Christian August Crusius: Draft of necessary truths of reason, in so far as they are set opposite to contingent ones - Spirits as part of moral universe

Crusius’ work culminates on the question of properties that free spirits have because of their moral attributes. He notes that such properties are essentially based on the infinite perfection of the divine will. Particularly important in this context are the divine holiness, the divine goodness and the divine righteousness. Since God necessarily has these properties, Crusius argues, free spirits must also necessarily have the properties based on these divine properties.

The properties Crusius is speaking about fall roughly into two categories. Firstly, since God wants the whole world to be perfect, Crusius begins, he also wants that free spirits would act in accordance with the rules of perfection, that is, that they would act virtuously. Of course, Crusius adds, this does not mean that God would force them to act virtuously, because then they would not be free beings. What God can do is to ensure that virtuous spirits will be happy and that those violating laws of perfection will be punished. All free spirits are thus necessarily subjected to the divine law, which God expects the free spirits to follow obediently.

In addition to this subjection to divine law, Crusius speaks of one other property, that is, immortality. He adds that it is not enough that a spirit is indestructible, in order for it to be immortal, but it must also be constantly alive and conscious of its own state. Thus, a free spirit is not by its essence immortal, even if we ignore the fact that God could annihilate even free spirits, because even hostile conditions of bodies can make spirits unconscious. Hence, Crusius concludes that we must show that God wants to prevent all the obstacles that could hinder the immortality of free spirits.

Crusius is particularly adamant that the Leibnizian notion of a pre-established harmony of souls and bodies does not in any way justify the immortality of free spirits, even if it would be true, which Crusius obviously does not accept, because he believes that souls and bodies do interact with each other. Indeed, he continues, since Leibnizians have to assume that before its harmonisation with a body the soul could not yet represent anything, it would be analogously plausible that the soul would lose all representations after this harmonious correspondence was over after the death of the body.

Crusius’ own justification of the immortality of free spirits is ultimately based on their being the main purpose in God’s plans for the world. In addition to freedom, God has given free spirits abilities to reason and abstract, consciousness and drives toward perfection, communion with God and virtue. All these attributes, Crusius argues, contribute in free spirits aiming for an indefinitely extended life in constant pursue of evermore perfect stages of virtue, which in fact should be the highest purpose of the world. If free spirits would not be immortal, God would have given these abilities in vain and the main purpose of the world would be defeated.

Crusius still considers the possibility that only some spirits would be able to reach immortality, while others would only serve as means for the blessed immortals to reach their goal. Crusius thinks this possibility is unbelievable, since God would not have given freedom to such beings that were only means for other beings. Indeed, Crusius points out, even spirits who have acted morally wrong have to be immortal, so that God can punish them for the whole eternity.

A more difficult problem Crusius faces when he considers the fate of babies who die before they could have developed their reason and thus their ability to act freely and make moral choices. Although he does not have even a very probable argument to back it up, Crusius does suggest that these children will probably continue living, even if their life after death will probably be less perfect than with those who have reached the maturity of moral beings.

Crusius is also uncertain what the life after death will be like. We might need no body anymore or we might receive a new kind of body or one exactly like the one we used to have - or we might go through all of these stages at different stages of our life after death. Crusius does insist that the life after death won’t include long periods of sleeplike condition, while waiting resurrection, as some Catholic thinkers had suggested. Crusius reasoning is that such long periods of passivity make us lose our abilities, so it would probably be harmful to our consciousness also.

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.

Speech about Chinese practical philosophy, recited in solemn panegyric (1726) and New anatomy or analytical idea of Wolffian metaphysical system (1726)

I have already mentioned the lecture ofChinese philosophy held by Christian Wolff and explained the rather drastic consequences of this lecture, namely, the accusations of atheism and the expulsion from hisposition. What is still left is to actually describe the lecture itself. While it was held in 1721, written versions of it appeared only few years afterwards. I am especially interested of a version that was published in 1726, called simply Oratio de sinarum philosophia practica, in solemni panegyri recitata, because in this version Wolff had annotated his original speech and thus explained his ideas further.

