Free to act

In previous post, I spoke of Wolff's general idea of the appetetive side of human mind and particularly of appetites based on unanalyzed information from perception, apperception and phantasms. Just like the move from lower to higher faculties of cognition happens through analysis of perceptions and phantasma, so does the move from lower to higher faculties of appetite, that is, from sensuous appetite to will. What distinguishes will from mere sensuous appetite or volitions from affects is that in case of volitions we can in general tell why we want or avoid something. In other words, volitions are based on conscious motives.

Although the existence of motives does characterize volitions, this doesn't mean that motives of our volitions would be completely transparent to us. Just like in case of concepts, the analysis of our motives could well be only partial and lead only to some gut feeling we couldn't really base on anything. Indeed, lack of reliable information could well lead us to volitions that we would discard at once, if we just knew better – for instance, we might follow a diet that we thought to make us healthy, even if more complete studies would reveal its inefficiency.

Furthermore, even if we knew well enough what was good for us, we might receive contradictory information from our senses that might be difficult to ignore due to its vividness, which might result in a mental conflict. Thus, we might well know that eating certain foods is bad for our condition, but the rich odours coming from grill might still seduce us to savour the taste of such detrimental nutrients.

Indeed, in actual decision making out motives are usually far from complete, and only in hindsight can we rationalize our actions and explain why we did them. This does not make us completely passive, because many impulses besides willing guide our activities. These other impulses also help Wolff solve the problem of Buridan's ass, that is, what to choose, when none of the options has a stronger motive than others. Wolff is of the opinion that we could choose in such cases, even if it would come about with great difficult. This choice could then be helped by other factors beyond motive. One of these is habit, which often takes the place of a motivated, reasoned choice. Thus, Buridan's ass might just prefer to pick out always a left hay stack, even if it had no reason to do this.

Wolff's account of Buridan's ass reveals that he doesn't think motives work in the same way as causes do – if two forces equal in quantity, but working in opposite directions would affect same object, no movement would occur, but two opposed motives do not prevent actions. Indeed, Wolff admits that motives do not so much determine actions, but give us a chance to choose some activity. Thus, humans cannot act without any motive at all, but they can still decide which motive to ignore and which not. This does not mean that we could choose what volitions and motives we do have, although Wolff admits that we could gradually teach ourselves to gain or lose some volitions. True liberty, Wolff concludes, lies actually in our ability to choose from given options the one pleasing us most. Because volitions are then not determined by the essence of the soul, this is enough to avoid Spinozistic conclusions, Wolff says.

Freedom to act is not restricted to choices within our own mind, Wolff argues further, because our actions do appear to have some effect on our bodies – if I decide to raise my hand, my hand is instantly raised. The power of mind over body is still not absolute, because we cannot just will our body to do physical impossibilities like flying. In addition, changes in body are instantly followed by changes in our mind, for instance, when light touches our eye. This is as much as we can empirically determine from their relation, that is, that they are dependent on one another. Real explanations of this interdependence will be offered in Wolff's Rational psychology, but now we are going to take a second look on Gottsched' philosophy.

Enduring pain

I have tried to criticize the common prejudice about Wolffian philosophy that he, in Kant's words, intellectualized appearances. As I have tried to show, this is a rather exaggerated and even misleading opinion. If anything, Wolff was Lockean, when it comes to the source of cognition, and even highly abstract concepts were for Wolff either phantasms dependent on perceptions or words symbolizing such phantasms. Instead of intellectualizing appearances, Wolff picked out a certain subgroup of them as an ideal of cognition, that is, distinct or analysed perceptions, which could be used as a basis for demonstrations.

Even if Wolff would not intellectualize appearances, he appears to fall into a second failing of many pre-Kantians, namely, he reduces appetetive side of human mind into its cognitive side. This seems evident from Wolff's suggestion that all cravings, desires, hopes, volitions etc. presuppose some cognition. In other words, we could not want anything to happen, Wolff says, if we could not see what the situation is like and compare it with some ideal how the situation should be. On top of this, Wolff defines all forms of enjoyment simply as intuitive cognition of something as perfect, making even bodily pleasure appear rather intellectual, like an aesthetic consideration of a statue.

