A Harmony of Goodness

The title is from Mary Beth Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness: Mutuality and Moral Living According to John Duns Scotus (1996; 2nd ed. 2012). Until very recently, my limited sense of Scotus was based only on the remarks of philosophers engaged in other work, who were themselves mainly responding to summary accounts of his views, which did not even mention a distinctive approach to ethics. This early book of Ingham’s, which fills that gap, is said to have contributed significantly to a recent revival of interest in Scotus. Ingham historically situates Scotus’s ethics within a larger context of practical concerns within the Franciscan tradition. Though her starting point is quite different from mine, I am impressed by the amount of common ground I am finding with her conclusions.

“Scotus’s spiritual tradition, with the primacy of love and the goal of ordered loving, affects his thinking in three important areas: the centrality of freedom as self-mastery, the role of the divine desire and creativity, and practical reasoning as an aesthetic act of moral discernment…. Within his Franciscan spiritual vision, we discover here a unified moral vision whose central experience is the beauty of the created order, whose inspiration is divine creative and abundant love, and whose fulfillment is found in building loving and inclusive relationships. It is only in this way that we promote the common good” (pp. 5-6, emphasis in original throughout).

A bit later, she will sketch a deep historical trinitarian basis for the way love is used here, but at the outset, to my ear, her Scotist-inflected view of mutuality recalls the mutuality of Aristotelian friendship described in the Nicomachean Ethics. She will also cite “friendship love” as the highest form of love, which has a surprisingly Aristotelian sound. (It may have a more specific Franciscan basis as well, of which I have yet to learn.) I also think of the very young Hegel’s Romantically inflected emphasis on love, which later grew into his more Aristotelian mature theory of mutual recognition.

Creationist views that emphasize raw power I find utterly alien. But with those whose practical import is to emphasize goodness and beauty in ordinary worldly being, I can find common ground. Divine goodness — especially when linked to a sense of beauty — many others before me have found to be a compelling metaphor. And at least since Avicenna if not since Plotinus, there have been major philosophers who aimed at a kind of reconciliation between philosophy and the traditions of monotheistic theology, which developed only after the time of Plato and Aristotle.

Ingham continues in the conclusion of her preface to the second edition, “My more recent discovery of Stoic and monastic influences on the medieval Franciscans, and my growing awareness of the importance of Franciscan Christian humanism have helped me reframe Scotus’s emphasis on the will to a deeper defense of the rationality of love. The central image of the morally mature person is the trained artisan whose self-mastery holds the key to enlightened tranquility and peace of heart. Here is that person whose presence, along with her actions, are transformative of the world around her. Here is the life of Christian praxis, fully realized” (p. 6).

Of course I welcome the de-emphasis in regard to will. The vocabulary of self-mastery probably comes from the Roman Stoic Seneca, whose influence on the Franciscans she will document later on. Self-mastery is the least objectionable form of mastery, for which I nonetheless try to find other words in light of Hegel’s critique as expounded by Brandom. The connection of ethical being to beauty in the whole of life still seems profoundly right to me, even though Hegel also legitimately criticizes the Romantic ideal of the beautiful soul.

Morality properly speaking is indeed a kind of maturity of a human, for which the common early modern reduction to obedience to sovereign authority is a poor substitute.

Personal presence and praxis are not in my preferred vocabulary, because they seem to put a sort of rose-colored fog around crisper Platonic and Aristotelian hermeneutic principles, but they do both in a sense refer to ethically relevant realities, even if only in a diminished way.

Ingham will also expound a Scotist critique of what I regard as the post-Aristotelian Stoic-Epicurean-Skeptical Hellenistic paradigm of medicine for the soul. This turns out to have significant points in common with the critique of the medical model that Nussbaum in hindsight attributes to Aristotle.

“A significant spokesperson for this moral vision of relational love and generous living is the man known as the Subtle Doctor, John Duns Scotus. Writing after the Condemnations of 1277 (Paris) and 1284 (Oxford), Scotus pursued a relentless analysis of the legacy of Greek thought available to Latin thinkers at the close of the thirteenth century…. This rethinking involved a serious and critical rejection of the naturalist and necessitarian worldview which had emerged from the Arab philosophers” (pp. 7-8).

