Epictetus: What Depends on Us

Continuing with Boulnois’s history of free will, the next exploration concerns the way that Epictetus uses the originally Aristotelian phrase “what depends on us”. Here again Boulnois weaves in much discussion of the broader Stoic school.

“The Stoics were forced, we say, to reconcile determinism with the ‘freedom of assent’. But in the Stoic school, these two concepts are not brought together until Epictetus. It is the interpreters who attribute freedom to impulse, to assent, and to ‘what depends on us’. Is this attribution legitimate?” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 203, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout).

“Cicero believes he sees a break in the determinism of Chrysippus, when the latter affirms that certain things depend on us: our actions. But according to Chrysippus, even what depends on us is subject to necessity: ‘even if many things come from us, these too are no less fated, for they are encompassed in the government of the universe’. Many events can occur only through us, but it is included in the order of the world that we necessarily do what depends on us to accomplish them. An action depends on us if we are its cause. Every act derived from us is imputable to us, even if it comes from an anterior cause, and only passes through us. We act in conformity to our nature, but our nature is part of nature” (pp. 203-204).

Stoic determinism is holistic. Humans do not stand outside of nature or fate; we are part of it. Thus Stoic fate is not something external to us. Every agent contributes to the total working out of the order of cause and effect. Our logos is part of the immanent divine logos that governs the world. Our contribution, which depends on us, is real and not an illusion.

“Even if everything is ruled by fate, certain things depend on us: our actions and certain mental acts. To say that the world is not the exhaustive cause of our assent and of our action, is to recall that we have a directing faculty that is their mistress. We cannot represent fate as something that occurs independent of us: if it is in conformity to fate that a boxer will win his match, this does not mean that he can fight ‘with arms dangling at his sides, under the pretext that according to fate he was bound to get out of it unscathed’; this means that he must fight, and that he will triumph through his strength and skill. Among the events of the world, many can only come to pass if we contribute to them. We cannot bend fate, but we can accomplish it” (p. 204).

We are not like leaves that are simply blown about by the wind, even if those who are dominated by their passions come close to this. The more we engage in critical thought and question ourselves, the more we achieve the freedom of Stoic assent.

“If the agent gives her assent, this produces an impulse (horme), which issues in action. The exterior thing is indeed the active cause of action, but it is the faculty of assent that completes it and that determines whether the agent accedes to the representation. By reason of their proper contribution of assent, individuals having different characters will react differently to the same representations. As a consequence, even if initial causality comes from the represented exterior object, still it is the agent who is the origin of her own action: she is the cause, the one responsible. Thus the fact that certain actions depend on us is compatible with the determinism of fate” (pp. 204-205).

Impulse for the Stoics has a rational character that follows from assent, although we who are not the ideal Stoic sage may assent to bad reasons. Through impulse, assent becomes an efficient cause. We are not just effects of nature, but contributing partial causes.

“For the Stoics, the human being, like all living beings, tends toward what is appropriate to her nature, but she heads toward that end by her assent. ‘What depends on us’ is not the order of the world, but our impulse (horme). Nonetheless, it is necessary to articulate this impulse with the order of the world. How is causal determinism compatible with moral responsibility?” (p. 205).

Within the Stoic system, this tendency of beings toward what is appropriate to their natures takes over some of the role of the banished Aristotelian final cause. Officially, Stoicism recognizes only one kind of cause, which is closer than anything in Aristotle to what later came to be called “efficient”. But Stoic nature is not only a seamless network of efficient causes; it also has a normative dimension. We are not only said to be subject to nature; we are also admonished to live in accordance with nature. If nature were purely and simply a matter of fact, of what is the case, this would make no sense. And for the Stoics, there is also providence exercised by the immanent logos.

“P. Hadot holds that for the Stoics, interior discourse ‘remains entirely free’. But what does ‘free’ mean here? Consent is not ‘free’ in the sense that the directing part of the soul can grant or refuse it, accept a thing or its contrary. It is free in the sense that it reacts to the representation in conformity with its nature, and spontaneously (but in the only possible way). If we want at any price to speak of freedom, it is a monovalent freedom. It is a capacity to act, but it is not the capacity to act and not to act (as in Aristotle). It is necessary also to distinguish: 1) the ambivalence of action (Aristotle): if ‘x can do y’, then ‘x can refrain from doing y’; and 2) the monovalence of action (the Stoics): ‘x can do y’, but this does not imply that ‘x can refrain from doing y’ ” (ibid).

Hadot is known for his accounts of ancient philosophy as not just theoretical discourse, but a way of life. What Boulnois is gently pointing out here is another example of the very widespread tendency to read medieval or modern notions of freedom into the ancient philosophers.

“In this theoretical framework, the agent is indeed the cause of action; but she is not the ultimate cause, because causality passes through her and she does not have the capacity to act otherwise. But then, what is willingness [pleine gré]? — Quite simply, spontaneity, the fact of not being constrained [contrainte] to act by an exterior cause. Action depends on me if I consent to it, because then I take responsibility for the causality, and I incur the blame or praise that it merits” (ibid).

This account of “willingness” as the criterion of moral responsibility is close to that of Aristotle. The very existence of these accounts ought to be recognized as thoroughly refuting arguments that moral responsibility can only be grounded by the postulation of an unobservable metaphysical free will. But they are also better accounts. Willingness and unwillingness are ethical criteria that serve to differentiate our judgment of situations. Metaphysical free will can play no such differentiating role, because it is supposed to be uniformly applicable. That in turn is to say that it can make no practical difference.

“The Stoics are characterized by their unitary conception of the psyche. They do not make a partial instance in us responsible for action (as in Aristotle, the logos, lust, or aggression), but identify its principle with the whole nature of the agent, with her ‘soul’, which includes her character, impulses, and beliefs. An action is accompanied by willingness [pleine gré] if it results from an assent given by the soul to a desirable representation. Acquiescence guarantees that the agent is the triggering cause of the action; it makes her responsible. But this assent is determined; it is in conformity with her individual nature and tendencies” (p. 206).

The Stoic insistence on a strongly unitary and holistic view of the soul stands in contrast to Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s Republic classically compares the unity of the soul to that of a city.

“For the Stoics, as for Aristotle, we can only attribute moral value to an action if it ‘depends on us’. Chrysippus seems to have used the same expression as Aristotle: our action is ‘dependent on us’ (eph’ hemin). But much later a substantialized form appears: ‘the “what depends on us” ‘ (to eph’ hemin); it has become a subsistent faculty: assent. From action that depends on us, we have passed to a principle in us by which action occurs: assent, the principle of action and the key to ethics. For the agent applies her own impulse to her action; the antecedent causes are only conditions sin qua non. But she exercises a causality, and she must assume responsibility for it, the blame or the praise. It is on this that our access to happiness and the freedom of the sage depends” (ibid).

There is value in the Stoic analysis of assent and non-assent to motivating appearances. “What depends on us” has great value as a distinguishing ethical criterion. But not only is the substantialization of what depends on us a reification, it completely changes its character. The late Stoics seem to hold that only something purely inner can depend only on us. The concern to identify something that depends exclusively on us is new; we saw clearly that in general, actions that depend on us do not depend exclusively on us. The claim here seems to be that our assent is the only thing that depends exclusively on us. This kind of assent does seem to be something purely “inner”. But assent is still something that happens. It is not itself a doer. But the later substantialized form is clearly also supposed to be a doer, and indeed the primary doer in us. Coupled with a strongly unitary view of the soul, that makes it into the primary us, or sense of “us”. This is a huge shift.

“As Alexander of Aphrodisias remarks, the Stoics safeguard ‘the “what depends on us” (to eph’ hemin)’ (a substantialized expression, which P. Tillet translates as ‘freedom’), while at the same time suppressing ‘the power of choice’ (exousia tes haireseos), which is to say the ‘capacity to perform contrary actions’. Thus for them, there is no choice between contraries, and responsibility is monovalent. In effect, ‘they affirm that what happens through us (di hemon) depends on us’. Thus everything that happens is in conformity with fate, but we are the causes (responsible) for what results from our impulse and our assent, and is produced in conformity with our nature, that is to say for what occurs through us. Although necessary, the effect produced by us is indeed ours. This action remains imputable to us, because it does not come from an extreme constraint, but is indeed produced by us, even if it results from an internal necessity. Human action is integrated into physical causality: just as the stone falls according to its nature and in conformity with fate, in the same way the human is moved according to her impulse and under the action of fate; her action is at the same time necessary and dependent on her” (pp. 206-207).

Alexander’s claim that the Stoics “suppress” the power of choice is a bit disingenuous. In a later chapter, Boulnois will point out Alexander’s major role in reshaping Aristotelian proairesis (resolution of a deliberation) into a strong notion of binary choice. The occasion for Alexander’s somewhat heavy-handed reinterpretation is indeed the Stoic rejection of Aristotle’s bivalent concept of action. The classic Stoic attempt to view the entire universe as an air-tight system of univocal efficient causality is indeed highly problematic, to say the least. What ought to be defended in this context is Aristotle’s very different, more “humane”, interpretively rich, relaxed pluralistic and non-exclusive notion of causes as reasons why things are this way rather than that. Not having an overly strong, univocal notion of causality in the first place removes the motivation for an overly strong notion of choice. Alexander re-reads Aristotelian causality in a much more systematic and univocal way that brings it closer to the Stoic view, and then finds it necessary to compensate for this with a stronger notion of choice.

All that notwithstanding, not only is there is nothing intrinsically bad about the Stoic motivation to think human action as embedded in the world; it has positive value in its own right. But Aristotle’s “compatibilist” view of human action is quite different from the Stoic one, for all the reasons mentioned above. A more hermeneutic view of causality and an emphasis on temporally extended resolution or commitment rather than punctual bare choice combine to make Aristotle’s approach more attractive.

That the human has a capacity to perform contrary actions seems uncontroversial. But “contrary actions” can be understood in as many ways as actions can be contrary to one another. Aristotle more specifically attributes to rational beings the ability “to act, or not to act” in specific ways. To my ear, acting and not acting in some particular way are not contrary actions properly speaking. I have long puzzled over the motivation for Aristotle’s emphasis on the narrower “to act, or not to act” case as a distinguishing characteristic of rational beings. But as Boulnois points out, Stoicism with its univocal view of causality effectively denies the validity of the “to act, or not to act” case altogether, while upholding the “up to us” criterion for ethical responsibility. But the plot is about to thicken even further. We are about to see why Boulnois still treats it as an open a question whether Stoicism really is determinist in the modern sense.

“The cosmos represents a network of preliminary or auxiliary causes of action, but not as a constraint, since the ‘complete’ cause includes the agent’s own character, beliefs, and dispositions. It only is what it is in its character of being done in this conjunction, but it is indeed she who does it: the determined action is exempt from constraint, indeed compatible with the responsibility of the agent. The Stoic position is compatibilist” (p. 207).

That Stoicism combines a kind of determinism with a defense of the reality of moral responsibility is an apparently obvious ground for calling it compatibilist. But here, suddenly, we have the novel introduction of a notion of “preliminary or auxiliary” causes. These do not behave in the strongly univocal way that we have been considering as characteristic of Stoic causes. Here we begin to see an ambivalence in the notion of “constraint”. At first it seemed to be a synonym for the kind of coercion or extraordinary circumstance that makes an action seem willing and unwilling at the same time. But in the context of a comparison with these new preliminary or auxiliary causes, the classic Stoic univocal efficient causes are in a different sense tightly “constraining” in a way that Aristotelian causes, and now also Stoic preliminary or auxiliary causes, are not.

Here also the Stoic concept of representation intervenes. First, it should be acknowledged that although it is defensible, the translation of Stoic phantasma or phantasm as “representation” is a bit of a stretch. This is definitely a case where a significant work of interpretation is presupposed by the translation. What can be shown is that Stoic phantasms have a strongly representational character. But phantasms have other characteristics as well. In the first instance, they are perceptual images. In Aristotle, the same Greek word is closely linked to the broad but underdeveloped notions of imagination and interior sense. These involve images that are in a way the same as those associated with sensible objects, but different in that they can arise — or be recalled — independent of present sense perception.

Stoic phantasms are also ancestral to medieval sensible species. The classic early Stoic theory of the phantasm forms a three-way bridge connecting optics, the physiology of sense perception, and inner experience. Since the early Stoics hold that everything real is in one way or another connected with embodiment, perceptual images begin as subtle bodies literally transmitted by light. The perceptual images thus transmitted re-present the visible forms of ordinary sensible bodies, and are again re-presented in something that begins to resemble the modern concept of “mind”. At each step, there is a kind of structural translation that preserves the “same” form in a different medium. For the early Stoics, this material translation of forms grounds a strong epistemological realism in an unequivocally physical and physiological theory that tightly knits together a kind of realism with a kind of representationalism.

If we speak of any kind of representationalism in Aristotle, it must be said to have a more poetic and less absolute character. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle does not rely on a kind of strong identity of the image across a continuous chain of physical transmission to underwrite strong claims of epistemological realism. He does not even separately claim that there is such a tight chain of transmission. Aristotle’s theory is more “relaxed” and aesthetic. It avoids strong claims of identity in representation. While holding that there is such a thing as real knowledge, Aristotle’s moderate realism also avoids the strong realism that unites the “dogmatism” attributed to the Stoics in the ancient world, with the dogmatism that will later criticized by Kant.

Boulnois continues, “The gods have given us the power of using our representations. It is true of itself that an inadequate representation does not take away our assent, and that we can refuse to consent to it. But certain commentators have demanded to know whether a comprehensive representation necessarily entails our assent, or whether it is only an occasion in the face of which we can again refuse consent. Epictetus is nonetheless clear on this point: before the demonstration of a moral contradiction, indeed before an adequate (comprehensive) representation, ‘like a balance, the reasonable soul is inclined, whether it wants to be or not’. It is impossible for the human not to approve that which appears to her as preferable in an adequate representation. There is indeed no place here for free will [libre arbitre] as the capacity of acting otherwise. The evidence of a representation does not do violence to reason, because it is itself recognized as a part of universal reason, and only submits to itself. But this in no way excludes necessity” (pp. 207-208).

“Aulu-Gelle gives another version of the argument: ‘if you throw a long stone cylinder in a steeply inclined terrain, you are the cause and principle of its fall, but soon the cylinder is carried away in rolling, no longer because you made it roll, but because it has the capacity to roll according to its measure and its form. In the same way order, reason, and the necessity of fate move kinds and the principles of causes, but it is our own will (voluntas) and the character of each one that control the impulses that issue from our deliberations and the acts of our spirit’ ” (p. 208).

“For a modern who accepts the principle of inertia, this seems to exclude every human impulse: once the initial impulse is given, it seems that the cylinder continues to roll on its path. But there is no inertia in ancient physics: the effect is always contemporary with its cause; and each nature follows its own tendency. As a consequence, to explain the continued movement of the cylinder, there must be a new impulse, ‘its proper force’, and the internal spontaneity of ‘its nature’. Necessity is compatible with spontaneity. For the movement of an object is produced not only by its antecedent causes (exterior impulse), but again by its own form (cylindrical or conical). There is an impulse proper to the agent; it does not passively submit to the causality of representations; it joins to them its spontaneity. Nonetheless, the nature of our spirit is itself subject to fate. Even what depends on us is explained by the state of our beliefs and our emotions. Our actions reveal what we are. They come from the acquiescence that we give or not, by function of our character, to representations that come from outside. Thus we are responsible” (ibid).

Conversely to the first point about inertia, it might be argued that if we think of form as having a kind of causality of its own, a separate concept of inertia might not be needed. It is not entirely clear which approach is more parsimonious. While it might with justice be said that one universal concept of inertia is simpler than a causal role exercised by innumerable forms, it could also be argued that inertia does not entirely eliminate the relevance of form. An appropriate articulation of form and matter might make a separate concept of inertia superfluous, but inertia does not seem to make all uses of formal and material cause superfluous.

” ‘What depends on us’ has constraint for its contrary, and not necessity. Our assent is indeed ours within the chain of causes, but it comes from the form of our individual soul, which itself obeys a necessary order. From here on, the key to assent lies in a word: voluntas [will]. This becomes the point of contact between a necessary nature and a unified psyche, the nodal point of ethics. Since the will is ours, it depends on us to act. By this articulation between impulse and assent, between the initial movement and the capacity to roll, Stoicism admits the existence of ‘what depends on us’ (in nostra potestate). Representation impresses a movement that is received in the soul, but assent depends on us — it is spontaneous. Once the exterior impulse is received, assent moves itself. We can indeed maintain that everything happens by necessity (modal determinism), without this preventing consent from depending on the soul, because it comes from it. This is why we are responsible for our action” (pp. 208-209).

The references to Latin terms here might seem out of place in the context of Epictetus, who wrote in Greek, but Cicero and Seneca had already written about voluntas before Epictetus flourished. The explicit introduction of a faculty of will is closely tied to the substantialization of occurrences of Stoic assent into a principle that gives assent or refuses it, which Boulnois has already pointed out in Epictetus. Only, according to Boulnois, this is still not yet the free will that is so much insisted upon by later writers.

“Action depends on us if it is committed by (hupo) us, and if it occurs through (dia) us: [quote from Alexander of Aphrodisias:] ‘Nothing of what is produced by anyone (hup’ hekastou) in conformity with their own nature can, they say, be otherwise, but each of the things done by them (hup’ auton) is produced in a necessary way […]: the circumstances being such, it is impossible to submit to them in another way, and not to be moved in this way’. Certainly, the key to decision is assent, and it is possible to refuse an imperfect representation. But this refusal is itself determined by causes: that the agent does or does not give her acquiescence to the representation, itself results from her beliefs and her desires. Thus action is determined, through the agent, by her impulses and her stronger representations. With the Stoics, will is not a free will, because it is a power of consenting to fate” (p. 209).

