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).

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).

Perfectionism?

I have been thoroughly enjoying all the unfamiliar detail of Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy. His next major section I found even more interesting. But as is common with this kind of history, generalizing abstractions can be problematic. Schneewind wants to characterize a counter-trend to natural law in the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries. In so doing, he moves back and forth between two different models that have very different implications.

When he states the top-level thesis of the book, he does so in terms of an ethics of self-governance that stands in contrast to the reduction of morality to obedience. This I find provocative and insightful. But the section immediately following the one on natural law is presented in terms of a model of “perfectionism”. Fortunately, he seems to use this only as a shallow grouping mechanism that does not significantly affect either the excellent detail or his main thesis about self-governance. But the connotations of the term “perfectionism” are nonetheless troublesome.

It seems that the term “perfectionism” was introduced into contemporary discourse by the political philosopher John Rawls in the later 20th century. Rawls uses the term to primarily name an elitist view of justice, that the state should accord special treatment to certain kinds of high achievers, rather than emphasizing equality before the law. He cites Nietzsche as a primary example, and contrasts this with his own view of justice as fairness. But Nietzsche does not like the state at all, and does not concern himself with matters of state policy.

Rawls attributes a more moderate version of this elitism to Aristotle, while also giving positive mention to a benign Aristotelian principle that people naturally enjoy the exercise of more developed capabilities, both by themselves and by others. Some latter-day conservatives have certainly tried to appeal to Aristotle in order to justify views based on presumptions of natural inequality.

Aristotle does along the way make incidental comments about observable differences in achievement. In these contexts, he does not always clearly distinguish between accidental, localized social facts and more general facts of nature. But at the level of principles, Aristotle is the historical source of the notion of justice as fairness that Rawls defends. Aristotle recommends extending the inherently reciprocal model of friendship to politics. He defines constitutional rule as one in which the same people both rule and are ruled. Moreover, Aristotle is in general highly sensitive to the accidental character of accidental facts. Anecdotal reports of accidental facts do not justify generalization about what is natural. In spite of his emphasis on particular cases, Aristotle is far more committed to these matters of principle than to any particular generalization from accidental facts.

Many discussions in contemporary philosophy are conducted at the level of broad generalizations about kinds of positions. In itself there is nothing wrong with this, but people are not always careful about the fit of particular cases to the generalizations. The outcome is that generalizations about kinds of positions are often applied in a sweeping, ahistorical manner.

Many of Rawls’s sympathizers have ended up relaxing his strictures against perfectionism. Stanley Cavell has argued for a concept of “moral perfectionism”, based on the transcendentalist Emerson, that has nothing to do with elitism. But this is even more recent.

In the present case, without really justifying it, Schneewind applies the term “perfectionism” to the whole early modern “rationalist” tradition, which is itself often the subject of overly broad generalizations. Implicitly, scholastic philosophy and ancient philosophy would be perfectionist as well. (He does not mention Rawls at all, though he does in passing mention elitism.) However, Schneewind also discusses the roots of “modern” natural law in scholasticism and Stoicism.

Schneewind includes valuable data on voluntarism and/or anti-voluntarism in many of the figures he discusses, but does not generalize much about it. Across the whole span of material that he discusses, I think a better contrast could be made between voluntarism and obedience theories on the one hand, and self-governance on the other.

Self-governance provides a far more sound and useful notion of freedom than strong metaphysical notions of absolutely unconditional free will. The great value of Schneewind’s book comes from his documentation of a long tradition of thought about practical self-governance, as background for the distinctively Kantian notion of autonomy.

A Theology of Beauty?

My understanding of Scotus and his historical significance might be headed for a major shift. [For the beginning of a resolution, see here.]

This kind of change of mind is not unprecedented. I used to read Kant and Hegel’s valorizations of freedom as sophisticated apologetics for some kind of voluntarism. But across many posts, we have seen that better readings of Kant and Hegel can eliminate such worries (see especially Hegel on Willing.) Very recently, I’ve been starting to wonder if what by general consensus is called the “voluntarism” of Scotus might also be read in some other way.

What is called “voluntarism” in the Latin theological tradition has to do with a relatively narrow debate about the priority of “will” and intellect. The will involved in this case is not any definite will, but rather an alleged power of free decision, where “free” is supposed to mean completely unconstrained. Theologians have often wanted to deny that God was subject to any constraint. But is it “constraint” to recognize the better reason? I think not, and many theologians seem also to agree.

Then too, in a scholastic context, those who like Aquinas are called “intellectualist” rather than voluntarist also defended the existence of liberum arbitrium, which technically includes a so-called “freedom” to cleave to the worse reason, or to any arbitrary fancy. But a common argument, also repeated in many variations, is that God’s “absolute” freedom — in effect a freedom to choose the worse — is never really exercised. There is still intense disagreement on this non-exercise means, as also occurs in the debate on absolute versus ordained power.

The pragmatist might advise us that a power that is never exercised does not in any meaningful sense exist. But as we have seen recently, Charles Pierce, the originator of pragmatism, vigorously rejected the reduction of reality to facts. Reality for Pierce is characterized by true — and in principle testable — conditional statements about what “would be” the case if this or that.

Aristotelian potentiality and actuality are often misread as power and fact, which completely loses the valuational significance that they acquire over the course of the argument of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Pierce too seems to follow this diminished reading. But this does not prevent him from making the valid point that scholastic talk about “powers” already goes beyond talk about present fact. In this way it is a good thing, even if (as I would add) it is also deeply tied to non-Aristotelian assumptions about the predominance of “efficient” causality.

Scotus does seem to argue that God in a supernatural way really exercises both absolute power and absolute freedom, and that humans making practical decisions do also in fact exercise absolute freedom. But in recognizing that he makes these claims, we still have to consider what these assertions mean in the total context of his thought, and what other countervailing tendencies there may be that need to be taken into account.

In the case of Aquinas, in spite of many divergences from Aristotle on important points, there is still a substantial extent to which he also defends many good Aristotelian positions that have been sharply contested by some conservative theologians. Overall I think Aquinas played a progressive historical role, by inventing and promoting an Aristotle whose texts mainstream opinion in the Church could allow to be read sympathetically, and thus no longer felt the need to ban. This is in spite of my disagreement on numerous matters of interpretation. Augustine has of course never been mistaken for an Aristotelian, but he too played a historically progressive role by taking philosophical thought seriously and making it theologically respectable.

These achievements of broad respectability — for Aristotle, and/or for philosophy in general — had the immense value of leaving open the possibility that others could read the philosophical texts in an even more sympathetic way. I therefore tend to read Aquinas (and scholasticism in general) in a sympathetic way, even though I harp on various matters of interpretation.

I have been feeling the deep irony that some of what I write nowadays, if taken out of context, could be misunderstood as professing a kind of dogmatic Aristotelianism. While I have always regarded Aristotle’s works with interest and sympathy, the degree of that sympathy and the strength of that interest have increased greatly over the years, as I have gradually overcome prejudicial judgments that I had too uncritically accepted, from the contemporary world’s widely diffused bias against Aristotle.

In any case, from my recent investigations it is beginning to appear that Scotus’s actual writings touching on ethics and natural-philosophical topics do not really at all sound like the working out of the consequences of a radical voluntarism. I do still think that Scotus’s theory of synchronic contingency — as it has been called in recent years — goes way too far in opposing the determinist bias attributed to the Arabic Aristotelians. But the most substantial account yet available of Scotus’s general attitude toward Aristotelian natural philosophy — Richard Cross’s The Physics of Duns Scotus (1999) — says in the front matter that when addressing natural-philosophical questions, Scotus never primarily relies on theological arguments, but only uses them in a secondary and corroborating way. This is actually true of many of the scholastics.

