to. But this “has to” is not absolute or logical necessitation, but ra-
ther a distinctive mode of axiological necessitation on whose basis
there will ideally be only one uniquely qualified, metaphysically via-
ble solution to the reality-design problem.

2. HOW OPTIMALISM WORKS

On the approach at issue, the emergence of actuality from possibility

can best be conceptualized as a matter of realization under constraints.
An illustration will be instructive. Thus for the sake of an example, let
it be that the ontological stage is set by a proto-existential 3 x 3 tic-
tac-toe gridwork which is to be filled in by Os and Xs. Further, let it
be that the constraints of physical possibility set by the proto-laws of
nature have it that the number of Os and Xs cannot differ by more than
one (i.e., that at most five of either can be used.) And finally let it be
that the axiological/evaluative constraints are the following two:

(1) that Os have preferential priority over Xs,

(2) that symmetry is a positivity which should be maximized.

On this axiological basis in process of elimination is set in train in

whose wake there is now but one unique solution to the issue of the
nature of actual existence:

O X O

X O X

O X O

The example illustrates (in a wildly oversimple way) how the descrip-
tive nature of existence can be determined by normative principles
that operate with respect to possibilities. And so the main point is
clear, viz., that a series of laws and principles of nomic and axiologi-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 52

cal constraint can perfectly well conspire to determine a single meta-

physically viable result to “the problem of world realization.”
A much oversimplified analogy to the sort of deliberations at issue
may nevertheless help to render the idea of world optimization more
graphic and show how this sort of issue can be addressed. Let us adopt
the general line of approach suggested by Leibniz, and assess the mer-
it—the comparative optimality—of possible worlds in terms of two
factors: the orderliness of their law structure (what is clearly needed
to possibilize the developmental emergence of intelligent beings) and
the variety of discernible phenomena (which is clearly needed to af-
ford such beings the material of stimulus and interest requisite for
cognitive developments).4
To concretize this line of thought, suppose a world with two predi-
cates F and G each of which can vary in intensity over a spectrum of
Small, Medium, and Large. (For example, F might be the footprint ar-
ea of a building and G its height—each of which can be Small, Medi-
um, and Large!) The result is a spectrum of possibilities of the follow-
ing 3 x 3 format:
G
S M L
S

F M

Each of the descriptive compartments of this manifold can either be

instantiated or uninstantiated amongst the membership of a particular
architectural “world.” And this can be indicated by filling in that com-
partment with O (non-instantiated) or X instantiated, yielding the re-
sult that there are 29 = 1,024 possibilities overall.5
For every X within the diagram, there is a corresponding exclusion
law of the generic format

An item that is <S, M, L> in point of F must not be <S, M, L> in point of G.
53 OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN

Lawfulness will now be a matter of how many such laws there are
(with a maximum of 9 (= 3 x 3) in the present sort of case).
Returning now to the Leibnizian formula:

M = lawfulness x variety = #X x #O

It will be noted that since #X x #O = 9, this quantity is going to be #X

x (9 – #X). And in the circumstances, with the possibility-range of #X
ranging from 0 to 9 this will be greatest when #X is 4 or 5.6 Then this
is requisite for M-maximization.
This, of course, still leaves open various different possibilities. Ac-
cordingly, ontological merit—as we have construed it to this point in
terms of order and variety—proves to be underdeterminative, with
some further, yet unacknowledged factor required to established
uniqueness. To address this problem, let it be that one takes the stand-
point that there is yet another variety-related factor that turns on min-
imizing imbalance and thus avoiding the corner positions. Then this
would narrow matters down to a single result, namely

O X O

X X X

O X O

On this basis, then, there will be but one single, uniquely optimal out-
come for the descriptive constituting of a world within the property-
spectrum at our disposal under the indicated conditions.
Such an oversimple analogy illustrates how, at least in principle, a
suitable survey across the spectrum of available alternatives can pro-
vide a basis for assessing the ontological aesthetics of world order.
And so, while the analogy is imperfect—as analogies are bound to
be7—it does go some way toward illustrating the basic idea at issue
with the sort of world optimization under constraints that is at issue in
these deliberations. Oversimple though they are, the illustrative analo-
gies do at least illustrate how a Leibnizian optimalism can operate in
principle.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 54

3. BACKGROUND: BY WHAT STANDARD?

If possibility-elimination on the basis of evaluation is to serve as the

avenue to actuality then we must, of course, confront the question of
what is it that is to effect such limitations. And since—by hypothe-
sis—the answer cannot lie in the realm of actual fact, we do well to
turn to that of normative value.
But just what is to be the standard of value at issue with an optimal-
ity principle? What is it that will decide the superiority of one alterna-
tive over another? What rhyme or reason is to be determinative in ef-
fecting such a discrimination in an intelligible and intelligent way?
The answer is, in a way, implicit in the very question itself, in that
it lies in the very factors of intelligibility and intelligence. For by its
own reckoning we cannot but judge those alternatives as superior to
those which best serve the interest of intelligence and intelligibility it-
self.
To be sure, the law’s operation here presupposes a manifold of
suitable value parameters, invoking certain physically relevant fea-
tures (symmetry, economy, or the like) as merit-manifesting factors.
The optimization at issue is—and should be—geared to a “scientifi-
cally reputable” theory of some suitable kind, coordinate with a com-
plex of physically relevant factors of a suitable kind. And it is this
presumed gearing to a positive value which like elegance is plausibly
identifiable as physically relevant—contingently identifiable as such
subject to scientific inquiry—that establishes optimalism as a reason-
able proposition and ultimately prevents the thesis “optimalism ob-
tains because that’s for the best” from declining into vacuity.
Without a lawful order of a decidedly complex and sophisticated
sort, the processes of cosmic and biological evolution could not bring
intelligent beings onto the scene. But when such a lawful order also
has to accommodate the vagaries of chance and choice required for
the developmental emergence of intelligence, anomalies are going to
be unavoidable. For situations are now bound to arise, where the well-
being of intelligence-endowed organisms and the axiological demands
of overall systemic advantage come into conflict. Rational optimalism
now becomes complicated.
55 OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN

Noophelia among the demands of intelligibility and intelligence—

should be seen as a perfectly “natural” process at work in the realm of
possibility and actuality alike. Those intelligibility-facilitation val-
ues—simplicity, regularity, economy, symmetry, harmony, etc.—are
not mattes of the personal preferences of individuals, but reflect im-
personal features of the objective conditions of things. Even as plants
can exhibit a heliotropism without engaging in purpose considera-
tions, so nature can exhibit an intelligence-geared nootropism without
any overt purposes. To be sure the former process can be explained in
terms of the laws of nature operative within the realm of physical ex-
istence. But so too can the latter be explained in terms of the laws of
metaphysics operative within the realms of possibility.

4. NOOPHELIC NATURALISM

The axiology at issue should nevertheless be seen as naturalistic. The

values involved encompass factors like stability, symmetry, continui-
ty, complexity, order and even a dynamic impetus to the development
of “higher” forms possessed of more sophisticated capabilities—
perhaps even a sort of Hegelian impetus toward the evolutionary
emergence of a creature possessed of an intelligence able to compre-
hend and appreciate the universe itself, creating a conscious reduplica-
tion model of the universe in the realm of thought through the artifice
of intelligence. And so the metaphysical values at issue make for an
altogether “naturalistic” axiology that can be postulated on the basis of
the world’s observable features.8 After all, whatever values may be
discerned in the operations of nature can and should still be something
natural—there need be nothing supra-natural (let alone supernatural!)
about it.
Since it is values rather than purposes that function in axiological
explanation, these explanations can and should be seen as entirely im-
personal. Granted, people can adopt and endorse various values (or
can fail to do so). But a value as such need not be anybody’s purpose.
Things and conditions of things can be valuable without being valued,
desirable without being desired. We need not commit the pathetic fal-
lacy in personalizing matters here by invoking the mediation of
agents. To reemphasize: when its modus operandi establishes com-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 56

mitment to a certain value, nature need not “seek” value any more
than water need “seek” its own level. A claim to end-direct transac-
tions in the world (“Nature abhors a vacuum”) is without any presup-
positions or implications with regard to a purposively operating mind.
To implement the principle of axiology by way of personification
would be self-defeating, since we ideally want to explain existence in
a way that is self-sustaining (self-contained, “ultimate”). A system
can be goal directed through its inherent natural “programming” (e.g.,
heliotropism or homeostasis) without any admixture of overt pur-
pose—even as a conservation of energy principle need not be held on
the basis of nature’s “seeking” to conserve energy.
Accordingly our axiological approach can take the form of a value-
naturalism—predicated on the idea that the operational system in
question is by nature value-tropic in that it inherently tends to realize
certain value-endowed conditions (maintaining stability, achieving
symmetry, prolonging longevity, operating efficiently, etc.) Of
course, the system that comports itself in this way need not overtly
hold such a value—like a physical system that pursues the path of
least resistance, it may well be the sort of thing for which the con-
scious adoption of values is simply not at issue. Accordingly, opti-
malism need not necessarily be operated through the purposive agen-
cy of a benevolent creator.
The salient point is that the regress of explanatory principles must
have a stop, and that it is here—with axiology—that we reach a natu-
ral terminus by way of self-explanation. With axiogenetic explanation
the world is, in a certain sense “constrained by value.” But this is no-
wise a matter of absolute necessitation but merely one of axiological
delimitation and thereby a constraint freed from all the negativities to
which the block universe doctrine of necessitarian deliberation is sub-
ject.

5. ISSUES OF OPTIMALITY

“But why should it be that optimalism obtains? What sort of plausible

argument can be given on this position’s behalf? Why should what is
for the best exist?” The answer to these questions lies in the very na-
ture of the principle itself. It is self-substantiating, seeing it is auto-
57 OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN

matically for the best that the best alternative should exist rather than
an inferior rival.9 But this self-sufficiency is just one of its assets; it
also offers significant systemic advantages. After all, we must expect
that any ultimate principle should explain itself, since it cannot, in the
very nature of things, admit of an external explanation in terms of
something altogether different. And the impetus to realization inher-
ent in authentic value lies in the very nature of value itself. A rational
person would not favor the inferior alternative; and there is no reason
to think that a rational reality would do so either.
To be sure, for rational closure some explanation is required for
why nature so operates as to implement a particular value V. But as
we have seen the prospect of self-invoking explanations is available
here. For example: nature favors economy (simplicity, harmony, etc.)
exactly because that is the most economical of things for it to do. Or
again: why do its laws exist as they do? Because that’s for the axio-
logical best in optimizing the systemic operations that obtain. And
why does what’s for the best obtain—just exactly because that itself is
for the best. The explanation of the operation of laws is axiological
(value-referential). And the explanation of the obtaining of values is
self-referential—i.e., is also axiological. The possibility of providing
an explanation on its own basis—a reflexive explanation that is liter-
ally a self-explanation—is now before us. Value is, or can be, regress-
stopping: it can be “final” by way of being self-explanatory in a man-
ner that purpose cannot be.
To be sure, could one ask: “Why should it be that reality is ration-
al?” But this is a problematic proceeding. For even to ask this ques-
tion is to ask for a reason. It is already to presume or presuppose the
rationality of things, taking the stance that what is so is and must be
so for a reason. In advancing that question the matter at issue has al-
ready been tacitly conceded. Anyone who troubles to ask for a reason
why nature should have a certain feature is thereby proceeding within
a framework of thought where nature’s rationality—the amenability
of its features to rational explanation—is already presumed.
But what is to be the epistemic status of a Law of Optimality to the
effect that “whatever possibility is for the best is thereby what is actu-
alized.” It is certainly not a logico-conceptually necessary truth; from
the angle of abstract logic it has to be seen as a contingent fact—albeit
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 58

one not about nature as such, but rather one about the manifold of real
possibility that underlies it. Insofar as necessary at all it obtains as a
matter of ontological rather than logico-conceptual necessity.10 And
the division of this former realm into real vs. merely speculative pos-
sibilities can hinge on contingent considerations: there can be logical-
ly contingent laws of possibility even as there are logically contingent
laws of nature (i.e., of reality). “But if it is contingent, then surely it
must itself rest on some further explanation.” Granted. It itself pre-
sumably has an explanation, seeing that one can and should maintain
the Leibnizian Principle of Sufficient Reason to the effect that for
every contingent fact there is a reason why it is so rather than other-
wise. But there is no decisive reason why the prospect of self-expla-
nation has to be excluded at this fundamental level.11 After all, we
cannot go on putting the explanatory elephant on the back of the tor-
toise on the back of the alligator ad infinitum: as Aristotle already
saw, the explanatory regress has to stop somewhere at a “final” theo-
ry—one that is literally “self-sustaining.” And in the end, what better
candidate could there be than the Law of Optimality itself with the re-
sult that the division between real and merely theoretical possibilities
is as it is (i.e., value based) because that itself is for the best?
Ontological optimalism is closely related to optimism. The opti-
mist holds that “Whatever exists is for the best,” the optimalist main-
tains the converse that “Whatever is for the best exists.” But in the
end these two theses come to the same thing. For if what is realized is
for the best it follows automatically that the best is realized.
Optimalism has many theoretical advantages. Here is just one of
them. It is conceivable, one might contend, that the existence of the
world (i.e., of a world) is a necessary fact while nevertheless its na-
ture—and thereby the existence of which world—is something con-
tingent. And this would mean that separate and potentially different
answers would have to be provided for the questions “Why is there
anything at all?” and “Why is the character of existence as is—why is
it that this particular world exists?” However, an axiogenetic ap-
proach enjoys the advantage of rational economy in that it proceeds
uniformly here. It provides a single uniform rationale for both an-
swers—namely that “this is for the best.” It accordingly also enjoys
the significant merit of providing for the rational economy of explana-
59 OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN

tory principles.
But—really!—how can sensible people possibly embrace the con-
ception that the inherently best alternative is thereby automatically the
actual (true) one. Does not the world’s all too evident imperfection
stand decisively in the way here?
The matter is not all that simple, however. For the issue is going to
pivot on the question of what “inherently best” means. If it means
“best” from that angle of your desires, or of my interests, or even of
the advantage of homo-sapiens in general, then clearly the thesis loses
its strong appeal. For here that “best” must be construed as looking to
the condition of existence-as-a-whole rather than to the benefit of one
particular privileged individual or group. Optimality in this context is
clearly not going to be a matter of the affective welfare or standard of
living of some particular sector of existence; it is going to have to be a
metaphysical good of some synoptic and rather abstract sort that looks
to the condition of the whole. Accordingly the objection “is not opti-
malism simply too Pollyanna-ish to be plausible” can be met effec-
tively. The optimalist need not simply shut his eyes to the world’s all
too evident parochially considered imperfections. For we can and
should stress that because of the intricate inherent interrelationships
among value parameters an “imperfection” in this or that respect must
be taken in stride because it is simply inevitable. (There is, in fact, a
point of view from which optimalism is a position that is not so much
optimistic as deeply pessimistic, seeing that it holds that even the best
of possible arrangements is bound to exhibit very real imperfections
from the angle of mankind’s parochial concerns or interests.)

6. NEO-PLATONIC ANTECEDENTS

The standard explanatory approach with regard to existence proceeds

in the descriptive order of consideration to address the question

• How is it that realty is as it has come to be: what is it that leads

reality to have the character that it actually has?

However, there is also the finalistic order of consideration that pivots

on the question
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 60

• Why is it what reality is as it has come to be: for what reason has
reality come to have the character that is actually has?

This shift from the merely descriptive to the rational order of delibera-
tion introduces new and additional issues. And the entry into the nor-
mative (axiological) evaluative realm serves to make it possible to ad-
dress these additional issues as well. It thus brings larger and more
elaborate issues into the domain of consideration and enables us to
achieve a more deeply grounded level of understanding. And this line
of consideration returns us to the antecedence of Neo-Platonism.
With Plotinus prominent in the foreground, the Neo-Platonists of
classical antiquity contemplated three fundamental principles of meta-
physics:

• Reality (“the One,” to on): the realm of being.

• Rationality (“the intellect,” intelligible order, mind: nous) the

realm of order.

• Soul (“the comprehended,” understanding: psyche): the realm of

cognition.

In a rationally ordered universe whose nature as such is comprehensi-

ble to rational intelligences these three are fused into an indissoluble
unity: a reality shaped by a rational order comprehensible to minds.
Rational structure is the crux at once of the nature, the rational order,
and the valuation of actual existence.
The gap envisioned by later philosophers between actuality and
normativity, between being and value, simply did not exist in Neo-
Platonism. For here value—“the good” broadly construed—is the very
crux and explanatory ground of being and the basis of its comprehen-
sibility.
Mainstream Neo-Platonism accordingly espoused the cardinal the-
sis of Plato’s Timaeus that reality is inherently optimific—a manifold
of being arranged for a realization of the best. Its commitment here is
61 OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN

to what might be called the Principle of Optimality to the following

effect:

Within any finite range of alternatives A1, A2, … An that which is opti-
mal—which is for the best, everything considered—is the one that actu-
ally obtains in reality’s make-up.