The lecture itself holds no surprises after reading Bilfinger's more detailed presentation of the topic. Wolff notes that while form of the Confucianism differs from modern moral philosophy – Confucius uses examples, where Europeans would have preferred deductions, and rituals form a large part of moral education – but essentially emphasizes the commonalities. For instance, Confucius divided human being into two parts – sensuousness and reason – and advised one to subjugate senses to guidance of reason, because this is what made human beings perfect and led to tranquility, just like states were happier if governed by wise men. Furthermore, Confucius suggested we should use external glory as an incentive for moral progression: one had more motive to be e.g. kind to other people, if kindness was something that the community thought worthwhile and commendable.

What especially the annotations show is Wolff's wish to downplay the possible atheist leanings in Chinese philosophy. As I have already mentioned in a previous post, it is rather difficult to say whether Confucianism endorsed the idea of a personal god or merely just the existence of an impersonal force. Wolff appears to speak for the more theist interpretation of Confucius or at least he attempts to argue for its plausibility.

A completely opposite view of Confucianism is suggested in Lange's Nova anatome, seu idea analytica systematis metaphysici Wolfiani. The work is actually a collection of Lange's texts, and a large part of it contains a more summarized version of Lange's earlier works attacking Wolffianism. Thus, we see Lange again criticizing Wolff for combining ridiculous idealism with at least equally ridiculous materialism through the Leibnizian notion of pre-established harmony. Lange has clearly just ignored Wolff's many explanations of these questions, so the result is a somewhat skewed view of them. Lange has still read at least Bilfinger's summary of Wolffian metaphysics: for instance, he dismisses Bilfinger's notion of hypothetical necessity, as far too deterministic to form any getaway road.

While these parts of the work feel hence fairly repetitive, Lange also takes some time to attack Wolff's lecture with its annotations. Some of the criticism is rather amusing, for instance, Lange attacks the legends meant to justify the longevity of Chinese wisdom by noting that some of the people involved apparently lived, when the world and China with it was covered by deluge according to the biblical story.

Lange's main complaint about Confucianism is rather predictable. He is convinced that Chinese have no divinity and at times appears to identify Confucianism even with the dreaded Spinozism. No wonder he is outraged when Wolff casually compares Confucius and Mohammed with Moses and even Jesus – a known atheist and a heretic put on the same level with a holy prophet, and even worse, with the son of God.

All in all, there's only one serious piece of criticism against the ethical theories of Confucius and Wolff, namely, that both use glory and ambition as an incentive for moral behaviour. Even here, Lange's argument misses the point. True, it is not truly ethical to do good deeds only because you desire the fame and reputation of a benevolent person – after all, this would leave the possibility that you acted mischievously in cases where no one could ever know. Still, glory and ambition might well be used as tools for educating moral behaviour, and indeed, this is what we do when we thank and praise children for their good behaviour.

So much for Confucius, next time we shall see how Wolff's metaphysics resembles the tale of Robinson Crusoe.

Christian Wolff: Example of the doctrines of true Chinese moral and politics; and also example of gentile philosophy applied to public matters: excerpted writings of Chinese classical person, Confucius, both told and written (1724)

I left out a crucial detail in the story of Wolff being fired due to his supposedatheism – the accusation was not made in a vacuum, but it had an incentive. Wolff had promised to lecture on Chinese philosophy. Apparently Wolff thought that Chinese moral philosophy was commendable, and even more remarkable was that Chinese managed to live morally without any explicit devotion of God – this opinion was the primary reason for suspecting Wolff of atheism.

Interest in oriental thought began already with Leibniz, who was especially intrigued by I Ching, a book on divination. What interested Leibniz was not so much the supposed window into future events, but the manner in which complex concepts were represented as combinations of two signs, a broken and an unbroken line. In this I Ching resembles binary arithmetic, which expresses all numbers as combinations of zero and one.

Wolff's lecture, on the other hand, concentrated on Confucian philosophy, which we have already seen mentioned by Bilfinger in his dissertation. It appears reasonable to suppose that Bilfinger actually introduced Wolff to Chinese philosophy, because he published soon after Wolff's lecture a book on the topic, Specimen doctrinae veterum Sinarum moralis et politicae; tanquam exemplum philosophiae gentius ad rempublicam applicatae; exceptum libellis Sinicae genti classicis, Confucii,sive dicta, sive facta complexis.

