Joachim Darjes: Elements of metaphysics 1 - Building bodies

Ever since Descartes suggested that matter is defined by extension, philosophers had been proposing theories as to what Cartesian idea of matter had overlooked, since clearly, extension as such is not yet matter. Darjes enters this discussion in the section on somatology, or theory of bodies or composite entities. He notes that to make a set of multiple entities into a unified entity, it isn't enough just to put them together. Instead, these parts must also cohere with one another.

Now, as we saw in the previous post, Darjes thought that in order that entities can cohere, all of those entities must be non-spontaneous, but also some of them must be active. In other words, there are no completely passive bodies in Darjesian metaphysics, only more or less active. The level of activity in bodies can even be perceived, Darjes suggests, since the difference of fluids and solids reduces to it – fluid bodies have more active entities in them than solid bodies, which have only so much active entities as required for the sake of coherence. Since the difference between fluids and solids is ultimately based on the essential difference between active and passive entities, the difference between fluids and solids must also be essential, Darjes concludes. Somewhat surprisingly, this means that fluids cannot really change into solids or vice versa.

A significant part of philosophical treatises of corporeal objects from this period often include an account of simple mechanical interactions, in which two bodies collide with one another. Darjes is no exception to this rule. He considers several cases – what if only one is moving or both, what if colliding bodies are solids or fluids etc. We need not get too far into the details, but just to note the general attempt to determine the result of the collision from the constituents and the structure of the colliding bodies. For instance, in a collision between a solid and a fluid, the fluid gives away, because a fluid body has more active constituents, which will move according to their own drive, as soon as bonds of coherence holding them together loosen a little bit, while the solid can remain unified in an easier manner.

As a final part of the first tome of his metaphysics Darjes introduces a discipline called mechanology, a study of machines. Machines, for Darjes, are systems of non-spontaneous entities, in which systems, again, mean collections of entities that can affect one another. Systems and therefore also machines are to be clearly differentiated from cohering bodies – in a system, the constituting bodies do not form a single entity, but remain independent of one another. Darjesian understanding of machines is quite extensive – the constituting parts of machines can be solid or fluid bodies or theoretically even elements. Indeed, the whole mechanology remains on a quite general level, where Darjes finds out such revelatory truths as that the state of a machine depends on its previous state.

The second tome of Darjes metaphysics moves then to the investigation of soul, which shall also be the topic of my next post.

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 - Immaterial materialism

Wolff's deterministic view of the world is essentially a materialistic doctrine, Lange thinks: immaterial souls are free to act how they want and their existence should thus make the world indeterministic. Now, Wolff does admit the existence of souls without renouncing his determinism, and we shall see next time how Lange reacts to this strategy.

In addition to souls, Lange sees immaterialism playing a role already in Wolff's doctrine of world, particularly in latter's notion of simple substances, which Lange interprets as essentially identical with monads of Leibniz. This is yet another point where Wolff himself is truly ambiguous. On the one hand, Wolff does note the resemblance of his simple substances with Leibnizian monads and does say that the simple substances in a sense represent the world. On the other hand, Wolff prefers to speak of elements and explains that representing is here symbolizing the interconnectedness of all things, because elements are not literally conscious of anything.

Despite Wolff's skepticism of full monadology, his doctrine of elements does satisfy some of Lange's criteria for immaterialism or idealism. Material things, Lange says, should be spatial and thus should be e.g. infinitely divisible, while Wolffian elements are not spatial and definitely indivisible. Wolffian matter is thus based on immaterial things and is therefore a species of idealism, which Lange thinks is just as bad as materialism - Wolffian philosophy is then doubly bad, because it combines both idealism (in its doctrine of simple substances) and materialism (in its doctrine of deterministic world).

Lange is clearly advocating the Aristotelian idea of matter as a undifferentiated mass, which can be carved out into different shapes, but which does not consist of independently existing units. While Wolff does accept his own idea of matter without any proper justification, Lange is equally stubborn and just states the self-evidence of his views – matter just cannot consists of something that is not matter. Lange would probably have been horrified of the modern nuclear physics, which he would have had to condemn as even more immaterial – matter consists there mostly of void together with some small points without any determinate place.

Interestingly, Lange's criticism has thus far dealt with questions that were later made famous by Kantian antinomies. Lange believes that world had a specific beginning in time and thinks that Wolff supposed it to be eternal; he holds determinism to be broken by free actions of humans and God, while he assumes Wolff to deny true freedom; and he believes matter to be infinitely divisible, while Wolff supposed it to consist of indivisible substances. Strikingly, Lange's anachronistic answer to second antinomy was diametrically opposite to others, probably because the doctrine of indivisible substances was associated with notorious atomism.