This is a patently metaphysical thesis in its insistence upon the exis-

tential impetus efficacy of value, holding that evaluative optimality
carries existential actuality in its wake. The basic idea here is that an
optimality that pivots on rational intelligibility is a truth-maker in that
it affords—of and by itself—a sufficient reason for existential realiza-
tion.
As regards optimalism, let us consider the Principle of Optimality
as per

OPTIMALISM: If X is optimal, then X is actually so,

in relation to its converse:

OPTIMISM: If X is actually so, then X is optimal.

The former—optimalism—moves from value dominance to actuality;

the latter—optimism—moves from actuality to value dominance. It is
readily seen that these two theses are interrelated and interconnected.
After all, it is a virtual tautology that:

• It is optimal that the actual be optimal.

This being so, (2) will immediately follow from (1).

And as regards the converse—(1)’s following from (2)—suppose
that not-(1) so that something (Z) were optimal but not actual. Then
not-Z is actual. But now if (2) held, then not-Z would be optimal, con-
trary to Z’s postulated optimality. So not-(1) entails not-(2), and thus
by contraposition (2) entails (1). Q.E.D. And it follows from these
considerations that optimalism and optimism—construed in the pres-
ently operative sense—are effectively equivalent positions.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 62

Finally, as regards self-sustainingness, consider the questions of

why it should be that optimalism obtains.
Philosophers have usually sought to separate issues of fact from is-
sues of value. They generally note and emphasize the difference be-
tween the questions “Is it true that p?” and “Is it (or would it be) a
good thing that p?” But with Plato and throughout the Neo-Platonic
tradition there is an ongoing effort to fuse these factors that are so de-
cidedly disjoined in otherwise mainstream thinking. For optimalism
sees the final causation of benefit and value as productively effica-
tious. In the Platonic tradition it sees “the good” as existentially pro-
ductive and views reality as value-determined.
The Church Fathers were drawn to such a Neo-Platonism as a doc-
trine readily geared to theological considerations. For as regards the-
ism, note that the optimality principle provides for a direct pathway to
establishing the existence of God via the idea that it would, everything
considered, clearly be for the best if the world were the well-designed
product of a benevolent creator—that is, if God existed and functioned
in this role.
But it is also possible to set the Principle of Optimalism as self-
sustaining. On its basis the question “Why is it that optimalism ob-
tains?” is answered in the self-sustaining basis of the consideration
that this itself is something that is for the best.

NOTES
1
The prime spokesman for this line of thought within the Western philosophical tra-
dition was G. W. Leibniz. A present-day exponent is John Leslie in his Value and
Existence (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979). And also the present au-
thor’s The Riddle of Existence (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1984).
2
To make this work out, the value of a disjunction-alternative has to be fixed at the
value of its optimal member, lest the disjunctive “bundling” of a good alternative
with inferior rivals so operate as to eliminate it from competition.
3
See Julius Bergmann, “Wolff’s Lehre vom complementum possibilitatis,” Archiv
für systematische Philosophie, vol. 2 (1896), pp. 449–76.
63 OPTIMALISM AND THE AXIOLOGICAL TURN

NOTES
4
Any comprehensive exposition of the philosophy of Leibniz can be consulted on
these matters, including the present author’s The Philosophy of Leibniz (Eng-
lewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967).
5
The Leibnizian spirit of the sort of deliberations at issue here are manifest in his
comparison of God’s creative choice with certain games in which all the space on a
board are to be filled according to definite rules, but unless we do careful planning,
we find ourselves at the end blocked from the difficult spaces and compelled to
have more vacancies than we needed or wished to. Yet there is a definite rule by
which a maximum number of spaces can be filled in the surest way. (C. I.
Gerhardt, Die Philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, vol. VII (Berlin: Wei-
dermann, 1890), p. 303; L. E. Loemker, G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and
Letters (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), p. 487.)
6
If (contrary to fact) the quantity at issue were continuous with a range from 0 to 1,
we would have it that merit (M) is given by

M = variety x lawfulness = z x (1 – z) = z –z2

By elementary calculus this quantity is maximized when z = ½. In our example,

having #(O) be 4 or 5 is thus as close as we can get to the maximum.
7
For one thing, our optimal resolution is not unique, since its variant with X and O
interchanged will yield the same result as would a systematic row/column inter-
change that would result from looking at the box sideways. (Of course uniqueness
could be assured by additional stipulations—e.g., that there must be a minimum of
Xs.)
8
It might seem at first thought that a reality that emerges under the aegis of physico-
metaphysical values is cold-bloodedly indifferent to the welfare of its having popu-
lation. But this is in fact unlikely. For such an existential manifold by its very na-
ture is a manifold of (quasi-rational) order that is bound to be congenial to the crea-
turesand especially the intelligent creaturesthat evolve within it. (What we
have here is a position that is a hybrid crossing of Leibniz and Darwin.)
9
Other principles can also be self-substantiating, seeing that, for example, the Prin-
ciple of Pessimism (that the worst of possible alternatives is realized) also has this
feature. However all of them same optimalism lack features essential for [resent
purposes.
10
The operative perspective envisions a threefold order of necessity/possibility: the
logico-conceptual, the ontological or proto-physical, and the physical. It according-
ly resists the positivistic tendency of the times to dismiss or ignore that second, in-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 64

NOTES

termediate order of considerations. And this is only to be expected since people

nowadays tend to see this intermediate realm as predicated on value considerations,
a theme that is anathema to present-day scientism.
11
After all, there is no reason of logico-theoretical principle why propositions cannot
be self-certifying. Nothing vicious need be involved in self-substantiation. Think of
“Some statements are true” or “This statement stakes a particular rather than uni-
versal claim.”
Chapter Four

THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF

INTELLIGENCE

SYNOPSIS

(1) Optimalism is a metaphysical theory of existence-explanation that

pivots on an axiogenetic optimality principle. (2) By its very nature
this doctrine is self-supportive. (3) Such an approach is part of a
longstanding tradition of evaluative metaphysics. (4) The values at is-
sue in optimalism center on intelligence and intelligibility. (5) The
very course of cosmological history provides empirical evidentiation
for this. (6) It is important, however, to distinguish between produc-
tive optimality and process optimality, and also to distinguish between
optimality of process and optimality of product. Only a carefully con-
structed version of optimalism can lay claims to plausibility.

1. OPTIMALISM AS A SELF-SUBSTANTIATING PROJECT

A s the deliberations of Chapter 1 have indicated, answering the ul-

timate questions about the world’s existence and nature trans-
cends recourse to the actualities but requires dealing in possibilities.
And Chapter 3 has argued that this transcendence demands a shift
from fact to value, thereby accounting for what is in the reductive
terms of what is existence-worthy among the possibilities. The result-
ing perspective has it that a workable account of existence lies in an
optimalism which seeks to explain existence through a systematic
elimination of possibilities on the basis of evaluative considerations—
a procedure which ultimately accounts of existence on its being what
is for the best within the range of the possible.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 66

Such an optimalistic explanation rests on adopting what might be

called an axiogenetic optimality principle to the effect that value rep-
resents a decisive advantage in regard to realization: in the virtual
competition for existence among alternatives it is the comparatively
best that is bound to prevail.1 The upshot is an optimalistic doctrine
according to which things exist, and exist as they do, because this is
for the (metaphysically) best.
Ontological optimalism is closely related to optimism. The optimist
holds that “Whatever exists is for the best,” the optimalist maintains
the converse that “Whatever is for the best exists.” The two combine
to harmonize existence and optimality in recomposed equivalency.2

2. OPTIMALISM’S SELF-VALIDATION

Optimalism is deeply rationalistic. It sees the optimal as being that for

whose realization there is the best of reasons—that which would be
actual if rationality had it is own way.
What sorts of considerations can possibly provide for the justifica-
tory validation of optimalism? Why should it be that the Principle of
Optimality obtains? Why should what is for the best be actual? But
consider! To ask this question is to ask for a reason. It is already to
presume or presuppose the rationality of things, taking the stance that
what is so is and must be so for a reason. Once one poses the question
“Why should it be that nature has the feature F?” it is already too late
to raise the issue of nature’s rationality. In advancing that question the
matter at issue has already been tacitly conceded. Anyone who trou-
bles to ask for a reason why nature should have a certain feature is
thereby proceeding within a framework of thought where nature’s ra-
tionality—the amenability of its features to rational explanation—is
already presumed.
Ultimately the validation of optimalism lies in the very nature of
the principle itself. It is self-substantiating, seeing it is automatically
for the best that the best alternative should exist rather than an inferior
rival for whose realization reason can devise no equally powerful
case.3 But this is just one of its assets; it also offers significant sys-
temic advantages. For of the various plausible existential principles, it
67 THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE

transpires—in the end—that it is optimalism that offers the best avail-

able alternative.
The principle being, as it were, self-explanatory, and for this very
reason asking to ask for a different sort of explanation would be inap-
propriate. We must expect that any ultimate principle should explain
itself and cannot, in the very nature of things, admit of an external ex-
planation in terms of something altogether different. And the impetus
to realization inherent in authentic value lies in the very nature of val-
ue itself.
Yet what is to be the status of a Law of Optimality to the effect that
“whatever possibility is for the best is ipso facto the possibility that is
actualized.” It is certainly not a logico-conceptually necessary truth;
from the angle of theoretical logic it has to be seen as a contingent
fact—albeit one not about nature as such, but rather one about the
manifold of real possibility that underlies it. Insofar as necessary at
all it obtains as a matter of ontological rather than logico-conceptual
necessity, while the realm of possibility as a whole is presumably
constituted by considerations of logico-metaphysical necessity alone.
But the division of this realm into real vs. merely speculative possibil-
ities can hinge on contingent considerations: there can be logically
contingent laws of possibility even as there are logically contingent
laws of nature (i.e., of reality). “But if it is contingent, then surely it
must itself rest on some further explanation.” Granted. It itself pre-
sumably has an explanation, seeing that one can and should maintain
the Leibnizian Principle of Sufficient Reason to the effect that for
every contingent fact there is a reason why it is so rather than other-
wise.
The Law of Optimality thus has a raison d’être alright. But one that
lies in its own nature. For it is, in the final analysis, for the best that
the Law of Optimality should obtain—that the best of reasons speak
on its behalf. After all, there is no decisive reason why that explana-
tion has to be “deeper and different”—that is, no decisive reason why
the prospect of self-explanation has to be excluded at this fundamental
level. After all, we cannot go on putting the explanatory elephant on
the back of the tortoise on the back of the alligator ad infinitum: as Ar-
istotle already saw, the explanatory regress has to stop somewhere at
the “final” theoryone that is literally “self-explanatory.” And what
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 68

better candidate could there be than the Law of Optimality itself with
the result that the divisions between real and merely theoretical possi-
bilities is as it is (i.e., value based) because that itself is for the best?
We must expect that any ultimate principle should explain itself
and cannot, in the very nature of things, admit of an external explana-
tion in terms of something altogether different. And the impetus to re-
alization inherent in authentic value lies in the very nature of value it-
self. A rational person would not favor the inferior alternative; and
there is no reason to think that a rational reality would do so either.
After all, to achieve an adequate resolution of our ultimate question
the principle at work cannot rest on further extraneous considerations.
For the question of why the truth of things is what it actually is will
arise with respect to the principle itself, and if it is to resolve such
matters it must do so with respect to itself as well. It must, in short, be
self-sustaining and self-grounding. Otherwise the requisite ultimacy
will thus be achieved.
The question “Why optimalism?” splits into two decidedly distinct
parts, namely (1) “Why is it that optimalism obtains?” and (2) “Why
is it that we should accept optimalism’s obtaining?” These issues are,
of course, every bit as distinct as “Why did Booth assassinate Lin-
coln?” and “Why should we accept that Booth assassinated Lincoln?”
The former question seeks an existence for a fact, the latter asks for
the evidentiation of a judgment.
As already noted, the answer to the first question is straightforward.
Optimalism obtains because it is self-potentiating. It is the case that
what is for the best obtains because this itself is for the best. Optimal-
ism, in sum, obtains on its own self-sufficient footing. Why should
what is for the best exist? The answer lies in the very nature of the
principle itself. It is self-substantiating, seeing it is automatically for
the best that the best alternative should exist rather than an inferior ri-
val. Value is, or can be, an explanatory terminus: it can be regress
stopping and “final” by way of self-explanation in a way that causality
or purposiveness can never manage to be.
69 THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE

3. OPTIMALISM AND EVALUATIVE METAPHYSICS

Optimalism has it that even as truly rational people will operform

what they think is best (not only for themselves but ideally for every-
one concerned), so a rationally functioning reality will act so as to re-
alize what is actually for the best, everything considered that for
whose realization the best reasons obtain. There can be no good rea-
son for reality to function otherwise—a circumstance that, after all, is
inherent in the very idea of what a “good reason” is.
Optimalism has many theoretical advantages. For example, it is
conceivable, so one might contend, that the existence of the world—
that is to say, of a world—is a necessary fact while nevertheless its
nature (i.e., of which world) is contingent. And this would mean that
separate and potentially different answers would have to be provided
for the questions “Why is there anything at all?” and “Why is the
character of existence as is—why is it that this particular world ex-
ists?” However, an axiogenetic approach enjoys the advantage of ra-
tional economy in that it proceeds uniformly here. It provides a single
uniform rationale for both answers—namely that “this is for the best.”
It accordingly also enjoys the significant merit of providing for the ra-
tional economy of explanatory principles. For to ask for a different
sort of explanation would be inappropriate. We must expect that any
ultimate principle must explain itself and cannot, in the very nature of
things, admit of an external explanation in terms of something alto-
gether different. The impetus to realization inherent in authentic value
lies in the very nature of value itself. To reemphasize: a rational per-
son would not favor the inferior alternative and there is no good rea-
son why a rational reality should do so either.
But whence does the good obtain its creative impetus? Simply as
part of the world’s pervasive lawfulness. What is at issue, however, is
not a law not (as yet) of nature but rather a proto-law of naturizing.
Whence does mass get its power to convert to energy, to deflect space
so as to engender gravity. That’s just how things work. (And why
should they work that way?—Just because that’s for the best.)
There is nothing all that new and original in the idea that value
(merit, being “for the best”) exerts on existential impetus. There are
innumerable traces of this line of thought in Plato and Aristotle, in
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 70

Neo-Platonism, in Christian scholasticism, and indeed in some con-

temporary thinkers as well (e.g., John Leslie). What is new in the pre-
sent discussion is only the web of argumentation by which this ancient
idea of axogenesis is being supported.
From its earliest days, metaphysics has been understood also to in-
clude “axiology,” the evaluative and normative assessment of the
things that exist. Already with Aristotle the aim of the enterprise was
not just to describe or characterize, but to grade (appraise, rank) mat-
ters in point of their inherent value. Such metaphysical evaluation has
two cardinal features: (i) it is genuine evaluation that involves some
authentic concept of greater or lesser value and (ii) the mode of value
involved is sui generis and thus not ethical, aesthetic, utilitarian, etc.
Accordingly, it evaluates types of things or conditions of things exist-
ing in nature (not acts or artifacts) with a view to their intrinsic merit
(not simply their “value-for” man or anything else). The very possibil-
ity of this axiological enterprise accordingly rests on the acceptance
of distinctly metaphysical values—as opposed to ethical (right/wrong)
or aesthetic (beautiful/ugly) or practical (useful/unuseful) ones.
The paternity of evaluative metaphysics in philosophical practice
can unhesitatingly be laid at Plato’s door, but as a conscious and de-
liberate philosophical method it can be ascribed to Aristotle. In the
Physics and the De Anima we find him at work not merely at classify-
ing the kinds of things there are in the world, but in ranking and grad-
ing them in terms of relative evaluations. Above all, his preoccupation
in the Metaphysics with the ranking schematism of prior/posterior—
for which see especially chap. 11 of Bk. 5 (Delta), and chap. 8 of Bk.
9 (Theta)—is indicative of Aristotle’s far-reaching concern with the
evaluative dimension of metaphysical inquiry.4 It was thus a sound in-
sight into the thought-framework of the great Stagirite that led the an-
ti-Aristotelian writers of the Renaissance, and later preeminently Des-
cartes and Spinoza, to attack the Platonic/Aristotelian conception of
the embodiment of value in natural and the modern logical positivist
opponents of metaphysics to attach the stigma of illegitimacy to all
evaluative disciplines. Nevertheless, despite such attacks, evaluative
metaphysics has continued as an ongoing part of the Western philo-
sophical tradition as continued by such thinkers as Leibniz, Kant, He-
gel, and Whitehead, all of whom envision world-systems where some
71 THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE

things have greater value than others.