There is a new collection of Scotus’s ethical writings (Williams 2017), which seems to have largely superseded the Wolter 1996 collection mentioned recently. The most substantial secondary work on Scotus’s ethics seems to be Mary Beth Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness: Mutuality and Moral Living According to John Duns Scotus (1996; 2nd ed. 2012). She speaks of Scotus’s “moral vision of relational love and generous living” (p. 7) as rooted in a broader Franciscan emphasis on the beauty of Creation. In her view, Scotist ethics develops and builds on a Franciscan theological aesthetics. Ingham’s account opens up perspectives on Scotus’s ethics that seem far closer to the ethical themes in Aristotle and Hegel than I ever expected,

The case for the existence and importance of such a Franciscan theological aesthetics gains additional support from The Beauty of the Trinity: A reading of the Summa Halensis (2022) by Justin Coyle. He argues that the main document of early Franciscan theology gives beauty a central place in its account of the Trinity that has been little recognized. Schumacher and Bychkow’s A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis (also 2022) translates selections from this same work, which had multiple authors, the most prominent of whom were Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) and John of La Rochelle (also d. 1245). Along with Roger Bacon, Alexander and John are the most prominent of the Franciscan predecessors of Scotus, whom Boulnois partially credits for some of the innovations that have been attributed solely to Scotus.

Signs, Concepts, Things

Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius each in their own way discuss signification as a triadic relation, with the soul or concepts in between signs and things. The 13th-century Franciscan Roger Bacon diverges sharply from this older view, arguing instead that signs refer directly to things. Bacon, who with Albert the Great was the first European to lecture publicly on the major works of Aristotle, is said to have initiated the study of Greek and Arabic optics (perspectiva) in the Latin-speaking world. The 1978 discovery of a manuscript of his lost work De Signis (On Signs) has raised scholarly awareness of his semiotics.

Boulnois has previously mentioned that Bacon treats concepts as a kind of sign. Here he contrasts Augustine and Aristotle with Bacon.

“Augustine thinks signification as a triadic relation between a thing, the sensible species perceived by the senses; another, the signified; and an interpreter, the mediating thought…. From the outset, Augustine distinguishes ‘natural’ signs from ‘given’ signs (data). Natural signs do not involve a voluntary production, but correspond to a natural causality: footprints recall the passage of an animal that produced them, smoke the fire that caused it. But the ‘given’ signs presuppose the intentional activity of a living being” (L’Être et représentation, p. 18, my translation throughout).

I like the idea that there is always need for interpretation.

The idea of natural signs is fascinating. These would have to be distinct from the sensible and intelligible “species” whose existence and role were debated by medieval authors. Whereas species are a kind of images or likenesses of things, smoke is not an image of fire, and tracks are not the image of an animal. The natural signs are each interpretable as effects of a particular kind, that point to a particular kind of natural cause. This implies the existence of a natural causality that is real in the sense of being in the things and not imposed by us, even if its particulars require interpretation.

Meanwhile, “given” signs do reflect a sort of imposition, even if the imposition is not the act of an individual. In contrast with the natural signs, they are said to be voluntary. The main example seems to be the words and expressions of a language. Relative to an individual, they are pre-given; but relative to a historical community, they mean what the community in fact takes them to mean.

“Augustine articulates this theory of the sign to that of language and intellection, notably with the idea of the verbum cordis [word of the heart], mental language, interior word, thought fixed on a word, definitional image of the thing in thought: ‘Even without sounding words, the one who thinks speaks in his heart’ ” (p. 19).

On this view, thought is understood as a kind of speaking in one’s heart. Subjective meanings attributable to speakers of spoken language are to be explained in terms of a “mental language” that is different from, but analogous to, any particular spoken language. This is different from the view that speaking in one’s heart is enabled by an interiorization of spoken language, without the need to posit a separate mental language.

Boulnois contrasts Augustine’s view with Aristotle’s “semiotics of inference”.

“But a completely different definition of the sign, of Aristotelian origin, interferes with this…. Here the sign is a proposition, the point of departure for reasoning by inference, such that it founds a demonstration…. The sign is the antecedent of a conditional proposition or of an inference” (ibid). “The sign, which in Augustine grounds a relation between two things, in Aristotle founds induction between two propositions” (p. 20).

Neither of these is equivalent to the simple view that signs stand for things directly, which is closer to what Bacon will defend. Boulnois is reading Augustine as saying that a sign is or grounds a real relation between two things, and Aristotle as saying it is or grounds a relation of implication between two assertions. But for both Aristotle and Augustine, the sign refers primarily to some kind of relation, rather than simply to a thing.

“Besides this semiotics of inference, Aristotle develops a complex semantics at the beginning of the treatise On Interpretation…. The symbolic relation is constitutive of language, but it can also be expressed in the vocabulary of the semeion [sign], of logical inference, which allows a passage from sensible expressions to concepts…. But by the intermediary of the concept, indirectly, signs refer to the thing” (pp. 20-21).

Aristotle and Augustine each develop their own kind of indirect or mediated or “moderate” realism.

“The Aristotelian definition of the sign as a principle of inference is reprised by Peter of Spain…. Whereas Augustine only envisages signs as presenting sensible species, Bacon wants to account for the intelligibles evoked by Aristotle — the concepts. But he makes them representing signs” (pp. 22-23).

Here Boulnois does connect signs with species in Augustine’s case, but their relation is still not one of identity. Many of Augustine’s medieval readers would likely have interpolated a notion of species (e.g., a sensible species of smoke, for smoke) into their understanding of Augustine’s account. In this way we might say that a sensible species of smoke is a sign of fire (“is” of predication, not “is” of identity). But smoke as a sign of fire is not the same as the sensible species of the smoke.

“This reorganization rests on the concept of representation, already used by Peter of Spain: when a sign represents, it constitutes a term in a proposition, and recalls many intentional objects (the signifieds), or it ‘supposes for’ them. With the concept of representation, expressing a theory of supposition (or of reference), Peter of Spain gives himself the means to unify the general relation between sign and signified (signification in Augustine), and the conventional relation between the vocal sound and the thing named. Avoiding here the mediation of the concept, he brings together under a single vocable the natural relation of the concept to the thing and the conventional relation of the vocal sound to the concept. In reprising this vocabulary, Bacon integrates in the same term of representation the relation of the sensible sign to the thing signified and of the concept to the thing known. He takes sides at the same time against Boethius, in posing that the signified of the concept is the thing itself and not an intermediary concept. Thus while Boethius ordered semantics by noetics, the theory of representation puts them on the same plane” (p. 23).

Direct realism was actually a radical innovation, as Boulnois points out.

“Bacon thus can unify all the relations, natural and conventional, between vocal sounds, intellections, and things, under the general concept of the sign. Even though he recognizes that Aristotle concentrates in the treatise On Interpretation on conventional signs, vocal sounds, it is necessary to produce a universal theory of signs, including intellections, vocal sounds, and writing” (pp. 23-24).

One abstract theory of signs and things signified is used to cover both natural and linguistic cases.

“Starting from this Baconian innovation, it will be necessary to examine the challenges of this response to the great semantic controversy over the sign. If the concept is a sign and if the sign represents the thing itself, in what way do the great semantic questions play out based on this fundamental decision? From this foyer can be explained the natural character of the concept, the convention of the linguistic sign, and the importance of an imposition inscribed in a juridical and political order” (p. 24).

From this standpoint, concepts are assimilated to natural signs, whereas linguistic signs are arbitrary and depend on convention. Concepts on this view are individually self-contained. They are what they are independent of any articulation by us. It remains that they must be naturally or supernaturally given to us. The implicit notion of any concept in Aristotle, on the other hand, depends not only on its form, but also more generally on what is (or would be) well said by us, which is to say on its articulation in language, which must be understood against a background of other articulations in language.

Next in this series: Signification, Representation

Being and Representation Revisited

Michel Foucault in Les mots et les choses (literally Words and Things, 1966; English tr. The Order of Things), the book that made him a celebrity in France and raised the brewing French controversy over so-called “structuralism” and humanism into high gear, argues that there was a major paradigm shift from resemblance to more abstract representation at the beginning of the classical age (17th century). More recently, Robert Brandom has focused more specifically on Descartes’s analytic geometry as based on a global isomorphic representation of geometry in terms of algebra, which replaced the medieval paradigm of resemblance.