The last problem is actually easy to solve, when one remembers that Wolffian cognition need not be highly conceptual. We need not be able make sophisticated explanations why a taste of sweetness or an orgasm is pleasurable, but we could just cry out ”Oh my God, yes, this is what I want” or even utter no comprehensible sounds. Indeed, the word ”intuitive” tells that this enjoyment does not need any linguistic expression at all, but is instigated by mere perception. What is important is that we human beings are, as it were, hardwired to seek for such feelings of perfection and to avoid respective feelings of imperfection.

Furthermore, we already know from the study of Wolff's theory of cognition that he acknowledges a difference in vividness and strength between sensations and higher intellectual representations. Indeed, a capacity to at least partially avoid the influence of distracting sensations was an essential precondition of more intellectual cognition. Similarly, Wolff can accept that bodily pleasures captivate us so strongly that it will cloud our reason – and similarly pain can make us unable to think clearly. Then again, we also can exercise an ability to become indifferent even to quite strong bodily pleasures and pains. Thus, although being tortured is painful, there have been people able to suppress these extreme feelings, and even if such extreme self-control is rare, all of us can in some degree endure at least some type of bodily discomfort.

A good question is whether Wolff is making an artificial restriction by declaring the appetites for pleasures and aversions of discomfort and pleasure to be essentially connected to cognitions. After all, appetites and aversions we are aware of might be just expression of some unconscious urges. Yet, Wolff is here purposefully restricting himself on what we can immediately observe of ourselves, while the explanations for these observations are left for rational psychology. Thus, Wolff can in empirical psychology point out only that conscious appetites and aversions are clearly dependent of cognitions. This still does not preclude the possibility of unconscious activities causing this whole play of appetites and cognitions.

In Wolffian system, why we feel positive and negative feelings is ultimately work of God and meant to be useful. For instance, bodily pleasure should reward us for benefiting the condition of our body, while bodily pain should warn us of harming our body. Yet, Wolff points out, enjoyment is defined only as cognizing something AS perfect, that is, there remains the possibility that what we enjoy is in truth really not perfect or even good for us. Taste of sugar sends a pleasurable feeling, because we require energy that is easily obtainable from sugar, but eating too much sweets will still be detrimental to our health. Similarly, pressure on nerves in our teeth will cause considerable pain as a warning for a possible dental injury, but similar pain felt in a dentist's chair occurs just as a side effect of fixing our teeth.

The possibility of deceptive enjoyments is essentially connected with the confusion of mere unanalysed sensations. Thus, pleasure or pain is just a murky feeling of ”Yes!” or ”No!” without any proper indication what actually is good and bad in the events causing these feelings. A good question is how we can then recognize enjoyment caused by true perfection and distinguish it from deceptive positive feelings – especially as working it out from Wolff's ontological definition of perfection seems rather difficult. Wolff's suggestion appears to be that constancy can be used as a relevant criterion – truly perfect things cause enjoyment that cannot be contradicted by future knowledge, while deceptive enjoyment could well be just momentary and fleeting.

Affects, like love and hope, fall usually to the more confused side of appetites and aversions – we have tender feelings toward a person and often just cannot explain why. Wolff presents an intricately detailed account of affects and defines them twice – first nominally, by explaining what e.g. love means, and then through its real definition which tells us how to generate love. As I said earlier when dealing with Wolffian theory of affects, the whole system of affects has too much material for a good blog text, thus, I will skip the topic now also. Hence, next time I shall move to consider the question of interaction between mind and body.

The height of cognition

When I look at the massive collection of Wolff's combined works, I get the impression he might have been a keen business man: after all, it requires a good sales pitch to get one's writings sold numerous times after the first print. Furthermore, it is not just the huge amount of reprints, which makes me consider the possibility, but also the fact that Wolff essentially made duplicated copies of his works in German and Latin. The most astonishing example is still Wolff's logic. The German version of logic was one of Wolff's first publications, but so fond of the topic Wolff was that he essentially summarised the main ideas of the book in his German metaphysics and especially in psychological chapters (after all, cognition is part and parcel of human mental life) and then years later in his book on morals (naturally, a moral person has a duty to find out as reliable information as possible). It is once again the point coinciding with logic I have now hit on Wolff's Latin psychology. Since I have so recently went through Wolff's Latin logic in quite a detail, I shall just do a quick summary of Wolff's ideas of intellect and cognition, especially from a psychological point of view.

