Tag: Ethics

Epictetus: What Depends on Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epictetus In Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resolution and Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thus we can return to our initial inquiry.”

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

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

“We have established six essential points.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive freedom is the ability to act well.

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

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

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

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

(See also Willingness, Deliberation, Choice.)

Ethical Resolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Classical Ethics

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

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

Resolution Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kant’s Anti-Voluntarism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Will in the Cambridge Platonists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neo-Stoicism to Descartes

We have reached part 2 of Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, which will develop a portrait of the major alternative to the natural law tradition in 17th-century ethics. Within this scope, the major figures will be the neo-Stoics; the Cambridge Platonists; and the four canonical “rationalists”, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. What makes Schneewind’s book especially interesting is his strong focus on the history of ethical thought. I am giving it unusually thorough treatment because I agree with his assessment that the history of ethics tends to be badly under-represented in general histories of philosophy, and in briefer accounts of individual major philosophers.

The first chapter of part 2, which I will discuss here, treats the neo-Stoics and Descartes. We have seen before that a concept of “right reason” derived from the Roman writers Cicero and Seneca already began to play a role in medieval ethics. This is now joined by notions of constancy and self-governance that also come from Cicero and Seneca. Not only the neo-Stoics but also Descartes embrace all three. The view of Descartes that emerges here is new and interesting, and quite unexpected.

To set up a contrast with the account he will be developing here, Schneewind quickly recalls the ground already covered.

“The modern natural lawyers held that by reasoning from observable facts we can find out how to cope with the moral and political problems that beset our lives. Experience gives us the evidence we need in order to infer that God exists and cares for us. Part of what we learn from it is that God has made the proper structure of our common life independent of any larger cosmic scheme” (p. 169).

“The major seventeenth-century alternative to modern natural law theory rejected both its empiricism and its refusal to tie morality to a divinely supervised universe. Many of those who rejected natural law theory held that God’s mind and ours are fundamentally akin…. As we improve our understanding — as we perfect ourselves — we will see ever more clearly that we are part of a harmonious whole and can live on harmonious terms with ourselves and others. On this view our participation in the divine mind is the most important fact about us” (pp. 169-170).

These writers have what I would call the Greek philosophical idea that reason and nature are themselves divine, or at least can legitimately be said to participate in a divine character. They do not rely on specific revelation for their respective views of God, but that does not make them irreligious. They reject a reductive, empiricist view of reason. They think that through participating in reason, we ourselves can be said to participate in divine activity, and this is our highest calling. So I don’t think it is quite right to say that these writers want to defend a divinely supervised universe. They variously defend a divine universe or a divinely created universe. Supervision sounds like direct intervention from outside. But Herbert of Cherbury has been called the father of English deism. The original Stoics saw divinity as immanent. Spinoza would have vigorously rejected the applicability of a notion like supervision to God. For Leibniz, God exercises providence at the level of possible worlds. There are a great many alternatives to the traditionalist or literalist theism that is implied by the term “supervised”.

From the phrase “as we perfect ourselves”, we begin to get a sense of what Schneewind will mean by perfectionism. (Part 2 is called “Perfectionism and rationality”. This chapter is called “Origins of modern perfectionism”.) It is uncontroversial that the figures he surveys in part 2 used the term “perfection” in various ways. But it is quite a leap to conclude from that fact, that this whole scope is appropriately summed up by an ism term of very recent coinage, “perfectionism”. At the outset, it has yet to be established that this grouping of figures has enough in common even to be appropriately called a stream. Leibniz is very different from Spinoza, and they are both very different from Descartes. One might also be concerned that an exclusive focus on perfecting ourselves is too narrow or individualistic to adequately characterize some of these figures. But Schneewind will bring to light a great deal that is of interest. In any case, he does an excellent job at the detailed level.

“The thought that our morality arises from our awareness of the divine mind was worked out in detail by the Stoics; and restatements of Stoicism were formative for seventeenth-century moral philosophy…. In the late fifteenth century the first printings of the works of Cicero and Seneca and of Latin translations of Epictetus made some of the major accounts of Stoicism readily accessible. Two sixteenth-century books helped spread Stoic teaching even more widely…. The Latin text [of Lipsius] went through more than eighty editions and was translated into several vernaculars” (p. 170).

Stoicism commonly contrasts our current state with the figure of the ideal Stoic sage, who by following the immanent divine logos or reason is able to rise above all disturbance by the passions.