A prime example of this methodological approach in recent philos-
ophy is G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica.5 For Moore taught that the
realm of ethical values is not self-contained but rather roots in a mani-
fold of metaphysical values. His celebrated “method of absolute isola-
tion” invites us to make comparative evaluations of two hypothetical
worlds supposed to be alike in all relevant respects except that in one
of them some factor is exhibited which is lacking in the other. Thus
Moore argues for the intrinsic value of natural beauty (i.e., its value
even apart from human contemplation) by the argument:

[A hypothetical] beautiful world would be better still, if there were hu-

man beings in it to contemplate and enjoy its beauty. But that admission
makes nothing against my point. If it be once admitted that the beautiful
world in itself is better than the ugly, then it follows, that however
many beings may enjoy it, and however much better their enjoyment
may be than it is itself, yet its mere existence adds something to the
goodness of the whole: it is not only a means to our end, but also itself
a part thereof. (Op. cit., § 50)

To espouse the project of evaluative metaphysics is thus to give

Moore the right as against Henry Sidgwick’s thesis that: “If we con-
sider carefully such permanent results as are commonly judged to be
good, other than qualities of human beings, we find nothing that, on
reflection, appears to possess this quality of goodness out of relation
to human existence, or at least to some consciousness or feeling.”6
(There is of course the trivial fact if “we” do the considering, “we” do
the evaluating. But the point to be borne in mind is that this need not
be done from a humanly parochial let alone an idiosyncratically per-
sonal and “subjective” standpoint.)
Sidgwick to the contrary notwithstanding, man is neither the meas-
ure nor necessarily even the measurer of all things in the evaluative
domain. Things no more become valuable because we think them to
be so than they are intelligible or efficacious because we deem them
so. Along these lines, as Leibniz already saw, the value of an existen-
tial domain is determined by an optimal balance of rational desiderata
such as procedural order (uniformity, symmetry) and phenomenal va-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 72

riety (richness, plenitude)—duly reflected in such cognitive features

as intelligibility and interest. It is its (presumed) gearing to an inher-
ently positive value which like economy or elegance, is plausibly
identifiable as physically relevant and as such subject to scientific in-
quiry, that establishes optimalism as a reasonable proposition and ul-
timately prevents the thesis “optimalism obtains because that’s for the
best” from declining into vacuity. To be sure, this means that optimal-
ism is not so much a principle as a program.

4. THE ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE

Optimalism obviously presupposes a manifold of suitable value pa-

rameters, invoking certain rationably-friendly and yet physically rele-
vant features (symmetry, economy, uniformity, harmony, or the like)
as merit-manifesting factors. And here optimization at issue is—and
should be—geared to a “scientifically reputable” theory of some suit-
able kind, coordinate with a complex of physically relevant factors of
a suitable kind. After all, many a possible world will maximize a
strange “value” of some sort (confusion and nastiness included). It is
its (presumed) gearing to a positive value which like economy sym-
metry, or stability is plausibly identifiable as physically relevant—
contingently identifiable as such subject to scientific inquiry—that es-
tablishes optimalism as a reasonable proposition and ultimately pre-
vents the thesis “optimalism obtains because that’s for the best” from
declining into vacuity. But this essential factor can and should—as we
have seen—be provided in terms of the rational order that is maximal-
ly beneficial to the interests of intelligence.
In seeking to furnish an explanation of the why of the world’s state
of things we presuppose that natural reality meets the salient demands
of explanatory intelligence. So if success in this venture can be
achieved at all—as inquiring intelligence demands it must—then we
might as well assume from the outset that reality is so constituted as to
meet this demand, and thereby so constituted as though it were the
product of an intelligent agent or agency. This being so, it would seem
that the most plausible consideration for a holistic explanatory will be
one to which any such theory must, if adequate, have to commit itself,
73 THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE

viz. that the real is rational in exactly the manner that an intelligence-
geared optimalism envisions.
In sum, intelligence-geared optimalism affords a promising pro-
spect for the explanatory resolution of holistic/synoptic questions be-
cause if any adequate and cogent grand explanatory theory is available
at all, this cannot but mean that reality is so constituted as to merit the
needs of inquiring intelligence.
In the end, then, there are basically two considerations that speak
for the acceptance of optimalism: its ability to address ultimate ques-
tions positively in providing for a plausible explanatory transit form
possibility to actuality; its ability to do this in a way that meets the ac-
tuality-abstractive demands of the situation, its capacity for self-
substantiation. After all, in facing a choice among alternatives—be it
in practical or in cognitive matters—we intelligent humans will, inso-
far as rational, opt for the best (most rationally cogent superior) of the
alternatives. And an intelligence congenial reality is bound to do like-
wise.

5. EVIDENTIATING OPTIMALISM

So much for the ontological side of why optimalism obtains. But there
of course yet remains the epistemological matter of its evidentiation—
of why it is that one would be well advised to accept optimalism. This,
of course, is something else again.
To obtain evidence for optimalism we will have to look at the
world itself: the substantiation for optimalism will have to root in our
knowledge of natural reality. And in this regard, optimalism, if tenable
at all, will have to be tenable on at least roughly scientific grounds.
And here the best evidence we could expect to have for optimalism is
that emergence in the universe of intelligent beings able to understand
the modus operandi of the universe itself: intelligent beings who can
create thought-models of nature. For optimalism’s evidentiation, then
we must look to a universe that is user-friendly to cogency (intelli-
gent) being in affording an environment that is congenial to the best
interest of intelligence.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 74

And so we confront the question “Is the world as we have it user-

friendly for intelligence?” And the answer here would seem to be an
emphatic affirmative with a view to the following considerations:

• the fact that the world’s realities proceed and develop under the
aegis of natural laws: that it is a manifold of lawful order whose
doings exhibit a self-perpetuating stability of processual function;

• the fact of a course of cosmic development that has seen an ever-

growing scope for manifolds of lawful order providing step by
step the materials for the development front of the laws of phys-
ics, their theme of chemistry, their biology, their sociology, etc.;

• the fact that intelligent beings have in fact emerged—that nature’s

modus operandi has possibilized and facilitated the emergence of
intelligence;

• the fact of an ever-deepening comprehension/penetration of na-

ture’s ways on the part of intelligent beings—their ongoing ex-
pansion and deepening of their underlying of the world’s events
and processes.

In sum, a substantial body of facts regarding the nature of the universe

speaks on behalf of an intelligence-geared optimalism. Evidence is
certainly not lacking here.

6. COMPLICATIONS OF OPTIMALITY

Optimality is something that can also be judged at two levels of delib-

eration, namely as regards the laws and processes at issue (nomic op-
timalism) and as regards the particular events that occur (phenomenal
optimalism). And the results that ensue here need not necessarily co-
incide. In particular, in a world with certain systemically positive fea-
tures—free will and contingency specifically above all—the series of
actual occurrences need not themselves always be optimal. Even as in
tennis the player with “the best game” need not win every point, so in
the universe with the processually best game need not always produce
75 THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE

the best possible result in the flow of occurrences. And from the angle
of the present considerations, process trumps product. The optimalism
being endorsed here is of the process-oriented variety. For a further
important distinction must be drawn at this point, namely that between

• product optimalism which looks to providing for realization of

the best possible result and

• process optimalism which looks to providing for a process that

maximizes the chances of achieving the best possible result.

A process optimalism is a doctrine to the effect not that what is best

exists, but rather what is for the best exists. And this is—clearly—
something quite different from product optimalism.
In fact, an intelligence-geared optimalism with respect to a world
containing free agents of finite and thereby imperfect capability in
matters intellectual and moral represents an optimality of process that
need not and will not involve an optimality of product. And in view of
this the problem of how evil can enter into the best possible world be-
comes tractable, exactly because the best possible in point of process
need not (and really cannot) involve absolute optimality in point of
product.
Intelligence-geared optimalism as here understood is directed to the
condition that makes life for intelligent beings in the first instance
possible, and in the second rewarding and pleasant. In principle, such
a theory would admit two distinct versions:

• Distributive (partitative) optimalism: Everything—every par-

ticular feature and facet of existing things—is for the best.

• Collective (holistic) optimalism: The overall sum-total of exist-

ing things—taken comprehensively and synoptically all-in-all—
is for the best.

The presently envisioned version of optimalism takes the latter form

because for rather obvious reasons the former is not really practica-
ble—among them its essential unrealism. For a sensible optimalism
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 76

has to focus upon the whole. It is not actually feasible to maximize the
beauty of every square inch of a large canvas if one’s aim is the reali-
zation of the overall beauty of a large canvas. Not every sentence of a
splendid story can or need itself be a thing of glory.
And on this basis the presently envisioned optimalism sees the aim
of the creative enterprise in terms of the utilitarian goal of the greatest
good of the greatest number. On this perspective, reality is in the final
instance concerned for the genus of intelligent beings, in the second
instance its species (e. g., humans), and in the third and final instance
its individuals. And it should be understood that in the larger scheme
of things the greater good of the greater number overall may well re-
quire the realization of a lesser good for some—so that, in principle,
realizing that larger good of the whole may well involve settling for a
lesser benefit for some of its constituents.
The point is that, in cosmology as in statecraft, where optimality is
concerned, systemic considerations can trump anomalous negativities
of detail. For example, a systemic whole that provides its agents with
free choices will outrank one without these features even if it involves
occasional negativities that would not otherwise exist. A superior re-
sult overall may well be available only when one tolerates some infe-
rior details—some localized less-than-ideal negativities that must be
taken in stride for the benefit of the greater good.
As these deliberations indicate, optimalism is a complex doctrine
that calls for a due heed of various distinctions and interpretations. For
only a carefully constructed version of optimalism can lay a reasona-
ble claim to plausibility.

NOTES
1
The prime spokesman for this line of thought within the Western philosophical tra-
dition was G. W. Leibniz and John Leslie is among its present-day exponents. See
also the present author’s The Riddle of Existence (Lanham MD: University Press of
America, 1984).
2
Optimalism is closely related to optimism. The optimist holds that “Whatever ex-
ists is for the best,” the optimalist maintains the converse that “Whatever is for the
best exists.” However, when we are dealing with exclusive and exhaustive alterna-
tives the two theses come to the same thing. For if one of the alternatives A, A1, …
77 THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE

NOTES

An must be the case, when if what is realized is for the best it follows automatically
that the best is realized (and conversely).
3
As noted above, other principles can also be self-substantiating, albeit not in a way
that meets present purpose.
4
His willingness to subscribe to teleological/axiological explanation is clearly at-
tested by Aristotle’s account of the rationale of the continuity of organic existence:
“For since some existing things are eternal … while others are capable both of be-
ing and of not being, and since the good … is always accordingly to its own nature
a cause of the better in things … for these reasons there is generation of animals.”
(De Generatione Animalium, 731b24–31).
5
Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1903. See in particular §§ 50, 55, 57,
112–113.
6
Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics (London and New York: Macmillan, 1874),
Bk. I, Chap. ix, § 4.
Chapter Five

DEFENDING OPTIMALISM

SYNOPSIS

(1) Optimalism does not require value to exercise a productive impe-

tus. (2) The world’s imperfection is no objection to optimalism. (3)
Optimalism is not defeated by the absence of maximality. (4) Optimal-
ism is not a metaphysical necessitarianism. (5) Optimalism has a de-
cidedly pessimistic side.

1. THE PROBLEM OF HOW VALUE CAN HAVE

EXPLANATORY EFFICACY

A seeming obstacle to optimalism looms in the question: “But how

can value possibly exert a causally productive influence?” And
the answer to this good question is that it does not do so. It has to be
reemphasized that—as already noted above—the role of value must be
seen not as operating productively within the sphere of actuality, but
rather as functioning reductive within the realm of possibility. What
value conditions do is not to create anything (i.e., productively engen-
der its realization). Their modus operandi is not causal but normative:
their role is to block or preclude certain theoretically available possi-
bilities from realizability. They serve an entirely restrictive function
and only manage to preclude certain theoretical possibilities from
qualifying as ontological (potentially achievable) possibilities. At this
stage we contemplate a tripartite hierarchy of (increasingly substan-
tive) possibilities: logical, ontological and physical subject to the con-
trol of logic, of axiology and of physics, respectively. It is thus at the
middle level of ontological possibilities that axiology does its work.
The operative impetus of optimality thus does not express itself by
way of causality in the realm of the real but rather by way of a deter-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 80

mination in the realm of the genuinely possible—that is, of the meta-

physically rather than logically possible. And this metaphysical possi-
bility should be seen as constraining the most fundamental laws of
physics, the most basic of which would emerge as invariant with re-
spect to those metaphysical possibilities.
Optimalism accordingly represents a doctrine of “final causes” in
Aristotle’s sense. But its axiotropism is emphatically not a causal the-
ory in the nowadays standard sense of efficient causation. It proceeds
not by production but by elimination.
The overall account accoridngly runs as follows: Nature—physical
reality as we have it—represents the actualization of certain possibili-
ties. But underlying this existential condition of affairs is the operation
of a prior sub- or metaphysical principle, operative within the wider
domain of logical possibility, and dividing this domain into disjoint
sectors of “real” and “purely theoretical” possibility. To put it very
figuratively, logical possibilities are involved in a virtual struggle for
existence in which the axiologically best win out so as to become real
possibilities. Specifically, when there are (mutually exclusive) alterna-
tives that are possible “in theory,” nevertheless none will be a “real”
or “ontological” possibility for realization as actual or as true if some
other alternative is superior to it. The availability of a better alterna-
tive disqualifies its inferiors from qualifying as ontologically availa-
ble—as real—that is, metaphysical—possibilities. And so whenever
there is a uniquely best alternative, then this alternative is ipso facto
realized as actual or true.
At this point a skeptical reader may well ask: “Given a spectrum of
possibility with a tripartite structure such as (1) (2) (3), what would be
the difference between an elimination that excludes the A of actuality
from compartment 3 and thereby impels it to the two other compart-
ments and a magnetic-style attraction that that causes A to move 1-or-
2-wise and thereby out of compartment 3? Is the effect not the same
either way?”
And this point is well taken—as far as it goes. But it overlooks
something important. The fact is that an attractive force involves a
causal agency of some sort. Possibility exclusions on the other hand
canthe sheer unavailability of alternativessimply root in “the gen-
eral modus operandi” of things without any reference to causal agen-
81 DEFENDING OPTIMALISM

cy. Consider an analogy. Suppose that a society exhibits a suicide rate

of 1.2 per 1000 per annum during a certain era of its existence. No
positive force is at work in constraining it to meet its quota of sui-
cides—no identifiable cause engenders this aggregate result. And
while it is effectively impossible to have a suicideless year, this lies in
“the nature of things” generally and not in the potency of some sui-
cide-impelling power or force. Again, more than 5 % of the letters on
the first page of tomorrow’s Times newspaper will be E’s. But no
force or power compels this effect. And while it is literally impossible
for no E’s to occur there and “the nature of the situation” precludes
this prospect, there is no force of attraction to constrain the presence
of E’s. It is inevitable that there be more E’s than Z’s but this result is
not the product of any power or force. This result is not produced by
some ad hoc force or agency or power—it is simply a feature of how
things work in this context.
In explaining why physical objects and events exist we must indeed
invoke causes and effects. But the fundamental laws of nature them-
selves do not “exist” as causally produced products—they just obtain.
Now when laws obtain, there is, no doubt, a reason for their obtaining
(an axiological reason, as we ourselves see it). But this reason can pre-
sumably be provided by an explanatory principle that need not carry
us into the order of efficient causality through the motivations of an
agent. To insist upon asking how values are able to function causally
in law-realization is simply to adopt an inappropriate model for the
processes involved. Value explanation just is not causal: values do not
function in the order of efficient causality at all and so does not the
Law of Optimality yield those results via the mysterious attractive
power of optimal possibilities but because suboptimal possibilities are
excluded through a displacement by their superior rivals which simply
preempts their place in possibility space. Axiogenetic theory has it
that even as the presence of light displaces darkness so does the avail-
ability of better alternatives preclude the very possibility of any inferi-
or so-called alternatives and require the intervention of a productive
agent or agency.
And so in essence this line of reply concedes that value does not
engender existence in the mode of efficient causations and that it
would indeed be rather mysterious if values were asked to play a
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 82

causal role in regard to laws. But this is to be seen as irrelevant. The

real point is that while value does not efficiently cause existence, it
nevertheless explains it, exactly because causal explanation is not the
only sort of explanation there is. And so the fact that axiology does
not provide such an explanation is not an occasion for appropriate
complaint. It does not stop value explanations from being explana-
tions. They present perfectly good answers to “Why is something-or-
other so?” type questions. It is just that in relation to laws, values play
only an explanatory role though possibility elimination and not a
causally productive role though actual creation. And this is no defect
because a productive process is simply not called for.
And so, while axiological explanations fail to address a question for
which design explanations have an answer—namely the causal ques-
tion “How do values operate productively so as to bring particular
laws to actualization?”—this reflects no demerit. For as has been
stressed repeatedly this question is simply inappropriate in the axio-
logical setting. Values don’t “operate” in the causal order at all. They
function only—and quite inefficiently—as delimiting constraints with-
in the manifold of possibility. The issue of a specifically causal effi-
cacy simply does not arise with axiological explanation.
What we have here, then, is not the operation of some rather myste-
rious force or agency but the preclusion (or rarefaction) of certain
(theoretical) possibilities owing to the operation of natural law: a
combination of the space of possibility from a wider range of hypo-
thetical possibility to a narrow range of mimic possibility under the
aegis of lawful principles—and optimality principle in the present
case. (Here “direct” preempts the prospect of a deeper explanation in
terms of further principles relating to the operation of the powers or
forces of some agent or agency.) The point is that the regress of ex-
planatory principles must have a stop and that it is here—with axiolo-
gy—that we reach a natural terminus by way of self-explanation. The
long and short of it is that axio-ontology can be autonomous and
nomically self-sufficient: it does not need to be seen as based in the
operative power of some productive force or power or agency.
However, if such an axiogenetic explanation is to work, then since
there is only one real world the manifold of “real possibilities” must
ultimately be reduced to one. That is, a series of successively operable
83 DEFENDING OPTIMALISM

value considerations must reduce the manifold of “theoretical possibil-

ities” more and more restrictively until at last, as with the little Indians
of the story, there remains but a single one. And that one is, in a very
real sense, necessitated: it is, so to speak, “constrained by value.” The
crux of the matter is that the Principle of Optimality functions in the
domain of possibility and does so in a way that is not productive but
eliminative.

