Philosophical pedantry – or, the nest of misunderstanding

Human communication is often wrought with difficulty, but in case of two philosophers from different schools the failure to understand is often quite fundamental – it is no wonder that philosophers have a hard time in explaining how communication can work, when they can't get it work for themselves. Often this lack of understanding is caused by nothing else, but different theoretical presuppositions, and in worst cases, merely by one using words in a different sense than the other. Usually a third person sees instantly where the crux of the miscommunication lies, but to the opponents this is like a blind spot – indeed, they are even unwilling to consider that the reason for argument might be just verbal and pedantically remain steadfast in their own way of speaking.

This philosophical pedantry is an important topic for a historian of philosophy, because the history of philosophy is full of bickering caused by verbal issues. Before the historian decides whether one philosophers was more correct than another in some question, he must determine whether the two were even discussing the same problematic. For instance, Kant and Hegel appear to have a different view on the relationship between thought and being. Yet, it might well be that both philosophers mean something different by thinking and being – and if one proved this, he would have defused one point of contention between the so-called Kantians and self-ascribed Hegelians.

The philosophical misunderstanding is more certain, when the words used are misleadingly familiar. Probably no one has any preconceptions as to what a conversational implicature is, but the more mundane concept of idealism has been defined in various manners – Plato was an idealist, because he spoke of ”ideas”, Leibniz was an idealist, because he thought everything perceives, Kant was an idealist, because on his opinion we do not experience things in themselves and Hegel was an idealist, because all philosophers are idealists, which in Hegelian parlance includes anyone who tries to explain everything from one principle (even a materialist).

Even the apparently non-philosophical terms contain hidden ambiguities. When a person familiar with modern analytic philosophy hears Hegel saying ”Truth is whole”, he instantly thinks that Hegel is suggesting an alternative to the traditional correspondence theory of truth – probably some coherentist theory. But a closer look reveals that when Hegel speaks of truth (Wahrheit) he is speaking of things like ”true friend”. ”Truth” means for Hegel something close to ”good”. So, the Hegelian phrase is not meant to describe what makes a belief or a statement true, but to note that wholes are in some sense better or more important than mere parts.

A common way of defending one's pedantry is to shout out loud ”this is not the way to use that concept!” Of course, to a person acquainted with the modern theories of truth Hegelian terminology appears strange. But this analytic philosopher ignores such religious claims as ”God is truth”, which do not say anything about our beliefs and statements. Indeed, it is often impossible to determine what is the right way to use a word – and then we get such non-sensical arguments as Leibniz and Clarke's discussion how to define the word ”sensorium”.

How then to avoid such pedantry? If you are faced with a pedant and want to avoid the nuisance altogether – just accept the terms he uses. You want to use this word instead of that, allright, anything goes for me. So you define idealism like this? OK, Hegel wasn't an idealist then.

If you yourself don't want to become a pedant, a good antidote is to introduce oneself to as many philosophers and philosophical schools as possible. One is definitely not enough and not even two: you might learn to translate phenomenological lingo to Hegelese and back, but you still may have a blind spot for medievals. Of course, it is not possible to familiarise oneself with all the possible philosophers, but at least you will learn to suspend your judgement, when a new philosophical figure comes up with some seemingly ridiculous statements.

How is one then to engage in a dialogue with an unfamiliar philosophical terminology? Defining one's concepts is a necessary first step, but not the complete solution, because all definitions stop at some ultimate point. After that, the best bet are concrete examples explicating how concepts are to be used – one might have difficulty explaining what truth means, but hearing someone using truth of sentences and another speaking of true friends would teach us much about the variety of ways to use the word.

Georg Bernhard Bilfinger: The three types of cognition – historical, philosophical and mathematical – articulated (1722)

Although my blog has been dedicated to the task of expounding the story of classic German philosophy in general, the field has been thus far ruled by Christian Wolff, with the exception of few pietists, who will become fierce enemies of Wolff. It is time to introduce a new minor figure, this time from the Wolffian side of the game: Georg Bernhard Bilfinger with his dissertation De triplicium rerum cognitione, historica, philosophica et mathematica, articulos.

