ABSTRACT
Traditional teleology is the view that everything in nature has a purpose, and indeed has been created for a purpose. One example of traditional teleology with which Kant was well acquainted was that presented by Christian Wolff in his Rational Thoughts on the Intentions of Natural Things, first published in 1723. Wolff confidently argued that we know two definite things about the purpose of the world and everything in it: first, that the world was created by God in order to reveal his greatness to us, and, second, that beyond being created to teach us this lesson, everything else in the world was created for our own use and happiness. Thus, Wolff first asserted that
Wolff then proceeded to explain how various aspects of the created world are a mirror in which we can come to see the perfections of God.Thus, for example, the sheer number of things in the world is “a mirror of the infinite cognition of God”;2 “the connection of the things in the world to each other” by the most direct possible routes is a “mirror of his wisdom”;3 and even the contingency of the existence of the particular things in the world is a mirror of God’s freedom: “If the world were necessary, then we could no longer know from it that there is a God, that
is, a being distinct from it in which the ground of its reality is to be found,”4 for it is precisely “the contingency of the world” that “makes it into a mirror of the freedom of the divine will.”5 Wolff expresses the second main thesis of his teleology, that the world is created for the purposes of man, in language like this:
Human happiness is not only man’s end, as Wolff had argued in his moral philosophy, but also God’s end for man.