Certainly the notion of representation plays a fundamental role in both Descartes and Locke. Foucault made a huge impression on me when I first read him around 1979, and — as witnessed here — Brandom is one of my current leading lights. But Foucault and Brandom are both just wrong about the middle ages being simply dominated by a paradigm based on resemblance.

While I have several times referred to L’Être et représentation [Being and Representation] (1999) by Olivier Boulnois, I have yet to more substantially work here on this important book, which details the rise of the notion of a “science” of metaphysics as ontology — closely associated with an abstract notion of representation, not reducible to resemblance — in the later middle ages. This offers a vital corrective to the rather ahistorical global generalizations commonly applied to these topics.

On Boulnois’s account, which involves a cast of many, the leading character in these developments will be the theologian John Duns Scotus (1266-1308). Boulnois is a leading scholar and translator of Scotus.

I would note that this substantial work on Scotus also seems to thoroughly invalidate the thinly documented valorization of the Scotist univocity of being by Gilles Deleuze. It is hard to think of a writer more viscerally opposed to the representationalist paradigm than Deleuze. Deleuze’s other valorizations of Spinoza and Leibniz and the ethical notion of affirmation in his early Nietzsche book influenced me in the past. But to my knowledge, Deleuze never even mentions the central role of representation in Scotus and its strong connection with univocity. I felt betrayed when I discovered this.

“To represent means at once to ‘make present’, ‘stand in place of’, ‘resemble’. Precisely, in the Middle Age the vocabulary of repraesentatio is used frequently, in all of these senses” (Boulnois p. 7, my translation throughout).

The point here is not to deny that resemblance plays a major role in medieval thought. It is rather that — as with several other notions commonly associated with modernity, such as a psychological Subject — the later middle ages already saw substantial and systematic use of a more abstract notion of representation.

“Already in Tertulian, the statue of Hercules ‘represents’ Hercules … it indicates his presence in absence — it takes his place. To represent is in a certain way to make present, and Maxim of Turin uses these two terms as synonyms. The liturgical use of the term follows naturally…. A new turn appears in the Cistercian order with Aelred of Rievaulx, as a meditative exercise that makes Christ present in the imagination” (ibid).

In spite of the visual or visualizing character of these uses and their association with notions of resemblance, there is clearly more going on here than just the application of a criterion of resemblance. We see explicit theoretical development centered on the notion of representation.

“But the text that durably imposed the vocabulary of representation seems to be the Latin translation of the De Anima [On the Soul] of Avicenna: the expression appears at least seventeen times in this work…. It is indeed repraesentatio that bears all the difficulty of the platonizing noetics of Avicenna…. In this way the problematic rejoins the central difficulty of another Platonism, that of Augustine, which has to understand how the soul, always spiritual, can have sensible images without losing its spiritual nature…. [T]he problem of representation obliges us to explore the confluence of Augustinianism and Avicennism” (pp. 8-9).

Representation is a fundamental concept of Avicenna’s elaborate psychology, which combines Platonic, Aristotelian, and medical elements. (Avicenna was the second greatest medical authority in the middle ages, after Galen.)

The historical importance of the adoption of Avicenna by later medieval Augustinians was already pointed out by the great Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson in the early 20th century.

“The Middle Age explains repraesentatio by its equivalents: stare pro (taking the place of) — signs take the place of things that cause them and to which they refer; supponere pro (supposing for) — in a proposition, the terms take the place of the thing to which they refer; similitudo, species, imago (being a resemblance, an image) — the sensible species, the phantasm, the concept representing the object they resemble; supplere vicem (playing the role of) — abstractive knowing takes the place of the object” (p. 9).

The role of signs in thought and language was already discussed by Roger Bacon in the 13th century. The theory of “supposition” was an important and sophisticated Latin innovation that anticipates modern referential semantics. Theories of “species” were another major non-Aristotelian Latin development, possibly derived from Stoic physiological-epistemological theories of phantasia.

“We need to ask ourselves about the logical, optical, and noetic status of representation, corresponding to the functions of the sign, of the sensible image (species or phantasm), of the concept. Taking the place of, being the image of, resembling, conceiving are diverse regimes that need to be studied in their own right. Then we need to rearticulate these terms one to another, and ask ourselves how the representation of being is constituted successively as a semantics, an eidetics, and a noetics. In a theory where concepts are themselves signs, where they also have sensible species for content, these three dimensions form a coherent system” (pp. 9-10).

His reference to the “representation of being” here anticipates what we will see as the Scotist approach to being in terms of representation. Roger Bacon treats concepts as signs.

The Latin middle ages saw huge development in logic, semantics, the theory of signs, optics, and noetics. Scholastic interest in logic is well known, and we have seen at least a taste of medieval noetics in the disputes about Aristotelian intellect. There was major development in geometrical optics in the Arabic-speaking world, and in the medieval and Renaissance Latin world. Representability is the minimal criterion of univocal being in Scotus.

“But it is also necessary to examine its genesis. What form of concentration allowed signification, knowledge, and thought to be re-expressed using only the concept of representation? And what changed in the notion of representation to make it possible to represent all things in a unique way? Researching the origin of a metaphysics of representation is not to write the history of the concept of representation, but the genealogy of a new structure, the thinking of being by representation” (p. 10).

Here I think he is onto something important. These discussions have a multi-dimensional aspect that is clearly not reducible to a notion of simple resemblance.

We will see that a “metaphysics of representation” and a “thinking of being by representation” are especially characteristic of Scotus, but not only Scotus.

Metaphysics “gets a new formulation in the tradition that goes from Roger Bacon to Duns Scotus, often identified with the English Franciscan school of the 13th-14th century. I hope to show that this is too restrictive, because the problematic plunges its roots further in the Augustinian and Avicennan ground and overflows this school, since we find important elements in Thomas Aquinas or Henry of Ghent” (ibid).

“With these distinctions made, it will be possible to measure the mutations of metaphysics that result. It gets its modern status as a science thanks to the concept of being, which allows Henry of Ghent to know all things in one sole act of thought, and in Duns Scotus replaces the analogy of being by founding its univocity: the unity of metaphysics rests on a noetic unity. We need to investigate that which gives priority to the concept, a unity engendered by intellect, with the power to represent all its meanings in its stable identity” (ibid).

By “modern” here, he means early modern. It is important to note that the disrepute of metaphysics and widespread talk about surpassing it came later. The early moderns generally claimed to have a new and better metaphysics. This will turn out to have Scotist and other scholastic roots.

I did not recall Boulnois’s use of “concept” in this context. This will be something to watch. In the context of univocal being and intellectual intuition of individuals, “concept” has a completely different sense than it does in Hegel or Brandom. By “concept” here, he seems to mean a mental representation that could be simply given as an atomic thing. It is important to note that the term “concept” can also be given a non-mentalist, non-representationalist, and relational rather than atomic interpretation in terms of conditions of use and consequences. This is a fundamental theme in Brandom’s work.

“This study aims at the same time to propose a new interpretation of the history of metaphysics. With the conceptual unity of being, it seeks to understand that which constitutes the invisible foyer and hidden sub-basement of modern philosophy” (ibid).

“This study is centered on the affirmation, more Avicennan than Aristotelian, that the ens can be apprehended in a unique concept, which leads to the univocity of the ens. The object of metaphysics thus becomes the first object of thought in the order of conception (first adequate object: being) and not the first object in the order of perfection (first object by eminence: God)” (p. 12).

Ens is the present participle of the verb esse, “to be”. Implicitly it refers to an individual entity, a particular “being”. This will be related to claims of knowledge by intellectual intuition of individuals as individuals. In this context, claims of univocity go hand-in-hand with claims to univocally know by intellectual intuition. “Concept” here seems to be tied to intellectual intuition, whereas in Kant and Hegel the two are sharply opposed.

