Christian August Crusius: Draft of necessary truths of reason, in so far as they are set opposite to contingent ones - What God does

The final part of Crusius’ natural theology is dedicated to the question of what God does, that is, what effects the divine activities produce. The obvious first answer for Crusius is that God has created the world, that is, the world that earlier was not has become existent. In the strictest sense, Crusius adds, creation refers to the generation of simple substances and their fundamental forces. In addition, God has also ordered these simple substances, but this is not something that only God could do.

God has not just created the world and everything in it, Crusius continues, but they also sustain all these things. Why couldn’t God just have created the things in such a manner that they would keep on existing without the help of God? Crusius’ answer is that this would have been impossible. Because the created things are contingent, their current existence is no reason why they would continue existing and thus they require the help of God for their continuous existence or otherwise they might as well just blink out of existence.

In addition to sustaining the existence of the things in the world, Crusius states, God also sustains the very order of the world. The threat here is not that the world would be completely wiped out of existence, but only that it would collapse into chaos. This threat is real, Crusius adds, because by themselves, material things would quickly move and change any given order.

Crusius adds that in some cases God sustains the actuality of certain things, but when free choices are involved, God can only sustain their possibility, while the actuality is then left for the decision of free beings. Thus, Crusius explains, God is not responsible for evil actions of free creatures, but merely sustains the possibility of such actions, which the action of a free person then makes real.

God does not just sustain the world, Crusius continues, but they direct the world in accordance with certain purposes. Original guidelines of this divine providence, he clarifies, are God’s fundamental desires, while what God attempts to achieve must have something to do with creatures capable of free actions, not with the mechanism of the material world. God is, as it were, building a kingdom, where the divine will morally obligates free creatures to do certain actions.

Crusius divided divine providence into such where God uses the course of nature to make something purposeful happen at appropriate time and such where God uses miracles or personally acts on the worldly things to make something happen. Since free spirits cannot be forced to do anything by natural causes, he points out, miracles must be especially used with them. Thus, particularly if there are plenty of evil free creatures, God has to do miracles, in order to assure the fulfilment of divine purposes. This still doesn’t mean that we should see miracles everywhere, since God can well use less miracles to produce more effects. In addition, Crusius notes, God need not make miracles obviously visible, unless the explicit purpose of the miracle is to be noted by human beings.

Christian August Crusius: Draft of necessary truths of reason, in so far as they are set opposite to contingent ones - What God is

It is one thing to say that something is, another to say what it is. Thus, it is no wonder that Crusius considers the question on the attributes of God, in addition to attempting to prove their existence. Yet, he also has to at first argue that we can speak reasonably about God. After all, as he himself admits, God should be so far above all finite things that we cannot ever really comprehend their essence.

One common way to describe God is through metaphors taken from human life, for instance, when we say that God hears or sees all things. Crusius accepts such anthropopathies, assuming that they are not understood in a too literal manner that would imply God's finity - this would be anthropomorphism.

Yet, Crusius is also keen to find out more literal attributes of God, in order to alleviate all accusations of humanising God. He notes that anthropathies can still provide an inkling of such literal attributes, if one can just remove the metaphorical element from them.

In fact, Crusius adds, all things can provide hints of what God is like. Firstly one can concentrate on how things are perfect and then assume that God is eminently more perfect. Secondly, one can pay attention to the fact that God must be able to create everything in the world. Beyond these two roads, Crusius suggests we have only a third route of describing God - negative one.

Well, Crusius does admit also a fourth, that of revelation. He especially refers to the notion of God as a Trinity, which he considers as the closest we come to knowing God's essence - or at least knowing an attribute that is not either an infinitised attribute of finite things or a relation. Indeed, Trinity - that of being a substance composed of three individuals - is something completely unique to God.

The other, non-revelatory attributes of God Crusius divides into non-active and active attributes, depending on whether the attributes involve any action or a capacity to an action. Foremost of the non-active attributes is infinity. This means, Crusius says, that God cannot have any imperfections. Furthermore, it implies that God has majestity, that is, that he is infinitely removed from all finite beings and inconceivable to them.

Although Trinity, Crusius insists, God is still simple. That is, the three persons of Godhead are in themselves incomplete, although they can e.g. have different actions. Furthermore, the simplicity of God implies that God is not material and that human souls are not a part of God.

Crusius is also convinced of the uniqueness of God, although he is not satisfied with many of the proofs suggested for this position. For instance, Crusius does not think that one could prove the uniqueness of God from the supposed impossibility of distinguishing infinite things, which would have all the same attributes - he points out that this distinction could still happen through relations or spatio-temporal characteristics. Neither does he approve the attempt to prove the uniqueness from the necessity of God, since there is nothing to show that there are only necessary things. Instead, Crusius favours a rather idiosyncratic proof: gods exist in space, and if there are several gods, they must exist in the same or different space, but in the latter case they would be finite, while the former is impossible.

In addition to these rather general attributes, Crusius’ non-active attributes for God contain also attributes related to what he calls the abstractions of existence or space and time. Here the case of time is perhaps easier to understand, since it just means that God is eternal or exists at all times (he does make the interesting suggestion that Trinity explains what God did before creation of the world: the three persons interacted with one another somehow).

The case of space is quite analogous, although Crusius’ result seems unusual: God is immense or they cannot be limited by anything. Crusius notes that this does not mean that God would consist of parts - the usual objection against God’s spatiality. Crusius explains himself by saying that the space of God is a mere abstraction and mere abstractions cannot be really broken into parts.

The active attributes of God refer, then, to those attributes of God that involve an action or a capacity for an action. On a general level, these attributes include that of God having an infinite force, that is, a force that can do everything that just happens to be possible. Some of the actions resulting from God using this force are a necessary part of their essence. Yet, all of them cannot be necessary, Crusius insists, and must be such that God can begin and stop doing them, because otherwise God would be less perfect than humans, who can do this.

Crusius also divides God’s actions into immanent actions that belong merely to the inner state of God’s essence and transient actions that either create a new substance or change the condition of a substance different from God. But can God create something different from itself, if God exists everywhere? Yes, Crusius asserts, as although two gods cannot occupy space, apparently God and a finite creature can.

Crusius notes that there are three kinds of actions: movement, understanding and will. Of these, God really cannot move, because as has been noted, God is everywhere. Then again, Crusius notes, God can definitely understand or think things - denying this would be implicit atheism, because otherwise God would be just a blind mechanism.

God’s understanding, Crusius says, should be infinite. This means, firstly, that God knows all there is and all there could be. Secondly, it means that God’s knowledge of actualities and possibilities must be perfect. For instance, God cannot take impossibilities as possibilities, God must know everything as distinctly as possible and therefore God definitely cannot know anything through sensations or deductions.

Crusius points out that God knows different things in a different manner. Some things, like possibilities and God’s own existence, God would know even if the world did not exist. God also has an encompassing vision of the world: its past, present and future. This vision includes, Crusius insists, also the actions of free creatures - we cannot understand how God can know them, but it is not contradictory. Between the two types of knowledge, Crusius states, God has also a third type: knowledge of what would happen, if a free person chose to do something.

In addition to understanding, Crusius assures us, God also has a will. Just like with divine actions, some of God’s volitions are necessary - these are God’s fundamental desires. With humans, Crusius recounts, fundamental desires include drive toward perfection, drive to share perfection to others, drive of conscience and bodily drive. The two latter cannot really be divine drives, but the two others can. God thus always desires to be perfect, and because they are, God is always infinitely happy or blessed.

God also desires perfection in things created, Crusius says, and this means that the world, if such exists, must form a moral system, where choices of free creatures can reflect divine perfection and all the other things can serve free creatures in fulfilling this purpose. Acting in accordance with divine perfection, Crusius suggests, means especially that free creatures must understand their dependence on God. God must thus give the free creatures laws that must be obeyed, and if the laws are not obeyed, God must punish the sinner. Crusius goes even further and insists that God can never really end the punishment, because this would mean that transgression would ultimately be forgotten and justice would not be served. He does concede that this might not mean that God would put sinners in an eternal torture, but only that a sinner is prevented from reaching the highest state of happiness possible.

Why did God then allow sinners to exist in the first place? Crusius’ first line of defence is that sinners were not created as sinners, but they freely chose to be such. Yet, this line of defence seems inadequate, since God still knew that the sinners would sin. Crusius’ second and rather cruel defence is that God had to be shown as a stern and righteous judge, since righteous punishment of sinners is a perfection.

In addition to punishing the sinners, God’s righteousness demands also rewarding the virtuous. Yet, God has also further reasons for this, since the second fundamental drive of God, Crusius says, is a desire to do good and show love to free creatures. Thus, God’s dice are loaded toward mercy and charity. Still, Crusius says, God won’t just hand out maximal amount of goodness to every creature, since this is ultimately impossible: there is no maximal goodness for finite creatures, since their goodness can always be increased.