“Does the necessity of assent render all ethical exercise vain? — In no way. The work on ourselves, the discipline of assent, consists precisely in criticizing the representations that are presented to us, in order to separate our subjective emotions and uncertain beliefs, and to open up a truth adequate to the world. Thus we give our assent to a true judgment, and choose not only what appears to us to be better, but that which is really better” (pp. 209-210).

This is similar to the earlier example of the boxer. If he is fated to win, this does not mean that he does not need to make any effort. It presupposes that (among other things), his character is such that he will in fact make the effort. If he did not have such a character (among other conditions), it could not be truly said that he was fated to win.

“Nonetheless, even if we do not consent, fate is accomplished. If I must go into exile, be imprisoned, or have my head cut off, I can refuse my assent; but necessity is accomplished no less. There are two ways in which fate is accomplished necessarily: assent (if this is the interior principle of my action); and constraint (if I am driven by an exterior principle). It does no good to oppose the order of the world: either the agent consents, and her interior spontaneity coincides with necessity, or she refuses her assent, and what is necessary is accomplished in spite of her, coming from an exterior principle, under the form of a constraint. According to Zeno and Chrysippus, the human is subject to nature in the manner of a dog attached to a chariot: [quote from Hippolytus:] ‘A dog attached to a chariot, if it wants to follow, at the same time follows it and is pulled by it, because it is at the same time the dog’s self-determination (autexousion) and necessity that act; while if it does not want to follow, it is constrained in every way. It is the same with humans: even if they don’t want it (me boulomenoi), they are in every way constrained to follow their fate’ ” (p. 210).

“The dog can refuse to consent to the movement that drags it along, but this will be painful and useless — it will be irresistibly dragged. Or it can trot in the rhythm of the chariot: it will arrive at the same result, but it will be in tune by its assent and will not suffer. If the human refuses her assent to the order of the world, she will be unhappy, since she will arrive necessarily at the contrary of what she wished. When she gives her assent, she will attain a form of happiness, since she will consent to what happens, in accord with nature: ‘if she accomplishes this, she will get what is due to her’. Happy and free, she will blend in with the determinism that she cannot change” (ibid).

“According to Cicero, the Stoics join with the representations received by the senses ‘the assent of the mind’, situated in us (in nobis) and voluntary (voluntarium)’: is this a doctrine of free will [libre arbitre]? No: the expression is clearly a hendiadys [one thing expressed by a conjunction], ‘in us and voluntary’ together translate eph’ hemin (‘what depends on us’). Cicero affirms that we give our assent willingly [de plein gré] (‘voluntarily’), but not that we have an undetermined will. It is not a question of posing a freedom of choice in the face of fate, as a number of commentators affirm, aided by problematic choices of translation. It is a matter of more fundamentally establishing our responsibility, of knowing whether action is voluntary, that is to say ours” (pp. 210-211).

“The Discourses of Epictetus begin with a question: ‘what is it that is in my power, and what is it that is not in my power?’ We will notice the singularization of the question. Aristotle speaks of ‘what depends on us’ (collectively). Epictetus no longer asks about a generic we, or about the kinds of action, but about what depends on me, here and now. Ethics is no longer thought starting from a particular political community (as in Aristotle); it starts from the singular dispositions of each. It is necessary to discover what each can legitimately desire, to separate out a domain that nothing can ever enter, a power that is mine, whatever the external circumstances may be. Does this consist only in assent? The only thing that depends on us is the correct usage of our representations; ‘this alone is emancipated from all obstacles, from all constraint’. By reason of this exclusive concentration on our assent, everything outside it is alien and ‘indifferent’, unworthy of being chosen (aproaireton). If our action deserves praise or blame, this does not concern external circumstances, but the beliefs in the name of which we give our assent and act: what comes from right convictions is beautiful; what comes from erroneous convictions is bad’. It is the assent that we give to our representations that explains the justice of our action. Only by this are we deserving of praise or blame. We have only to render an account of our ‘use of representations’, that is to say the way in which we put our sensible impressions to the test to see if they deserve our assent or not; the rest is not imputable to us” (pp. 211-212).

“It is by this that Epictetus introduces a relation between ‘what depends on us’ and freedom. The Manual begins with this fundamental thesis: ‘Among the things that are, some depend on us (eph’ hemin), and others do not depend on us. […] What depends on us is by nature free (eleutheros), without impediment and without shackles. What does not depend on us is weak, enslaved, in chains, and foreign’. The key to ethical liberation lies in the distinction between our works and the rest; this is what is new. Ethical life is a continual effort to distinguish what depends on us from what does not. This permanent attention frees the agent from the desire to obtain what we cannot have, and that make us depend on someone else. Who submits to this discipline is never frustrated in her desires; this allows her to avoid trouble and the passions” (p. 212).

“Is this a doctrine of freedom of the will? Certainly, in affirming that ‘what depends on us is by nature free’, Epictetus makes freedom a property of our assent. But the judgment is conditional; it is in aligning impulse and desire with what depends on us that we are free, and in desiring what does not depend on us that we are enslaved. As a consequence, the key to freedom lies in the restriction of our desire to ‘what depends on us’. What kind of freedom is involved here? An ethical freedom. Not that of doing everything we want, but that of not desiring what we cannot do. It is only in this extreme restriction that we can let our propensity bloom” (ibid).

Epictetus In Context

The next stage of development in Boulnois’s historical argument about free will focuses on the late Stoic Epictetus (d. 135 CE). An accurate account of Epictetus requires that we understand the views of the Stoic school as Epictetus received them. This affords an excellent occasion to give these views a more than passing mention. (In Généalogie de la liberté, there is an intervening chapter on future contingents in Aristotle’s On Interpretation, but according to Boulnois, it is only the way in which this latter topic was transformed by Boethius (ca. 480-524 CE) that makes it relevant to the genealogical investigation of free will. I may return to his argument about Boethius at some future date.)

Shortly after the time of Aristotle, the Stoic school emerged and became famous. The works of its founder Zeno of Citium (b. 334 BCE) and its main systematizer Chrysippus (ca. 336-206 BCE) are known only from quotations in later writers. But Stoicism came to occupy a significant place in the broader culture of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In this way, a kind of philosophy achieved wide social influence and diffusion in the broader culture that has rarely if ever been equaled.

In contrast to Plato and Aristotle, early Stoic thought is distinguished by its strongly systematic ambitions and more “dogmatic” style of teaching. Like most Greek philosophers, the Stoics emphasize reason. They rationalize the Greek religious idea of fate in a famously strong form, propounding an unprecedented determinism of cause and effect. They make embodiment a criterion of reality. But while rejecting Platonic forms, they give an important place to incorporeal lekta (“sayables”, meanings, or propositional contents). The Stoics followed the Megarian tradition of formal logic, which differs from that of Aristotle in important ways, and begins with propositions rather than terms.

Stoicism seems to have originated the idea of a deterministic physics. At the same time, the Stoics introduce and universalize a strong notion of providence that would later be adopted by the monotheistic religions. But unlike those later traditions, the Stoics see divinity as entirely immanent in the world.

The Stoics advocate a stern morality, based not on an Aristotelian harmonious coexistence of reason and desire but on a quasi-ascetic ideal of eliminating the passions, while remaining engaged in worldly action. Nonetheless they recognize that elimination of the passions is vanishingly rare in humans.

Passion for the Stoics is a disorder of reason. In those who are ruled by passion, the whole soul is still said to have a rational character. The passions themselves are explained as resulting from rational assent to false propositions. Chrysippus is also said to compare reasoned action to walking, and passion to running, in which it is harder to stop. Meanwhile Stoicism explicitly promotes an egalitarian attitude toward humanity.

Later Stoicism, known mainly from surviving works of Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, focuses primarily on ethics, and has been widely admired. Epictetus — a slave who was later emancipated — is regarded as later Stoicism’s most substantially philosophical representative.

“What is freedom? As a first approximation, the Stoics do not hesitate to repeat the response of the Sophists, for whom it consists in being able to do what we want. Thus Epictetus’s Discourse IV begins with this provisional definition: ‘One who lives as he wants (hos bouletai), […] one whose impulses are not obstructed, in whom desires are realized, in whom aversions do not fail’. To be free is to lead a life in conformity to one’s desires and impulses, without being prevented from accomplishing them. Freedom consists in doing what we want and enjoying it without obstacles.”

“But this definition is ironic and empty, for it remains a promise rarely kept. A bit later, Epictetus continues, ‘Who wants to live in error?’, ‘Who wants to be a dupe in life?’ — And he concludes: ‘No bad person lives as he wants; and as a consequence he is not free’. Ultimately, freedom does not consist only in the satisfaction of our desires and impulses. It only consists in doing what we want on the condition that we will what is good. Freedom of the will is empty if it is not ordered to the good” (Boulnois, Généalogie de la liberté, p. 197, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout).

A kind of freedom and a kind of will are important in Epictetus, but close examination will show that he does not have a concept of free will, in the way that that comes to be understood in the later tradition. Boulnois notes that the Sophist concept of doing what we want is political rather than psychological.

“Thus Epictetus transposes the Sophistic definition (associated with a form of political power) to the individual faculties. True freedom is profoundly linked to the will (‘to live as he wants’). It is interior, and consists in holding to the things that depend on us (ta eph’ hemin). But problem is to know what sort of things depend ‘uniquely on us’, and on nothing else. In effect, to live without obstacles and attain serenity, it is necessary to discipline our desires, which trouble us when what we do not desire happens. It is necessary to be able to desire nothing that is in the power of others. ‘Of the various things we love and hate, let us beware. Necessarily, those who have power over them are our masters’. We can only enjoy without hindrance if we limit our desires to the citadel of the soul, that is to say the domain that depends on us” (pp. 197-198).

As this figure of the inviolable citadel of the soul illustrates, later Stoicism develops a much sharper distinction of inner from outer in the human than we find in Plato or Aristotle. Converging with early Christian views, this comes to dominate the subsequent Western tradition. Much of the same Greek vocabulary of Aristotle’s ethics is adopted by the Stoics, but given different meaning. Not until Hegel does this “alienated” separation of inner and outer come to be substantially challenged. For this later Stoic-Christian view, only in the inner are we truly at home, and only in the inner do we find our freedom. A similar privileging of the inner is also characteristic of Avicenna.

“Thus the access to freedom rests in the first instance on exercises that put into practice the delimitation of ‘what depends on us’. The free human is such that ‘everything happens in conformity with her decision (proairesis), and whom nothing can hinder’. In effect, to be free it is necessary to know what depends exclusively on us, and to desire only what is inside these bounds. ‘Who is the unhindered human? The one who desires nothing alien to herself’. The one who is attached to her body, to possessions or to her reputation is chastised, for she obtains neither durable goods nor serenity. The sage knows her place in the universe: ‘What she can choose is without obstacles. What she cannot choose can be obstructed. When she places her good and her advantage in the only objects that cannot be obstructed and that depend on her, she is free.’ Inversely, ‘if she places her good and her advantage in exterior goods, which cannot be objects of her choice, she will be the slave of those who have in their power the things she admires or believes’. As Marcus Aurelius says, ‘If the act depends on you, why do you accomplish it? If it depends on another, from whom do you take it?’ ” (p. 198).

The reference to exercises here is significant. Whatever requires exercises to develop cannot be metaphysically intrinsic or innate.

“The problem of individual freedom is born with this reversal of freedom’s first, political, sense. Freedom becomes a positive attribute, a concept that we can attribute to ‘what depends on us’ (eph’ hemin). The mutation is capital. As Hannah Arendt says, freedom is no longer ‘experienced in the fact of acting and of associating with others, but in the will and in commerce with oneself’. The scission between metaphysical freedom and political freedom is already consummated” (ibid).

The hugeness of this cannot be overstated. What Boulnois here calls “individual” freedom seems to be a freedom that is supposed to be intrinsic or innate to the individual (“metaphysical”), and therefore unrelated to social conditions. But insofar as political freedom consists in civil liberties and civil rights, it is highly applicable to individuals, who have or do not have — or have only some of — such liberties and acknowledged rights. The real contrast is the one he mentions at the end, between political freedom, which depends on and directly refers to our real-world social conditions, and a “metaphysical” freedom that is claimed to be independent of whatever is or is not the case in our social conditions.

“What is the significance of this mutation? In contrast to the Aristotelian universe, which leaves room for contingency in the world of humans, for the Stoics nature is subordinate to fate. But in the grip of fate, is there a place for choice? For responsibility? For freedom?” (p. 199).

“The Stoic doctrine of freedom is generally interpreted in the following manner: by reason of their deterministic physics, the Stoics could not admit that freedom consists in the capacity to choose, therefore they fall back on a doctrine of the freedom of the sage, which consists in consenting to the necessary order of the world.”

[quote from Pierre Hadot:] “There is a difference between the freedom of choice, thanks to which the directing principle has the possibility of rendering itself good or bad, and real freedom, thanks to which, choosing the moral Good and universal Reason, the directing principle succeeds in that its judgments are true, its desires realized, its willings efficacious. It is only this real freedom that is properly freedom.”

“In place of an apparent free will [libre arbitre], a real moral freedom, reduced to the citadel of the soul. This interpretation is characterized by two points: 1) it leaves in the shadow the reality of this freedom of choice: does the human or does she not have the ability to choose between contraries? 2) in opposing apparent freedom to true freedom, it makes it seem as if the question of choice and that of freedom pertain to the same concept. But that is not the case. The double concept of freedom (apparent and true) does not appear until Augustine (see chapter 8), to cover by a single term what among the Stoics are two distinct concepts, and two different questions” (p. 199).

The two concepts are eleutheria (freedom) and proairesis (resolution or “choice”).

“To elucidate these two concepts, it is necessary to examine four questions: 1) Is Stoic thought about causality determinist? 2) In what sense, according to the Stoics, do actions depend on us? 3) Is there a place, for them, for a doctrine of choice? 4) What does being free signify for them?” (pp. 199-200).

The remainder of this post covers Boulnois’s discussion of the first of these. The other three will be treated later. But haven’t we already said Stoicism was determinist?

“The Stoics maintain that everything happens in conformity with fate, fate being the unified network of all the series of causes. But what is it that is a cause? The Stoics no longer call causes the ensemble of explicative factors of a being (as in Aristotle, for whom they come in pairs: agent and patient, matter and form, producer and final cause), but only those that actively produce an effect: efficient causes. According to the Stoics, causality is exercised when a body enters into contact with another body, and they make an incorporeal effect arise: ‘the scalpel is a body, which becomes for the flesh, another body, the cause of the incorporeal predicate “being cut” ‘. The body of the patient remains, but it receives a new predicate. Thus causality implies a contact, and produces a transformation” (p. 200).

Although with a bit of squinting the Stoic lekta can be understood in modern terms as propositional contents, speaking about the cause of a predicate sounds odd to us, because it mixes physics (governed by causes) with logic (which can be thought of as governed by the applicability of predicates). This serves as a reminder that we should not go too far in claims about the “modern” character of Stoic causality.

To my ear, “for whom they come in pairs” in reference to Aristotle sounds too categorical or too simple, but that is a side issue. Much more important is the good contrast he makes between Aristotelian “explicative factors” and a monomorphic notion of efficient cause. When I previously studied Stoicism, I was not yet sensitized to this Aristotelian concern, so in thinking about causality more recently, I have not had the fact that Stoic causality is “efficient” in mind. But from a historical or “genealogical” point of view, this has great significance.

A distinctive feature of the ethically bad or reductionist modern notion of cause that can be very useful in certain kinds of practice — but has an alienating effect on both the practice and the theory of general interpretation in human life — is its amenability to calculation. Even Aristotle — despite his strictures against an excessive desire for precision in ethical matters — notes that the substitutability of means to a given end in principle allows for the same kind of exactness in reasoning about the logistics of means that is characteristic of reasoning about geometrical figures (or, for modern readers, mathematical reasoning in general). This quasi-mathematical precision about the means to ends is just where the “modern” intuition of causality excels, and this is exactly what is needed for a “determinist” account of things.

“After this the Stoics affirm that every effect necessarily has a cause — a version of the principle of causality reduced to efficiency: ‘the world would be dislocated and unhinged, and would not remain eternally one, conforming to a unique order and a unique economy, if we introduced an event without a cause (anaitios)’. Consequently the cause is no longer explicative but efficient. The principle ‘nothing is without a cause’ takes on a new dimension. But above all, the Stoics also maintain the converse: every cause necessarily produces its effect, which is the principle of determinism. According to the testimony of Alexander of Aphrodisias, they declare: ‘From every event follows another that is related to it necessarily (ex anagkes) as to its cause’. Not only is there no effect without a cause, but again every cause necessarily produces its effect: ‘When all the circumstances environing the cause and that of which it is the cause are the same, it is impossible that sometimes they have no effect, sometimes the effect is different, and sometimes the same’. All things being equal otherwise, a cause always and necessarily produces the same effect” (pp. 200-201).

To say with the Stoics that every effect necessarily has a cause is both narrower and more “precise” than to say with Aristotle that every quality of things has a dialectical reason why it is the way it is. Conversely, general interpretation as I understand it is ethically better but logistically weaker than the narrow means-end reasoning at which modernity excels. Determinism depends on this narrowness to exclude ambiguous cases from consideration. The Stoic aitiaton (“effect”, literally “that which is caused”) is literally or identically the passive construction corresponding to a Stoic cause (aitia). For better or worse, the exactness of the Stoic aitia stands in contrast to the relative openness of the Aristotelian aitia.

“On the ground of this new conjunction between causality and necessity, the Stoics admit a universal determinism; each event follows necessarily from causes that precede it, and that necessarily produce the consequences that follow from it. The ensemble of causes and effects thus forms a necessary series, and the ensemble of causal series constitutes a necessary and ordered totality: nature, God, or fate” (p. 201).

The Stoic aitia is subject to a strict “logic of identity” that is foreign to Aristotle. For Aristotle there is such a thing as strict identity, but it only applies to special cases. The Stoics in effect claim that all causes and effects have strict identity.