“Generous living” recalls the cardinal Aristotelian virtue of magnanimity, though I suppose that Ingham is thinking of Christian charity.

I appreciate the explicit drawing out of a notion of “relational” love from trinitarian perichoresis or mutual inherence. She draws attention to Scotus’s emphasis on the notion of a deeply “relational” native affection for justice in the soul, which, following Anselm, he contrasts with the affection for possession or convenience that generalizes possessive “love”.

The affection for justice can also be read as recalling Plato’s deliberately provocative suggestion that all beings should be understood as in some sense desiring the ultimate Good. The latter stands in contrast to the modern ideology of possessive individualism that was already germinating in the Greek Sophists, who were so sharply criticized by Plato and Aristotle (a criticism that also grounds Hegel’s repugnance toward the status of all Roman citizens as chattels of the sovereign Emperor).

“Scotus possesses several qualities which make him attractive. As a Franciscan, he is deeply committed to the value of creation and to our relationship with all that exists. As a theologian, he exhibits very positive attitudes toward women, both in the inclusive imagery he uses when speaking of God and his focus on Mary as sinless model of human perfection. As a medieval writer, he is aware of the dangers of the original sin tradition within Latin Christianity…. Scotus rejects out out of hand the famous argument of Anselm, in which the Bishop of Canterbury places the Incarnation within the context of payment for the sin of Adam and Eve…. There is no repayment of an infinite debt for which Jesus had to be born or to be sacrificed” (p. 9).

Scotus is a leading defender of the immaculate conception of Mary. I don’t have opinions on issues of this sort, but a de-emphasis on sin in favor of more affirmative values is certainly to be welcomed. This is a very significant distinction, which could support recovery of a positive valuation of finite things in general. But even if it does not depend on original sin, Incarnation still poses serious difficulties.

“Scotus moves beyond a binary presentation of issues and seeks to harmonize various aspects of a situation, so as to discover the truth beneath the differing positions. His is an approach which is reconciling: bringing together internal and external realms, human and divine activity, natural and graced living. In Scotus we discover an integrated presentation of what human really might mean” (p. 10).

The general practice of seriously airing arguments pro and con on any topic — perhaps derived from Abelard’s initially controversial Sic et Non — is an attractive dimension of scholasticism that the Enlightenment’s wholesale dismissals do not appropriately attend to.

Ingham develops a guiding metaphor of the harmonious sound of a wind chime in her presentation of Scotus in this book.

“The harmony of musical sounds coming from a wind chime is not a tune that one could whistle. It is a quiet song created by the fragility of the figures, the balance of the pieces and the harmony of their interaction…. I have chosen this image because Scotus offers, in my view, an aesthetic paradigm within which to consider the contours of moral living…. Part of my own reading of Scotus has been informed by his concern to speak of the morally good act as a beautiful work of art or as a beautifully executed performance, and of the moral agent as a formed artist” (p. 11).

In her metaphor, the central part of a wind chime that strikes the others and creates a beautiful sound corresponds to the will. But the wind chime metaphor overall does not seem at all voluntarist.

“The ability to choose freely, after proper deliberation, constitutes the uniquely human quality of moral living” (p. 12).

Ingham here reinserts the Aristotelian practical coupling of choice with deliberation that Scotus seems at a theoretical level to explicitly repudiate in favor of a categorical, undialectical, absolutist insistence on free will. Clearly she is arguing that Scotus himself in ethical contexts restores a more balanced view, and that Scotus does in fact generally commend more balanced views in practical matters. She also points out that Scotus says theology is ultimately a practical discipline and not a theoretical one. This seems right as far as it goes, though Scotus also seems to insist, contrary to Aristotle, that there is is such a thing as a practical science.

“[T]he spiritual tradition within which he writes… sees human living as an ongoing process of divinization within which human and divine persons work together to produce goodness, within which there is no rift between the natural and so-called supernatural realms” (p. 13).