In addition to these fundamental desires, God also has freedom, Crusius insists, that is, God can begin actions that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. This does not mean that even God’s free actions would be completely against their fundamental desires, in other words, that they wouldn’t satisfy God's desire for perfection and goodness. It is more that God has a complete freedom of not creating such a world at all, but has freely chosen to create it. Furthermore, Crusius emphasises, world could also have been otherwise, since God could have chosen many different means to fulfill the perfection of the world.

Christian August Crusius: Draft of necessary truths of reason, in so far as they are set opposite to contingent ones - Proving God’s existence

Diverging clearly from the Wolffian order of metaphysics, Crusius proceeds after ontology to natural theology. His justification is that while knowing the properties of things in the world requires knowing the properties of their creator, natural theology presupposes only a general concept of the world as a sum of all things, of which we we perceive a part and of which we ourselves are a part, and additionally some individual truths about souls.

Crusius’ first task in natural theology is to prove the existence of God, that is, an intelligent and necessary substance, which differs from the world and is the effective cause of the world. Crusius’ strategy is to throw everything at the wall and see what happens to stick, as he is willing to provide a whole bunch of different proofs, deeming the topic so important that it must be decided by any means necessary - the various proofs convince different people and corroborate one another. Crusius doesn’t even provide any other systematisation of this hodgepodge of proofs, except a classification based on the supposed strength of them.

The most certain proofs, Crusius says, are demonstrations that are ultimately based on the three principles of human cognition and of course principles derivable from them, such as the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of contingency (things that can be thought not to exist are contingent). Crusius presents altogether five of these demonstrations, all of which can be regarded as modifications of the cosmological proof in the Kantian classification. I will not go in detail to these proofs, but merely note their prominent features:

• Crusius bases the existence of complex things on the existence of simple things, which they consist of. Then he uses the principle of contingency to show that simple things in the world are contingent and so require God for their existence.
• Crusius argues, as we have seen, that there are no infinite series of changes. This means, he insists, that the world must have been created by a substance that has existed eternally before creation.
• Crusius notes that all series of movements must be ultimately derived from an action of an infinite force.
• Crusius also uses the principle of contingency to directly conclude that the world is contingent.
• Crusius insists that plant and animal species must have originated from single individuals, which due to their well ordered nature must have been created by God.

The last of the demonstrations provides also a sort of link to what Crusius calls an infinitely probable proof of God’s existence. This proof is basically the old argument from the order in the world to someone creating it in an orderly fashion. Crusius insists that it is not just a question of teleology - it is a question of plants, animals and other things having a well ordered structure and not just them being mere means for human purposes.

Crusius admits that it is possible that this order would have been fashioned from blind chaos by pure chance, or as Crusius suggests some atheists said, by a revolution in the structure of the world. Yet, Crusius instantly counters, such a revolution would have required an infinite number of coincidences, making the only option or the existence of God thus infinitely probable. Indeed, he argues, this proof shows clearest why God would have to be an intelligent substance and not mere force of nature.

The final or the lowest level of the proofs in Crusius scheme consists of such that result in finite probability. First two of those involve history. Crusius argues that the oldest history books (by which Crusius refers especially to the Bible and other myths) assume that the humankind has not existed forever and it is not probable that the first humans would have been created with natural means that do not work nowadays (e.g. humans being generated in the bowels of the earth). Furthermore, Crusius emphasises that during human history all nations have believed in some divine being or beings and asserts the improbability of a so widely spread deception.

Third of the merely probable proofs is based on the supposition that all humans have a conscience or a natural propensity to know what is right and what is wrong. Crusius argues that the universal existence of such a propensity cannot be a mere coincidence, generated by lucky circumstances, but must have been planned by the creator of humankind to help humans to decide what to do and what to avoid doing.

There is a conspicuous absence in Crusius’ battery of proofs - the ontological, or as it was then often called, the Cartesian proof. I noticed in an earlier post that Crusius would have accepted the proof in his ontology, but his theology clarifies that this is not the case - no proof of God’s existence can be based on a mere principle of contradiction, but some consideration of causality must happen. Crusius’ justification is evidently inherited from Hoffmann: although we cannot think the most perfect being without accepting its existence in our thoughts, this does not tell whether the most perfect being has existence outside our thoughts. If it would be a valid, Crusius adds, we might as well prove that the most perfect man and woman must exist, although the existence of men and women altogether is contingent.

What the Cartesian proof does say, according to Crusius, is that if God’s existence has been guaranteed otherwise, we can say this existence is necessary. This strategy is not that far from Wolff’s, who first proved God’s existence through a cosmological argument and then proceeded to show through an ontological argument why God must exist (because God is the most perfect being).

The main target of Crusius’ proofs are atheists. Crusius includes under atheists also people who doubt God’s existence. Such doubting atheists attack only the supposed weaknesses in the proofs of God’s existence, for instance, they might reject proof from the order in the world by pointing out imperfections in the world. Crusius’ answer to this particular objection is that what is imperfection from a limited point of view can actually contribute to the perfection of the whole world.

Another point the doubting atheists make, Crusius says, is that humans cannot really have a perfect conception of God and therefore it is as reasonable to deny as to accept God’s existence. Crusius insists that we do not need such a fully adequate concept of God to speak about their existence, but we have to just be able to distinguish God from other things. God is no empty word, Crusius assures, although we as finite things can know God mostly through negations or through God’s relations to other entities.

The more strict atheists, Crusius says, deny outright the existence of God. Some of these atheists are materialists, like ancient atomists, who consider even thinking and willing to be mere movement of matter and who do deny the existence of all simple intelligent substances. Other atheists Crusius groups under the title of universalists. Universalists he divides into those like Anaximander, who suppose that the final cause of the world can lie in the simple substances of the world, which may be intelligent, and those like Spinoza, who think of world as a unified simple substance, with things in it as mere properties of the substance. All of these forms of atheism, Crusius thinks, fall short in that they have to assume an infinite series of causes.

Crusius ends the discussion of the existence of God by noting that atheism is not the only erroneous view on theological matters. There are also deists, or as he also calls them, virtual atheists, who do not deny the existence of God, but only that of God being a moral lawgiver and judge. This is a topic he leaves for the next chapter on the attributes of God.

Christian August Crusius: Instruction to live reasonably - Worshipping God

After talking about duties toward oneself, Crusius turns his interest to duties toward God. In some sense, he notes, we have been talking about them all the time, because all duties are based on God’s will and therefore duties toward God. Still, there are some duties that are specifically duties about God, which is their immediate object.

Now, one might wonder how God can be an object of a duty, since God is supposedly immutable and no one can actually do anything to him. Crusius clarifies that it is more a question of, firstly, our notion of God, and secondly, of our relationship to God. In other words, it is our immediate duty toward God to act in accordance with his perfection and our relationship to him.

It is thus our duty to obey God, Crusius says. In fact, he says, all duty is in a sense obeying God since God wants us to obey all duties. Crusius considers the question whether the duty to obey God would make God an awful tyrant. Crusius notes that this duty is not just arbitrary whimsy of a dictator, but flows from the very nature of divinity.

Two sides exist in human mind, Crusius continues, cognitive understanding and volitive will, and both have their own duties toward God. If we start from the side of the understanding, Crusius notes that we are obligated to know God, since it is noblest thing to know the ultimate source of everything. This does not mean that we should know God perfectly, since as we are imperfect entities, our knowledge is always limited. Still, we should try to know what God actually is and what kind of properties he has, what he wills and what he has achieved in the world (creating and sustaining the world, to start from the obvious). Furthermore, Crusius remarks, we should try to know other things as parts of a hierarchy, the pinnacle of which is God.

Yet, knowing God is not the only cognitive duty toward God that Crusius recognises. Indeed, he notes that in addition to knowledge we might have beliefs, not just in the broad sense of convictions, but in the sense of weaker convictions that might still be doubted. Now, Crusius says, we might have rational reasons to believe in this strict sense something, even if we couldn’t demonstrate its certainty. Particularly, he says, if disbelief would break an obligation toward God, we should choose belief, even if the truth of this belief could not be perfectly demonstrated. For instance, accepting general skepticism would imply that God has made us incapable of knowing anything, which Crusius considers a blasphemy. Even seemingly absurd statements about God (e.g. his trinitarian nature) should be believed, Crusius concludes, if there just is external evidence making it probable.

When it comes to will, Crusius suggests, we have a duty to love God, since God loves us also. This love of God implies that we try to live as virtuously as possible, since God wants us to be good. Other things implied by love of God, Crusius goes on, are that we should respect God, be thankful to him and humble ourselves before him.

