General cosmology (1731)

After Wolff's huge works on logic and ontology, his Cosmologia generalis feels refreshingly short with its under five hundred pages. The shortness of the book might also reflect its lack of importance in the purely philosophical part of Wolffian system. Wolff's cosmology works mostly as an introduction to general natural science or physics and is thus firmly connected with Wolff's more empirical studies. Then again, of other parts of metaphysics only theology is essentially said to be based on cosmology, because Wolff argues for the existence of God from the existence of a certain type of universe.

The topic of Wolffian cosmology is then world or universe and general types of objects in it. The very existence of universe is not so much proven by pure reasoning, but assumed – or at least the existence of a universe is justified by certain empirical observations we have. What we actually perceive or observe are certain things – rocks, trees, houses and such. Now, all of these entities are finite, that is, their existence requires a number of other entities, either existing at the same time (like trunk supports branches) or existing before them (like rain requires gathering of clouds).

As they say, no smoke without fire.

The entities we observe are then connected to various other entities in space and time through causal influences. These intricate relations form a kind of web or nexus, in which one thing can be connected to any other thing of the nexus through a string of causal relations. A totality of such interconnected spatio-temporal things is then a world or a universe. There might be different possible universes, because a number of possible strings of events might have occurred, but only one of them truly has occurred, that is, the string of events constituting the history of our world.

I have investigated the nature of this Wolffian universe in quite a detail earlier, but there's no harm in going through it all again. World is a composite of things, and as a composite, its nature is dictated by the nature of its parts. Thus, Wolff concludes, if we replaced just one peck of sand, the world would be completely different, because its identity is determined by the very entities constituting it.

Now, in the actual universe, all things we happen to observe are composite substances, that is, they consist of other things and what they are or their essence is determined by their constituents. If we then want to change these substances, we must essentially change their constitution, that is, remove some parts or add other (for instance, if we want to make blackened metal objects shiny, we must remove all the grime on the surface of the objects), or then we can change the way they happen to move at the moment. All these changes require then direct contact with the object to be changed: you cannot pluck something out, if you are not close enough. In effect, this means that world and all the composite objects that we observe can be changed only through motion that comes in contact with what is to be changed. Wolff can thus add that the world is like a machine or a perfect watch which remains in action, even if its creator fails to wind it.

As we have mentioned number of times, Wolff does not think that his account of world could be called necessary in the strict sense of the word. Indeed, it is easy to see that even if we could explain all the events of a current day, we would be forced to explain them by referring all of them to past events, which would then be completely unexplained and required a new explanation. At the end, these events would be necessary in the strict sense, only if no other series of events would be even conceivable, which is clearly not so.

Then again, Wolff also claims that worldy events are not completely inexplicable facts. Indeed, this non-explicability of some facts should be contradicted even by the principle of sufficient reason, which states that all contingent things and events arise out of some more primary things and events. In case of universe, these primary things and events are movements of material bodies, which with machine-like predictability leads to further things and events. This deterministic view of universe does not completely cancel the non-necessity of the worldly events, because a deterministic series as a whole is not necessitated by anything,

This is enough for the Wolffian scheme of macrocosmos, next time I'll take a look of what he has to say on microcosmos, that is, bodies and their parts.

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

It is especially in Wolff's comments on empirical psychology where his wish to show the usefulness of his theories becomes evident. Wolff emphasizes that he has especially found two different types of faculties in human mind: cognitive and volitional. The study of cognitive capacities should generally help to improve our mental capacities and particularly help us to find a proper methodology for science. Wolff makes here some barbed strikes against Lange's Mental medicine, which he dismisses as a useless piece of charlatanry that wouldn't help anyone know anything.

Wolff's strategy for improving cognitive capacities is based on his attempt to quantify all mental capacities: capacity of memory can be quantifies by the number of new things a person can hold in his mind at the same time etc. On this quantitative basis Wolff can then make such useful recommendations as that capacities of concentration are improved in the morning, when there are still less distractive stimuli. Wolff's quantification goes in some cases further than with some previous philosophers. For instance, while Descartes thought that all people have an equal light of reason, Wolff states that this light varies according to natural capacities.

The aim of the education of cognitive capacities is to make one's ideas more distinct, that is, analysed. Although Wolff does define sensations in terms of distinctness, this does not mean that he would want to base science in some non-empiricist manner, which has become increasingly clear. Indeed, Wolff merely suggests that we should continue to analyse or conceptualize our individual sensations and so transform them into experience. Wolff thus wants to say that experience is something more than mere sensation: in a somewhat rasist comment Wolff even says that Hottentots, Lapponians and Samoyeds don't really have reliable experiences, although they undoubtedly sense things. The conceptual analysis of sensations turns them into experiences, which then can act as basis of scientific axioms.

Wolff appears to admit that the cognitive capacities of human mind are in some sense unfree. This is clear with sensations: we cannot choose that we'll see green, when we focus our gaze on a certain piece of grass. Furthermore, in case of conceptual reasoning there are also certain restrictions: if we are following a line of reasoning, the conclusion isn't haphazard, but follows from the premisses, perhaps true some psychological necessitation.