I called Bilfinger a minor figure, and judging by his influence, he truly is such. The main point of importance in Bilfinger's career is that he introduced Germans to Chinese philosophy and especially to Confucianism – even in the dissertation he mentions these themes in passing.

We have already have the opportunity to familiarise ourselves with the dissertations of the time when we looked at Wolff's first publication, which combined elementary mathematics with rather strong philosophical conclusions without any clear connecting link. Bilfinger's dissertation is rather less ambitious and is mostly a discussion of the ideas of Wolff and his teacher Tschirnhaus.

The main purpose of Bilfinger's thesis is to classify and define different types of cognition or science. Bilfinger starts by determining various meanings of the term philosophy by comparing it with mathematics (well, actually he just follows his two predecessors, as he does in the whole book). When you learn mathematics, you might learn various definitions of mathematical objects. Similarly, philosophy if often restricted to mere verbal bickering, where the fight is all about the meaning of words. This is the lowest type of philosophy: although it is important to make one's meaning clear, it is not worth to start arguing for the meaning of a word.

Secondly, we could be taught who was the person who discovered some important theorems. This corresponds with merely historical study of philosophers, philosophical schools and their opinions. Beyond the verbal explanation of mathematical and philosophical terms and the historical description of mathematics and philosophers, there's still the real mathematics, and corresponding to it, real philosophy. What do these consist then?

To answer this question, Bilfinger presents another division, this time between different moments of cognition. Cognition should begin with a historical phase, where history has the traditional sense: we observe and experiment. The results of this historical phase are then to be used by philosophy as a material for discovering the first principles of cognition. These principles are then to be used finally in mathematics for deriving new truths.

The three types of cognition, historical, philosophical and mathematical, form then a sequence based on experience, but ending with a system of knowledge founded on indubitable experiences: note the balance between empiricism and rationalism that Wolff had already endorsed. If the sequence would form a cycle, we would be very close to the later hypothetico-deductive account of science, where theories are tested against observations.Yet, Bilfinger imagines that the creation of theories involves more than mere guess work, and indeed, is what real philosophy is all about.

It seems amazing, but this is the whole content of Bilfinger's dissertation: two divisions borrowed from other philosophers. Next time, we shall return to Wolff and to another set of reasonable thoughts.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts of human acting and letting others act upon you - Do your duties

No modern system of ethics would be complete without a discussion of duties. Indeed, following Kant, we would probably think that duty is what ethics is all about – after all, ethics should tell what you ought to do. At first sight Wolff's discussion of duty seems quite in line with this Kantian idea. Wolff defines duty as something that one is bound to do by some law. In ethics, the law in question is the natural law.

On a closer look, Wolff's idea differs from Kant's later theory. As the reader might remember, for Wolff, natural law commands us to do those things that any conscious person would do, if she had perfectly clear and distinct concept of what is going on. Thus, duty is not just something we ought to do, but also something that we would do, if we had correct information. Furthermore, the motivating factor for this ideal person would be the purpose of perfecting everything. Wolffian duty has then a goal external to the duty itself.

For Wolff, ”you ought to do it” can then be translated by ”you would do it, if you just understood how good it is for you”. The problem in this identification is that it sometimes appears to lead to unintuitive results. Consider for instance the choice of using your money to buy new shoes and of giving it to the beggar on the street. If a perfectly rational person would be motivated to choose former over latter, that choice would be a duty in the Wolffian sense, although the opposite choice would appear to be more virtuous. Of course, it all comes down to whether Wolff thinks a perfectly rational person would make this choice. The answer requires a look at the detailed system of duties Wolff presents.

Wolff divides all duties into three classes: duties towards oneself, duties towards God and duties towards other people. I recall that the division precedes Wolff's ethics and goes probably all the way to medieval philosophy. Remnants of the division can be found still in Kant's ethics, which differentiates between duties towards oneself and duties towards orher people. Indeed, even in Wolff duties towards God play a minor role compared with other two sorts.

