Free Will in the Cambridge Platonists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cambridge Platonists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hear hear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Last Natural Lawyer

“After issuing a large Latin Pufendorfian treatise on natural law in 1688, [Christian Thomasius] published in 1692 a little German Introduction to Ethics, subtitled On the Art of Loving Reasonably and Virtuously, and followed it with a book about applying the art…. His final Latin treatise … embodied yet further and more fundamental changes of view” (Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, p. 160).

That subtitle caught my attention, because it sounds like Duns Scotus on love. Thomasius’s view of love is actually closer to Cumberland, though.

“The two books on love show Thomasius working in terms of a long tradition of moral and therapeutic thought centered on love — love not as Christian agape or caritas but as a purely human phenomenon not requiring to be explained by divine grace. Cumberland treated love similarly, and constructed his doctrine of natural law so as to show that morality centers on it. He also sought to avoid voluntarism; and the two aims coincided beautifully. The logic of displacing voluntarism led him to the law of love, the requirement that we maximize natural good; and if that is the moral law, we have a plain way of showing that God’s commands are not arbitrary but are justifiable in terms we understand. Thomasius began as a thorough disciple of Pufendorf; and when he finally rejected voluntarism, he moved at least as close to utilitarianism as Cumberland did” (ibid).

Rather than implicitly invoking fire and brimstone in the manner of the Protestant voluntarists, Thomasius emphasizes seeking the good. Actions are to be judged not in terms of obedience, but in terms of their consequences.

“Thomasius took the Grotian problematic for granted even when he rejected Pufendorf. His objections to modern natural law theory are of special interest precisely because they come from an erstwhile adherent” (ibid). “As head of the new university of Halle, Thomasius occupied a commanding position in the intellectual life of Germany. His defection from Pufendorf was a highly significant response to the dominant work on natural law” (p. 161).

“Early in his chapter on the passions Thomasius gives us a central indication of his reason for abandoning Pufendorf. Proper religious feeling, he tells us, is definable as reasonable hope and fear of God, and is also called childlike fear. Unreasonable fear of God is superstition. It is a servile fear. After this it is no surprise to read later that ‘the concept and representation of God as a father grounds a childlike fear, but that of God as absolute monarch a servile fear’. Only fools imagine God as a despot: [quote from Thomasius:] ‘if a wise man should imagine God as a human ruler, he would rather imagine him as father than as ruler. For it is more suitable to God’s perfection to seek for the best for men than to pursue his own utility through laws written in men’s hearts in a despotic manner’ ” (ibid).

I think it better not to speak in terms of fear at all, but the main point here is the rejection of servile fear as a motivation. Thomasius clearly recognizes the terrible consequences of regarding God as an absolute monarch.

“Here the rejection of voluntarism is tied directly to God’s pursuit of the greatest good. Thomasius adds that if we think of God as ‘a despotic lawgiver who obligates men outwardly through punishment’, then we must also think that no actions are honorable or shameful independent of God’s will” (ibid).

Aristotle might remind us that the greatest goods are those sought for their own sake. Acting for the sake of a reward is a sub-ethical motivation. Avoidance of punishment is even lower. Something is deeply and profoundly wrong with the idea that God would want us to be sub-ethically motivated.

“A wise God is a teacher rather than a lawgiver, he says, and we can only learn when we have a peaceful mind, not one disturbed by fears. God, moreover, teaches by reason” (ibid).

“If God does not punish, then his directives are not law in the same sense as human laws are. Divine and human law are not really members of a common species…. Thomasius retains the natural law distinction between what a teacher does in counseling and what a superior does in issuing a command. But he no longer says that what a commanding superior does is to obligate. A superior rules. And he almost says that God’s directives are to be taken as counseling. God is a father, and ‘a father’s directions are more Counsels than Rules’. God directs us to our good, and we can understand what that is” (p. 162).

Obeying a command does not make us moral. What matters for ethics are the intentions and consequences of an action.

“Counsel binds by showing the person counseled an ‘intrinsic’ force coming from what is necessarily connected with the act in question. Rule binds by an external or outer force connected only by human choice to the act. A wise man, Thomasius says, ‘considers the inner duty the superior kind’, and is usually governed by counsel. Fools are usually governed by rule’ ” (pp. 162-163).

Only intrinsic motivation is ethical.

“Justice, for Thomasius, is concerned with preventing people from damaging one another so seriously that society will not be able to continue. Its rules concern only publicly observable behavior toward other people. Justice matters because there are wicked people who tend to disturb the peace and who must be controlled. The honorable, by contrast, concerns only one’s inner life. Honorable people control their passions and desires and do nothing shameful. Decorum or propriety, like justice, is a matter of one’s relations to others. It concerns the ways in which one might help others or improve one’s inner condition so that one does not wish to harm them. If the honorable person is the most estimable, and the unjust is the worst, the person of propriety is of a middling sort. In the wise person all three kinds of goodness must be combined” (p. 163).

“The principle of honor is ‘Whatever you will that others should do, do yourself’; the principle of propriety is ‘Whatever you will that others should do to you, do to them’; and the principle of justice is ‘Whatever you do not want to have done to you, do not do to others’ ” (pp. 163-164).

