Christian August Crusius: Instruction to live reasonably (1744)

(1715-1775)

Although most important of Christian Wolff’s critics, Adolph Friedrich Hoffmann, did not have the chance to publish anything beyond logic of his system, we could view the work of his student, Crucius, as a sort of completion, and furthermore, as a conduit, through which basic anti-Wolffian ideas were transmitted to Kant.

The first book of Crucius I shall be looking at, Anweisung vernünftig zu leben, is almost at the opposite of spectrum from the methodological work of Hoffmann, that is, the interest of Crucius lies in the question how to live well. But before studying that question, Crucius says, we must first investigate the nature of human will. While in Wolffian school this study was a part of psychology - itself a part of metaphysics - Crucius noted that human will could not actually be a topic of metaphysics, which should study only what is necessary. Instead, Crucius introduced a completely new discipline, thelematology, dedicated just to human will.

A further difference from Wolffian practices is the definition of will Crucius endorses. While Wolffians usually distinguished will as a rational faculty from sensible appetite, Crucius saw will more as having irrational and rational modifications - in other words, instead of the difference between animals and human beings, Crucius emphasised the difference between mere material and animated objects.

In addition, the relation between representation and will was somewhat different with Wolffians and with Crucius. While Wolffians apparently defined appetite and will as a capacity for certain type of representations - irrational or rational representations of good and evil - and actions flowed in a seemingly necessary manner from these representations, for Crucius will was more a power to act according to representations. In other words, Crucius thought that representations provided a mere model for action, while will was the cause actualising these models. Indeed, Crucius said that without will a representing entity couldn’t act. Still, Crucius noted, there isn’t really any merely representing entities, because representations of such an entity would be completely purposeless, and God never creates anything without a purpose.

Capacity for representations - what Crucius calls understanding - is then, he says, dependent on will as its goal. Then again, will is also dependent on understanding, Crucius continues, because without representations provided by understanding will wouldn’t have anything to act in accordance with. Despite this mutual presupposition, Crucius insisted, the two capacities must be based on different basic forces - that is, when we are speaking of finite entities, while with God understanding and will are merely different names for one infinite force. In case of finite entities, on the other hand, representing something does not explain why the entity strives for something, and similarly, striving for something does not explain why the entity has representations.

Will acts for some purposes, Crucius says, although in a sense we speak of purposes only when the subject of willing knows distinctly what it strives for. In a sense, this notion of purpose, Crucius notes, can mean three distinct, but related things. Firstly, we may say that the subject strives for some state of itself or subjective purpose, for instance, when Alexander the Great wanted to receive the title of the high king of Persia. Secondly, the subject may be said to strive for some external object or objective purpose, for instance, when Alexander the Great was interested of the realm of Persia. Finally, the subject strives for a formal purpose, that is, to be in some relation to the objective purpose, for instance, when Alexander the Great wanted to subject Persia under his rule.

Will, Crucius notes, is free, when and in so far as it could be directed to another purpose than it happens to be directed. When this freedom of will is applied, a person is said to make a decision. On the contrary, when will continues to strive for some purpose without any decision, Crucius defines will to be controlled by a drive. Some of the drives are basic or belong to the essence of the person, while other drives are essential or contingent consequences of these basic drives.

Once a striving of human will is fulfilled, Crucius says, the person enters into a state of pleasure, while a contrary state of events leads person into a state of pain. Because human being is controlled by many drives, a person can experience many types of pleasure and pain. Crucius notes that we have no reason to assume that other animals are conscious of anything, thus, we have no reason to assume they feel pleasure or pain. On the other hand, Crucius thinks that God can feel pleasure, but no pain, because God’s will is always fulfilled.

Crucius defines good and evil in terms of will: what is good for a person is what is in accordance with her will, while evil for a person is what is contrary to her will. This is only a relative notion, Crucius says, and against Wolffians, he is quick to distinguish good from perfection. Crucius does note that there is an absolute or metaphysical sense of goodness, as what is in accordance with God’s will.

Although will and understanding are two different forces, Crucius noted, will can affect understanding, because human beings can think purposefully. Will does not have a complete control over understanding, Crucius says, because it also follows its own laws, for instance, association, but it can at least determine how long understanding considers something. Furthermore, Crucius insisted that will could be said to affect itself in the sense that certain desires and drives could have an effect on one another and the power of decision could also affect the desires and drives.

In addition to understanding and itself, Crucius was certain that will - or more accurately, the whole soul of human being - could affect body, because when we earnestly willed to move healthy limbs, the limbs truly moved. Crucius explicitly argued against occasionalism by saying that God could not continuously act as a mediator between soul and body, because it would be below the status of divinity. Probably against the Leibnizian notion of pre-established harmony Crucius noted that God would not have created world, if it had no interaction with souls (what Crucius appears to have missed is the Berkelyan possibility that material world might not exist at all). Crucius admitted that this interaction could not be explained, because we did not know the nature of souls nor of the smallest parts of bodies. Still he was certain that we could know why God had to provide the possibility of the interaction - finite spirits had to exist in some definite place and not omnipresently, like God, thus, they had to be able to change their position in relation to other things.

A move toward accepting the soul-body -interaction had happened also within the Wolffian tradition. A more notably anti-Wolffian stance in Crucius’s thelematology was his insistence that will was free in a strong sense of not being externally coerced nor internally necessary. Crucius defended his position, firstly, through a need to take ethics seriously: unless will would be free in a strong sense, we would have no reason to praise or condemn the actions of a person and becoming virtuous would be down to mere luck.

A more metaphysical reason for believing the possibility of free will, Crucius noted, is that a series of causes must finally come back to an uncaused cause or basic activity. True, he admitted, not all basic activities were free: elemental activities are by nature continuously actualised, while other basic activities, like that of human understanding, are bound to certain conditions, but by their nature inevitable, whenever these conditions are in place. Free will differs from these other basic activities, because its actions are only made possible by external conditions, but free will is still required to turn this possibility into an actuality. To make matters more complicated, Crucius noted that finite understanding cannot demonstrate beforehand whether free will would actualise some possibility, but infinite understanding or God could know it intuitively.

While his ethical and metaphysical arguments for free will were not completely foolproof, Crucius had to rely on a mere assurance that we are conscious of being able to do things otherwise. He admitted that some philosophers had held this idea to be mere imagination. Yet, he concluded, God must have created some freely acting entities, so that creation as a whole would have some purpose.

Free will, Crucius assured, was not against the principle of sufficient reason, because all generated things do need a cause. Where Wolffians had went wrong was in insisting that the cause would always be completely determined to produce only a certain result - something that Wolff himself might actually have agreed upon. Furthermore, Crucius was also aware that we are not always completely free - we do have drives that might restrict our decisions, and we might require considerable effort for diminishing the hold of drives. Only God has a completely free will, which is not restricted by anything - true, God can will only things in conformity with his goodness, but, Crucius argued, this was merely an explanation of what kind of things God wills.

This is what we would usually hear about Crucius’s notion of will in a treatise on history of philosophy. But I would like to go all the way through this book and see how Crucius applies these abstract notions to more concrete questions. Next, I’ll be looking at the general properties of human desires.