Joachim Darjes: Elements of metaphysics 1 - Forceful being

We have been studying what Darjes calls primary philosophy, but we finally come to his ontology, when we see his definition of an entity (ens). In effect, by an entity Darjes means something that is not accident, that is, which can be in itself. What this being in itself means, according to Darjes, is at least that in the same place as one entity exists, no other entity can exist. Thus, impenetrability of an entity is an ontological characteristic for Darjes, while accidents might share the same place by occurring in same entity. An entity need not exist, but it can be a merely possible entity. If it does exist, Darjes calls it a substance.

Darjes notes that all substances can contain something which is a reason for something else being what it is. In other words, they are forces that can act on other things. Now, because this activity is an essential part of what substances are, they can also be divided according to their level of activity. The highest kind of substance is completely active and needs at most something to remove obstacles from its way to start acting – they are what Darjes calls an effective conatus. At the lowest rang of substances are completely passive substances, which require some efficient reason to make them act – these are what Darjes calls bare potentia. Between these two extremes fall cases where substances are in some sense passive and in some sense active – these substances Darjes calls either ineffective conatuses or potentias with conatus (it is difficult to say whether Darjes means these two to be separate groups, depending on whether the emphasis is on the active or the passive side of the substance or whether they are just two names for the same thing).

Darjes does not just distinguish between different kinds of forces or substances, but also between different kinds of actions these substances can make occur. The actions might happen within the substances or be intrinsic to it – these would be immanent actions. Then again, the actions might also be extrinsic to the substance – these would be transitive actions. Of course, Darjes also admits that some actions might be partially immanent and partially transitive.

Like all Wolffians, Darjes is a nominalist who insists that no universals can exist. Hence, all substances must be individuals. Although substances cannot then be divided into universals and individuals, Darjes does divide them into complete and incomplete substances, depending on whether a substance acts or not. He also notes that a substance can be variably or contingently complete, if it sometimes happens to act and sometimes not. Even if a substance would be contingently complete, it still might be a necessary existent, since there is no necessity that a necessary existent would always act.

A notion near to completeness is the subsistence of a substance. Darjes defines subsistent substance as a complete substance that is not sustained by something else. Here, sustaining means a relation in which one force determines another to act in a precise manner. Thus, subsisting substance would act and not be acted upon by other substances.

Darjes goes on to define states of an entity. In effect, these are nothing more than collections of some determinations that the entity has. For instance, being a substance or substantiality and subsistence are states that some entity might have. Depending on the determinations making up the state, the state can be internal, external or mixed, and it can be necessary or contingent. For instance, if there are some entities existing absolutely necessarily, then they have an absolutely necessary state of substantiality. With contingent entities, on the other hand, their state of substantiality is also contingent and in fact depends ultimately on some absolutely necessary substance.

Darjes does not remain on mere level of definitions, but tries to determine some general characteristics true of all substances, based mostly on the principle of sufficient reason. The most important conclusion is that all substances must persevere in their state of action or non-action, until some further reason makes them change their state. Thus, an action continues, until something comes to impede it.

Darjes also spends some time considering how to quantify forces. His idea is to measure forces through the actions they can make happen. For instance, if two passive substances have the same quantity of force is they are as quick in producing same actions, then they will produce same action in same time. Thus, by checking what the substances can achieve and how quickly they do it, one can compare the quantity of their forces with one another.

Natural logicians

Wolff defines logic as the discipline for guiding cognition to truth. That is, for Wolff logic is not just a canon or rule book for separating clear falsities from possible truths, but an organon or methodology for finding truths. Now, Wolff notes that such a discipline or science should properly be called an artificial logic and distinguishes it from what he calls natural logic. Such a natural logic might be an innate capacity for searching truths, but it might also be learned through education, like rules of thumb for solving some mathematical problems, just as long as we are still unclear about why such rules actually work.