Last time I described Wolff's notion of intellect as a faculty of distinct ideas. Although one can have distinct ideas of individual objects, it is especially universalities Wolff is interested here, because universalities are an essential ingredient in the more complex forms of intellectual cognition, that is, making judgements and reasoning on basis of judgements. I also noted Wolff's distinction between intuitive cognition based on direct observation of ideas and symbolic cognition based on language and generally signs and their manipulation. Wolff notes that this duality continues throughout all levels of cognition. Thus, we can have direct awareness of a universal feature shared by a number of entities or we can just refer to this feature with a general word, we can note a connection between certain ideas of universal features of we can express this connection with a string of words and we can use the connections we have observed to deduce more connections or we can use formal rules of syllogism and mechanically calculate consequences of certain linguistic expressions.

The capacity to draw inferences Wolff calls reasoning, and it is closely related to the faculty of reason, which is just the capacity to view a whole system of universal truths and their interconnections. The more pure a reason is, the less external material it has to use, and pure reason would observe a system based only on definitions and self-evident axioms – note that Wolff does not indicate what sciences actually belong to pure reason, but one would assume that at least mathematics is a part of it.

Pure reasoning is then expectedly a form of a priori cognition. In Latin logic Wolff made it clear that actually all cognition uses reasoning a priori, that is, also deductions based on experiences. Here Wolff also explains that all cognition based on experiences is a posteriori, thus making it possible that cognition is both a priori and a posteriori – this is what Wolff calls mixed cognition. Wolff is thus beginning to approach a position in which a priori and a posteriori refer to components and not types of cognition. We might also note that Wolff divides experiences and says that a posteriori cognition can be based on active experiments and passive observations, which includes in addition to sensuous perceptions also apperceptions, thus making psychology explicitly not part of pure reason.

We might finally point out that Wolff introduces the notion of an analogy of reason, which was especially important to Wolff's followers, such as Baumgarten. Wolff's idea appears to be that as the ideal of reason is a system of interconnected truths, we might expect that world conforms to this system in the sense that it is also a system of interconnected entities. Thus, if some part of nature is known to be structurised in a certain manner, we have a justification to assume that some similar part of nature is also structurised in the same manner.

So much for theoretical part of the soul, next time we'll start to tackle the practical side of our nature.

Reflecting on intellect

I have pointed out a number of times that although sensation as such belongs in Wolff's psychology to the less clear side of faculties, even sensations can be more or less clear. Just consider a common enough experience, such as perceiving a bicycle. When we notice a lone bicycle, the actual sensory data received by human mind contains a lot more than just the bicycle, for instance, balcony above the bicycle and bricks on the wall that the bicycle is leaning against. Then again, what we are clearly aware of includes only a fraction of this data, namely, just the bicycle, while the wall, the balcony and others recede into a murky background. This effect can be very pointed, as shown by the famous example of people counting how many scores a player makes in a basketball match not noticing a guy in a monkey suit dancing on the field. This difference in the levels of clarity Wolff considers under the concept of attention. We might say that if human consciousness is like a light, only some objects can be in its focus.

The effects of the faculty of attention seem not completely positive, because the necessity of focusing one's attention on a part of sensory data prevents the possibility of considering more than one thing at a time. This is especially lamentable in case of sensations, which are easily disturbed by other sensations. Thus, it is not easy to concentrate one's attention on some particular sensation for a long period of time, because other sensations constantly demand our attention too.

Yet, although attention itself has a limited range and might thus not show all facets of a thing, we can also systematically move our attention from one facet of a thing to another and thus ultimately go through it all – this method Wolff calls reflection. We can also imagine the various parts of the thing as separate from the whole – this is what is called abstraction. When we then reflect how the various abstracted parts combine into a totality, the result is a more detailed view of the structure of a thing, which is not just clearer, but also more distinct, due to us having discerned the various parts of the thing and their interrelations and retaining all of this in memory.

