Recently, there has been new and important scholarship on the history of German philosophy between Leibniz and Kant. Eric Watkins, Corey Dyck, Nicholas Stang and R. Lanier Anderson are among those who have written about this period and its importance for our understanding of Kant, and the eleven essays in Baumgarten and Kant on Metaphysics add to this growing body of scholarship. Baumgarten lived from 1714 to 1762 and was a rationalist in the tradition of Leibniz and Wolff. Today he is primarily remembered for two reasons: he coined the term ‘aesthetics’ and he was the author of the metaphysics textbook that Kant assigned in his lectures on metaphysics and on anthropology. In 2013, Courtney Fugate and John Hymers published the first complete English translation of Alexander Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, and Fugate and Hymers have followed up their translation with a collection of essays about Baumgarten’s metaphysics and its influence on Kant.
Some of the best essays in the collection explore the connection between Baumgarten and Pietism. The conflict between Wolff and his theological opponents, who drove him into exile, was a seminal event in the history of the German Enlightenment. Pietist philosophers and theologians led this opposition. They accused Wolff and his followers of determinism, naturalism and atheism, which is to say, of Spinozism. In 1723, they successfully lobbied Friedrich Wilhelm I to suppress Wolff’s philosophy. The king banished Wolff from Prussia and banned his books throughout the kingdom. However, exile did little to silence Wolff, and an intense, sometimes vicious, debate followed between the Wolffians and their Pietist critics.
Baumgarten is typically described as a follower of Wolff. However, Brandon Look, in his essay ‘Baumgarten’s Rationalism’, points out some relevant details of Baumgarten’s biography that are often overlooked: Baumgarten came from a Pietist family, he was raised in the famous Pietist Waisenhaus and he studied in Halle, a centre of Pietist thinking. Indeed, he was taught by Wolff’s chief opponent, the theologian Joachim Lange. Moreover, Baumgarten appeared to recant his philosophical beliefs on his deathbed. During his final days, he forbade any mention of philosophy and reaffirmed his faith in Christianity, something that scandalized Moses Mendelssohn. In light of this, Look argues that Baumgarten can be best understood as a ‘rationalist Pietist’. Like Leibniz and Wolff, Baumgarten is committed to the principle of sufficient reason, however, he does not see this as incompatible with religious belief and he works hard in the Metaphysics to distinguish his rationalist philosophy from naturalism and atheism. Look acknowledges that Pietism and Wolffianism were not actually as antithetical as is sometimes assumed. A distinguishing feature of Pietism was its anti-doctrinal nature and there was a fair amount of heterodoxy among the Wolffians as well. What makes Baumgarten’s blending of these two schools of thought noteworthy and interesting is that it made him open to criticisms raised by Wolff’s critics.
This is an idea that Clemens Schwaiger and Corey Dyck develop further in their respective contributions. Schwaiger, in his essay ‘Baumgarten’s Theory of Freedom’, argues that Baumgarten took the Pietist objections about determinism seriously, far more so than Wolff, and that he tried to address them. For example, the Pietists believed that freedom entailed the capacity to arbitrarily choose evil over good, or vice versa. Were this not the case, it might be impossible to resist temptation. This capacity for arbitrary choice is an example of the freedom of indifference that Leibniz and Wolff both explicitly reject. Baumgarten rejects it as well; he denies that choice is possible in a state of equilibrium. Nonetheless, he tries to explain how it is still possible to deliberately choose evil. Schwaiger identifies a number of crucial differences between Wolff and Baumgarten with respect to their accounts of the faculty of desire, the will and freedom, and argues that Baumgarten made these changes in response to criticisms raised by the Pietists. Corey Dyck makes a similar point about Baumgarten’s rational psychology in his contribution ‘Between Wolffianism and Pietism: Baumgarten’s Rational Psychology’. He compares Baumgarten’s account of the soul in part three of the Metaphysics with that of Wolff and argues that some of the differences between them can be explained by Baumgarten’s attempt to address objections raised by the Pietists. Along these lines, he focuses on three main issues: the nature of the soul’s power, the relationship between the soul and the body and the proof for its immortality.
In addition to exploring the influence of Pietism on Baumgarten’s thought, these three essays also show that Baumgarten was more than just a follower of Wolff. They effectively challenge the assessment of Lewis White Beck, who described Baumgarten as a ‘thoroughgoing’ Wolffian and denied that he was a ‘highly original philosopher’ (Beck Reference Beck1996: 283). Indeed, another trio of essays focusing on Baumgarten’s ontology make a convincing case that neither of these statements is true. Angelica Nuzzo, in her ‘Determination, Determinability, and the Structure of Ens’, offers a reading of the opening sections of the Metaphysics. She argues that Baumgarten’s concepts of determination and determinability are innovative and differ in a number of subtle ways from Wolff’s. Kant criticizes Baumgarten for failing to distinguish between the logical determination of concepts and the real determination of things – Baumgarten’s notion of determination is both logical and metaphysical. Although Kant rejects Baumgarten’s position, Nuzzo argues that Baumgarten’s influence extends beyond him. She claims that Baumgarten’s unique conception of determination and determinability can be seen in the debate over Johann Joachim Spalding’s Betrachtung über die Bestimmungen des Menschen, Maimon’s principle of determinability and even Hegel’s Science of Logic.
