Tag: Olivier Boulnois

Epictetus: What Depends on Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epictetus In Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resolution and Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thus we can return to our initial inquiry.”

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

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

“We have established six essential points.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive freedom is the ability to act well.

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

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

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

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

(See also Willingness, Deliberation, Choice.)

Ethical Resolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scotist Controversies

There is a conservative religious-political viewpoint or movement called Radical Orthodoxy, led by Anglican theologians John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, which wants to blame all the ills of modernity on the univocity of being promoted by the medieval Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus. Supposedly, the Scotist univocity of being is responsible for the very idea of the secular. Among the authorities they cite in support of this historical claim are the great French Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson, who contrasted the bad “essentialism” of Scotus with the good “existentialism” of Aquinas, and Olivier Boulnois, who has documented the role of Scotus in re-founding metaphysics as a “science” of ontology independent of Aristotle in the Latin-speaking world.

While I am very far from being an unequivocal defender of Scotus, and indeed worry quite a lot myself about the evils of voluntarism, I find myself sympathizing with the Franciscans on these historical claims. The point that I wanted to make in the recent series on Boulnois’s Being and Representation was that there are very specific and explicit medieval Latin sources for the “metaphysical” wrong turn that Heidegger claimed was endemic to Western philosophy as a whole, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.

A Triangular Relation?

In the previous post, we saw a sharply binary model of signifier and signified being applied by Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. At least in Bacon’s case, this goes hand in hand with a new kind of “direct” realism that aims to deal directly with things in the world, and repudiates the subtleties of the indirect account of knowledge and meaning by way of concepts and the passions of the soul that was broadly shared by Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius. But Scotus complicates the picture considerably by also promoting a triangular model that includes concepts understood in a certain way. Scotus also argues for a non-psychological approach to concepts.

“Does the sign signify the thing itself or the concept in the soul? — We have said that for Scotus, the great semantic controversy of the Middle Age, more fundamental than any other, is constituted by the following question: Is the vocal sound the sign of the thing or of the concept?” (Boulnois, L’Être et représentation, p. 35, my translation throughout).

“The line of the English Franciscans seems to have developed this theory long before him: for Roger Bacon, linguistic signs have been arbitrarily instituted by humans to directly indicate the things themselves. Words are not related to things by means of a conceptual interpretation. A new, radically non-Platonic way of thinking language arises: instrument of communication, it ‘takes the place of’ (supponit pro) the thing, and not the idea of the speaker. What is more, it exercises a representative function uniquely defined by its capacity to refer to present and existent things. For Roger Bacon, the name signifies solely the thing on which it has been imposed. It can only refer to things (even if it can signify connotata, by inference). But at the same time, there is a relation between the vox [vocal sound] and the species in the soul. The vocal sound is its proper presentification, but it makes the representation of a thing arise in the mind. It makes the thing be conceived, or makes it arise in the soul. Thus the sign in a single gesture refers to the thing and recalls a representation. The vox is not a concept, but a thing that signifies another; it signifies a singular thing in the present, without involving essence, and no longer passes by way of the intellectus to arrive at the res [thing]. There is a sort of collaterality of the sermo [spoken word] and the intellectus that both refer to the res” (ibid).

Scholastic accounts of language typically focus on proprieties of naming. Implicit in this approach is an account of meaning that begins from individual terms. Broadly speaking, this approach has an affinity to modern bottom-up theories of semantics, which aim to put together a picture of the world in a compositional way from individual terms taken as given.

In the early 20th century, Saussurean linguistics developed an alternative approach that treats the signifier in a relational way, such that each signifier is understood in the first instance as identified by its difference from other signifiers, independent of its nominal reference to a signified. This led to an incipient “deconstructive” analysis of individual terms in the broad current of 20th-century European (especially French) “structuralism”, which then came to be explicitly thematized in developments that Anglophone writers came to refer to as “post” structuralist.

