The Best of All Worlds?
When I was young, I clung to Kant like a life raft. His moral law and categorical imperative gave me something solid to stand on when the world felt uncertain. Certainty was not just a preference; it was a shield. I needed a philosophy that promised structure, one that drew clear lines between right and wrong, duty and neglect, because life itself often felt like a storm, and I wanted a compass that could not be moved by the winds. But as the years passed, life did not simply test those convictions, it shattered them, again and again. Trauma has a way of eroding the neat edges of certainty. It exposes how even our most rigid philosophies can crack under the weight of lived grief. I discovered that Kant’s fixed moral architecture sometimes left little space for the mess, the mercy, and the mystery of being human. It was in that breaking that I began to hear another voice, Leibniz’s, whispering that perhaps the best of all possible worlds is not a perfect one, but one in which even trage...