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.
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