From a completely different starting point in a pragmatist reading of analytic philosophy and German Idealism, in the late 20th century Brandom developed an “inferentialist” semantics that begins from whole sentences as the minimal unit of assertion, and focuses on explaining the “material” inferential properties of propositions in terms of normative assessments of proprieties of concrete assertion, rather than in terms of universal formal rules. Brandom understands the meaning of concepts inferentially, in terms of their use or functional role in assertions, and emphasizes the non-psychological character of meaning understood in this way. From this point of view, concepts are not to be identified with individual terms, and instead have a holistic character, such that each concept involves other concepts.

In sharp contrast to both of these as well as to Aristotle and Augustine, Scotus develops his triangular model of signification in a way that aims to be consistent with a primacy of individual things, and with a direct association of words to things.

“[I]n his first commentary on [Aristotle’s] treatise On Interpretation, [Scotus] maintains, like Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, that the vocal sound signifies the concept, which resembles the thing or ‘represents’ it. The vox immediately signifies the species, the representation of the thing in the intellect, but it mediately signifies that which it represents, which is to say the thing itself. But in the second commentary, closer to Bacon, he holds that the vocal sound directly signifies not the conceptions of the intellect, but the thing itself. When Aristotle and Boethius say that the name directly signifies the passions of the soul, it is necessary to understand by this not the concept, or the resemblance in the soul, but the thing that is conceived. This second version is evidently a radical revision of Scotist semantics. It is also the definitive position of the theological works” (pp. 36-37).

“Following Bacon and [Peter] Olivi, Duns Scotus breaks with the Boethian interpretation of signification, but he does so with a nuance, integrating the Aristotelian semantics; the verbal sign (verbum) is directly the sign of both the thing and the concept, but it is in the first instance the sign of the thing, and then the sign of the concept. The sign comes from a direct causality of the thing and signifies it directly. Nonetheless there is a logical anteriority of the concept, for it is on it that the linguistic sign depends. Scotus formulates his response in the vocabulary of his own theory of causality. The concept, the written sign, and the phoneme are all three ordered effects of the same cause: the thing itself…. Writing, the vocal sound, and the concept are signs, situated on the same plane, none of them exercising any causality over the others, and they signify the same signified” (p. 37).

If the sign is in the first instance the sign of the thing, it is difficult to see how the concept can be logically anterior to the relation of sign to thing. But Scotus apparently wants to assert both, and also that the concept is a kind of sign, and that the sign is a kind of thing.

“[T]he word, the concept, and the thing no longer form a series, but a triangle…. The play of natural causes, the weight of institution, and the semantic relation are articulated with one another, but remain autonomous…. The concept is the first, natural effect of the thing itself. It is it that is first of all a sign of the thing, and not the vocal sound or writing. It constitutes the object of logic, an anterior object, more fundamental than vocal sounds, and supposed by them…. If there is a science of things, metaphysics, and a science of words, grammar, logic occupies an intermediary and central place, as the science of concepts” (p. 39).

Scotus wants to give metaphysics a new status as a rational science, in a strong sense that is independent of Aristotle. Meanwhile, he also explicitly rejects Aristotle’s thesis that logic is a tool for clearly expressing meaning and not a science with its own subject matter, which Brandom has recently revived under the name of logical expressivism.

“Noetics studies the concept insofar as it constitutes an aspect of the mind (mens), where it is found as an accident in a subject. Logic, on the contrary, considers the concept as sign, insofar as it refers to a signified. This is the ambiguity of representation: we consider in it either the thing that represents, or the thing that it represents, the being of the representing or the being represented…. Logic is distinct from psychology…. The aim of thought is not reducible to its psychic reality” (pp. 39-40).

Boulnois does not point it out here, but Scotus’s assumption that the concept is in the mind “as an accident in a subject” is directly opposed to Augustine’s strong contention that the mind should not be seen as a subject in which knowledge and love inhere as accidents.

