Tatsachen des Bewußtseins und »nexus rerum« in Christian Wolffs Psychologie

Christian Wolff asserts that empirical and rational psychology presuppose each other so far as they deal with the same object, the soul, and investigate it from a different point of view: in the first case in relationship to its existence, in the second by meaning its essence. The paper shows how this distinction is problematic and argues that Wolff’s psychological thought ultimately constructs itself around two different theoretical topics – the facts of consciousness and the connection of things – corresponding to two different logics. The distance of these approaches can be illustrated by finding out some theoretical tensions concerning concepts like perception and apperception or faculties like sensibility and imagination. It is therefore shown that Wolff’s methodological principle of the »connubium rationis et experientiae« cannot be understood as the assertion that only empirical psychology deals with experience and only rational psychology concerns the essence of the soul. Within the first can namely be pointed out a phenomenological approach which puts in evidence the moments of consciousness, as well as an objective approach which is rather interested in explaining the same psychological moments by referring them to the real connections of things.