“The necessary sequence of causes entails the necessity of all events. Everything that will happen in the future is already contained in the present state of the causes, and is determined by the ensemble of the past: ‘it is indeed necessary that what is true comes from causes; thus when it follows, it comes to be necessarily’. The number of causes being finite, their combination must be reproduced periodically, from which arises the thesis of the eternal return (which will be reprised by Nietzsche). As result, the state of the world at a given instant precontains as a necessary cause the ensemble of its future states. As Cicero says, ‘If there could exist a mortal capable of perceiving by the mind [esprit] the relation of all the causes, he would not be mistaken in any way: in effect, one who knows the causes of future events knows necessarily all that will happen’. Only one world is possible. It is indeed necessary. Every omniscient observer knows it” (pp. 201-202).

Perceiving the relation of all the causes would be a kind of omniscience. That which can only be known by an omniscient observer (not us) cannot play a role in real-world ethical practice. Aristotle’s definition of the necessary is the logically weaker and more humane criterion “that which follows always or most of the time“. Stoic necessity is the overly strong “that which follows always”, full stop.

“In this necessary totality, how can human action find a place? The Stoics distinguish between a condition sin qua non and the production of the act. Thus they oppose two sorts of causes: preliminary (procatartic) causes, and the all-encompassing or containing (synectic) cause, the action of the breath [pneuma] that orders and conserves the universe. These distinctions have the purpose of preserving the efficacy of assent: the latter has preliminary causes, but they depend on each agent. Even if necessity governs nature and our representations, it is in our power to give to them or to refuse to them our aquiescence. Fate is not an absolute cause but a preliminary cause, without which it would suppress ‘what depends on us’ (eph’ hemin) and that which is ‘willing’ (hekousion). Chrysippus thus identifies the workings of fate with proximate and preliminary causes: ‘If everything comes to be by fate, it follows that everything comes to be by anterior causes, but not that these causes are principal and perfect; it suffices if they are auxiliary and proximate. If these are not in our power, it does not follow that the impulsion is not in our power’. The auxiliary and proximate cause represents the exterior conditions of fate, the order of the world, but the perfect and principal cause is the assent of the human. It is indeed the human who acts, and who acts according to her consent. Certainly the state of our desires and of our beliefs is determined by the system of the world, but it depends on us to consent and to act. The representations caused by the world do not depend on us, but it is we who consent, and not the impulsion that triggers our action” (p. 202).

The introduction of “preliminary” or procatartic causes here is unexpected. This is a major qualification on what up to now was being said unconditionally. Just now, we were saying that for the Stoics all causes produce their effect necessarily; now it seems that only the synectic or “all-encompassing” causes do so. Is it still appropriate to call this determinism? Perhaps this is why he raised the first question above, about determinism.

Fate was the very thing that led to the discussion of determinism in the first place. Strict determinism and the attempt to represent causality in the world by an air-tight, systematic logic of identity in which all terms are univocal (if indeed that is what we still have here) create artificial problems that later authors will try to solve by positing a radical metaphysical free will. What we might call Aristotle’s “logic of difference” does not encounter these problems, because it does not try to apply overly strong criteria in the first place.

“For it is the very nature of the mind [esprit] that is the principal and perfect cause of assent, and the exterior world only constitutes an antecedent and auxiliary cause: ‘Every rational animal does nothing without the representation of a thing that has been incited from the outset, then only if an impulsion begins (impetum cepit), then only if assent confirms this impulsion’. At the outset the exterior cause is a condition sin qua non, but the moving impulsion and the principle of impulse come from the soul of the agent, who then produces aquiescence by way of confirmation (or infirmation), when the desire has already begun, and thus triggers movement (or not)” (p. 203).

What is this “mind” that is exclusively inner? Does assent even have a principal and perfect cause? A condition sin qua non is a necessary condition, but determinism requires conditions that are both necessary and sufficient.

“Since the doctrine of causality is identically a doctrine of responsibility, every human must be answerable for her action; this is not reduced to the conjuncture of the world and her representations, but comes from herself, by her assent. Nonetheless responsibility does not signify that the agent is the sole origin of movement. It no longer signifies that the action has no exterior causes. For agents are responsible for the actions that depend on them, which is to say that the actions that pass through them and that we can attribute to them, whatever the causal explication of their arising may be” (ibid).

We are responsible for the actions that pass through us. It is unclear to me at this point why responsibility would “no longer” signify that the action has no exterior causes. This seems to imply that it did signify that at some earlier point. I don’t think that is what Boulnois really means.

Resolution and Freedom

Boulnois sums up the results of the investigation into Aristotelian ethical proairesis (resolution, or “choice”) and the ambiguities of freedom as follows.

“Is it necessary to say that this resolution is free? Does it include a choice? The concept of choice assumes the existence of an alternative, followed by the pursuit of one of its terms and the eviction of the other. And certainly, when there are many means, relating the one that appears best to the end pursued implies a choice. But on the one hand, as we have seen, it is always a matter of a generic capacity, common to many agents. And on the other hand, Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, or even that of willingness” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 153, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout).

We only deliberate about or between definite alternatives, under definite conditions that we weakly “know” or deem to be applicable. This is not a wide open field, but a piece of topography with blurry details that deliberation will bring into better focus. In the domain of human actions, this kind of relative and comparative practical judgment (phronesis) is so essential that without it, there can only be anarchy or tyranny, and no ethics.

If we are honest with ourselves, we must recognize that even our best conclusions must in principle remain open to Socratic questioning. We are not the sole judge of our endeavors; our success in any endeavor depends partly on the judgment of others. Even the tyrant who denies reciprocity wants his authority to be recognized by others (only he does not return the favor).

“Nonetheless, Aristotle knows and uses the concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action. It indicates not the source of action, but its end. Eleutheros designates the human in a free condition, as opposed to the slave, but also one who is able to exercise political liberties, and who can, in a regime that permits it, be considered a full citizen. Moreover, the free human is also the one who breaks free of all political activity, to lead the life of a private citizen devoted to study” (ibid).

“The correspondence between the city and free humans is assured by an education adapted to each political regime, to allow them to become virtuous citizens. In effect democracies, which should be based on free humans, suffer a sophistical definition of freedom — as if freedom ‘consisted in doing whatever we want’, and as if the laws were for the human a kind of slavery, when they are ‘her salvation’. What is proper to the free human is to act in conformity with an order, necessarily; it is slaves who behave ‘randomly’, in a contingent manner” (pp. 153-154).

This and other matter-of-fact references to social inequality in Aristotle are commonly taken as evidence that he condones such inequality, or even aims to defend it. While our sensibilities might prefer it if he passionately denounced all such inequalities, Aristotle himself was by birth Macedonian and therefore deemed not a citizen of Athens. Unlike Plato, he had no wealthy and connected native family to help protect him from persecution. Socrates had been executed for speaking too candidly, and even Plato was forced into exile, so Aristotle did not have full freedom of speech. Nonetheless, in such cases he typically not only makes it explicit that he is referring to a (mere) matter of fact and not a norm, but also mentions a possible doubt, even though he does not develop it.

“We cannot exclude reflection on action from the concept of freedom, for this is its horizon. Ethics has for its task the formation of free humans in the city. Simply put, the (demagogic) definition of freedom as the ability to do whatever we want is precisely that against which the whole Aristotelian doctrine of virtue is constructed. On the contrary, it is following an ethical education, in exercising her resolution, that the human can acquire the surety of judgment and the pleasure in the good that characterize the free human. Indeed freedom is not the beginning, but the journey’s destination” (p. 154).

“Thus we can return to our initial inquiry.”

“For Aristotle, the problem of knowing whether a will acts freely or in a determined manner does not arise. Freedom and slavery are two modes of social existence of the human. The place of freedom is not the will, but in acting well. It is a matter of orienting ourselves to the good by virtue. — For him there is no question of will. Despite the Latin translation, hekousion (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, barring the cases of constraint and ignorance. Proairesis does not signify ‘free arbitration’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution. The stakes of this interpretation are much more fundamental than a problem of translation. It is the global hermeneutics allowing action to be elucidated that is radically different; willing action is that where ‘the principle is in us’; we are ’causes’, which is to say ‘responsible’. Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle never envisaged” (ibid).

Proairesis is the rational outcome of a deliberation, not an arbitrary choice. Even the English terms “willing” and “voluntary” have an obvious etymological connection with “will” or voluntas that reflects the earlier Latin translations. But a closer look at how Aristotle uses the concepts that the later tradition calls by these names confirms what Boulnois is saying here — they have nothing to do with a radically undetermined metaphysical will.

“We have established six essential points.”

“1. An agent is responsible for her actions if she acts spontaneously, without constraint and without ignorance, that is to say she is not moved from the exterior and knows the sense of her actions. This spontaneity signifies that she is also master of not executing them” (pp. 154-155).

Boulnois’s French has contrainte, hence the English “constraint” here. But constraint, as a negative term, only narrows our options. Aristotle’s examples for this more specifically involve coercion (threats against one’s children, etc.) or extraordinary circumstance (throwing valuables overboard in a storm in hopes of keeping the ship from sinking) that positively push us to do something in particular that we would not do otherwise. For Aristotle, we are exempt from blame in this case precisely because the determination of the action in this case is not “from us”, but from coercion or extraordinary circumstance.

The term “master” to my ear suggests a total control, which is not Aristotle’s or Boulnois’s intent. The point here is the simpler one that the agent is able both to do and to not do various particular things. In the special context of the ideal sage discussed by the Stoics there really is total control, but the Stoics are careful not to assert that we have total control. But the Western theological mainstream claims that we through our “will” do have a strange kind of total control that gives us the whole responsibility for our inevitable sin, while God retains total control over the grace needed to overcome it.

A symmetrical practical ability to do or not do various particular things is what for Aristotle distinguishes a “rational” or discursively enabled capability of a being “having logos” from a purely “natural” capability, like that of fire to heat things. Fire has no ability to “heat or not heat”, but I as a discursively enabled being am capable of deliberating as well as simply doing. It is this discursively enabled practical ability to deliberate that for Aristotle gives me the ability to walk over there or not walk over there, or to raise a controversial point or not raise it.

“2. Willing action is that which ‘we cannot refer back to other points of departure than those that are found in us’. A contrario, this opens the way to a casuistics of excuses (constraint and ignorance). But it is not a question of starting from the agent to find in her a first principle of the triggering of action” (p. 155).

Both terms in the phrase “casuistics of excuses” seem to have negative connotations, but perhaps this is misleading. I see no such negative aspect applied to the criterion of willingness elsewhere in the larger argument.

“3. It is possible to analyze human action without postulating a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing it in a physical determinism whose fabric it would need to tear apart. Ethics is thinkable without a theory of the will” (ibid).

Ethics in the first instance applies to the actions of the whole human being.

“4. Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which refers above all to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is thinkable without a doctrine of free arbitration” (ibid).

This is a gentle understatement. Ethical judgment and ethical action are precisely not arbitrary.

“5. Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation by the agent: it at least implicitly evaluates the reasons for doing x rather than nothing; what she will do is not immediately obvious to her. That is to say that there are, for her, a multitude of options and of reasons for acting. But a) these options are only possible epistemically (she believes them possible, but they are not always really accessible). And b) these reasons for acting are not uncontrolled impulses; they refer to an ethical ideal that the agent pursues principally” (ibid).

In all practical matters, we deliberate and act with less than perfect knowledge.

“6. A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free arbitration, freedom is ethical in its essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the end of an education in virtue, and an apprenticeship in moral discernment. Action is in effect evaluated morally not by what it produces, but by the virtue to which it bears witness” (pp. 154-155).

In ethical deliberation we are concerned with free and sincere inquiry into what we should do. For judgments about virtue, patterns of activity are more important than punctual acts. Character consists in such patterns of activity. Character is also more important overall than the consequences of particular acts. Ethics is ultimately about who we are, that is to say what kind of beings we are. But I also think that what our acts truly are includes what their consequences are, so I would not exclude consequences as Boulnois seems to do here.

“The good only appears in truth to one who investigates it with rigor, in a correct discernment. The one who is able to perceive it is the virtuous, the man of the good. All thought about action is situated in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (pp. 155-156).

The negative freedoms that matter for ethics are freedom from coercion, freedom from ignorance, and freedom from automatically following our immediate impulses. There is no need to claim that we are somehow completely exempt from causality.

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power of self-determination. The (real) possibility of acting otherwise is not essential to it. It is not necessary to presuppose an autonomy of the will that is detached from all exterior determination. Nonetheless, as the Politics attests, Aristotle deploys a thought of freedom, which consists in ordering one’s actions to live in a virtuous way, in the context of a city itself ordered by laws — quite the contrary of the subjective arbitrariness that consists in doing what we want. And the fact that our action is necessarily determined by our desires does not reduce its ethical value. For what is truly worthy of praise and blame is virtue, that is to say the faculty of not being able to do otherwise than to take pleasure in the good. The key to ethics resides in the moral education provided for by the legislator, and not in the contingency of choice. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 156).

Positive freedom is the ability to act well.

Aristotle is the source of our idea of a “government of laws, not of men”. The aim of this is precisely to provide safeguards against subjective arbitrariness.

“It is here that the finitude of the human as agent reveals all its significance. We are on a finite plane, in the sublunary world where contingency reigns. And even if we admit that causes are sequenced in a necessary system of the world (which Aristotle refuses to do), we do not know the system (which is why apparent options or epistemic possibilities are sufficient for the agent, whether they are real or not). What’s more, if we could know it, it would not push us to act, because it would not be desirable. Just as the idea of the Good is useless because it does not move our desire and does not motivate our action, the idea that there is a sequence of causes and effects changes nothing in our way of living. Whether the world is determinist or undetermined, we have the same obligation: to act well, in conformity to virtue, amid the contingencies of the world of humans” (ibid).

This is an extremely important insight. Ethics does not depend on any metaphysical truth, knowledge, or assumption. Acting well only to requires us to be sincere, fair, reasonable, and kind in our dealings with appearances.

“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have accomplished the action that is best absolutely. Similarly, in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘the best’ (superlative). For this it would be necessary to possess all the elements that would allow us to judge for ourselves; but this information is given to us little by little, in the course of our journey. If I take a path, it is in following this path that its obstacles, its accidents, its advantages and its inconveniences are unveiled. But I do not know if another path offers more dangers, encumbrances, or advantages (and I can only run through them all afterwards, indeed in other conditions). The only way to know absolutely which path is best is to take two paths at once, which is impossible. — At least without recourse to an omniscient observer. Only such a one can see two paths at once. Only such a one can know which is the best in itself. It is thus that the God of metaphysics makes ethics enter another dimension, in which it will no longer be thought starting from finitude” (pp. 156-157).

Resolution Distinguished

“Resolution is an act of the agent. Is it a form of opinion or of desire? At the outset, is resolution an opinion or a belief (doxa), for example the opinion that ‘this is to be done’? No, for three reasons.”

“1. Opinions are vaster objects: we have opinions about eternal truths and about impossible things; but we only resolve to act on the real and the temporal. What is more, opinions are true or false, but not resolutions. We care about whether an opinion is true, but about whether a resolution is just. It is precisely in the character of resolution that what is proper to ethics, the difference between theory and practice, comes into play.”

“2. Having a true opinion is not the same thing as taking the good resolution. An agent can believe precisely that she should do something without acting in accordance with this opinion: ‘Some have good opinions, but by reason of their malice, choose what they should not’. The agent can be intelligent, informed about the truth, and make a bad choice, because her choice is affected by her emotions, themselves concretized in habitus. When she is affected by vices, her resolution is not the better.”

“3. The more a thing appears to us as good, the more we resolutely aim for it. Our degree of engagement in a resolution is proportional to our certitude that it is a good, while opinion is concerned with what we do not know in a sure way. Otherwise said, opinion goes together with incertitude, but resolution does not. We can hesitate over what is uncertain, but we resolve without difficulty on what appears to us as risky” (Boulnois, Généalogie de la liberté, pp. 141-142, my translation throughout).

“From this the fundamental principle of ethics: ‘It is by our resolution for the good or the bad, and not by our opinion, that we become good or bad’. This principle is radically anti-intellectualist; contrary to what Plato says in the Protagoras, it does not suffice to know the better to be able to do it. Our moral character does not depend on our theoretical attitude, but on the ensemble of our resolutions, where repetition constitutes our disposition to act, indeed our aptitude for performing good actions” (p. 142).

“Resolution draws closer to affective dispositions. Aristotle, following the Platonic tripartition of the soul, distinguishes three forms of desire (orexis): appetite (epithumia), spiritedness (thumos), and rational wish (boulesis); the first two are not deliberated, while only the third presupposes logos. Is resolution a form of appetite or spiritedness? No, for three reasons. 1) Animals without language have appetite and spiritedness, but not resolution, which characterizes the human. 2) Humans can aim resolutely at an object without appetite or spiritedness. The one who masters herself (the ‘continent’) indeed aims at an object contrary to her appetite by resigning herself to it, even though she has no appetite for it. 3) In contrast to desire, resolution is not concerned with pleasure: ‘The object of appetite is pleasure and pain; that of resolution is neither the one nor the other’. Certainly pleasure accompanies every virtuous life, worthy of being aimed at by a resolution, and some (the intemperate) make pleasure itself the end of their existence. But what Aristotle wants to insist upon is that every resolution is not in its essence determined by the representation of a pleasure” (pp. 142-143).