“In this triangle of word, concept, and thing, the concept is described as a sign, and reciprocally the cognitive act is itself a semiosis. Duns Scotus breaks with Augustine and Boethius, who reserve signification to vocal sounds and writing. He participates in what C. Panaccio has called a general movement of ‘semantization’ of thought. Logic, conceived as a rational science, a theory of signs or of ‘signifying reasoning’ (ratio significandi), is no longer a subalternate discipline, concerned with the expression of thought. Because thought is signifying, logic becomes a theory of thought itself. Nevertheless, it does not fall to it to resolve the problem of the place of thought. Concepts are natural signs, not conventional ones: they are combined in propositions according to logical rules, the structure of which subtends all possible oral or written propositions, even if they are not proffered. They constitute the elements of a universal mental language, of a general grammar and of a pure theory of communication. This language is for Duns Scotus a subjacent condition of all oral enunciations and effective writings” (pp. 40-41).

Thus apparently the treatment of concepts as a kind of sign is closely related to the non-Aristotelian idea that logic is a science with its own subject matter.

“But above all, this ideal possibility is real: it is accomplished par excellence in the domain of angelic communication. Angels communicate with the aid of intelligible signs, which is to say pure concepts, without phonetic or graphical support. Each angel directly causes a concept in another, by an immediate communication. It is on this occasion that Duns Scotus formulates a formal theory of pure thought” (p. 41).

If concepts are natural signs and signs are real things, then concepts are real things.

“The sign establishes a double relation. On the one hand, it is the image of the thing that caused it; on the other hand, what is more important, it signifies it: the concept is a real object, which has a natural existence, belonging to a causal chain; but it bears a resemblance to the object it represents. This resemblance is produced by the concurrent double causality of the thing itself and the intelligible species conserved in memory. — Is it necessary to say that the concept preserves the transparency of representation, while the conventional sign loses it? For a concept, does representare signify a ‘resemblance to’, or simply: ‘taking the place of the presence’ of an object, which was already the sense of the word in Peter of Spain? Does the representivity of the concept for the intellect come from its resemblance to real objects, or from its dependence on a cause?” (pp. 41-42).

Given Scotus’s insistence that the sign refers directly to the thing, it is surprising to read that “We cannot pass directly from the representation to the thing” (p. 43). But our act is different from the reference of the sign, so technically there is no contradiction.

“But even in maintaining that the relation of cause to effect is first, Scotus does not go to the point of abandoning resemblance: both are real aspects of intellection. Even if it supposes the causality of the object, semiosis is a complex process that is not reduced to it, since it supposes a play of resemblances. The sign is recognized more than it is produced” (ibid).

In a way, the play of resemblances resembles the mutual dependence of signifiers in the Saussurean tradition.

That the sign is recognized more than it is produced is a nice injection of good sense that stands in obvious tension with the foundation myth of signs as imposed and instituted “at will”. But the user of a sign is usually not its institutor.

“The phoneme homo no longer signifies the concept of the human: like the concept, it signifies the real human, even if it depends on the concept for this. The three forms of signification (formal sign, oral sign, written sign) are parallel, even if their terms are ordered according to a serial dependency. The signification of the concept is a natural relation between the intellect and things. The signified of phonemes and graphemes remains the thing itself, but it depends on a conventional relation.”

“In this Scotus directly opposes Aristotle, for whom the vox is a sound emitted by the mouth of a human being, accompanied by an imaginative representation. Words are not the tools of knowledge, but of communication” (p. 43).

I think that knowledge in Plato and Aristotle (and Hegel and Gadamer and Habermas and Brandom, among others) implicitly has a dialogical (and therefore in part communicative) character. Gadamer has highlighted the dialogical element in Plato and Aristotle. The “communicative reason” elaborated by Habermas involves a dialogical view of knowledge. It is only “monological” conceptions of knowledge that do not involve an element of communication.