“Contemporary studies of ‘modern metaphysics’ from Suárez to Kant (Schulmetaphysik) show that the classic articulation of metaphysics into metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis rests on a discreet but decisive acceptance of the univocity of the concept of being, particularly in Suárez. Thus modern metaphysics acquired the status of a science and a univocal constitution thanks to the concept of ens in Scotus, which replaced the analogy of being. The univocity of being comprehended in a unique concept remains the principal turn in the history of metaphysics…. This structure imposes itself from the 14th to the 18th century, passing through the work of Suarez and Wolff” (p. 13).

The bad idea here is that a being has a concept, straightforwardly and univocally. This is antithetical to Aristotle, for whom the very beginning of wisdom is that things are said in many ways. I have occasionally invoked “beings” as objects of Aristotelian phronesis, which is all about grasping particulars in an open way that is not locked in to a univocal “concept”.

Next in this series: Signs, Concepts, Things

Power and Its Shadow

Omnipotence has been a problematic concept introduced by theologians in the monotheistic traditions. It has affected traditional metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, and politics. It has deep historical connections with political absolutism.

Ethics in the Socratic tradition take as a starting point something like the Kantian autonomy of reason, coupled with an agnostic but sympathetic view of religion.

For the Latin scholastic theologians, the autonomy of philosophical inquiry is only relative. But most stop short of a completely unqualified omnipotence, and do endorse a relative autonomy of philosophy. There is a long tradition of “faith seeking understanding”. This allows for a socially beneficial relation of benevolent mutual respect between theological and philosophical discourse.

For several centuries in the later middle ages, the main vehicle for expression of Christian theology consisted of meta-commentaries on the 12th-century theologian Peter Lombard’s commentary on the Bible, known as the Sentences. Lombard’s work was one of the foundations of Latin scholasticism. Over 1400 commentaries on it are known. Lombard was a student of the great Peter Abelard, but backed off from Abelard’s more controversial views.

Here I will largely translate and comment upon a brief survey of omnipotence in the Sentences commentary tradition by Olivier Boulnois. This introduction to his edited volume La puissance et son ombre: de Pierre Lombard à Luther (1994) touches upon many points of “historiographical” interest. The French volume focuses on Lombard’s distinctions 42-44, which are the parts dealing with omnipotence. It includes translations from Lombard himself, William of Auxerre, Hugh of Saint-Cher, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Augustinus Triumphus, Duns Scotus, Durand of Saint-Pourcain, William of Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, and Martin Luther. My aim here is only to partially translate and comment upon the introduction by Boulnois, which is entitled “What God Cannot Do”.

“Can God walk, speak, lie, sin, die, make a mistake? Can he restore virginity? Do other than what he does? Create other worlds?…. Can God annul the most fundamental eternal truths or change them?” (p. 11, my translation throughout).

First, it should be noted that there is not just one concept of omnipotence. Its meaning has been the subject of great controversy in the past. We will see several competing versions in what follows.

Second, the medieval theological mainstream in fact recognized that there are some things God cannot do, or at least will never do. The great scholastics recognized that omnipotence has be qualified in some way in order to be at all defensible, even if they would not themselves phrase it that way. Their arguments are about where and how to draw the line.

“[T]o ask what God cannot do is to research the limits of the possible, and to pose a question that bears on one of the principal senses of being in Aristotle” (pp. 11-12).

The last is a reference to potentiality (dynamis in Aristotle’s Greek), which in the Latin tradition is mainly understood as a kind of power.

“The fundamental question becomes: what does the proposition ‘he can’ signify? To respond, it is necessary to articulate three concepts: power [puissance], ability [pouvoir], possibility” (p. 12).

Puissance and pouvoir can both mean power, but with different nuances. Puissance is standardly used to translate the potentia of the Latin tradition. Pouvoir is used to express ability, and also political power.

Boulnois asks, “With what power [pouissance] are we concerned here? With Aristotle’s being in potentiality (intermediate between being and non-being)? Or with the effective power [pouissance] to make be what is not? But doesn’t that presuppose power [pouissance] in the first sense?” (ibid).”

“Effective power to make be what is not” recalls the theory of creation in Aquinas.

Boulnois continues, switching to the other French term for power, “With what model of power [pouvoir] are we confronted? With the generosity of an overcapacity that dispenses in accord with its own goodness? With the arbitrariness of always-revocable decrees? With the fixation of laws in conformity with which power [pouvoir] must itself act to act legitimately?” (ibid).

Here we begin to see the connection with political power.

“What form of the possible do we encounter? This is the whole problem of modality: in the logical sense, everything noncontradictory is possible; but isn’t it necessary to add a second form of possibility, real possibility, that which can be effectively realized by causes?” (ibid).

Possibility and necessity are both modal concepts. I still need to write more about the ethical significance of modality. While preparing this post I dashed off another quick note.

“For the problem of omnipotence bears on the limit conditions of an order of the world and an order of discourse” (ibid).

Claims of omnipotence have a global impact on how we understand everything else, which is literally explicit in the very term. (“Omni” is Latin for “all”).

“The situation of the question of omnipotence in the organic unity of the Sentences leads to thinking the possible in terms of divine omnipotence, and not the inverse” (p. 15).

When two terms are identified or linked, questions of the order of explanation can acquire a large importance. Here this involves the relation between philosophy and theology.

“Peter Lombard analyzes divine power in a double way” (p. 16). “From then on, the question turns on the status of the possible in the divine understanding: does what is impossible for God come from God (as Henry of Ghent believed at one time) or rather from the inconsistency of the thing itself (Duns Scotus)? Or again, is it necessary to say that the question has no sense, it being given that there is a strict reciprocity between the reality of the possible and divine thought (Ockham, reprised by Luther)?” (p. 17).

“But the evolution of the interpretation explains the modern contradiction between divergent points of view: a God who is the cause of the possibility of eternal truths (Descartes), or is submitted to the necessity of the best of [all] worlds (Leibniz), or again is identical with the necessity of all his attributes (Spinoza)” (p. 18).

Omnipotence in Descartes underwrites a theological voluntarism. Infinity and a very different kind of omnipotence are the most important properties of Spinoza’s God, who is also equated with Nature. Leibniz uses another nonstandard kind of omnipotence, explicitly developing his metaphysical views in terms of a highly rationalized form of creationism.

“For the problem of omnipotence is first of all a problem of exegesis” (p. 19). “If God can do anything, isn’t it necessary to say that he can lie, be mistaken, be put to death? Doesn’t one go to the point of making God a bad power? Augustine strives to resolve the difficulty: ‘And its inability to lie is a great power of the Word’. As a consequence, divine omnipotence does not consist in being able to do all, except in an inadequate sense…. Thus omnipotence is defined simply as God’s power to not be prevented from doing all the good that he wills. Augustine carefully avoids defining omni-potence as a power to do all” (p. 20).

We are teetering on the edge of paradox here. It is precisely the qualifications of what initially seems like the unqualified par excellence that allow an ethical perspective to be recovered. At the very least, this is in great tension with the motif of unqualified power.

“If God cannot do something, that is because it is not a true power (walking, sinning, being mistaken are marks of imperfection)…. If all that God cannot do is only weakness and negativity, God will be in himself every positive power. ‘He can do all that power can do’. Divine omnipotence has become the infinite affirmation of power” (p. 21).

For the 11th-century monastic reformer Peter Damian, according to Boulnois, “The origin of nature is not subject to the same laws as nature. Creation ex nihilo affords a striking illustration of this: ‘Nature itself is made against nature’. Nature thus becomes identical to the will of God: ‘Nature itself has its proper nature, which is to say the will of God” (pp. 24-25).