“The rules of justice are appropriately backed by threats of punishment. The rules of the other two domains cannot be. The honorable is a wholly inner matter, hence beyond the reach of force; and Thomasius is quite explicit about propriety. ‘Certainly the rules of propriety regard men in their relations to other men. Nevertheless no one can be forced to propriety, and if one is forced, then it is no longer propriety’…. We must perform such duties in the right spirit, a spirit of love or direct concern. Obligation, however, exists only where we can be compelled, and we cannot be compelled to feel love, gratitude, or pity” (p. 164).

“Moreover since the duties of honor and propriety are more fully inner duties than those of justice, and are given more weight by the wise man, they are in an important sense higher or ‘more perfect’…. In this domain we are ruled neither by God nor by the magistrate. Inner obligation does not have other people as its source. Hence we can say that here we ‘can be obligated to ourselves and that we can make laws for ourselves (for example, through a vow). These obligations are higher and more important than merely external obligations open to enforcement by sanctions. The latter constitute the domain in which humans make laws properly so called. The former come very close indeed to constituting a domain we are now inclined to recognize as that of morality. In it we are self-governed” (p. 165).

The Moral Core of Scotist Ethics

Previously, I discussed the introduction to Mary Beth Ingham’s The Harmony of Goodness, on the ethics of John Duns Scotus. Here I extensively quote and discuss her central chapter on moral goodness.

“Scotus inherited a framework of Stoic natural law and Augustinian eternal law from his immediate predecessors…. The created order is the direct result of divine choice; all nature and human nature have been established according to God’s will” (ibid).

Only a single sentence separates the two in the above quote, which seem to pull in opposite directions. The venerable tradition of natural law is usually seen as a family of views that hold core ethical values to be universal, inherent to human nature, and discoverable by reason. This is usually seen as incompatible with their depending directly on the will of God.

Like natural law, the eternal law in Augustine that she mentions is similarly supposed to be universal and unchangeable, in accordance with Augustine’s strong emphasis on separation of the eternal from the temporal. But at the same time, Augustine’s early work On Free Choice of the Will is the founding document for voluntarism in the Latin tradition. So the same tension is already present in Augustine. (Incidentally, On Free Choice of the Will was translated by the same Thomas Williams who translated the newer anthology of Scotus’s writings on ethics, and who has debated with Ingham about voluntarism in Scotus). And already the earliest Franciscan theologians sought to explicitly weave a modified view of natural law into their theological voluntarism (see also A Theology of Beauty?, Free Will as Love?). All this prefigures the ambiguity that we have recently begun to see in Scotus.

“To pursue and love the good is in fact to pursue God, the proper object of the human will. All this means that Scotus understands moral goodness according to an ancient paradigm: as the beautiful whole made up of an action and all the circumstances surrounding it” (p. 84).

This sort of perspective ought to be welcomed. The formulation here, though, seems crafted to remain agnostic on the question of Plato’s Euthyphro: Does God will a thing because it is good, or is it good because God wills it? The Platonic Socrates and Leibniz hold the former; the latter defines theological voluntarism.

“Deus diligendus est (God is to be loved) expresses theologically the first and fundamental principle of the moral domain. As Scotus explains, this principle belongs to natural law and admits of no exception” (p. 86).

With Plato, we ought to affirm that the Good is beautiful, and is to be loved. Any view that supports this (and I believe that includes the implicit views of most people) ought to be kindly received. The good, the beautiful, and the lovable constitute the free and generous poetic ground of religion. Darker views of a world dominated by sin and requiring commanding authority to achieve a semblance of goodness ought to be banished.

“The Good is to be loved” or “God is to be loved” is a very abstract kind of natural law. According to Ingham, Scotus holds that the first three of the ten Mosaic commandments — glossed by the Franciscans as “God is to be loved” — have an absolute status, whereas the other seven are metaphysically contingent on choices made by the Creator in instituting the order of the world. It is the absolute part that he associates with natural law.

Any substantive natural law limits the scope of voluntarism. But the meaning of voluntarism is precisely to assert that there is no such limit. But Scotus asserts the truth of voluntarism, and he asserts the existence of natural law. In this he is followed by Ockham.

“[T]he more perfect moral act is really a more intensely loving action. As primary moral principle, the command to love God above all grounds the body of knowledge called moral science. Here too, this body of knowledge is accessible to human reason and to the human will via the higher affection for justice…. Our human will is constituted to seek the good as known in a manner which is not necessitated by any external force. Our ability to control our own actions and to develop in self-mastery and self-determination is the foundation for moral living. In other words, persons who wish to pursue a moral life seek to love justly, in accord with an objective order. We want to love the highest good in the most perfect manner” (p. 87, emphasis in original).

The main substance of this seems right, and the universality at the end is to be commended. But in company with Aristotle, I prefer to speak neither of moral science nor of commands. What could be termed loving justly, in accordance with a broadly but not strictly objective order, is matter for wise judgment that can also be called free. No genuine seeking of the good by any being is necessitated by external force. It is a desire from within. We are attracted to the good. The affection for justice is as much of a motivator for humans as the desire for advantage and convenience.

“Accordingly, the human desire to love God is not limited to a narrow class of believers. In fact, all persons desire to love the highest good in an absolute manner” (p. 88).

This is a most welcome conclusion. It is a ground for the elimination of all sectarianism.

