Having survived Lange's
eight-hundred-page -magnum opus I did not want to proceed right away
to yet another gigantopedia of a German obscurity. Thus, I decided to
read two lighter, non-philosophical works by an old friend, Christian
Wolff. Don't let the length of the titles intimidate you, because in
these times, the shorter the work, the longer the title. The title
was meant to work like an ingress to an article, luring potential
readers to buy the latest thoughts ”concerning the unusual
phenomenon” – this is the language of the mystery writers.
Indeed, the whole phenomenon at Halle
feels like a cross between X-Files and Mythbusters. A strange light
was seen at the sky after 7 o'clock in the evening at Halle, and the
same phenomenon could be viewed all over the Europe, from London to
Königsberg. ”Flying saucers!” would be the cry of modern
UFO-enthusiasts; ”wrath of God” thought the religious enthusiasts
or Schwärmereien of Wolff's time.
But then the consulting philosopher, C.
Wolff arrives at the scene and deduces at once that the public has no
need for alarm: such phenomena are not that unusual. The cause of the
strange light has been a gaseous evaporation bursting into flame:
predecessor of swamp gas, apparently. And was it God behind it all?
Well, the Allmighty can use all sorts of natural phenomena as symbols
for his messages, but because there is no mention of flaming gases in
the Scripture, there is no need to assume any greater meaning behind
the light.
(Of course, if Wolff would have taken the sign seriously, traveled to the easternmost point where the phenomenon was seen and
waited for a couple of years, he would have witnesses the birth of a
boy named Immanuel, who would have been the one to deliver philosophy
from dogmaticism. A missed opportunity, indeed.)
The second text, then, is a somewhat
more serious work, although agricultural studies are far from what
modern philosophers usually spend their time with. But Wolff was not
afraid to stain his hands with dirt and he even disapproved
philosophers who failed to do anything useful. What is really
remarkable in this short work is Wolff's ability to put his
scientific methodology to real practice: we hear how Wolff studies
previous agricultural works and does his own experiments in the
garden, before finally concluding that planting seeds deep enough and
far from one another might increase the yield.
Wolff's agricultural study was also
apparently under a serious discussion. A year after the original work
Wolff had to publish an elucidation answering some questions from an
interested reader. Even more striking is that the work was translated
to English, which is more than can be said for Wolff's philosophical
works. One has the impression that Wolff truly was a notable botanist
and not just an incompetent diletantte.
Wolff's achievements in both myth
busting and agriculture are a good example of a remark C. D. Broad
once made of major philosophers often having experience with some
fields of science: just think of Descartes' books on analytic
geometry, optics and mechanics, Leibniz's work on differential
calculus and Kant's early works on physics. Even Hegel proudly stated
at the frontispiece of his Phenomenology that he was a member of the
German mineralogical society.
If we extend our focus from sciences to
all fields of life beyond philosophy, we find statesmen, like Francis
Bacon, philologists like Nietzsche, playwrights like Lessing or
Sartre and psychoanalysts like Lacan. We might even suggest that a
good philosopher needs such an anchor in something else beyond
philosophy, so that her ideas and thoughts will have some substantial
relevance. Indeed, the only philosopher Broad knew who could be
called a pure philosopher was his mentor, McTaggart – and his
metaphysical theory of a timeless reality of spirits perceiving one
another is as far removed from practice as any philosophy can be.
Let this suffice for a detour. Next
time, another obscurity waiting an examination.
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