Baumgarten: Metaphysics – this or that

In Baumgarten's sketch of ontology we have progressed into the section on internal disjunctive predicates, that is, to the most general classification of all things. We have actually witnessed already one of these classifications, namely, the division of things into singular or universal, which with Baumgarten can be roughly identified with the division into actual and merely possible things.

Another important distinction for Baumgarten is the one between necessary and contingent matters, which is actually a somewhat dual classification in Baumgarten's philosophy. Firstly, there is the classification of necessary and contingent features of all things. Transcendental characteristics, which belong to all things whatsoever, are clearly necessary. In particular, all essences and attributes are necessary – this means only that the realm of possibilities is inevitably fixed and what is possible, must also be possible. Modes, on the other hand, are contingent, because one and the same thing can have different modes at different times.

This classification of features leads then to a similar classification in relation to things. Necessary things are such that have only necessary features, that is, which have only an essence and attributes, but no modes. Contingent things, on the other hands, have modes and are thus not necessary. We might also describe this differentiation in terms of mutability. Modes are such things that can change, that is, a thing might have this mode now, but something else later. In other words, modes are features that can vary, and things with such features can change them. Thus, contingent things are mutable. Necessary things, on the other hand, have no features that could change and are therefore immutable.

Another distinction having a close connection with the distinction of necessary and contingent is that between reality and negation. Actually, these terms form more like a scale, at the other end of which would be found complete negation, that is, a thing which cannot be described through any positive predicates. Baumgarten notes that such a thing would be actually nothingness, that is, such an entity doesn't actually exist, but all possible things are real or positive in some measure.

The scale of reality is then formed by noting how much negation is added to realities in a thing. At the other end of the scale, there is a completely positive thing with nothing negative in it, in other words, which is not limited by anything (this means obviously God). Other things, then, are sort of mixtures of positive and negative features.

Now, these negative features are either necessary to the thing having them or not. Necessary negations concern the essence or attributes of something – for instance, human beings have necessary negation of mortality. Baumgarten notes that the contingent negations or privations must then concern modes – for instance, if a certain person is blind, this is just a privation, because it doesn't belong to the essence of humanity to be blind. While all negations are bad things or evil, necessary negations are what Baumgarten calls metaphysical – they are inherent in the nature of things and thus something of which we cannot complain. Privations, on the other hand, are true defects, because they are defects that things ought not to have.

The idea of a scale going from absolute negation to absolute reality is no mere figure of speech for Baumgarten, because he truly thinks that one could quantify such intensive notions like reality and negation. This is part of Baumgarten's Wolffian heritage, in which mathematics is seen as a key point in all properly scientific research. Indeed, Baumgarten goes even farther than Wolff and with every metaphysical topic provides explanations what would be a unit of quantity for that notion and what meaning the ”greater-lesser” -relation would have with it. Thus, for instance, in a minimal ordering a minimal reality is grounded on another minimal reality and adding both units of reality and grounding relations will make for a more complex order (unfortunately, Baumgarten does not consider the question what to do in cases where the comparison of structures is not so easy – if order A has more units of reality than B, but C has more grounding relations than either, while still less realities than A, how should we compare quantities of A and C?).

Next time I'll continue with the division of substances.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on God, world, and human soul, furthermore, of all things in general - Truth vs. dreams

At least since the days of Descartes the problem of the reality has perplexed philosophers. Is the world that we perceive truly real, and not a mere dream, hallusination, figment created by a powerful daemon or mere fiction fed into our brain by a mad scientist? Wolff himself notes the problem, but apparently fails to take it very seriously. Wolff simply decrees that in dreams all processes are less ordered than the truth. By order Wolff means the occurence of some similarity, that is, of a pattern or a rule, which the things follow. Ultimately the basic criterion is the principle of sufficient reason or causality: processes in dreams do not follow any causal laws.

Wolff's criterion is perhaps enough for distinguishing our usual dreams from what we happen to call reality. He is not interested of a possibility that a new, even more real world might be discovered beyond the world of experience. This might be a consequence of Wolff's pragmatic nature – after all, there has to be some limit for the demand of indubitability. Furthermore, Wolff could continue, if we some day discover that we have been dreaming all along, at least this discovery will be made through the very same criterion of the regularity of processses. Here Wolff is once again paving the way for German idealists, who also had some doubts about the need to find any ultimate reality beyond the world of experience.

In modern analytic philosophy one is accustomed to mean by truth a characteristic of propositions, beliefs etc., while here Wolff essentially refers by truth to the reality. Furthermore, he almost instantly extends the notion of truth to apply to all sorts of processes. Truth thus becomes a quantifiable characteristic: the more regular and law-governed a thing is, the truer it is.

Wolff also introduces the notion of perfection (Vollkommenheit), which he then immediately characterises as a coherence of a manifold, which is yet another form of regularity in addition to truth as a regularity of processes. The regularity in its various guises appears then to be the primary value characterising simple things: the goal the finite simple things try to acheive is the regularity both in their internal processes and in the system of things they causally engage with.

Like with truth, Wolff also suggests that perfection is a quantifiable characteristic. Indeed, he appears to suggest that there could be a calculus of perfections for counting from individual perfections the quantity of their combination. Yet, the value of this combination is not a simple sum of the perfections, because one must also take into account how well the perfections fit together. For instance, the perfection of a house is not to be determined by its beauty and its utility, but one must also consider how well the beauty and the utility serve one another.

A complex thing with several constituent perfections might not then be perfect as a whole, if the perfections clash with one another. Similarly, harmony of apparent imperfections can produce a greater total perfection. It takes no Leibniz-scholar too see where this line of reasoning is heading to – we might indeed live in the best possible world, although its individual elements might seem quite unpleasant.

Before moving to the next issue, I will shortly recapitulate what Wolff has to say about the division of things. We have essentially three possible types of entities. Firstly, there are the complex finite things, and we know from experience that they exist all around us. Indeed, the whole world is a complex of all finite things. Then there are the finite simple things, and we know that at least some of them must exist – otherwise we wouldn't have even complex things to discuss about. Furthermore, although we do not yet know it, our own soul will also probably be finite, but simple. Finally, there might be an infinite thing, although we do not yet know whether there is any actual infinite thing – if there is, it will play the traditional role of God. Thus, even in his ontology Wolff has preliminarily outlined the three other parts of metaphysics: cosmology, psychology and theology. Next time, we shall move to the more concrete parts of Wolffian metaphysics.