“There are two great commandments. Love for God constitutes the first commandment, love for neighbor the second” (p. 89). “The first command ‘God is to be loved’ is an analytic truth…. According to the present contingent order, we observe the command to love God through acts of love for our neighbor” (p. 90).

Notwithstanding the oddness of identifying commands with propositions, to speak of analytic truth here is consistent with calling it natural law.

“In his distinction between natural law narrowly understood … and more broadly construed … Scotus remains coherent without requiring narrow legalism. Exceptions are seen to be part of the moral landscape; we should not be surprised when we encounter them. Indeed, the natural and moral orders are woven with threads of particularity. Concrete situations require good judgment and right action” (pp. 93-94).

Yea, verily.

“Although Scotus’s discussions of the relationship of the law to the divine will appears to align him with a divine command tradition, in fact this is not the case. In contrast to a natural law tradition (where moral goodness depends upon rational discernment of the good as seen in the natures of things and their natural perfection), a divine command theory maintains that the foundation for moral living (both necessary and sufficient) rests entirely upon God’s commands” (p. 94).

I think she successfully makes the case that this is not a crude divine command theory, such as we might hear from some fundamentalists. But I expect that Ockham’s version would also not be a crude one. But it is Scotus and Ockham themselves who want to affirm that there is a kind of natural law layered on top of a subtler divine command theory.

“He identifies the first command (Love God) as a self-evident truth. It is true on the basis of the meaning of its terms, not on the basis of any ulterior proposition or command. Scotus explicitly argues, ‘if God is, then God is to be loved’, since God is, by definition, the highest Good. Moral actions are determined on the basis of the natural and rational recognition of the good.”

If we put aside the somewhat spoiling but possibly inessential references to command, otherwise this does not sound at all voluntaristic. Self-evidence is another notion that is perfectly valid when taken broadly, though it goes wrong when we attempt to take it too strictly. But excessive claims of self-evidence are a very different kind of error from voluntarism.

The question is whether any additional essential good is accomplished by also calling something (the object of ) a command, when we have already recognized it as an intrinsic good. Plato and Aristotle would say no.

“A second implication of this vision relates to the ecumenical dimension of this moral approach. By identifying a first, self-evident principle for moral living, Scotus escapes moral sectarianism and remains a thinker whose ideas are strong enough to be attractive to traditions other than Judeo-Christian. His moral presentation of law neither requires adherence to Christianity nor to any specific Christian revelation” (pp. 94-95).

These are consequences we ought to expect from a point of view that recognizes the existence of any natural moral law, even (or perhaps especially) a very abstract one like Scotus is advocating.

“Scotus removes any reference to necessary fulfillment (a transcendent teleology) in an eternal reward from moral discussion and focuses his attention on the concrete act and agent seen, here and now, in all their particularity as morally beautiful. The morally good act is not judged insofar as it is a means to a pre-determined end. Rather, it constitutes an artistic whole within which harmony and proportion exist among its several elements. Likewise, the morally mature person imitates divine creativity in judging what is morally beautiful, in producing beautiful acts and a beautiful character” (pp. 97-98).

The morally good act is not to be viewed as a means to obtain a future reward, but as an intrinsic good in itself. The criteria for human goodness are to be found here in earthly life, thoughtful inquiry, and attitudes of caring concern. Belief in specific propositions about sin and reward does not add to moral goodness.

“Ordinatio I, distinction 17 offers us the classic text for Scotus’s elaboration of moral goodness as it is linked to judgments of beauty.”

[quote from Scotus:] “one could say that just as beauty is not some absolute quality in a beautiful body, but a combination of all that is in harmony with such a body (such as size, figure, and color), and a combination of all aspects (that pertain to all that is agreeable to such a body and are in harmony with one another), so the moral goodness of an act is a kind of decoration it has, including a combination of due proportion to all to which it should be proportioned (such as potency, object, end, time, place, and manner), and this especially as right reason dictates” (p. 98).

This is the centerpiece of her case. Though so far at least it is only a single passage, moral goodness is here very clearly identified by Scotus with a kind of beauty. I do find it odd to refer to it as a decoration, though. This makes it sound like a superficial addition. I think the goodness of an act is essential to what act it is.

“The Ordinatio I, distinction 17 definition of moral goodness as ‘the harmony of all circumstances [belonging to an act] in accord with right reason’ blends mutuality, virtue, consequences, and principle within an aesthetic model.”

“When Scotus refers to all the circumstances which belong to an act, he appeals to Aristotle’s discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics. The morally good act admits of several converging factors: goal, object, intention, time, place, manner and consequences” (p. 100, brackets in original).

I can only applaud when Scotus explicitly invokes the Nicomachean Ethics here. Others might insert ugly talk about sin at this juncture. And again, this part does not seem at all voluntaristic.

“The appropriate course of action must be determined by the operation of right reasoning. For example, while lying is wrong, telling the truth is not always appropriate. Sometimes ‘telling the whole truth’ would do more harm than good. The morally mature person is capable of determining when the truth should be told, and to what degree the truth should be told” (ibid).

Scotus according to Ingham seems to be saying, God commands us to use good judgment. With that sort of claim and that sort of command, I have no issue.