In contrast, Wolff emphasizes that human will is definitely free and capable of undetermined choice – an answer to the accusation of Wolff being a determinist. As we saw earlier, Wolff suggests that a person cannot will to do something he is not motivated to do, but that he can emphasize some motivation over the others. True, even the volitional part of human mind can become unfree, if mind is slave to its own affections. Still, this state of slavery does not prevent the possibility of a truly free action. Indeed, it is just such a task of becoming as free as possible that makes the study of volitional part of the mind important for morality and ethics.

Next time I'll turn to Wolff's comments on cosmology.

Christian Wolff: Remarks on Reasonable thoughts on God, the world and the human soul, also on all things in general - Causality vs. indeterminism?

One of the most outrageous bits of Wolff's metaphysics was his apparent attempt to deduce principle of sufficient reason from the principle of non-contradiction. Some readers have even declared that Wolff has thus Leibnizian distinction between logical and empirical truths: Leibniz said that logical truths were based on the principle of non-contradiction and empirical truths on the principle of sufficient reason, so Wolff's deduction apparently showed empirical truths to be logical. This is clearly a mistaken reading, because Wolff still accepts the Leibnizian distinction and use of the two principles as criteria. Indeed, Leibniz had merely said that logical truths were necessarily true, because their opposites were contradictory, while the empirical truths require some previous explanation and were thus not necessary. Wolff just added that the latter criterion was itself necessarily true and in need of no further explanation.

Although Wolff's proof of the principle of sufficient reason does not reduce all truths into logical truths, the proof itself was rather unconvincing and based on a very ontological reading of the principle of non-contradiction. Now, Wolff apparently felt the need to justify the principle once again.

First of all, Wolff notes that actually the principle as such requires no proof, because no philosopher and indeed no human being would truly doubt it – or at least if someone says he doubts, he is still bound to use the principle unconsciously, when asking causes of events and motives of actions. I already noted that Wolff had used in the original book a strategy where the principle of sufficient reason was justified as a necessary presupposition of us having coherent experience. Here Wolff is then suggesting that the principle is somehow natural to human mind. Both strategies have a Kantian feel, especially if one combined them: we couldn't have experience without using the principle of sufficient reason, thus, the principle must be ingrained in us.

Still, there is a difference. While Kant apparently speaks determinedly of causality as a necessary presupposition of experience, Wolffian ground is something in thing A that explains something else in thing B, where A and B might be also the same thing. Examples Wolff uses clearly show that in addition to causal influences he is also thinking of motives as possible grounds. Wolff is thus not saying that ”every event has a cause” would be true of all experience, but instead the more general statement ”every event either has a cause or is a motivated action”.

Wolff also explains his original proof of the principle through the simile of scales: if two sides of the scales are evenly balanced, the scales does not tip to either direction, and if the scales do tip, something must have been added or taken away to change the balance. In effect, this simile confirms my interpretation of the proof: the different possibilities, as it were, compete with one another for the chance of actualisation and because of their opposition, they would remain eternally in a state of null actuality, unless something came and changed the scales in favour of one possibility. What appears different in Wolff's new account is the admission that in case of human actions grounds or motivations might not completely determine the action: human being has still the opportunity to choose what motive he is going to emphasize – we shall later see what effects this admission has on Wolff's psychology.

Wolff also presents a completely new line of defense for the principle. In essence, he outlines three possibilities: firstly, the principle of sufficient reason might hold always, it might hold never, or it might hold sometimes, but not always. Somewhat hastily, Wolff concludes that the second option cannot be true, because experience tells us that at least some events have had a preceding ground (remember that Hume's criticism of causality was still to come). How about then the third possibility? Wolff suggests that if there were no possibility to actually say when something has a ground and when not, then we would actually land back to the second possibility. Thus, there must always be ground telling whether there is a ground or not – and then we are actually in the first option that the principle holds in all cases.

Wolff's argument is based on his fault of not underlining yet another form of ”ground”. This ground is more of an explanation based on ”form” or structure of events: just like we can justify the proposition that a figure has angles adding up to 180 degrees by its being triangle, similarly events might have some structural features that either make the principle to apply them or not. Indeed, Wolff has not managed to justify the principle, but he has noted the possibility of a third ontological position between full determinism and full indeterminism, which we might call restricted or controlled indeterminism. That is, if we do not want to admit that all events are deterministically caused, we do not have to take everything to be indeterministic, if we suppose that indeterminism applies only within some restricted area of events, which does not hinder the determinism outside this area. This possibility seems interesting, firstly, because it appears to fit in with current state of physics (the area would have to be defined in terms of e.g. size of entities involved). Secondly, it might even be compatible with Kantian notion of deterministic causality as a presupposition of experience, that is, indeterministic causality might not hinder the possibility of experience, if it was restricted to some area that was a) rarely seen in experience and b) controlled in the sense that effects in that area would have no real effect outside that area.

So much for the principle of sufficient reason, next time I'll wrap up with Wolff's comments on the rest of ontology.

