We have seen Lange criticizing Wolffian
philosophy, but his own opinions have remained mostly hidden. Now,
the veil of mystery is to be opened a bit, when I study Lange's
Disputatio metaphysica mechanica, de necessario et contingenti ac
libero, notiones ad dijudicationem Spinosismi aliorumque errorum
necessarias.
The topic of Lange's treatise is
apparently rather dry and academic: modalities, that is, concepts of
possibility, necessity, impossibility and contingency. Yet, behind
these abstractions lies the problem of determinism and freedom that
the dispute between Wolff and Lange circled. Lange had criticized
Wolff for not separating geometric and physical necessity – Wolff
could say that the deterministic world was not necessary, because for
him only God was a truly necessary entity, while the concrete world
was necessary only if one already assumed the fact of creation.
We can at once note that Lange was
perhaps a bit unfair in his condemnation of Wolffian notion of
necessity as a mere geometric necessity of Spinoza. As I have argued,
for Wolff, necessity of God is not just logical necessity or logical
contradiction of the non-existence of God. Instead, God cannot fail
to exist, because he has in himself sufficient power to exist –
nothing can stop God from existing. In other words, God is absolutely
necessary, because he does not require any external boost for
becoming actual, while all the other things are at most just
hypothetically necessary, because they do require such a boost.
For Lange, on the contrary, absolute
necessity is twofold. God is absolutely necessary in the same manner
as with Wolff: he requires nothing for becoming actual and exists
therefore eternally. Absolute necessity of God is internal, but there
is also external absolute necessity – namely, with things that
depend only of God and not of any other free agents. External absolute
necessity is then the immutability of certain deterministic things
that lie beyond control of humans, such as the motions of planets.
Concept of hypothetical necessity in
then restricted by Lange to things that lie in human control. This
notion of hypothetical necessity clearly requires at least partial
freedom of human beings – free choices are the only real source of
contingency in the world. The existence of hypothetical necessity
requires also that these free choices can have real effects on the
world – otherwise, the contingency would be restricted to mental
processes, which would be causally closed in relation to the physical
world.
What Lange then does in comparison with
Wolff is to emphasize the special role of finite free entities. God
has, in a sense, just created the general features of the world,
while the filling of the world with particular content has been left
for the free choice of his creations – God has given the human
being the tools, but it is human being himself who can choose how to
use these tools.
Lange runs into some obvious problems,
when he tries to reconcile his notion of human freedom with the idea
of divine omniscience. In order that human freedom be real, God
should not have decided what human beings should do, still, he must
also know what they will do. There might be no problem, if God just
knew on instinct what the future is like – if I know beforehand
that Peter will go to work tomorrow, I am still not the cause of
Peter's future actions, which could well be freely chosen by him.
Problem is that God has also created human beings – if he chose to
create Peter, he should have known what Peter would do in future –
thus, he should be at least partially responsible for his actions:
he could have chosen not to create Peter, if he knew Peter would
become criminal. Problem is that Lange never faces the problem
adequately, hence, the very same lack of moral responsibility of
which he blames Wolff and other deterministic philosophies falls on
his own theological notion of freedom.
Next time I'll take another look at
Wolffian metaphysics.
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