All the duties mentioned thus far have been internal duties, that is, they concern our mental actions. We do have external duties toward God, Crusius insists. Firstly, all the so-called internal actions have some external signs, and we might say that showing the external signs of appropriate internal actions is an external duty. Then again, Crusius continues, we also have an external duty to e.g. pray to God, if we have difficulties in upholding our internal duties. Still, he concludes, there is no external duty toward God that would have no relation to internal duties.

Joachim Darjes: Elements of metaphysics 2 – The city of God

While the metaphysical compendiums in Wolffian tradition have usually ended with a look on natural theology, Darjes has left cosmology as the final chapter of his metaphysics. This makes some sort of sense, since he has already emphasised that cosmology is no proper part of metaphysics, since it does not deal with characteristics of all things or of things from one of the highest genera of things – cosmology is about world, which is a certain complex of things, consisting of many kinds of things (in Darjesian philosophy, material bodies and immaterial souls and spirits).

Another oddity is Darjes' inclusion of certain notions from natural law to his discussion. He is particularly interested of the concept of right and possession. Right to something, for Darjes, means that a person has the ability to use that something without hurting other persons or their rights. This seemingly innocuous definition allows Darjes to conclude that in fact God is the primary owner of everything – God surely can control everything that exists, and he cannot really hurt rights of others, since he made all things in the first place.

Darjesian definition has also important consequences for the rights of finite entities. Firstly, he notes that finite entities can really have rights only for complex things, because they have no power to do anything to simple entities. Secondly, since all things already belong to God originally, finite entities can have right to anything, only if God has provided them the right to use things in some manner.

In addition to owning everything, God also governs world. This means that he sets the goals toward which this ”city of God” strives. The main purpose divinity has set for everything, according to Darjes, is the happiness and perfection of all rational beings. Thus, Darjes concludes, all rational beings should strive for their own happiness and perfection and help others to find these also – and definitely not hinder others in their search.

Darjes does not go into particularities of what actions are good for happiness and perfection, but merely notes what tools God uses for guiding rational entities toward their appointed goal. Firstly, God can directly reveal some guidelines. Secondly, God might appoint further rewards and punishments and even a kind of heaven and hell, to provide further incitement for good actions. Despite these rather naive Christian notions, Darjes also supposes that all rational entities will eventually be able to perfect themselves – the purpose of punishments is also just to help personal perfection.

We are now finally finished with Darjesian metaphysics. Next up on the list is a return to the work of Martin Knutzen.

Joachim Darjes: Elements of metaphysics 2 – Goal of creation

All Wolffian metaphysics thus far have concluded with natural theology – study of the infinite entity behind everything else. Although natural theology isn't the end of Darjesian metaphysics, he certainly wasn't able to ignore it completely. He starts by noting that an infinite entity is characterised by being perfect in all senses. Thus, infinite entity must be active and spontaneous. It must also not be dependent on anything, hence, it cannot be a material entity consisting of other entities. In other words, infinite entity must be a spirit, which acts perpetually. If there are infinite entities, Darjes finally notes, there can be only of them.

Now, Darjes notes that some philosophers have denied the existence of any infinite spirit. Such philosophers can be called atheists, since they deny the existence of God, which would be infinite spirit. But Darjes goes even further and insists that even skeptics that doubt the existence of an infinite spirit should be called atheists. Indeed, Darjes extends the notion of atheist even further, by defining God as a certain kind of infinite spirit – that is, God is also defined, according to him, by having freely created all the finite entities. Therefore, Aristotle, who thinks that the perfect self-thinking intellect has not created anything, and Stoics, who think that even divine Logos doesn't do anything freely, could be called atheists, Darjes concludes.

Darjes spends quite a lot of time on debunking the arguments of all these supposed atheists, but his main argument is undoubtedly his supposed proof of God's existence. While Christian Wolff based his assumption on the existence of God to a variant of cosmological argument – the existence of e.g. my own soul can be explained only through God – and used the so-called ontological argument merely as an explanation of God's existence (i.e. by noting that God in its perfection has all that it takes to exist) and while Baumgarten had exclusively relied on ontological argument (that is, by arguing that a combination of all perfections must also contain perfection of existence), Darjes appears to just try to throw various arguments and see what sticks. He begins by noting that a notion of infinite spirit must be possible – indeed, spirits are possible, and there seems to be no problem in supposing a spirit that is more perfect than anything else, he insists. Then, Darjes continues, infinite spirit must exist, because it is such a thing that exists, if it just is possible. As if not completely convinced of this ontological proof, Darjes defends the existence of God with two other proofs – firstly, he uses the cosmological argument that all finite entities must be dependent on God, and secondly, a somewhat weaker proof that God's existence is probable, because otherwise we would have to make too many assumptions to explain everything in the world.

A topic that Darjes seems to regard as wanting a more thorough examination is the characterisation of God. A general foundation of the examination is that as a perfect entity God must have also perfect attributes. Indeed, these attributes are unique to God, Darjes says, and one cannot then make a true distinction between God's essence and his attributes, because there isn't any entity that would have similar attributes and still not be God.

Darjes notes that some attributes of God, such as his infinity, spirituality, immutability, necessity and uniqueness, do not concern anything that God does, while others or the so-called operational attributes do. A good example of the latter is the cognition of God, which should be the best kind of cognition possible – that is, Darjes says, God should be omnipotent. This omnipotent cognition of God is for Darjes threefold. Firstly, God knows through his very constituting force all the things that could be – this is natural cognition of God. Secondly, God also knows freely all the things happening through his spontaneous actions. Finally, Darjes notes, God must have cognition mediating between the other two kinds of cognition, that is, cognition of causal chains that lead to actualisation of different possibilities.

A counterpart to God's cognition is his volition, which Darjes classifies into two kinds corresponding with two kinds of God's cognition. Firstly, God wills through his very nature that all things must cohere with all the attributes of God. Of course, Darjes notes, all things simply must cohere with the perfection of divinity. In other words, God wills that some things, which necessarily are in a certain manner, must be as they are. Secondly, God's volitions are not restricted to necessities, but God also wills things that might not be as they are, such as the existence of some non-divine entities. Whatever the kind of volition, Darjes notes, the object of this volition must be optimally good. More particularly, God wills that there are finite, but free entities, that they will always have means for perfecting themselves through their free actions and that they should not squander their freedom. Furthermore, Darjes remarks, God never wills anything evil, but at most permits evil, that is, lets something bad happen, if it is necessary for the existence of something even more good. God doesn't even punish people, Darjes says, if this punishment does not contribute to the development of the punished persons.

Merely willing, God would just decree things, but in addition, he also executes his decrees, Darjes notes. In particular, this means that God has caused the existence of finite entities, that is, has created them. Darjes notes that it is unsure whether this act of creation happened at some particular point or whether it has been going on through eternity. In any case, Darjes continues, God does not just create finite things, but also continues to sustain them with the same act, by which he created them in he first place. God could, undoubtedly, just annihilate all finite entities, but he doesn't have any reason to do that.

Baumgarten: Metaphysics – Divine deeds

Like majority of the German philosophers at the time, Baumgarten was quick to distance his ideas from Spinozism. Thus, he insists that God is not just a passive source of emanation, but an active creator. Of course, God has not created everything, Baumgarten says. Essences of all things are necessary and thus in need of no creation. Since essences of things contain their necessary limitations, Baumgarten can also say that God is not the cause of these limitations – whatever evil there is in the world, is then ultimately no fault of God.

What God has done then is that he has given existence to some of the essences and their complex or the world. With the world, he created all its parts, down to the simple substances or monads. Because God knows best, this world must be the best possible, even though it necessarily has some evil due to the limitations of the substances. Quite traditionally, Baumgarten suggests that the end of the creation is to reflect the glory of divinity, especially in the eyes of all substances with intellect to comprehend the perfection of the world and its creator.

Baumgarten also states, again quite traditionally, that God has not just created the world, but also sustains its continued existence. This means especially that God makes sure that world follows certain stable physical laws. Such stable laws might allow some evil to happen – a human being might be killed, because a bullet follows a certain trajectory. Still, this is not something that God would have positively wanted to happen, but just something he has allowed as a consequence of the working of natural laws.

God can have more specific influence in world's events. Such special influence cannot then have any bad effects, since it is something God has positively willed to happen. Indeed, Baumgarten assures us, the aim of these divine interventions is often to help the frail worldly creatures and prevent them from succumbing to their limitations. One particular type of such interventions is revelation, which in strict sense means for Baumgarten God speaking supernaturally to finite beings. The content of such revelation is usually something that humans could not have found out by themselves, but it can never contradict what philosophy has to say about world and God.

