In the post-Kantian
era of philosophy we are familiar with term ”transcendental”
having something to do with the necessary presuppositions of
knowledge and cognition. Yet, before Kant, transcendental described
features that transcendend all differences between things, that is, that
could be predicated of every existing thing or even of every possible
thing. In a way, transcendental was just a synonym for ontological.
A list of such
transcendental features or predicates was a traditional sight in
works of metaphysics, although what to include in such a list might
slightly differ from writer to writer. Still, if something could be
found in all of them, it would be unity. Even Aristotle had
maintained that ”being” and ”one” are almost synonymous,
since all existent things are unities. Even Wolff had briefly
followed the tradition and Baumgarten goes even so far as to dedicate
a section of his metaphysics to the notion of unity.
Of course, one might
have different notions of what being a unity means. Baumgarten
approaches the term from the familiar notion of determinations – it
is combinations of determinations that are somehow unified. More
precisely, we might have either separable or inseparable sets of
determinations, and unities are formed of inseparable sets. All
essences, then, form such unities, because the essential properties
of a thing cannot be separated without destroying the very thing.
Because all possible things have an essence they are in this sense
transcendental unities.
If unities concern
things, order concerns conjunction of things, that is, many things
grouped together. Conjunction itself might not be ordered, Baumgarten
says, and this seems evident, since we don't usually say that hay stack is in order, although it does consist of many hays in conjunction. Order
requires that something remains same in the things in the
conjunction, and this same element can then be expressed in
propositional form as a law.
A peculiar type of
order lies in what Baumgarten calls transcendental truth, which is
something altogether different from what we might call truth. For
Baumgarten, transcendental truth is the ordering of some plurality
into a unity. Truth in this sense requires then some principles
according to which this plurality is unified. In other words,
transcendental truth refers to a sort of stability holding things and
their groupings together, while dreams should lack such truth, Now,
since every possible things combines various properties according to
general ontological principles, every thing must have transcendental
truth, that is, it must be stable and not collapse into a heap of
determinations.
While all orders do
not combine things into unities, they might still in a sense connect
things, for instance, by making them follow same laws and rules. Such
a conjunction of many things is the essence of perfection, Baumgarten
says, and whatever causes such a perfection is then good. While this
might appear rather strange definition of goodness, we might justify
it by noting that is quite aesthetic notion of goodness that is meant
here. Just like in case of truth and unity, Baumgarten then defines
transcendental perfection and goodness – since essence rules
attributes of things, a thing is always in some measure perfect and
good.
This concludes
Baumgarten's tale of properties of all things whatsoever. Next, we
shall see what he has to say about basic disjunctions or
classifications of entities.
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