“In itself, the written or oral sign is only an ensemble of sounds or letters, which causes nothing more than the knowledge of itself. The imposition of the sign describes the passage from concept to sign, and reciprocally interpretation allows a reascent from the sign to the intelligible concept that subtends it. The process of interpretation follows a trajectory inverse to that of imposition. It is thus a contingent process of association” (p. 45).

“In the moment of imposition, the imposer associates sense and intellect, in relating a perceived name to a conceived thing. In the moment of interpretation, the hearer recalls the relation between the name perceived in the present, and the past thing that she knew more or less distinctly” (p. 46).

I don’t think of interpretation as happening in a moment. It is not only dialogical, but also involves mediation, concepts, and an extension in time. In the same way, only in a very improper sense is jumping to a conclusion a kind of judgment. But Boulnois is summarizing Scotus here, not necessarily asserting this in his own name.

“Signification cannot take the place of knowledge. There is no transparency between the sign and thought” (ibid).

Knowledge implies a knower in a way that formal signification does not. But the dialogical expression and elaboration of knowledge is closely interwoven with the dialogical elaboration of signification and meaning.

“But what is it that is signified? The thing, yes, but in what sense of the word ‘thing’? According to [Scotus’s] Questions on On Interpretation, not the thing in its singularity and its existence, but the thing as quiddity [what Aristotle calls the “what it is”], indifferent to singularity and universality, to existence and nonexistence: the thing as it is seen by the mediation of a concept…. According to this semantic, signification is no longer an intelligible correlation between the signifying and the concept” (pp. 46-47).

Indeed, “thing” is said in many ways. Thing as quiddity and thing as object are almost mutually exclusive. I use “object” in a deflationary way as a relative term, as in “the object of”, not as naming something that is assumed to be a free-standing thing in its own right. I don’t actively use the term “quiddity”, but I think of it as a more static and self-contained projection of essence, which in its more proper usages is not something self-contained. Brandom says that a concept is not the kind of thing we could have just one of. I think of essence in a similar way. All articulation is inter-articulation, involving more than one term.

“From now on, signification can be thought independent of the scope of the concept.”

“Linguistic signs signify directly, without passing through the concept. They can signify a thing more precisely than intellect can conceive it. The circulus vini, a sign that indicates the presence of new wine in the inn, causes nothing new in the intellect of the one who perceives it. It is an arbitrary sign, constituted by a convention…. Convention is limited to establishing a relation of reason between two things, two physical realities: the sonorous matter of the phoneme (the vox) and the reality signified (the res). To be valid, this relation-convention supposes the knowledge of the two terms…. A weak and confused knowledge of the thing suffices for us to be able to use a sign, and to signify in a suitable way. We can signify in a way that is more precise than we conceive” (pp. 47-48).

Signification is a “formal” concept, in what seems to be Scotus’s distinctive sense of the term “formal”, which is neither Platonic nor Kantian, and also not to be understood in terms of modern logical or mathematical formalism. The formal status of signification is what allows it to be “more precise” than the knowledge we actually have. But as Hegel reminds us, formal precision (in any of these senses) is not always a virtue when applied to real things.

“Duns Scotus is inspired by the analyses of Olivi to establish a relation between semantic representation and juridical representation, the sign and the law.”

Peter Olivi was another important 13th-century Franciscan, and another strong voluntarist.

“A sign can be speculative or practical. The speculative sign leads to knowledge; it allows a concept of the signified to be formed in the intellect, but its characteristic tells us nothing of its real existence; for example, homo is the sign of a concept, and allows the knowledge of an essence, of a nature in general, whether or not a human exists. The practical sign implies the existence of its signified; it is the sign of an existence, and not of a simple possibility…. Since the practical sign signifies the advent of an effect, and this effect depends on the ordered power (that is to say on the free voluntary disposition) of someone who can cause it, only the author of this effect can give this practical sign certain being. It suffices that the institutor is disposed to regularly produce the signified of the sign she institutes…. Contracts, pacts, and promises are examples. The practical sign pertains to a juridical order instituted by humans. It depends on a law…. The sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent, who is self-determining in limiting herself to the order she institutes. This one, in proportion to her political power, can engage in rendering real what she has disposed in the order of signs” (pp. 48-49).