What I am interested here is not so much Confucian philosophy or whether Bilfinger interpreted it faithfully, but the question what intrigued Wolffians in it. We may begin from what he clearly was not interested of. There is very little mention of any metaphysical theories of Confucians, and indeed, Bilfinger explicitly suggests that it is ethics and politics in which Confucius excelled. This lack of metaphysics had actually grave consequences.

As Wolff's fate shows, Confucianism was supposed to be an atheist philosophy. Indeed, it is rather unclear what Confucius and his followers actually thought of gods. The closest they come to religious issues are references to Heavens, which in a sense take the place of God. Yet, because Confucians are very quiet of such metaphysical questions, it remains unclear whether Heavens is meant to be a conscious person or an impersonal force. Thus, even if Confucianism were not atheistic in the usual sense of the word, it still managed to create morals without any relation to God.

A more important difference in Bilfinger's eyes concerned the styles of Confucianism and western philosophy. Teachings of Confucius are full of rich illustrations and parables whereby the moral teachers can make the basic ideas instantly concrete and easy to grasp. This liveliness in preaching is amplified by attempts to truly live the life by the tenets of Confucianism and thus exemplify its principles in one's own life. Indeed, even the emperor of China was meant to be a moral inspiration for all his subjects.

Compared with Confucianism, western and especially Wolffian philosophy seems rather dry and academic, and one might suspect that Bilfinger wanted to uphold the idea of philosophizing in concrete life through morally educational tales. Still, Bilfinger is not completely against the peculiar dryness of Wolffian philosophy. Indeed, he notes that Confucianism cannot surpass western philosophy when it comes to precision and care for arguments.

Next time, we shall see once again how Wolff fares against a ferocious attack.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on the social life of men and especially on the community - The enlightened despot

The origin of households in the Wolffian system is the desire for intercourse, together with the obligation to care for the possible outcome of the intercourse, that is, children. Now, Wolff suggests that household by itself cannot satisfy all needs of a human being. At most, a life constricted to a household can satisfy only basic needs, but this would be only animal and not human life – the households could not provide for the future nor would they be able to care for higher needs like science and arts. Wolff even invokes the Hobbesian argument that a life without a community of men would be a life of fear, because anyone could be killed by other people.

A community or a state is then created by households entering into a mutual contract that aims at the general well-being of all of them – note that it is the head of the houshold that gets to decide the loalty of everyone in his family. Wolff obediently notes all the six classical possibilities with the traditional names derived from Aristotle: the good constitutions or monarchy, aristocracy and polity and their corrupted variants or tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. Wolff then does allow the possibility of ”polities” or republics ruled by majority votes, although he notes that they are often hindered by party politics. Still, the rest of the book is clearly meant for absolute or constitutional monarchies, where the king has all or at least majority of power in his hands. Wolff's task is to enlighten the German despots and make their minds accessible to reforms their states required.

Wolffian ideal of society contains some characteristics that justify calling him an enlightenment philosopher. For instance, Wolff encourages kings to found schools, colleges and universities for educating people in sciences and handicrafts, to build hospitals and apothecaries for serving the sick and to make the cities beautiful for all senses by filling them with works of art and by making sure that nothing stinks. Then again, the main interest of Wolff in politics is the upholding of public morality, which gives Wolff's suggestions a moralizing tone. Thus, Wolff suggests that only art that teaches morals is to be accepted and that a state should be filled with buildings for public moral preaching. The most extreme suggestion from modern standpoint is that all punishments should happen in public in order that potential criminals would think twice of their immoral intentions.

The idea of places for public moral preaching is interesting as a not so veiled attempt to promote churches as necessary for the well-being of the state – the attempt becomes even more apparent, when Wolff notes that belief in God is almost a prerequisite for a moral society. True, Wolff has admitted that morality is possible without religion. Wolff even goes so far as to accept China as an atheist state that has one of the best constitutions in the world – as we shall see, this admission will be fatal to Wolff's carrieer. Still, Wolff is convinced that majority of atheists will be scoundrels incapable of living in community with other people.