“The whole question of modality is raised here…. For Aristotle, only the future is contingent…. But for the theologian, who speaks of the possible insofar as it is the object of divine power, even if a thing is, insofar as it is, it can not be…. Even if an event is realized, at the very moment when it is real, it is not necessary. For it could not be if it were not willed by God” (p. 25). “The restoration of [virginity, according to Damian] resembles a new creation, and it is not subject to any mundane law, even that of contradiction…. All power and all knowing are coeternal with God, sovereign creator of the world” (pp. 26-27).

Again modality comes up. The idea that the present state of the world is contingent is reasonable in itself.

Among the most radical claims associated with omnipotence is that God can change the past. Up to a point, it seems to me that we should affirm the contingency of the present as well as the future, but it is also very possible to go too far in this. What is challenging to specify is how to draw the line between good flexibility and bad arbitrariness.

For Aristotle, Boulnois says ” ‘That which is, when it is, and that which is not, when it is not, is necessary’. This principle does not bear only on a necessity of discourse. It also implies a real necessity. For Aristotle, the possible is nothing but being in potentiality, that is to say being which tends toward existence, and which at the end of an infinite time, will end by coming to be. There is what could be called a statistical interpretation of modality, according to which that is possible which was, is, or will be in an infinite time. Indeed it is a temporal interpretation, according to which there always will be a state of affairs in which the contingent is realized. Relayed by Maimonides, this principle is the basis of the celebrated ‘third way’ of showing the existence of God in Thomas Aquinas” (p. 32).

Aristotle’s “statistical” modality is not statistical in the numerical sense. He defines the necessary as that which is always true. “Always” may not be entirely air-tight. He also explicitly speaks of things that are true “for the most part”, and sometimes of things that are always true or true for the most part.

Boulnois continues, “The motif of this disequilibrium can be easily designated: it is the primacy of presence in all metaphysical analysis of manifestation. While the [more traditional] theologians, following Augustine, envisage temporality as a triple manifestation of the divine power in the past, present, and future, Bonaventure, in the manner of the Aristotelian metaphysics, places himself in the perspective of the thing in its evidence enunciable by the finite subject. He goes on to invoke an important argument: between the thing and its form of presence (be it a presence of the past or an existence in the present instant), there exists an analytic relation…. The presence of the thing is included in all manifestation. On the other hand the future, which is not yet, is not analytically included in the content of the thing that comes to be” (pp. 32-33).

There really was a “metaphysics of presence” in Latin scholasticism. The error is to attribute it to directly to Aristotle.

“From this point on, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Ockham pose only the question of the necessity of the past…. They no longer ask if the same question can be extended to the future. The reference to Peter Damian conceals a mutation of the problematic: instead of being posed from the transcendent freedom of God, the possibility of the contingent will only be envisaged starting from the human experience of the present. The ontology of the contingent becomes the possibility of finite freedom” (p. 33).

“All the commentaries on the Sentences, following the line of Peter Lombard, preserve the memory of the condemnation of Abelard by the council of Sens. In the spirit of this council, it is not permitted to think that God is necessarily determined to act and can only do what he does. The council Fathers, led by Bernard of Clairvaux, see in this prohibition a line that is not to be crossed. The omnipotence of God requires us to think that he can do what he does not do, omit what he does not omit, do what he does in another manner or at another moment, or similarly omit it. The divine omnipotence thus appears as sovereignly free, indifferent between acting and not acting” (pp. 33-34).

This is the point at which the thesis of omnipotence becomes dangerous.

“Peter Abelard himself was moved by a metaphysical principle, the principle of reason. God can only do what he does, because ‘God does nothing without a reason’…. Abelard does not admit that God can act against the order he has decided to follow…. God cannot go against his proper wisdom and his proper rationality. Reason imposes itself on him in being the form of his freedom. In a sense, Abelard is quite simply faithful to the patristic tradition that orients divine action toward the good. But he systematizes to the point of paradox, in limiting divine freedom by his wisdom” (p. 34).

The whole question about whether or not God can act “against” what he has “decided” is artificial, because it assumes an anthropomorphic and temporal notion of “decision”. If God is pre-eminently the Eternal as Augustine says, the temporal metaphor of decision is inappropriate.

“Peter Damian makes an equation between divine omnipotence and human freedom: what is possible for the human must at least be possible for God” (ibid).

This argument clearly depends on an anthropomorphic analogy. What is called “possible” for the human depends in part on the particular character of human finitude. It is not at all the same as what would be called “possible” for an eternal neoplatonic God exempt from all finitude. Frankly, it is not even clear that it is appropriate to speak of possibility in relation to God at all. Aristotle says that the first cause is pure act and entelechy. Augustine very strongly associates God with the eternal.

“As Peter Lombard well saw, contrary to the censors of Abelard who ignore the point, the position of Abelard is equally motivated by the principle of the best. As with Leibniz later on, the principle of the best follows from an interpretation of the principle of causality…. Abelard in turn follows the principle of causality, attested by Plato: ‘Nothing comes to be without a cause’. But he reinterprets it in the light of Christian theology, for which the cause of the created resides in the exemplary reason, the divine idea, model, or archetype by which God thinks the creatable before instituting it. It is in this sense that Augustine writes: ‘Who would dare say that God created things without reason?’ For Abelard, as a consequence, the world is created in a universal order, and in it no event escapes divine providence: nothing that appears contingent or due to chance comes to be outside of his prescience or his wisdom. Reason itself is a means of revelation. Despite the apparent disagreements between the Bible and Plato, a more profound reading of these two texts allows us to reconcile them, and to underline the identity between the rationality of God and his freedom” (p. 36).

“For in this problematic cause and reason are synonyms: ‘ratio vel causa‘, writes Peter Lombard…. The position of Abelard is indeed an important stage in the constitution of the principle of reason, between Plato and Leibniz. In Plato, the principle of causality, exterior to the demiurge, and the principle of the goodness of the cosmos are enunciated separately. For Abelard, the principle of reason has become interior to the divine wisdom, and conforms to the primacy of goodness. For Leibniz, finally, the principle of reason is no longer divine, but is identified with essence in general: every substance is the sufficient reason of its accidents” (p. 37).

“Without a doubt, the condemnation of Abelard played a decisive role here. We recall that Heidegger speaks of a ‘time of incubation’ of the principle of reason, already formulated since the birth of philosophy. But he does not respond to the question he himself raises” (p. 37). “In all the rigor of their terms, the condemnations of the council of Sens, in rejecting the application of the principle of reason to God, preserved the principle of reason in an incubator” (p. 38).

“If God creates a world, he cannot create it without what makes it a world: its order, the harmony of its parts…. God cannot create without: 1) what makes it a totality: that which is required for the achievement of a universe; 2) what makes its parts compatible with one another: the conditions of existence of creatures, one in relation to another; 3) what permits each of its parts to have sufficient consistency to possess the perfection of an essence and that of existing. The creation of a world results in the positing of a finite order, governed by the mathematical or musical principle of the harmony of the all, that is to say a certain proportion between the parts” (p. 39).

The strong notion of the coherence requirements of a world in Leibniz removes the usual arbitrariness from the notion of creation.

“This common problematic leaves room for a whole gamut of individual positions, from Albert the Great to Ockham. For Albert the Great, ‘if one places oneself in the point of view of being’, starting from the things that really exist, no better order is conceivable…. For Bonaventure, … God can make either a world different by its substances (but which is not really better, because it is incomparable), or a world different by its accidents (but that is really the same as this one)…. For Ockham, on the contrary the most probable position is ‘that which admits that God can make another world better than this one and specifically distinct from it’ ” (pp. 39-40).

“Can God change eternal truths?…. Descartes raises this question” (p. 40). “God does not know truths as true unless he wills that they be so” (p. 41). “This debate has a long medieval history” (ibid).

Hugh of Saint-Cher is credited with originating the distinction between absolute and ordained power.