“Resolution can be dissociated from sensible desires, appetite and spiritedness. Can it be identified with the third term, boulesis? And to begin with, what does boulesis mean? — Since Cicero, the boulesis of the Stoics has been translated to Latin by voluntas: [quote from Cicero:] ‘As soon as the image of something that appears to be good is presented, nature moves us to obtain it’. Nonetheless, the Stoics affirm that such a mastery of impulse is found only in the sage: only the sage wants what he does; the others are obstructed and tossed around by their passions. It is much later, with Augustine, that this prerogative of the sage will become a faculty accessible to all. Our concept of will, as capacity to consent or not to our representations, carries all this history. — But in Aristotle, boulesis always designates the desire that pertains to the part of the soul gifted with speech (logos). It is an enunciable, intelligible form of desire. The translation by ‘will’ does not agree with this: will is the triggering principle of action, while boulesis can rest without an effect. Boulesis is a wish: the wish does not require the existence of a will; it is the form that desire takes in the discursive part of the soul; like all desire, it is moved by its object, whereas the will is an active principle; finally, we can wish for what does not depend on us, even for what is impossible” (p. 143).

“Thus resolution cannot be identified with a wish. Aristotle cites three reasons for this. 1) We do not take the impossible as a resolution, but we can wish for it (say, to be immortal). 2) No one resolves to do what is not in her power, but we can wish for it (say, the victory of our city at the Olympic Games). 3) We wish to attain an end, but we resolve to take up the means that lead to it (if we wish for health, we decide on the means to achieve it). The first two reasons prevent seeing in boulesis a concept of will (efficacious, trigger of action): we cannot will the impossible, or will on someone’s behalf. As a consequence, boulesis designates a wish more than a willing: we wish to obtain what appears to us as good. Like resolution it is a form of desire, but resolution and wish are distinguished by their objects: the wish can concern the end, the action of another, and even the impossible, while we only resolve on a means that we can accomplish ourselves” (pp. 143-144).

“Thus proairesis is neither desire nor opinion. It is the conjoint act of these two faculties, for there is no ‘intentional faculty’, no power distinct from resolution. Resolution results from the complex conjunction of many operations. Medieval authors tried to express this phenomenon in their metaphysical language: Thomas Aquinas, in affirming that freedom has the will as its subject but the intellect as its cause; Duns Scotus, in holding that the act of the will results from the concurrence of two partial causes, the intellect and the will. But this only serves to obscure the concept again, in the absence of an adequate ontological elucidation” (p. 144).

“If all proairesis bears on an action accomplished willingly, all willing action is not for all that a proairesis: children and animals act willingly, but without deliberation. Since they do not possess the power of anticipating and organizing an action, their movement depends on them, but they have no resolution. Within our desires, resolution results from a deliberation, which is deployed by means of language: ‘we desire because we have deliberated’, and not the inverse; otherwise said, ‘the principle and the cause’ of our resolution ‘is deliberation’. This point is decisive against all the empiricist, mechanist, or naturalist explanations: it is not the mere brute presence of the desirable object that provokes our resolution; the principle that triggers it is situated at the level of discourse (logos). The conjunction of an opinion and a desire is not sufficient, again it is necessary that the resolution comes from a reasoning. The true principle of our resolution is of the order of language and thought. Like all living beings, the human is necessarily moved by what appears to her as desirable, but in contrast to the other living beings, it is by speech that the desirable appears to her. Deliberation discerns as good the object that our resolution entails, and triggers our desire” (pp. 144-145).

“For we deliberate neither about that which is necessary and immutable, nor about an unforeseeable hazard, nor about the impossible, but solely about that which depends on us. Resolution concerns action that can be accomplished by us, ‘what can come to be through us (di’ hemon)’, that of which we can be the cause. We deliberate on that which no one can do in our place. — As a result, we do not deliberate on the end that we pursue, but on the means for attaining it. No more do we deliberate when it comes to following a rule, respecting orthography, or following a recipe. There is only a place for deliberation when many lines of action are possible. — It is necessary to underline: Aristotle does not say precisely that resolution depends on us. What depends on us is the action that is the object of this resolution, and not the anticipative resolution in itself. And if there is a choice of one means among many, from this point of view it is accidental. Aristotle indeed proposes a theory of decision, or of resolution, but not a theory of freedom of choice, or of free arbitration” (pp. 145-146).

“For what depends on us is ambivalent. Resolution concerns actions that we have the power to accomplish, on the condition that we also have the power to not accomplish them. ‘Where it depends on us to act, it also depends on us to not act, and there where there is a place for the “no”, there is a place for the “yes” ‘. The principle of mastery applies to all our willing actions, including those that are resolved upon or deliberated. It would be too easy to affirm that only beautiful actions depend on us because we accomplish them, while ugly ones do not depend on us, as if beliefs and the emotions they evoke prevent us from being the source of them; this would be to shirk our responsibility. As Chisolm used to say, we are responsible not for all we have done, but for what it depends on us to do or not do: ‘that which can be or not be’. This is why we can resolve to execute them or not. The touch stone of ‘what depends on us’ is the power to say no. It is the possibility of negation that reveals that a statement is implicitly an affirmation. But precisely, this does not imply the existence of a common power, anterior to affirmation and negation, to pursuit and to flight. Aristotle does not feel the need for a third instance, consent, preliminary to the yes and no. Every action coming from me is implicitly a yes. But I could have not done it” (p. 146).

“Such actions are ontologically contingent: they could also not be. The metaphysical tradition, in deducing the existence of a power of choice, of a will or a free arbitration: ‘the rational is equivalent to the fact of having in oneself the principle [that allows] the choosing or rejection of a thing’ (Alexander of Aphrodisias); ‘this is proper to the will, by which a substance is the mistress of her act, because it depends on her to act or not act’ (Thomas Aquinas). — But in the alternative between acting and not acting, Aristotle does not specify whether he speaks of actions in the generic sense (in general, the human can laugh or not laugh), or of singular actions (at this instant, can this human walk or not walk?). And precisely, the absence of supplementary characterization obliges us to understand actions in a broader (generic) sense. If the agent walks, she is responsible for having walked, because she also has the faculty of not walking. This does not imply that in a given situation, taking into account her beliefs and desires, she can act or not act, and act in one way or another way. — On the other hand, contingency is not indetermination. Nothing obliges us to understand this contingency in an absolute manner, and as subject to our power. Aristotle has in mind the ensemble of actions that depend on us (eph’ hemin) in general (in the sense of a collectivity: the humans, the agents, the citizens), but not those that depend on me here and now. It is a matter of actions that are imputed to us, if we are not prevented by an exterior constraint” (pp. 146-147).

“The contingency of our action is simply generic, it does not necessarily signify that the action has no determining cause: the human has in general the capacity to act or not act, to do x rather than y. But Aristotle never claims that an agent has, all things being equal otherwise, at a given instant, the capacity to do a thing or its contrary, to act and to not act. ‘What depends on us is a generic capacity, proper to the human, and not that of this particular individual, here and now. Reciprocally, in insisting on the idea that deliberation is the cause of our resolution, Aristotle holds that at the interior of this bivalence, we aim more often at what the logos presents to us as desirable. He does not claim that at a given instant, the state of the universe being given, the human has the choice between committing such an action or not. Aristotle quite simply mentions neither determinism nor free choice, because he does not debate about choice or about destiny, and he has no need to explain our responsibility for an action” (pp. 147-148).

“The principle of our resolution is not an exterior cause, but the conclusion of a reasoning. The agent ceases to ask herself about the good way of acting when there is in herself the point of departure of the action, ‘when she brought back the principle to herself, and within herself to the part that leads, because that is what resolution means’. In effect, deliberation starts from the end that we desire, and investigates the means to achieve it. It is complete when the last means that we have found corresponds to a gesture in which we have the initiative. For Aristotle, the principle of movement is analogous to the principle in geometric analysis, which signifies precisely that the relation between deliberation and action is necessary” (p. 148).

“In ourselves, resolution initiates movement, and action that depends on us consists in this, of which we have to give an account: ‘We all agree that in actions that are willing and in conformity with a resolution (kata prohairesin), each of us is responsible (aition), and that in actions accomplished in spite of ourselves, we are not responsible’. Can we with Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire translate: ”with respect to the causes that are voluntary and which result from free arbitration, each is the cause and is responsible’? — Precisely not. Is this a matter of a ‘libertarian’ conception? That would be to presuppose what is in question: the existence of an indeterminate will in Aristotle. All we can say is that for Aristotle, by anticipatory resolution the agent becomes herself the responsible one who can justify what happens (as with the political action of Demosthenes)” (pp. 148-149).

“According to R. A. Gauthier, we have here a ‘draft of the theory of free arbitration’. But we must reject the retrospective illusion that consists in attributing to Aristotle the conclusions of his successors. Why does an analysis that does not speak of free arbitration become an analysis that almost speaks of it, and that already speaks of it? Aristotle in no way seeks to resolve the problem of free arbitration, because it is not posed in his ethics: [quote from Pierre Aubenque:] ‘Approaching the notion of proairesis from the perspective of “freedom of the will” is to condemn oneself to looking in the Aristotelian texts for what is not there, and neglecting what is there. What is not found there is a doctrine of freedom and responsibility. What is found there is a new contribution to an ontology, and to an anthropology of action’ ” (p. 149).

“An action is implicitly ours when we are in sum its principle, except when there is a constraint, in the same way that a statement is implicitly an affirmation, except when the signs indicate a negation. It is not necessary to have a principle of choice that allows passage from the one to the other. At the same time, our action is called willing when it is entailed by an internal principle, that is to say that it is necessarily caused by our deliberation: given the premises, the conclusion of a practical reasoning is necessary. In brief, what characterizes a willing action is spontaneity, and what characterizes a resolved action is the intervention of language. In the one case as in the other, this does not prevent its depending necessarily on its conditions” (pp. 149-150).

“In this context, what is the principle of action? If resolution is entailed by deliberation, what triggers action is the directive part of the soul. ‘Three things are mistresses (kuria) of action and of truth: sensation, intellect, and desire’. — Is sensation sufficient? It determines the particularity of circumstances, because it perceives the concrete singular in a practical reasoning (‘here is a drink’), but it is not the principle of action, because it is not the beginning of a causal chain that leads there. Is thought sufficient? No more so: it is not thought alone that is the origin of action, but practical deliberation. — Is it necessary to hold to desire alone? Not any more so. It is not necessary to confound the origin of an action and its control, the principle (arkhe) and the master (kurios). Only an articulation between desire and thought constitutes the moving principle of human action. This is operated by practical reason, which starts from an aim, the object of desire, and researches the means to attain it” (p. 150).

“The principle of action is indeed resolution (proairesis), ‘and the principle of resolution is desire and reason — that which pursues an aim’. Resolution is a principle, but it has principles of its own, desire and practical reason. all the better suited to join forces because they are analogous: ‘What affirmation and negation are in thought, pursuit and flight are in desire; […] for the resolution to be good, it is necessary at the same time that the discourse be true and the desire just: it is necessary that the latter pursue what the first affirms’. Resolution concerns what is presented to us as desirable in language, so that the object of desire corresponds to the object described as feasible by a reasoning. The affirmation that concludes discourse and the pursuit that animates desire concur in one sole and same act. Thus the principle of properly human action is resolution, that is to say the conjunction of desire and of the logos in pursuit of an aim” (pp. 150-151).

“Resolution is not the only principle of the conduct of humans, but it is its principle par excellence: no action can be fully good if it is not decided upon intentionally, resolved. Indeed more so than action, resolution reveals the virtues of character. For we judge the moral character of the agent not according to her intelligence, but according to the quality of her resolutions” (p. 151).

“If the quality of resolution makes the quality of moral character, the trajectory of ethics consists in passing from desire, which concerns the apparent good, to resolution, which concerns a good determined by a deliberation. When we pursue what appears to be a good, how do we know whether what we pursue is an ‘absolute’ or an ‘apparent’ good? The Sophists affirm that whatever anyone desires is good; Plato, that we can only will the true and absolutes good. Aristotle leaves this alternative behind by referring to the honest man, the man of the good (spudaios): ‘That which is in truth the object of a wish is the object of the wish of the man of the good […] For the man of the good judges correctly about each sort of thing, and in each the truth is what appears to him […] Without a doubt the most important difference between the man of the good and the others is that he sees the truth in each sort of thing, for he is the rule and the measure of each of them’ ” (pp. 151-152).

“This passage has been taken as a sort of relativism tempered by the prudence of the man of the good: with the incapacity of discovering the truth about the good, it is necessary to trust the honest man, and to universalize his subjective judgment. But even as he reprises the sophism (Protagoras: ‘man is the measure of all things’), Aristotle rejects the relativism that it implies: certain humans can see ‘the truth in each sort of things’ — simply, the condition for achieving this is not just theoretical (it does not suffice to know the good in order to desire it), it is also affective or practical (it is necessary to have acquired the habit of finding pleasure in choosing acts that are worthy). While the Sophists identify freedom with the capacity to act as we want, and Plato with sole adherence to the Good, Aristotle proposes a third way: ethical freedom is the art of deciding well, of taking the resolution required by the circumstances” (p. 152).

“The good human like the vicious desires what is pleasant, for pleasure is the phenomenon of good. But the good human reasons correctly and desires justly, and this is why her choice bears on that which is truly good, while the vicious holds tight to the form of the apparition, that is to say to pleasure, and can associate it with any object whatever. Vicious resolution concerns the uncontrolled pursuit of agreeable objects; virtuous resolution to pursuit of the correct middle term. The good human’s ethical virtue ensures that she will make good choices, and her prudence ensures that she deliberates correctly. The resolution taken by the good human is indeed a point of coincidence between the apparent good (which all seek) and the true good (which she discerns). In order to leave behind the confrontation between Sophists and Platonists, Aristotle has recourse neither to a relativism of appearances nor to an objective norm; in the element of virtue (and of desire), he aims at a coincidence between the phenomenon of the good and its truth. There are certainly degrees, but they mark a progression: each perceives the measure of good of which she is capable” (pp. 152-153).

For a longer excerpt from Sach’s translation of this part of the Nicomachean Ethics, see here.

Ethical Resolution

“Resolution” is Olivier Boulnois’s recommended translation for what I have still been calling the “choice” associated with deliberation in Aristotle’s ethics.

I am slowly pulling together resources for a larger project that aims to recover a positive view of the core of classical — and especially Aristotelian — ethics, and in particular to show that it has untapped value for the cause of human emancipation.

To even get off the ground, such a project must be able both to seriously respond to widespread global critiques of “Western metaphysics”, and more specifically to show how classical ethics can help rather than hinder the advancement of democratic and anti-elitist concerns.

In this setting, Boulnois’s recent large book Généalogie de la liberté (2021) develops a tremendously important analysis of the historical and linguistic dimensions relevant to evaluation of claims about human free will. Boulnois’s work meticulously traces the evolution of related concepts, through many twists and turns. The result is a gripping account of how later views of free will relate — or not — to Aristotle’s way of approaching these matters in the Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere. This is a rather extreme example of how translation always involves some measure of interpretation. It shows how artifice, invention, and radical interpolations can come to appear natural.

This post will start with the concluding paragraph of Boulnois’s first chapter on Aristotle (chapter 4), then cover roughly the first third of his reading of the Nicomachean Ethics in chapter 5 — not because his initial framing and background discussions are not very interesting, but because I want to get right to the main historical part, and specifically to his positive account of how Aristotle develops a rich, robust, and widely admired ethics without ever appealing to a metaphysical concept of free will. (Particularly in the part addressed here, Boulnois will also make a number of forward references, to illustrate the ways in which Aristotle’s account is transformed in the later tradition. This first part focuses on questions of vocabulary and translation, which are necessarily a bit technical, but very important; the upcoming parts 2 and 3 will be more “philosophical”.)

“The Aristotelian definition of imputability is strictly ethical, and not metaphysical: an agent is responsible for her action if she is not coerced and she does not act in ignorance. It matters little whether or not she has the possibility of acting otherwise. We consider that she is responsible for her action because she acted spontaneously, and because she should have acted otherwise. It is not necessary to presuppose a metaphysical concept (the will), or to attribute to it a property (autonomy) detached from all exterior determinism” (p. 132; emphasis in original throughout; my translation throughout; female pronouns and substitution of “human” for “man” my interpolation).

Aristotle’s beautifully simple notion of ethical responsibility became overlaid with complications in the later tradition. While the motivation for these complications is usually claimed to be ethical, careful historical interpretation tells a different story.

“Is free will proper to the human? All of medieval and modern reflection on action rests on this thesis. Thus Thomas Aquinas declares: ‘As [Greek church father] John of Damascus says, the human is made in the image of God, and “image” signifies intellectually, free by his power of arbitration (liberum arbitrio), and having power in virtue of himself (per se potestativum)‘. Like God, the human is the principle of her works; in the image of God, she possesses a will, a free arbitration and a power by herself. Descartes concentrates this image in the will: ‘it is principally due to this infinite will that is in us that we can say that we are created in his image’. This ‘Christian’ definition of what is proper to the human takes in a metaphysical reflection: the expression of John of Damascus, which Burgundio of Pisa had translated to Latin by liberum arbitrio and per se potestivum, is the Greek term autexousion, the key concept of the Stoic theory of action. But to understand its signification, it is appropriate to inquire into its origin” (p. 133).

It turns out that the term autexousion (self-possessed, or one who is self-possessed) does not appear at all in Aristotle. It has a prominent role in Epictetus, and seems to have originated in late Stoicism. Following the typical Stoic pattern of moral absolutism, it would be said that the sage has self-possession in an unqualified way, and that those who do not have it in an unqualified way do not have it at all. But for Aristotle, in all matters of this sort, it is the relative cases that occur in real life that matter.

Burgundio of Pisa made the first Latin translation of the Nicomachean Ethics in the 12th century. He also translated the Greek church fathers John of Damascus, Nemesius, and John Chrysostom. It appears that Burgundio deliberately sought to harmonize his translation of Aristotle with the work of these theologians. Boulnois notes that Nemesius explicitly discusses Aristotle, and John discusses Nemesius at length. But this is only one part of a much longer story.