So much for Lange's views on Wolffian cosmology, next time we'll see what he thinks of Wolffian psychology.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on the effects of nature (1723) and Ludwig Philipp Thümmig: Attempt to most thoroughly clarify the most remarkable incidents in nature, whereby one will be lead to the deepest understanding of them (1723)

Baroque Cycle of Neal Stephenson contains a lovely scene portraying a typical meeting of the Royal Society. A number of curios and weird phenomena are presented to the audience without any regulated order – one members tells a story of fying fishes living in some oceans, another describes a neat trick with a vacuum pump, while third has just developed differential calculus.

Although such a motley of topics seems chaotic, it reveals what has truly captivated the hearts of men for science – it is the extraordinary that interests us. Consideration of curiosities has for long been a part of science – there is even a pseudo-Aristotelian book Problems, which is nothing more than a collection of what the author considered weird and proposed explanations for these dilemmas. Nowadays weird has been used for good measure in popularisation of science – for instance, in the show Mythbusters dealing with such age-old problems as whether cars truly explode when driven off cliffs.

Versuch einer gründlichen Erläuterung der merckwürdigsten Begebenheiten in der Natur, wodurch man zur innersten Erkenntnis derselben geführet wird is a similar collection of curios, written by Ludvig Philip Thümmig, whom we have already met as an editor of a book of Wolffian essays. Here we finally see some of Thümmig's own work, as he ponders such scientific problems as why a boy sees everything double, why animals with two bodies combined are sometimes born, why some trees grow from their leaves and why does gravity work in different grades across the globe – Thümmig's solution to this question convinced at least his mentor Wolff, who mentions it in his own book on natural science, Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Würckungen der Natur, which is also the second book I am considering this time.

While Thümmig's book is a haphazard motley, Wolff does not fail to give us a work with systematically arranged topics. Here Wolff is once again just following a far older tradition. The nameless collector of the works of Aristotle arranged his books on nature in the following order: first came books on the general principles of natural world, then followed books on the cosmos in general and the heavens in particular, after which came books on atmospheric phenomena and earthly objects, while the story finished with books on living nature. This formal scheme was so well thought out that even Hegel essentially followed it in his own philosophy of nature. Thus, it is no wonder that Wolff himself applied this often used model of natural science.

In his natural science or physics Wolff is quite reliant on empirical information and rarely wonders from presenting the conclusions of the science of his time. One exception where Wolff's physics comes in contact with his metaphysics is the description of animal sensation, where Wolff reminds us of the Leibnizian idea of pre-established harmony: while human bodies go through certain changes in their sensory organs, their souls have corresponding sensations, although bodies and souls do not interact with one another.

A more detailed crossing of physics and metaphysics occurs in the very beginning of the work, in the description of the physical objects as complex substances. An important conclusion of this definition is according to Wolff that all the properties of the complex should be derived from the properties of its constituents and the spatiotemporal structure according to which these constituents have been combined - I have called this the lego-block view of the world. Although seemingly innocent, endorsing this view leads Wolff to some substantial consequences.

Observations suggest that there are some peculiar properties that are difficult to explain through mere spatiotemporal structure of things – for instance, the characteristic of objects gravitating toward the nearest big collection of matter or the property of warmth. Now, if these characteristics are not explainable through the spatiotemporal form of the bodies, it must be explained through the constituents of them – that is, there must be types of matter that cause gravitation or warmth.

The assumption of special matters was not a peculiarity of Wolff, but a common occurence at the time, and even Hegel commented on this habit of scientists. One just saw a peculiar phenomenon – certain kinds of metal attract or repel one another – which was explained by assuming a new type of matter, in this case magnetic matter. While the notion of caloric or heat matter and similar properties as matters sound rather quaint, we should not assume that such reification of properties is non-existent nowadays. One just has to open a book on particle physics to learn about photons or particles of electro-magnetism, glueons or the particles holding the nucleus of atoms together and perhaps even gravitons causing gravitation.

Physicists may well have good reasons for such reification in these cases, but taken to its extremes it will lead to the philosophical theory of tropes – all general properties are actually individual things, like this redness, this sweetness, this roundness. The individual things are then just mere conglomerate of these tropes – for instance, the three tropes of particular sweetness, redness and roundness combine to form a particular strawberry.

