Christian Wolff: Natural theology, prior part – Good and powerful

Wolffian God is not satisfied with mere contemplation of possibilities, but decides to actualise one of the possible worlds. In order to do this, he needs to have the capacity to actualise anyone of them. Indeed, God could make anything happen that is possible and only impossibilities are limits to his capacities – in effect, God is omnipotent, Wolff says.

What God requires for this use of his capacity is mere act of will. This is of course completely different from what human beings do – in us, decision and actualisation of a plan are two completely distinct events. In fact, there is an even further difference, Wolff says. Human beings usually start by contemplating all the possibilities and only after careful consideration make their choice. With God, these two events are connected in one act – God chooses even in contemplating possibilities.

Now, when God chose to actualise this world, he knew exactly what would happen in this world, because he knows everything that would happen in any possible world. This appears to lead to the famous problem of divine prescience – how could our choices be completely free, if God already knows what we are going to choose beforehand. The answer to this problem is also quite traditional – knowing something does not cause it, thus, even if God knows what Obama will do tomorrow, he did not choose it for Obama's sake. Of course, this line of reasoning has the striking weakness that God does choose the world that is to be actualised and seems so responsible of everything that happens in the world.

What is more important is that God must have had some reason for picking this particular world – as we know already, Wolff thinks it is because the actual world is the most perfect of all worlds. The Leibnizian story of a necessary evil which all worlds must have and which God doesn't cause, but only allows should be familiar by now. Wolff also emphasises God's wisdom and goodness. God is wise or he knows the best means for actualising his ends, thus, the world and its laws are the most efficient there can be and allow, for instance, human beings to actualise their ends. Indeed, God has given humans liberty, because he is good and hopes they will of their own choice make good decisions – and even if they don't and end up doing evil things, in the end, even this serves the final good.

God's wisdom is then for the most part incomprehensible to human beings – we simply cannot see all the strings that should turn evil actions into good effects. Yet, God can reveal us information that goes over what we can directly know through experience – Wolff's take on the idea of divine revelation. This is also a good place to stop, because in next post I will finally think of the ways God effects other things, that is, nature and spirits.

Such a perfect world

Wolff has attached every entity with an essence, which, as it were, contains the kernel of a thing or its central characteristics, from which all features of the thing, or at least their possibility, can be explained. Every thing, whether just possible or actual, has also an essence, or else it wouldn't be a thing. Thus, even world must have such an essence or nature, and the nature of the world (or simply nature) means for Wolff the sum of all principles of mutation inherent in the world, that is, the sum of all active forces in the world.

Now, by natural Wolff simply means something belonging to the nature of any topic. In case of world, natural then means something being or happening in accordance with the forces and laws governing motion. Events that do not happen according to these forces and laws are then supernatural events or miracles. Furthermore, there is an intricate relation between the miracles and laws of motion. Wolff admits that laws of motion are not necessary and that events we would call miraculous are completely possible events of another world. Yet, Wolff goes even further and suggests that miracles can in a sense happen even during the normal course of events – this doesn't imply contradiction, Wolff says, but only the incompleteness of the world we live in. If world is a clockwork, miracle is like a finger entering the works and doing something clock itself wouldn't be able to do. Miracle changes the world, and to do that, it must have adjusted the inner workings of the elements of the world, because elements can exist only in a single world. In order that the world would remain the same world, another miracle will have to follow that changes everything back to how it was.

Laws of motion then define the nature of the world, but they also contribute to its perfection. Perfection in general Wolff defined in his ontology as arising from the unification of a multiplicity under some rules. In case of world, this unification must take the form of a spatio-temporal whole, and the rules governing it are clearly the laws of motion. Thus, when we become aware of the laws governing physical world or the order of nature, we are not just becoming more informed, but also able to appreciate the perfection of the world. Due to the incompleteness of human cognitive capacities, Wolff thinks we can never know the perfection of the world completely – a clever way for Wolff to avoid the possible objection that world does not appear perfect.

Before I completely move away from Wolff's cosmology, I would like to point out how misleading is the Kantian account of what cosmology is about when it comes to Wolff. As it is well known, Kant uses especially his idea of antinomies to undermine the traditional cosmology – reason faces insurmountable dilemmas in its most important questions. Now, ironically the four problems Kant mentions are not treated by Wolff in his cosmology. Problems about human freedom and possible creation of the world are respectively psychological and theological for Wolff, and the questions of the spatiotemporal limits of world and of the divisibility of matter are never comprehensively discussed by Wolff, as far as I can see.