With such traditionally religious notions ends Baumgarten's Metaphysics. Next time, I shall take a look at how to combine necessity with freedom.

Baumgarten: Metaphysics – Pulling God out of the hat

It is especially in his rational theology where Baumgarten diverges most from standards set by Wolff. As we should know by now, for Wolff, it was the cosmological argument that ruled the field of theology. With Baumgarten, we find no traces of this argument. Instead, Baumgarten starts straightaway with the ontological argument, which with Wolff clearly played a second fiddle.

The two gentlemen don't just have different taste in arguments, but their very arguments are different. Indeed, when with Wolff, ontological argument was essentially dependent on cosmological argument, with Baumgarten, the ontological argument obviously has to work on its own.

There's already a clear difference in the manner, in which Wolff and Baumgarten try to prove the possibility of God. With Wolff, the proof was based on the fact that he defined God as a sum of known possibilities that are also known to be possible in combination – it requires just quick analysis to see that this proof must work. Baumgarten, on the contrary, bases his proof on more spurious ideas. He defines God as a sum of positive characteristics, which have no negations or limitations in them. He then suggests that contradiction could only occur, if such a combination of characteristics would have some negations in them. This leap of thought seems to require a more careful justification – after all, one might think that characteristics might restrict one another without being literal negations of one another. Yet, it seems that with Baumgarten, development of a thing in one dimension is completely indifferent to its development in another dimension – basic characteristics are independent of one another.

Now, with Wolff, it is then all about knowing whether his combination of perfect possible characteristics is just a contingent entity or also necessary – in the former case, we can say nothing about its existence, in the latter case, we can conclude infallibly that it does exist. The only manner in which Wolff could decide this was to show that necessary things existed – this is where the cosmological argument came in.

Baumgarten, on the other hand, simply assumes that existence is one of the independent dimensions, of which the sum of all positive characteristics consists of. As one knows well, Kant was very much against this idea and denied that being or existence would be even a characteristic in the same sense as other characteristics of things. Wolff did not go as far, because he noted that Baumgartenian line of thought could not lead very far – even if you added existence as a characteristic of some possible entity, it would still be just possible existence (this is why he had to prove a stronger notion that he could add necessity to the required possible combination of perfect characteristics). With Baumgarten, actual existence is something you can just add to a possible thing and make it exist – indeed, existence is defined by him as a completeness in the combination of all characteristics of a thing.

Baumgarten then thinks that he has shown the necessity of God's existence – God comes out, when you start to add all sorts of perfections and finally existence. God cannot then fail to exist, because that would mean contradiction. Baumgarten's final account of all the properties of God is rather traditional (he is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good), but one should not even expect originality in such carefully observed part of education.

Next time, I shall wrap up Baumgarten's natural theology, and with it, all of Baumgarten's metaphysics.

Christian Wolff: Natural theology, posterior part – The enemies of faith

Included with the second book of Natural theology is also Wolff's first complete take on worldviews that rivaled Christianity – one might suppose that it was especially atheism controversy that generated his interest in the topic. It is no wonder that Wolff rejects all these theories, but what is interesting is how he groups these various viewpoints into distinct sets.

The most important of the wrong theories is obviously atheism, which Wolff thinks is so important that it deserves a chapter of its own. We all know atheists are of the opinion that God does not exist. What is more, a consistent atheist must even deny the possibility of God, because by Wolff's a priori proof, God would exist, if he just were possible. Because God does not exist, there is no final explanation of the world, but instead, the world must be an independent entity requiring no explanation – a strange conclusion in Wolffian eyes, because nothing extended could be really independent for Wolff. The worldly events must either go on forever or form a loop in which things repeat one another. In any case, they must follow an iron necessity, since nothing outside the universe could come and change anything. This doesn't mean that there would be no freedom, since human souls might still have the freedom to do things – this freedom just probably would have no consequences on the level of material world. Still, it means that morality is difficult to combine with atheism, because the necessity of the world makes it impossible to apply values like good or bad to it.

After atheism, Wolff groups together fatalism, deism and naturalism, probably because his pietist opponents had often grouped these three together. Fatalism, or the idea that everything in the world happens necessarily, is evidently the one Wolff likes least. Wolff clearly states that atheists must inevitably be fatalists, at least if they want to accept the laws of physics. Still, all fatalists need not be atheists, but they may well be deists, that is, they may believe that God has just created the world, but does not afterwards interfere with it in any manner. Wolff also points out that deist, like atheist, cannot use the idea of divine providence as a way to booster people's behaviour, yet, deist can be more consistent with morality, because he can accept that God might have chosen another world, which might have been better or worse.

Still, it is the third idea or naturalism that is the most interesting of the three theories. By naturalism Wolff does not mean belief in natural sciences, but the idea of natural theology as the only true source of religion. Wolff might have sympathised with the view, but he clearly wanted to show also that natural theology and revealed religion need not be rivals, but could in many cases meet one another.

It is not so strange to see materialism and idealism in the same chapter, but anthropomorphism seems a stranger bedfellow. Yet, Wolff obviously has a point – if God is thought to be shaped like a human, he is obviously material or at least has a material constituent. This also shows that materialist need not necessarily be atheist, since she can just assume that God is some material things (perhaps even the world itself).

Wolff criticizes both anthropomorphists and materialists, because they make God into something very ungodlike – a material object that could be cut to pieces. Interestingly Wolff is less critical of idealism and even says that idealist need not deny physics, because she can just think it concerns an apparent world. Still, Wolff finally denies idealism, because it takes away from the glory of God, who then wouldn't have created an independent world.

The final chapter of the book gathers together various philosophical theories, but also paganism or belief in the existence of several gods, which is perhaps highlihted, because it shares similarities with Manicheanism: both theories suggest that there are several principles guiding world and thus they essentially lower the status of God. The final two systems, Spinozism and Epicureanism, are quickly dealt with. Spinoza has the disadvantage, because it clearly confuses the notion of independency and substance – God is the only independent thing and others are God's creations, but these creations surely are not parts of God. Epicureanism, on the other hand, falls from traditional reasons – emphasising mere sensual pleasure destroys values in themselves.

Finally a last page on Wolff's natural theology. Next time I'll turn to a new philosopher.

Christian Wolff: Natural theology, prior part – God and the world

In the beginning, God might have created heaven and earth, but it is hard to explain what God did in this supposed creation. First there was no world and then there was one, but because we cannot do such things, these words do not convey any clear meaning. It appears that in case of creation, whether there was such thing or not, we are always incapable of truly understanding what it is all about.

Christian Wolff tries to shed some light on the topic. World is dependent on its elements, so in creating the world, God must have used the elements. Because elements, on the other hand, are dependent on the very world they should constitute, God cannot have used elements as a construction matter, but he must have begun his labourious efforts by creating the elements out of nothing. At the same time as he created elements, God ordered them to various structures constituting the world itself. On top of all this, he also created finite souls to think this world.

Now, Wolff believed that space and time are relational, that is, that there would be no space and time without any spatial and temporal things. Thus, space and time did not exist before creation, but both began to exist in the creation.

Since Wolffian God is supposed to exist beyond time, it seems hard to decide whether the world is supposed to be finite in its history or whether God created it as having existed for an infinity. Here, on the other hand, Wolff is willing to accept that there is a first state of the world. Because this beginning is not explained by anything in the world, it must be miraculous, Wolff concludes. This appears to be actually the first time when Wolff explicitly admits time has a first moment – it might be that he is trying to prove his non-Spinozism by this move.

God is then capable of doing the miracle of bringing truly new things into existence, while no other thing can do this, but is only restricted to modifying what is already given. Indeed, nothing else would even exist without God, because he is also preserving world. Of course, Wolff notes, since God is atemporal, his act of preservation is the same as his act of creation.

Wolff's God is still not just a creator and upholder of the world, but just like in Christian tradition usually, he has designed the world down to its last details. Indeed, God is a moral being who has wisely set up the machinery of the universe in such a manner that it serves some higher end, which obviously must be good – God is providential, which can be seen in the fact that all things in the world are of use to one another.

Especially in case of rational beings, like humans, God has set up some goals, which they should strive to obtain – God gives human an opportunity to perfect some part of the world. Of course, God doesn't force anyone to follows his councils, but merely creates an obligation that we should follow them. It is then up to an individual whether she wants to follow God, but in the end it would be in her best interests to follow them, since God's rules should be of benefit to anyone.

All in all, Wolff appears to know quite a lot of what God is like, what he has done, and what he wants of us. On a closer look, Wolff admits that we know not very much about this God. We know that God is the final ground of everything, but this is about as much as we can say. Many of the supposed divine attributes are mere negations – final ground of world is not material, but he isn't also any human soul. Then again, the supposed positive attributes of God are only eminent, that is, they are somehow similar as some of our own attributes, but in reality quite incomprehensible, because we do not know e.g. what an infinite understanding would be like. When people of Kantian leanings thus accuse Wolff of a philosophical arrogance and of an attempt to base substantial knowledge of God on mere concepts, these accusations do not hit the mark – our knowledge of what God is, is rather meager.