“Hugh of Saint-Cher [distinguishes] two aspects of divine power. As conditioned, it cannot be contradictory…. In the measure that the order of the finite is subject to the principle of contradiction, God cannot make two opposed propositions [both] true. But in itself, the same power as absolute is not subject to the principle of contradiction: nothing can limit its power” (ibid). “In this he anticipates in an unheard-of way the motifs and the difficulties of the Cartesian position, even if he does not like [Descartes] speak of creation or of eternal truths” (p. 42).

“Thomas Aquinas poses the same question, but he responds in a completely different way…. The divine power can only make what is possible, that is to say what is in the nature of things. The nature of simple essences and the principle of non-contradiction are the source of all their proprieties, and the divine power is in a way limited to these possibilities” (pp. 42-43).

Here Aquinas comes across as much more sensible than some of the others. In significant measure at least, he upholds the reality of secondary causes. A concept of God construed in a way that would invalidate all other concepts and reason itself seems fit only for sectarians.

“Subsequently, the debate develops in another form: is the impossible impossible because God so decided, or is it impossible by nature…? Henry of Ghent at one time held the first thesis, but ended up retracting it. Duns Scotus maintains an order that supposes the distinction of diverse moments…. It is only logical contradiction between the parts that grounds the formal impossibility of the thing, and indeed the divine intellection of that impossibility. There is an irrevocable anteriority of the possible and indeed of the impossible to the divine intellect. Possibility is imposed on God in the same way it is imposed on the human (that is to say in a univocal way)” (p. 43).

This is an important qualification about Scotus. Although he was regarded as a realist in the controversies about nominalism and realism, he generally comes across as an extreme voluntarist. But Boulnois is a leading Scotus scholar who has translated 2000 pages of Scotus and written a large book about him, so I assume he knows what he is talking about.

“For Ockham, on the contrary, power and the possible are correlatives. There is in the first instance an absolute real identity between divine intellect and will. And in addition, there is no anteriority of the possible to the intellect. The possible not being other than the non-contradictory, all the possibles are independent. No limit of the ontological consistency of the possible restrains the divine power…. Ockham accepts all the consequences of the identification of the absolute possible with the divine power…. There is neither an anteriority of the impossible to the divine omnipotence (Scotus), nor an anteriority of omnipotence to the impossible (Henry of Ghent), but a strict correlation” (pp. 43-44).

Once again, when two things are assimilated together, it may mean that one is being reduced to the other. For instance, I hold that there is no separately existing thing called will — that Aristotelian intellect, practical judgment, and wisdom better explain the freedom that some want to supernaturally explain by will. Ockham on the other hand is a voluntarist who sees will everywhere, and seems to deny that modality is anything real.

“An other is not always a world. It is only after Bonaventure that the theologians come to speak of a possible other world” (p. 46).

This is fascinating. I never would have guessed that Bonaventure would partially anticipate Leibniz on the subject of worlds.

“For Scotus, the order fixed by God appears to be necessary from the point of view of every inferior agent, when it acts according to that order…. In the order instituted by God (nature), starting from contingent hypotheses, the laws of nature are necessary for the finite. They draw their necessity from the fact that it is God who invests them with their legality” (p. 47).

From this point of view, necessity only comes about from divine will. Sheer will conceived as a brute fact is thus said to come before justice or wisdom. This undermines all criteria.

“For Aristotle, the concept of world is that of a totality: there is only one possible world, and it is a fortiori the best” (p. 48).

But the argument that this is the best world because there is no other is a very weak one that Aristotle does not himself make, because he does not consider alternate worlds, and also does not consider the world to be created.

“For [Peter Damian], even a good that is never produced is in the power of God, the reason for its retention residing in the secret of his good will. His analysis results in distinguishing two poles in the divine power: on the one hand, the omni-potence taken in itself, which no im-potence can encumber, and on the other hand the order in which it is exercised, and which can explain that omnipotence is not manifested…. Thus, Peter Damian constructs the conceptual armature between two poles, which later took the name of absolute power and ordained power” (p. 53).

Peter Damian was an 11th-century monastic reformer who campaigned vigorously against corruption in the Church. He advocated solitude and ascetism, and reportedly introduced practices of flagellation that were regarded as too extreme by some. In the early 20th century, it was argued that Damian exempted God from the principle of non-contradiction, but this has been rejected by later scholars. He wrote a treatise on omnipotence arguing that God can restore virginity, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he neither claimed that God can change a past event, nor that God can contradict himself.

What will become the distinction between absolute and ordained power allows appearances to be (mostly) saved while the claim of absolute power is maintained. I would note that this is an elaboration of Augustine’s reconciliation of miracles with natural causes, which treats natural causes as God’s established habits that are not invalidated by miracles. It will often be expressed using Aristotle’s notion of things that happen in a certain way “for the most part”, but there is no indication that Aristotle intended this as a way of leaving room for miracles. What happens for the most part in Aristotle involves variation in the way that the order of nature works out in particular cases, not suspension of it or exceptions to it.

“The ordained power has for object that which has been preordained, or disposed by God. It is a preordination of the possible in the divine understanding, and not the order of the real outside of God. Indeed it coincides with his prescience…. The ordained power does not presuppose order and is not determined by it; on the contrary, it is it that determines it in determining itself: it prefigures it, it is the pre-supposition of order. It is the pre-order” (p. 55).

According to this view, the order of the world corresponds to the “habitual” operation of creation. The habitual order is subordinate to the power of creation that produces it. The habituality of the created order is real, but it also has real exceptions in the form of miracles.

According to Boulnois, “Absolute power and ordained power form a couple of concepts, a dialectic, such that we never find one without the other. There is no theology of absolute power without the theology of ordained power. What we find instead are different ways of thinking this dialectic” (ibid).

“The object of absolute power is identical to the object of divine wisdom, to the totality of what is possible for God. The object of ordained power is identical to the object of the principled will of God” (pp. 55-56).

“For God does nothing without prescience. His action is subordinated to the order predetermined by him, and can never depart from that order. As a consequence, operative power is subordinated to ordained power; and reciprocally, God never operates directly by his absolute power. Absolute power taken in itself, naked, is not operative” (p. 56).

It was I and not Boulnois who earlier brought Augustine’s justification of miracles into the discussion. I much prefer Aristotelian natural variability to the Augustinian theory of miracles. But on the older view Boulnois is characterizing here — that God never acts directly by his absolute power — it would seem that there could be no exceptions to the ordained order. This seems consistent with Augustine’s rigorous view of eternity, but it is in tension with Augustine’s justification of miracles.

It appears that Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was instrumental in changing the traditional Augustinian pattern in these matters. Boulnois is a world-class expert on Scotus, so he is well qualified to point this out.

“While reprising these classical elements, the interpretation of Scotus breaks with his predecessors, for three reasons: 1) The theory of absolute power and ordained power is extended to every free being. 2) In reprising the distinction between fact and principle, Scotus conceives the two members of the distinction as two ways of acting and not simply as two powers. God intervenes in fact by his absolute power to modify what is in principle the course of things. 3) Even when he has chosen an order, at the same time and from the same point of view, God can do that which he did not decide upon. The divine power is open to an array of synchronic possibilities, and the state chosen in fact does not exclude other possibilities” (p. 56).

Each of these three points is significant: 1) Beliefs about human free will come to be patterned on a pronouncedly voluntaristic interpretation of divine omnipotence. 2) Fact is for possibly the first time asserted to be more decisive and more inclusive than principle or essence. Reason must accommodate presumed facts, rather than governing their interpretation. 3) Far from being stably grounded in eternity and essence, order of all kinds is now treated as fundamentally contingent and revocable.

In 20th-century scholarship, the emergence of such “modernist” views was most often associated with William of Ockham, who as the arch “nominalist” in accounts of the 14th-century debate about universals has been treated as diametrically opposed to the more traditional “realism” attributed to Scotus. But according to Boulnois, Scotus was the decisive innovator with respect to these views about will, fact, and order.

“It is this interpretation that seems to have had the most influence on subsequent medieval thought.”