“If Stoicism was to help modern Europeans cope with their lives, or if it was, as du Vair hoped, to shame them into improvement by showing how virtuously even a pagan could live, its doctrines had to be made acceptable to Christian readers. Neo-Stoicism was the result of the effort to blend two rather disparate views” (p. 171).

Much the same could be said of scholastic Aristotelianism. Whether we approve or disapprove of their innovations, both neo-Stoicism and scholastic Aristotelianism have an innovative character, and do not simply repeat Greek philosophy.

“Du Vair has no qualms about adding a notion of will to Stoic moral philosophy” (p. 171n). “The will’s main task is to enable us to pursue only what is truly in our power…. Du Vair ends by saying that God is delighted above all else by seeing us attain the perfection he created us for; but because ‘our natural forces can never bee sufficient of themselves to keepe us in this perfection’ we must invoke God’s favor” (p. 172).

It is important to note that a notion of will has to be added here. The way it is defined by du Vair above is unique and interesting. It recalls the later Greek Stoic Epictetus’s recommendation that only that which is in our power should be called good or evil.

“Lipsius gives us rather more theory than du Vair, but with no less of a Christian turn. In urging the great virtue of constancy upon us, Lipsius is urging us to live by right reason, ‘a true sense and judgement of things human and divine’. Reason, he says, is the remainder in man of the image of God…. Reason is divinity within us…. Through right reason all of us belong to a common kingdom” (p. 173).

The reference to constancy and right reason is significant. Both of these terms are important in both Cicero and Seneca. They do not exactly come from Greek Stoicism, but rather represent new contributions to Stoic thought (or Stoic-influenced thought, in Cicero’s case). In a bit, we will see that Descartes also adopts them.

“[Lipsius] develops Cicero’s deep belief that the honorable course of life is also the useful course” (p. 174).

“[Neo-Stoicism] tells us that if we look at our own reason we can both see what the highest good is and move toward attaining it. We can do so essentially because reason in us is the divine in us” (p. 175).

“For Herbert [of Cherbury], and for the moral innatists generally, our guide to God’s mind is our own mind, and therefore moral ignorance, leading to wrongdoing, is first of all defective self-knowledge” (p. 183).

The neo-Stoic notion of innate ideas will be adopted by Descartes, and criticized from an empiricist point of view by Locke.

“Herbert held that, in becoming aware of the Common Notions, we are sharing thoughts with God” (p. 184).

Herbert’s Common Notions with respect to religion consist of five affirmations: existence of God; a duty of worship; centrality of virtue; need for repentance; and reward or punishment in an afterlife.

“Descartes rejects this view because of a position he holds firmly but never fully expounds, a position that greatly distressed a good many of his early readers. He thinks that truths of the kind Herbert’s Common Notions contain would constrain God, the way pagan deities are tied by fate; and he is emphatic in asserting that we must not admit that anything could subject God to such necessities. Even eternal verities must depend on God’s will, as a king’s laws do in his country. There are eternal truths, such as that the whole is greater than the part; but they would not be true unless God had willed them to be so. God’s will is as much the cause of essences and of what is possible as it is of what is actual” (ibid, extensive embedded citations omitted here and below).

Here we get a taste of Descartes’s famous voluntarism, which, it seems to me, leads in a very different direction from those of Herbert and the neo-Stoics. But even here, there is a new twist.

“God’s creative willing is completely free because he is initially indifferent to every possible state of affairs. He does not create something because it is better that it should exist than that it should not; rather, his willing something to exist makes its existence better. Before he wills, he could have no reason to will as he does. Descartes goes to the extreme of allowing that God could perfectly well have commanded his creatures to hate him. But unlike Luther, Calvin, and Suarez, he says not a word about God’s having commanded that we are to obey certain laws of nature” (ibid).

This last distinction has huge importance. In common with the fundamentalists, Descartes defends an outrageous voluntarism, but in so doing he does not appeal to special revelation or fundamentalist literalism.

“It will become clear that Descartes is proposing a thoroughgoing ethic of self-governance.”

This I find utterly fascinating. Self-governance is another important theme from Cicero and Seneca. I think of it as a kind of opposite pole to voluntarism and the command/obedience paradigm. But as we were just reminded, Descartes is one of history’s more notorious voluntarists. We have recently seen that there were defenders of natural law who were not at all voluntarist. With Descartes, it is the converse — we get a very strong but abstract voluntarism that is not tied to any claims about specific natural law.

“His refusal to make any claims about divine imposition of laws of nature goes beyond his determination not to discuss anything that is properly a matter for theologians” (pp. 184-185). “It is part of the same outlook that leads him to exclude all talk of final causes from physics” (p. 185).