The setback of trope theories is that it is difficult to see how all properties could be reified. For instance, do not the tropes themselves have properties, such as being a trope? Is this then supposed to be yet another trope? Furthermore, a trope theorist has difficulties explaining how to account of our thinking about universals. Redness of this particular strawberry should in trope theory be completely different from redness of this particular flag – how can then we describe both of them as red? If we suppose that the two tropes are connected by being similar in some manner, we face yet another dilemma – isn't the similarity yet another property?

So much for the physics of Wolffians. Next time I shall discuss the first of many atheism controversies to come.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on God, world, and human soul, furthermore, of all things in general - Can soul be material?

While in the chapter on empirical psychology Wolff merely observed the mental capacities of human beings, in the chapter on rational psychology he tries to determine the nature of the soul or the thing that has such capacities. Nowadays it is easy to think such an attempt as completely ridiculous: after all, Kant should have shown that rational psychology was based on mere sophistic reasoning. We shall have to speak of the Kantian criticism in the future. At this point we may just note the surprising fact that Wolffian theory of the soul begins with a reasoning of transcendental nature. That is, Wolff begins from the fact that human beings are conscious of themselves and investigates the presuppositions of this fact.

The beginning of Wolff's reasoning is innocent enough. We are conscious of something, Wolff says, when we can distinguish it from other things. For instance, I am conscious of a hand mirror, only if I am able to differentiate the mirror from e.g. hands holding it. Particularly, consciousness of oneself implies the capacity to distinguish between oneself and other things. In other words, consciousness is connected with a clarity of thoughts, which for Wolff meant a capacity to distinguish the object of thought from other objects.

Furthermore, in order to distinguish different objects from one another and to recognise them as different, one must be able to contrast them with one another and to consider them one after another, Wolff continues. In order to do this, the conscious being must have imagination and memory, that is, he must be able to think of things that are not present and to recognise them as having been present. Indeed, consciousness is generated, because we can think of a thought for a period of time, note that the time has changed, but the thought itself has remained.

The arguments thus far have been essentially about characterising what it means to be a conscious personality: e.g. a person needs to have a memory, in order that she would have a sense of continuity of self. I cannot see why Kant or his followers would have any reason to argue with these considerations. In fact, much of the Kantian and post-Kantian German philosophy consists of such theorising on the nature of human consciousness, although in a somewhat deeper level.

What Kant and his followers would probably find unacceptable is the next move where Wolff tries to prove the immateriality of soul or the thing that is conscious. Wolff starts by noting that all material processes must be explicable through mere mechanical movement of material objects. Thus, if soul would be material, thinking would also be such a mechanical process. Now, human beings can be conscious of their own thinking, that is, they can note that the starting and the end point of thinking are different and still parts of a continuous process of one thing. Here Wolff simply states that such representation of continuity is impossible with mere matter: material objects as complexes can at best represent only other complexes, but they cannot represent a unified process of thought.

Wolff's blunt statement that matter as a mechanism cannot represent thought processes is quite unsatisfactory, especially as we nowadays don't think that matter consists merely of lego-like blocks that interact only through mechanical contact. Wolff does try to amend his reasoning by noting that material object can represent things – for instance, we can make a clay model of a building – but it cannot represent the original as separate from the representation. I have a feeling that Wolff has here confused first- and third-person perspectives. Surely an external observer cannot see e.g. brain as a representation of the process of thought,but this does not mean that the brain could not represent this to itself, if it just were conscious.

The situation appears even worse, when we consider that by denying the complexity of the soul Wolff has to accept the possibility of a simple thing representing complexities, which appears at least as difficult as a complex representing a unity. Indeed, how could a single partless entity represent a complex of many entities correctly? The only possibility appears to be that the complex is characterised through passage of time: at one point soul represents one part of the complex, at another point other parts and at final point the combination of the two previous phases. Indeed, we might well believe that human consciousness does work in this manner: e.g. when looking at a boat moving at the sea, we concentrate first on its rear end and then on the other end and only after that note that both parts go together.

The problem with this solution is that it once again threatens the supposed unity of consciousness. Suppose that I am thinking of myself. This act of thinking then represents some state of my mind, say, a memory of yesterday. But this act as simple can only represent one thing, thus, it cannot represent itself. We could then begin a new act of thinking that had the original act as its object. This procedure could be iterated indefinitely and so a problem is revealed: no matter how far we'd go, there would always be left at least one act of thought that had not been combined with other acts, that is, the very act of thinking all the other thoughts. This problematic was something that intrigued some of the later German philosophers, although Wolff appears to not have noticed it.

Wolff's argument for the immateriality of the soul was then unconvincing. Next time we shall see whether he can at least characterise this supposed immaterial entity.