Christian August Crusius: Instruction to live reasonably - How to win friends and influence people

After dealing with the general rules of prudence, Crusius turns to its first area of application, that is, private affairs. He begins by noting that large parts of this study can be discarded, because they belong already to other sciences. Firstly, prudential care of one’s body and health belongs to medicine, secondly, prudential care of one’s understanding and intellect is the matter of logic, and finally, prudential care of one’s will and motivations has already been dealt in various parts of ethics and moral philosophy.

What is left for Crusius to consider is the prudential care of relationships with other people - in other words, how to get others to respect, honour and care for us. Unlike in case of proper moral philosophy, this is not so much a question of what one is deep down like and what an ideal, omniscient, God-like observer would say about one’s character, but more about how one appears to other people. Thus, although a person would be far from perfection in some field, she might still be respected, because she was viewed as perfect, at least when compared to other people.

Even so, Crusius is quick to warn his readers to avoid such a mere relative honour, because an honour based on being better than someone else will just create envy in others. In fact, he notes, lasting respect and honour must be based on true perfections. Furthermore, he continues, one should be careful in not bragging about one’s perfections and showing them only with good understanding, if one wants others to respect them.

A further, but related question Crusius considers is how to get people to love oneself. Love, Crusius defines, is awakened by perceiving perfections in someone and makes the lover attempt connecting with the beloved. Most often love is awakened, Crusius says, by perception of a perfection of will, because good will and good behaviour are signs of a person who is easy to connect with. Indeed, Crusius notes, a simple way to find love is to show love. Similarly, one should avoid things like mocking others and being ungrateful, if one does not want to be despised by others.

Crusius defines friendship as a type of love, more particularly, as connection of persons, in which both attempt to promote one another’s private ends. Because friendship is kind of love, Crusius advises, finding friends is a lot like making people love oneself. Indeed, he notes that best means for getting friends is to make oneself indispensable to others.

With this rather Dale Carnegian part of Crusius’ philosophy behind us, we have only one more part of the book to consider - that of prudential affairs of state.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on God, world, and human soul, furthermore, of all things in general - All you need is love

The early modern philosophers were fascinated by the problem of human emotions that appeared to combine the imcombinable, that is, the material world of bodies and the spiritual world of human souls. For instance, anger is a conscious state, but also something you feel in your chest. They might be called passions or affects, but the task was still the same: to catalogue and define their seemingly endless variety.

It is thus no wonder that Wolff also spends a considerable number of paragraphs on the issue of affects. I already mentioned briefly in the previous post that Wolff had accepted the Leibnizian idea of imperceptible changes in the human soul. Thus, Wolff has to add a layer of sensuous or indistinct subconscious desires (Begierde) and aversions (Abscheu) that we do not consciously perceive, although they do affect us. It is only when such a desire or aversion – or a combination of several – becomes great enough that we experience a real affect.

It would be quite pointless to go through all the different affects in detail: the truly interested will find a short summary of the Wolffian definitions of them at the end of this text. I shall instead investigate one important affect – love – and its definitions in Descartes, Spinoza and Wolff.

Starting with Descartes, we find him defining love as an emotion that induces the human soul to desire joining with the object of its love. I might be reading more to the Cartesian definition than I should, but the mention of joining suggests the idea of matrimony or even the more physical joining in sex. Of course, love is used as an euphemism for sex – we do call sex making love, and when Janet Jackson speaks of loving someone under cover, we know what she is insinuating. Yet, Descartes would still have failed to characterise all types of non-sexual – e.g. parental – love.

Moving on to Spinoza, we find him criticising Descartes for confusing a certain consequence of love with love itself. Spinoza's himself defines love as a pleasure together with an idea of its cause. One might be wary of Spinoza's emphasis on pleasure: term ”lovesickness” tells rather well that love is not always just fun and games. Yet, Spinoza knows that pleasure of love is often mixed with various negative feelings, such as jealousy. Somewhat more disturbing is that Spinoza fails to specify humans as the object of love. True, we do speak of loving chocolate, detective stories or a sip of white wine, and Shirley Bassey sings of Mr. Goldfinger who loves only gold. Still, we usually feel that these are just secondary types of love or even mere likings compared to our love of fellow humans.

Wolff, finally, defines love as a preparedness to be noticeably delighted of the luck befallen on beloved. Compared with Descartes' and Spinoza's rather crude forms of love, Wolffian love is quite refined, altruistic and even saintly. This is the love that mystics spoke about and that Beatles made their song of: all you need is not sex nor gold, but love – respect and care for other living beings and their welfare. Yet, no matter how refined love of Wolffian definition is, it is also removed from the ordinary earthly love – tell a person that she should be glad of her spouse getting lucky and you will probably be thought a bit naive.

Descartes, Spinoza and Wolff have thus been able to define some aspects of love, embodied in the figures of Don Juan, Uncle Scrooge and Buddha, but none of them has truly captured the totality or essence of love. This just shows how complex a seemingly simple emotion like love can be – and indeed, we may wonder if ”love” or "Liebe" designates more than one emotion. Furthermore, this complexity might make us disbelieve that love would be something that could be pointed out in a brain scan: this man obviously loves, because that area is red, says the neuropsychologist, and we may ask what he means by loving – sexual infatuation of a playboy, miser's lust of money, mystical absorption into pantheistic unity or something else?

So much for affects and especially affection or love. Next time, we shall speak of will.