Time&Eternity

134 chapter 3
forces Clarke to declare that absolute space and absolute time are necessary
attributes of God’s divinity. In contrast, the primacy of wisdom in Leibniz’s
concept of God leads to the idea of the beauty of preestablished harmony. 90
It is God’s wise foresight that makes a corrective intervention in the mechanics
of the world unnecessary. In divine wisdom, God does nothing unintentionally;
all God’s actions are well founded. 91 Leibniz’s aversion to the
existence of a vacuum should be understood in light of the principle of
God’s wisdom—namely, the less matter that exists, the fewer objects would
be available for the goodness of God. God’s work would then be incomplete,
which would contravene God’s wisdom and the axiom of sufficient
cause that is asserted by Leibniz. 92
In his second reply, Clarke concedes that the continual need to repair
the world’s mechanism can be understood only in relative terms. He says
that what to human observation appears to be disorder is, in reality, the expression
of God’s perfect idea. In the same breath, he assures the reader that
God is neither “a mundane intelligence” nor “a supramundane intelligence,”
but rather “an omnipresent intelligence, both in and without the
world. He is in all, and through all, as well as above all.” 93
In his third letter, Leibniz directly attacks Newton’s space-time concept.
He considers the concept of space as “a real absolute being” 94 to be contradictory.
Such space would have to be eternal and infinite, which is why it is
also erroneously conceived of as God or, at least, as an attribute of God.
However, because space consists of parts, it cannot belong to God in such a
manner. For this reason, Leibniz explains: “As for my own opinion, I have
said more than once that I hold space to be something merely relative, as
time is; that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of
successions.” 95
Accordingly, space and time are not things, but rather arrangements of
things. In comparison to Newton’s Principia, the emphasis of the inquiry
has shifted in Leibniz and Clarke. If Newton was primarily concerned with
the question of which space and time concepts are the most successful in
physics, then Leibniz and Clarke are debating less about the physical implications
than about the ontological question of what space and time are. All
three are thus a long way from thinking that the setting of a standard for
time is more a matter of convention or consensus than a question of truth
or error. 96 With their assertion that space and time represent real and independent
values, Newton and Clarke are in clear conflict with a conventional
solution. The relativity of time and space in Leibniz, however, also should
not be understood in the sense of a conventional model, because relativity
does not exist in the mutual relationship of diverse possible reference systems,
but rather in the relationship of the phenomena to one another in