Taking up and extending Aristotle’s orientation of the human toward divinization at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Plotinus directly challenges us to become godlike, and in effect says to a theistic reader that this is what God would want for us. Meister Eckhart holds such an orientation to be compatible with Christianity. The stakes are high here, because Christianity has often categorically rejected such a goal, equating it with Luciferan pride. Ingham seems to be saying that Franciscan humanism and Scotus in particular also have a more moderate stance on this question.

“As one might imagine, the integration of Aristotelian philosophy into Christianity was not an easy matter…. Study of Aristotle was not favorably received by the theologians…. As early as 1215, public lectures on the Metaphysics and De Anima were forbidden. Even Thomas Aquinas, with his sympathetic reading of Aristotle, did not escape posthumous condemnation in 1277 (Paris) and again in 1284 (Oxford)” (p. 16).

“[Scotus] takes great pains to defend another’s position with the best arguments available and he answers these arguments methodically. This type of openness is rare in any thinker, and all the more surprising when one is dealing with a non-Christian opponent” (p. 17).

“I have chosen to present Scotus’s moral paradigm not as a defense of the primacy of freedom in moral living, but rather as an appeal for the harmony of goodness and as an expression of mutuality at all levels of human living. To a great extent, this is because I find love to be more central than freedom in his texts (ibid).

“Scotus emphasizes freedom because the highest form of love (love of friendship) is, by definition, a love that cannot be coerced or demanded…. This purest and best love is mutual; it entails reciprocity and produces communion…. The entire journey of human living, from internal choices to external actions, culminates in a relation of mutuality with God and with all persons” (p. 18).

Ethics and Effectiveness

I’m sampling a French anthology edited by Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey and Gwenaëlle Aubry, Excellence in Life: On the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics of Aristotle (2002; my translation throughout). Dherbey’s essay “Ethics and Effectivity in Aristotle” aims to show that Aristotle anticipates Hegel in successfully overcoming the apparent opposition between pure principles and the real world. This makes a nice complement to Robert Pippin’s discernment of strongly Aristotelian notions of actuality and actualization in Hegel’s ethics.

Dherbey begins by noting that some people situate pure ethics outside of all real-world effectiveness, while viewing real-world effectiveness as inevitably involving moral compromise, shortfall, deviation, and corruption. He associates this with “romanticism, from Schiller to Sartre” (p. 1). I think of the “beautiful soul” criticized by Hegel. Aristotle avoids this unfortunate result by emphasizing what Dherbey calls the “weight” of ethics, or “the inscription of the moral act in an exteriority that prolongs it” (ibid). Brandom makes the related point that we do not own or control the full scope of our deeds.

“The one who does nothing cannot act well”, Dherbey quotes from Aristotle’s Politics. Moral excellence is not constituted by intentions alone. Dherbey says that for Aristotle, “the validity of the intention is judged by the act that realizes it, or doesn’t realize it” (p.4, emphasis in original). Pippin develops a similar point in more detail in his remarks on actuality in Hegel.

For Aristotle it is not enough just to have the good will that Peter Abelard took to be the basis of virtue. According to Dherbey, Kant’s affirmation that nothing can be called good, if not a good will, makes intention the very source of the goodness of a good act. I am impressed by Nancy Sherman’s argument that Kant came closer to Aristotle than is commonly thought. But in any case, while Aristotle is far from disregarding the importance of what we might call the agent’s subjectivity, for him the goodness of an act depends on more than this.

Dherbey notes a major cleavage between Aristotle and the Stoics on another related point. For Aristotle, “not acting ‘lightly’ signifies that ‘intentional’ action, in order to be virtuous, must take support from a stable foundation, from a support that is none other than ethos or character…. It is indeed character, more than punctual intention in the modern sense of the term, that governs ethical choice” (p. 5; see also What We Really Want). It was the Stoics who bequeathed to later writers a strong notion of punctual decisions. I find the narrowing of ethics to a focus on punctual acts of decision to have consequences that are quite pernicious.