2. THE IMPERFECT WORLD OR “POLLYANNA” OBJECTION

IN THE LIGHT OF ARROW’S THEOREM

Is optimalism not defeated by the objection: If it were the case that

value explains existence, then why isn’t the world altogether perfect
in every regard?
Does not reality’s all too evident imperfection not constitute a deci-
sive roadblock to optimalism? For if optimal alternatives were always
realized would not the world be altogether perfect in every regard?
Not at all! For what is at issue here is optimality on the whole and
overall. And the best achievable result for a whole will, in various re-
alistic conditions require a less-than-perfect outcome for the parts. A
game with multiple participants cannot be won by every one of them.
A society of many members cannot put each of them at the top of the
heap. In an engaging and suspenseful plot things cannot go with unal-
loyed smoothness for everybody in every character.
Moreover, an object that is of any value at all is subject to a com-
plex of values. For it is the fundamental fact of axiology that every
evaluation-admitting object has a plurality of evaluative features.
Consider an automobile. Its parameters of merit clearly include such
factors as speed, reliability, repair infrequency, safety, operating
economy, aesthetic appearance, road-handle ability. But in actual
practice such features are interrelated. It is unavoidable that they trade
off against one another: more of A means less of B. It would be ridicu-
lous to have a supersafe car with a maximum speed of two miles per
hour. It would be ridiculous to have a car that is inexpensive to oper-
ate but spends three-fourths of the time in a repair shop.
One of the most portentous developments of modern economics is
Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem demonstrating that the indi-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 84

vidual preferences of a group cannot be satisfactorily combined to

yield a coherently amalgamated collective preference measure for the
community as a whole, all individuals duly included. This finding
shattered a doctrine of the school of “welfare economics” and rocked
the landscape of economics to an extent that earned its author a Nobel
prize. But this argument is readily transposal to show that the several
evaluatively preferential features of a single object cannot be satisfac-
torily combined to yield a coherently amalgamated collection prefer-
ence measure for the item as a whole, with all value aspects duly con-
sidered.
The long and short of it is that there just is no way in which the
preferability situation for the community at large can be aligned to the
preferences of its individuals. And so, if the best interests of the com-
munity—as-a-whole—are to be served satisfactorily, then some of its
individuals must pay a price for it. And this generic situation that
characterizes the economic situation of a society in relation to its indi-
viduals also is played out once more at the larger cosmological level.
Here too it lies in the inexorable logic of the situation that some indi-
viduals must suffer in the interests of the general good. For optimizing
the whole need not necessarily optimize the parts. But the converse
holds as well. Optimizing the parts need not optimize the whole. Sepa-
rately splendid ingredients need not bake conjointly into a splendid
cake, nor separately splendid episodes combine into a superb story.
Combining the nicest sentences in the grammatically most elegant
structures will not produce a splendid story. The best-contrived local
arrangements need not issue in the best overall result for the compre-
hensive whole.
But what then of the victims who have drawn the short sticks in the
lottery of existence and accordingly bear the brunt of those unavoida-
ble negativities? What can be said of them? Is it fair, is it just?
The answer here cannot be but a loud and resounding NO!
But justice and fairness—important though they individually are—
are simply two goods among many. The arrangements of life afford a
good many assets and desiderata: not justice and fairness alone but al-
so love and friendship, pleasure and hope, etc. One simply cannot
have it all ways at once. In any such setting of competing and conflict-
ing multiple desiderata some of these have to be traded off against
85 DEFENDING OPTIMALISM

others. The spaciousness of one’s house competes with the convenient

accessibility of its rooms. We cannot eliminate the monotony of the
road’s straightness save by making the journey longer.
In any multicriterial setting, “absolute” perfection is simply an im-
possibility. Perfection—maximum realization of every value dimen-
sion all-at-once—is simply unrealizable because of the interaction of
parameters: in designing a car you cannot maximize both safety and
economy of operation. Analogously the world is not absolutely per-
fect—perfect in every respect—because this sort of absolute perfec-
tion is in principle impossible of realization. And of course it makes
no sense to ask for the impossible. Accordingly, the objection “If val-
ue is the key to existence, the world would be perfect” collapses. All
that will follow on axiogenetic principles is that the world will exem-
plify an optimal interactive balance of the relevant natural factors. An
optimally realizable best need not be “perfect” in the naive sense of
that term which unrealistically demands maximality in every relevant
respect. Leibniz had the right approach here: optimalism does not
maintain that the world is absolutely perfect but just that it be the best
that is possible—that it outranks the available alternatives.
It is an inherently inevitable feature of the nature of things—an in-
evitable “fact of life”—that value realization is always a matter of
balance, of trade-offs, of compromise. The reality of it is that value
factors always compete in matters of realization. A concurrent maxi-
mum in every dimension is simply unavoidable in this (or indeed any
other realistically conceivable) world. All that one can ever reasona-
bly ask for is an auspicious combination of values.
“But—really!—how can sensible people possibly embrace the
conception that the inherently best alternative is thereby automatically
the actual (true) one. Does not the world’s all too evident imperfec-
tion stand decisively in the way here?”
The matter is not all that simple, however. For the issue is going to
pivot on the question of what “inherently best” means. If it means
“best” from that angle of your desires, or of my interests, or even of
the advantage of Homo sapiens in general, then clearly the thesis loses
its strong appeal. For it to be plausible, that “best” had best be con-
strued as looking to the condition of existence-as-a-whole rather than
one particular privileged individual or group. Optimality in this con-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 86

text is clearly not going to be a matter of the affective welfare or

standard of living of some particular sector of existence; it is going to
have to be a metaphysical good of some synoptic and rather abstract
sort that looks to the condition of the whole. Accordingly the objec-
tion “is not optimalism simply too Pollyanna-ish to be plausible” can
be met effectively. The optimalist need not simply shut his eyes to the
world’s all too evident parochially considered imperfections. For what
the optimalist can and should do is to insist that because of the intri-
cate inherent interrelationships among value parameters an “imperfec-
tion” in this or that respect must be taken in stride because they have
to be there for an optimal overall combination of value to be realized.
There is, in fact, a point of view from which optimalism is a position
that is not so much optimistic as deeply pessimistic. For it holds that
even the best of possible arrangements is bound to exhibit very real
imperfections from the angle of narrowly parochial concerns or inter-
ests. And as regards the sort of value that indeed is at issue, this is
something that will all be dealt with in some detail below.
And this sets the stage for the handling of our present problem in
terms of what might be called a desideratum compromise. For while
justice and fairness are indeed prime desiderata, they are not the only
ones. One could not—should not—want to insist that fiat justitia ruat
caelum. The only reasonable approach is one that looks to a proper
balance among desiderata—a rational economy of positivities. And if
there is to be any reconciling this world’s injustices and unfairnesses
with the idea that its existence should not be deemed a total misfor-
tune will—seemingly—have to take the form not of denying its goal
imperfections but in acknowledging that these too are part of the una-
voidable costs requisite for the realization of a larger good.
Moreover, there are generally multiple parameters of desirability
that function competitively so that some can only be enhanced at the
cost of other—even as to make a car speedier we must sacrifice oper-
ating cost.
With an automobile, the parameters of merit clearly includes such
factors as speed, reliability, repair infrequency, safety, operating
economy, aesthetic appearance, road-handle ability. But in actual
practice such features are interrelated. It is unavoidable that they trade
off against one another: more of A means less of B. It would be ridicu-
87 DEFENDING OPTIMALISM

lous to have a supersafe car with a maximum speed of two miles per
hour. It would be ridiculous to have a car that is inexpensive to oper-
ate but spends three-fourths of the time in a repair shop. Invariably,
perfection—an all-at-once maximization of every value dimension—is
inherently unrealizable because of the inherent interaction of evalua-
tive parameters. In designing a car you cannot maximize both safety
and economy of operation, and analogously, the world is not, and can-
not possibly be, absolutely perfect—perfect in every respect—because
this sort of absolute perfection is in principle impossible of realization.
In such cases we have a teeter-totter, see-saw relationship that
might be characterized as desideratum complementarity.1
What we have here is a relation of competition and tradeoff among
modes of merit akin to the complementarity relation of quantum phys-
ics. The holistic and systemic optimality of a complex whole will re-
quire some of its constituent constituent comportments to fall short of
what would be content for it if abstractly considered in detached isola-
tion. This suffices to sideline the objection: “If optimalism obtains,
why isn’t the world absolutely perfect?”

Display 1
ARISTOTLE’S GOLDEN MEAN

Virtue Too little Too much

proper self-esteem self-contempt self-aggrandizement

financial prudence spend-thriftiness miserliness
bravery cowardice foolhardiness

The phenomenon of desideratum complementarity is also illustrated

by the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean. Display 1 illustrates
Aristotle’s idea of virtue as a balance between vices. Here we have a
situation of the following structure. There are two vices V1 and V2 that
stand in conjugate opposition. And in “going to extremes” in avoiding
one vice (self-contempt, say) too extensively we fall into the grasp of
the other (self-aggrandizement, say). And so here the two virtues at is-
sue with vice-avoidance are accordingly locked into a situation of de-
sideratum complementarity as per
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 88

feasible arrangements
V1-avoidance

V2-avoidance

Too much of the one virtue means too little of the other, and the
search for a “happy medium” to balance matters out between the two
is exactly the Aristotelian quest for the golden mean.
The interactive complexity of value is crucial here. For it is the
fundamental fact of axiology that every object has a plurality of eval-
uative features some of which will in some respects stand in conflict.
And consequently in any multicriterial setting “absolute” perfection is
simply an impossibility.
And of course it makes no sense to ask for the impossible. It is an
inherently inevitable features of the nature of things—a logico-
conceptually inevitable “fact of life”—that with the complexity of a
world at issue, value realization will always be a matter of balance, of
trade-offs, of compromise because value factors always compete in
matters of realization. Concurrent maximization in every relevant pos-
itivity is simply unavailable in this or indeed any other realistically
conceivable world. All that one can ever reasonably ask for is an aus-
picious combination of values—an overall optimal profile.
Accordingly, the objection “If value is the key to existence, the
world would be perfect” collapses. All that will follow on axiogenetic
principles is that the world will exemplify an optimal interactive bal-
ance of the relevant natural factors. For thanks to the inevitable inter-
connections of things in a complex lawful manifold the only possible
way to achieve a diminution of negativity at one point requires a more
than compensatory argumentation of negativity at another. All manner
of imperfections can indeed be there: it is just a matter of there being
fewer of them, on balance, than is the case with any of the other
available alternatives. And it is, after all, the best possible world that
is to be at issue.
89 DEFENDING OPTIMALISM

3. THE POSSIBLE TOPLESSNESS OBJECTION

Since Leibniz’s day two formalistic objections to the idea of a best

possible world have been made. One, which might be called the Buri-
dan’s Ass objection, turns on the idea of a tie among several distinct
maximally equimeritorious alternatives. The other, which I shall dub
the Possible Toplessness objection, turns on the prospect that any
possible world might be surpassed by yet another more meritorious
alternative, so that there just is no best possibility at all.2
However, among distinct maxima, the problem is not all that seri-
ous. For in the final analysis this does not invalidate optimalism ex-
actly because there is no difference in point of merit here. With di-
verse maxima the specific outcome may well just not matter. The cru-
cial point with optimization lies in securing an alternative that is as
good as any and cannot be improved upon.
A variant of the no-unique optimum objection turns on the multi-
dimensionality of value—the prospect that since there are different
types and aspects of merit it will transpire that alternative A1 is supe-
rior in point of merit m1 and A2 in point of m2 with no one alternative
winning out overall. This potential difficulty has to be met through
the considerations, already contemplated above, that while perfection-
superiority in point of every applicable sort of merit—is indeed im-
possible, that what really matters for optimization is a balance an
overall combination of features of merit that realized the best overall
profile. Accordingly, the multidimensionality of values will not—or
need not—stand in the way of realizing one particular alternative as
best (or at least as not bettered by yet another) when considered on the
whole, with all those value disparities taken into appropriate account.
A further potential difficulty seems to arise in the form of a possi-
bility range that is evaluatively “topless”—that is, which does not
have any alternatives that are optimal of not being bettered by all-in-
all any other3 so that every alternative is surpassed by yet another that
is better. Should this happen, then it would seem to be fatal for opti-
malism because with such a range there just is no optimum and there-
fore no possibility of optimization.
Here optimalism must take the bull by the horns. Insofar as situa-
tions can be imagined which—like that of a “topless” infinite alterna-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 90

tive spectrum—could raise difficulties for the theory, it could and

should simply be seen as part and parcel of optimalism to maintain
that such situations will not actually arise: that a reality that is benign
in this regard as in others will exclude such a problematic situation.
As optimalism sees it, the very fact that toplessness conflicts with op-
timalism ejects this threat from the range of real possibilities.
There is, moreover, another way of addressing the issue. For con-
sider the pivotal question:

Why cannot there be several different and distinct <lines, surfaces,

worlds> that are as <straight, flat, meritorious> as such a thing can
possibly be?

The answer is that to be a <line, surface, world> that is as <straight,

flat, meritorious> as such a thing can possibly be is just exactly what it
is to be a <straight line, plane, our-way-described world>. There just
are no different alternatives here because being

• perfectly straight,

• perfectly flat,

• optimally meritorious

is just exactly what leads a <line, surface, world> to qualify as consti-

tuting <a straight line, a plane, a world answering to the actual one’s
description>. With each of those features <straightness, flatness,
world-optimality> there is a natural terminus in a unique result with
response to maximality/optimality. There thus are just no other possi-
ble worlds different from this one that answers to maximal merit just
as there is no other surface other than the plane that answers to maxi-
mal flatness.
To be sure, when a line is not altogether straight a yet straighter one
can always be found. And when a surface is not altogether flat, a yet
flatter one can always be found. This sort of toplessness has to be
acknowledged: suboptimality can always be improved on. But that
does not argue against the uniqueness of maximality. After all, certain
91 DEFENDING OPTIMALISM

sorts of descriptors—maximally straight curves or maximally flat sur-

faces—are such that by their very nature must issue in a single result.
And—as Leibniz already insisted—“maximally meritorious possible
world” stands with them in this regard. Accordingly, the Toplessness
Objection to a world-optimality thesis is, in the final analysis, not real-
ly a telling objection at all.

4. THE BLOCK UNIVERSE OBJECTION

Does optimalism not bespeak a Spinozistic determinism? Will it not

engender a “block universe” whose every detail is deterministically
necessitated? By no means. The necessitation at issue relates to the
why of the universe and not to its what. It is not only conceivable but
presumably actual that “the best possible world” whose existence is
axiologically necessitated by value considerations is one which in its
internal mode of functioning provides for the contingencies of chance
and free agency. The necessitation at issue here must emphatically not
be construed as a matter of occurrence-necessitation as this is stand-
ardly construed in metaphysical deliberations about causal determin-
ism.
The objection has long been made—especially in relation to the
ideas of Leibniz—that an optimalistic approach is omni-deterministic
and necessitarian in constraining the range of possibility to one single
unique resolution that renders reality’s status quo unavoidably inevi-
table. This result, verging on fatalism, is something Leibniz himself
strove valiantly to avert. Still, can any version of optimalism really
avoid disintegrating into determinism of a block universe where eve-
rything is inexorably necessitated? After all, if the theory says that the
optimum must be realized and only one among the possibilities is op-
timal, then that and that possibility alone becomes effectively inevita-
ble.
The first point to be made here is encompassed in Leibniz’s own
insistence that there is a crucial different between the logical necessity
of absolute constraint at issue with no possibly realizable alternatives
at all and the metaphysical necessity having no realization-meriting
alternatives that is at issue with axiological optimization. The former
mode of possibility-reduction is the rigid necessitation of logical con-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 92

straint, the latter is only a matter of axiological elimination. Axiologi-

cal selectivity is something quite different from absolute necessity.
The second key point is less subtle. It is simply that by its very na-
ture optimalism precludes rather than engenders a block universe of
fallibilistic meritability—exactly because that just is not the best pos-
sible alternative. The very considerations that make the block universe
unpalatable also militate decisively against its being the result of a
sensible optimalism. After all, a block universe is not even in the run-
ning for an optimal prospect. Excluding contingency, eliminating free
will, and generally engendering a necessitarian block universe are on-
ly too obviously optimality-precluding negativities. The doctrine itself
automatically invalidates them.
A critically important point must be made in this connection. The
“necessitation” at issue with those possibility-eliminating axiological
proto-laws is normative; it is emphatically neither an absolute (logico-
conceptual) nor a causal necessity. And accordingly it is nondetermin-
istic, since it is not only conceivable but presumably actual that “the
best possible world” is one whose internal mode of functioning pro-
vides for the contingencies of chance and free agency. Even if there is
only one successful candidate for an optimal world there is no deter-
ministic constraint about it. There is, or need be, nothing forced about
the choice of an optimum. And moreover, an optimal world may af-
ford more than one possible history. Optimalism thus need not—must
not—issue in a necessatarian determinism. After all, optimalism’s
bearing on cosmic explanation is not akin to the totally scripted moves
of a military ceremonial. If the idea is to be workable at all, it will
have to be construed on the analogy of designing a safe playground
where fractious children can find the excitement needed for having a
good time. The result is not a block universe but a “playing field” of
natural laws optimally user-friendly for finite free agents who make
their way in the world by meeting their needs and wants not by in-
stinct (let alone pre-programming) but by the use of intelligence.