“The most fundamental dimension of goodness in a moral act relates to its objective quality. By objective, Scotus means directing attention to the object of the action. For example, in the proposition ‘tell the truth’, truth is the object of the action. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is an objectively good act because persons (both you and your neighbor) are worthy of love. ‘Protect life’ is a moral command, because living beings have value. Every moral action has a natural objective dimension which can be identified if we reflect on what is being done and to whom. Scotus assumes that this sort of objective identification of goodness belongs to common sense reasoning. Everyone, he states, knows who they are and what they are doing. Anyone who has lived more than several decades comes to the realization that some things are better than others, if only as a result of living with the consequences of our actions” (p. 101).

The sense of “objective” here seems close to that which it has in contemporary common speech, but this might be misleading. Scotus was one of the originators — possibly the originator — of the philosophical use of the terms object, objective, objectivity, etc. But it is generally accepted that this group of terms and the correlated one of subject, subjective, subjectivity have — in a way, at least — undergone a 180 degree reversal in meaning. For “objective” in Scotus is said of things present to the mind, while “subjective” is said of the thing itself. This is a fascinating piece of history.

Ingham’s text above notably does not distinguish between the meaning of the terms in Scotus and their common meaning in present-day English. I think this is possible because at a connotative level they are not far apart, even though Scotus speaks of an objectivity of things present to the intellect, and we speak of an objectivity of things in the world.

What is “in the intellect” in Scotus’s sense is not “subjective” in our sense. This probably also has to do with the Augustinian sense of interiority as an opening onto a kind of universality, rather than something private to us. Outer things meanwhile we apprehend only through the medium of sense perception, imagination, and emotion. In this context it makes sense to regard intellect as a source of objectivity.

We could also associate this talk of objectivity with the realism commonly attributed to Scotus. It should be remarked too that any kind of realism also seems to push back against voluntarist tendencies, insofar as the real is granted some status independent of us.

“But this initial objective dimension does not exhaust the moral beauty of the action. In addition, there is the free quality of an act chosen by someone. In other words, I might tell the truth or love my neighbor simply because someone in authority has told me to do so. These acts would be objectively good but they would not be the result of my own free choice: they would not enhance my moral character” (ibid).

Intent is not the only thing we attend to in considering acts from a moral point of view, but it seems an inalienable part of it.

“Moral objects are human goods which can be identified by reflection on what it means to be human” (ibid).

“Because we are rational, we seek reasonable explanations for human behavior, explanations which exhibit consistency, coherence, and rationality. In addition, everyone desires goodness, even though we can be mistaken about all the consequences of certain actions seen to be good…. Thus, the truth and the good (either real or apparent) are significant moral objects: they are human goods. Indeed, truth and goodness are the two most fundamental moral objects: they respond to our human aspirations which express themselves in activities of knowing and loving” (p. 102).

Calling the truth and the good human goods seems promising.

“Conscious intent to perform a moral action is essential to the morally good act. It is not just doing what good people do, it is acting as good people act, when and where they act, and for the same reason that good people act. In the truly moral action, character is joined to performance, motivation to action, in the here and now” (p. 103, emphasis in original).

I would just say intent here. Scotus lived long before the Cambridge Platonist Cudworth, who coined the English term “consciousness”, and Locke, who popularized it. It might be argued that something like this is implicit in Augustine — who clearly does at least partially anticipate Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. But at the very least, there is a clear difference between explicitly saying something and arguably implying it.

“Loving motivation depends upon the natural goodness of the act, upon its objective appropriateness. I cannot perform any act I please out of love; I can only perform good acts out of love…. Thus, the orders of love depend upon orders of natural and moral goodness. A key implication of this analysis is the way in which Scotus avoids a moral theory based solely on love” (p. 105).

This is important on both counts. There is no such thing as lovingly demeaning someone. Love is not an empty criterion.

“[quote from Scotus:] “… For no sin should be left unpunished anywhere if there is one ruler of the universe and he is just…” (p. 108).

This one is much less auspicious. What happened to mercy and charity? Shouldn’t they always be in sight?

“Law is neither impersonal nor necessary. On the contrary, it is very personal, highly creative and brilliantly executed by the symphony of nature…. When we pay attention to and imitate the goodness of nature, we have the foundation for our own creativity” (ibid).

This is an important point, but it is really about juridical interpretation as a practice. Law as such — i.e., viewed in terms of its content — is “impersonal”. But a good jurist like Averroes exercises mercy and charity in applying the law (conservatives claimed that his sentencing was too lenient).

“In De Primo Principio, for example, Scotus analyzes the concept ens infinitum [infinite being]. This is the philosopher’s name for God…. We know this as possible, he asserts, because when we bring the terms together, we notice no dissonance” (ibid).

She calls infinite being the philosopher’s name for God. This is a non-Biblical designation, and perhaps philosophical in that very diffuse sense. But in stricter terms, it is Scotus’s new non-Biblical name for God, which would not be accepted by Plato or Aristotle. This usage of “philosopher’s” goes against the commonly accepted usage in Scotus’s time, which is derived from the Arabic (the “philosophers” implementing various combinations of Plato and Aristotle were all finitist).

“There is nothing in the terms themselves which would make them mutually exclusive. Thus ens infinitum is possible and, if possible, necessary” (p. 109).