“The concept of proairesis [resolution or ‘choice’] is analyzed for the first time in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle there evokes diverse ways of attaining the good: 1) ‘that which depends on us’ (eph’ hemin); 2) ‘voluntary’ (hekousion) action; 3) ‘resolution’ (proairesis); 4) moral virtue (arete ethike). These four conditions are four degrees of description of action. To be deserving of praise, an action must be virtuous; to be virtuous, it must be resolved (decided); to be resolved, it must be voluntary and depend on us (eph’ hemin). That is to say, what we have the power to do or not do is primordial, and present at all the levels of analysis. Far from flourishing in a liberty of indifference, this common condition is our way of pursuing the good, and it is deployed according to four modes” (ibid).

In Aristotle, the focus of resolution is on ethical ways of acting. For the theologians, a capability for free arbitration is innate in the soul, and this is what is meant when it is said that the soul is created in the image of God.

I am deliberately using the odd-sounding literal translation “free arbitration” here for libre arbitre, which is standardly rendered as “free will”. Arbitre generally means arbitrator, not will. The presumption is that the will acts as an arbitrator. I would argue that what makes a good arbitration good is necessarily not arbitrary.

The explicit mention of arbitration here has to do with the liberty of indifference that is attributed to the will in the Western Christian theological tradition. The Latin libero arbitrio from which the French is derived is Augustine’s own shortening of his original phrase libero arbitrio voluntatis, which is something like “free arbitration by the will”.

“First of all, is it necessary to follow the translation of Burgundio? Does proairesis really signify ‘free arbitration’ [free will, libre arbitre]? The term [proairesis] appears in Greek in the epoch of Demosthenes, but it is Aristotle who first makes a technical use of it. It has been translated to French in multiple ways: ‘free arbitration’ [free will, libre arbitre] (B. Saint-Hilaire), ‘preferential choice’ [choix preferentiel] (J. Tricot), ‘decision’ [decision] (R. A. Gauthier and R. Bodeus). But these translations are themselves conditioned by the Latin translations of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, of which the Middle Ages knew several versions” (p. 134).

My own brief early treatment of this part of Aristotle used the term “choice”, following Sachs’s translation, but explicitly presented it as nonarbitrary, as it seems to me Sachs does as well.

“What are the principles that guided the first translation by Burgundio in the 12th century? The first translation, the Ethica vetus, translates proairesis by voluntas in book II; in book III, it sometimes preserves proairesis in transliteration, but it also renders it by ‘anticipated judgment’ (preiudicium), later by ‘choice’ (electio), and finally by eligentia (choice that is realized progressively), a term that Burgundio employs from then on constantly. In effect, after having used voluntas in book II, he cannot retain it in book III: this book contains in effect the concepts of ‘willing’ or ‘against one’s will’ (hekousion, akousion), which are translated by ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, which would be redundant with voluntas; he thus hesitates between three possibilities: conserving the Greek term, expressing the idea of anticipated judgment, expressing the idea of progressive choice — and finally follows this last decision. From then on, the Latin term voluntas translates boulesis (‘wish’), the traditional translation since Cicero), but also proairesis (in book I), and again willing action (under the form of the adjective voluntarium, ‘voluntary’). The translation of Burgundio thus concentrates different ethical concepts in the single term of will” (pp. 134-135).

Translating several different Aristotelian terms by one trivially makes the one term that much more widely used, increasing its apparent prominence in the text. At the same time it blunts the kind of nuanced distinctions that Aristotle thrives upon. It imposes unity on what is multiple on its face. In doing so, it deliberately introduces the very same kind of equivocation that Aristotle works to extricate us from in his signature move of pointing out things “said in many ways”.

Even more significantly, we see adjectives, verbs, and nouns in predicate position transformed into a separate quasi-substance (“the will”) within the soul, to which acts are attributed. These acts of willing, unlike the ethical actions considered by Aristotle, are posited as completely internal to the soul. By contrast, the Aristotelian “resolution” that Boulnois aims to recover has an outward-facing aspect and an intrinsic relation to what the later tradition calls “external” action, insofar as it is measured by what we discernably do and don’t do.

The whole notion of punctual actions internal to the soul is a creative invention of the theologians, that is now so familiar to us that it seems natural. Indeed the whole idea of a sharp, categorical distinction between internal and external in the human only emerges in stages, mediated by Stoicism and middle Platonism. It only attains the full force familiar to us in early Christian theology.

Aristotle is in general much more interested in activities than in punctual actions or events. Unlike an action-as-event, an activity can be inwardly directed. But meanwhile he attributes actions-as-events to the whole human being active in the world, not to the soul alone. For Aristotle, the soul is not so much a cause of events as a source or place of meaning.

“The translation of Grosseteste continues a solution envisaged by Burgundio, but imposes it in a coherent and homogeneous way: it always renders proairesis by electio. But the inconvenience of this translation appears in book II, where ‘willing’ action, rendered by ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium) is distinguished from proairesis, rendered by ‘choice’ (electio). It is thus necessary to say that ‘children and other animals have in common the voluntary, but not choice (electio). A strange ‘voluntary’, without will or choice!” (p. 135).

As it is presented in Aristotle’s text though, the distinction between proairesis and “willingness” or “voluntariness” does not seem strange at all — at least, as long as we do not reify will into an independent faculty superior to intellect and desire, and then attribute the willingness or voluntariness to the will rather than to the action. I too have previously hesitated over the English terms “voluntary” and “willing” due to their obvious etymology, but the way the corresponding terms are used in the Aristotelian text seems clear enough. (To further round out a self-contained dossier on these matters, some time soon I will transcribe more of Sachs’s translation, which I continue to greatly admire.)

Boulnois continues, “It is thus Burgundio who traced the rut into which all the medieval and modern translations have not ceased to fall. But must we understand, like him, proairesis as a ‘choice’? And why does he effect this concentration on will? Here it is necessary to inquire after its hermeneutic horizon: we also owe to him the translations of the De natura hominis of Nemesius of Emesa and the treatise On the orthodox faith of John of Damascus, the one and the other meditating on the vocabulary of free arbitration. There is here a historic point of intersection: John relies on Nemesius, who himself cites Aristotle; thus Burgundio translated three works, and each time understood proairesis as a choice and an arbitration” (pp. 135-136).

There is no concentration on will in Aristotle, because in Aristotle there is no separate faculty of will. A definite “will” can be attributed to a whole human being, but he never speaks of an indefinite will over and above the instances of definite will.

“For Nemesius of Emesa, proairesis precedes every action; it is itself associated with the logos; it depends on our judgment. This is a decisive mutation: in Aristotle, practical reason is not a ‘deliberation’ anterior to action, it is its very logic; in Nemesius, proairesis precedes actions; it has become a full-fledged faculty, itself in our power and depending on our judgment: proairesis becomes that which, by nature, depends on us, before any action. Nemesius associates this interiorization with Christianity; he cites Matthew 5:28: ‘He who looks at a woman with desire has committed adultery in his heart’. Thus it comes to be that a faculty of acting has an interior faculty of deciding resolutely for ourselves — a free arbitration” (p. 136).

The decisive mutation he attributes to Nemesius is the interiorization mentioned here. As will be confirmed shortly, Boulnois does not at all mean to reject deliberation. Rather, he is recalling that for Aristotle, the sin qua non of practical reasoning is that it directly issues in action (which is why we call it “practical”). Converting it into something that can be purely interior radically changes the meaning.

In any case, faculty psychology is another later development that has been read into Aristotle in hindsight. It is of course common for translators to take their intended audience’s preconceptions into account, but here the preconception gets in the way of understanding the text.

“In its turn, the work of John culminates in a reflection on the union between the human will and the divine will in Christ. John of Damascus describes the functioning of this psychic union: after the wish regarding the end comes deliberation, in which proairesis is like an epilogue. Thus there exist two appetitive faculties: boulesis (wish?) is concerned with the end, while proairesis is concerned with the means, and arbitrates among them to attain the end: ‘proairesis consists in effect in a taking (hairesthai) and picking (eklegesthai) between two objects, one more than the other’. It is clear that John interprets proairesis as a preferential choice: we take one object in preference to the other. It was logical that this interpretation is incorporated in the translation; Burgundio here translates proairesis by electio: ‘Choice (electio) consists in choosing between two objects and wishing for one more than the other’. Prohairesis has become a choice. It remains oriented toward its end, and is placed structurally in the orbit of the will (since boulesis is a form of willing, thelesis). — But it is precisely this interpretation that inspires Burgundio’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. It remains subject to competition from the concepts of voluntas and of premeditated judgment; this precisely confirms that the complex of translations, despite the attempts at emancipation in book III, remains dominated by the primacy of will” (pp. 136-137).

“With the translation of proairesis by ‘choice’, the key concept of Aristotelian ethics is integrated into the semantic field of will. The Burgundian point of intersection, which gathers Aristotle, Nemesius, and John together in the same bundle of translations, constitutes a second beginning of proairesis as free arbitration in the 12th century” (p. 137).

The way I have been rationalizing continued use of “choice” for the past year is by emphasizing the way in which deliberation is said to determine choice in the Aristotelian text. I did not at all construe it as an Augustinian “free choice of the will”. But still, this nonstandard use could be confusing to readers of the English.

“But apart from the interpretation of John and Burgundio, what does Aristotle want to say? The root hairesis is associated with the verb haireo: to seize, take, or capture. Hairesis signifies first of all a taking. From this the sense of ‘taking a position’, ‘choice’, ‘option’ (and derivatively the sense of philosophical position, then a religious sect, ‘heresy’). — But what does the prefix pro signify? Either ‘in advance of’, or ‘in place of’. The term can thus signify ‘to take in advance’ or ‘to take in preference to another thing’. Preliminary anticipation or preferential choice, which sense is to be admitted?” (ibid).

This suggests a nice, unexpected connection with the Kantian “taking” of things as thus-and-such.

“In Plato, the verb prohaireo (proelometha) has the sense of a premeditation more than that of a choice: ‘If we have nothing else at hand, do you want us to take up weaving?’ Here, precisely, no choice is possible; this does not prevent deciding in advance what we will take up. — In Demosthenes, the expression serves to claim a line of political conduct; accused, the orator assumes responsibility for the account: ‘these events, which my proairesis and my politics have produced’. Here the term has the sense of a deliberate intention, or of a political project — of resolution; Demosthenes thus aligns himself as an engaged and clear-seeing actor in the uncertain setting of political action. Proairesis designates the line of conduct he has intentionally followed, his decision: ‘the proairesis of one who deliberates is manifested in his very thought’. Demosthenes underlines that we do not deliberate about the past; only the present and the future require a deliberation. It is necessary to judge the plans he has formed in the context of the urgency of the moment: ‘Misfortunes were threatening; others were present; examine the proairesis of my government, and do not calumny the events’. The same applies after the fact: ‘If today someone can see a course better than mine, or, more generally, another possible course outside of those I had for proairesis (prohailomen), I consider myself culpable.’ When Demosthenes defends his decision, it is to underline that he could not have acted otherwise, that there was no other possible alternative. But what matters is to undertake a project, to courageously make a resolution for the future” (pp. 137-138).

I found this part particularly clear and helpful. Here proairesis seems to connote proactive, rational commitment and intention.

“The task of the orator in the context of the city is to discern ‘events from their birth, to foresee them, and to announce them in advance (prolegein) to the other citizens’. Proairesis is thus indisputably the capacity to project into the future. Political action only has meaning if it is cognizant of possible events in advance, in the decisive instant, and if it proposes a project. The first quality of a citizen is ‘when he exercises power, to firmly conserve for the city the proairesis of nobility and preeminence’; it is clearly a matter of a global design to be maintained through time, of a resolution. Even if indirectly proairesis often involves the possibility of making choices, the pro of proairesis in Demosthenes designates first of all an anticipation; if hairesis designates a knowledge, proairesis is an anticipative knowledge, a resolution” (p. 138).

“But in what sense does Aristotle use proairesis? As we have seen, for Aristotle human action is a particular case of the movement of animals. But what is proper to the human comes from discourse (logos). It is this difference that allows her to deliberate, to determine a practical conclusion. In the same way that desire is the principle of movement, proairesis is the principle of properly human action. Thus Aristotle defines proairesis as a kind of desire joined with deliberation (with discourse). Thus practical reasoning distinguishes action from movement” (pp. 138-139).

This principle that guides properly human action, as distinct from other bodily movement, is thus associated by Aristotle with the language and discursive thought that distinguish humans from other animals. Properly human “desire joined with deliberation and discourse” distinguishes properly human action from other animal movements, which are born of desire alone. For Aristotle, ethics is not about the training of a presumed will that decides, but rather about acting well in a rich and multifarious sense.

“Translation is not everything, and all solutions have a contingent aspect. But it is necessary to adopt one. Three possibilities are offered to us: choice, intention, resolution. Which to retain? — After having characterized proairesis as concerning actions done willingly, Aristotle adds that it is concerned with what we have ‘deliberated about beforehand (probouloumenon)’, since it ‘is accompanied by speech and by thought’; otherwise, ‘according to its name itself, it seems to signify that which is taken before (or more than) something else’. Here again, pro can have two senses: ‘before’ and ‘more than’. In the first case, it is necessary to understand ‘what we decide to take before something else’. In the second case, it is necessary to understand ‘what we decide to take more than something else’. But the second case is a particular case of the first; to take something more than something else is to prioritize it, to prefer it (praeferre is to prioritize). And especially, the parallel with ‘deliberated beforehand’ (indisputably temporal) encourages understanding ‘that which is known in advance’. The concept of resolution expresses this idea fairly well. When an agent has deliberated, he fixes in advance his intention on a project that guides his action: he resolves” (p. 139).

With this temporal argument, we are getting to the heart of the matter. Aware that he is arguing against a received view that is itself relatively plausible, Boulnois recalls that serious translation (or even, I would add, serious reading) must often recognize that interpretations of a text are debatable. Then it becomes a matter of considering multiple points of evidence, to obtain a well-rounded point of view. It is perfectly possible to sustain a general line of argument even if one of these is conceded. But conversely, arguments are strengthened when they converge from several directions.

In the next chapter, he will argue that it was not until Boethius (480-524 CE) that the interpretation of proairesis in ethics came to be read in light of Aristotle’s entirely separate discussion of future contingents in On Interpretation. Boethius’s reading makes good sense if we accept the radical departure of Alexander of Aphrodisias (flourished around 200 CE) from Aristotle in his polemic against Stoic fate. Alexander’s “libertarian” reading is presupposed by the much later arguments of Duns Scotus (d. 1308 CE) for a definitely non-Aristotelian radical contingency of everything due to the dependence of everything on the will of God. But in another upcoming chapter, Boulnois will systematically dismantle the argument of Alexander, highlighting its implicit dependence on the Stoic view it opposes, which anticipates Avicenna’s un-Aristotelian notion that efficient causality comes before purpose and meaning in the understanding of things.

Boulnois quotes from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, which covers much of the same territory as the better-known Nicomachean Ethics. Here I have more or less substituted the English of The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, p. 1942, while leaving proairesis in Greek as Boulnois does: “Since then [proairesis] is neither opinion nor wish singly, nor yet both (for no one [has proairesis] suddenly, though he thinks he ought to act, and wishes, suddenly), it must be compounded of both, for both are found in a man [who has a proairesis]” (ibid).

He provocatively recalls the root meaning of hairesis (a taking or seizing), in order to argue that proairesis is not just preferring one thing to another, but necessarily includes a duration of time and a forward-looking element. (I have previously read this as a non-arbitrary preference grounded in reasons; this is still available as a fall-back position if we do not accept the whole of Boulnois’s argument.) He argues that the interpretation of proairesis as “choice” is fatally flawed, because in in common speech choice need not depend on deliberation, but according to Aristotle proairesis does. Proairesis is therefore more than just a choice.

“To have a proairesis, it is necessary to have an opinion on the action to be taken and to wish it, but this does not suffice: proairesis presupposes a duration, and first of all that of deliberation. But what does proairesis mean here? Aristotle explains: ‘proairesis is a seizing (hairesis), not absolutely, but of one thing in view of another (pros heteron). But this cannot occur without examination or deliberation. This is why proairesis concerns a deliberative opinion.’ The accent is put on the relation to the end. It is a matter of an intentional decision. Proairesis is indeed more than a choice: one can choose without deliberating. It is more than a decision, because we can decide in an instant. What the time of deliberation entails is the anticipative seizing of the relation between the end and the means. It is a matter of an ‘anticipation’ (pro-hairesis). We can speak of an ‘anticipative seizing’ or of an ‘intentional aiming’ in the measure that it aims at the future. — But the most rigorous translation seems to be ‘resolution’; resolution integrates many constitutive elements of proairesis; it takes time to be formed, it aims at the future, it implies an intention from which it will not let itself be diverted, and it can be the result of a deliberation. This is why it has an incontestable ethical dimension” (pp. 139-140).

“Resolution introduces the logos and time. If animals and children are already capable of acting willingly, their impulsion is characterized by suddenness; while proairesis presupposes a premeditation, a preliminary deliberation, and a hierarchization of priorities. The object of our resolution is initially the object of our desire, insofar as this results from a deliberation (and does not determine it). It is resolution that makes us good or bad, because it is it that triggers this kind of action more than any other: the greater the good we are reaching for, the stronger the resolution that leads us to it” (pp. 140-141).

“With Aristotle, we are indeed far from the medieval and modern interpretation, which speaks of choice (electio). Certainly every choice presupposes a resolution, but resolution is a more fundamental concept than choice” (p. 141).

Classical Ethics

I don’t like arguing in terms that are primarily negative, but found myself doing just that in the course of recent work on Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy. There, a debate between voluntarism and anti-voluntarism occupies center stage. Unsurprisingly, I found myself identifying with the anti-voluntarists. But as I said, I don’t like arguing in terms that are primarily negative.

