The final task of
Wolff's Latin rational psychology is to show the place of human souls
in a hierarchy of what could be called mental entities – a hierarchy
in which humans form neither the highest nor the lowest rang.
Completely outside this hierarchy are material entities, but
apparently also mere elements of material entities, which have no
mental capacities and which do not represent the world in any proper
sense of the word. Wolff is thus clearly distancing himself from the
monadology of Leibniz, in which all monads actually perceived.
Even if Wolff does
not accept elements as souls, he dos affirm that animals have mental
capacities: animals have sensations and thus consciousness, they are
guided by sensuous appetites and aversions and they can even imagine
things that they are not perceiving. Thus, Wolff concludes, they must
have souls. It it not clear how substantially Wolff wanted to
understand this ascription of souls to animals, because the
capacities Wolff has described as belonging to animals are all such
that have bodily counterparts in Wolff's scheme. Is saying that
animals have souls only another way to point out that animal bodies
exhibit similar processes as bodies of truly ensouled humans or
should animals truly have a simple substance that senses, imagines
etc.?
Whatever the case
about the supposed animal souls, Wolff says that they clearly lack
some capacities inherent to humans. Animals particularly do not have
the capacity for language, and because of that, they cannot think or
have distinct perceptions or concepts. Thus, they also lack proper
self-consciousness and cannot therefore even have free will. Wolff
takes this distinction between unself-conscious animals and
self-conscious humans as important enough to warrant a new concept: spirits, Wolff says, are entities capable of self-conscious
intelligence and will. While it was unclear whether animal souls are
simple entities, spirits undoubtedly must be.
It comes as no
surprise that Wolff does not want to restrict the concept of spirit
to mere humans. He notes that human spirits or souls have essentially
limited intelligence and will: they do not understand world or the
essence of goodness completely. This suggests then a possibility of a
perfect or infinite spirit that succeeds where humans must fail.
Another important concept is the notion of a necessary spirit or a
spirit that cannot be created nor destroyed, but has always existed
and will always exist. Although Wolff does not yet identify the two,
it is clear that the roles of an infinite and a necessary spirit will
be combined in the person of God.
Human spirits are
then not necessary, but can be created and destroyed, although as
they are simple substances, their creation does not involve
combination of parts and their destruction does not involve taking
them apart. Now, since it is only such material creation and
destruction that we understand, creation and destruction of human
spirit lies beyond our understanding. Still, we can see at least that
human spirit cannot have been formed from the spirits of its parents,
because two simple entities cannot be turned into a third simple
entity.
Wolff goes on to
speculate that even a fetus must have a soul, since it evidently can
have sensations. Still, all the perceptions of the fetus must still
be obscure and therefore it cannot have any consciousness nor any
memory. This raises the question whether the human soul is meant to
be generated along with the body or whether it might have
pre-existed, say, as the soul of some animal. Whatever the case, the
perceptions of the soul become more clear and more distinct, when the
fetus develops into a full-grown human being. Wolff concludes that
this level of distinctness and the memories gathered by the soul
cannot suddenly disappear when the body dies, but human spirit must
go on living in another shape.
This is as much of
Wolff's rational psychology I am going to examine. Next time, it
shall be a good time to return to some of the opponents of Wolffian
school.
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