This is another large subject. Galileo and Descartes are among the early advocates of a physics that looks to mathematics rather than teleology to ground its explanations of the workings of nature. What is less frequently recognized in standard accounts of this is that Avicenna, Aquinas, Suarez, and their co-thinkers already turn what they call efficient causality into a “cause of existence”, which then makes it appear that efficient causality is fundamental and grounds all other causality, rather than being limited to an account of the relations of means to ends. Or again in another way more relevant to modern physical explanation, the means are given an expanded explanatory role that eclipses the original Aristotelian priority of ends.

“Descartes is no atheist, but he does not think that we can use rational knowledge of God to solve problems either in theory or in practice. His God is at least as inscrutable as the God of Luther and his predecessors, perhaps more so” (ibid).

Descartes uses the unknowability of God in a way that is in a sense opposite to the role it plays in Luther’s proto-fundamentalism. For Descartes it opens up a large space for secular modes of explanation; for Luther on the other hand, it requires an increased reliance on revelation over natural knowledge.

“Our most basic ways of thinking do not allow us to infer anything at all about how God thinks. The fact that we cannot conceive alternatives to the laws of geometry and logic shows the limits only of our minds, not of God’s power. Confined thus to our own way of thinking, we cannot ‘share in God’s plans’. Hence in physics, Descartes holds, ‘we must never argue from ends’ ” (ibid).

Though they do have points in common, mathematical physics and what I would call Aristotle’s hermeneutics of nature are fundamentally different disciplines. Received views of the history of science notwithstanding, the one does not really compete with the other. If we are doing mathematical physics, Aristotelian ends will not be relevant.

In common with the neo-Stoics, Descartes defends an important role for innate ideas. But Descartes does not understand his innate ideas in the Stoic way, as immanent fragments of a divine mind within us.

“The same is true in practice. Knowing nothing of God’s purpose in making the world, we cannot suppose that he made everything in it for our benefit” (ibid).

“We can know God’s purposes only if he reveals them” (ibid). Here Descartes is closer to Luther.

“If we are speaking ‘from the human point of view adopted in ethics’, we rightly say that God made all things for his glory; but all that this means is that we must praise God as the efficient cause of all that exists. A further conclusion also follows. Whoever loves God fully will be completely resigned to whatever happens, even if it involves evil or death to himself. For Descartes as for the Christian neo-Stoics, God’s providence is a kind of fate, showing us that mere fortune has no role in the world” (ibid).

Descartes takes for granted the notion of efficient cause as “cause of existence” that was developed by Avicenna, Aquinas, and Suarez to replace Aristotle’s “source of motion”.

“But from the attitude we are to take toward life as a whole, we cannot infer any specific guidance” (ibid).

For Descartes at least, it is a straightforward consequence of his voluntarism that God has nothing like an ethical stance, from which practical conclusions can be drawn. From God’s completely arbitrary freedom, logic dictates that no definite ethical conclusion can possibly follow. The more theologically minded voluntarists, on the other hand, follow tradition rather than strict logic on this point, and assume that morality should be derived from God’s commands, which are assumed to be known by revelation.

“Descartes offers an a priori proof of God’s existence, and an a priori proof to show that he is not a deceiver; he thinks of God as the creator and the indispensable continuing ground of the existence of the world; but his voluntarist insistence on keeping God untrammeled entails that although God’s existence and power explain everything in general, they can never be used to explain anything in particular” (ibid).

The thought behind this seems to be that to directly explain particulars by appeals to God is to treat God as unconditionally committed to those particulars, whereas Descartes wants to say that God is not unconditionally committed to any particulars. But this also means that we should not claim the authority of God’s will to justify any worldly particulars. No human view of worldly particulars has an exclusive or unquestionable claim to divine sanction. Love of God, properly understood, can never legitimately excuse dogmatism, sectarianism, or claims that some particular human authority is unconditional.

“What is true of physics and biology is equally true of morality. We can come to trust our faculties by considering God’s perfection, but then we must do our science for ourselves. We can come to love God by considering his perfection, but then we must determine for ourselves how we are to act” (ibid, emphasis added).