John Hymers focuses on another foundational concept from Baumgarten’s ontology in ‘Contradiction and Privation: Baumgarten and Kant on the Concept of Nothing’. Like Wolff’s, Baumgarten’s ontology begins with the principle of contradiction. From this axiom, he deduces the principle of excluded middle and the principle of sufficient reason. Yet Hymers claims that Baumgarten formulates the principle of contradiction somewhat differently than Wolff, as Baumgarten identifies it with the concept of nothing: anything that violates this principle, according to him, is nothing. Hymers sees an advantage in formulating the principle of contradiction this way in that it avoids any mention of simultaneity. Baumgarten does not assert, as Wolff does, that something cannot have contradictory predicates at the same time. In his metaphysics lectures, Kant worried that this temporal reference made the principle empirical and, therefore, an unsuitable foundation for metaphysics, yet, oddly enough, it does not appear that Kant recognized Baumgarten’s innovation. Hymers also addresses Kant’s brief discussion of the concept of nothing, which concludes the Amphiboly chapter. Kant claims that ontology should begin with the concept of an object in general, rather than either possibility or impossibility. This concept would stand over and unify both the concepts of the possible and the impossible. Since even this generic concept of an object in general must be conceived in accordance with the categories, Kant distinguishes four different ways to think about its non-being, which correspond with the four classes of categories. Hymers claims that Baumgarten is the implicit target of Kant’s fourfold account of the concept of nothing as Baumgarten’s ontology starts with this concept. Hymers goes on to defend Baumgarten against this criticism by arguing that his concept of nothing cannot be subsumed under the categories, as it represents what is truly inconceivable, and that Kant’s concept of an object in general fails to unite the possible and the impossible.
Courtney Fugate likewise finds reason to distinguish between Baumgarten and Wolff in his discussion of the ontological argument in his essay ‘Baumgarten and Kant on Existence’. Fugate claims that Baumgarten has the strongest version of this argument, one that is strengthened by a crucial distinction that Baumgarten makes between existence and actuality. This distinction is not found in Wolff and it allows him to avoid Kant’s famous objection that existence is not a predicate.
However, not all of the essays in the collection distinguish between Baumgarten and Wolff quite so clearly. A few of them make claims about Baumgarten that are not unique to him and could be equally applied to Wolff. For example, Paul Guyer, in his essay ‘Baumgarten, Kant and the Refutation of Idealism’, argues that Baumgarten influenced Kant’s refutation of idealism in the B-edition of the first Critique. Although Baumgarten rejects idealism in the Metaphysica, Kant does not adopt his argument because it relies on the premise that God has created the best possible world. Instead, Guyer claims that Baumgarten influenced the refutation of idealism in two specific respects: first, he traces Kant’s concept of idealism to Baumgarten and second, he claims that certain aspects of Baumgarten’s monadology inspired Kant’s refutation. Baumgarten defines idealism as the view that the world is composed exclusively of intellectual monads, or spirits, writing that ‘[w]hoever admits only spirits in the world is an idealist’ (Baumgarten Reference Baumgarten2013: 176 [§402]). Yet, Guyer does not acknowledge that Baumgarten’s definition of idealism comes directly from Wolff, who claims that idealists ‘admit only spirits or those things that do not consist of matter’ (Wolff Reference Wolff1983: 3). Guyer also suggests that Baumgarten may have showed Kant that it is possible to posit external objects without attributing spatiality to them. Monads are non-spatial entities that, nonetheless, constitute a spatial order through their external relations and Guyer compares them to the Kantian thing-in-itself, which is inherently non-spatial but appears to us in space. However, there is something odd about identifying this view about monads with Baumgarten, rather than Leibniz, and Kant himself would have associated it primarily with the latter. Guyer writes that Kant adopts ‘both the Baumgartian definition of idealism as the denial that there is anything other than spirits and the Baumgartian strategy of asserting the real existence of objects other than ourselves while not really attributing spatiality to those objects’ (162). It is, however, misleading to describe either the definition or the strategy discussed here as ‘Baumgartian’, as neither of these ideas originated with him. Despite the tenuousness of this connection to Baumgarten, Guyer’s essay is nonetheless valuable in providing a clear history of the development of Kant’s refutation of idealism.
Overall, this collection should be a very useful resource for readers of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, particularly in underlining the fact that Baumgarten was not an orthodox Wolffian but deviated from Wolff in many interesting ways.