Johann Joachim Lange: Metaphysical-mechanical disputation, on necessity and contingency and freedom, inquiry for determining necessary errors of Spinozism and others (1724)

We have seen Lange criticizing Wolffian philosophy, but his own opinions have remained mostly hidden. Now, the veil of mystery is to be opened a bit, when I study Lange's Disputatio metaphysica mechanica, de necessario et contingenti ac libero, notiones ad dijudicationem Spinosismi aliorumque errorum necessarias.

The topic of Lange's treatise is apparently rather dry and academic: modalities, that is, concepts of possibility, necessity, impossibility and contingency. Yet, behind these abstractions lies the problem of determinism and freedom that the dispute between Wolff and Lange circled. Lange had criticized Wolff for not separating geometric and physical necessity – Wolff could say that the deterministic world was not necessary, because for him only God was a truly necessary entity, while the concrete world was necessary only if one already assumed the fact of creation.

We can at once note that Lange was perhaps a bit unfair in his condemnation of Wolffian notion of necessity as a mere geometric necessity of Spinoza. As I have argued, for Wolff, necessity of God is not just logical necessity or logical contradiction of the non-existence of God. Instead, God cannot fail to exist, because he has in himself sufficient power to exist – nothing can stop God from existing. In other words, God is absolutely necessary, because he does not require any external boost for becoming actual, while all the other things are at most just hypothetically necessary, because they do require such a boost.

For Lange, on the contrary, absolute necessity is twofold. God is absolutely necessary in the same manner as with Wolff: he requires nothing for becoming actual and exists therefore eternally. Absolute necessity of God is internal, but there is also external absolute necessity – namely, with things that depend only of God and not of any other free agents. External absolute necessity is then the immutability of certain deterministic things that lie beyond control of humans, such as the motions of planets.

Concept of hypothetical necessity in then restricted by Lange to things that lie in human control. This notion of hypothetical necessity clearly requires at least partial freedom of human beings – free choices are the only real source of contingency in the world. The existence of hypothetical necessity requires also that these free choices can have real effects on the world – otherwise, the contingency would be restricted to mental processes, which would be causally closed in relation to the physical world.

What Lange then does in comparison with Wolff is to emphasize the special role of finite free entities. God has, in a sense, just created the general features of the world, while the filling of the world with particular content has been left for the free choice of his creations – God has given the human being the tools, but it is human being himself who can choose how to use these tools.

Lange runs into some obvious problems, when he tries to reconcile his notion of human freedom with the idea of divine omniscience. In order that human freedom be real, God should not have decided what human beings should do, still, he must also know what they will do. There might be no problem, if God just knew on instinct what the future is like – if I know beforehand that Peter will go to work tomorrow, I am still not the cause of Peter's future actions, which could well be freely chosen by him. Problem is that God has also created human beings – if he chose to create Peter, he should have known what Peter would do in future – thus, he should be at least partially responsible for his actions: he could have chosen not to create Peter, if he knew Peter would become criminal. Problem is that Lange never faces the problem adequately, hence, the very same lack of moral responsibility of which he blames Wolff and other deterministic philosophies falls on his own theological notion of freedom.

Next time I'll take another look at Wolffian metaphysics.

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 - Stuck in a clockwork world

While Lange's interpretation of Wolff in the question of the eternity of the world was at best questionable, his view of Wolff and determinism is spot-on. Wolff does believe that world – that is, an entity containing all complex things – is governed by strict rules where the previous states of things determine the further states of the things, just like in a clock the current state of all the bits and pieces determines their next state.

Lange's fear is that the strict determinism of Wolffian world leaves no room for human freedom, or at least it deprives from soul the possibility to control its body – it is strictly speaking not I who lift my hand, but the movement of the material objects in the vicinity of the hand. And if my hand happens to strike body of a fellow soul – well, how could I be accused, because the movement of the hand was necessary and people cannot be punished for necessary actions. The judge could, of course, retort that it is just as necessary for his mouth to utter the condemning words, but still a lingering doubt is left – were truly all these actions necessary?

Wolff's strategy would probably be to deny the necessity of the world. After all, there are many different possible worlds that God could have chosen to actualize and it is in a sense contingent that he happened to pick out this world. Thus, it is not necessary that I hit my neighbour, because in another possible world I – or someone very similar to me – would not have stricken a man in similar circumstances.

Lange would be very unsatisfied with this answer, and it all comes to how to define modalities like necessity and contingency. Necessity Wolff speaks of Lange calls geometric necessity, probably thinking of Spinoza's geometric method – we might call it logical necessity. But it doesn't matter at all to us, whether something happens in another possible world or not. It is our own world we are interested of, and here everything happens deterministically, that is, all the future states are determined once the beginning has been given, without any possibility to actually change the course of nature. This is the sense in which Lange wants to speak of necessity – as the inevitability of events in the context of the actual world. The respective contingency would then not concern possibilities in another world, but indeterminacy of the actual world.

Lange can then conclude that Wolff is in this matter no better than Spinoza, who both rank as extreme materialists. Wolff is in a sense even worse, because he is also an extreme idealist. We shall see next time how this curious combination is possible.