“He included what he called a ‘provisional morality’ … but he told Burman that he did so only ‘because of people like the Schoolmen [who] would have said that he was a man without any religion or faith, and that he intended his method to subvert them’…. The provisional morality is to be used while Descartes, or his reader, is withholding assent from all his beliefs…. obey the laws and customs of your country … be constant once you have chosen a course of action … master yourself rather than the world, by making yourself desire only what is fully within your power…. God gave us the power to separate truth from falsity ourselves, and he intends to spend his lifetime using it…. Metaphysics may constitute the root of the tree of knowledge, but the useful sciences are its fruits” (p. 186).

Constancy, mastering oneself, and desiring only what is in our power are all precepts highlighted by the neo-Stoics. At each point in time we work from the best resources available to us, but no general inquiry into morality is ever really over. Something new can always arise.

“[N]one of us will ever have all the knowledge we need to live an ideal life. Whatever morality we come to, it will always be ‘provisional’ ” (p. 187).

“For Descartes the thinking substance that is our mind is simple. All the different mental functions must therefore be construed as ways of thinking. To a critic’s suggestion that this must entail that there is no such thing as will, Descartes replies that the conclusion does not follow: ‘willing, understanding, imagining, and sensing and so on are just different ways of thinking, and all belong to the soul. The thoughts we experience as depending on us alone are volitions, the sole actions of the mind; the perceptions that constitute knowledge are passions. Some volitions, such as those directing us to think about an abstract entity, aim inward; others aim outward, as when we decide to walk. However directed, volitions, as thoughts, are about some object; and their function is to unite us to or separate us from that object” (pp. 187-188).

Gone is the insistence of the theological voluntarists on a separate faculty of arbitrary choice. For Descartes it is the whole person who is unconditionally free.

“The will is as important in purely theoretical thinking as it is in practice. When a theoretical thought occurs to us, we can either accept it — make it ours — or reject it; and if we accept it, we come to believe or know it. When a thought about something good occurs to us, our acceptance of it is what we call desire, and the desire may effectively move our body by redirecting spirits to the pineal gland. Willing in relation to action is thus active thought about good and ill, or about perfection and its opposite. We necessarily pursue what we take to be good and avoid what we take to be ill. If we see clearly and distinctly ‘that a thing is good for us’, then, Descartes says, as long as we keep that thought before us it is impossible to ‘stop the course of our desire’. We can abstain from pursuing a clearly perceived good only by thinking that it is good to demonstrate, by so doing, that we possess free will” (p. 188).

Will is here identified with Stoic interior freedom to assent or not assent to anything that is suggested to us. This is not the same thing as arbitrary choice of a course of action.

“Our liberty is thus not basically a liberty of indifference. We are indifferent to alternatives before us only when we lack sufficient clear knowledge of the goods and ills involved in them. Indifference in us is an imperfection — a lack of knowledge — though on God it is a result of omnipotence. But our ability to give or withhold assent, or our freedom, is a positive power, and no imperfection. That we have this power is so self-evident, Descartes claims, that our knowledge that we possess it ranks with our knowledge of the other innate ideas. We cannot doubt our freedom, even when we see that God has predetermined all events and cannot understand how this predestination is compatible with our freedom. When we act freely we do what we most want to do. We want to assent to clear and distinct propositions, since clarity and distinctness give us the best reasons for assent. And we want to unite ourselves with what we clearly see to be good, since, again, there could be no better reason for desiring something. We can be indifferent when we lack reasons either to accept or to reject; and acting without reason is not what we think of as acting freely. ‘And so’, Descartes says to a critical questioner, ‘I call free in the general sense whatever is voluntary, whereas you wish to restrict the term to the power to determine oneself only if accompanied by indifference’. We can indeed act freely in cases of indifference, but the ability to do so is not significant. It is because free will is the power to accept or reject that we are open to praise and blame and can acquire merit or demerit” (pp. 188-189).

This seems to further confirm that human freedom in Descartes is an elaboration of neo-Stoic concepts, rather than a continuation of the scholastic liberum arbitrium, or power of arbitrary choice.

“For Descartes, then, ‘voluntariness and freedom are one and the same thing’, and the proper use of freedom is to lead us to act only from clear and distinct perceptions. But these are hard to obtain, in large part because the soul is tied to the body. The body causes us to have imperfect perceptions of objects in the world. These perceptions are confused and indistinct thoughts that what is perceived would be good or bad for us. The desires they tend to lead to are usually desires for what is in fact not as good as it is made it seem. Only knowledge can help us; yet even though we desire knowledge when we see how good it is, we cannot always get it” (p. 189).

The association of freedom with acting on clear and distinct perceptions combines Descartes’s own criterion of clarity and distinctness with the Stoic theory of assent. This is the result we would expect when both are affirmed.

