There are two ways to deal with
additions, remarks and clarifications meant for explaining one's own
philosophical text. Firstly, it is possible to incorporate such
additional material to the old text and sell it as a new edition –
this is what philosophers such as Kant and Hegel will do. Then again,
one can also create a completely new book meant to elucidate the
first. This second strategy was used by Schopenhauer and before him
Wolff in the commentary of his Magnum opus on metaphysics:
Anmerckungen über Die vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt
und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt.
When Wolff dealt with other sciences or branches of philosophy, he
often made references to his earlier works and especially to German
metaphysics. Wolff thus had a reason for choosing this manner of
publication – incorporating additions to the original would have
meant changes in the paragraph numbers used for reference purposes.
This seems different from Schopenhauer, who probably was just too
lazy to edit the first part of his masterpiece.
The motivation
behind Wolff's commentary is naturally the need to clarify some
points that had not been understood properly. As we have seen, Wolff
was especially criticized in the pietist circles of German academic
life, who regarded Wolff as a atheist in disguise continuing the work
of Spinoza. It is then no wonder that the longest comments Wolff
makes are aimed at Lange and his compatriots.
At the very
beginning of the commentary Wolff notes that his criticizers had
mistakenly thought that he had denied some doctrine, because he had
not wanted at that stage to commit himself to any position concerning
that doctrine: for instance, he had not at first wanted to say
anything about the possible independence of the world, because he was
not yet in a position to disprove it, and some reader (clearly Lange)
had concluded that Wolff actually believed in the eternity of the
world. Wolff is clearly dedicated to the way of presenting theorems
that occurred in the mathematical works and especially in Euclid's
Elements: one should not use premises one has not yet proven to be
correct.
One aim of the
commentary is then to emphasize the various interconnections between
the different parts of German metaphysics and even different parts of
Wolff's whole philosophy. The strict Euclidean method of presentation
often prevents such discussion: you cannot say that proposition
proven here will help to prove another proposition there, because we
are not yet in a position to do the actual proving. The more relaxed
form of commentary allows this, and thus Wolff can justifiably note
in it that e.g. proposotions of psychology will be used as premises
of morality.
Despite the task of
showing interconnections, Wolff's commentary is still rather
fragmentary: only some paragraphs require comments and of these only
few require a lengthier discussion. Thus, it is no wonder that my
texts about the commentary will also be fragmentary in the sense that
they are rather short and form no coherent whole.
I shall begin unraveling this confusing mishmash by studying the notion of ground
or reason. Until next time, then!
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