Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on God, world, and human soul, furthermore, of all things in general - Pre-established harmony

Ever since Descartes suggested that the finite world consisted of two types of substances, material and spiritual, the question of possible interaction between the two had formed a dilemma. Descartes' own suggestion that pineal gland had something to do it was considered a failure. An easy solution would have been to get rid of one side of the equation altogether. But the rejection of spiritual substances or souls, that is, materialism of Hobbesian sort was considered antireligious. On the other hand, the opposite of materialism, which denies the existence of matter and which Wolff called idealism, attracted religious men like Berkeley, but was otherwise seen as rather farfetched.

Spinoza's solution was to deny that there is any true difference between soul and matter: both are merely one and the same thing from two aspects, thus, they do not interact, although changes in one reflect the changes in the other. But Spinoza's answer led to a pantheistic world view, where everything was a mere modification of original unity or God. A more theologically acceptable solution was occasionalism, according to which God had to give a helping hand, whenever an apparent interaction of any substances would occur. Problem was that occasionalism required constant wonders and so undermined scientific discussions.

Wolff follows Leibnizian solution of the problem, that is, he supposes that God had created the material world and the souls in such a manner that they appeared to work in harmony with one another. For Leibniz and Wolff, soul was closed off from any influences and all its states followed from its previous states. Still, soul could represent the world around it, because when the soul had been generated by the God, it represented the world perfectly and thereafer, because of the laws governing both matter and souls, the two will remain in perfect sync (one might object that two clocks that begin by showing the same time might not be synchronised after few days, but I will assume that God has ordained the laws in question so that the harmony remains).

Leibniz's theory is undoubtedly ingenious, but it somehow feels too elaborate. Furthermore, it still appears to verge on materialism. The body is not truly controlled by the soul, thus, whatever words are coming out of the mouth of the person sitting next to me, whatever actions she will perform – all this must be caused by some changes in her body in general and her brain in particular. I know that in myself there is something more – namely, my consciousness that exactly corresponds to the actions of my body – but in case of other persons I might as well assume that they are mere machines.

Leibniz and Wolff had, of course, a reason for adding independent souls to the equation. The material bodies can be destroyed through disassembly of their parts, but partless and simple soul cannot be disassembled. Thus, human consciousness should live on after the death of the body.

What is most unsatisfactory in this account of the immortality of the soul is that it apparently fails in its purpose. True, Wolff and Leibniz do conclude that the soul is immortal. But the connection between the soul and its body has been defined to be very tight: what soul perceives, what it imagines and what it thinks all correspond to some states in the body of the soul. Indeed, Wolff even goes so far as to admit that a fault in person's brain will lead to a fault in the corresponding perception of the soul. It would then seem reasonable that the capacities of the soul would be gravely diminished when its body completely ceased to exist.

Here Wolff relies on some outlandish speculations. He assumes it to be proven by a collague that the soul is generated at the very instance when its body is assembled. The capacities of the soul grow all the while when it is connected with the body (Wolff conveniently forgets cases of senility). Thus, Wolff concludes, as the state of the soul after death is a mystery to us, it is reasonable to suppose that it will continue developing and perfecting itself.

This is a good example about what I think the greatest fault in the whole chapter on rational psychology. Wolff already knows the answer he must get – soul must be immaterial, it must be immortal and its life after death must be happy and perfect. The grounds for these conclusions are then discovered afterwards, and no puzzle about the nature of the soul has ever actually existed.

So much then for soul: there's only God to discuss anymore.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on God, world, and human soul, furthermore, of all things in general - Truth vs. dreams

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.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on God, world, and human soul, furthermore, of all things in general (1719)

In 1982 appeared a humorous scifi book bearing the lofty title, Life, the universe and everything. Wolff's Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt attempts something similar, just replacing life with soul and adding God as a bonus. But the loftiness is in order, because a new era in German philosophy was about to begin: this is the first ever book on metaphysics in German language.