Duties towards God appear to cause some problems for Wolff, because an omnipotent being should not need the help of his creations for anything. Still, Wolff could not exclude God altogether, because that would have probably been considered a blasphemy. Wolff then suggests that God and his perfections can still motivate us to do virtuous things and that these divinely motivated duties might be called duties towards God. Problem is that then all duties would be also duties towards God, as long as the motivation for them would lie in God.

Wolff's way for solving the problem begins from the assumption that a perfectly rational person would in all likelihood know about God. His knowledge of God would then necessarily induce some feelings: he would love God for all his work for human beings, he would fear making God disappointed etc. Wolff suggests that we would then have a duty for pursuing those affections, which we could call a duty towards God – somewhat strange notion as such affections appear to be involuntary and not dependent on our will. In addition to these affections – well you can always say a few prayers and thus show your faith in the wisdom and omnipotence of God.

With the divinely inspired duties taken care of with few words of devotion, the Wolffian moral agent still has to tackle with duties toward himself and other persons. Personally, I've always found the class of duties toward oneself rather peculiar. This is probably because I have never understood how self-perfection could be taken as an end in itself. Surely it is moral to develop your skills for helping others, but it seems peculiar that mere developing skills in itself would be morally upright. Hegel had the intruiguing notion that perfecting your skills only for the sake of perfection is somewhat like sharpening your sword just for the sake of admiring it: it undoubtedly looks prettier, but isn't it a bit useless?

Wolff's ideas of duties towards oneself contain the further problem that they don't clash well with his ideas of the relationship between soul and body. Wolffian duties towards soul are rather straightforward. One should strengthen one's will through ethical reasoning and fables and one's reason through reading works of Wolff. (By the way, Wolff pronounces the publication of text books as his moral duty. No doubt the profits he gained from them must have been God's way of thanking Wolff for his dutyful life.).

It is the duties towards body that appear more problematic. As one might remember, body is in Wolffian scheme just a physical thing that is constantly in contact with the soul, which is the true personality of human being. Still, Wolff can earnestly say that soul must take care of its body, although body is not even itself conscious of anything. True, the fates of the body and the soul are connected and the soul feels everything that happens to the body, so that the soul would be in pain, if something bad happened to its body. Yet, this connection is only temporary and one might think it could be broken, if the body became too ill – but no, Wolff denies the right of suicide, apparently for no other reason but that the soul must show its dedicated perseverance by making the body to live as long as it can. Somewhat inconsistently, the soul must bear through all the hardships the body goes through, but the soul must still see to it that the body gets what it needs, i.e. that it is fed and clothed.

Although Wolff admits that eating well and clothing yourself warmly are moral duties, thus proving that your parents were right, he is fortunately not as interested of external glory. Glory and honour depend on what other people think of you and it is enough if you act as if you were worthy of glory, no matter what others think of you. Then again, dishonourable life deserves to be ridiculed. Indeed, Wolff makes the historically interesting remark that disease is usually no reason for shame, but if your nose drops due to illicit sexual behavior, that's your own fault (the slow detoriation of the nasal tissue is one possible symptom of syphilis disease, but Wolff's remark appears to be pointed at ”fornication with pictures of women” or masturbation, which was at that time suspected as one possible cause for the symptoms of syphilis).

One might expect that the apparent self-centredness of Wolff's morality would be mitigated when he comes to duties towards other people. Wolff even starts in a promising tone by declaring that one should do to others exactly what one ought to do for oneself. Yet, there is a twist. Apparently the highest point of perfection is independence, which makes a sort of sense in the Wolffian world view, where every soul already is a closed totality with not true connection with the external world: a soul perfects itself, when it appears to be what it truly is, that is, independent of anything else. Now, helping others in their need would constitute a breach of their independency and would thus take away from their perfection. Hence, Wolff advises that one should help others only when what they require is beyond their own skills and powers. Most of the duties towards others are then merely negative: one should not e.g. cheat others.