Now, this stage of representing things distinctly is already intellect, Wolff defines, thus further confusing the lines between sensational and intellectual faculties – looking at a particular bicycle and seeing how all its parts combine to form a complex machinery that will move the one riding forward is already work of intellect. In fact, this is also an instance of intuitive cognition, by which Wolff means cognition generated immediately by examining our ideas – such cognition can be confused, if we don't know anything about the structure of what we examine, but through reflection it becomes more distinct. Thus, Wolffian psychology allows for the possibility of intuitive intellect, although this notion has a completely different meaning than with Kant (I assume the awareness of the mechanics of a bicycle wouldn't be something Kant would call intuitive intellect).

Note that the use of intellect is not restricted to mere universalities, but intellect could be applied individual things, like bicycles. Still universals are a topic studied by intellect – we can not just reflect on parts of a thing, but also on similarities and differences between different things, thus becoming aware of universals or features shared by many things. Moving to universalities usually requires the use of words that can be used to symbolise individual things and especially universalities – the use of words is then properly called symbolic cognition. Although symbolic cognition thus makes it easier to reflect on universal features of things and might help us to invent new things (especially through some Leibnizian ars characteristica) and is especially useful in communication of ideas, we can always refrain from using it and remain on the level intuitive cognition, Wolff assures us.

While the level of intellect as such is already achieved, once we have distinct ideas, it is of course possible to have more distinct ideas (e.g. to know what the parts of the bicycle are made of). This possibility implies a final level of highest intelligence that has nothing but distinct ideas of everything (note that this would essentially require an infinity of ideas, because the things that we perceive are infinitely divisible). A notion distinct from the idea of a highest intelligence is that of a pure intelligence. Pure intelligence does not so much know everything perfectly, but is undisturbed by various sensations and uncontrolled imaginations that distract human attention so easily.

So much for a general look on reflection and intellect, next time I shall look more closely at the use of intellect.

Phantastic faculties

I have studied Wolff's idea of imagination in an earlier post quite extensively, but I still feel there's some possibility for clarifying the role of this faculty in more detail. Especially I shall have to emphasise its role as still officially one of the lower faculties, but even so, on a higher level than mere sensation as such.

Imagination, then, is supposed to be the faculty that reproduces ideas of certain individuals, even if they are absent. The reproduced ideas created by imagination Wolff calls phantasms. They are thus to be distinguished from sensuous ideas, which could not be produced without the presence of some concrete thing corresponding to these ideas. Still, there could be no phantasms without any sensations. That is, Wolff ascribes to Lockean principle that mind without experience would be like a blank slate without anything written on it.

I have already noted about the similarity of Wolffian distinction between sensations and phantasms and Humean distinction between impressions and ideas. Like Hume, Wolff also notes that phantasms or products of imagination are less vivid and have fewer details. Then again, this is actually positive according to Wolff and speaks in favour of phantasms. The vividness of sensations makes it difficult to concentrate on them: if we try to look at a beautiful painting, a sudden honk from car horns outside the window can ruin our aesthetic experience. The lack of unnecessary details in phantasms, on the other hand, helps to make them clearer, which is a requirement e.g. for mathematical thinking. True, phantasms can also be confused by sensations, and a honking car horn will make it difficult to follow mathematical constructions imagined in your head. Yet, even this obstacle can be circumvented, as soon as one finds a dark room isolated from all external stimuli.

The lack of sensations thus helps us to concentrate on our phantasms. Indeed, when all sensations have been cut out, phantasms become more vivid, which explains, according to Wolff, the seeming substantiality of our dreams. Like all experiences, dreams come with different levels of clarity, starting from a completely dreamless sleep and ending with lucid dreams, in which we are aware that we are dreaming.

Imagination as a faculty of producing phantasms is thus important for its own sake, but it also provides materials for other faculties, Wolff continues. Firstly, phantasms are more in our control than sensations are. In fact, a given phantasm can be, as it were, divided into its constituent phantasms – we can imagine a human head, independently of its body. Furthermore, we can also combine different phantasms, attaching a human head onto a body of a horse, thus creating the phantasm of a centaur. This is the work of what Wolff calls inventive faculty, which is responsible, among other things, all the works of fiction.