The basis of this argument is the claim that some contentful truths can be derived solely from the principle of non-contradiction. This is a modern “rationalist” notion, favored, e.g., by the Wolffians who were the most immediate target of Kant’s critique. An infinity of being is not claimed by Plato or Aristotle or anyone else before Scotus, except perhaps Lucretius and other atomists.

“While such an aesthetic approach to moral goodness might appear odd to us today, this relationship of the mind to beauty has a long philosophical history. Plato’s Symposium celebrates the rational search for wisdom as the ascent to beauty. Augustine echoes Plato in his hymn to God as that Beauty he had longed for (Confessions X, 27)” (p. 109).

For better or worse, aesthetic approaches to ethics were adopted by the Romantics. The Romantic version came to be sharply criticized by Hegel, after his juvenile period. On this matter, my sympathies are divided.

“With his rejection of an objective or pre-determined external goal for human moral reflection available to natural reason alone, Scotus focuses his discussion upon the functioning moral agent. His is a theory of moral praxis, here and now. The object of moral reflection is not, he states, an abstract excellence but the perfection of the human person” (p. 112).

Aristotle focuses his discussion on what might be called the deliberating moral agent, although the provenance of this use of “agent” is medieval and not Aristotelian in the proper sense.

“Scotus’s critique of natural teleology was not, for all that, a rejection of happiness as the goal of moral living. Rather, he sought to reframe moral living around the happy life, understood to be the fruit of the harmonic relationship between the two affections of the will. It is, as I have argued elsewhere, the replacement of Aristotelian teleology with Stoic teleology” (ibid).

It is with the Stoics that teleology came to be associated with the exercise of divine providence. Though he speaks of it with reverence, Aristotle’s first cause is the beautiful and loved telos or good end to which beings are attracted. It is not a personified being that exercises providence, or directly or specifically addresses current states of affairs in the world.

“Proper and appropriate moral decision-making is itself the goal of human action. It is not simply a question of choosing, but of choosing well and ‘rejoicing, loving and hating rightly’ ” (p. 116).

This itself seems well and proper. As soon as we are concerned with doing anything well or rightly, we have left the terrain of voluntarism and command and obedience. There is also an argument that good obedience, if taken seriously, requires more than mere obedience. This has an air of partial plausibility, but only at the cost of paradox — as soon as we raise the question of obeying well, it is no longer obedience that enables us to obey.

“Finally, Scotus’s presentation of moral goodness underscores the personal and intentionally relational aspects of moral living. It emphasizes goodness to be enhanced by the operation of deliberative human reasoning and charitable human desire” (ibid).

It seems that Scotus himself does apply this terminology of relation. This is the pros ti (toward what) of Aristotle’s Categories, which became relatio in Latin, and also seems to play a role in Scotus’s theology of the Trinity. The modern mathematical notion of relation, to which Pierce made major contributions, treats it as a predicate that is (equally or symmetrically) abstracted from the relata or things that are related, whereas “toward what” has a constitutive asymmetry. The mutuality that Ingham attributes to the Scotist conception of the Trinity is also not fully symmetrical in the way that Hegelian mutual recognition explicitly is.

“This is a person-centered, not principle-centered moral paradigm…. The ability to make moral decisions in difficult circumstances comes as a result of moral training and experience. Drawn toward beauty, the moral person seeks to enhance both beauty of character and beauty of action. The central moral imperatives of love for God and neighbor are both accessible to natural reasoning and available to the will through the affection for justice. Proper reflection on the significant aspects of human nature, such as intellection and love, reveal those actions which promote fundamental human goods. These goods are not limited to the Christian tradition but belong to all persons of good will: truth, peace and harmony…. Finally, at the highest level of goodness within human action, we become co-creators and co-artists, co-musicians with God, whose ear is delicately attuned to the music of the human heart” (pp. 116-117).

Free Will as Love?

I was surprised and intrigued to learn that Augustine in various works seems to more or less identify will with love. Of course it is not surprising that a Christian theologian would write about love. I count 65 occurrences of the word “love” in Augustine’s famous early treatise On the Free Choice of the Will. But my quick scan of all 65 passages did not find this identification. Nor is this identification mentioned in the introduction to the Cambridge edition, or in a great many discussions of free will by other writers who mention Augustine. I have confirmed, however, that this surprising identification of will with love does appear in a number of Augustine’s other works, and is considered by some to be an important theme. I first encountered this identification of will with love quite recently, in secondary literature on Scotus. Then I found references back to Augustine.

Scotus reportedly makes this identification too. He also seems to hold that all virtue is virtue of the will. I think of virtue more generally as virtue of something like character or emotional disposition. Once a separate faculty of will and decision is posited in the human, I can see how it might seem plausible to locate virtue in the will. But I don’t think there is such a separate faculty, and Plato and Aristotle did not think so either.

We make judgments and decisions based on varying combinations of thinking and feeling. The particular drift or orientation of our judgments and decisions could reasonably be described as some definite will, but this does not justify the assumption that choice and decision should be attributed to a separate faculty that is independent of all our thinking and feeling, as well as of all external circumstance.

What is clear is that we want some things, and don’t want others. Plato and Aristotle call this desire. Our desires count as ours by Aristotle’s criterion of willingness. We are responsible for the whole of our desire, even though there are things we desire without choosing to do so. There is a whole spectrum of desires, some of which are ethically beneficial and highly rational, while others may be completely irrational and ethically harmful.