The solution to this is not hard to find. What I have in common with Schneewind’s anti-voluntarists can be described as a positive view of classical ethics. As I wrote in an early post here, “I think the introduction of rational ethics by Plato and Aristotle was the greatest single event in the history of talking animals on our planet, marking the threshold of a kind of historical cultural adulthood. Before that, there were traditional values; codifications of traditional values into law; and attempts by some people to impose their will on others; but there was no ethics as free and open inquiry into what is right.”

Resolution Revisited

After all the troubled waters of late with voluntarism and free will, it’s time for a breath of fresh air. In an upcoming post, I’ll be taking a more detailed look at the chapter “Resolution” in Olivier Boulnois’s Généalogie de la liberté (2021), which does a brilliant job of uncovering what I think is a genuinely Aristotelian perspective on what I too have still been calling ethical “choice’. This also has tremendous importance for the evaluation of global claims about the history of metaphysics. For now, as a kind of reminder, here are the bits of the chapter that I translated last year.

“Is free will proper to the human? All of medieval and modern reflection on action rests on this thesis…. The concept of proairesis is analyzed for the first time in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics” (p. 133, my translation throughout).

“To begin with, must we follow the [12th century Latin] translation of Burgundio? Does proairesis really mean free will?” (p. 134).

“With the translation of proairesis by ‘choice’, the key concept of Aristotelian ethics is integrated into the semantic field of will. The Burgundian point of intersection, which connects Aristotle and [the Church Fathers] Nemesius and Damascene in the same bundle of translations, constitutes a second origin of proairesis as free will in the 12th century” (p. 137).

“Aristotle defines proairesis as a kind of desire joined with deliberation (with discourse)” (p. 139).

“With Aristotle, we are indeed far from the medieval and modern interpretation, which speaks of choice (electio)” (p. 141).

“The most rigorous translation seems to be ‘resolution’…. Resolution introduces logos and time” (p. 140).

“The object of our resolution is first of all the object of our desire, insofar as this results from a deliberation” (pp. 140-141).

“Our moral character depends not on our theoretical attitude but on the ensemble of our resolutions, the repetition of which constitutes our disposition to act, indeed our aptitude for beautiful actions” (p. 142).

“Since Cicero, the boulesis of the Stoics has been translated to Latin by voluntas [will]. But the Stoics affirm that such a mastery of impulse is found only in the sage…. It is only later, with Augustine, that this prerogative of the sage becomes a faculty accessible to all. Our concept of will, as capacity to consent or not to our representations, carries all this history. But in Aristotle, boulesis always designates the desire that pertains to that part of the soul that is capable of speech. It is a form of desire that is enunciable, intelligible…. Boulesis indeed is a wish: a wish does not require the existence of a will; like all desire, it is moved by its object” (p. 143).

“Among our desires, resolution results from a deliberation, which deploys itself in language…. The true principle of our resolution is of the order of language and of thought. Like all living beings, the human is necessarily moved by what appears to her as desirable; but in distinction from the other living beings, it is through speech that the desirable appears to her…. Resolution bears on action that can be accomplished by us…. There is only a place for deliberation when several lines of action are possible…. We deliberate on that which no one can do in our place” (p. 145, emphasis in original).

“It is necessary to underline: Aristotle does not exactly say that the resolution depends on us. What depends on us is the action that is the object of that resolution…. Aristotle does propose a theory of decision, or of resolution, but not a theory of freedom of choice, or of free will” (pp. 145-146, emphasis in original).

“Such actions are ontologically contingent: they could [also] not be. The metaphysical tradition deduced from this the existence of a power of choice, of a will or a free will” (pp. 146-147).

“Nothing obliges us to understand contingency in an absolute manner, and as subject to our power. Aristotle refers to the ensemble of actions that depend on us (eph’ hemin) in general (in the sense of a collectivity: the humans, the agents, the citizens), but not to those that depend on me (here and now)…. But Aristotle never claims that an agent has, other things being equal, at a given instant, the capacity to do one thing or its contrary, to act and not to act. ‘What depends on us’ is a generic capacity, proper to humankind, and not to some particular individual, here and now. Reciprocally, in insisting on the idea that deliberation is the cause of our resolution, Aristotle holds that at the interior of this bivalence, we more often see what the logos presents as desirable” (p. 147, emphasis in original).

“In this context, what is the principle of action?” (p. 150).

He quotes Aristotle, “and the principle of resolution is desire and reason…. What affirmation and negation are in thought, pursuit and flight are to desire…. For resolution to be good, it is necessary at the same time that the discourse be true and the desire just” (p. 150).

“The sophists affirm that every desire is good; Plato, that we can only truly will the true or absolute good” (ibid).

“While the sophists identify freedom with the capacity to do what we want, and Plato with sole adherence to the Good, Aristotle proposes a third way: ethical freedom is the art of deciding well, of arriving at the resolution the circumstances require…. The resolution taken by the homme de bien [literally, “man of the good”] is indeed a point of coincidence between the apparent good (which all seek) and the true good (that she discerns). In leaving behind the confrontation between sophists and Platonists, Aristotle has recourse neither to a relativism of appearances nor to an objective norm; in the element of virtue (and of desire), he aims at a coincidence between the phenomenon of good and its truth” (p. 152).

“Is it necessary to say that resolution is free? Does it consist in a choice?… Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, nor even that of willingness” (p. 153).

“Nevertheless, Aristotle knows and uses a concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The Latin translation notwithstanding,‘hekousion’ (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, except in cases of constraint or ignorance. Proairesis does not mean ‘free will’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution… Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle did not envisage” (p. 154).

“It is indeed possible to analyze human action without postulating in the agent a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing her in a physical determinism…. Ethics is indeed thinkable without a theory of will” (p. 155).

“Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which mainly refers to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is indeed thinkable without the doctrine of free will” (ibid).

“Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation in the agent: she at least implicitly evaluates the reasons to do x rather than nothing; that which she does is not imposed on her from the outset. That is to say that for her, there are a multitude of options and reasons to act” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free will, freedom is ethical in essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the completion of an education in virtue” (ibid).

“All thought about action situates itself in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (p. 156).

“It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have absolutely accomplished the best action. In the same way in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘best’ (superlative)” (ibid).

Kant’s Anti-Voluntarism

There is a great deal more of interest in J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy beyond what I have covered. His treatment of the 18th century is as rich as what we have seen from the seventeenth. Nonetheless, the main contours of his argument have already been well enough documented to show the basis of his conclusions about the respective historical roles of voluntarism and antivoluntarism, to which I will now turn.

“The Kantian conception of morality as autonomy was not invented just out of the blue…. In earlier chapters I have argued that controversies over voluntarism, the doctrine that God creates morality by a fiat of will, were central to the development of modern moral philosophy. Because of its importance in the theologies of Luther and of Calvin, and in the philosophical thought of Descartes, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke, the issues voluntarism raised could be avoided only by unbelievers like Hume, the radical French thinkers, and Bentham. Everyone else held that God must somehow be essential to morality. Those opposed to the voluntarist explanation of God’s role in it were united in their moral rejection of what the theory implied about the kind of community that is possible between God and human beings, and consequently among ourselves. Voluntarism, they held, makes it impossible for us to love God. Hence it excludes a central Christian moral requirement. And if love of God is impossible, then the common moral understanding of our relations to one another is unavoidably affected. A morality of tyranny and servility can be avoided only if God and man form a moral community whose members are mutually comprehensible because they accept the same principles” (p. 509).

The positive side of Schneewind’s argument has to do with the emergence of a new paradigm of self-governance, as a major alternative to the paradigm of morality as obedience that dominated earlier Christian teaching about ethics. Self-governance is the main precursor of the characteristically Kantian emphasis on autonomy. Meanwhile, voluntarism leads to a morality of tyranny and servility.

“Montaigne opened the way to modern moral philosophy by rejecting every conception of morality as obedience that he knew…. The psychological assumptions of the morality of obedience were formally challenged as early as 1625, when Lord Herbert of Cherbury argued that everyone could know what morality requires. His argument was repeated, in essentials, by a number of later philosophers. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Cambridge Platonists began to offer a more hopeful picture of our desires than that of Hobbes or the Calvinist Puritans. Later thinkers — some, like Shaftesbury, influenced directly by the Cambridge philosophers — elaborated on the point. Eventually a variety of new views were worked out in order to underpin conceptions of morality as self-governance” (p. 513).

The originally Stoic idea of self-governance came to be embraced by many later Christians, as an alternative to voluntarism and one-sided emphasis on obedience. There were also voluntarists who were not obedience theorists, and obedience theorists who were not voluntarists, but these are exceptions. Through consideration of a great many historical figures, Schneewind documents strong correlations between voluntarism and obedience theory, and between antivoluntarism and self-governance theory.

This also suggests a more particular motivation for Kant’s emphasis on the investigation of “pure” or a priori principles. Whatever is pure or a priori — which for Kant means it has no dependence on any particular empirical content — he deems to be valid for the whole universal community of rational beings, which for Kant includes God. Part of the significance of pure or a priori principles for Kant is that they are shareable between God and humans.

Without further ado, here is a longer passage from Schneewind’s conclusion.

“A remark in the Foundations [of the Metaphysics of Morals] gives us a telling indication of Kant’s alliance with the antivoluntarists. Kant says that it is ‘self-evident’ (leuchtet von selbst … ein) from the common ideas of duty and of the moral law that there must be a pure moral philosophy, independent of anything empirical. Everyone will admit, he says, that if there is a genuine moral law, then it ‘does not apply to men only, as if other rational beings had no need to observe it’. If he did not know Pufendorf’s specific denial that there is any law common to God and man, his study of Crusius and of Leibniz’s Theodicy would have taught him that voluntarists would have denied these points. He might have argued for them; it is surely surprising that he could have thought them self-evident. An unquestioned assumption that the moral community must include God would, however, make it seem self-evident to him that there must be a moral law that applies to all rational beings, not to humans only, and a pure a priori moral philosophy to explain it. Kant is plainly making that assumption.”

“Another indication of Kant’s antivoluntarist moral stance is his attitude toward servility. As I pointed out in the last chapter, the early Notes show how strongly Kant objected to the thought of the dependence of one rational being on the commands and desires of another, seeing it as somehow contradicting our essential free agency. The mature Kant does more than condemn servility, as the antivoluntarists always do. He explains what is wrong with it. Humanity in our own person requires us to respect ourselves and to pursue those ends which are our duties ‘not abjectly, not in a servile spirit‘, but always aware of our dignity ‘as a person who has duties his own reason lays upon him’.”

“If these are small pointers to Kant’s agreement with the antivoluntarists, his account of the basic moral principle as a principle of pure practical reason, together with his thesis that the principle motivates rational agents to comply with it, make it plain that he stands with them on the central issues. His account of God’s indispensability to morality is also common among the opponents of voluntarism. From Hooker through Leibniz and Wolff, they assign God the task of assuring us that we live in a morally ordered universe, one in which virtue is, ultimately, rewarded and vice punished. Only in such a world does morality make sense for free and intelligent but needy and dependent creatures. Kant describes God as having this function when he discusses the religious outlook that moral agents will have. They will believe in a Kingdom of God, ‘in which nature and morality come into a harmony, which is foreign to each as such, through a holy Author of the world’. The antivoluntarists thought that they could give theoretical grounds for their belief in divine order. Kant defends the older view on new grounds, resting the belief in divine order on the requirements of autonomy itself. But this radical reversal should not conceal the deep similarity of his position to the older one.”

“The Kantian morality of autonomy is decisively opposed to voluntarism because the rationality of the moral law that guides God as well as us is as evident to us as it is to him” (pp. 509-512).

“For Kant, however, it is not knowledge of independent and eternal moral truth that puts us on an equal footing with God in the moral community. It is our ability to make and live by moral law. The invention of autonomy gave Kant what he thought was the only morally satisfactory theory of the status of humans in a universe shared with God” (p. 513).

Free Will in the Cambridge Platonists

Schneewind dedicates the final section of his chapter on the Cambridge Platonists to their views on the vexed topic of free will. There are quite a few interesting nuances here. But it is important to first recall a few generalities, beyond what Schneewind mentions. The following thumbnail sketch is far from complete, but will serve for this discussion.

What is called free will is in general a subject of immense linguistic confusion. Each time the term is used, we need to pause and consider in which of several highly divergent ways it is being said. First of all, there is no such term in ancient Greek. Second, not only have there been a great many highly developed positions on questions related to this, but different authors use key terms like “free” and “will” in quite different ways. We have to be careful when translators use such modern terms to translate ancient authors.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle instead uses a number of more specific terms, in ways close to their meanings in ordinary speech. These include “deliberation” (bouleusis), “choice” (prohairesis), and what is “up to us” (eph hemin). He classifies human actions as voluntary (hekousios), involuntary (akousios), or mixed (miktos). Actions may also be considered abstractly (aplos), or in the context of an occasion (kata ton chronon).

What is most relevant here is that for Aristotle, an action is called “voluntary” when it is not forced and is not attributable to ignorance. We are unequivocally morally responsible for voluntary actions; responsible in a weaker sense for mixed actions; and not responsible for involuntary actions. It is my contention that insofar as they are justified, claims about the necessity of something called free will for ethics refer to this relatively common-sensical Aristotelian distinction.

In a much more specialized and systematic way, the late Stoic Epictetus (d. 135 CE) redefines prohairesis (choice) as the one and only thing that is eph hemin (up to us), and therefore makes us who we are. In Stoicism generally, all things are said to be governed by fate, understood in terms of cause and effect. Its main early systematizer, Chrysippus (late 3rd century BCE), is usually understood as advocating a “compatibilist” theory of human freedom. Choice in Stoicism is said to involve an inner hegemonikon or ruling principle in the human that is able to exercise or withhold assent (prokatathesis) to appearances and desires. It does not automatically have power over them, but can in principle discipline itself so as to achieve an inner freedom of choice. Only in the fully realized Stoic sage does it have full control.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all broadly emphasize that we are morally responsible for our actions, although their main concern in this seems to be not the dignity of the human, but rather to explain how God can be omnipotent, and yet have no responsibility for evil. Jewish, Eastern Christian, and Islamic traditions all seem to pretty consistently draw the conclusion that humans have what is translated as free will, even though God has foreknowledge of the outcome. But perhaps because it is less controversial in these contexts, the exact meaning of “free” and “will” is left relatively open.

Matters are far more complicated in Western Christian traditions, which came to be dominated by highly nuanced attempts to mediate between conflicting doctrinal concerns. Augustine (354-430) in his early work seems to be a strong advocate of free will, but in his later polemics against Pelagianism, strong doctrines of original sin and the insufficiency of human virtue come to overshadow this. It has been argued that Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was the first defender a fully “libertarian” account of free will in the human. The first universally recognized advocate of such a position is Duns Scotus (d. 1308). Many other writers such as Aquinas make important uses of early Augustine’s term “free will” or liberum arbitrium, while giving it an “intellectualist” slant and taking great care to avoid imputations of Pelagianism.

The Cambridge Platonists sought to heal sectarian divisions in Christianity by promoting a new kind of Christian Platonism. Schneewind previously mentioned that they drew inspiration from the Greek church fathers, as well as Plato and Plotinus. Cudworth wrote a whole book on free will from this point of view.

“Cudworth’s objections to Smith’s consequentialist view of punishment occurs as a passing comment in his discussion of free will. Because our relation to God is such a central issue for the Cambridge thinkers, the complexities of the free-will problem could not be avoided. How can we explain our status as genuine agents, neither mere mechanical transmitters of divine activity nor servile subjects made to comply with commands we would otherwise resist, while acknowledging God’s supremacy and our total dependence on him? Whichcote did not produce any extended philosophical treatment of free will. Smith’s remarks on the issue are more interesting for the attitude they reveal than for the philosophical light they shed on it. More and Cudworth alone grappled with its more difficult aspects. Although Cudworth’s work was not published until the nineteenth century, we can use it to discover the difficulties seen by the most astute philosophical thinker of the Cambridge group as arising from an effort to reconcile the deification of the human, on which they all insisted, with that proper obedience to God, which none of them wished to deny” (Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, pp. 210-211).

We saw last time that Cudworth wants to defend the traditional view of reward and punishment in the afterlife, even though he is honest enough to admit that eternal punishment cannot in itself be a good of any kind. He agrees that other actions all aim at some good. But instead of rejecting eternal punishment on that Platonic ground, he wants or feels doctrinally compelled to uphold a traditional view of justice as retribution, alongside his broadly Platonic view of the good.

“As always in this period, the question of human free will leads unavoidably to the question of what divine free will is, or perhaps is not. Does our liberty make us similar to God, or different from him? He sees God as free not because God acts from ‘an absolute will’, doing as he pleases in an arbitrary fashion, but because God always wills what is best, in accordance with his own nature as shown him by his own understanding. So too in us. Liberty is reason, the ‘liberal election of, and complacency in, that which our understandings propound to us as most expedient’. To be free is to act voluntarily. It is doing what we see to be best, even in the particular situation and not only in general. When we do not see clearly what is best, we fluctuate in a kind of indifference and are in suspense about what to do. God is never in this unhappy state. Our indifference is therefore an imperfection. The perfection of freedom is to be moved by the universal good seen clearly in the particular case. It is to be moved wholly by the divine order of goodness in the universe” (p. 211, internal citations omitted throughout).

The idea that God wills what is best and that we should too sounds promising as an alternative to command and obedience, but the reference to expediency is a bit disappointing. This aspect sounds more like another anticipation of utilitarianism than an inspiration from Plato or any other Greek philosopher. Of course, there are broader and narrower conceptions of utility and expediency, and it is the narrower ones that are most troublesome.

Cudworth rejects theological voluntarism, but he wants to defend a version of human free will that is stronger than what he himself thinks is needed for ethics. Here we must pay close attention to exactly what notion of free will is at issue.

That liberty is reason and that God does not act from an absolute will but wills what is best, is good Platonism. That for a human to be free is to act voluntarily rather than involuntarily is good Aristotelianism, even though Cudworth generally wants to avoid Aristotle. That perfect freedom is to be moved by the order of goodness in the universe steers the Christian concern with freedom in a broadly Platonic direction that is a big improvement over the voluntarist emphasis on sheer will. Cudworth’s anti-voluntarist idea that freedom of indifference is an imperfection is original and interesting.