Secondly, we can use phantasms as indicators for something we have sensed or in general experienced at some past point of time. This is the task of memory, which Wolff clearly says not to be any container of images or memories. Instead, memory is actually a name common to various interacting faculties, which, for instance, recognise a sensation or phantasm as resembling something that we have witnessed, or produce phantasms of things we have witnessed.

Imagination, together with its related faculties, forms then a second level in the hierarchy of faculties in Wolffian psychology of cognition. Together with sensation, they form the lower level of cognition, in which imagination appears clearer than the multifarious and uncontrollable sensations. This does not mean that sensations could not be basis of clear and even distinct experiences, as becomes clear in the next post, where I will move to consider the higher levels of cognition.

Sensational cognition

After proving that soul or consciousness exists and that we can in some measure study it, Wolff begins to discuss the theoretical or cognitive part of soul. I might notice, by the way, that this is a rather common ordering, and indeed, I have never seen a philosophical study of consciousness begin with volition. The custom goes all the way back to Aristotle's De Anima, and presumably every philosopher has just copied his predecessors in this matter.

Before actually beginning to study any cognitive faculties, Wolff defines certain notions common to all of them, starting from the concept of faculty itself. Scholars of German philosophy are often so ingrained in the language of faculties that they fail to ask even what is meant by a faculty. Wolff actually defined the term already in his ontology, where it was explicated as any active potentiality, that is, any possibility to do something that was actually engaged with actualising this possibility. In other words, faculties of soul or mind are just capacities of mind to do something, but also not passive. Instead, they are active or actually use what they can do.

After faculty, Wolff continues by describing what is meant by clarity and distinctness of perceptions or representations. The notions themselves I have explicated quite sufficiently for a number of times: clarity means for Wolff ability to distinguish a perception, while distinctness means ability to recognise partial perceptions that help to distinguish the whole perception. I could still note one more time that these concepts should not be read as forming a strict division to e.g. clear and unclear perceptions. Instead, they work more as defining a scale of clarity and distinctness: we can distinguish an object with various accuracy in different situations, and analysis required for distinctness might reveal further characteristic marks. This notion is further backed up by the fact that Wolff calls clarity of perception light of soul – light does not form a clear division with darkness, but between light and total darkness there are many shadows and gray areas.

These very same perceptions can also be called ideas, although Wolff prefers defining idea as a representation, in which we are especially interested of the object represented: that is, when we talk of perceptions, we talk of an act of subject, but when we talk of ideas, we talk of individual objects. Concepts, on the other hand, are representations of general characteristics of things, of genera and species. Cognition, then, means acquiring ideas and concepts of various things, that is, conceiving what things and their characteristics are. Cognition can then have various levels of clarity, but Wolff places the most important distinction on whether the ideas and concepts involved are distinct, that is, analysed into further ideas and concepts. Cognition with distinct ideas and concepts is in Wolffian psychology on a level higher than cognition with obscure and confused ideas and concepts, that is, one should aim at analysing one's ideas and concepts.

Wolff begins the study of cognition from faculties of lower level. Wolff's choice reflects a natural development – we begin with confused and even obscure ideas, which little by little become clearer and more distinct. Thus, it is no wonder that Wolff begins with sensations, which presumably are the beginning of all cognition. Sensations are also the link of human cognition to the external physical world. An important element of this world is our own body that appears constantly attached to us and seems to be in continuous correspondence with certain perceptions (note how Wolff avoids the question whether this correspondence is explained by actual interaction between body and human mind or whether there is no interaction between them – such questions will be tackled in rational psychology). Sensation, then, is defined by the special correspondence between human mind and sensory organs of the body, that is, sensation is a perception that can be understood by basis of changes in these organs (even if they are not caused by these changes).

Because sensation is studied by Wolff in a part dedicated to the lower part of human cognition, it becomes natural to ask if Wolff completely discarded sensation as without any value and completely obscure. Yet, the idea of clarity and distinctness as a scale instead of division makes it possible that sensation could rise in clarity and even gain some distinctness. This is especially shown to be true by Wolff's investigation of attention and reflection, but even sensations themselves contain levels of clarity – a stronger sensation is also clearer than a weaker sensation. A further value of sensations lies in their relative freedom from arbitrary whims of human mind. Thus, if one is looking at some spot, one cannot just choose what one is seeing. The only way to control what one senses is to move to another spot or at least look to somewhere else.