Natural logic means for Wolff then just the usual workings of cognition, and its proper place of discussion would be psychology, on which logic then depends on. Natural logic forms in Wolff a process, stages of which are familiar already from Wolff's German writings and in which we begin with sensations or perceptions (as I've noticed before, Wolff does not distinguish these carefully). Some of the sensations are somehow connected to things that are external to the consciousness and that appear to make impressions on sense organs. Yet, Wolff also admits the existence of an inner sense, by which we come to know ourselves.

The sensations or perceptions form then the starting point of cognition for Wolff, although they are also its most rudimentary phase. While perceptions can only refer to things that are actually present, imagination helps us to e.g. recollect images of absent things that we have seen previously. Both perceived and imagined things can then be concentrated on and apprehended. Such an act of apprehension requires that we use the perception or the imagination as a representation of the real thing.

Suffice to say, this representation is what Wolff called in German Begriff (a concept), while in Latin version he uses words like Notio and Idea, which reveals the clear Lockean influences. While Kant was later to disparage Wolff for intellectualising appearances, he was actually doing quite the opposite and made at least some concepts into mental pictures. Thus, the image of the rose in front of me or of the one I remember seeing are all concepts for Wolff. True, we can also refer to these images and individuals represented with them by words, but this is secondary. Note that all the concepts at this point concern only individuals, since universalities cannot be perceived or imagined as such.

The mental images of past and present things can then be compared with one another. These comparisons might immediately instigate in us an awareness of e.g. certain similarities between different things. This awareness is the first instance of judgements, and like concepts, they have their own linguistic counterpart in propositions. Furthermore, it is through such judgements that universal concepts come to existence – when we think of whiteness and if we are not just thinking about the word ”white”, we must be thinking about several white things and the recognition of their similarity.

From judgements of similitude we form then notions of genera of things, which are nothing apart from the things and their similitude and the words we use for designating these spurious entities – we thus see Wolff here advocating nominalism. In addition to similarities, we also intuitively note dissimilarities between things and can thus divide genera into different species. Finally, we can extend the set of true judgements we can make by using our intuitive judgements as a basis on which we can build complex demonstrations.

Now, if all of this is natural logic, what task is then left for artificial logic anymore? That is, if one can do all this by instinct or at least learn it by following how others use their reason, why should we need an independent science of reasoning? Wolff himself doesn't consider the problem, but Hegel will have a convincing answer in an analogy. Surely our digestion, muscles etc. work by themselves, but we can still profit from learning anatomy and physiology, because we can then eat in a healthy manner, exercise properly etc. Similarly, we surely do think naturally, but logic teaches us how to think well.

Next time I shall say something about Wolff's classification of concepts.

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

It's hard to do commentary on another commentary – you are twice removed from the real meat of the problematic, and because the commentary itself has no clear organisation, there usually is no guiding thread to connect the various points. Thus, after reading the chapter on ontology I was left with mere crumbs that by themselves would not have the required length of a blog post. Still, I didn't want to make the time spend with Wolff's commentary go to waste, so I present some of these crumbs in a fragmentary fashion.

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One key point in the atheism dispute has been the notion of modalities: if Wolff says that events in the world are hypothetically necessary, doesn't this make his theory Spinozistic? Wolff's consideration of modalities here reveals his own belief – Wolff has to define modalities in this manner to avoid Spinoza's fatalism. That is, Spinoza could say only that possibility means something that has existed, will exist or does exist, which would make all possibilities become actual someday. Wolff's definition of possibility as non-contradictoriness allows the extension of possibility to be larger than the extension of past, present and future actuality. Thus, the only truly necessary thing for Wolff is God, who has no external cause, while other things require some previous cause for their actualisation. Interestingly, the tide of philosophy was to go backwards. What is true sense of possibility and necessity for Wolff, will be disparaged by Kant as a mere formal notion of modalities, while the mere hypothetical necessity and possibility in a world of Wolff are raised to the status of real or ontologically substantial modalities by Kant.

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Connected with the Wolffian theory of modalities is his notion of essences, which he clarifies in his commentary through a helpful simile: if I want to determine what a triangle is like, I need to only determine its essence, that is, two of its sides and the angle between them, because the rest of the triangle is determined through these measures. Unexpectedly, this very same example occurs in Hegel, when he explains how the sensuous side of a thing (say, a triangle) contains lot of surplus material that could be summarized through a lot simpler structure (in this case, through the three quantities). I suspect that Hegel didn't bother to read that much Wolff, so the coincidence is even more surprising.