Next time we'll turn to Wolff's empirical psychology.

Christian Wolff: Remarks on Reasonable thoughts on God, the world and the human soul, also on all things in general - Fragments of cosmology, rational psychology and natural theology

It has become evident that Wolff clearly wants to distance himself from the image of a radical atheist and Spinozist. This is even more evident, if we take into consideration his comments on cosmology, which he straightforwardly defines as a discipline required especially for the proof of God's existence. Indeed, it is the contingency of the world and its dependence on God that Wolff especially wants to emphasize in his comments – thus, he once again uses considerable efforts to state the difference between absolute and hypothetical necessity, which his opponents had muddled.

Wolff also clarifies the notion that things are infinitely dependent on other things, which I also noted to be somewhat confusing statement and which the pietists read as a commitment to the eternity of the world. Wolff notes that he is merely stating what the worldly things would have to be like, if only natural explanations or causation according to natural laws would be allowed. In other words, there couldn't have been a natural beginning of the world, because every natural law requires a previous state from which the current state arose.

Such an impossibility does not of course rule out a supernatural beginning or a beginning that did not happen according to natural laws. Indeed, Wolff is convinced that the principle of sufficient ground must then lead us to accept such a supernatural beginning – infinite series of causes just isn't a possibility. Wolff is here underlining the contingency of natural laws: they are necessary only within the world, but not from a more extensive perspective.

Furthermore, Wolff even makes it clear that in a sense natural laws are not necessary even within the world, that is, if God is taken into account. Wolff states that God need not follow laws of nature, but if he so desires, he can make worldly things behave in a manner they usually wouldn't. Of course, Wolff is quick to point out that God doesn't do such miracles, unless there is a good reason, but it is evident that he wants to make God's freedom stand more out.

Interestingly, Wolff appears to take the principle of the identity of indiscernibles as a mere natural law. Indeed, he does consider it a real possibility that God could have created two completely equal things, although he just has had no reason to do it. We can see Wolff distancing himself here from Leibniz, who apparently suggested that the identity of indiscernibles might somehow be based on the principle of sufficient reason.

Even clearer is Wolff's struggle against becoming identified a a mere Leibnizian in his behaviour towards monadology. Wolff does want to present the theory of monads in as plausible manner as possible, but he emphasizes forcefully that he himself does not believe in it. Main reasons for his disbelief are physical. Wolff is unconvinced that all the richness of phenomena could be reduced to elements that all share the same force of representation. True, one could on basis of this power understand why elements or monads can form larger totalities, such a material objects, but the further characteristic of material objects that resist the intrusion of other material objects into the same place is something Wolff cannot understand as derived from force of representation.

Still further clue of Wolff's growing disenchanment of Leibniz is provided by Wolff's clarification of the status of pre-established harmony as a mere hypothesis, but this is something we have already dealt with. In addition, Wolff seems keen to downplay the importance of whole rational psychology: if one just knows e.g. that movements of soul and body somehow correspond with one another, nothing more is required, if one does not have a scientific bent for discovering grounds for everything.

The urge to distinguish himself from Leibnizian thought is probably a symptom of Wolff's need to answer the accusations of atheism and fatalism, which becomes even more evident in the rest of Wolff's book. Thus, Wolff spends considerable number of pages in explaining that while one can derive all properties of souls from its representative capacities and all properties of God from his capacity to view all possible worlds at once, this does not mean that the nature of soul and God would be mere theoretical or passive regard of actual and possible worlds, but that both soul and God are active. And just like Wolff decided to defend the freedom of the soul, equally certain is his tendency to defend the divine liberty – even if the act of creating this world is the most reasonable and God as eminently good and wise will then inevitably choose to create it, this still doesn't mean that God couldn't have chosen completely different world to create.

Thus end Wolff's remarks on his metaphysics, which set his scheduled publication back a year – it was only the next year that Wolff could finally publish his account of biology, to which I shall turn next time.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on God, world, and human soul, furthermore, of all things in general - World as a clockwork

You might think that after a chapter on empirical psychology Wolff would turn into rational psychology, that is, that he would explain what has been observed of human consciousness. Yet, a chapter on cosmology or the study of world intervenes with the pretext that knowing the essence of human soul requires knowing the essence of the world.

