A central message of
Wolff's rational psychology was that the empirically observed nature
of human soul is explained best, if it is assumed to be a force for
representing the world, and most of this side of Wolff's system was
spent showing how each distinct faculty could be reduced to such a
force. With Baumgarten, on the other hand, this is more of an
assumption already shown in the empirical psychology. Thus,
Baumgarten uses most of the pages of his rational psychology for
pursuits that overstep the limits of what we can experience, while
with Wolff, these seemed more like an afterthought.
A commonality in
Wolff's and Baumgarten's rational psychology is their belief that
nothing material or no complex substance can account for soul's
capacity to represent even itself. Baumgarten can then simply note
that a soul as a simple substance is a Leibnizian monad. Although
soul as such is then not a complex substance, it is attached to
several such substances. Firstly, all the souls in the world form
what Baumgarten calls a mystical body – this is evidently a reference
to the idea of the church as the mystical body of Christ. Secondly,
every soul is also tied up with some corporeal substance or body.
This necessary relation to a body makes soul finite – its
representations are limited by the position of its body.
An important matter
for Baumgarten is the freedom of human soul. Baumgarten thinks that
human soul must be free, because it can move its own body
consciously. Of course, he notes, this is only possible, if
pre-established harmony is accepted, because only then the (ideal)
causation of the movement of human body is dependent only on the
human soul. If either the influx theory or the occasionalism is
accepted, the responsibility for bodily movement is taken away from
the soul, because in both theories the decisions of the soul are
determined externally, either by other bodies or by God.
After these
relatively mundane concerns, Baumgarten heads straight into
theological speculations. He at first notes that soul cannot have
been generated by the parents – indeed, soul as a simple unit
cannot have been formed out of a union of other substances. Then
again, it might have been transferred to the body at the time of
conception.
As for the end of a
soul, as monads they cannot be taken apart and will continue their
existence as long as world endures. This still does not mean that all
souls would be immortal, since this requires some kind of
personality, that is, conscious memory of having been alive before.
Humans have such a personality and therefore probably continue their
existence in the afterlife – Baumgarten also supposes that they
will continue their moral progress, vicious people becoming more and
more unhappy and virtuous people becoming more and more happy. Animal
souls, on the other hand, are not personal in this sense – and
Baumgarten speculates about a possibility of a whole hierarchy of
souls, with different levels of awareness, in which human souls form
only one stage.
So much for
Baumgarten's psychology, next time I'll take a look at his theology.
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