The words in the title of Wolff's book are not just flowery decoration, but tell quite explicitly what Wolff's book is all about. It investigates, firstly, God. This happens in a discipline that was traditionally called natural theology – that is, based on facts that could be known by a person in a state of nature, while revealed theology relied on Bible and church traditions. Secondly, Wolff's book investigates the physical world or contains a study on cosmology. Thirdly, it investigates human soul, based both on observations of human behaviour (in empirical psychology) and on indubitable reasoning (in rational psychology). Finally, it investigates characteristics shared by all things, that is, ontology. But before any of these discplines can begin, Wolff wants to find an indubitable starting point for his investigation.

In many periods in the philosophy of history, there has been a definitive Philosopher, who one must comment upon, if one is to do serious philosophy – one might not agree in everything with the Philosopher, but even this disagreement must be presented as a commentary on the Philosopher. In the medieval times the Philosopher was Aristotle, in German idealism, Kant, and in certain period of analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein.

In the early 18^th century philosophy the Philosopher appears to be Descartes. We have seen how Lange followed closely in Descartes' footsteps in his description of the natural light of human reason and how Rüdiger took Descartes as one of his main opponents and as the paradigmatic representative of modern physical mechanism. Now we are about to see how Wolff begins philosophy in a Cartesian style.

Indeed, the first paragraphs of Wolff's German metaphysics start from the certainty of the existence of the metaphysical investigator: even if you doubt your own existence, you are at the same time confirming that it is you who is doubting. Even egoists cannot deny this reasoning – egoists being here those who later would be called solipsists, that is, philosophers believing ony in their own existence.

And like Descartes, Wolff uses the discovery of this incontrovertible starting point as an example of the correct methodology. But instead of Descartes' clear and distinct perceptions Wolff inserts his own methodology that we have discussed in earlier texts: our knowledge of our own existence is based on an incontrovertible experience – we are conscious of ourselves and of other things – on an analytical statement – what is conscious, exists – and on rules of syllogistic reasoning.

In fact, it is rather remarkable that according to Wolff, the Cartesian ”I think therefore I am” is a syllogism, when Descartes himself was convinced that it shouldn't be expressed as a syllogism: Cartesian sentence is immediately certain and convincing, while it supposed basis ”all that is conscious exists” is not. The difference reflects the difference in the attitudes of the two philosophers towards syllogistic: Descartes thinking it it an outdated model science and Wolff endorsing it as the true model of science.

Wolff's syllogistic interpretation of Cartesian meditations is interesting also for Kant-scholarship. As we will someday see, Kant expressed the arguments of rational psychology, such as Cartesian cogito, in a syllogistic form. If Kant's criticism would be explicitly targeted only towards Descartes, it would then at least partially miss its point. The existence of the Wolffian interpretation shows that there was a tradition of reading Cartesian sentence as a syllogism and that Kant was probably talking to representative of that tradition.

In addition to methodology, Wolff also uses his Cartesian starting point to ground his ontology, but this will be an issue I shall deal next time. Indeed, I shall probably be spending quite a while with the work: after all, the first German book on metaphysics deserves it.

Joachim Lange: Mental medicine - Curing your mind through Descartes

Last time I gave a preliminary account of what philosophy and its negation, philomoria, were for J. J. Lange and how the two were supposed to be related. This time I shall say something about the concrete methodology of philosophy as Lange conceived it.

As we should remember from the previous text, for Lange philosophy was essentially striving towards wisdom, which was defined as a connection with God. This connection or harmony is actually what humans are intended to live in. Yet, in the current state of things humans are naturally disharmonious. The natural human being is disturbed by sense impressions, and while education can help a person to correct her original state, it might lead her to even worse things – like Aristotelianism.

It is this state of disharmony that Lange strives to cure in Medicina mentis. Although Lange mentions many methods of cure, such as conversation with other persons and prayer, philosophically most interesting is the use of lumen naturale, natural light or human cognitivie capacities.

As one might remember, Descartes was in addition to Socrates the only philosopher that Lange viewed in a completely positive light. For instance, Lange views Cartesian method of doubt as a sober form of skepticism, because it strives to find a reliable and indubitable ground, while an unhealthy skepticism, like the ancient Pyrrhonism, leads merely to turbulence of mind and eventually to libertine denial of all values.