So much for the first past of Wolff's theology, onward to second!

Christian Wolff: Natural theology, prior part – Good and powerful

Wolffian God is not satisfied with mere contemplation of possibilities, but decides to actualise one of the possible worlds. In order to do this, he needs to have the capacity to actualise anyone of them. Indeed, God could make anything happen that is possible and only impossibilities are limits to his capacities – in effect, God is omnipotent, Wolff says.

What God requires for this use of his capacity is mere act of will. This is of course completely different from what human beings do – in us, decision and actualisation of a plan are two completely distinct events. In fact, there is an even further difference, Wolff says. Human beings usually start by contemplating all the possibilities and only after careful consideration make their choice. With God, these two events are connected in one act – God chooses even in contemplating possibilities.

Now, when God chose to actualise this world, he knew exactly what would happen in this world, because he knows everything that would happen in any possible world. This appears to lead to the famous problem of divine prescience – how could our choices be completely free, if God already knows what we are going to choose beforehand. The answer to this problem is also quite traditional – knowing something does not cause it, thus, even if God knows what Obama will do tomorrow, he did not choose it for Obama's sake. Of course, this line of reasoning has the striking weakness that God does choose the world that is to be actualised and seems so responsible of everything that happens in the world.

What is more important is that God must have had some reason for picking this particular world – as we know already, Wolff thinks it is because the actual world is the most perfect of all worlds. The Leibnizian story of a necessary evil which all worlds must have and which God doesn't cause, but only allows should be familiar by now. Wolff also emphasises God's wisdom and goodness. God is wise or he knows the best means for actualising his ends, thus, the world and its laws are the most efficient there can be and allow, for instance, human beings to actualise their ends. Indeed, God has given humans liberty, because he is good and hopes they will of their own choice make good decisions – and even if they don't and end up doing evil things, in the end, even this serves the final good.

God's wisdom is then for the most part incomprehensible to human beings – we simply cannot see all the strings that should turn evil actions into good effects. Yet, God can reveal us information that goes over what we can directly know through experience – Wolff's take on the idea of divine revelation. This is also a good place to stop, because in next post I will finally think of the ways God effects other things, that is, nature and spirits.

Christian Wolff: Natural theology, prior part (1736)

Wolff's Latin series of metaphysical works is finished by his Theologia naturalis. While from the modern perspective this must be the least interesting part of Wolff's system, it is, on the contrary, largest of all the Latin metaphysical works, and indeed, was published in two volumes. The first volume begins with a brief explanation of what natural theology is all about, but is especially characterised by an a posteriori method – that is, Wolff attempts to use experience to determine the existence and properties of God. The second volume should then obviously use an a priori method – a novelty in Wolffian system, and we shall see how it fits in with the more established part of his theology.

Wolff's primary route for God's existence has always been through what Kant would later call a cosmologial proof. Wolff begins by admitting the existence of reader's own soul – if nothing else exists then I at least exist. Then Wolff notes that there must be a complete grounding of the existence of this soul. Complete ground or reason can then be only something which does not require any further explanation or anything external for its own existence. It is clear this proof has a number of weak points. What is this grounding supposed to mean? If it is just a nickname for a mental demand of human consciousness that all things must be fully grounded, then we clearly need not take it seriously as an ontological principle – even if I'd have to insist on God's existence, this would not necessitate God's actual existence. Then again, it appears unreasonable to suppose that the complete ground in an ontological sense couldn't be an infinite series of past events, especially if one believed that such a series would be necessary.

Whatever the case, the rest of the book sets out to discover further characteristics of this final explanation of everything. The most straightforward feature is that while God, like all entities, must have some force, it must be a force that requires nothing external for activating it. In effect, if there is no inherent contradiction in the structure of God, it will, as it were, actualise itself, no matter what – we shall return to this idea, when we are dealing with the second book on natural theology. Figuratively one can say that God existed before anything else and God will exist after anything else.

God's necessity and self-sufficiency reveal at least what God cannot be. God cannot have been generated in a literal sense of the term and he definitely cannot be destroyed – thus, he cannot be material. Then again, because human souls are essentially dependent on the world they represent, God cannot be a human soul. Still, God has chosen to create a particular world and so must have some mental activities or be spirit. In fact, by thinking what sort of spiritual activities are required in an act of creation, one can try to determine what God is like.

Now, in order that God can choose a world to create, he must have first checked out all the possibilities from which to choose the world to be created – in effect, God must have considered all the possible worlds. This means that God must have some cognitive activities, yet, they are of quite different type than human cognition. For starters, God does not have any passive faculties, because he is constantly acting or cognising things. Furthermore, God does not need to move from one aspect of a world to another, but he comprehends immediately everything that would happen in one possible world. Because possible worlds contain all that there might be, God is definitely omniscient.

If God then knows all things perfectly well, can he also know what we know, as we know it? Well, God cannot fail to have a perfect knowledge, thus, he cannot force himself into a mode in which he would have only human type of knowledge of world and cannot therefore have any firsthand experience on the condition of human consciousness. Still, God can know that some other person has a more imperfect view of the world.

Because God can at once see all the past, present and future events, he has complete historical knowledge of all individual things. This does not mean that God could not have universal or philosophical knowledge also. Indeed, God can intuitively know whether certain feature of things is universally connected to another feature, so making him the greatest scientist of all times. Of course, even in universal knowledge God is not restricted to any use of symbols, although he does see that humans usually require such aids for universal knowledge.

Before moving onto more active side of divine attributes, it is good to note in passing that Wolff also used considerable number of pages for determining whether Bible got it right – that is, whether e.g. Bible is correct, if it says that God sees something, or whether it must be using symbolic language. It is a bold move, especially considering accusations of atheism against Wolff and the recent schism with the Wertheimer Bible, that Wolff even considers such questions, even if these questions feel rather dated nowadays. Next time more about the divine will.

Christian Wolff: Remarks on Reasonable thoughts on God, the world and the human soul, also on all things in general - Fragments of cosmology, rational psychology and natural theology

It has become evident that Wolff clearly wants to distance himself from the image of a radical atheist and Spinozist. This is even more evident, if we take into consideration his comments on cosmology, which he straightforwardly defines as a discipline required especially for the proof of God's existence. Indeed, it is the contingency of the world and its dependence on God that Wolff especially wants to emphasize in his comments – thus, he once again uses considerable efforts to state the difference between absolute and hypothetical necessity, which his opponents had muddled.

Wolff also clarifies the notion that things are infinitely dependent on other things, which I also noted to be somewhat confusing statement and which the pietists read as a commitment to the eternity of the world. Wolff notes that he is merely stating what the worldly things would have to be like, if only natural explanations or causation according to natural laws would be allowed. In other words, there couldn't have been a natural beginning of the world, because every natural law requires a previous state from which the current state arose.

Such an impossibility does not of course rule out a supernatural beginning or a beginning that did not happen according to natural laws. Indeed, Wolff is convinced that the principle of sufficient ground must then lead us to accept such a supernatural beginning – infinite series of causes just isn't a possibility. Wolff is here underlining the contingency of natural laws: they are necessary only within the world, but not from a more extensive perspective.

Furthermore, Wolff even makes it clear that in a sense natural laws are not necessary even within the world, that is, if God is taken into account. Wolff states that God need not follow laws of nature, but if he so desires, he can make worldly things behave in a manner they usually wouldn't. Of course, Wolff is quick to point out that God doesn't do such miracles, unless there is a good reason, but it is evident that he wants to make God's freedom stand more out.

Interestingly, Wolff appears to take the principle of the identity of indiscernibles as a mere natural law. Indeed, he does consider it a real possibility that God could have created two completely equal things, although he just has had no reason to do it. We can see Wolff distancing himself here from Leibniz, who apparently suggested that the identity of indiscernibles might somehow be based on the principle of sufficient reason.

Even clearer is Wolff's struggle against becoming identified a a mere Leibnizian in his behaviour towards monadology. Wolff does want to present the theory of monads in as plausible manner as possible, but he emphasizes forcefully that he himself does not believe in it. Main reasons for his disbelief are physical. Wolff is unconvinced that all the richness of phenomena could be reduced to elements that all share the same force of representation. True, one could on basis of this power understand why elements or monads can form larger totalities, such a material objects, but the further characteristic of material objects that resist the intrusion of other material objects into the same place is something Wolff cannot understand as derived from force of representation.

