Just like Wolff,
Baumgarten divides psychology into two parts, empirical and rational.
Yet, just like with the previous parts of his metaphysics, the
interesting thing is to see where Baumgarten deviates from Wolff's
examples. Like in many previous cases, the first obvious change is
the lack of full proofs in Baumgarten's text. The existence of soul
is almost just assumed from the fact of our self-consciousness –
there must be something, which can be conscious of itself. Then, by
just noticing that this soul must be that which underlies all states
of being conscious of something – that is, of representing
something – Baumgarten at once concludes that the soul must be a
force or activity of representing things.
Just like with
Wolff, in Baumgarten's psychology my body is not really mine at all,
but just the material body that I happen to represent most often.
Still, Baumgarten at least makes it clear that representations of a
human soul are somehow directed by the position of its body – if my
body would now be in Lincolnshire, I would have very different
representations of the world around me.
Baumgarten assumes
from Wolffian philosophy the hierarchy of different levels of clarity
and distinctness of representations. A striking novelty is
Baumgarten's idea that there are actually two different scales,
according to which the clarity of a representations could be
evaluated. Firstly, there is the intensive clarity, which measures
how well we can distinguish a thing through that representation –
this is the basis of what in Wolffian philosophy distinguished clear
and eventually distinct representations. Secondly, there is extensive
clarity, which measures how many individual characteristics of a
thing are represented – in effect, it tells how vividly we
experience some object. Extensive clarity is something that even
non-distinct representations might have in abundance, and for
evaluating such vividness Baumgarten suggests a completely new
science, which he calls aesthetics. In effect, such aesthetics would
include what we understand by the term, but it would in general be a
science investigating all non-distinct or sensitive cognition.
Baumgarten's account
of the sensitive cognition is somewhat more scholastic than Wolff's -
while Wolff is often satisfied with indicating that several cognitive
skills are somehow interrelated, Baumgarten tries to make clear
divisions and thus presents far more individual faculties. Both
philosophers have fairly similar stories to tell about the basis of
all cognition, that is, sensation, which for Baumgarten refers to a
cognition of the present state of the soul and the body (and thus
mediately of the world), in which levels of intensive and extensive
clarity are different.
Baumgarten's account
of imagination shows already the scholastic tendency I mentioned.
With Wolff, imagination was a name for a complex of interrelated
skills, such as memory and invention, which all rely on our ability
to represent things which are not present to us. With Baumgarten, on
the other hand, imagination is merely this ability to represent
things, which are not present us – and in fact, it is precisely an
ability to represent past states of soul, body and world. Memory, or
the ability to recognise an imagined representation as past, is
already a distinct ability for Baumgarten. In addition to memory,
Baumgarten also distinguishes such faculties as perspicacity (ability
to perceive identities and diversities of things – note that this
happens already at a level, in which we don't really have distinct
thoughts) and innovation (ability to combine imaginations to form new
representations). Especially the faculty of innovation comes with an
interesting twist. Both Wolff and Baumgarten admit that even
imaginations represent individual things, but whereas Wolff included
innovation as one type of imagination and thus implied that even such
fictional combinations of phantasms, like centaurs, are individuals,
Baumgarten could conceivably state that such fictive innovations are
no individuals, since innovation as a faculty differs from
imagination.
In Baumgarten, our
capacity to represent past things is based on the fact that all past
and present things form a causal nexus. Because a similar nexus
connects present to future states, Baumgarten concludes that we must
have a faculty of representing future things and events, although
this appears to be more obscure than representing past things. Just
like Baumgarten distinguished sharply between imagination as
representing past and memory as recognising something as past, he
also points out a further faculty for recognising some representation
as being of a future event – this is the faculty on which
prophesising is based. A more mundane example of such a ”vision of
future" Baumgarten presents in connection with another faculty or
judgement, which means for Baumgarten representing or perceiving how
perfect or imperfect something is (all of this happens still at the
level of non-distinct cognition). If such a judgement is turned on
future events, it can be used in practice for deciding how to act.
Just like with
Wolff, intellect or understanding is not a completely distinct
faculty separate from sensation, but more of a higher level of human
mind, born out of sensations through attention, reflection and
comparison. In difference to Wolff, Baumgarten points out that
intellect forms only a one possible way to improve our cognition.
Intellect or understanding is generated by purifying our sensations,
that is, through clarifying our ideas, but it is also possible to
make our representations more vivid – this makes our mind more in
tune with what is beautiful.
Following Wolff,
Baumgarten explains human feelings of pleasure and pain through the
notion of perfection – perceiving something as perfect makes us
feel it pleasurable, while perceiving something as imperfect makes us
feel pain (of course, it is also possible that an object is not
regarded as either). Expectations of pleasure and pain make our soul
strive for something and thus act like motives.
Baumgarten is quite
clear that our soul requires such a motive to do anything at all –
if we are not forced to do anything, we will follow our own motives.
Such motives could be generated either by mere sensations and other
indistinct representations – then they are mere impulses – while
conscious motives are caused always by distinct representations. Here
a real freedom means then action instigated by such conscious
motives.
The final topic of
Baumgarten's empirical psychology is the interaction between soul and
its body. Baumgarten says that on basis of mere psychology we cannot
say which is better, the idea of a true causal interaction or the
idea of a pre-established harmony. Yet, as we already know, his idea
of the perfect possible world points towards the Leibnizian idea.
So much for
Baumgarten's empirical psychology, next we shall see what he has to
say about rational psychology.