To me it seems preposterous to say that the sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent. A sign belongs to a field of reciprocal determination that is independent of anyone’s will. (See also Hegel on Willing.)

“The practical sign is an ordination of power. In this sense, it belongs to the theology of absolute power and ordained power. In Duns Scotus, these two concepts apply to every free agent: absolute power includes all that a free being can effectively do, de facto. Ordained power includes all she can do in conformity to a law, de jure. The institutor is an absolutely free agent, who self-determines freely in choosing this or that order” (p. 49).

An earlier book by Boulnois develops the history of the theology of absolute power and ordained power in detail. A later book treats the history of theological voluntarism in the Latin tradition.

For Scotus “It is will that founds the truth of the practical sign, and not the inverse” (p. 52).

But “there are signs of which we are not the institutors, and that we receive as fully established by an alien will…. We are under the law of signs, and they do not always depend on us” (ibid).

Next in this series: Perspectiva

Scotist Semiotics?

Still slowly working on a re-reading and partial translation of Olivier Boulnois’s L’Être et représentation (1999), we have already gotten a hint that Latin scholastics such as Roger Bacon and John Duns Scotus used some of the very same key terminology as the 20th-century Saussurean structuralists, but seem to have held a diametrically opposed view on the specific matter of the relation of signifier and signified. Boulnois does not explicitly mention the more recent French context. The last post was in part about what is called “signification”.

As a university student in the late 70s, I was tremendously excited to learn about French so-called “structuralism”, which seemed to support my own primitive insight that “relations are prior to things”. In this context there was a lot of talk about signifier and signified, growing out of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Together with the American pragmatist Charles Pierce, Saussure is considered to have originated modern semiotics, or the study of signs. For a while, semiotics was high on my horizon.

A key point in the Saussurean tradition, which grew very big in postwar France, was that there is no direct relation of the signifier to the signified. Instead, it was said in effect that we are signifying animals who live and thrive in a sea of signifiers, and build meaning out of differentiation.

For Saussure, the signified is not the referent but the concept. What the concept really is was not discussed in detail. Saussure himself seems to have seen it as falling under what he called psychology and social psychology, which was a rather conventional view when he was writing in the early 20th century, but this plays no real role in his theory.

What is essential is the detachment of signification from reference. For Saussure, the sign is a two-leveled thing that consists of (sensible) signifier and (conceptual) signified. But in relation to its referents in the world, the sign is “arbitrary”. The sound or word “tree” has no inherent relation to a tree. I am not concerned to argue for or against Saussure here, just setting the stage.

For Roger Bacon, signs refer directly to things. For Scotus, “The sign leads immediately to the signified. Between them, we must not ask about any intermediary. It attaches only to a single signified: the present thing itself. It represents it” (p. 26, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout)

Here we see an explicit strong positive valuation both on presence and immediacy, and at the same time on representation. Representability will be Scotus’s minimal criterion of being. I see all three of these claims as deeply problematic, but that does not mean they can be simply and categorically rejected.

“This theory is unfolded in four theses:

“1) Every sign is a thing, and reciprocally every thing can be a sign; it is thus that the father is a sign in relation to his son. ‘The sign is said relative to a signified, as “father” relative to a “son”; and it is also necessarily the sign of something, which is its foundation.’ A sign is at the same time the manifestation of something, and refers to an other. It is necessarily a real foundation, even if it also implies a relation of signifying/signified. On the one hand, it brings an information to the sense, the sensible species (visible, audible, etc.), or to the cognitive power (the intelligible species); on the other, it produces a knowledge of something else” (ibid).