“Descartes’s remedy for ignorance lies in the second maxim of his provisional morality: to be as decisive as possible and to be constant in acting even on doubtful opinions, once he has made a decision. He later rephrases the rule as requiring ‘a firm and constant resolution to carry out whatever reason recommends’, even when we know we may not have the final truth. Virtue, he adds, ‘consists precisely in sticking firmly to this resolution’. If we had clear and distinct knowledge of the good, it would give order to our action. Because we lack such knowledge, only the will’s strong resolve to be constant can create order. If we are resolute, we act firmly even on beliefs we are not sure of. The free will, Descartes repeatedly says, is what comes closest to making us like God. God is utterly constant. As long as we are constant and act on what seem to us after reflection the best reasons, we will never feel remorse or regret. We will have nothing with which to reproach ourselves” (ibid).

This is the richest elaboration of the Stoic virtue of constancy that we have seen. In the inevitable presence of uncertainty, the best we can do is to consistently act based on our best assessments, and not to abandon our current best assessment of any given matter until we have a better one. He is making the point that vacillation is not evidence of open-mindedness. Rather, it is due to a lack of constancy.

“Descartes’s definition of virtue as resolute constancy of will puts self-governance squarely at the center of his ethics” (ibid).

In order to achieve this, we must not be swayed this way and that by passions. This is a Stoic criterion.

“Our final goal ought to be to obtain the supreme good…. Next, he supposes that the sovereign good must be something that is wholly within our power. Plainly wealth, power, and other external goods are not so. If anything is, it is our thought” (p. 190).

That our highest good must be something that it is within our power to achieve again recalls the precept of Epictetus that only things within our power are properly called good or evil. Descartes does not, however, share the Stoic goal of eradicating the passions.

“But because the passions are to be accepted and are in any case not eliminable… We must form the habit of thinking that only what lies wholly within our power is good. What lies wholly within our power is the exercise of our will…. [T]o show that we have free will, we can suspend action…. Suspension for Descartes … is an act that enables us to make a better decision” (p. 191).

What he calls suspension here is again the Stoic withholding of assent that Epictetus says is always within our power. This shows how constancy as a criterion leads to a concept of self-governance. To hold consistently to right reason is to show constancy, and the ability to show constancy only emerges as a consequence of self-governance. Right reason itself is not reducible to any set of fixed rules. It is rather a higher-order criterion of coherence. In this way, it is not unlike Kant’s criterion of unity of apperception, which is also a higher-order criterion. Stoic self-governance is the remote ancestor of Kantian autonomy. According to Schneewind’s front matter, this is the single most important thesis of his book. No Greek philosopher would agree with the medieval and early modern reduction of morality to obedience.

” ‘It is the nature of love’, Descartes says in his longest discussion on the subject, ‘to make one consider oneself and the object loved as a single whole of which one is but a part; and to transfer the care one previously took of oneself to the preservation of this whole’ ” (p. 192).

For all his emphasis on the individual cogito, Descartes recognizes that those we love are from a moral point of view part of us.

“Descartes presents what he calls ‘generosity’ as the quality that leads us ‘to esteem ourselves at our true value’…. We properly esteem ourselves most highly when we find that we know that only our power of free willing belongs to us” (ibid). “Generosity involves control of one’s desires, and leads one to think well of others, as being equally with oneself able to use their free will well. Generosity is thus ‘the key to all other virtues’. The generous person will be led away from love of the kinds of goods that are made less valuable when others share them, such as wealth or glory, and toward love leads us toward the kinds of things whose value is not altered when everyone shares them, such as health, knowledge, and virtue. When the love of God leads us to think of ourselves as part of the great whole he has made, the nobler we think the whole, the more we will esteem ourselves as well” (p. 193).

Descartes’s allergy to Aristotle may prevent him from invoking Aristotelian magnanimity, but when he says generosity is the key to all other virtues, the effect is similar.

“Because believing something and knowing that one believes it are different, ‘many people do not know what they believe’. Innatism is thus compatible with a denial of any cognitive standing to commonsense views of morality; and it is significant that, unlike Herbert, Descartes makes no appeal to common agreement as a test of truth. He does, however, agree with Herbert in stressing that we should each think things through for ourselves…. Self-perfection, either through increased knowledge or, lacking that, through constant will, is the key to all morality. And only seeing for ourselves will give us the knowledge we need” (ibid).

Here we are indeed coming close to the Kantian criterion of autonomy.

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.