Baumgarten: Metaphysics – Unity, order, truth and perfection

In the post-Kantian era of philosophy we are familiar with term ”transcendental” having something to do with the necessary presuppositions of knowledge and cognition. Yet, before Kant, transcendental described features that transcendend all differences between things, that is, that could be predicated of every existing thing or even of every possible thing. In a way, transcendental was just a synonym for ontological.

A list of such transcendental features or predicates was a traditional sight in works of metaphysics, although what to include in such a list might slightly differ from writer to writer. Still, if something could be found in all of them, it would be unity. Even Aristotle had maintained that ”being” and ”one” are almost synonymous, since all existent things are unities. Even Wolff had briefly followed the tradition and Baumgarten goes even so far as to dedicate a section of his metaphysics to the notion of unity.

Of course, one might have different notions of what being a unity means. Baumgarten approaches the term from the familiar notion of determinations – it is combinations of determinations that are somehow unified. More precisely, we might have either separable or inseparable sets of determinations, and unities are formed of inseparable sets. All essences, then, form such unities, because the essential properties of a thing cannot be separated without destroying the very thing. Because all possible things have an essence they are in this sense transcendental unities.

If unities concern things, order concerns conjunction of things, that is, many things grouped together. Conjunction itself might not be ordered, Baumgarten says, and this seems evident, since we don't usually say that hay stack is in order, although it does consist of many hays in conjunction. Order requires that something remains same in the things in the conjunction, and this same element can then be expressed in propositional form as a law.

A peculiar type of order lies in what Baumgarten calls transcendental truth, which is something altogether different from what we might call truth. For Baumgarten, transcendental truth is the ordering of some plurality into a unity. Truth in this sense requires then some principles according to which this plurality is unified. In other words, transcendental truth refers to a sort of stability holding things and their groupings together, while dreams should lack such truth, Now, since every possible things combines various properties according to general ontological principles, every thing must have transcendental truth, that is, it must be stable and not collapse into a heap of determinations.

While all orders do not combine things into unities, they might still in a sense connect things, for instance, by making them follow same laws and rules. Such a conjunction of many things is the essence of perfection, Baumgarten says, and whatever causes such a perfection is then good. While this might appear rather strange definition of goodness, we might justify it by noting that is quite aesthetic notion of goodness that is meant here. Just like in case of truth and unity, Baumgarten then defines transcendental perfection and goodness – since essence rules attributes of things, a thing is always in some measure perfect and good.

This concludes Baumgarten's tale of properties of all things whatsoever. Next, we shall see what he has to say about basic disjunctions or classifications of entities.

Perfectly true order

I can be quite quick with Wolffian notions of order, truth and perfection, since I covered them already while discussing his German metaphysics. Something of a novelty is Wolff's definition of order, which he states to be a similarity in the modes of things either located nearby each other or following one another. Such an order is then an explanation for a certain thing with particular features being in the place it is – for instance, in a well-ordered library, the place of an individual book is explained by the classification system requiring that a book with certain topic is situated in a particular place. In the case of library, the order is contingent or based on the external factor that some librarian has arranged the books in a suitable manner. There is also a possibility that the order is based on nothing but the very essence of the things ordered: this is the case, for instance, in ordered sequences of numbers.

A well-ordered library?

The principle of ordering can be linguistically embodied in a rule or a set of rules, Wolff asserts. The different rules can then be organised into a hierarchy of rules, in which the different subrules are grouped under more general rules – think of an instructional booklet for keeping a library in good order. As anyone with some experience on libraries knows, often librarians have not been able to order all the books perfectly according to the instructions, for instance, due to physical limitations of the library building or insufficient time for organising books. Similarly, there can be defects in all sorts of orderings, which makes it plausible to speak of more and less perfect orders. A complete lack of order or confusion is also a possibility.

Truth in an ontological or transcendental sense of the word or reality, as we might call it, can then be recognised through its orderly nature. Dreams, Wolff continues, are characterised, on the contrary, by a lack of order of confusion. Wolff goes even so far as to suggest that dreams would be contradictory, which can at most mean that they contradict the rules governing true reality, or indeed, almost all sets of rules. Because all things should have some orderliness in them – at least they have an essence that determines their attributes and possible modes – all things are in some measure true, Wolff concludes.

Finally perfection, which Wolff identifies with the scholastic notion of transcendental goodness, is defined as consensus in variety or unity in multiplicity. Perfection must again have its ground, and this ground is the regularity or orderliness of its constituents. Lack of perfection can then be defined as imperfection or evil. This does not still mean that an exception in the orderliness of some structure would entail its complete imperfection. Indeed, the imperfection might be just apparent, because from a more extensive viewpoint the apparent imperfection might be governed by some rule.

One might reasonably ask whether Wolff is smuggling some normative notions into his ontology with these definitions. Indeed, he appears to suggest by associating the notion of orderliness with words like truth and perfection that order is somehow preferable to a lack of order. Why should we assume that reality is well-ordered, instead of being at least somewhat chaotic? And why should we deem regularity as something perfect and worthy to strive for?

The most plausible defense of Wolff is to assume that the definitions as introduced in ontology should as yet carry no normative weight. Instead, the names hint at future arguments in future parts of philosophy, where the notions are shown to coincide with how we usually understand these words. Thus, we might see e.g. in theology that God has created an orderly world and in ethics that regularity is something we should strive for.

So much for these notions, and indeed, so much for general characteristics of all things. Next time we shall look at some complexities of space-time.