5. OPTIMALISM’S PESSIMISTIC SIDE

Is not optimalism merely a form of wishful thinking? Not necessarily!

For even as in personal life what is best for us is all too often not at all
93 DEFENDING OPTIMALISM

what we individuals want, so in metaphysics what is abstractly for the

best is very unlikely to bear any close relationship to what we would
ideally want to have if we humans could have things our way.
What prevents optimalism from being too Pollyanna-ish to be plau-
sible is the deeply pessimistic acknowledgment that even the best of
possible arrangements is bound to exhibit very real shortcomings. The
optimalist need not simply shut his eyes to the world’s all too evident
parochially considered imperfections. For what the optimalist can and
should do is to insist that, owing to of the intricate inherent interrela-
tionships among value parameters, an “imperfection” in this or that re-
spect must be taken in stride because they have to be there for an op-
timal overall combination of value to be realized. Leibniz took the
right approach here: optimalism does not maintain that the world is
absolutely perfect but just that it be the best that is possible—that, all
considered, it outranks the available alternatives. There is, in fact, a
point of view from which optimalism looks to be not so much optimis-
tic as deeply pessimistic. For it holds that even the best of possible ar-
rangements is bound to exhibit very real imperfections from the angle
of narrowly parochial concerns or interests.
What we see as imperfections in the world—its unkindness to us
and our interests as individuals and as a species—can (and personally
is) part of the price that must be paid for the optimization of affairs at
the level of the whole. Local imperfection is the collateral damage in-
curred in the process of achieving global optimization. And so opti-
malism need not shut its eyes to the world’s imperfection. It need not
succumb to a wishful thinking that ignores reality’s failure to have
things go as we would ideally wish.
There is accordingly a world of difference between optimism and
optimalism. For optimism maintains that things go well and optimal-
ism maintains that things will go as well as possible. The difference is
immense. It is one thing to say that there were many people in the ca-
noe and another thing to say that there were as many as possible. For
it would well turn out that in the latter case that there were only a few.
In any case, the presently salient point is this, that as long as the
prospect of a cogent rationale for the world’s all too evident moral and
physical evil is available—as does indeed seem to be the case—the
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 94

In any case, the presently salient point is this, that as long as the
prospect of a cogent rationale for the world’s all too evident moral and
physical evil is available—as does indeed seem to be the case—the
charge that optimalism is clearly untenable in the face of the world’s
realities cannot be sustained.4
Optimalism, in sum, has it not that the world is perfect but that it is
as perfect as it is possible for an authentic world to be. And this is a
view that is not necessarily all that optimistic. Approached from the
angle of our want—rather than needs—it is a doctrine that can be re-
garded in a decidedly pessimistic light.

NOTES
1
Consider the special case of an overall value that is simply the additive total of two
individual value parameters: V = v1 + v2. Now in those cases where these two pa-
rameters of merit stand in a relation of desideratum complementarity with v1 X v2 =
c, then the overall value that is realizable will (by elementary calculus) be maxim-
ized at v1 = v2 = c , with a maximal total value of 2 c . The broader lesson is
simply that even with value-parameters of unlimited scope separately, the total val-
ue that can be realized in aggregative conjunction can be decidedly limited.
2
For a discussion of these issues in the Leibnizian setting see David Blumenfeld, “Is
the Best Possible World Possible?,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 84 (1975),
pp. 163–77; Nicholas Jolley, The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alvin Plantinga, “Which World Could God
Have Created?,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 70 (1973), pp. 539–52; Nicholas
Rescher, Leibniz: An Introduction to His Philosophy (New Jersey: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1979); and Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Na-
ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For technical reasons relat-
ing to the overall specifics of Leibnizian metaphysic, the solutions to these prob-
lems that are proposed here are unavailable to Leibniz. But there is no reason why
this need give us pause.
3
Leibniz himself saw the existence of the actual world as a decisive argument
against such toplessness since no alternative could be realized on grounds of supe-
rior merit so that a benevolent creator would be effectively paralyzed.
4
Among the other objections that may be made against noophelic optimalism
(=axiogenesis) is “that it is just theology.” This issue will be addressed in the con-
cluding chapter.
Chapter Six

ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE

WORLD

SYNOPSIS

(1) Is optimalism defeated by the world’s improvability? (2) After all,

could the condition of intelligent beings not be vastly improved? (3)
Almost certainly it could not be improved by “tinkering,” because (4)
the so-called Butterfly Effect presents a decisive obstacle here, (5) as
is vividly illustrated by the “Monkey’s Paw” story. (6) The world as
we have it is a package deal where “improvement” in one regard is
only possible through degradation elsewhere. (7) Nor is there reason
to think that replacements would insure matters. (8) After all, the very
idea of world replacement is deeply problematic. (9) And with appro-
priately construed worlds, improvement is simply not in prospect. (10)
This does not, however, result in Spinozistic necessitarianism. (11)
Not—as already noted—is it incompatible with a decidedly pessimistic
stance. (12) The Leibnizian “best of all possible worlds” theory is not
readily defeated, problematic though it may seem on first view.

1. THE IMPROVABILITY THESIS AND THE ISSUE OF

“NATURAL EVIL”

U ntil recently, no philosopher since Leibniz’s day has grappled se-

riously with the question of whether it is feasible to see the actual
order of nature as the optimal resolution of the problem of world-
realization under plausible constraints—constraints, that is, which
could reasonably be seen as appropriate requirements for a coherent
universe.1 After all, the Leibnizian claim that this is the best possible
world may seem to be absurd because so much patently appears to be
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 96

amiss with the world. And yet the idea that the world is improvable is
not without its problems.
Since classical antiquity, theorists of an atheistic persuasion have
deployed the argument that if this world indeed were the product of
the productive agency of an intelligent creator, then it would be far
better than it is. As they see it, the world’s imperfection in encompass-
ing such “natural evils” as cataclysmic disasters, epidemic diseases,
accidental injuries, and the like, mark it as improvable, and thereby
countervail against the prospect of an intelligent creator. (The world’s
moral imperfection rooting in the wicked misdeeds of its intelligent
agents—that is, the “problem of natural evil”—poses separate and dis-
tinct issues.2) The imperfection of the natural world—it’s potential for
improvement—is adduced as a decisive obstacle to divine creation.
After all, if even we mere humans can envision ways to improving the
world, then how can it possibly be the product of divine creation? And
so the problem of how a perfect God can create an imperfect world
looks to be a faith-defying paradox.
The idea that the actual world as we have it is the best possible goes
back to Plato’s Timaeus. Here we are told (29A) that the cosmos is
“the best thing that has come into being” because:

The divine being (theos) wished that everything should be good and
nothing imperfect AS FAR AS POSSIBLE (kata dunamin) … since he
judged that order (taxis) was better than disorder. For him who is the
supremely good, it neither was nor is permissible to do anything other
than what is the best [among the possibilities].3

Plato envisioned a world which, imperfections notwithstanding, is

nevertheless “for the best” in being just as perfect as the conditions of
a physically realized world will permit. And Leibniz effectively
agreed with this position.
Alfonso X, King of Castile (1221–84), known as “the learned” (el
Sabio) and as “the Astronomer” (el Astrólogo), who wrote prolifically
on astronomical matters, deserves the eternal gratitude of scholars for
his efforts to ensure the transmission of Greco-Arabic scholarship to
Latinate Europe. But he is nowadays known mainly for his audacious
declaration—issued in wake of studying the Ptolemaic system of as-
97 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

tronomy with its profusion cycles and epicycles—that “If the Lord
Almighty had consulted me before embarking on his creation, I would
have recommended something simpler.” And many has been the theo-
rist who, walking in Alfonzo’s footsteps, has thought that improve-
ments could be made upon the Creator’s handiwork.
Voltaire insisted that a benign Creator would certainty have averted
the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that killed so many of his most dedi-
cated devotees. And, predicating his reasoning on the doctrine of evo-
lution, Bertrand Russell wrote: “If I were granted omnipotence, and
millions of years to experiment is, I should not think Man much to
boast of as the final result of my efforts.”4 And in another place he
writes “If God really thinks well of the human … why not proceed as
in Genesis to create man at once?”5
Voltaire was certainly not alone in thinking it absurd of Leibniz to
deem this vale of tears to be the best of possible worlds. And in just
this vein, David Hume insisted that, if the world were indeed the
product of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator its arrangements
would be far better than they are:

A being, therefore, who knows the secrets principles of the universe,

might easily, by particular volitions, turn these accident to the good of
mankind, and render the whole world happy, … Some small touches,
given to Caligula’s brain in his infancy, might have converted him into
a Trajan. One wave, a little higher than the rest, by burying Caesar and
his fortune in the bottom of the ocean, might have restored liberty to a
considerable part of mankind.6

And Hume went on to offer some helpful suggestions:

The author of nature is inconceivably powerful: His force is supposed

great, if not altogether inexhaustible. Nor is there any reason, as far as
we can judge, to make him observe this strict frugality in his dealings
with his creatures. It would have been better, were his power extremely
limited, to have created fewer animals, and to have endowed these with
more faculties for their happiness and preservation.7

And more recently, in his discussion of the Problem of Evil, Alvin

Plantinga considers the idea that God could have improved upon this
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 98

world by arranging for Hitler to die in his sleep prior to inaugurating

the Holocaust genocide of European Jewry.8 The idea that a divinely
created world would have to be a good deal better than this one has
long intrigued philosophers—and not philosophers alone.
And so, over the centuries, optimalism has faced the charge of
emulating Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss who will acknowledge no evil in
the world—much like that familiar trio of monkeys who “see no evil,
hear no evil, speak no evil.” And what principally gives people pause
here is that they see this world as imperfect on grounds of potential
remediation. One theorists after another has maintained that, given the
chance, he could readily improve on the natural world’s arrangements
by this, that, or the other modification.
And from there it is only one short and easy step to the conclusion
that a benevolent creative deity does not exist.9 Thus Bertrand Russell
bolsters this anti-theistic argument with the acid comment that “An
omnipotent Being who created a world containing evil not due to sin
must Himself be at least partially evil.”10 After all, it seems only plau-
sible to suppose that if there indeed is a deity acting as the intelligent
contriver of the universe, he/she/it would have prevented all sorts of
misfortunes and disasters.11

2. THE TURN TO OPTIMALISM

The present deliberations will try to cast doubt upon this idea of the
world’s prospective amelioration. They endeavor to rebut the seem-
ingly plausible Improvability Thesis that a better world might be ob-
tained by fixing some of the many things that are wrong with the
world as it stands.
One important preliminary must be noted. Both improvementists
and their optimalist opponents must be in agreement on one funda-
mental point, namely that there is a cogent and objective standard for
world assessment. Claiming that the world is improvable and claiming
that it is optimal both alike require a standard for merit-assessment.
Now for present purposes we will take this standard to be the best
condition for the real interests of the world’s intelligent beings. How-
ever, the idea of “best conditions” can here be construed in two decid-
edly different ways: either via the actualities relating to their welfare
99 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

and wellbeing, or via the possibilities at their disposal—with the open

prospect that they may well mess them up. On the surface, this second
alternative doubtless appears more plausible.
It is, to be sure, theoretically possible to contemplate a different
standard of world-merit, one which looked, for example, to the prolif-
eration of the different varieties of organic life. But this is not the sort
of thing that those who complain about the world’s imperfection have
in mind. They tend to be much more parochial about it and see our
human condition as pivotal. The shift from humans to intelligent crea-
tures at large is doubtless as far as they would be prepared to go, and
for dialectical purposes this is the stance to be adopted here.12

3. ON THE INFEASIBILITY OF LOCAL TINKERING:

BURLEY’S PRINCIPLE AS A LOGICAL OBSTACLE

Now on to improvement.
For starters, one key obstacle that stands in the way of the Improv-
ability Thesis is the pervasive interconnectedness of things. Man is, as
the ancients have it, by nature an intelligent animal, and this automati-
cally carries with it the inherent limitation of the frailties of the flesh.
If you want animals you must provide them with organic food. And a
food chain brings with it a Nature rough in tooth and claw. All world-
ly arrangements have a down-side that involves imperfection. Imper-
fections of various sorts accompany any class of items, so that a world
cannot be devoid of imperfections—if imperfection indeed is, as it
must be, an involvement with limitations of some sort. But consider a
somewhat more drastic alternative. What if we lived in a Berkeleyan
world whose “nature” is not material and whose intelligences are dis-
embodied spirits? Such a world would of course dispense with physi-
cal evils and injuries (and with physical pleasures as well). All the
same, affective anguish and psychic distress would certainly remain.
Alienation of affection can cause greater anguish than physical injury.
And who is to say that in a psychical world spiritual injuries are not
felt even more acutely, and that disembodiment would do finite beings
a disfavor.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 100

Display 1

THE GIST OF BURLEY’S PRINCIPLE

(1) Let p and q two be arbitrary truths, with p ∈ T and q ∈ T.

(2) (p v ~q) ∈ T by (1)

(3) And let us now suppose p to be false, so that ~p by supposition

(4) ~q from (2), (3). Q.E.D.

Note: T is the manifold of all truths.

There just is no real prospect of local tinkering with the world without
wider ramifications. In this world—and indeed in any possible
world—states of affairs are interconnected and local changes always
have pervasive consequences. Any local “fix” always has involve-
ments throughout, and in consequences no tweaking or tinkering may
be able to effect an improvement. This very important fact can be seen
from two points of view—the logico-theoretical and the empirico-
substantive. Let us begin with the former.
As Walter Burley already observed in the 14th century, any and
every change of one truth can potentially destabilize any other.13 Thus
let T be the set of all truths and now consider the situation of Display
No. 1, which sets out the idea of Burley’s Principle: The logic of the
situation is such that the introduction of any falsehood whatever into
the set of all truths destabilizes everything: any other truth must then
be abandoned. The systematic integrity of fact means that the idea of
changing one item while leaning all the real alone is simply impracti-
cable.
The structure of fact is an intricately woven fabric. One cannot sev-
er one part of it without unraveling other parts of the real. Facts en-
gender a dense structure, as the mathematicians use this term. Every
determinable fact is so drastically hemmed in by others that even
when we erase it, it can always be restored on the basis of what re-
mains. The logical fabric of fact is woven tight. Facts are so closely
intermeshed with each other as to form a connected network.
101 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

As far as the logic of the situation goes, any change anywhere in

the manifold of truth has reverberations everywhere.14 Once you em-
bark on a reality-modifying assumption, then as far as pure logic is
concerned all bets are off. At the level of abstract logic, the introduc-
tion of belief-contravening hypotheses puts everything at risk: nothing
is safe anymore. When supposition postulates falsehood, then to main-
tain consistency one must revamp the entire fabric of fact. And this is
a task of Sisyphusian proportions: something that those who make glib
use of the idea of other possible worlds all too easily forget. The world
is something too complex to be remade in our thought. Reality’s reach
has a grip that it will never entirely relax: it is a tight-woven web
where the cutting of any single thread can lead to an unraveling of the
whole.
Yet there are, of course, other important aspects of improvability
that lie beyond the logic of the situation. And they too require atten-
tion.

4. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT AS A SUBSTANTIVE OBSTACLE

TO TINKERING

Consider the following objection: “How can one possibly claim the
world to be all that meritorious and benignly contrived. Surely, envi-
sioning a better world would not be all that hard. After all, it wouldn’t
have taken much to arrange some small accident that would have re-
moved a Hitler or a Stalin from the scene. To figure out how this sort
of thing could be arranged—to the world’s vast improvement!—is not
Rocket Science!”
Alas, dear objector, even Rocket Science is not good enough. For
what stands in the way here is the massive obstacle of what is known
as the Butterfly Effect. This phenomenon roots in the sensitive de-
pendence of outcomes on initial conditions in chaos theory, where a
tiny variation in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can issue
in immense variations in the long term behavior of the system. E. N.
Lorenz first analyzed the effect in a pioneering 1963 paper, leading to
the comment of one meteorologist that “if the theory were correct, one
flap of a butterfly’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the
weather forever.”15 With this process—changing even one tiny aspect
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 102

of nature—one single butterfly flutter could have the most massive re-
percussions: tsunamis, droughts, ice ages, there is no limit. With this
phenomenology in play, re-writing the course of the cosmos in the
wake of even the smallest hypothetic change is an utter impracticabil-
ity.16
A chaotic condition, as natural scientists nowadays use this term,
obtains when we have a situation that is tenable or viable in certain
circumstances but where a change in these circumstanceseven one
that is extremely minutewill unravel and destabilize the overall sit-
uation with imponderable consequences, producing results that cannot
be foreseen in informative detail. Every hypothetical change in the
physical make-up of such a worldhowever smallsets in motion a
vast cascade of further such changes either in regard to the world’s
furnishings or in the laws of nature. And for all we can tell, reality is
just like that. Suppose that we make only a very small alteration in the
descriptive composition of the real, say by adding one pebble to the
river bank. But which pebble? Where are we to get it and what are we
to put in its place? And where are we to put the air or the water that
this new pebble displaces? And when we put that material in a new
spot, just how are we to make room for it. And how are we to make
room to the so-displaced material. Moreover, the region within six
inches of the new pebble used to hold N pebbles. It now holds N + 1.
Of which region are we to say that it holds N – 1. If it is that region
yonder, then how did the pebble get here from there? By a miraculous
instantaneous transport? By a little boy picking it up and throwing it.
But then, which little boy? And how did he get there? And if he threw
it, then what happened to the air that his throw displaced which would
otherwise have gone undisturbed? Here problems arise without end.
As we conjure with those pebbles, what about the structure of the
envisioning electromagnetic, thermal, and gravitational fields? Just
how are these to be preserved as was given the removal and/or shift of
the pebbles? How is matter to be readjusted to preserve consistency
here? Or are we to do so by changing the fundamental laws of phys-
ics?
Limits of necessity can root not only in the fundamental principles
of logic (logical impossibility) but also in the laws of nature (physical
impossibility). For every scientific law is in effect a specification of
103 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

impossibility. Thus it indeed is a law that “Iron conducts electricity,”

then a piece of nonconducting iron thereby becomes unrealizable. Ac-
cordingly, limits of necessity are instantiated by such aspirations as
squaring the circle or accelerating spaceships into hyperdrive at trans-
luminal speed. Many things that we might like to do—to avoid ageing,
to erase the errors of the past, to transmute lead into gold—are just not
practicable. Nature’s modus operandi precludes the realization of such
aspirations. We finite creatures had best abandon them because the
iron necessity of natural law stands in the way of their realization.
“But is the Butterfly Effect not an artifact of the ‘laws of nature’—
the rules by which Nature plays the game is the production of phe-
nomena: And would not omnipotent God alter those rules so that the
world’s occurrences are no longer inextricably intertwined?” This is a
tricky question that requires some conceptual unraveling. An omnipo-
tent creator could ex hypothesi create a chaos. But he could not create
a Cosmos that affords a user-friendly home for intelligent beings
without thereby creating the sort of coordinated fabric of intelligible
lawfulness that carries a Butterfly Effect in its wake. For how else
could those intelligent agents make their way in the world? An exis-
tential manifold could possibly dispense with the lawful coordination
that underpins the Butterfly Effect, but an intelligence-supportive
(“noophelic”) Nature could not possibly do so.
We then have to reckon with the prospect that the lawful order in-
herent in the Butterfly Effect could not be abandoned without massive
collateral damage to the intelligent and thereby intelligible order of
things.

5. MONKEY’S PAW ISSUES

“But could not the amount of human suffering that there is in the
world be reduced in some different dispensation?” For sure it could.
But the question is: At what cost? At the price of there being no world
at all? At the price of there being no humans in the world? At the price
of having all humans be ignorant, dull, and unintelligent? At the price
of having only humans without empathy, sympathy, and care for one
another? The proper response to all of these questions is simply: Who
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 104

knows? No-one can say with any assurance that the cost of such an
“improvement” would be acceptable.
The idea of collateral damage has important ramifications here. It
is—unfortunately—entirely possible for the removal of even a Hitler
or Stalin from the world stage to be achievable only at the price of vis-
iting upon mankind an even greater disaster. To render this idea
graphic, one should consider W. W. Jacobs’ chilling story of The
Monkey’s Paw, whose protagonist is miraculously granted wishes that
thereupon actually come true—but always at a fearsome price.17
The salient point at issue here is straightforward. Granted, the
world’s particular existing negativities are in theory remediable. But
to arrange for this will likely require accepting an even larger array of
negativities overall. (The Monkey’s Paw perplex.) The cost of avoid-
ing those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of
an even larger volume of misfortune.
What the Monkey’s Paw Perplex means is that we can no longer be
glibly facile about our ability to tinker with reality to effect improve-
ments in the world by somehow removing this or that among its patent
imperfections through well-intentioned readjustments. For what would
need to be shown is that such a repair would not yield unintended and
indeed altogether unforeseen consequences resulting in an overall in-
ferior result. And this would be no easy task—and indeed could prove
to be one far beyond our feeble powers.
To “fix” some negative aspect of the world would involve a change
of how things happen within it, i.e., altering the laws of nature under
whose aegis things happen as they do. And the effects of this will
prove imponderable. For as one recent writer has cogently argued:

If water is to have the various properties in virtue of which it plays its

beneficial part in the economy of the physical world and the life of
mankind, it cannot at the same time lack its obnoxious capacity to
drown us. The specific gravity of water is as much a necessary outcome
of its ultimate constitution as its freezing point, or its thirst-quenching
and cleansing functions. There cannot be assigned to any substance an
arbitrarily selected group of qualities, from which all that ever may
prove unfortunate to any sentient organism can be eliminated especially
if … the world … is to be a calculable cosmos.18
105 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

What is crucial in this regard is the operation of natural laws. Our uni-
verse is an orderly cosmos rather than an anarchic jumble. And only
this can provide a home for beings whose actions are grounded by
thought. Only through some degree of understanding of the orderly
modus operandi of a world can an intelligent being whose actions are
guided by beliefs come into operation. And in a realm in which what
happens proceeds in accord with natural laws, a finite embodied is in-
evitably at risk of mishap. Bruce Reichenbach has it right: “Natural
Evils are a consequence of natural objects acting according to natural
laws upon sentient, natural creatures.”19 And the fact of it is that those
natural laws make the world a package deal.
But someone will now object as follows: “This reliance on the But-
terfly Effect is problematic. For this effect is the result of the fact that,
in certain respects, the laws of nature have yielded a system of the sort
that mathematicians characterize as chaotic. Surely one could change
the laws of nature to avoid this result.” It is no doubt so. But now we
have leapt from the frying pan into the fire. For in taking this line we
propose to fiddle not merely with this or that specific occurrence in
world history, but are engaged in conjuring with the very laws of na-
ture themselves. And this embarks us on the uncharted waters of a
monumental second-order Butterfly Effect—one whose implications
and ramifications are incalculable for finite intelligences. The point is
simple: Yes, the world’s particular existing negativities are indeed re-
mediable in theory. But to avert them in practice might well require
accepting an even larger array of negativities overall. The cost of
avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realiza-
tion of an even larger mass of misfortune. And the very possibility of
this prospect shows that the Improvability Argument does not actually
manage to accomplish its aim.

6. THE PACKAGE-DEAL PREDICAMENT:

THE TEETER-TOTTER EFFECT

“But surely if one effected this-or-that modification in the world with-

out changing anything else one would improve matters thereby.” Alas,
the difficulty here lies in that pivotal phrase “without changing any-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 106

thing else.” In anything worthy of the name “world” the constituent

components are interrelated and interconnected. You cannot change
one without changing innumerable others. The situation is not unlike
that of language. Change the U of GUST to I and you do not leave the
rest unchanged. Everything changes: shape, meaning, pronunciation.
Granted, most of us would have little difficulty in conjuring up a
few of our fellows without whom the world would be better off—or so
we think. But the problem is that in a lawful world getting rid of them
would have to be achieved in a way that effects broader changes—
more virulent diseases, more enterprising murderers, stronger impetus
to suicide—all of which have wider and potentially deleterious conse-
quences. A world is an infinitely complex arrangement of interlocked
features and interrelated factors. And it is bound to have these coordi-
nated in a complexity interrelated harmony. Modify this and you dis-
turb that.
After all, changes to the existing order of things do not come cost-
free. Could homo sapiens be improved by yet another pair of eyes at
the back of the head? Presumably not. The redesign of this bio-system
could not be effected without incurring additional vulnerabilities. And
the mechanisms for processing the additional information provided
would involve added complications that would doubtless not be cost-
effective in added benefit. Nature has doubtless seen to it that we are
as well adjusted to our bio-niche as the world’s fabric of natural law
permits. And there is no reason to refrain from seeing this sort of situ-
ation replicated on a cosmic scale.
The upshot of these considerations is thus clear. The idea that the
world’s defects can be fixed by tinkering is decidedly implausible.
And given the fact that re-engineering the world-as-a-whole lies be-
yond our feeble powers, we have to face up to the consideration that—
for all we can tell—this is indeed the best of possible worlds, and that
changing the existing condition of the universe in any way whatsoev-
er—would diminish the sum-total of its positivities. We have to face
the prospect that it is unrealistic to contemplate a “quick fix” for the
negativities of this world.
The world we actually have—and indeed any possible alternative to
it—is a coordinated whole. Once starts to tinker with it, it disappears
on us. For in seeking to change it, we create conditions where there is
107 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

Display 2

CONTRASTING TINKERING WITH REPLACEMENT

B
A

no longer any anaphoric “it” to deal with. To tinker with a world is to

annihilate it.

7. MOVING FROM IMPROVEMENT TO REPLACEMENT

All the same, perhaps something else, something altogether different

might take its place. Possibly! But this something else could readily
prove to be worse overall.
Consider the situation of the Display 2 diagram. Think of this as the
cross-section of a mountainous terrain. Note that in whatever direction
you move away from the peak of A, you go downhill. Small-scale
tinkering never yields an improvement. But nevertheless A’s peak is
no more than a local maximum. If you abandon A altogether and shift
to B you can achieve a greater height.
The situation that is now under considerations is analogous. For it
can transpire that: When one “fiddles” with the description of the ac-
tual world (A) by changing some of its features in any direction, one
indeed makes matters worse, but nevertheless matters improve by
abandoning this world altogether and shifting over to some entirely
different world (B). So even a world that cannot be improved by
change might nevertheless be improved upon by all-out replacement.
Thus the fact that this world may not be improvable though change
does not automatically mean that it is “the best of all possible worlds.”
Non-improvability is not the same as all-out optimality. To improve
something is still to keep it, while to improve on it contemplates re-
placement. And so nonimprovability notwithstanding, one might nev-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 108

ertheless proceed to argue that another world—a replacement one rad-

ically different from ours—might be superior to it.
However to bring this line of thought to a convincing conclusion
would require initiating some world or other that could reasonably be
seen as superior to ours. And this is a task that confronts the replace-
ment theorist with impossible difficulties. For how could such a world
possibly be put on the agenda of consideration? Improving upon the
actual world calls for identifying some other, different and alternative
nonexistent world that is demonstrably superior. And just this is a task
which—as is not hard to see—cannot possibly be effected by finite in-
telligences.
“But surely it is possible for there to be a world without earth-
quakes!” Indeed so. But the move from a descriptive possibility (no
earthquakes) to an authentic world requires a lot of fleshing out. (For
example—no earth no earthquakes.) The problem here lies in the
move from possible states (no earthquakes) to possible worlds. But
now to meet the dialectical needs of the situation it will not do to in-
voke the mere possibility of a superior world. The objector will have
to make good his challenge by specifying one in detail. And herein
lies an insuperable difficulty—the problem of getting rid of those
earthquakes without causing imponderable systemic disruptions.

8. PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFYING POSSIBLE WORLDS

At this juncture an important point comes into play with respect to ac-
tual vs. possible. With actuals there is a crucial difference between
generic and specific knowledge—between knowing that something
has a feature and knowing which item has that feature. Here
K(∃x∈S)Fx—that is, knowing that some x in S has the property F—is
possible without knowing of some specific x that it has F:
(∃x∈S)KFx. But with mere possibilities the preceding distinction does
not apply. The only way of knowing that some mere (nonexistent)
possibility has a certain feature is by specifying the possibility that
possesses this feature. Real objects have an identity apart from their
specification. But mere possibilities do not. And this renders the task
of specifying a superior world unachievable for us.
109 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

“But surely some alternative world would be superior to ours—

though I concede an inability to provide an illustrative example.” This
sounds plausible enough. Surely some general officer is in the Penta-
gon right now—although I don’t have a clue as to who that individual
might be. But this sort of response will not work, being based on a se-
riously flawed analogy. For one knows a great deal about the Penta-
gon and its general modus operandi. But there is nothing comparable
going on with respect to merely possible worlds—no general princi-
ples of functioning that would lead to a comparable result.
Granted, it is in a broad sense conceivable that optimalism fails and
that some alternative world might be superior to this one. But this
does not bear in the dialectical situation at issue. For the argumenta-
tion at issue here is that of the atheist who insists that this world can-
not be a divine creation on grounds of its imperfection. “Even I, he
says, with my imperfect intellect can come up with ways of improving
upon this world.” And in this dialectical context the mere possibility
invoked above will not do the job.
As contemporary possible world theorists generally see it, we can
and should be prepared to contemplate altogether different worlds,
worlds removed from and indeed incompatible with our own in their
make-up and their modus operandi.20 But what do such worlds in-
volve?
For one thing, they must be worlds. As such they will have to be
manifolds of concrete reality. To qualify as such, its constituent indi-
viduals must also be concrete as regards the definiteness of its
makeup. Specifically, a world must be descriptively definite com-
pletethat is, any descriptively specifiable feature either must hold of
the world or fail to hold of it; there is no other alternative, no prospect
of being indecisive with regard to its make-up.21 A world must be de-
cisive about what to be like. In consequence the Law of Excluded
Middle must apply: the world and its constituents must exhibit a defi-
niteness of composition through which any particular sort of situation
either definitely does or definitely does not obtain. A possible world
must be decisive in its composition: its individuals cannot be “around
6 feet tall”—they have to commit to a definite size.22
After all, a world is not just some sketchily described state of af-
fairs, but will have to be a “saturated” or “maximal” state of affairs-at-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 110

largea state that affairs-in-toto can assume, a synoptic totality that

suffices to resolve if not everything then at least everything that is in
theory resolvable.23 (Unlike the state of affairs that “A pen is writing
this sentence” a world cannot leave unresolved whether that pen is
writing with black ink or blue.) If an authentic world is to be at issue
(be it existent or not) this entity must “make up its mind,” so to speak,
about what features it does or does not have.24 Any assertion that pur-
ports to be about it must thus be either definitively true or definitively
falsehowever difficult (or even impossible) a determination one
way or the other may prove to be for particular inquirers, epistemolog-
ically speaking. Authentic worlds do and must accordingly have a
wholly definite character.25
And just here lies the problem, for we can never manage to identify
such a totality. Consider a state-of-affairs indicated by such a claim as
“The pen on the table is red.” An item cannot just be red: it has to be a
definite shade of redgeneric redness will not do. Nor is it a state of
affairs that “There are two or three people in the room”that state of
affairs has to make up its mind. Nor again is it a state of affairs that
“The butler did not do it”its being the wicked gardener who did the
sort of thing that a state of affairs requires. No matter how much we
say, the reality of concrete particulars will go beyond it. As regards
those merely possible worlds, we simply have no way to get there
from here.
The point is not that we could not obtain different universes if we
altered the initial conditions of the world or even to laws of nature.
Rather it is that the situation of “what would happen if” would become
ultimately unproblematic with any universe sufficiently complex to be
of interest in the present context.
And this consideration is probatively crucial, for to provide a per-
vasive refutation of optimalism it will not do merely to insist that there
might possibly be some alternative world superior to the actual. The
opponent has to make good on his claim by presenting a cogent case
for contending that some specifiable possibility would be superior.
But world design is too big a job for us. Actually identifying alterna-
tive worlds is impracticable for us as a matter of basic principle.
111 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

9. WITH WORLDS, PERFECTION IS NOT A PROSPECT

And further difficulties lurk. Prominent among them is the salient

consideration that with worlds, perfection is unattainable with respect
to created worlds. One salient reason for this is the phenomenon of
what might be called desideratum conflicts where in advancing with
one positivity we automatically diminish another. What we have here
is vividly manifested in the phenomenon of positivity complementarity
that obtains when two parameters of merit are so interconnected that
more of one automatically means less of the other, as per the follow-
ing diagram:

Positivity 1
feasible combinations

Positivity 2

The crux here is that one aspect of merit can be augmented only at the
price of diminishing another.
We shall characterize as a Teeter-Totter Condition any arrangement
where an improvement in regard to one aspect can only be achieved at
the cost of worsening matters in another respect. And whenever two
inherently positive factors are (like familiarity and novelty) locked in-
to such a teeter-totter relationship we cannot have it both ways.
Whenever this situation is in play, it stands decisively in the way of
absolute perfection.
Consider a simple example, the case of a domestic garden. On the
one hand we want the garden of a house to be extensive—to provide
privacy, attractive vistas, scope for diverse planting, and so on. But on
the other hand we also want the garden to be small—affordable to in-
stall, convenient to manage, affordable to maintain. But of course we
can’t have it both ways: the garden cannot be both large and small.
The desiderata at issue are locked into a see-saw of conflict.
Again, any criminal justice system realizable in this imperfect
world is going to have inappropriate negatives through letting some of
the guilty off while also admitting false positives by condemning
some innocents. And the more we rearrange things to diminish one
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 112

flaw, the greater scope we give to the other. And so it goes in other
situations without number. The two types of errors are locked together
in a see-saw balance of complementarity that keeps perfection at bay.
Throughout such cases we have the situation where realizing more of
one desideratum entails a correlative decrease in the other. We cannot
have it both ways so that the ideal of an absolute perfection that max-
imizes every parameter of merit at one and the same time is out of
reach. In the interest of viability some sort of compromise must be ne-
gotiated, seeing that the concurrent maximization of desiderata is now
unavoidably unrealizable.
Even an appeal to God will not help here. For as the medieval
schoolmen already emphasized, God’s omnipotence consists in an
ability to do anything that is possible. Doing the impossible is not as
issue. Neither can God make one selfsame proposition both true and
false, nor can he make 2 plus 2 come out 5, nor can he forget facts.
Nor can God make lesser number exceed the larger, nor turn virtue in-
to vice, nor make an inferior state of things into a superior. The truths
of logic and mathematics, and the conceptual truths about the nature
of things are not alterable and this holds for God as much as anyone.
But—and this is crucial—the impossibility of God’s doing the impos-
sible is not an obstacle to his omnipotence. God can certainly create a
good world, and indeed an optimal one. But even He cannot make a
manifold of finite being that is flawless and perfect.
Given the inherent tension between various modes of merit, a natu-
ral world cannot be perfect and exhibit all possible possibilities in
maximal degree. As Plato already insisted, the imperfectability of the
natural universe is an inevitable aspect of its physical materiality, its
embodiment (somatoeides, Politikos 273B).26 And was it followed in
this view by the entire Neo-Platonic tradition.27
All this harks back to the discussion of the Ontological Argument
with its familiar point that such a thing as “a perfect mountain” is
simply not in the range of possibility. For world-imperfection is built
into the very nature of things. Limitedness is unavoidable with finite
beings. Humans cannot be super-human—if there at all they have to
be there as the type of things they inherently are. In an organically
complex world, the interests of some species may have to be subordi-
nated to those of others (e.g., as providers of food). Moreover, the in-
113 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

terest of particular individuals may have to be subordinated to those of

the entire species as a fire that destroys some trees may nourish the
soil for the ampler developments of others later on.
World optimization is always maximization under various existen-
tial constraints imposed by the taxonomic nature of the things whose
realization is being contemplated. And such constraints means that
while the world may well be as good as it can be as a whole—i.e., is
aggregatively merit-maximizing—nevertheless it is not correspond-
ingly merit maximizing in its parts taken distributively. The condition
of many of these parts is far from optimal and can certainly be im-
proved. It is just that the merit of the parts is so interconnected and in-
tertwined that improvement in one area is bound to carry with it dimi-
nution in another.
The medieval schoolmen already had the correct take on the issue.
They inclined to look on perfection as a matter of completeness. For
them, “perfect” and “whole” were virtually identical concepts.28 How-
ever, they went on to insist that an optimal whole need not be perfect
in each of its constituent aspects, and that increasing the perfection of
some part of aspect will throw the whole out of balance. As St. Thom-
as put it “God permitted imperfections in creation when they are nec-
essary for the greater good of the whole.”29
And so, as Leibniz insisted, optimality is one thing and perfection
another. And our world can abandon any claims to the latter without
compromise to its claims to the former. For things to be “as good as
they can get” does not require the realization of perfection.

10. THE SPECTRE OF SPINOZISM

At this point it might seem that the specter of Spinozism looms omi-
nously before us. For the point of contenting that this is the best of
possible words—that, for better or worse, this is as good as it gets—is
clearly preempted by the Spinozistic idea that this is the only possible
world. If this were so, then there just would be no alternatives to this
world of ours: its existence and nature would become necessary, with
the issue of its optimality thereby somewhere between trivial and im-
material.30 But this prospect is unraveled by the fact that the existence
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 114

of this world is contingent—that there could, in theory, be some dif-

ferent order of existence (or indeed, perhaps no world at all).
However, it is necessary also to draw a distinction that was already
stressed by Leibniz between absolute (logico-metaphysical) necessity
and normative (ethico-evaluative) necessity. For the world’s necessity
is certainly not tenable if we look to absolute or logical necessity. Al-
ternative world-manifolds are always logically possible, seeing that
logic confines itself to generalities—all of its theses and structure be-
ing abstract and universal in nature—it cannot mandate the existence
of something unique and concrete. However, a specific existent world
that contains concreta lies beyond the reach of logically necessity on
anything like the standard conception of logic.31 Particularity is al-
ways contingent, and any coherent manifold of particular truths is
bound to have logically coherent alternatives.32
And so if necessity is to be realized in matters of existence, it can-
not be of the strictly logico-conceptual mode, but rather of the present-
ly contemplated axiological mode. And now necessity will have lost
its sting. For what we now have is, in effect, a Leibnizian theory of the
mitigated necessity of world optimization. For Spinoza the world as it
is the one and only available possibility. For Leibniz it is the one and
only optimal possibility. The difference turns on a single world. But it
is one that is obviously far-reaching and portentous in import.33

11. OPTIMALISM DOES NOT DEMAND OPTIMISM

The traditional approaches to natural or physical evils look to several

alternative ways of addressing the problem, preeminently including
the following:

• An illusionism that dismisses natural evil as merely apparent

and not real. This is the approach of Oriental mysticism and of
the Panglossian unrealism which Voltaire mistakenly attributed
to Leibniz.

• A facilitationism that sees natural evil as part of the indispensa-

ble causal means to a greater good. (The melodrama must have
115 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

its villain so that the persecuted heroine can fully appreciate the
delights of a heroic rescue.)

• A compensationism that sees natural evil as compensated for in

the larger scheme of things—either in this world or in the next.
(This, according to Kant, is the key rationale for belief in an af-
ter-life.)

• A holism that sees natural evil as the collateral damage that is

unavoidable in even the best of possible arrangements contrived
with a view to the realization of salient positivities. (This is in
essence the Leibnizian view of the universe that as a package
deal that inextricably links the positive and the negative.)

The present discussion’s optimalistic approach most closely approxi-

mates the last of these options. It takes the line that physical evil rep-
resents the price of an entry ticket into the best arrangement possible
within the limits of inevitable constraints. The world’s physical evils
are seen as the inescapable consequences that are bound to occur
when intelligent beings of limited capacity come to be emplaced with-
in a world-order whose lawfulness is on the one complex enough to
permit their rational development but simple enough to afford them
cognitive access for the management of their affairs.
However—as has been stressed repeatedly—the idea that this is the
best of possible worlds emphatically does not commit one to an overly
rosy view of its merits. For what optimalism maintains is only that this
world, however imperfect, is such that any other possible world (and
thus an actively fleshed out world and not just some incomplete indef-
inite scenario) will involve a still greater balance of negativity over
positivity. Accordingly, none of those traditional plaints about this
world’s evils and deficiencies refute the prospect of its being the best
of possible worlds. For it being the very best of the possibilities need
not and will not require being perfect. Even the best of possible
worlds can admit all manner of imperfections it is just a matter of
there being fewer of them, on balance, than is the case with any of the
other alternatives. Saying that this is the best of possible worlds is not
necessarily to give it altogether unqualified praise.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 116

And so, as an argument against the Leibnizian view, the lucubra-

tions of Voltaire’s Candide are a non-starter. Here Dr. Pangloss’ skep-
tical pupil pressed him with the question Si c’est ici le meilleur des
mondes possibles, que sont donc les autres? (“If this be the best of
possible worlds, than what in heaven’s name will the others be
like?”)34 But a perfectly good answer was available to the good Doc-
tor, which despite its cogency he was reluctant to give, namely the re-
ply: “Even worse!” The facile optimism of Dr. Pangloss, the butt of
Voltaire’s parody Candide, misses the mark if Leibniz (and not some
naive and simple-minded Leibnizian) is intended as its target.
A plausible objection to optimalism is the challenge of fairness,
which effectively runs as follows:

Even if one grants that the world as is represents the optimally achieva-
ble resolution to the problem of world creation, is it not deeply unfair
that some of its members should, for no failing of their own making and
responsibility, occupy a position inferior to that of others? The proper
handling of this objection is not simple but requires recourse to some ra-
ther subtle distinctions. For fairness is a matter of proportioning out-
comes to claims. And even as people come into the world without
clothes, so they enter it without claims. It is incontestably lamentable
that some of the denizens of even the best of possible worlds should fare
badly. Their condition is unhappy and unfortunate. They deserve our
sympathy in full measure. But victims of unfairness they are not. For
unfairness only arises with preexisting claims. And in the context of re-
alizing world-possibilities there simply are none. Those whose lot
comes up short in possible worlds may be unfortunate, but they are not
victims of unfairness. They have no preexisting claims upon reality—or
upon God.

Yet is it not unjust that some should thrive and others suffer? Here it
would seem that one can do no better than to revert to the previous
consideration that perfect worlds—and in particular, worlds in which
all individuals are treated with perfect justice—just are not on offer.
There simply are no perfect worlds any more than there are perfect
men. And we cannot ask it of anyone—not even of God—that they
should do better than the best that is possible.
117 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

12. CONCLUSION

The upshot of these Neo-Leibnizian deliberations runs as follows:

First, that in relation to natural evil there is no convincing reason for
holding that the world can be improved by modification and tinkering.
Second, that the variant complaint that the actual world could be im-
proved upon by replacement confronts its proponents with the effec-
tively unmeetable challenge that no such putatively superior replace-
ment could ever be identified. Third, that the idea that this world’s
manifest imperfection stands in the way of its optimality is quite erro-
neous since even the best is bound to be imperfect here.
But is optimalism not by its very nature theological and thereby un-
scientific? Surely not! Water flows downwards; tumbleweeds follow
the path of least resistance; entropy increases. All such processes ex-
hibit a uniform directionality in respect of some factor. They act plan-
conformably but without any explicit planning. They proceed regular-
ly but without regulation. And axiotropism can be seen as just another
such phenomenon—albeit one that functions at a more fundamental
level. Nature dictates an optimal arrangement for stacking logs and for
packaging cannon balls. The most efficient and effective means of
reaching specified ends are often dictates by nature’s laws. In princi-
ple this sort of situation could prevail at the global level as well.
In closing, it is advisable to return to the start and reemphasize the
dialectical purport of the present deliberations. It has not been their
object to argue that this clearly imperfect world of ours is indeed the
best possible. Instead—and far more modestly—the discussion has
tried to show that the standard objections to this idea just do not work.
So if one is minded to take seriously the Leibnizian view that this is
the best of possible worlds, there is no convincing obstacle of general
principle to stand in the way.35

NOTES
1
Albert Einstein might perhaps be viewed as a thinker who sought to turn back the
clock here.
2
Some of the classical texts on this issue are presented in Mark Larrimore (ed.), The
Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). The religious dimension of the prob-
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 118

NOTES

lem is subject of a vast literature. On its history and (very extensive) bibliography
see Friedrich Billicsich, Das Problem des Übels in der Philosophie des Abendlan-
des, 3 vols (Wien: Verlag S. Sexl, 1952–59). However, this classic study of the his-
tory of the Problem of Evil devotes only one somewhat perfunctory chapter (Vol.
III, pp. 195–205) to the issue of evil in nature. And even here it is the negative as-
pect of the struggle of organic existence inherent in the Darwinian survival of the
fittest that is its focus. The issue of the prospect of imperfect design is that physical
order of nature does not figure in this otherwise monumental work.
3
Timaeus, 298 and also 29E–30B.
4
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1935),
p. 222.
5
Bertrand Russell, ibid., pp. 194.
6
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 11.
7
Ibid. For a modern perspective on the issues see John R. Hick, Philosophy of Reli-
gion (4th ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990).
8
Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (New Haven: Harper Torch Books,
1974). See also Roderick M. Chisholm, “The Defeat of Good and Evil,” Proceed-
ings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 42 (1968–69),
pp. 26–38.
9
See, for example, R. K. Perkins, Jr., “An Atheistic Argument from the Improvabil-
ity of the Universe,” Nous, vol. 17 (1983), pp. 239–50.
10
Bertrand Russell, [Link].
11
This also provides an objection to some versions of a doctrine of intelligent design.
On Intelligent Design Theory see J. H. Davis and H. L. Poe, Chance and Dance:
The Evolution of Design (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation, 2008);
William A. Dembski, Intelligence Design (Downer’s Gove, Ill, 1999); Ernan
McMullin (ed.), Evolution and Creation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1985); Roger Penrose, Tower of Babel: Scientific Evidence and the New
Creations (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998); Delvin Ratsch, Nature, Design,
and Science (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001); Michael Ruse, The Evolution-
Creation Struggle (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000); as well as
Elliot Sober, Philosophy of Biology (2nd ed., Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2000).
119 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

NOTES
12
Admittedly cashing in this loose reference to “the condition of intelligent beings”
will need a good deal of fleshing out. Is one to be a Rawlsin maximin theorist for
whom the standard is set by the condition of the worst (the least well-off). Is one to
be an elitist from whom the standard is the condition of the best, the most able and
highly developed? Or is one to be a democrat whose standard is the preponderant
condition of the middle run? And is the standard—however otherwise construed—
to be applies at the level of individuals or at the level of species? Clearly larger and
deeper issues lurk behind these questions. But we need not pursue them here be-
cause the thrust of the considerations of the present deliberations will apply across
the board—mutatis mutandis—no matter which specific standard is chosen.
13
See the author’s, Conditionals (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 77–83.
14
This condition of things is old news, already noted in his influential Treatise on
Obligations by the medieval scholastic philosopher Walter Burley (ca. 1275–ca.
1345) laid down the rule: When a false contingent proposition is posited, one can
prove any other false proposition that is compatible with it. Translated in part in N.
Kretzman and E. Stump, The Cambridge Translation of Medieval Philosophical
Texts, Vol. I: Logic and Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1988), see pp. 389–412. Burley’s reasoning proceeded by way of exam-
ples.
15
Lorenz’s discussion gave rise to New Line Cinema’s 2004 feature film The Butter-
fly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart.
16
Think here of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of cosmic evolution that plays
so prominent a role in the setting of the Anthropic Hypothesis.
17
An intriguing example of the adverse consequences of “improving” matters in the
world is afforded in Kenneth Boulding’s intriguing study of the unhappy conse-
quences of significant life prolongation: “The Menace of Methusalah” in the Jour-
nal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 55, no. 7 (March 1965), pp. 171–
179.
18
F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, 2 vol.’s (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1928), vol. II, p. 201.
19
Bruce Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press,
1982), p. 106. I myself would amend the passage to read “the inevitable conse-
quences.” The issue is one of the “collateral (damage)” that is (unavoidable) in pur-
suing the greatest achievable measure of the good.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 120

NOTES
20
On possible worlds in literary theory in their interrelationship with philosophical
issues see Mihailesau and Hamarneh (eds.), Fiction Updated: Theories of Fiction-
ality, Narratology, and Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.)
21
On this feature of concrete worlds see the author’s “Leibniz and Possible Worlds,”
Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 28 (1995), pp. 129–62.
22
See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1974). An alternative perspective could be mereological: a possible world
now being seen as simply the sum-total of the possible individuals that exist within
it. (The two approaches come to the same thing if we adopt a theory of reductive
particularismor “methodological individualism” as it is sometimes calledac-
cording to which every state-of-affairs regarding things-in-general reduces to a col-
lection of facts about some set of individuals.)
23
“A possible world, then, is a possible state of affairsone that is possible in the
broadly logical sense.” (Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity [Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1974], p. 44).
24
Some logicians regard possible worlds as collections of statement rather than ob-
jects. But while there is much to be said for such an approach, it faces two big ob-
stacles: (1) not every collection of (compatible) statements can plausibly be said to
constitute a world, but rather (2) only those can do so those which satisfy an appro-
priate manifold of special conditions intending that any “word characterizing” set
propositions must both inferentially closed and descriptively complete by way of
assuring that any possible contention about an object is either true or false. And
such macro-sets of statements lie beyond our grasp.
25
Authentic worlds thus differ from the schematic “worlds” often contemplated by
model logicians. The latter are not possible worlds as all, but conceptual constructs,
while, insofar as we can provide them, are inadequate to the needs of the situation.
26
See Plato’s Timaeus 28Cff, 35A, 50Dff.
27
Even—indeed especially—in the sunlight, will material objects cast a shadow. Cf.
Plotinus, Enneads, III, 2.5.
28
Totum et perfectum sunt quasi idem Duns Scotus maintained. (Quoted from W. Ta-
tarkiewicz, On Perfection (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1992), p. 47.) St.
Thomas maintained that perfectum dicitur cui nihil deest secundum modum suae
perfectionis (Summa Theologiae I 4.1 ad resp.). The substantial study of The Idea
of Perfection in Christian Theology (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) by R.
121 ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