So much for sensations, next time I shall turn to imagination.

Empirical psychology (1732)

After cosmology, Wolff turns his attention once again to human soul, and just like in his German metaphysics, he divides the topic into two parts. The book I now reading, or Psychologia empirica, concerns, as the title says, empirical psychology, which is meant to provide us with the experiential information that any theory of human soul or consciousness should be able to explain. Second part, or rational psychology, is then supposed to present the theory used for explaining the propositions of empirical psychology.

Psychology is so for Wolff an empirical science, and it is through experience that we must ascertain the existence of the very topic of psychological investigations, that is, the human soul. Wolff can finally apply the Cartesian strategy, with which he had started the German metaphysics. He begins from the rather indubitable fact that we are aware of things external to us. Note that we need not confirm that there are things outside us, just that there is this state of being conscious of them. Now, it is easy to conclude that there must also be someone who is conscious, or the ”I”.

Wolff declares that the starting point of the deduction or the state of consciousness of external things is so indubitable that psychology has as certain beginning as mathematics. Clearly, he once again does not want to say that the existence of external things is certain, but only that our consciousness of them is. Wolff thus suggests that the consciousness of external things is dependent on the possibility of being conscious of ourselves. Later on, Kant tried in his refutation of idealism, as it were, to reverse this line of thought and show that our self-consciousness is dependent on our consciousness of external things.

Wolff then defines soul as that which is conscious of itself and external things. One might wonder if Wolff is here moving to the perilous area of Kantian paralogisms. Yet, one must remember that at the stage of empirical psychology Wolff merely describes what can be experienced without committing himself to any theories explaining these experiences. Thus, Wolff can certainly assume that there is both consciousness of things and consciousness of this consciousness and that these two states of consciousness are part of same stream of consciousness. He might even have the right to call this stream soul, if he just refrains from saying that the soul is e.g. immortal and independent substance – it would be just a different name for human mind or consciousness.

A more difficult problem lies in the question about the relationship of soul and body. Like a good Cartesian, Wolff notes that soul is known before body, that is, while we can be quite certain of the existence of our soul, the existence of our body is more doubtful. One might think that this assumption relies on Kant's fourth paralogism about the supposed relationship of soul and body. Yet, when it comes to empirical psychology, Wolff even here remains within the limits of what Kant could accept. Even Kant doesn't deny that ”I am and I think I am” is far more certain that the statement ”I am a bodily being”. It is only when from these facts conclusions like ”I am not a bodily being” are drawn that philosophers stray from a safe path.

Wolff's empirical psychology is then not full of paralogisms – if these are anywhere to be found, it will be in rational psychology, where Wolff will try to explain the empirical facts of our mental life. Even so, we still have to ask whether Wolff's methodology in empirical psychology is acceptable, as even I have voiced some skepticism about it.

Now, the aim of empirical psychology, according to Wolff, lies in cognition of our own soul: cognition is here defined as nothing else but awareness or consciousness of something. The cognition of ourselves, Wolff continues, we receive through our capacity of apperception. The word ”apperception” was introduced by Leibniz, because he wanted to separate consciousness of external things (perception as such) from consciousness of oneself. Wolff follows this lead in a rather unimaginative fashion. Perception, he says, is simply representation of something, while apperception is then perception of ourselves. All perceptions involve the possibility of apperception, that is, when we observe, for instance, an apple, we can also note that we are observing this apple. Wolff just takes it for granted that this self-observation is unproblematic, without considering in Kantian manner how this self-observation takes place. Yet, despite these methodological problems, we might still accept the results of such a self-observation, just as long as we do not make any problematic inferences from them – that is, just as long as we remain at the level of empirical psychology and note, for instance, that we have memories, without stepping to the field of rational psychology by trying to explain why we can remember things.

Before moving onward to a more substantial account of capacities of human mind, I shall make a note of the structure of the book. Wolff uses the trusted notion that human mind has a cognitive and volitional part, basing even the division of the book on that presupposition. Within each major part, Wolff then differentiates between less and more clear faculties – sensory perceptions from understanding, sensuous impulses from free will. Next time, we shall be looking at the book in more detail, starting from sensation or perceptions.