If we then come back to our original problem of a person wondering whether he should spend his money to new shoes or whether he should give it to a beggar, Wolff would in most likelihood suggest that we should somehow calculate whether helping the beggar is really worth more than new shoes. Yet, the requirement for independence would in most cases make the scales turn in favour of the shoes. This sounds dangerously close to a person who would not give anything to charity, because the poor are just too lazy to make themselves rich.

To be fair, Wolff is describing morality without any connection to a society or a commonwealth. It will be the task of Wolff's political works to describe societies in more detail, and we shall later see whether Wolff can find a place for solidarity and team spirit. But first, a slight detour to a student of Wolff.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts of human acting and letting others act upon you - What's on your mind?

If you have always wondered how to find out what other people have in mind, Wolff instructs how to do it. One might wonder what this has to do with the topic of Wolff's German ethics. Well, in order to do good things, you must learn what is good and what is not – and one way to do this is to see what others think is good.

Wolff's method is rather simple. Suppose a person perceives or otherwise experiences some situation and in her imagination and memory she has a maxim telling whether such a situation is good or bad and what one should do in that sort of situation. Then through a simple syllogism we see that the person will evaluate the situation and act in a certain manner. So, if a person sees a beggar and her maxim is to donate to the poor, she will give an alm.

Then again, we can also reverse the process. In other words, if we know the particular experiences a person has and the actions following from these experiences, we can instantly know what general maxims she follows in her actions. Thus, if we see a person giving a fiver to a beggar he has just seen, we can suppose that the person has a general maxim of helping the poor.

Of course, it is not as simple as that, because people can act contrary to their maxims, if they feel the need to deceive other people. For instance, the person giving the alms in the last paragraph might only want to make an impression to a lady who truly likes charity. Generally, the possibility of deception prevents us to be truly certain of what is going on in other people's minds.

Wolff suggests a method for circumventing the possibility of deception. Although one's actions can be deceiving, emotions cannot be – that is, if a person thinks some situation to be good or bad, we can assume that she will generally evaluate similar situations in the same manner. Hence, the person trying to fool a lady with a generous gift to the beggar would be instantly revealed by his emotion that he disliked his act of charity.

Maxims could thus be read from emotions, but how can emotions of a person be deciphered? Now, as we might remember from Wolffian psychology, Wolff's and Leibniz's dualism with a pre-estabished harmony verges on materialism. Indeed, because of the harmony, one can at least in principle find out what emotion a soul is feeling, when one is studying the corresponding body. Indeed, we do evaluate the emotions of people by looking at the expressions of their faces and other non-verbal forms of communication. But Wolff goes a step further and appears to accept the validity of physiognomy.

Physiognomy is a discipline of great antiquity: there is a book called Physiognomy, which was ascribed to Aristotle, although the author was probably just a member of the Aristotelian school. The basic idea behind this discipline is rather simple – by studying the physical characteristics of a person we could determine also his mental characteristics. Classic physiognomy appealed, for instance, to resemblance with other animals – if he looks like a pig, he is probably going to behave like a pig.

Physiognomy was criticised even during Wolff's life and is nowadays dead as a dodo when it comes to respectable science, but similar statements can be found in more modern disciplines. For instance, genetic determinists are certain that the personality of a person is completely encoded in her DNA. Thus, Wolff's readiness to accept physiognomy implies that he might not be completely against these later theories – genetics would not then be in contradiction with Wolffian dualism.

Yet, Wolff did not accept even physiognomy wholly, because of a point familiar from the genes-environment -discussion: while physiognomy might be correct of human beings in their natural state, education can change the temperament of a person. Ironically, Wolff has more difficulties in combining the possibility of educating a person with his view of the human soul: because human soul is actually closed up from external influences, it cannot really be educated, that is, other people only seem to educate the person, who then develops freely from his natural state.