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Wolff's nominalism is a feature I did not emphasize the first time around: he explicitly says that universals or genera and species are mere summaries for similarities between things (A and B are both ostriches  because they resemble one another and all the other ostriches . An interesting question is then how the similarity is to be defined, and in general, how things are distinguished from one another. Now, in some places Wolff appears to admit at least the possibility or conceivability that two spatially separated individuals of the same species might be identical in every other respect, thus going against Leibnizian principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Then again, Wolff also subscribes to the definition of individuals as fully determinate in comparison to incompletely determined universals – we noted in case of Thümmig that this definition appears to naturally lead to the Leibnizian principle, because two distinct individuals couldn't on account of this definition be completely similar, because they would then belong to a genus defined by all their characteristics – contradiction, because this genus would then be a completely determinate universal. One possible solution might be that the complete determination of individuals would not consist of mere qualities, but also of quantitative and spatial determinations. Indeed, Wolff says ambiguously that individuals are determined by what we can perceive in them, which might include also their position in space.

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Next time it's on to psychology!

Ludwig Philipp Thümmig: Institutions of the Wolffian philosophy provided for the use of academics - Fully determinate individuals

The difference of individuals and universal properties has been recognized at least since the time of Aristotle. Indeed, it is obvious that the universal genus of horse is not an individual horse, although on some reading Plato had treated the genus just as one individual among others. Despite the familiarity of the distinction, it is quite hard to say what exactly differentiates universals from individuals.

Now, Thümmig suggests the rather curious definition that individuals are fully determinate in every way, while universals are still further determinable. The idea behind the strange definition is actually rather simple. Take some general class of things, such as vertebrates. Now, if we know that an animal is a vertebrate, we know something of it – at least that it has a vertebra. Still, many other characteristics of the said animal are completely undetermined by its being a vertebrate, for instance, whether it flies or not. Universal vertebrate is thus determined through this collection of properties shared by all vertebrates. This collection does still not determine any concrete individual, because a particular vertebrate has still some characteristics not included in the collection.

Similarly, all concrete individuals must be completely determined in respect of all possible characteristics (presumably there's an infinity of such possible characteristics). In other words, we cannot have an individual thing that would neither have a certain characteristic nor not have it: the individual must be determinately one or the other. Furthermore, nothing but a completed determination of possible characteristics could individuate a particular thing. One might object that it could still be possible that an individual is identifiable through some incomplete list of characteristics – for instance, George Washington can be plucked out from the rest of the humanity by him being the first president of United States, even if we didn't knew what he was called. But the objection forgets that in Wolffian philosophy we are allowed to look at other possible worlds. Thus, there could be another possible world where the first president of United States was a man called Thomas Jefferson, and the given description would not distinguish the two possible first presidents. Note that while an individual is determinate in all aspects, we might not be able to determine all its aspects.

Some universals and no individuals are then clearly indeterminate in some respect, but Thümmig's definition suggests also that all completely determinate things are individuals, but never universals. This is a far more uncertain proposition. Suppose for instance that we would know a particular rock and all its characteristics completely. Now, if we could then copy the rock and its exact characteristics, we would have two different individuals with the exactly same characteristics. In fact, the list of these characteristics would be completely determined - this was the presupposition - but it would also define a universal class containing several individuals (the two rocks).

Thümmig's definition thus clearly presupposes the idea that no two individuals could have a matching set of characteristics. This principle of the identity of indiscernibles originates actually from Leibniz, who according to a story once challenged courtiers to look for two exactly similar leaves just to prove the principle. Indeed, the principle might well be empirically sound, but as the thought experiment shows, it shouldn't be really accepted as an incontestable axiom of pure reason – and certainly it should not be hidden within a definition. Still, Thümmig's mistake is small when compared to what Baumgarten later did with the same notions – more on this later.

Next time we shall look on animal psychology.