“There are two models, fundamentally distinct: 1) A logical model, for which absolute power is the power capable of the totality of possibilities (of all that is non-contradictory), and the ordained power corresponds to the choice of a particular order. 2) An operative model, for which divine intervention de potentia absoluta is a possibility of modifying in fact that which is in principle the course of things. What is outside of order is not disorder but fact.” (ibid). “For Scotus, the model is no longer a logical model, but an operative model. He no longer distinguishes two forms of power but two forms of action (according to the law and outside the law)” (p. 57).

What is described as the traditional view here tends to make order overly strong, presuming it to be capable of explaining all facts, while the “modernist” view makes fact overly strong, tending toward a proto-fundamentalist denial of the need for interpretation, and at the same time shrinking the scope of order so that fact always exceeds it.

As Boulnois argues more generally in his big book on Scotus, L’Être et représentation (“Being and Representation”, 1999), this historic transformation is too large to be attributed to a single figure, but Scotus is nonetheless at its center. Modern large-scale interpretation of the history of Latin philosophy has generally centered on Aquinas, who was canonized as a saint in 1323, and specially declared by the Pope to be central to Catholic philosophy in 1879 after the rise of neo-Thomism.

(From a broad point of view, the “moderate realism” of Aquinas has much to recommend it, but one-sided emphasis on Aquinas has obscured the real diversity and complexity of Latin philosophical views and the important role of numerous others, including Scotus. The pragmatist Charles Pierce rather casually called himself a Scotist realist. Heidegger wrote his dissertation on Scotus, but in later work tended to reject Latin philosophy with a very broad brush, without addressing important historical detail.)

“No more than his predecessors does Scotus say that God acts by an absolute power, but only that he can act otherwise than he does (and it is in this that his power is absolute). This has no immediate operative content…. Duns Scotus does not say that God acts by his naked absolute power, but precisely always, according to a beautiful oxymoron, ‘in the manner ordained by his absolute power’. What characterizes the position of Scotus, more than the operative model of absolute power alone, is at the same time the extreme opposition of this dialectic between the two concepts and the possibility at every instant of one toggling to the other. To safeguard divine freedom, Scotus creates an infinite oscillation between an instituted juridical order and a de facto power that is nonetheless not disordered and immoral” (ibid).

What Boulnois calls a beautiful oxymoron in Scotus, the de facto claim of an infinite oscillation between order and fact — evinced by the phrase “ordained by his absolute power” — seems to collapse the evolved distinction between ordained and absolute power. Perhaps this is why Scotus was called the “subtle doctor”. But the implications of this position are not at all subtle. They are quite dramatic.

“What characterizes the end of the Middle Age is at once the inflation of arguments resorting to absolute power and a fragmentation of models allowing it to be thought” (p. 58).

Boulnois cites Avignon Pope John XXII’s blunt declaration that the absolute and ordained power of God are the same thing. John apparently used this to justify a politicized claim that salvation can only be achieved through the institutionalized sacraments of the Church. “All that which is ordained by God is irrevocable” (p. 59). This was a time of bitter conflict between the Avignon Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV. It was under John that Aquinas was canonized as a saint. John was also the one who formally declared witchcraft to be a heresy.

We saw above that William of Ockham also emphasized the inseparability of absolute and ordained power. But he apparently used it to argue for the opposite practical conclusion, that law and ordained power can always be surpassed by fact and absolute power, and that salvation can be achieved through faith alone. Under the protection of Louis IV, Ockham accused the Pope of heresy.

(From the point of view of the logical pragmatics I have discussed in reading Brandom, the formal identification of two things with different connotations can be interpreted as a reduction of one to the other, or of the other to the one, or as a nonreductive combination of the two. Different connotations imply different pragmatics or conditions of use.)

Boulnois says that Ockham interprets the thesis of the nonseparability of the nominally distinct powers (absolute versus ordained) in terms of its consequences for the power’s object (the world), rather than in terms of its subject (God).

“John XXII insists on the fact that the identity of divine power entails the invariability of the order chosen by God…. For [Ockham], the theory of John XXII comes back to saying that the order of the world cannot be other than it is. From this it follows evidently that no creature can do what it does not do…. He sees in this a resurgence of Greco-Arabic necessitarianism, an error condemned in 1277. And to say that humans can only be saved by the institution is not only an error, but a heresy: in fact, many humans are saved by their faith without being baptized” (p. 60).

“Greco-Arabic necessitarianism” is another exaggeration. Among the Greeks, the only real necessitarians are the Stoics. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes do all seem to slant things in the direction of objective order and necessity, but the radical voluntarism of Ghazali seems to have been more historically influential in the Arabic tradition.

“For Ockham, order is always a de facto order, a complex of contingent and revocable singularities. It is thus the object of ordained power; but what God can do (in principle), even if he never does it, is the object of absolute power. There is here an extraordinary cross-chase in relation to Duns Scotus. What the one calls the object of ordained power, the other calls the object of absolute power, and vice versa. The fact and the principle exchange their role” (ibid).

On Boulnois’s account, Ockham is a less radical voluntarist than Scotus.

“For Ockham, it is necessary to thus understand the distinction ‘power to do something’: the expression is sometimes taken according the laws ordained and instituted by God, and of these things one says that God can do them by his ordained power. In another way, ‘power’ is taken in the sense of power to do anything that is not self-contradictory, that God has ordained that he will do or not do, and of these things, one says that God can do by his absolute power. The ‘ordained power’ indeed does designate the order established by God, as in Duns Scotus. But the ‘absolute power’ designates not his de facto power, but only everything that is not contradictory: it has a logical sense and not an operative one (since it designates what God does not do); he returns quite simply to the traditional sense admitted before Scotus” (pp. 60-61).

“[Ockham’s influential student] Adam Wodeham explicitly cites two interpretations of absolute power…. Adam Wodeham clearly thinks ordained power as an order instituted regularly and capable of dispensation, like Scotus and Ockham. But he is also aware of the existence of two models for thinking absolute power: that of Duns Scotus, for whom the power to do the contrary of the established order is absolute, that is to say autonomous and absolutely capable of acting; and that of Ockham, for whom the absolute power of God is subject to the logical principle of contradiction. For Scotus, even when God has ordained the contrary, he can do something by his absolute power. For Ockham, God can only act by his absolute power if there is no contradiction with what he has ordained” (p. 61).

“As a consequence — and contrary to received ideas — the great epistemological rupture of the 14th century was effectuated by Scotus more than by Ockham…. [Scotus] is infinitely more revolutionary, in admitting that God has a de facto power that is other than the power in principle without being immoral. Nonetheless, the position of Ockham and that of Scotus converge on one point, essential for theological ethics: even if, by the ordained power of God, the human can only be saved by baptism and entry into the institution, by the absolute power of God, the human can be saved without Church or charity…. One of the distant consequences of this hypertrophy of absolute power will be the possibility, vigorously enunciated by Luther, that there is a predetermination indifferent to good and evil” (p. 62).

Luther argued for justification by faith alone, traced all authority solely to the Bible, and tended to emphasize its literal word.

“It would be exaggerated to make the new theory of divine power bear all of the motif of the metamorphosis of theology after Scotus. It would also be exaggerated to try to reduce everything to the new theories of intuition or of the primacy of will. First of all, Scotus is only the spokesman for a whole generation of thinkers who each contributed to the restructuring of theology” (p. 63).

But these caveats address only certain over-simplifications of the historical interpretation Boulnois develops.

“It is the triangle of power, knowledge, and will that is modified in its entirety. In the human as in God, power [pouvoir] becomes a power [puissance] to act in principle or in fact. Power remains a capacity to act according to an order (interpreted juridically as a law), but it also becomes the capacity to act outside the law or against it. Furthermore, for thinking of the problems of beatitude from the side of common abstractive knowledge, there developed a theory of intuitive knowledge of the singular contingent. Finally, for the Franciscan theologians above all, freedom of the will is an innate quality” (p. 63).