Wolffian politics is then not so much interested of the welfare of the people, but of their morality – although bodily and mental welfare is, of course, part of moral perfection in Wolffian system. Thus, it is just natural that in Wolff's opinion laws of a state should be based on the law introduced already in Wolff's moral writings, that is, the natural law. Wolff does allow some changes to be made to the natural law in case when following it would be extremely difficult. For instance, natural law determines that a child should become independent, when she has all the necessary skills for taking care of herself. Yet, because it is often hard to determine the exact time when a person has become mature in his actions, state must make a concession and determine some fixed age at which everyone is to be considered an adult.

Natural law is for Wolff even a higher authority than state. Usually one must obey the rulers of one's state, but if the rulers break the natural law, people are not committed to obeying them. Thus, if a king tries to murder someone, the attemped victim has the right to defend herself. Yet, Wolff advices people to resist the ruler's will only in the cases where one's own well-being is threatened or where one is commanded to do immoral things. Hence, if a despot threatens to kill your neighbours, you have no obligation to help them – unless you happen to be the soldier who is to pull the trigger.

Wolffian system of politics appears then to have no true stopgap for tyrants and dictators. True, Wolff does advise kings to limit their own power and become as symbolic rulers as king of Sweden or queen of England are nowadays. Wolff even justifies this adivce through a comparison with the universal monarch or God, who leaves the actual government of the world to humans. Yet, there is no guarantee that a tyrant would follow Wolff's advice. Indeed, Wolff can only hope that religion and the fear of God would stop kings from tyrannical behaviour – a rather poor hope when Wolff has just congratulated God of not meddling in human affairs.

The individual states are then related like individual persons to one another, and just like persons ideally act like self-enclosed monads, so should states have no concern for the international community. Positive in this isolationism is that Wolff thinks all warfare to be evil and justifiable only as a self-defence – although Wolff does accept also reasonable suspicision of evil intentions as a reason for self-defence, somewhat like American head of state before the attack to Iraq. But Wolff appears to be blind to the invisible economic battle that his mercantilist tendencies generate – Wolff advices states to horde as much money as possible, which in effect make economic co-operation impossible in international level.

So much then for Wolffian politics. Next time I'll have something to say about the generation of Wolffian school.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts of human acting and letting others act upon you - Do your duties

No modern system of ethics would be complete without a discussion of duties. Indeed, following Kant, we would probably think that duty is what ethics is all about – after all, ethics should tell what you ought to do. At first sight Wolff's discussion of duty seems quite in line with this Kantian idea. Wolff defines duty as something that one is bound to do by some law. In ethics, the law in question is the natural law.

On a closer look, Wolff's idea differs from Kant's later theory. As the reader might remember, for Wolff, natural law commands us to do those things that any conscious person would do, if she had perfectly clear and distinct concept of what is going on. Thus, duty is not just something we ought to do, but also something that we would do, if we had correct information. Furthermore, the motivating factor for this ideal person would be the purpose of perfecting everything. Wolffian duty has then a goal external to the duty itself.

For Wolff, ”you ought to do it” can then be translated by ”you would do it, if you just understood how good it is for you”. The problem in this identification is that it sometimes appears to lead to unintuitive results. Consider for instance the choice of using your money to buy new shoes and of giving it to the beggar on the street. If a perfectly rational person would be motivated to choose former over latter, that choice would be a duty in the Wolffian sense, although the opposite choice would appear to be more virtuous. Of course, it all comes down to whether Wolff thinks a perfectly rational person would make this choice. The answer requires a look at the detailed system of duties Wolff presents.

Wolff divides all duties into three classes: duties towards oneself, duties towards God and duties towards other people. I recall that the division precedes Wolff's ethics and goes probably all the way to medieval philosophy. Remnants of the division can be found still in Kant's ethics, which differentiates between duties towards oneself and duties towards orher people. Indeed, even in Wolff duties towards God play a minor role compared with other two sorts.

Duties towards God appear to cause some problems for Wolff, because an omnipotent being should not need the help of his creations for anything. Still, Wolff could not exclude God altogether, because that would have probably been considered a blasphemy. Wolff then suggests that God and his perfections can still motivate us to do virtuous things and that these divinely motivated duties might be called duties towards God. Problem is that then all duties would be also duties towards God, as long as the motivation for them would lie in God.