Greek philosophers may attribute some things to love that some moderns attribute to will. In this vein, we may be said to “love” all that we prefer or seek. Some of Augustine’s references to love have a rather similar sound.

In any case, Augustine and Scotus both emphasize the role of love in their trinitarian theology. Sometimes this is called an ordered love, to distinguish it from animal passion. This ordered love is what they call caritas, or charity. One of Boulnois’s numerous books on Scotus that is out of print and expensive has a title that translates to The Rigor of Charity. An introductory book on Scotus by Thomas Ward is called Ordered by Love. If there is a non-evil voluntarism, this emphasis on love might help explain it.

I believe that in recent browsing I saw a passage in Scotus arguing that the best love, which he calls theologically meritorious, is freely given with no thought of advantage, and therefore the will is free. Unlike all the other arguments for free will that put it in the register of power and efficient causality, love freely given is something I too hold dear.

Aristotle on Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Tragedy to Dialogue

The historical development of philosophy follows a different trajectory from that of human ethical culture as a whole. Philosophical development tends to have what Nietzsche called an untimely character. In their ethics and meta-ethics, Plato and Aristotle for example are far ahead of the nostalgia for heroic values that was still typical of classical Greek culture as a whole. In the culture as a whole, the highest expression of traditional values was tragedy, expressed both intimately in the poetic word and publicly as a performative spectacle. At the same time, traditional values were already challenged by the corrosive and alienating effects of proto-modernity in the ethical individualism and subjectivism of the Sophists. This impasse between tradition and individualism is still typical of modern culture as a whole today, even though Plato and Aristotle already showed the way out of it, through rational discourse in a context of mutual regard.

Brandom in A Spirit of Trust (2019) provocatively suggests that to limit our ethical responsibility to what we do intentionally is to perpetuate the alienation brought about by individualism and subjectivism. The solution to this dilemma, he says, is not to return to the traditional views that treated right and wrong simply as objective social facts or as commands given to us by society or by the gods, but rather to view what Aristotle would call unwilling actions and the unintentional consequences of the actions of each as the joint responsibility of everyone in the universal community of rational beings.

The broadly traditional view, according to Brandom, is that we are individually responsible for the totality of our objectively ascribable deeds, regardless of circumstances and regardless of what we intended. Oedipus in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles must accept guilt and punishment for unwittingly having killed one who turned out to be his father, and for having married one who turned out to be his mother, after his parents had left him in the wilderness at birth because of a prophecy that he would bring them ruin. Oedipus is exiled from the city — a punishment regarded as worse than death — and deliberately blinds himself out of remorse, showing that he too accepts the verdict. From this point of view, even great humans are but pawns of fate, but we are nonetheless objectively responsible for the objective status of our objective deeds, whatever it may be.

The modern view is that responsibility is “subjective” rather than objective. We are individually responsible only for what we deliberately choose and intend, and no one at all is responsible for what happens by accident or unintentionally. But a great deal of what happens overall is accidental or unintentional.

Brandom reads Hegel in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology as providing the first real alternative to both the traditional view and this modern view. Hegel’s view is what Brandom calls “postmodern”, not in the pop culture sense of so-called postmodernism, but in the sense of providing a serious alternative to both traditional and modern views, which is what motivates the “Postmodern” in the masthead under which I write here.

For Brandom, Hegel’s achievement as expressed in the theory of mutual recognition is unprecedented. I think that mutual recognition is already implicit in the form of Platonic dialogue — rational discourse in a context of mutual regard — and begins to be made explicit when Aristotle treats forms of friendship and love that emphasize mutuality and recognition of the other as one of the two pinnacles of ethical development, along with wisdom.

Hegel on Ethics and Religion

Hegel had complex views on the relation between ethics and religion, and his thought on these matters evolved over time. As a teenager, he was impressed by writers of the German moderate Enlightenment, and immersed himself in the literature of classical antiquity. He graduated from the Lutheran seminary at Tübingen (where his roommates were the future philosopher Schelling and the future poet Hölderlin), but was reportedly very critical of the way theology was taught there.

Hegel’s earliest work is principally concerned with religious and social themes. He develops a critique of what he there calls “positive” religion, which he sees as putting excessive emphasis on particular representations, doctrines, and institutional forms. As a source for spiritual renewal, at this stage he looks mainly to the classical Greeks. He does not yet share Schelling and Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for Kantian philosophy. But a bit later, he begins to engage with Kant, and to move away from his earlier more unconditional classicism. In the works of this period, he interprets the teachings of Jesus as anticipating Kantian ethics, while also emphasizing love as a fundamental motivator. Now he begins to interpret Christianity and Kantian philosophy as the two main elements of a major historic spiritual advance beyond what was achieved in classical Greek culture.

I take the Phenomenology of Spirit to contain the best statement of Hegel’s mature views in this area, and will save that for last here.

His later lectures on the philosophy of history are very accessible, but in some ways extremely misleading. In general, Hegel popularizes and simplifies a lot in his lectures. And while today his so-called Philosophy of History is the best known example of this old genre, it is very much a genre piece. “Philosophies of history” particularly dedicated to valorizing the contributions of the nascent German nation had become commonplace in Germany since the late 18th century. University professors were civil servants who were expected as a condition of their employment to contribute to what might uncharitably be called propaganda supporting German nationalism and its state-sponsored religion. The most notorious characteristics of Hegel’s Philosophy of History in fact have much more to do with this obligatory social context than with the distinctive philosophy that Hegel develops mainly in the Phenomenology and the Logic.