On the threshold of modernity, new voluntaristic super-powers are attributed both to God and to the human. The alleged fact of voluntaristic will is no longer constrained by an orientation toward the good.

“As a consequence, willing is no longer tautologically willing the good. But reciprocally, what God wills is ipso facto the good. On the edge of the new theology of omnipotence, the theories of intuition and of will will be adjoined, to construct a new model of practice and of epistemology. With this new device, it is the whole harmony between the transcendentals, being, truth, and the good, that is disrupted. The objects of power, of will, and of knowledge are no longer necessarily aligned” (pp. 63-64).

“Conceiving divine intervention de potentia absoluta as a real possibility led to an undermining of the intelligibility and predictability of natural phenomena. The order of the real no longer appears except as a descent into particularity in the ocean of possibles. This disjunction has a paradoxical consequence: philosophy is all the more free to expound the necessity of the order of the present world, while the theologian makes contingency surge into this world here, when he does not invoke an infinity of other possible worlds. The present order can become an absolute, and the absolute can contain an infinity of other orders. The order and the absolute are disseminated in an indefinite variation of hypothetical orders. The order and the absolute are no longer articulated; they pass one into the other” (p. 64).

As Boulnois says, treating divine intervention in the world by absolute power as a real possibility tends to undermine intelligibility. I would add that this undermining of intelligibility undermines ethics as well.

“This renewal of the problematic figures an evolution of theology. It makes God less and less human, less and less reached by knowledge of the order of the universe, less and less oriented toward the norm of the good. Divine omnipotence thus founds a ‘skeptical’ movement, which has consequences for the theology of justification (from Scotus to Luther). The order of salvation appears more and more contingent…. The equilibrium between the order of the world and the omnipotence of God attained in the Sentences of Peter Lombard ended up a victim of its own success. After being articulated with nature, the supernatural becomes omnipresent, and finally suspends all autonomy of the order of nature. There is no longer a consistent finite order. Omnipotence figures a more and more uncertain order of the world, and results in a complete concealment of God and his plans from the human. God is so unknowable that his attributes are founded in the brilliance of his omnipotence, reachable only by faith, and not allowing any certainty to exist. Following this metamorphosis, God, the object par excellence of theological intelligence, who was at first thought of as ineffable, will be finally named as incomprehensible. The world will appear as a labyrinth of axiomatics and exceptions, in which individuals are toys” (pp. 64-65).

This omnipresence of the possibility of supernatural intervention, outside the order of nature — and the correlated suspension of all autonomy of the order of nature — are what undermine intelligibility.

“It is now the model of political power [pouvoir] that serves to think the divine power in an identical, univocal sense, even in a particular case: all power can be exercised either juridically, or de facto” (p. 65).

“By a cross-chase of which history has the secret, these ‘absolutist’ arguments will serve later for the exaltation of monarchic power against pontifical pretensions. In Jean Bodin, they serve to describe the absolute power of the prince. This theory leads to a reinforcement of political absolutism — and simultaneously to an evanescence of the predictability of the law of nature” (p. 66).

“The theme of absolute power grounds the work of Duns Scotus in three dimensions: ontological (the action of every free agent), juridical (the king and his realm), theological (God and his decrees). This origin reveals a structural correspondence between the modern concepts of individual freedom, of divine power [puissance], and of political power [pouvoir]” (ibid).

“The black sun of omnipotence shines with a paradoxical light. When power wants to be without shadow and without limits, it accumulates within itself the night in which all evils are absolved; it endorses dark things and obscurity. On the contrary, the power that is incapable of evil and excludes it is a pure light without darkness. It does not suppress the shadow, or assume it, or absolve it, but dissociates it from itself and separates it from its sharp light. But for this it must be a power capable of lacking power” (p. 68).

Aristotle on Friendship

Philia, commonly translated as “friendship” or “love”, is one of the summits of Aristotelian ethics. It embodies a kind of reciprocating good will, grounded in fondness and a kind of identification with the other, and it motivates us to do good. Aristotle discusses it from many angles. This is a historical background for Hegel’s ideas about mutual recognition. I’ve selected a few core passages to comment upon.

“And friendship seems to be present by nature in a parent for a child and in a child for a parent, not only in human beings but also in birds and most animals, and for animals alike in kind toward one another, and especially among human beings, which is why we praise those who are friends of humanity. And one might see among those who travel that every human being is akin and a friend to a human being” (Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 144, emphasis added).

He considers familial bonds as a kind of friendship grounded in nature, not only among humans but among other animals as well. As the feeling of commonality in human communities, friendship has political significance. He explicitly suggests that we ought by default to see every fellow talking animal as a friend or potential friend.

“And friendship seems to hold cities together” (ibid).

“Cities” are a figurative way of referring to human society in general. Just above, he explicitly mentions every human being.

“And when people are friends there is no need of justice, but when they are just there is still need of friendship, and among things that are just, what inclines toward friendship seems to be most just of all. And friendship is not only necessary but also beautiful, for we praise those who love their friends…. Moreover, people believe that it is the same people who are good men and friends” (ibid).

Without much effort, friends naturally tend to treat one another better than justice would demand. Friendship motivates us to do good.

“[Friends] have goodwill and wish for good things for one another, not being unaware of it” (p. 146).

“[T]here are three species of friendship, equal in number to the kinds of things that are loved; for in accordance with each, there is a reciprocal loving which one is not unaware of, and those who love one another wish for good things for one another in the same sense in which they love. So those who love one another for what is useful do not love one another for themselves, but insofar as something good comes to them from one another. And it is similar with those who love on account of pleasure, since they are fond of charming people not for being people of a certain sort, but because they are pleasing to themselves. So those who love one another for what is useful have a liking based on what is good for themselves, and those who love for pleasure have a liking based on what is pleasant to themselves, and the other person is loved not for what he is, but insofar as he is useful or pleasant. Therefore, these are friendships of an incidental kind, since it is not insofar as the one loved is the very person he is that he is loved, but insofar as he provides, in the one case, something good, or in the other case, pleasure” (ch. 3, p. 146).

Even in the friendships based on usefulness or pleasure, there is a “reciprocal loving”.

“And those who wish for good things for their friends for their own sake are friends most of all, since they are that way in themselves and not incidentally” (p. 147). “And people wish for good things for those they love for those others’ own sake, not as a result of feeling but as a result of an active condition” (ch. 5, p. 150).

Kant’s emphasis on treating other people as ends in themselves has its origins here.

“Now the friendships that have been discussed consist in an equality, since the same things come from both people and they wish for the same things for one another” (ch. 6, p. 151).

“But friendship seems to be present in loving more than in being loved…. And since friendship is present more in loving, and those who love their friends are praised, the virtue belonging to friends seems to be loving” (ch. 8, p. 153).

“And it is especially in this way that those who are unequal might be friends, since it could equalize them” (p. 154).

While there are also friendships among unequals, in which a kind of proportionality to circumstances stands as the next best thing to equality, friendship between equals clearly serves as a kind of model. This equalizing role of friendship is why it is closely linked to justice.

“Now it seems, as was said at the beginning, that friendship and justice concern the same things and are present in the same things; for in every sort of community there seems to be something just, and also friendship. At any rate, people address their shipmates and fellow soldiers as friends, and it is similar with those in other sorts of communities. To whatever extent they share something in common, to that extent there is a friendship, since that too is the extent to which there is something just. And the proverb ‘the things of friends are common’ is right, since friendship consists in community” (ch. 9, p. 154 ).

Aristotle uses the figure of speech that “the friend is another self” (book IX ch. 4, p. 168). We both tend to see our friends as like ourselves, and more often form friendships with those we are disposed to see as like ourselves. As is often the case, he moves back and forth rather fluidly between definition and description, and between more and less proper or exact senses of the word. Thus the same term serves here as a universalizing ideal and there as a distinguishing criterion.