Interestingly, Lange sees the core of unhealthy skepticism not in doubt, but in refusal to accept some facts. Thus, Lange regards both infamous atheists of the time, Spinoza and Hobbes, as partial skeptics, because they did not accept the validity of the Christian notion of God. This peculiarity is connected with Lange's definition of skepticism as the opposite of what he calls formal truth.

What then is a formal truth for Lange? First of all, a material truth is simply a validity of some fact: this is so and so. Formal truth, on the other hand, is a material truth that is in harmony with a mind. Thus, a material truth might not be a formal truth for some person, if that person fails to assent this truth. Then again, a material truth might not be a formal truth, if it is only a part of the whole picture or fails to describe anything essential to the mind involved. In other words, formal truth is an assent by mind of an essential material truth.

The bad form of skepticism, then, is the opposite of formal truth, because it involves a failure to assent to an essential material truth. Thus, atheism as a rejection of God's existence is by Lange's definitions this sort of skepticism. On the other hand, Descartes is not a skeptic in this sense, because ultimately Descartes doesn't reject e.g. God's existence.

In light of Lange's appreciation of the great French philosopher, it is no wonder that Lange's ideas of using the natural light of human reason derive largely from Descartes. Indeed, Lange even calls the use of natural light meditation, borrowing the name obviously from Cartesian Meditations. The meditation, Lange says, should begin from an indubitable starting point. Like Descartes, Lange affirms that this starting point is not demonstrated syllogistically. In fact, Lange goes a step further and says that it is indemonstrable in all senses, that is, an incontrovertible fact.

Lange's rejection of the demonstrability of the first truth is connected with another modification of Cartesian meditations. While Descartes begins from an indubitable proposition, ”I think, therefore I am”, Lange begins from a non-propositional self-consciousness, which he further defines as perception of mind by itself.

Similarly, Lange does not demonstrate other truths concerning mind from the fact of its existence, but says that these truths are just contained within the original self-consciousness. Indeed, he explicitly criticises Descartes for limiting the foundational notion of mind to cognition. Still, what Lange actually tells of mind has a Cartesian air: mind is a non-material substance, but intrinsically connected to a material body, through which it receives impressions of material things and which it can control.

Langian meditations continue in a Cartesian manner, although not through demonstrations: thinking about oneself leads one to think of God, through whom one can even find some certainty in thinking sense objects. Yet, the most important point for Lange is to point out that through self-consciousness one can discern also the limits of natural light and the need for a supernatural light of divine revelation: reason itself shows the need for antirationalism.

Lange's Cartesian inspired antirationalism has an interesting relation to Jacobi's later antirationalism. The purpose of both writers is the same: to move the attention from the mundane science to God as the true meaning of human life, and both also begin from some immediate, indemonstrable starting point: Lange from self-consciousness and Jacobi from Glauben or faith. Yet, for Jacobi it is not Descartes, but Hume, who offers the starting point.

Considering that Descartes was a stout believer, but Hume leaned more towards agnosticism or even atheism, Jacobi's position might seem awkward. But the tides of philosophy had changed from the days of Lange. For Lange, the immediate starting point was human self-consciousness, which immediately led to God as the ground of that consciousness. Self-consciousness was thus a justification for the existence of God, while God was the only thing giving value and stability to the sense world.

At the time of Jacobi, on the other hand, self-consciousness as the first principle was almost exclusively used by philosophers of Kantian inspiration. Now, one thing that philosophers like Fichte appeared to do was to downgrade the role of God in the trinity of self-consciouness, God and material things. Indeed, they seemingly tried to account for the existence of the material things in terms of mere self-consciousness.

Jacobi thought this strategy was ultimately nihilistic, because it destroyed the true source of values. Furthermore, it made it more difficult for Jacobi to use Lange's strategy of justifying the existence of God through self-consciousness: who needs God to account for the existence of material objects, if they can be accounted by the self-consciousness itself?

In this light Jacobi's endorsement of Hume becomes more understandable. Hume had argued that we couldn't really demonstrate the substantiality of the objects of experience through our mere self-consciousness, but that we had to just believe in their stable existence. This stability inhered then somewhere beyond self-consciousness, and Jacobi could then just assume that it inhered in God as the source of all values.

So much for Lange, for the time being. Next time, we shall see what happened 17^th of March, 1716, around 7 PM, at Halle.