Overly simplified formulations in the philosophy of history lectures are the main source for very common but deeply mistaken claims that Hegel sees world history as straightforwardly governed by a single linear and universal teleological unfolding (e.g., of “the realization of the consciousness of freedom”) that is either ordained by God, or itself constitutes God. As someone very interested in the details of Aristotelian teleology, Kantian “internal” teleology, and Hegel’s use of them, I see such a simplistic and overly strong historical teleology as completely incompatible with the principles Hegel defends in his main philosophical works.

Hegel does indeed see genuine progressive development within history, and not a mere succession of accidents as Aristotle was more inclined to do, but contrary to the common stereotype, this does not constitute or correspond to a global development of “History”, as if Hegel thought that History were itself an independent thing in its own right in the Aristotelian sense. History is just a summation of many largely independent developments, a very weak form of unity. Even in the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel points out what he considers to be instances of retrograde development — from better to worse — such as the transition from the Greek world to the Roman world.

If history for Hegel had the strong unity claimed by the stereotype, this would be logically incoherent. But for Hegel himself it poses no problem, because he has no commitment to such a strong unity. He emphasizes that the independence of Aristotelian independent things is not absolute, but he agrees with Aristotle that it is with the independent things that we should be principally concerned, in our attempts to understand history as in anything else.

In the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel is polemically concerned to contrast the modern “German world” — as the embodiment of freedom, genuine community, and progress — with the old “Roman world” of imperial absolutism, bureaucratic administration, and negation of the individual. Martin Luther is presented as the original hero of the German world, and Kant as his successor. Luther’s founding gesture is interpreted as the assertion of the priority of individual conscience over institutional authority, and thus as consistent with moderate Enlightenment.

Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion also aim primarily at an edifying popular presentation. There he among other things gives a sympathetic account of core elements of common Christian doctrine and symbolism, and eventually argues for the superiority of offenbare or “revealed” religion over other forms that he discusses with more limited sympathy. But at the same time, he seems to radically reverse the traditional understanding of revealed religion. For Hegel, offenbare means out in the open, intelligible in the light of day, not anyone’s private preserve. These again may seem to be compatible with the traditional meaning. But the kind of unconditional authority traditionally claimed for revelation is effectively ruled out by Hegel, who considers all appeals to unconditional authority to represent a low state of ethical development.

In some measure, what Hegel means by offenbare was Luther’s point too. Luther did after all translate the Bible to German so that more people could read it for themselves, and advocated that they do so. But for Luther, the text of the Bible is simply given to us by God as literal truth. He promotes a new direct authority of the literal text in the common tongue as a replacement for the mediating institutional authority emphasized by the Catholic Church. But for Hegel, no truth in the full sense of the word can depend on authority for its validation; the authority of a text can only derive from judgments about the content it articulates; and all such judgments could in principle be contested anew. Truth is a matter of intelligibility that should be understandable by anyone, never the special province of some particular authority. Hegel sees that behind emphasis on divine authority — as opposed to, say, goodness or love — lie strong claims on behalf of some human authority.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology, these issues are touched upon from multiple points of view. What corresponds to the later Roman world is particularly associated with the religious point of view of what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness, which emphasizes the extreme transcendence of an eternal and infinite monotheistic God, while devaluing worldly life. In general, Hegel’s portrayal of this kind of religion is unfavorable. Yet the unhappy consciousness is also said to have a progressive aspect, insofar as its new notion of the infinite God potentially leads to a questioning of the ultimateness of all finite representations, and thereby also to a questioning of any representation that is supposed to be simply given to us. Hegel explicitly suggests that the development of “negative” theology in the new monotheistic setting of the later Roman world leads in principle to the questioning of finite representations.

Later in the Phenomenology, Hegel at length and in several stages criticizes what happens when purely individual notions of Reason are applied to these matters. First comes the naive activist who unilaterally judges everything in the world by her own principles, and finds the world to be lacking. In part this has to do with uncharitable interpretation, even though there also really are plenty of things that are wrong with the world. But the main problem with this point of view is its complete lack of Socratic self-questioning. It focuses simply on the vigorous assertion of one’s own conclusions. Though this does involve a glimmer of self-consciousness, it is only a glimmer. The essentially reflective character of what Hegel means by self-consciousness is fundamentally lacking.

Much later still comes the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, which has a much more reflective character, and recognizes that it is bound by duties. But this moral self is still limited to a strictly individual point of view on what ought to be universal. Hegel thinks that ultimately, even the best — most sincere and open-minded — unilateral moral judgment by an individual involves an untenable hubris (the excessive pride commonly highlighted in Greek tragedies). As Brandom points out, one of the great lessons of the Phenomenology overall is that moral judgment should not be unilateral — anyone judging someone else must also confess and ask for forgiveness. This should in turn make us more forgiving of others. For Hegel, moral judgment is the province of participation in the universal community of rational beings, under conditions of mutual recognition. Only thus can individual and narrower community prejudices be overcome.