“Why should we ever have thought otherwise? Smith blames it on the Jews. Their notion of legal righteousness, now replaced by the inner righteousness of the Gospels, forced them to believe in a free will so absolute that it could do or refrain from any action of its own power. The law, for them, was merely the ‘object’ on which this power was to be exercised. Compliance earned absolute merit, and nothing more was needed from God than the law’s indication of his will” (ibid).

That in contrast to Christian emphasis on love, Judaism and Islam recognize only Law, is a cliché common among Christians. It is of a piece with other clichés about the moral inferiority of paganism, which are refuted by a better acquaintance with Greek philosophy. Apparently too, it was very common for 17th-century English Christians to characterize theological ideas they did not like as Jewish. All four of the Cambridge Platonists Schneewind discusses reportedly do this at times. In today’s polarized world, one need not be a defender of Zionist divine right to recognize that this is wrong. But apart from the red herring of blaming the evils of voluntarism on the Jews, these Christian Platonists make valid and telling criticisms of theological voluntarism. Schneewind does us a great service by bringing these angles to our attention.

“Smith calls Maimonides as witness to the Jewish belief that man’s ability to remain totally indifferent to good or evil, and to choose either, showed itself only after Adam’s sin. Thus Adam’s Fall occasioned ‘the rise of that Giant-like free will whereby [humans] were enabled to bear up themselves against heaven itself’ and live without any need for grace” (ibid).

Smith’s reference to Maimonides sounds distorted at best, since Maimonides was known as a strong “intellectualist” and not as a voluntarist. The connection between free will and sin has its classic source in Augustine. The earliest appearance of theological voluntarism is in Philo of Alexandria who of course was Jewish, but apparently Philo had essentially no influence on historical Judaism until he was rediscovered in the 19th century. On the other hand, contemporary scholarship finds a very significant influence of Philo on the Alexandrian church fathers like Clement (150-220 CE) and Origen (185-254 CE).

“Once we see that God is not to be served for wages, but out of love, we will see why we need not and should not claim to possess a free will of this kind” (ibid).

God is not to be served for wages, which is to say that for these Christian Platonists, promises of reward in the afterlife offer only motivation of a very inferior kind, compared to the Platonic and more generally Greek-philosophical motivation of seeking the good for its own sake. Cudworth will nonetheless also defend the traditional view of reward and punishment as socially needed, in order to keep the unphilosophical masses in line.

As we saw above, More’s initial explanation of free will uses what we can recognize as the Aristotelian distinction of voluntary from involuntary actions. To this he adds the Stoic notion of assent. Schneewind points out how far this is from late Augustine and Luther.

“More does not find things so simple. If there are any people who by nature always act for the best, they are indeed blessed; but they are in a small minority. More is concerned with the rest of us, who have to struggle to be good. Is there free will, entitling us to merit if we choose rightly? More’s first answer is that action from free will is simply one kind of spontaneous or voluntary action. We act voluntarily when we do what we ourselves see to be best. By contrast, we act from free will when we could, even seeing what is best, either act or refrain from acting. Only some external force or our ignorance can make action involuntary. But it is less clear what, on More’s view, might deprive us of free will. His problem arises because he holds that a truly honest man really cannot choose to do something base and vicious. It would seem that in forbearing, the honest man acts voluntarily but not freely. And although More speaks of ‘this power of not acting, when it regards things that are base’ as a perfection, he finally defines free will as a ‘power of abstaining from ill’. St. Augustine, with Luther following him, had said that since the Fall we are free only to choose what is sinful. More instead cheerfully says we are free only to resist evil — if our character is poor enough for evildoing to be an option for us” (pp. 211-212).

This distinction between acting voluntarily and acting from free will again effectively recovers Aristotle’s ethical criterion of voluntary versus involuntary actions, while appropriately putting aside voluntarist claims about a freedom of indifference. No extravagant metaphysical claims are needed or even relevant for the kind of freedom or “voluntariness” that is relevant to ethical judgments about responsibility for actions. But these Platonists seem to doubt their own claim that ethical goodness is within the reach of all normal adult humans.

“Even this asymmetrical freedom does not leave More happy. One of the objections to allowing it arises from the theory that the will necessarily follows the greatest perceived good. This of course is his own basic view; and he sees that it entails that sin arises from ignorance. That makes sin, by his own account, involuntary. But is it? Are we not all able to know the good? Here More suddenly develops doubts. ‘The bulk of mankind’, he says, ‘see little of themselves [and] can never discover what is the ultimate good’. If this is their own fault, then they are culpable, as having freely willed not to develop their potential insight into the good. But the ability to learn what is good is itself a gift, for which one can claim no merit. Not having it is also not a moral fault, even though its absence makes it impossible for one to be virtuous. ‘But whether any are so utterly deprived of this natural aptitude’, Smith confesses in despair, ‘is to me so hard and perplexing a question that I had rather wholly decline it, than involve myself with such mysteries of providence” (p. 212).

“More’s concern arises out of Smith’s position. Those who are so thoroughly moved by love that they need no law are also those who cannot bring themselves to act basely. For them the kind of free will claimed by the Jews [sic] is not needed, or rather, as More puts it, we should not say of them that they have free will. But More is less willing than Smith to take these blessed few to be meritorious. Are they not so fully tied to the divine order of goodness that they have no real agency of their own? Is it only the imperfect who need freedom in order to be blamed, and perhaps to be controlled by laws and sanctions? More sees the issue but not a solution” (pp. 213-213).

One who is thoroughly moved by love and reason and cannot bring herself to act basely needs nothing else. The reference to “merit” applies to views of Christian salvation that base it on something other than our moral goodness. Schneewind finds something similar in Cudworth, presented with a little more sophistication. Cudworth cannot quite free himself from a retributive concept of justice that runs deep in the Christian tradition, alongside celebration of the new dispensation that is supposed to be based on love. He nonetheless makes the point that contrary to what has been claimed for it, a liberty of indifference has no moral value.

“Cudworth thinks he needs a strong form of free will in order that ‘divine justice retributive, dispensing rewards and punishments’, may have a justifiable sphere. One kind of freedom poses no problem. We can choose between things that do not differ in goodness or badness at all, as when we pick one coin rather than another when someone offers us money. God also possesses this power. Though he always acts for the best, much about the world is in itself indifferent — for example, whether the number of stars is odd or even, or the exact date of the last judgment. But liberty of indifference of this kind makes for neither praise nor blame. Only where we choose what we clearly see to be the worse alternative can we be blamed. And this is where the problem lies” (p. 213).

Perhaps the problem here has to do with the intrusion of questions about efficient causality, conceived as something over and above good intentions and good consequences. On such a theory, we would not deserve credit for the good intentions and good consequences of our actions, unless it could be shown that we were also the efficient cause of those actions. But if a putative showing of this sort comes back to a kind of metaphysical claim that if applicable at all would always be applicable, we would not have added anything to our account of what makes this or that particular action meritorious.

“The ‘common psychology’ is at fault. Either it makes the will always follow the understanding’s judgement of good and ill, in which case the will is necessitated, not free. Or it allows the will to set the understanding to work on specific objects. But then the will must act blindly, and liberty amounts only to ‘mere irrationality and madness itself acting … all human actions’. A blind will independent of knowledge would make virtue and vice as impossible as praise and blame. What psychology must we call upon to allow freedom, and to avoid imputing all moral evildoing to God as the sole agent?” (ibid, ellipses in original).

More precisely, it is a certain received notion of hypostasized will as superior to reason that is the problem. A will that is not guided by understanding can only be blind. A will that is guided by understanding need not be “free” in what I would call the spurious sense of anthropological voluntarism. Cudworth at least begins to find a better model of freedom in the Stoic concept of self-governance, and even anglicizes the Stoic notion of the hegemonikon as superior to the voluntarist concept of will: “the ruling principle is none of these”.

“Cudworth’s answer is suggestive if not wholly clear. The division of the mind into faculties of will and understanding is a mistake: it is the individual as a whole who knows and chooses. The soul has many powers, or levels of activity. Its plastic nature, the source of its basic life functioning, is not within its control at all; desires are not directly under our control; conscience exerts itself whether we will it to or not, and joins the will sometimes in controlling desire. The ruling principle is none of these, nor is it the understanding alone. He uses the Stoic term ‘hegemonicon’ for the governing principle in us, or our self-power. It is, he says, ‘the soul as comprehending itself, all its concerns and interests, its abilities and capacities, and holding itself, as it were, in its own hand … redoubled upon itself more or less, in consideration and deliberation’. It can be self-impairing as well as self-improving, but either way it is that through which we make ourselves what we are” (ibid, ellipses in original).

The reification of a separate faculty of “will” as an internal efficient cause of our choosing as we do does indeed seem to be part of the problem here. On some accounts at least, the Stoic hegemonikon is not a separate faculty acting as a kind of interior cause, but an emergent property of self-governance in the whole human being. It makes good sense that self-governance in a human would be a kind of holistic property, rather than the effect of a discrete cause. This would also be a remote ancestor of something like the emergent unity of apperception in Kant.

The source of the power of assent or non-assent in Stoicism is left relatively open. In Kant, the unity of a unity of apperception transcends the order of factuality. Not only is it not attributable to a separate faculty, it does not name an existing state of affairs either. It is rather a kind of goal toward which we can be seen to tend — in effect, an Aristotelian telos or final cause.

“How does this reflexive hegemonicon operate? It does in the distinctively human world what plastic natures do in the purely material world. It serves as a source of order, under God but acting independently of God. It does not make us indifferent to apparent good and ill. It enables us, however, to consider carefully before we act. Haste is thus the source of blameworthiness. We might always have suspended choice and thought again. Grant that we have this power over ourselves and you grant that we are not always determined by ‘antecedent necessary causes’. Thus in the war between conscience and the passions, the understanding does not inevitably determine the agent one way or the other: ‘the matter wholly depends upon the soul’s hegemonic or power over itself, its exerting itself with more or less force and vigor in resisting the lower affections … this is not a single battle … but commonly a long lasting or continued war’. God praises or blames us as the battle turns out” (pp. 213-214).

In my lexicon at least, reflexivity or self-consciousness in us humans is also not a simple global property that we could be said to simply have or not have in a binary way. It is a matter of nuance and detail. It grows weaker and stronger at different times.

“Cudworth argues that the possession of a ruling power of this kind is a necessary attribute for beings as complex as we are. Without it, our various aspects would not function together to make meaningful action possible. In making us at all, God had to make us free; and he therefore had to make us capable of erring and sinning. It is thus no derogation from God’s power that he created self-acting beings other than himself, nor even that he created them with a freedom — that of choosing a known lesser good — that he himself does not possess. God’s fecundity is such that he makes all the possible kinds of being, even those that are self-acting; and out of them all he creates a harmonious whole, without constantly interfering in the world he has made” (p. 214).

Likewise, the freedom that matters for ethics is not something that we are simply given, or have or do not have. It is always a matter of degree, and it is again a matter of nuance and detail.

“What leads us, then, to use or not use our power over ourselves? How does the hegemonicon reflexively decide whether we shall follow our conscience or passion? On what principle does it accept or reject the promptings to action that come before it? Free choice is not the same, Cudworth insists, as determination by the good. Neither is it the same as chance determination, or pure contingency. We do not make ourselves damnable by ‘the cast of a die’. But on the details of the alternative to these rejected views, showing how self-acting agency is to be understood, Cudworth is silent” (ibid).

If my analysis is at all correct, these are badly framed questions. There is no single efficient cause that gives us, or could give us, freedom or self-consciousness. Our self-governance inheres, in varying degrees, in many different details of how we lead our lives.

The Cambridge Platonists

Viewed historically, none of the world’s major religious traditions is a monolith. The Cambridge Platonists were not so much philosophers as Christians who sought new ways to avoid the destructive sectarianism that became especially common in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. They stand out as sincerely religious figures for whom religion ought to put ethics first, rather than questions of doctrinal purity. The world needs more of those.

We are still walking through J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, which seeks to characterize the full complexity of 17th- and 18th-century moral philosophy in the European tradition, and in so doing to explain the background of Kant’s innovations in ethics. In particular, it documents the existence of alternatives to the widespread medieval and early modern tendency to reduce morality to a matter of obedience to divinely sanctioned law.

Beyond the scope of Schneewind’s argument, it is also important to note that none of the Greek philosophers sees morality as reducible to obedience. It is commonly claimed that Christianity is ethically superior to Greek philosophy, but historically it is just wrong to claim that only Christianity introduced criteria of love and forgiveness. If we look seriously at what is usually translated as the cardinal virtue of “friendship” in Aristotle, it is first and foremost a kind of non-possessive love. A readiness to forgive is one of the principal characteristics of Aristotle’s other cardinal virtue of magnanimity. Aristotle’s generous, non-exclusive outlook also recognizes yet other other cardinal virtues in free and open deliberation, unbiased practical judgment, and a kind of generous fairness or equity (epieikeia) that looks beyond the letter of the law. There are multiple summits. Rather than claiming that Christianity is by definition morally superior to such a philosophical outlook, the apologetic claim ought rather to be that it is capable of reaching the same heights.

“Thomasius’s rejection of servility in our relation to God is a late articulation in Germany of an attitude that found full voice earlier in England. ‘A right knowledge of God, John Smith wrote in the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘would beget a freedom and liberty of soul within us, and not servility’. ‘Reverence God in thyself’, Benjamin Whichcote exhorted his readers, ‘for God is more in the mind of man, than in any part of this world besides’. Ralph Cudworth quoted Athanasius in order to assert that ‘God was therefore incarnated and made man, that he might deify us’. From the 1640s on, these three formed part of a group engaged in a radical rethinking of Protestantism” (p. 194).

“Like many others who contributed to the development of thought about morality, these thinkers were responding to religious controversies that were tearing their society apart. Sectarian Calvinism was swamping out the Thomism that Hooker had thought foundational for a national church…. Could one appeal to reason and decency to hold society together? Many held that such a view smacked of Pelagianism in modern dress. The appeal to reason was dangerously like Arminianism in its denial of arbitrary prevenient grace; it also resembled the anti-Trinitarian doctrines of Socinianism. Could one insist on natural law without suggesting that one was either a papist or a Hobbesian? Everyone who had opinions seemed to be absorbed in questions of doctrinal purity. Finding biblical texts to prove one was right, denouncing those who did not accept exactly the correct formulation of saving truth, taking political action to exclude those in error from membership in one’s church — these matters seemed to be overwhelmingly important. The disagreements that they occasioned and exacerbated threatened not only to destroy the possibility of a common faith among English Protestants. They were a threat to maintaining any common social and political life” (pp. 194-195).

We have already seen this concern to avoid conflict over religion in Schneewind’s coverage of the natural law tradition. It is important to see why even intensely religious thinkers were motivated to defend what we may think of as secular values. They could see very concretely the evils of rampant sectarianism.

“Whichcote, Smith, More, and Cudworth were deeply embroiled in these local battles. Unlike many of their opponents, however, they developed a stance and a philosophy that in important ways transcended the particularities of the quarrels of the times. Commonly called the Cambridge Platonists, the group’s central members were divines who spent much of their lives as academics at Cambridge. The originators of the movement were not philosophers but preachers and reformers. Though they developed a complex and coherent outlook, they did not wish to present it in the kind of systematic form that philosophers often strive for. They worked out their views in terms of Scripture, and argued, as did most of those whom they addressed, by interpreting biblical texts. Such theory as they presented was offered largely to show the implications of their new way of reading texts. Their Platonism was much mediated by Plotinus and the Greek fathers of the church. Using Plato to provide help for a new Christian exegesis was an incidental, not a central, aim. The most coherent philosophical account of the group’s outlook seems indeed quite Platonic, or neoplatonic. But Ralph Cudworth’s Plato, an all but overt Christian who had learned about God’s revelation to the Jews from the Egyptians, is not exactly the Plato of modern scholarship. The extent of genuine Platonism in the group matters far less than its attempt to put Christianity in a new light” (p. 195).

This aspect of Schneewind’s emphasis will be mine here as well.

“Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83) originated the movement. In sermons and personal teaching he insisted on two conclusions: that morality is the heart of religion, and that reason and religion are the same thing. ‘There are but two things in religion’, Whichcote writes, ‘Morals and Institutions: Morals may be known, by the Reason of the thing; morals are owned as soon as spoken, and they are nineteen parts in twenty, of all religion’ ” (p. 196).

It is important to recognize that this was not part of a minimalist, common-denominator view of religion, like that promoted by deism. Positive embrace of poetically rich specific religious heritage need not be accompanied by insistence that the virtuous pagan and others who do not share the same heritage of symbolic identification are automatically consigned to hell.

“[Whichcote] is no Deist. Unlike Lord Herbert of Cherbury, he aims to preserve the essentials of Christianity. Where Herbert had given conscience the primary role as a test of true revelation, Whichcote gave morality a place no one since Pelagius had dared to give it. His radical claim is that ‘the Moral part of religion does sanctify the soul; and is Final both to what is instrumental and instituted’. Morality suffices to win salvation and must be the controlling factor in the arrangements we make about both worship and church governance; and morality is to be known by reason, rather than by appeal to authority, including biblical authority” (ibid, internal citations omitted here and throughout).

Religious beliefs offer additional motivation and sustenance for us to act ethically ourselves, not additional requirements by which to judge others.

“The one part of religion in twenty that comes by institution — by God’s positive will revealed in scripture — has, Whichcote holds, merely instrumental value…. But the moral part of religion ‘is necessary in itself’, containing requirements dictated directly by reason. The requirements of morality are not due to God’s will; any sane person would want to abide by them even if God granted a dispensation from them. It is only if we live in accordance with these necessary moral laws that we will be truly happy. ‘Morality’, Whichcote says, ‘is not a means to anything but to happiness; everything else is a means to morality’…. Like Cudworth and Smith, Whichcote cites scripture to authorize his claim that we can be deified by making ourselves virtuous” (p. 197).