NOTES

N. Flew addresses the issue of human imperfection only; the idea of imperfection
in physical reality is not considered.
29
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I. 4.1.
30
Some physicists hold that if the world’s lawful make-up is such that if things were
even slightly different, there could be no world at all. And then this would be the
only physically possible world. See Michael Heller, Ultimate Explanations of the
Universe (Berlin: Springer, 2009), pp. 92–93). But this is a matter of necessitation
by the physical laws as they stand—which could themselves be different. And this
is not Spinozisism because he wants to trade in logical-theoretical possibility.
31
Even the Ontological Argument for God’s existence—controversial as it is—does
not rest on considerations of mere logic, but involves a “creative definition” name-
ly a substantively laden specification of the nature of the deity.
32
This line of objection to Spinoza’s argumentation is admittedly sketchy and in need
of a great deal of development. But in any case, it’s potentially controversial nature
inheres in the consideration that it is effectively identical with St. Anselm’s proof
of God’s existence save only for the substitution of natura for deus.
33
See Sven K. Knebel, “Necessitas moralis ad optimum” in Studia Leibnitiana, vol.
XXIII (1991), pp. 3–24 and 78–92, and Vol. XXIV (1992), pp. 182–251. See also
Stefan Lorenz, De mundo optimo (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1997; Studia Leibniti-
ana Supplementa, Vol. XXXI).
34
“Discourse on Metaphysics,” § 6. Cf ibid, § 5, and also “The Principals of Nature
and of Grace,” § 10; Theodicy, § 208.
35
This essay originated as a lecture prepared for the undergraduate philosophy club at
the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 2010.
Chapter Seven

OPTIMALISM AND THEISM

SYNOPSIS

(1) Both a naturalistic and a theistic version of optimalism are in the-

ory available. (2) The former institutes optimality metaphysically, via
the mere protolaws of possibility, whereas the latter institutes optimal-
ity theologically through the workings of a benevolent creator. (3)
Neither alternative is a forced option mandated by optimalism itself.

1. THEOLOGICAL RAMIFICATIONS

C learly, neither optimalism nor optimalism is something necessary.

As far as the epistemology of the matter goes, if they hold good
they will do so contingently. For the naturalistic optimalist, axi-
otropism would—as best we can tell—be an inherent feature of the
manifold of possibility: a self-sustained metaphysical law of possibil-
ity analogous to physical reality’s laws of nature. For the theist, axi-
otropism would be a reflection of the creative intent of a benign deity.
For the former viewer is its own engenderer, for the latter it forms part
of the purposive agenda of a creative agent. For the naturalistic opti-
malist value is something ultimate—standing at the end of the explan-
atory road. For the theistic optimalist it is a descriptive consequence of
the creative modus operandi of a benevolent creator. But either way a
Principle of Optimality is seen as available as an explanatory instru-
mentality available for service in explaining the nature of things.

2. THEISTIC OPTIMALISM

With theistic optimalism we have the following principle:

 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 124

(TO) What is optimal is actual because a benevolent God has it be

so. God grounds (produces, engenders, causes, effects) the
operation of optimalism. Letting G be the theistic doctrine of
God’s existence, and O the thesis of optimalism we here
have a justifactory argument whose structure is: G → O.

However, there also lies before us the prospect of a converse reason-

ing of optimalistic explanation of God’s existence:

(OT) God exists because his doing so is optimal. The principle of

optimalism grounds the existence of God. The reason at is-
sue here has the structure: O → G.

There is, moreover, also a line of explanatory reasoning that contem-

plates the self-grounding of optimalism on its own basis:

(SE) Optimalism actually obtains because its so doing is optimal.

Structure O → O.

However, grounding as such is not actually explanatory unless it pro-

ceeds by way of recourse to something else of a somehow more fun-
damental character. So it is clear that reasoning of the format O → X
or O → O does not really explain optimalism, seeing that O is here the
input rather than the output of explanatory reasoning. Only X → O
(with X ≠ O) will serve here.
All the same, in the hermeneutic order of deliberation the self-
sustaining coordination of G and O can instructively be contemplated
via the entire tripartite complex of principles as per the coordinative
cycle:

G O

This, however, is the condition of things obtaining in the order of

hermeneutic coordination rather than in that of productive explana-
tion. As far as the later Neo-Platonists were concerned, Christianity
was philosophically a god-send. In an era where self-explanation was
125 OPTIMALISM AND THEISM

no longer deemed as plausible, their commitment to optimalism’s effi-

cient productivity of value as the ratio essendi of being required an
explanatory underpinning which Christian theology was ready and
able to supply.
On this basis it is clear that what looks to be the most promising
joins the Platonic (and Neo-Platonic and Leibnizian) tradition and, in
the spirit of the Church Fathers, proposes to see optimalism function-
ing on essentially theological grounds. Such Neo-Platonism saw three
inner factors as paramount in the ontological domain:

• Fact (to on: existence reality).

• Value (nous: rational order).

• Spirit (psyche: understanding).

The critical insight of the Church Fathers is the need for thematic het-
erogeneity in explanation. Absent circularity, we cannot explain fact
in terms of fact without reaching the dead end of unexplained explain-
ers. And the same holds for explanation in terms of values of in terms
of supra-natural (i.e., theological) coordinators.
But the systemic harmonization of all three domains is something
else again.

Fact Value

Spirit

And here the explanatory process is not a matter of linear, prior-to-

posterior considerations but one of coordinating and meshing the con-
siderations operative in all three thematic domains. As the neo-
Platonic tradition saw it, coordinative rather than reductive explana-
tion provided the crucial instrumentality of metaphysical explanation.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 126

3. AN OPTION

Naturalistic optimalism looks to a value tropism at work in the mani-

fold of possibility and it sees this as inherently natural to this realm
much as is a mundane context the tendency of water to descend to its
own level is something altogether natural. Its advocates views the
structure of the manifold of possibility as subject to restrictive condi-
tions that determine things by a process of ongoing curtailment of the
range of a natural restrictivity of value.1 The tendency to value-
maximization, so regarded, is a proto-law prevailing among possibili-
ties even as energy conservation or action-minimization are initial
laws within the realm of physical actuality. And it dispenses with any
further or deeper exploration) value maximization because it sees this
as self-explanatory, it being for the best that the best possibility is re-
alized. And so, while theistic optimalism saw optimality as externally
instituted through the creative agency of a benevolent deity whose
purpose in the design of his creatures was to institute the best of pos-
sible arrangements, naturalistic optimalism would regard the position
as self-sufficiently self-grounding.
Optimalism as such is compatible with either of these approaches.
Both axiological emergence and divine selection—can be contemplat-
ed. And either can in theory provide a pathway to the other. In princi-
ple, a naturalistic optimalism can regard the institution of an optimal-
istic mode of things as only natural and to be expected relative to the
existence of a benign creator.

NOTES
1
The creative self-sufficiency of the possible is sometimes mistakenly ascribed to
Leibniz via his much-discussed idea of an exigentia existentiae. See Ingetrud Pape,
Tradition und Transformation der Modalität (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966).
Chapter Eight

ULTIMATE EXPLANATION

T he “ultimate why question” is that which asks not just “why does
the universe exist,” but rather “why does the universe exist as it is:
why is it that the nature of physical reality is as we find it to be?”
Now for better or for worse this is a question that cannot be an-
swered solely on scientific principles. And there is a simple and deci-
sive reason why this is so. For scientific explanations by their very
constitution as such must make use of the laws of nature in their rea-
soning. But this strategy is simply unavailable in the present case. For
those laws of nature required for scientific explanation are themselves
a part—an essential and fundamental part—of the constitution of
physical reality. And they are thereby a part of the problem and not in-
strumentalities available for its resolution.
The reality of it is that that (revised) “ultimate why question” con-
fronts us with a choice. Either we dismiss that question as being una-
vailable, inappropriate, and perhaps even “meaningless” (as logical
positivists have always argued). Or we acknowledge that answering
this question invites and indeed requires recourse to some sort of an
extra-scientific, extra-factual mode of explanation—one that trans-
cends the cognitive resources of natural science.
And with this second alternative the options become very limited.
For we here enter into the region of teleology, where there are just two
available alternatives.
On the one hand lies the teleology of purpose, which itself can in
principle operate in two ways: either by the conscious purposiveness
of an intelligent being (a creator deity), or by the unconscious finality
of a natural impetus towards the creation of intelligent beings, given
the survival-conclusiveness of intelligence.
And on the other hand, yet another, decidedly different approach
envisions a teleology of value which proceeds to account for the na-
ture of the world in axiological, value-involving terms as being for the
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 128

best (with respect to some yet to be specified mode of evaluative op-

timality).
Accordingly, four different doctrinal approaches confront us with
respect to issues which that (revised) ultimate why question puts be-
fore us:

• dismissive positivism

• theological creationism

• anthropic evolutionism

• evaluative optimalism

Each option is available. And none is forced upon us by the inexorable

necessity of reason itself. In the final analysis “You pays your money,
and you takes your choice.”
But is the resultant resolution simply a matter of unfettered prefer-
ence based on personal taste and inclination? By no means! Here as
elsewhere rational choice must be based on the available evidence —
and thereby on deliverances of experience.
So the question becomes: Given the sort of world that our overall
experience indicates this one to be, what sort of explanatory proceed-
ing seems best suited to account for this situation? At this stage, how-
ever, the experience at issue will no longer be only the observational
experience of our (instrumentality augmented) human senses. Rather
in matters of the sort now at issue this evidence will be a matter not
just of observation, but of the cumulative evidence of the aggregate to-
tality of one’s life experience. And of course this “experience” has to
be construed in the broadest possible sense, including not only the ob-
servational but also the affective, not only the factual but also the im-
aginative, not only physical experimentation but also thought experi-
mentation, not only the personal but the vicarious.
The question is one of the extent to which one’s experience creates
a role for speculative, observation-transcending factors in evidentia-
tion (the story of the Doubting Thomas paradigmatic here). If there is
little or no room for affectively guided conjecture, dismissive positiv-
129 ULTIMATE EXPLANATION

ism is the way to go. And as the scope of tolerance increases one can
move on to anthropic evaluatism, evaluative optimalism, and theolog-
ical creativism, in just about that order. The question in the end is one
of epistemic proprieties and policies in relation to the admission and
evaluation of evidence.
At this point the distinction between relativism and contextualism
becomes crucial. With relativism, the matter is one of arbitrariness and
indifference—sheer groundless preference is the order of the day here.
With contextualism person-to-person variation occurs once again, and
not just because they differ in point of preference, but because they
differ in point of circumstances and situation with regard to the avail-
able evidence. And while in the former case there is no requirement
for evidential reason to go one way or the other, in the latter case there
decidedly is. For the matter will in the end depend not on the individ-
ual’s preference but in the individual’s evidence as his experience de-
termines it.
And so while there will indeed be a lack of uniformity across the
whole range of different individuals, nevertheless for given individu-
als, with their particular body of personal experience in place, there
will, in all likelihood, be only one rationally acceptable and appropri-
ate resolution in sight—only one “live option” to use William James’
instructive expression. So here there will be no unique one-size-fits-all
resolution—since matter will depend crucially on the experiential evi-
dence at one’s disposal. But this is apt to be a matter not of the arbi-
trariness of relativistic indifference but rather of the rationality of situ-
ation contextualism.
In the end, then, a single, unique ultimate explanation will not
emerge as the inexorable product of evidential reason in a way that is
independent of individualized experience. Yet while there indeed are
alternatives here, they will, by rational necessity, fall within a very
narrow range with regard to their general strategy.1 Interestingly
enough, however, consider the situation that results if mere dismissive
positivism is itself dismissed. Then the resultant adjudication among
the remaining alternatives is not really a forced choice at all. Each “al-
ternative” is itself flexible that a complex combination of the three is
possible and provides for further options.
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 130

But be this as it may, the ironic fact remains that in the final analy-
sis the rational individual’s resolution of the problem of ultimate ex-
planation rests on something that is itself contingent—namely the
structure and substance of this experience.

NOTES
1
This chapter was originally published in the Journal of Cosmology in 2012.
NAME INDEX
Alfonso X, King of Castile, 96-97
Allen, Diogenes, 26n1, 29n25
Anscombe, G. E. M., 27n9
Anselm, St. 45, 121n32
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 29n32, 113, 120n28, 121n29
Aristotle, 2, 29n30, 29n32, 67, 69-70, 77n4, 80, 87, 144
Arrow, Kenneth, 83

Bergmann, Julius, 62n3

Bergson, Henri, 2, 22, 26n4
Billicsich, Friedrich, 118n2
Blumenfeld, David, 94n2
Boulding, Kenneth, 119n17
Burke, Michael B., 28n21
Burley, Walter, 100, 119n14
Burnyeat, Myles, 27n12

Caesar, Julius, 97
Caligula, 97
Campbell, Joseph K., 27n15
Carlyle, Thomas,18
Chisholm, Roderick M., 118n8
Clarke, Samuel, 7, 15, 27n14
Copleston, Frederick C., 19
Craig, William Lane, 29n26, 29n30

Darwin, Charles, 63n8

Davis, J. H., 118n11
Dembski, William A., 118n11
Descartes, René, 21, 38, 50, 70
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 35, 47n3

Edwards, Paul, 1-26, 27n18, 29n33

Einstein, Albert, 50, 140, 147n9, 117n1
 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 132

Empedocles, 29n32
Epicurus, 38, 50

Flew, R. N., 120-21n28

Gale, Richard M., 28n19

Gerhardt, C. I., 26n1, 63n5
Gill, J. H., 27n9
Gödel, Kurt, 50

Hegel, G. W. F., 70
Heidegger, Martin, 3, 26n5, 26n6
Heller, Michael, 121n30
Hempel, Carl. G., 23-24, 29n28
Hick, John R., 118n7
Hitler, Adolf, 98, 101, 104
Hume, David, 1-26, 27n15, 29n32, 97, 118n6

Jacobs, W. W., 104

James, William, 129
Jolley, Nicholas, 94n2

Kant, Immanuel, 2, 8, 11, 21, 25, 29n27, 70, 115

Knebel, Sven K., 121n33
Krell, D. F., 26n5
Kretzman, Norman, 119n14
Kutcher, Ashton, 119n15

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1-2, 5, 7, 15, 21, 24, 27n14, 29n32, 35,
38, 44-45, 47, 50, 52, 62-63, 70-71, 76n1, 85, 89, 91, 93-97, 113-
114, 116, 126n1
Leslie John, 62n1, 70, 76n1
Lewis, David, 27n13, 31, 47n1
Loemker, L. E., 26n1, 63n5
Lorenz, E. N., 101, 119n15
Lorenz, Stefan, 121n33
133 NAME INDEX

Malcom, Norman, 3, 27n8

Moore, G. E., 71

Nozick, Robert, 4, 26n6

Pape, Ingetrud, 35, 126n1

Penrose, Roger, 118n11
Perkins, R. K., Jr., 118n9
Plantinga, Alvin, 94n2, 97, 118n8, 120n22, 120n23
Plato, 29n32, 41, 50, 60, 62, 69-70, 96, 112, 120n26
Plotinus, 60, 120n27
Poe, H. L., 118n11
Pruss, Alexander R., 28n19

Ratzsch, Delvin, 118n11

Reichenbach, Bruce, 105, 119n19
Rescher, Nicholas, 94n2
Rowe, William R., 8, 28n21, 29n26, 29n33, 28n19
Ruse, Michael 118n11
Russell, Bertrand, 19, 97-98, 118n4, 118n5, 118n10
Rutherford, Donald, 94n2

Salmon, Wesley, 47n2

Scotus, Duns, 120n28
Sidgwick, Henry, 71, 77n6
Smart, Amy, 119n15
Sober, Elliot, 118n11
Spinoza, Baruch de, 21, 38, 50, 70, 114, 121n32
Stalin, Josef, 101, 104
Stump, Eleonore, 119n14

Tatarkiewicz, Władysław, 120n28

Tennant, F. R., 119n18
Tillich, Paul, 28n24
Tymeniecka, Anna-Teresa, 4, 27n11

Voltaire, 97-98, 114, 116

 Nicholas Rescher • On Explaining Existence 134

Waismann, Fredrich, 27n9

Whitehead, A. N., 70
William of Ockham 8, 27n16
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3-4, 27n7, 27n9
Wolff, Christian, 35, 50