In between, Hegel discusses the relations between Enlightenment and faith. Here he is mainly concerned to defend faith against overly broad or unilateral Enlightenment critiques that, e.g., simply identify religion with superstition or a conspiracy of priests and kings, as if it had no relation at all to ethics.

Toward the end of the Phenomenology, as a resolution of the issues he has pointed out with the alleged self-sufficiency of the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, he develops an account of the essence of religion as having to do most fundamentally with promoting mutual recognition in a community. As I put it before, religion and the notion of something greater than ourselves for Hegel play an essential role in keeping individual conscience honest. This applies not only to some ideal philosophical religion we might imagine, but also to concrete, imperfect historical religion in real communities. Hegel now suggests that in this way, even concrete historical religion, in spite of its reliance on particular representations, helps us to overcome the limitations inherent to the individual moral self.

In a final turn, Hegel argues that religion and philosophy are in a way concerned with the same subject matter. The difference is that religion as usually understood assumes and works from particular representations of what is universal, whereas philosophy for Hegel aims to approach the universal in a universal way, and in this sense constitutes the “truth” of religion. To approach the universal in a universal way for Hegel necessarily involves beginning from the concrete. But it also involves letting the thought of that concrete actively explicate itself through reflection, rather than attempting to ground it in something said to be simply given to us, or to be justified by pre-existing authority.

In more traditional language, I am tempted to say this amounts to treating something like a negative theology that nonetheless does not turn its back on the world as taking precedence over all positive theology that presupposes particular representations. Negative theology and its analogues hold that no positive assertions we are capable of formulating about the divine should, strictly speaking, be held to be true, but that the divine can nonetheless be approached by saying it is not this, and it is not that. Giving precedence to this over the positive theology that presupposes particular representations has generally not been regarded as an orthodox position (unless perhaps we consider certain schools of Buddhism), but it is one whose possibility is suggested by the very existence of something like a negative theology.

Historically, anything like a negative theology has usually been associated with very strong insistence on the transcendence of the divine. If by analogy we apply the term to Hegel (which to my knowledge he never did himself), it must be with the proviso that for him its object would not be a transcendence, but rather something like the ultimate ethical intelligibility of life (which, we might say in an Aristotelian way, of all things properly knowable by us “most deserves to be called divine”), viewed as compatible with the recognition that many things in life are not as they ought to be, and need to change.

Wisdom and Judgment

For Aristotle, the ultimate aim of a talking animal as such is wisdom, which cannot be separated from ethical sensitivity and concern for others. This wisdom might be characterized as an excellence in reflective judgment or interpretation.

There has, however, come to be a traditional view of what is called judgment — especially common in early modern logic — that reduces it to the grammatical form of predication (“A is B”), and its truth to a matter of simple correspondence to fact, which is presumed to be independently knowable. Predication on this view aims to be a kind of authoritative saying of how things are, grounded in putatively immediate truth that is not supposed to depend on any kind of normative inquiry or process of interpretation in order to be known. Things just factually are certain ways, and judgments are conclusions produced immediately that are supposed to correspond to the facts. Judgments are either right, and thereby count as objective; or wrong, and to be dismissed as merely subjective. But in neither case do they involve any depth of engagement or extensive activity. They are “shallow”.

This dogmatic way of thinking, criticized by Kant and Hegel, is utterly alien to the kind of spirit of rational inquiry promoted by Plato and Aristotle, who thought that assertions should be grounded in reasons shareable and discussible with other humans, and not on vain claims of immediate insight. But both this reductive use of “judgment” for the mere immediate production of a representation, and the reduction of truth to a correspondence to presumed fact, have often been wrongly characterized as Aristotelian, when they are really of much later origin.

I would suggest that the very idea of better or worse judgment, or of judgment as something of which there could be an excellence, is incompatible with the shallow black-and-white view of judgment as simply right or wrong. Judgment as activity is anything but an immediate production. It is an extensive and intensive activity of interpretation and reflection.

The contemporary American philosopher Robert Brandom writes, “Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea…. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for…. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from unminded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (Reason in Philosophy, pp. 32-33; see Kantian Intentionality).

Over the course of many posts, we have seen not only that what Aristotle calls nous and gets translated as “intellect” is an activity and not a stuff, but also that it is intrinsically concerned to seek the better in each instance. The highest good for Aristotle is not a pre-given content, but the result of a truly consistent aiming at the better in life, where what is better is intelligible, and once again not pre-given, but expressible in terms of reasons that any human can share in evaluating.

A important notion of responsibility is also implicit in Aristotle, as when he points out that the freedom of ethical beings is not an arbitrary license, but is commensurate with the taking of responsibility. For Aristotle, unfree beings have no responsibility insofar as they are unfree. It is free beings capable of real deliberation and choice that have responsibility.

On the other hand, at a top level Aristotle prefers to stress the affirmative values of friendship, love, and reciprocity over the constraints of responsibility. For Aristotle, an ethically serious person guided by affirmative aims will turn out to be responsible in her actions. Kant was more distrustful of our affirmative aims, as possibly biased by our individual impulse, and therefore tended to emphasize duty and responsibility as more reliable motivators for ethical action. Aristotle has the more optimistic view that there can be such a thing as desire that is consistent with reason about what is better. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; The Goal of Human Life).