The sign thus brings a (participial or ongoing) “information” or informing form to sense or intellect.

The notion of forms being somehow transmitted, and of their being a kind of thing that can be transmitted, has an interesting ambiguity. The image of species as discrete things flying through the air seems hard to sustain. And yet, there is a sense in which form is not locked up in one thing, but can be “communicated”. And what we call the thing — not merely stuff or an object, but participial “information”, or some form as a happening — is grounded in the becoming or manifestation associated with a present participle.

This manifestation is the mark of reality, which is not just a collection of ready-made objects or truths but a process of being manifested. This goes beyond mere presence as a snapshot or image capable of being mastered, and beyond mere representation as referentially standing for something. This is the sense in which objectivity as a happening involving essentiality goes far beyond the mere being of objects mastered or possessed.

I have always thought it was a happening or unfolding (or happening-as-unfolding, as distinct from happening as a mere punctual event — procession or “emanation”) like this that the neoplatonic talk about something beyond being aimed at — not mere being-there or a necessary support for it, but a nonpunctual unfolding of unmastered essence that is precisely not to be identified with “Being”, or with the putative object of “ontology”. And on the other hand, I want to think that ordinary being is already nonpunctual or outside of itself, and thus strictly transcends both representation and event, at very the same time that it is susceptible to genuine understanding and criteria of reasonableness.

“2) Every sign supposes an inference. Here Scotus recollects the Aristotelian heritage, in line with the unification aimed at since Albert the Great. Taking the theology of sacraments as a point of departure, and trinitarian theology as an example, it is not limited to the model of the linguistic sign. The sign permits an inference, which starts from the posterior to go back to the inferior [sic]: if b, then a. A thing signifies another if its existence entails that of another, be it anterior or posterior. Indeed it becomes the element of a reasoning by inference or likelihood (enthymeme). One same theory of the sign is to provide an account of signification and of inference. It allows a unified theory of semiotics as cognitive science to be constructed. The linguistic sign is only a particular case, thought on the model of inference. It functions not as a code (according to a biunivocal correspondence), but according to relations that are more numerous and more complex” (p. 27).

Quite unexpectedly, we have here not only an emphasis on inference in the context of signification, but it is contrasted with a mechanical code or biunivocal correspondence in a way that makes it sound like what Sellars and Brandom call material inference. But for Brandom this grounds a non-representationalist account, whereas Scotus, as we will see over the course of a number of upcoming posts, is arguably the arch-representationalist of the whole Western tradition.

“3) Scotus aims to provide a general and unique theory of the sign. To be a sign, it suffices to be a thing. But what is a ‘thing’? Not always a sensible, physical, material reality: for him it suffices to have a formal being, a reality sufficiently unified and positive to be able to be opposed to the term with which it is in relation, to become the foundation of this relation. The sign is the real term of a real knowledge. Unlike a sensible thing, a sign is first of all a formal object, a possible object of knowledge. ‘This is true not only of the sensible sign, taking “sense” [in Augustine’s definition] strictly, for the corporeal sense, but again it is true for the incorporeal sense, taking sense generally, for any cognitive power.’ The senses are not only sensibility (here, in the organic sense), but knowledge in the broad sense — intellection. The sign is not always sensible; it can be immaterial, and consist in a concept or an intelligible species. Like Bacon, Duns Scotus integrates in the theory of the sign the intelligible signs that are the concepts of the soul. But he envisions also the case of the angels, who communicate and transmit species or purely intelligible representations. By a philosophical decision, Scotus generalizes the status of the sign. The subtle Doctor gives an indifferent definition that is neutral and transcends genres. He conceives a transcendental semiotic” (pp. 27-28, brackets in original).

The idea of “formal distinction” — roughly, that there can be a “real” difference in definition where there is no difference in “being”, whatever that is — seems both plausible, and by no means inherently tied to the objectionable claims that will is superior to reason.