Still further clue of Wolff's growing disenchanment of Leibniz is provided by Wolff's clarification of the status of pre-established harmony as a mere hypothesis, but this is something we have already dealt with. In addition, Wolff seems keen to downplay the importance of whole rational psychology: if one just knows e.g. that movements of soul and body somehow correspond with one another, nothing more is required, if one does not have a scientific bent for discovering grounds for everything.

The urge to distinguish himself from Leibnizian thought is probably a symptom of Wolff's need to answer the accusations of atheism and fatalism, which becomes even more evident in the rest of Wolff's book. Thus, Wolff spends considerable number of pages in explaining that while one can derive all properties of souls from its representative capacities and all properties of God from his capacity to view all possible worlds at once, this does not mean that the nature of soul and God would be mere theoretical or passive regard of actual and possible worlds, but that both soul and God are active. And just like Wolff decided to defend the freedom of the soul, equally certain is his tendency to defend the divine liberty – even if the act of creating this world is the most reasonable and God as eminently good and wise will then inevitably choose to create it, this still doesn't mean that God couldn't have chosen completely different world to create.

Thus end Wolff's remarks on his metaphysics, which set his scheduled publication back a year – it was only the next year that Wolff could finally publish his account of biology, to which I shall turn next time.

Christian Wolff: Of different interconnections between things, wisdom and fatalistic necessity, system of pre-established harmony and Spinozan hypothesis splendidly commented, while at the same time weighing justifications for demonstrating existence of genuine God and illustrating many chapters of rational theology (1724)

We have just seen Lange's thorough criticism of Wolffian philosophy leading to the surprising conclusion that Wolff was no better than a common atheist like Spinoza was thought to be. By coincidence, Wolff had the very same year written a treatise – De differentia nexus rerum sapientis, nec non systematis harmoniae praestabilitae et hypothesium Spinosae luculenta commentatio, in qua simul genuina Dei existantiam demonstrandi ratio expenditur et multa religionis naturalis capita illustrantur – where he explicitly tried to show how the Leibnizian tradition differed from Spinozism.

As the title so clearly says, Wolff tried to establish two points of difference: one concerned the supposed necessity of the world, while the issue of second was the interaction of souls and bodies. Of these two points, the second is easier to decide. True, it appears that Wolff and Spinoza have identical views of the topic: both deny any true interaction of souls and bodies and maintain that the series of bodily changes and the series of mental states should somehow reflect one another. Yet, there is a crucial difference. Leibniz and Wolff envisioned the body and the soul as two different substances, while Spinoza thought them to be mere aspects of one human being. With Spinoza then, as Wolff's student Bilfinger had already pointed out, bodies and souls were necessarily intertwined. Wolff and Leibniz, on the contrary, accept that the union of the two substances is contingent and therefore separable. This is important especially as a justification of the Christian notion of life after death – soul or consciousness might exist also without any body to sustain it.

A more interesting questions concern the difference between a fatalistic world of Spinoza and a world created by a wise God. At first sight it appears quite incomprehensible how one could even confuse the two. After all, Spinoza's world is necessary and only that is possible what happens within that world – there is then nothing truly contingent, because all things follow necessarily from the very necessity of God and therefore only a person with inadequate information could call things contingent. Wolffian God, on the other hand, can think of true alternative possibilities and chooses one of them as the world to be created. Hence, even if the laws of Wolff's actual world are just as unbreakable as in Spinoza's necessary world, these laws are still contingent according to a more extensive perspective – God could have chosen other laws.

But as we saw from Lange's criticism, the true problem lies in Wolff's notion of God. Wolff emphasizes the understanding of God, when he describes God as a wise and intelligent creator. But understanding is a passive capacity – when God sees that a certain possible world is the most optimal, he cannot decide himself what to describe as the best possible world. Thus, because God is also good and he must automatically choose to create the best possible world, it appears that we could replace God with a very powerful computer that would just have enough capacity for viewing even the smallest details of all possible worlds.

Wolff's answer is to suggest that his opponents fall into equally ridiculous consequences and are even closer to outright Spinozism. Wolff's point is that if his opponents wish to de-emphasize the omniscience of God's understanding, they must at the same time emphasize the omnipotence of his will, that is, they must hold that divine will has a power to do things that the divine understanding has not decreed to be good. Now creation becomes a blind act of will – God becomes like an unstoppable and irrational manufacturing plant that just spurts out things without any rhyme or reason. Sure, what is produced is in a sense contingent, but because of the omnipotency of creator, the world feels like it is governed by a rigid necessity – and this time there's not even the justification that this is all for the best.

The struggle between Wolff and his supposed opponents circles then around the question whether the freedom of God, and indeed, any conscious being, falls more to his will or to his understanding. In a sense, it is quite obvious that it is our capacity to choose that makes us free – if we could just watch what happens, without having the ability to affect anything, we would not be truly free. Yet, as Wolff among other philosophers has pointed out, mere blind will without understanding is equally not free – after all, we wouldn't call a machine that works on randomly generated numbers a free person. It appears then that both understanding and will are required for the possibility of truly free decisions; I shall not pursue the question how to unify the two faculties into a coherent whole.

So much for the question of necessity. Next, we'll have a short detour on Chinese philosophy.

Johann Joachim Lange: Humble and detailed research of the false and corruptive philosophy in Wolffian metaphysical system on God, the world, and the men; and particularly of the so-called pre-established harmony of interaction between soul and body: as also in the morals based on such system: together with a historical preface on that what happened with its author in Halle: among treatises of many important matters, and with short check on remarks concerning duplicated doubts on Wolffian philosophy - Infinite computer

We might state Lange's main criticism of Wolffian theology quite simply: God has very little to do in Wolff's system. True, Wolff does admit that God exists and even proves his existence, but Lange cannot even commend Wolff's proof, which he deems to be faulty. Indeed, Lange hits on a crucial defect. Wolff's principle of sufficient reason or ground states that all things should have some ground, that is, all physical things should derive from a previous cause and all conscious actions should be somehow motivated. From this principle Wolff suddenly moves to a stronger principle that all things should have a full ground, that is, they should be based on an ultimate ground that requires no further ground for its existence. Lange notes that Wolff's original principle of sufficient ground is consistent with an infinite causal series bringing about the current event, thus, making the leap to the stronger principle unjustified.

Even if Wolff does accept God, Lange continues, Wolff's deterministic world system leaves almost no room for divine push on events. Wolff does make a halfhearted attempt to explain the possibility of miracles: God can supernaturally affect world, if he then makes another miracle that corrects the world so that it will once again return to its deterministic course. In effect, miracles of Wolffian God can make nothing new happen, because their results are erased by the second miracle of restitution.

Lange is especially opposed to Wolff's notion of what God is like. Wolff defines God as an entity that can think of all infinitely multiple possible worlds. God is then meant to choose one of these possible worlds for actualization – thus, he does not truly create the world, Lange says, meaning perhaps that God does not design the world from scratch, but accepts the world from a ready-made brochure of possible worlds. Even this choice is less of an achievement than it seems, because God is essentially a passively cognizing entity without any spontaneous volitions. God is like a computer that has been programmed to choose the best possible world – God as perfectly good cannot really choose any other option. Hence, the supposed choice becomes a mere justification of the goodness of the actual world – creation is as deterministic as the world created.

An atheist would then have no difficulties in accepting Wolffian philosophy, Lange concludes, for the assumption of God is mere play of words. Indeed, Lange thinks, Wolff even defends atheists by saying that atheism is compatible with morality. We shall see next time in more detail what Lange has to say about Wolffian ethics.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on the purposes of natural things (1724)

16^th of March, 1938. Two uniformed men are walking through Vienna. They knock on a door and ask the housekeeper to let them in. Noting the telltale swastika on their clothes, she refuses to let them in – her employer has Jewish roots. The arguments grows louder, but then a voice is heard above: ”Watch out!” Pedestrians quickly disperse, and the body of a scholar of Novalis, obese cabaret actor and dilettante historian hits ground. Egon Friedell has died.

This story, told in a preface for Friedell's magnum opus, the three-part cultural history of modern age, awoke my interest to the book itself in my youth. Friedell is not viewed as particularly reliable source these days, but his style is memorable. He was an enthusiastic admirer of such great philosophers like Leibniz, Hegel and especially Kant, and it was Friedell who particularly made me fall in love with classical German philosophy.

This is the stuff that stories are made of. Without his grim death, I might never have read Friedell's books, thus, I might never had dedicated myself to German idealism and this blog might have never existed. The events have a distinct end which makes sense of everything leading to it and in a sense even justifies all the grim details. Such a chain of events makes one ask whether it might have been planned all along.