Nevertheless, Wolff admits that physiognomy is not a reliable method for deciphering people's emotions, and thus the hopes of reading other people's minds have been destroyed. This appears to be a common theme in Wolff's philosophy: he sets out an ideal of knowledge and even develops a method for acheiving it – but in the end, human frailties hinder the use of the method.

Next time, we shall look at the duties of a moral person.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts of human acting and letting others act upon you - Finding the greatest good

In Kantian ethics greatest good is only something that people could hope for: moral actions certainly wouldn't guarantee that one would find greatest good, although they would undoubtedly make one deserve it. In the days of pre-Kantian innocence, one could still believe that the connection between good actions and greatest goodness could be positively proven. Indeed, we have seen that Wolff simply states moral actions to aim at nothing else but the growth of the perfection in oneself and in others. The perfection itself is best one could hope for, but just as a further incentive, God is willing to make anyone happy who wants to act in a moral manner.

Doing the right thing becomes then a mere question of mental calculation: in each situation, you should determine the best possible outcome you could hope for and the most suitable means for acheiving the outcome – and then you already have incentive enough for doing the thing. The final goal should then be organizing all the actions so that they are geared towards the perfection of oneself and others.

The idea of people actually solving all their problems through an ethical calculus sounds quite fabulous. Indeed, Wolff himself admits that actual moral problems are usually too detailed for any humanly calculus. Instead, the ideal of ethical calculus should be applied only to the problem of discovering general principles of action. Thus, an investigator of ethics should try to discover which actions in general work for the human perfection and which hinder its progress. A prudent person would then just follow these general principles, even if they did not hold perfectly in any particular case, because he would understand their reliability.

Still, one might still be uncertain how Wolff would account for the cases where a person acts against such principles due to sensuous influences and desires. Wolff's strategy is to rely on his theory of sensations as a source of confused information. Conflict between ethical reasoning and sensuous desires becomes thus a conflict between two kinds of information: clear and distinct vs. dark and indistinct. A person could in theory free herself from the slavery of sensuous infuences through a perfect clarification and analysis of her consciousness. In practice, this is impossible for human beings, thus they must pit sensuous influences against one another.

Wolff ponders also the possibility of using sensuousness as a general instrument for advocating morality in society at large by representing difficult ethical thoughts through symbolism and ceremonies. Wolff has probably in his mind at least the sacraments of church, but when he discusses how one could invent as rational symbols and ceremonies as possible, Wolff's ideas start to resemble Adam Weishaupt's later society of Illuminati and the more traditional freemasonry. One might wonder if Wolff himself was part of some masonic lodge.

Next time we shall learn how to read other people's minds.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts of human acting and letting others act upon you - Following your conscience

The word ”conscience”, derived from Latin conscientia, has a long history, beginning perhaps from Latin translations of Bible. The German equivalent Gewissen was fixed for the precise purpose by Luther's translation of the Bible. Conscience began thus its course as an essentially religious term – bad conscience was that nagging awareness within you that you had sinned and thus deserved some punishment.

Conscience was thus a type of knowledge, as the original Latin and the German translation imply – namely, it was a knowledge of the morality of one's own actions. In its original conception, conscience was a voice sent by God, while in the post-Kantian German philosophy it became a a direct certainty over all moral questions – an idea that Hegel was quick to criticize.

Wolff accepts the idea of conscience as the source of ethico-moral knowledge from the tradition – Gewissen is the capacity to estimate the worth of actions, which have either already taken place or which have only been planned. Indeed, one and the same action could be evalued even both when planned and after its actual occurrence, and the judgement need not be same in the two cases: we may regret our decisions later.

In Wolff conscience is then identified with moral judgements and not with moral feelings. True, he admits, conscience may cause a number of feelings – we might, for instance, feel pangs for some evil action or be proud of morally upright choices. Yet, these feelings are mere effects of conscience, but not conscience itself – they are mere tools which conscience uses in order to promote good actions.