In closing, Dherbey quotes Hegel’s remark in his History of Philosophy lectures that for Aristotle, “The good in general is not defined as an abstract idea, but in such a way that the moment of realization finds itself essentially in it” (p. 12).

I would add that this is deeply related to Aristotle’s argument against Plato that potentiality at least in part depends on actuality, rather than being a power that simply produces the actual (or being a template that fully anticipates the actual, as Leibniz seems to have held).

Good will does not vindicate an action, but it does provide an additional reason to be forgiving in our evaluation of actions that turn out badly.

Conscience and Conscientiousness

For Hegel traditional cultures were full of Ethical Spirit as a sort of direct identification with the customs of a community, but they did not recognize the genuine agency of living individuals. Harris in his commentary identifies three successive shapes of a spiritual self in Hegel’s Phenomenology. The crudest is the deeply alienated notion of a person as a bearer of legal rights, which dates back to imperial Rome. Far more sophisticated is the modern moral self, exemplified in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte. We saw that the moral self for Hegel came to grief in contradictions between its ideal of moral perfection and the imperfect reality of its actual life. It became stuck in an alternation between its certainty of an ideal truth that it externalized in God or a separate intelligible world, and the recognition that it was not that ideal and could not meet it.

A third form of spiritual self for Hegel is identified with Conscience and a “conscientious self”. Whereas the moral self externalizes its values in God and/or a separate intelligible world, the conscientious self internalizes its values and thoroughly identifies with them. In this way, the conscientious self avoids all the “real versus ideal” contradictions the moral self becomes mired in.

The standpoint of Conscience carries a different danger from that of the moral self. Hegel spoke of the moral self as “displacing” its values into a Beyond not unlike that of the Unhappy Consciousness. The self of Conscience is entirely “happy” in that its values are right here and its very own, but it is in danger of being too “happy”. Because all its standards are internalized, it is especially easy for it to fall into self-deception or hypocrisy.

I have puzzled more than usual over the transitions in this section. Harris’ commentary on this particular part, while containing many insightful remarks, did not really help me better grasp the transitions, as it generally has in the other parts.

After speaking about Conscience, Hegel goes on to talk about the Beautiful Soul. The term “Beautiful Soul” was already established in German Romantic literature. Hegel makes sharper negative remarks about it than he just had about the possible self-deception or hypocrisy of Conscience. Nonetheless, it seems that “Beautiful Soul” is just an alternate term for Conscience after all.

When Conscience goes too far in the direction of self-satisfaction, it degenerates into a smug figure perfectly insulated from all questioning or criticism. Confidence is a good thing, but a bad Beautiful Soul is always too easy on itself. It never doubts that everything it does is right.

Then we move suddenly from the Beautiful Soul to the evil-doer. The best explanation I’ve so far worked out for this is that the attitude of the evil-doer in general resembles the hypocrisy of a bad Beautiful Soul. As Plato said, all beings always seek the good (or rather what seems good to them); evil is precisely a distorted, overly narrow “good” accompanied by non-recognition of others or other points of view.

Hegel goes on to suggest that the “hard-hearted” judgmental attitude of the moralist who wants to hold others to standards unconditionally is subject to a hypocrisy of its own that is structurally not that different from the hypocrisy of the evil-doer. When they confront one another, each fails to adequately recognize the other. Hegel encourages us to look forward to a world in which each of them could freely confess the inadequacy of its recognition of the other, and then forgive the other’s inadequate recognition.

(Here my reading is departing slightly from that of Harris. Harris briefly criticizes language like I just used, which sounds like a moral ideal for the future, which he thinks would be too Fichtean for Hegel. I still worry about misconceptions of Hegel as an apologist for his own particular community, so I prefer Brandom’s suggestion that Hegel does not intend to claim the transition to mutual recognition is yet completed.)

We can always find fault with someone if we try hard enough. Hegel cites the aphorism that “no man is a hero to his valet”, but wants us to do better than that. The better perspective is that fallible humans with weaknesses can still be heroes.

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