Such considerations drive teleological explanations, which purport to explain what happens through what derived of it. Of course, one might always suggest that such explanations reflect more our expectations than anything in the world, but the criticism can be argued against through the very same means – if we believe that there are purposeful events, then we will probably see them everywhere, but if we believe that there are no purposeful events, then we will describe apparent purposeful events as mere coincidences, even if they would really be purposeful.

It is apparent that at least human behaviour involves purposiveness, and thus it becomes as no surprise that I chose to begin this text with a reference to Friedell - I had a distinct purpose in my mind, when I did this. As it happens, Friedell was also my first source on Christian Wolff, whom Friedell ridicules as a philosopher obsessed with teleology: night exists so that we can sleep and fish, but Moon exists so that it wouldn't be too dark even at night. So far I had not yet found any corroboration of Friedell's characterization, but the current book,Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Absichten der natürlichen Dingen, is especially a work dedicated to teleology.

Nowadays it is thought a sound scientific methodology to avoid teleological explanations and idea of natural purpose, and therefore a whole book dedicated to teleology will probably appear ridiculous. Yet, teleological explanations might not be completely unscientific. Witness, for instance, Aristotle's Physics, which contains a reference to an end as one sort of cause. What Aristotle means is that when things are left to their own devices, they tend to move toward certain stable condition – for instance, a rock falls to the ground, where it will rest. Thing in a stable condition might not be completely inactive, in so far as their activities are stable: Aristotelian examples of such stable actions include recurring movement of stars and ongoing processes of living organisms. All in all, Aristotelian teleology might involve then nothing else, but a supposition of the existence of such stable conditions of things.

Wolffian teleology cannot be reinterpreted in a similar manner, because the supposed end of e.g. metals lies not in their own nature, but in their various uses in human culture. Instead, Wolffian teleology is essentially a technological undertaking – Wolff describes how we can use metals to produce kitchenware, weapons, scientific instruments and so on. This is nothing but applied science, we could say.

What goes beyond applied science is the assumption that things in general are useful for technological purposes – this in an attitude justified by Wolff's metaphysical theory of gracious, wise and powerful God. What appeared particularly unconvincing to Friedell in this attitude was the idea that humans especially are the central beings whom all other things should serve – even all the stars in the sky exist only to help navigation.

This apparent anthropocentricity is explained by a metaphysical assumption of Wolff – every object contains in a sense the whole world in itself, in other words, an individual is so closely interconnected with the world around it that neither could exist without the other. Thus, in a sense we could take any object of the world as its central or most essential object. For instance, we could view Earth as the most important place in the whole universe, but for equally good reasons also Jupiter or an arbitrary planet in the Andromeda galaxy fit the bill. In other words all things are both means and final purposes.

This principle of a reciprocal purposefulness allows Wolff to enlarge our knowledge beyond what we can immediately experience. If all heavenly objects and their occupants are final purposes, these objects must have the necessary means for fulfilling the purposes of the occupants – they must have oceans, an atmosphere etc. This is a place where Wolff clearly breaks the limits of the acceptable use of teleology, and as the moon landings have shown, there are heavenly objects that are very inimical to life.

(Well, unless the stories of moon landings weren't just clever government tricks meant to confuse people. We might passingly note how all conspiracy theories resemble a sort of negative teleology – the conspiracy theorist believes that all negative events are the result of an evil person with almost divine capacities. No wonder one favorite Moriarty of at least Christian conspiracy theorists is the Devil, who is apparently out there to make us all atheists.)

Wolff does also admit a more substantial centrality in teleology. Inorganic objects exist only as tools for organic objects, and furthermore, irrational organisms exist only for the sake of rational beings – human beings are at least the most essential entities on Earth. The most crucial question is undoubtedly then what these rational entities are supposed to do. According to Wolff, the main aim of the rational entities is to witness the existence of God and particularly his goodness, wisdom and power – he has the will to create the best possible world, he knows what it's like and then just creates such a world. Like a small child, the omnipotent God requires an audience to praise his achievements, we might ironically say.

So much for teleology, next time we shall see whether Wolff's philosophy can hold on against a thorough attack.

Johann Joachim Lange: Reasons for God and natural religion against atheism, and, all those who produce, or promote, ancient or recent pseudophilosophy, especially Stoicism and Spinozism, and principles of genuine true philosophy entwined with demonstrative method (1723)

1723 was a turning point in Christian Wolff's career. Until then, he had spent relatively uneventful life as a professor in the university of Halle, writing immensely popular text books on nearly everything. In the conservative atmosphere of German philosophy, Wolff's philosophy was not universally appreciated, and accusations of atheist tendencies were made by his pietist competitors – rather unexpected of a philosopher who had dedicated a significant portion of his major work to God.

Slander is one thing, but the rumours were starting to worry Friedrich Wilhelm I, the king of Prussia. King was a collector, not of stamps or coins, but of big men, which were conscripted by king's officers, by hook or by crook. Story goes that king Friedrich Wilhem was rather worried about the supposed fatalism of Wolff's philosophy. If all events followed strict necessity, the men in king's collection would not be accountable for what they did – especially if they happened to desert the army. Fearing of the fate of his personal toys, if such terrible ideas would spread, king promptly decided to dismantle Wolff's professorship. Fortunately Wolff quickly landed on a new position at the university of Marburg.

The controversy around Wolff's philosophy continued for a while, and it is on this context that we have to evaluate Johann Joachim Lange's breathtakingly titled Caussa Dei et religionis naturalis adversus atheismum, et, quae eum gignit, aut promovet, pseudophilosophiam veterum et recentiorum, praesertim Stoicam et Spinozianam, e genuinis verae philosophia principiis methodo demonstrativa adserta. We have already met Lange's pietistically oriented philosophy and his attitudes towards atheism should come as no surprise – atheism is wrong, contradictory and against morality.

The dislike of Spinoza and his geometrical method was a common theme for more religious thinkers. Indeed, Lange begins by explicitly noting that the use of mathematical method without any guidance might lead one to atheism – if one did not listen to the warnings of common sense, one could stubbornly follow a train of thought leading to absurd conclusions. One can detect a clear sarcasm in Lange's choice of presenting the book in the very same geometrical style of definitions, axioms and propositions to be proved – particularly as some of the axioms and postulates he chooses are later proven as propositions. This is not a foundationalist attempt of building the whole edifice on an unshakable basis, but a coherentist attempt to show how all the jigsaw pieces fit in to form a larger picture.

The structure of the book is thus twofold. First, Lange moves from certain common sense assumptions to the existence of God. Here the mediating link is provided by the notorious cosmological proof. But Lange is not satisfied to use it once, but repeats the same form over and over again with different topics. A soul of the human being cannot be material, thus, it must have been fashioned by God, but the same goes for human body and the whole human race, and indeed, the whole material universe, which just cannot be grounded in nothing.

The pivotal point in the deductions is human liberty. Lange's cosmological proofs that apply to material universe hinge on the results of empirical science and the supposed finite age of the Earth, but the proofs concerning human soul are based on the inshakeable conviction that human soul is free and able to control matter and therefore is irreducible to mere matter. Furthermore, the assumption of human liberty is also behind Lange's improved Cartesian proof. While Descartes used the presence of the idea of God in human mind as a justification of God's existence, Lange tries to deintellectualise this argument – human mind is primarily will and not cognition, but because in our will we have an impulse to know God, this impulse must come from a higher source.

Secondly, Lange then uses the supposedly established existence of God as a justification of further propositions, which include also the fact of human liberty – one of the supposed axioms of Lange. Lange's proof of human liberty hinges on God's role as a judge that will evaluate the worth of every human being. Lange points out that such evaluation would be meaningless, unless the evaluated persons have a liberty to choose their own actions – thus, God must have created human beings as free agents.

It is obvious that human liberty is then crucial to Lange. Without it most of the proofs for God's existence would fall down – or at least they wouldn't lead to a sort of God that Lange is looking for, but to a fatalistic world soul. Indeed, it appears that when Lange is attacking atheism, his true target is the deterministic and mechanistic worldview of new philosophy. Human liberty is the highest ground of human existence and those who dare to deny it are miserable people, because they contradict the natural certainty of their own freedom. The topic of human liberty is also where Lange's grudge against Wolffian philosophy becomes clear. Wolff's endorsement of Leibnizian pre-established harmony breaks the required connection between the soul and the body: soul only appears to control body, which is actually moving according to its own laws.

One could even say that the battle against atheism has always been a battle for human liberty. Nowadays hardcore atheists feel great pleasure in pointing out faults in creation science. Yet, the kernel of a religion is not constituted by any dogmas, but by rituals and cults. Denial of God appears to leave no room for an objective meaning of life and hence deprives world of all magic. Even pantheism is suspected, because it reeks of closet atheism.