“The central thesis is that we are each able to know, by thinking for ourselves, how we are to live and behave, and that we each have ‘power to execute and perform’ according to this knowledge. Because Whichcote is strongly opposed to voluntarism, he insists that there is something to be known at the base of morality. ‘Moral laws are laws of themselves’, he tells us, ‘without sanction by will; and the necessity of them arises from the things themselves. God made us to know both him and his creation, and so made the mind with sound faculties. If we use them properly we are in accord with ourselves; to refuse to seek truth and to refuse to think for oneself are equally to be at odds with oneself. The important truths are readily accessible to us, moreover, and are neither recondite nor difficult” (ibid).

This is the principle of self-governance that we have already seen in the neo-Stoics.

“When we are immoral, we act against our own principles and contradict our own reason. We therefore need no external tribunal to tell us we have acted wrongly. ‘The unrighteous are condemned by themselves before they are condemned by God.’ Being self-condemned is what is really meant by being in hell; being self-consistent and filled with ‘humility, modesty, righteousness, temperance, reverence of deity and the like’ is what is meant by being in heaven. Heaven and hell are not places; they are states of mind…. To be saved, and so deified, simply means to live in accordance with what we ourselves see to be right” (p. 198).

“Like Lord Herbert, Whichcote argues in several sermons that because God holds us all equally accountable, he must have made saving knowledge available to all alike…. In Whichcote’s thought, then, moral knowledge [is] more widely accessible than knowledge either of the natural world or of revelation…. That inner governance which is both morality and religion must lead to virtuous action, or it is nothing” (p. 199). ” ‘The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most voices, are false measures of truth’ ” (p. 199n).

Hear hear.

“John Smith (1618-52) … agrees that morality concerns one’s inner condition, not only law-abiding external action, that heaven and hell are states of mind, that sanctification and justification must go hand in hand, that the laws of morality do not arise from God’s arbitrary will, and that we participate in God’s mind…. Even ignorant men feel an instinctive yearning toward union with God…. If we can only bring ourselves to act better, we will know more. This is what Smith means by saying that we learn more about God through action than through speculation. Truth and goodness ‘grow both from the same root and live in one another’ ” (p. 199-200).

“It is just obvious that though we should love ourselves, we should love other people and God even more. We can increasingly transform our desires to fit that insight. The search for our own perfection is, in Smith’s eyes, an effort to increase the extent to which we act out of love for others” (p. 200).

If our own “perfection” consists in acting out of love for others, the end goal must encompass a good deal more than our individual perfection.

“Smith’s opposition to voluntarism and his belief that God is essentially a loving being push him in the direction of a consequentialist view of morality. Although it would be absurd to think of God obeying anyone else, he is ‘not Ex Lex and without all law’…. God follows his reason, and so he takes the goodness of things as a reason to bring them about. God’s aim must be to bring goodness into being in the world; and the law of nature that he has inscribed within our souls tells us to do the same…. Not only is the law inscribed in us a law of goodness. It is one which we need not be made to follow by threats. A law of that kind — the kind Grotius and Hobbes took as central — can exact only external observance” (pp. 200-201).

“Henry More (1614-87) was the one member of the Whichcote group to publish a systematic work on moral philosophy during the seventeenth century. The Encheiridion Ethicum of 1666 … is in some respects eclectic and a little eccentric. It nonetheless spells out the consequences of the views of Whichcote and Smith when those are given a philosophical form. More does not take up all the ideas they raise — he rejects voluntarism, for instance, but without elaborating on the rejection or arguing for it…. Yet its main thesis is quite straightforward, and plainly in line with the Cambridge emphasis on love and reason as together forming the center both of morality and of our relations with God” (p. 202).

What more could we need in order to be ethical, besides love and reason?

” ‘In morality we are as sure as in mathematics’, Whichcote pronounces, and More produces some twenty-three ‘moral axioms or noemas’, which, he says, in a phrase recalling Whichcote, are ‘agreed to as soon as heard’. The noemas are self-evident and can serve the purpose in moral reasoning that ‘first undeniable axioms’ do in mathematics. More introduces them because they will make morality plain and compelling even to those unfortunately lacking in what he calls the ‘boniform faculty’, a brief account of which opens his treatise” (pp. 202-203).

I have a few doubts about this part. More’s noemas, summarized below by Schneewind, all in all seem pretty reasonable, but I regard appeals to self-evident principles as a weakness, even in mathematics. (Martin-Löf’s constructive type theory manages to do without.) Some things are so evident that they are hard to explain; but that does not make them self-evident. On the other hand, this is a rather technical point. Somewhat more seriously, while we may feel something close to certainty about the abstract principles themselves, all practical applications involve interpretation at the point where universals are applied to particulars, and such interpretation is in principle always open to further development. But again on the other hand, in practice what is almost self-evident is hard to distinguish from what “is” self-evident.

“What exactly that faculty is remains somewhat of a mystery even at the end of the book. But it is at least a love of the highest good as well as an insight into it; it leads us to do good as well as to desire it for ourselves; it makes us ‘pant after God’; and it is the supreme faculty in our minds or souls, through which we resemble God, ‘who is goodness it self’ ” (p. 203).

It is undeniable that the whole human being (often, at least) has a kind of overall sense for what is good in various situations. Calling it a faculty seems a bit reified.

“Noema I tells us that the good is that which is ‘grateful, pleasant, and congruous’ to any living being. In III and IV we learn that some beings are superior to others, and that goods may differ in quality, in quantity, or both. These noemas also underlie sincerity, the virtue by which the mind is wholly devoted to the pursuit of the best and brought to pursue the greatest good with the greatest zeal. Noema V instructs us to choose the good, preferring not simply the greater to the smaller but the more excellent to the less. The seventh noema recognizes an asymmetry of good and evil: it is better to miss a considerable good than to suffer a comparable evil. Noema IX suggests that there might be a trade-off between a lesser good of more ‘weight and duration’ than a superior good of less extent. Noemas X and XI tell us that, allowing for probabilities, pursuit of good and avoidance of evil should not be affected by the times at which they occur. These plainly show the rationale of prudence; and noema XII gives the ‘demonstration’ of that virtue, saying that a calm mind undisturbed by the passions judges better than a mind roiled by desires. Noema XIII, finally, requires that we purse the greater good with the greater zeal” (pp. 203-204).

What is perhaps most noteworthy in this enumeration is the passing mention of sincerity. A bit further below, Schneewind characterizes More’s ethical stance, as he previously did that of Cumberland, as consequentialist (that action is good which brings about good). This invokes one of the two major dimensions relevant to ethical assessment: consequences. The other, invoked by the mention of sincerity, consists in our intentions, good will, and acting in good faith.

“Noema XIV, grounding justice, is simply More’s version of the golden rule: if you want someone to do good to you, you are bound to do the same good for him in similar circumstances. In XVI we are told to return good, not evil, for good. Noemas XVII-XIX say that it is good for people to have the means to live well, and that the more who have the means, the better. Moreover it it is better for one person to be prevented from living luxuriously than for many to be in want. There are two noemas concerned with obedience: we are to obey the magistrate ‘in things indifferent’ and to obey God rather than men. Finally, we are to give people what is due to them, without troubling them”; but we should recognize that people can forfeit their rights by bad behavior” (p. 204).

This all seems unobjectionable, if a bit pedantic. But I expect I would find the views of More’s opponents truly horrendous.

“More has no sense that there is any tension among these axioms; he seeks no reduction of their number; and he believes in addition that being fully virtuous will make us perfectly happy. He plainly thinks that morality is wholly a matter of the pursuit of good, and that there can be no ultimate conflict or disharmony among the parts of that search” (ibid).

I don’t see tension either. But in attempting to specify universal principles of good at this level of detail, it is inevitable that not all of the principles will be of the same kind. Moreover, this being the case aggravates the worry that it is hard to know whether the enumeration is complete.

” ‘Therefore it is necessary … first to inquire and find out, what is the mode and standard of this right reason?’…. The principle, perhaps not surprisingly, turns out to be the boniform faculty, which is now equated with an intellectual love of all good. Because this is the divine in us, ‘it ought in preference to be the rule and standard of all the rest … this most simple and divine sense and feeling in the boniform faculty of the soul, is that rule or boundary, whereby reason is examin’d and approves her self’. It is a single and simple idea, ‘but all the shapes and modes of virtue and well doing’ come from it — including justice, temperance, and fortitude. If your boniform faculty is operating, you need not appeal to the noemas, which cover the same ground” (pp. 204-205).

We have encountered the Stoic criterion of right reason numerous times recently. Here More raises the good question of its “mode and standard”, though he answers it rather quickly. But his answer is not vacuous, even if it does raise further questions.

While the “intellectual love of all good” sounds a bit like Spinoza, Spinoza’s library and correspondence, which have been well studied, contain no reference to any of the Cambridge Platonists. Like many of their contemporaries, More and Cudworth in fact denounced the conclusions of Spinoza. But a century later, Herder would synthesize what became the influential Romantic view of Spinoza by integrating Cudworth’s notion of “plastic natures”, mentioned again below.

“More thus presents a fully consequentialist ethic. He is quite willing to speak of laws of nature, even giving a rather Grotian account of the rights involved in them. But he plainly intends the laws to be explained in terms of their tendency to produce good. Divine reason, he says, has dictated to us ‘such laws as tend, in their own nature, to the happiness of all mankind’. And we find in the supreme rule derived from, or constituted by, the boniform faculty, a principle that everyone can use to make moral decisions. Considering the value of things other than virtue, More dismisses subtle wit and strong memory as unimportant as long as we are filled with love of neighbor and goodwill to mankind. ‘For the good and perfect man is not so much actuated by a list of precepts gotten without book, as by living inwardly and printing in his mind a single and sincere sense of things.’ We are to pursue in singleness of mind that which is the best. And the rules for doing this are plain enough for everyone to use” (p. 205).

As mentioned above, Schneewind has previously noted a consequentialist turn in Cumberland. But in Cumberland, it is natural law that anchors and gives shape to our love of the good, whereas in More, the validity of law is derived from our sense of the good. Law is no longer a voluntaristic fiat ex nihilo.

“Love is thus the source of law. The law is the expression of the boniform faculty, which is what is divine within us. By living in accordance with it, we ourselves approach divinity. That is what Plato taught when he spoke of virtue as a thing divine, ‘and how much ally’d, and resembling unto God himself’ ” (ibid).

“That [Cudworth’s] orientation is the same as Whichcote’s and Smith’s is clear from a notable sermon preached by invitation to the House of Commons in 1647. The moral quality of our lives — ‘willing or not willing as we ought to do’ — matters more than anything else. Those who turn themselves away from self-centered love to love the good in all things, as God loves, will find heaven within and thus need nothing more. They will be moved by a law of love which leaves them free in obeying it because in this obedience, even though they are under ‘the most constraining and indispensable necessity’, there is no ‘narrowness and servility’. They are a law unto themselves. Doctrinal differences are unimportant; following the commandment to love is the sole way to know more about God. And our chief task is to perfect not our intellects but our wills or hearts” (p. 206).

Will is now a definite intent that can be explained, rather than a faculty serving as a supernatural unexplained explainer, as it is for the voluntarists.

“Like his Cambridge colleagues Cudworth thinks that when we come to know God better through reforming our will and loves and lives, we are coming to know God’s mind directly. The aim of his True Intellectual System is to spell out a metaphysics that explains how this is possible” (ibid).

Here will has the unobjectionable sense of a definite intent, rather than an unexplained super-power that disrupts and hijacks our ability to reason about the good.

“He is opposed also to the occasionalist element in Cartesianism — the thought that God and God alone sustains the world and its apparent activity, by exercising his power at every moment to keep things existing and working in accordance with his plans” (ibid).

Occasionalism usually arises as a consequence of theological voluntarism, so to oppose the latter is also implicitly to oppose the former.

“Yet we are not forced to say that God does everything. Nature is not divinity itself, but there are what Cudworth calls ‘plastic natures’ that affect natural things, acting without consciousness but as if intelligently. They serve as God’s under-ministers to do the job of maintaining order. Animal reproduction and the ‘mellification’ of bees are examples of this. Plastic natures are at work as much in the macrocosm of the universe as in the microcosm, ‘which makes all things thus to conspire every where, and agree together into one harmony’ ” (ibid).

In effect, Cudworth’s plastic natures act as natural agents of providence. Cudworth is highly aware of the fact that Descartes’s mechanistic view of nature allows no place for any such agents. Meanwhile previous Christian accounts of providence had implicitly assumed an overtly supernatural direct control of, or intervention in, natural events by God. By this innovation, Cudworth charts a course between Scylla and Charybdis. Cudworth has little use for Aristotle, but his plastic natures take over the role of what for Aristotle is “internal” teleology embedded in the workings of nature.

Following the old scholastic pattern that was also adopted by the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino, More and Cudworth both explicitly attack the unity of the material intellect in Averroes. More wrote an elaborate poem “Antimonopsychia” that uses Plotinus to refute the “monopsychism” that various writers misattributed to Averroes. But Cudworth also uses Platonic ideas in God’s mind in a way that unwittingly resembles Averroes’s use of the “treasury” of forms in the material intellect to underwrite and explain the human intellect’s capability for objective understanding of essences.

“Cudworth’s Platonizing theory is that unless we were in direct contact with God’s ideas no one could think or speak in ways that could be understood by anyone else…. But when all created minds contemplate the very same ideas or truths in God’s mind, ‘they do all of them but as it were listen to one and the same original voice of the eternal wisdom that is never silent’ ” (p. 207).

“What, then, do we learn about morality when by living in love we manage to suppress the passions and desires that muddy our thoughts and obtrude between our minds an God’s? ” (ibid).

The Cambridge Platonists seem generally to adopt the Stoic and neo-Stoic view that human passions both can and need to be radically suppressed so that they do not impede our reason, rather than the more moderate Aristotelian view that desire and reason can come to form an integrated whole in the human being. They identify Plato’s eros with the caritas that Augustine sharply distinguishes from cupiditas.

“A central part of the answer … is that there are special moral ideas in God’s mind that guide him in his creativity and which ought to guide us. Voluntarism is, consequently, false.”

“Cudworth is quite willing to accept God’s omnipotence, but he denies what he accuses Descartes of thinking, that it alone entails voluntarism. It is not limiting God’s power to say that he can do only what is not self-contradictory. God’s wisdom is as much a part of God as his will, so if the latter is limited by the former, God is still not controlled by anything external to himself” (pp. 207-208).

“To make a more positive case, Cudworth brings in some considerations about essences and concepts. Like Suarez, he holds that essences are immutable. One might change the name one attached to the essence, but doing so would not touch the essence. Now it is essences that make things what they are; and if essences cannot conceivably be changed, then even God cannot change them. So God cannot by will alone make something that is essentially good into something that is not essentially good. God can either make something exist or refrain from doing so; but if that thing is by its nature good, then God in creating it is necessarily creating a good thing. And God cannot make something good without endowing it with the essence of goodness. Will alone, therefore, Cudworth concludes, cannot be what makes good things good” (p. 208).

“In chapter XLVI of Leviathan Hobbes used his theories of language and knowledge to attack the kind of theory of meaning to which Cudworth is here appealing…. Cudworth plainly knew Hobbes’s view and saw the threat it posed to his own Platonism. He adverts parenthetically to the possibility that moral terms might be ‘meer names without significance, or names for nothing else but willed and commanded’ ” (ibid).

“Against materialism Cudworth erects a theory of plastic natures, based on the view that the evidences of design in nature would not have come about from matter alone, and on the rejection of occasionalism. In defending the irreducibility of moral concepts, his purpose is to defeat voluntarism, whether Hobbesian or Cartesian. To do so he moves to arguments about essences and meanings that are quite general, and not tied specifically to morality as such. His other Cambridge colleagues did not use arguments of this kind. But Cudworth was plainly not satisfied with the kind of view that underlies Smith’s and More’s rejection of voluntarism…. The upshot of this view, as I pointed out in the case of More and of Cumberland after him, is a proto-utilitarian ethic, a consequentialist view that tells us that God necessarily loves good generally and acts to bring about as much as he can, and that we ought to do likewise” (p. 209).

“John Smith spells out a further consequence, as I noted earlier. Punishment cannot be retributive; it must be either determent or reformative. Cudworth raises an objection to this conclusion, an objection we do not really expect…. Consequentialism must be rejected because it forces us to the wholly unacceptable conclusion that God could not reasonably carry out retributive justice. But if consequentialism cannot be accepted, then the argument from God’s goodness will not give a satisfactory reason for rejecting voluntarism. Cudworth seems to think he is forced by his moral concerns into arguments about meaning and metaphysics” (pp. 209-210).

Even the proto-deist Herbert of Cherbury had included reward and punishment in an afterlife in his minimalist program. Cudworth clearly recognizes Smith’s point that punishment or retribution cannot be a good in itself. As Schneewind points out, this results in an impasse for Cudworth, who also clearly wants to hold onto a traditional Christian view of supernatural reward and punishment.

“It is as if he would like to attribute to God two moral attributes, goodness and justice, yet hesitates to do so…. His view of eternal punishment suggests that he believes that divine retribution does not do good in the way that beneficience does. Hence justice and love might conflict. But not only is such conflict theoretically inadmissible in Cudworth’s harmonious universe. The question is politically loaded. The Puritans emphasized an Old Testament deity of justice and vengeance. If Cudworth were to give justice priority in God’s moral nature, he would seem to have gone over to their side. But insisting on the priority of love, as he generally does, leads him into serious difficulties explaining eternal punishment. Perhaps silence seemed the best way out” (p. 210).

I will devote a separate post to Cambridge Platonist views on free will.