It's hard to do commentary on another
commentary – you are twice removed from the real meat of the
problematic, and because the commentary itself has no clear
organisation, there usually is no guiding thread to connect the
various points. Thus, after reading the chapter on ontology I was
left with mere crumbs that by themselves would not have the required
length of a blog post. Still, I didn't want to make the
time spend with Wolff's commentary go to waste, so I present some of
these crumbs in a fragmentary fashion.
***
One key point in the atheism dispute
has been the notion of modalities: if Wolff says that events in the
world are hypothetically necessary, doesn't this make his theory
Spinozistic? Wolff's consideration of modalities here reveals his own
belief – Wolff has to define modalities in this manner to avoid
Spinoza's fatalism. That is, Spinoza could say only that possibility
means something that has existed, will exist or does exist, which
would make all possibilities become actual someday. Wolff's
definition of possibility as non-contradictoriness allows the
extension of possibility to be larger than the extension of past,
present and future actuality. Thus, the only truly necessary thing
for Wolff is God, who has no external cause, while other things
require some previous cause for their actualisation. Interestingly,
the tide of philosophy was to go backwards. What is true sense of
possibility and necessity for Wolff, will be disparaged by Kant as a
mere formal notion of modalities, while the mere hypothetical
necessity and possibility in a world of Wolff are raised to the
status of real or ontologically substantial modalities by Kant.
***
Connected with the Wolffian
theory of modalities is his notion of essences, which he clarifies in
his commentary through a helpful simile: if I want to determine what
a triangle is like, I need to only determine its essence, that is,
two of its sides and the angle between them, because the rest of the
triangle is determined through these measures. Unexpectedly, this
very same example occurs in Hegel, when he explains how the sensuous
side of a thing (say, a triangle) contains lot of surplus material
that could be summarized through a lot simpler structure (in
this case, through the three quantities). I suspect that Hegel didn't
bother to read that much Wolff, so the coincidence is even more
surprising.
***
Wolff's nominalism is a
feature I did not emphasize the first time around: he explicitly says
that universals or genera and species are mere summaries for
similarities between things (A and B are both ostriches because they
resemble one another and all the other ostriches . An interesting
question is then how the similarity is to be defined, and in general,
how things are distinguished from one another. Now, in some places
Wolff appears to admit at least the possibility or conceivability
that two spatially separated individuals of the same species might be
identical in every other respect, thus going against Leibnizian
principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Then again, Wolff also
subscribes to the definition of individuals as fully determinate in
comparison to incompletely determined universals – we noted in case
of Thümmig that this definition appears to naturally lead to the Leibnizian
principle, because two distinct individuals couldn't on account of
this definition be completely similar, because they would then belong
to a genus defined by all their characteristics – contradiction,
because this genus would then be a completely determinate universal.
One possible solution might be that the complete determination of
individuals would not consist of mere qualities, but also of
quantitative and spatial determinations. Indeed, Wolff says
ambiguously that individuals are determined by what we can perceive
in them, which might include also their position in space.
***
Next time it's on to
psychology!
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