So much for Lange, next time I'll take a look at a philosophical dispute for the first time in this blog.

Barthold Heinrich Brockes: Earthly delight in God, consisting of various poems taken from nature and ethics, together with an addendum containing some relevant translations of French fables of Mr. de la Motte (1721)

At the very beginning of my blog I expressly noted that I should avoid works of fiction and poetry, because I felt I would have little to say about such manners. Yet, I also admitted that in some case I surely had to do it, if the thinker in question had written mainly fictional works – no matter how inconsequential the thinker might seem.

Barthold Heinrich Brockes is probably not the most important German thinker of his time. He was educated in the Thomasian school of philosophy, but unlike the other Thomasians we have met so far, he wasn't an ardent enemy of Wolffians. Instead, Brockes could be best described as a thinker of Aufklärung, or German enlightenment, and hence, his inclusion in the blog broadens our view of German philosophical culture in early 18^th century.

When one hears of enlightenment, one is bound to think of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and others rather radical thinkers, who at least influenced the later revolutionists in France. But the German enlightenment was never so radical and most of the times it was never as critical of church as French enlighteners were. Instead, German enlightenment was all about the education of mankind – and in this case, education was meant to include also moral instruction. We have already seen such tendencies in Wolff, particularly in his insistence that all art must serve the use of upholding morality in state.

Now, the work of Brockes is almost a paradigmatic example of Wolff's suggestion. Brockes was known as a translator, and even the book Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott bestehend in verschiedenen aus der natur und Sitten-Lehre hergenommenen Gedichten, nebst einem Anhange etlicher hieher gehörigen Uebersetzungen von Hrn. de la Motte Französisch. Fabeln contains, as the title says, translations of few French fables. Furthermore, Brockes himself was a poet, and the book I have been reading now is also a book of poetry.

Brockes' place in the history of German literature is far from glorious, which one wouldn't believe from reading the preface that praises the talents of Brockes both as a translator and as a poet. What is interesting is the explanation what makes Brockes a poet among poets. Apparently the author has not only the imagination required for creating dazzling images, but also the understanding required for making his poems well ordered and something more than just incomprehensible mess. This interplay of imagination and understanding was more generally held to be a precondition of good poetry and art. Something similar can be seen even seen in Kant's notion of beauty as caused by the free play of faculties, although there it is more about experiencing than creating beauty.

I shall briefly describe one exemplary piece of this poet-to-be. The poem with the ominous title ”the world” begins with the image of people watching the world, as it were, through the wrong end of the telescope: everything looks much smaller than it really is. For instance, a businessman sees nothing but profits and losses, while a doctor sees nothing else but illness and cures. Even philosopher fairs badly, because he sees nothing else but planets circling around the sun – Brockes is probably thinking of works like Newton's natural philosophy. Among these failed attempts to understand the world, there is one who does it right – the dreamer who sees God in all phenomena of nature.

This exemplary poem shows already Brockes' fascination with nature. Most of his poems simply describe some natural event, like the awakening of animals in spring, thunderstorm or sun. But nature is not described in these poems as an entity deserving an independent account. Instead, the worth of all these events is that they reveal the power of God – the nature is a piece of art and behind this art there must be some artist.

In a sense, Brockes' poetry is nothing more than constant use of teleological argumentation deducing from the perfection of natural objects the existence of their creator. Yet, it is not any arguments, but the sentiment behind this statement that is important. To find perfection in the colour of grass and in rain falling from the sky, and not just any perfection, but a feeling of divine serenity and splendour – this is what Brockes is trying to convey. The enjoyment of nature was even an international phenomenon during 18^th century, and in Germany it finally culminated with the pantheistic tendencies of romantic school, in which God and nature were often regarded as opposed, but still related poles.

One may feel that such a pantheistic appreciation of nature is far from theistic delight with nature, yet, at least this underlying feeling of the divinity of natur is shared by both alike. For a pantheist the splendour of nature is a part of the nature, while for a theist the perfection must originate somewhere beyond nature. The official credo at the time was theistic, both in Wolffian and Thomasian schools, latter of which will be my topic next time.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on God, world, and human soul, furthermore, of all things in general - The ultimate thing

When one for the first time hears Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason, it seems quite obvious and self-evident: of course, everything happens for a reason. But as Samuel Clarke was quick to notice, the innocent appearing principle could be used for smuggling substantial presuppositions behind our backs. For instance, Leibniz himself used the principle to justify the more uncertain principle of the identity of indiscernibles: God could not have created two exactly similar things, because God would have no ground for choosing the situations of the two things.

Wolff begins the chapter on natural theology by a similar abuse of the principle of sufficient reason. Theology itself is probably a familiar term to everyone, but what makes it natural? The answer is that natural theology is supposedly based on mere human reason, while the other type of theology – that is, revealed – is based on supposed divine revelation.

Wolff thus supposes that a sufficient reason is only such that requires no reason beyond itself. In effect, Wolff has not been demanding just an explanation, but a full explanation of everything, ending with a final term that is self-explanatory. And as we might remember from previous texts, Wolffian ground/reason is not just any explanation, but a causal agent actualising things. The principle of the sufficient reason is hence suddenly turned into a commitment for the existence of a final instigator of causal things. That is, to a commitment that while normal possible things require some external force to overcome the opposite possibility of their non-existence, there is a thing that has enough force in itself for self-actualisation.

It takes no theologian to guess that this self-actualising thing, which cannot fail to exist, is meant to be the traditional God: a transcendent being beyond both the physical world and the realm of human souls. One might still wonder why Wolff accepts only a single self-actualising thing. After all, the causal chains in the world might have more than one beginning, that is, there might well be more than one God.

Although Wolff does not directly answer this problem, he does try to argue against the identification of humans and God on the basis of the possible multiplicity of human souls. Wolff notes that when one accepts the existence of the world, it is easy to see that the human soul as dependent on the world cannot be God. Idealists, who deny the existence of the world, and even what Wolff calls egoists and what we would call solipsists, that is, philosophers admitting only their own existence, admit at least that there are many possible human souls. Yet, just this plurality of souls makes it impossible that the humans would be Gods. Plurality of possible Gods is apparently against the necessity of the supposed God: if a thing might be otherwise and still a God, it would require a further ground why the thing then is like it actually is, thus, it surely couldn't be self-actualising and self-explaining.

When it comes to God's characteristics, Wolff follows tradition: God is, for instance, capable of intuiting all things immediately, thus, requires no symbolic knowledge; he is wise, that is, capable of planning the relationships between the things in the most perfect manner possible; he also lives in the highest possible bliss, because he sees the perfection of the world. But what interests us most is the relationship between the God and the world.

Until now, the status of the possibilities or essences in Wolffian philosophy has been rather unclear: on the one hand, essences are said to be eternal and thus existing, on the other hand, they are not actualised. Wolff suggests that it is the understanding of God that sustains all the various possibilities: they exist in a sense, because God is continuously thinking all of them.

Although God thinks all the possibilities and especially all possible worlds, this does not still make them actual. Instead, actuality is received through a force, which is external, if the actualised thing is not God, and ultimately, through God’s will.

Interestingly, this characterisation is connected to Wolff’s notion of philosophy as a science of possibilities. Although the understanding of humans is not as pure as God’s – that is, it is confused or sensous – we can at least partially follow what is going on in God’s understanding, because the content of his understanding is necessary: that is, there can be no other possibilities. Then again, what is actual depends on God’s choice and the motives behind it. Thus, we can know generally that God has chosen the best possible world, but we cannot with certainty say that a particular chain of events would belong to the best possible world – in other words, there cannot be any true science of actualities.

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Because I have finally reached the end of Wolff’s German Magnum Opus, this is a great opportunity to evaluate the whole book. The historical worth of Wolff’s German metaphysics is unquestionable. Although there had been philosophical books written in German, Wolff’s book was still the most systematic treatment of all the major topics of traditional metaphysics, and as we shall most likely see in the distant future, its influence can still be felt in Kant’s writings. That said, we might still question the originality of his work in a wider perspective of the Europian philosophy in 18th century: I shall say a little bit about this topic in the next post.

Does German metaphysics then hold any interest for a modern philosopher? As we have witnessed, the book is full of gaps in argumentation, unwarranted presuppositions and plain sophisms. Still, one must appreciate at least the architectural design of the book, where in the ontology the classification into three main types of things – complex or material things and especially the world, simle, but finite things and especially souls, and the infinite thing or God – is introduced and where the final chapter ties all the knots by showing how both the material world and the souls are dependent on the God.

Wolff's German metaphysics has finally ended. I have been rather longwinded on the topic, but I have felt this has been necessary, because of the historical importance of the book. Next time, I shall make a short detour on an earlier philosopher: we shall meet the supposed predecessor of Wolff.