The basic structure of the world Wolff discovers through observation: world is a series of variable things that exist side by side one another (i.e. in space) and one after another (i.e. in time) and generally are connected to one another in the sense that anyone of the things contains a reason why the others near it in space and time are situated as they are. World is then a complex thing, that is, a thing consisting of things that are parts of the world.

The notion of a complex thing is familiar already from Wolffian ontology, and indeed, most of what Wolff finds characteristic of the world is a simple application of previous ontological results. Thus, world as a complex is defined by being a certain combination of its parts, like a structure built out of Lego blocks. Yet, the temporality of the world ensures that it is not a mere static structure, but processual, and indeed, its later states are based on nothing else but its previous states. The world is then like a machine – and Wolff specifically compares it to a clockwork, where the position of the hand is determined by its earlier positions and by the movement of the machinery.

World is then for Wolff deterministic and all events in the world are certain, if the previous events are known. Yet, this does not mean that the events would be necessary: they could have happened otherwise. Analogically, there is not just one possible way to make a clock, but the parts could have been assembled differently. True, we don't see any alternative worlds lying around, like we do see clocks of various sorts, but we can read alternative world histories in works of fiction. Wolff is here applying the idea of possible worlds, which he has probably picked from Leibniz.

The assumption of possible worlds creates doubles of the modalities of necessity and possibility. Firstly, we could speak of absolute possibility and necessity, that is, of what is possible or necessary in all possible worlds. Secondly, we could speak of possibility and necessity within one possible world: what is possible in this sense is something that has happened, happens or will happen in this particular world. What is specifically impossible in one possible world are the events of all the other possible worlds. The possible worlds contradict then one another: only one of them can be actual, no matter what David Lewis says.

As any philosophy student should know, the idea of possible worlds was important for Leibniz as a component in the justification of the perfection of the actual world: God knew all the possible worlds and as a wise and good person chose the best possible world to be actualised. We are still at a chapter on cosmology and God will be investigated only later on. Still, Wolff prepares the issue by characterising the notion of the perfection of a world.

Wolff begins by noting that all complex things and thus all worlds have some sort of regularity and are therefore valuable: remember that in the chapter on ontology Wolff had defined perfection through regularity. Yet, worlds are not all of same value, Wolff adds: some are more regular than others. By regularity Wolff does not mean a mere uniformity, which by itself would not mean perfection. Instead, diversity is also an essential component in perfection. In other words, the value of the world is to be decided by the question what sort of laws it has: a good world follows a number of laws, all of which form a rational hierarchy. Note that Wolff does not intend that we could deduce what these laws could be. Instead, one finds the particular laws through abstraction from the actual phenomena and more general laws through abstraction from more general laws. In this manner Wolff justifies the general law that nature makes no leaps.

The possible worlds are nowadays treated as a legitimate way to explain e.g. modal properties of sentences. Yet, Wolff's manner of suggesting a scheme for the perfection of the world is rather unbelievable, because there are a number of possible scales for measuring the perfection of anything. The problem can be better grasped through the analogy of clockworks.

There are rather different types of clocks and watches, although the main principle and purpose is the same for all of them. Now, while one clock might beat the others by being more realiable and always on time – say, some atomic clock – another clock might be cheaper, although not as precise as a time keeper. Then again, a fancy pocket watch might not be cheap nor reliable, at least if its owner forgets to wind it, but it still is ecological, requiring no batteries, and probably the most sylish of the three examples. It would be rather difficult – if not downright impossible – to say which of the three clocks is the most perfect: all of them are good in some respect and bad in other respects.

It appears reasonable to suppose that the perfection of possible worlds would be similarly and most likely even more multidimensional: that is, there would be no single criteria for deciding the perfection of the world, but several. Hence, although one world might perfect according to one criterion, another world could well be perfect according to another criterion. How should one then choose between them?

True, the Leibnizian-Wolffian God might have some clever mathematical formula that would take into account all the different aspects of perfection and hence be a perfect criteria for deciding between several possible worlds. The problem with this solution is that one should still demonstrate that this clever formula could not give the same value to two different possible worlds: otherwise, the possibility of two equally good worlds would still remain. We shall see later if Wolff has any argument to support this claim.

So much for macrocosm, next time we shall visit the opposite context or the microcosm.

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.