Furthermore, Wolff would deny that the source of the judgements of the conscience is some mystical faculty for immediate moral knowledge. Instead, moral judgements are properly based on knowledge of the characteristics of things and their connections – that is, on reason, by which Wolff refers to the faculty used in sciences in general. Wolff is thus assimilating the account of conscience into the general account of scientific reasoning, in opposition to many former and later theories of conscience.

Undoubtedly Wolff does not assume that people would go on making explicit mental calculations over the worth of their possible and actual actions. Instead, they will often just e.g. implicitly apply some ethical principle to a particular case. Still, Wolff is convinced that animals are incapable of even such implicit reasoning and are therefore without conscience.

In addition, one should remember that Wolffian reasoning is not the reasoning of the caricature rationalists. True, Wolff would undoubtedly accept some of his ethical principles as conceptual truths – his definition of perfection would probably be a good example. Still, Wolff does accept also reliable experiences as a basis of proper reasoning – in philosophy in general, and also in ethics in particular.

Finally, Wolff does accept also the possibility of faults in ethical reasoning. Sometimes we don't know the proper information to decide the issue, at other times we may be confused by sensuous information and in yet other cases our conscience might be deceived by our desires. In other words, erroneous conscience is a possibility.

Next time something about how to find the highest possible good.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts of human acting and letting others act upon you (1720)

After showing his skill in metaphysics, Wolff moved on to publish a book called Vernünftige Gedancken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen. Considering that the new work was of the same length as the previous, I assume that Wolff must have worked with the two texts side by side.

The topic of the new book is Menschen Thun und Lassen, where Thun straightforwardly means doing something. The word Lassen is a bit more difficult to translate, but it is a counterpart of Thun and refers probably to someone being an object of an action. The issue of the book is then what human beings should do and what allow others to do to them – that is, it is a work of ethics we are dealing with.

Nowadays no book on ethics woud dare to ignore Hume's guillotine, but Wolff's work has grown in a more primeval climate, where no one had had the audacity to suppose that the is and the ought should be somehow separated. Thus, Wolff is not afraid to base ethics straightforwardly on metaphysics. Wolff had actually used normative notions like perfection already in his ontology. That is, according to Wolff, there are values which are independent of all actual inclinations of any subject, even God.

Characteristically Wolff adds that these values are not just embedded in the ontological structure of all there is, but they also determine the action of human beings – we all do what is good and avoid doing what is evil, provided we know clearly what is good and what is evil. The statement seems not so radical, if we remember that human beings are for Wolff always impure knowers, who must base everything on confused experiences.

Because true goodness lies in Wolff's opinion in perfection, he suggests as the primary principle of ethics ”make yourself and others more perfect”. One might wonder how Wolff makes the leap from the definition of goodness and the fact of human motivation to a commandment. Yet, Wolff has actually made such leaps even in mathematics – in postulates and problems Wolff has turned statements of the sort ”if A is done, B is the result” into rules of the sort ”if you want to make B happen, do A”.

True, Wolff's primary ethical principle appears to lack the condition inherent in the postulates and the problems. Yet, this condition is actually implicit in the fact of human motivation for good: because all people try to achieve goodness, they should perfect themselves and others. Wolffian ethical principle is then what Kant would later call a hypothetical imperative.

What appears more perplexing is why the perfection of other peoples should matter – surely desire for goodness would imply a motivation for only one's own perfection? But we must remember that for Wolff pleasure arises from mere inscpection of something perfect. Hence, the more the perfection for the world in general is acheived, the more joyful and merry will a rational person be.

This abstract enjoyment of perfection is the only inherent reward for good actions. But because God desires also good actions and the growth of perfection, He will reward the good people with further happiness (Glückseligkeit), Wolff states. Once again, Wolff does not naively think that good people would have all the luck (Glück) in the world – luck is something that varies very much from one context to another. Instead, he means by happiness a more permanent position – an unwavering state of serenity untouched by any external influences.

The story of Wolffian ethics will continue with a text on the capacity of grasping ethical truths.