Wolff's way for solving the problem begins from the assumption that a perfectly rational person would in all likelihood know about God. His knowledge of God would then necessarily induce some feelings: he would love God for all his work for human beings, he would fear making God disappointed etc. Wolff suggests that we would then have a duty for pursuing those affections, which we could call a duty towards God – somewhat strange notion as such affections appear to be involuntary and not dependent on our will. In addition to these affections – well you can always say a few prayers and thus show your faith in the wisdom and omnipotence of God.

With the divinely inspired duties taken care of with few words of devotion, the Wolffian moral agent still has to tackle with duties toward himself and other persons. Personally, I've always found the class of duties toward oneself rather peculiar. This is probably because I have never understood how self-perfection could be taken as an end in itself. Surely it is moral to develop your skills for helping others, but it seems peculiar that mere developing skills in itself would be morally upright. Hegel had the intruiguing notion that perfecting your skills only for the sake of perfection is somewhat like sharpening your sword just for the sake of admiring it: it undoubtedly looks prettier, but isn't it a bit useless?

Wolff's ideas of duties towards oneself contain the further problem that they don't clash well with his ideas of the relationship between soul and body. Wolffian duties towards soul are rather straightforward. One should strengthen one's will through ethical reasoning and fables and one's reason through reading works of Wolff. (By the way, Wolff pronounces the publication of text books as his moral duty. No doubt the profits he gained from them must have been God's way of thanking Wolff for his dutyful life.).

It is the duties towards body that appear more problematic. As one might remember, body is in Wolffian scheme just a physical thing that is constantly in contact with the soul, which is the true personality of human being. Still, Wolff can earnestly say that soul must take care of its body, although body is not even itself conscious of anything. True, the fates of the body and the soul are connected and the soul feels everything that happens to the body, so that the soul would be in pain, if something bad happened to its body. Yet, this connection is only temporary and one might think it could be broken, if the body became too ill – but no, Wolff denies the right of suicide, apparently for no other reason but that the soul must show its dedicated perseverance by making the body to live as long as it can. Somewhat inconsistently, the soul must bear through all the hardships the body goes through, but the soul must still see to it that the body gets what it needs, i.e. that it is fed and clothed.

Although Wolff admits that eating well and clothing yourself warmly are moral duties, thus proving that your parents were right, he is fortunately not as interested of external glory. Glory and honour depend on what other people think of you and it is enough if you act as if you were worthy of glory, no matter what others think of you. Then again, dishonourable life deserves to be ridiculed. Indeed, Wolff makes the historically interesting remark that disease is usually no reason for shame, but if your nose drops due to illicit sexual behavior, that's your own fault (the slow detoriation of the nasal tissue is one possible symptom of syphilis disease, but Wolff's remark appears to be pointed at ”fornication with pictures of women” or masturbation, which was at that time suspected as one possible cause for the symptoms of syphilis).

One might expect that the apparent self-centredness of Wolff's morality would be mitigated when he comes to duties towards other people. Wolff even starts in a promising tone by declaring that one should do to others exactly what one ought to do for oneself. Yet, there is a twist. Apparently the highest point of perfection is independence, which makes a sort of sense in the Wolffian world view, where every soul already is a closed totality with not true connection with the external world: a soul perfects itself, when it appears to be what it truly is, that is, independent of anything else. Now, helping others in their need would constitute a breach of their independency and would thus take away from their perfection. Hence, Wolff advises that one should help others only when what they require is beyond their own skills and powers. Most of the duties towards others are then merely negative: one should not e.g. cheat others.

If we then come back to our original problem of a person wondering whether he should spend his money to new shoes or whether he should give it to a beggar, Wolff would in most likelihood suggest that we should somehow calculate whether helping the beggar is really worth more than new shoes. Yet, the requirement for independence would in most cases make the scales turn in favour of the shoes. This sounds dangerously close to a person who would not give anything to charity, because the poor are just too lazy to make themselves rich.

To be fair, Wolff is describing morality without any connection to a society or a commonwealth. It will be the task of Wolff's political works to describe societies in more detail, and we shall later see whether Wolff can find a place for solidarity and team spirit. But first, a slight detour to a student of Wolff.