I’m still grappling with the suggestion that a concept could be a sign. That concepts are inferences, or at least are closely associated with inferences, seems plausible enough, and certainly better than the idea that a concept is a mental image. Brandom identifies concepts with rules we adopt to govern inference. That signification is closely related to inference also makes sense. But while it makes sense that a concept would be immaterial, I find it hard to affirm that the same would be true of a sign.

“4) The sign concerns the category of relation. Bacon had already remarked that ‘the sign pertains to the category of relation’. By itself, the sign brings about the knowledge of something else. It is constituted by a relation of inference to the thing signified. Does it go the same for signification as for knowledge? For Bacon, the sign represents something to someone: it implies two relations, in the accusative and in the dative, toward the signified and toward the interpreter, and it is the second that is essential. But Aristotle himself describes knowledge as a relation, and remarks that the destruction of the thing known entails that of the corresponding knowledge. Does the sign still signify when its signified disappears? The first, traditional, position consists in dissociating the truth of enunciation from the truth of the sign, and says, like Anselm, that there is a ‘true sign’ even when it does not signify something. Quite the contrary, for Bacon the sign loses its value as a sign. ‘If we cannot conceive anything by a sign, it is void (cassum) and vain, it cannot be a true sign; but it is only a sign according to the substance of the sign, and it does not have the status of a sign: it is thus that the substance of the father remains when his son is dead, but not the relation of paternity. And whatever vocal sound, the circle of wine or an other [sign], imposed in act in relation to a thing and instituted for it, can represent it and signify it, if what it signifies does not exist in act, it is not a sign in act.’ If the thing that it represents is absent, the sign represents nothing, it is indeed not a sign. It must receive a new institution” (pp. 28-29).

This use of Latin substantia seems very far indeed from Aristotle’s ousia.

Earlier, Boulnois had contrasted the radicality of Bacon’s direct realism with traditional views. He said that Bacon’s notion of the sign — in contrast with either that of Augustine or that of Aristotle — involves only two elements, omitting the mediating role of concepts or of the soul. Here it sounds like Bacon on another level does still leave a role for an interpreter. But perhaps an implicit distinction is being made between interpretation as immanent to the level of content (which a direct realist would presumably reject), and a transcendent dimension of something like the person of an interpreter standing over and above any content, which may be related to the voluntarism we will be hearing about shortly.

“The distinction between the kinds of sign is at the center of the semiotic theory: it brings out the principal articulations, and in particular allows the relation of signs in general to linguistic signs, of semiotics to semantics, to be thought. In Scotus, the relation signifier/signified is organized along three divisions” (p. 30).

Much more than a simple division of the subject matter is going on here.

“1) The relation signifier/signified can be natural or conventional. The natural sign manifests a real relation that is found in nature, while the conventional sign translates a relation of reason, which only exists for the intellect that establishes it. This opposition recovers the division between two kinds of inferential signs. The non-linguistic natural signs imply a causality and a real relation; the instituted signs, of which linguistic signs are a part, imply an intellectual decision, and indeed a relation of reason. The conventional (ad placitum) sign has only a relation of reason with its object; it is a second intention, a simple perspective of the mind with no objective correlate. Scotus gives as an example ‘the voice and the gestures of the monks’ who have taken a vow of silence. These signs ‘could signify other things, if it pleased the institutors’, for what has been instituted at will can be revoked at will. — But the natural sign better reveals the essence of the sign: ‘The natural sign signifies more truly than the conventional sign’. In effect, the natural relation of the thing to its sign is a real relation, implying a first intention: an aspect of the thing has exercised a direct causality on what signifies it. For example, the relation of smoke to fire and that of the thing to the concept are real” (pp. 30-31).

The vocabulary of first and second intentions comes from Avicenna. Roughly, first intentions are supposed to refer directly to concrete real things and genera like “horse”, whereas second intentions refer to abstract concepts like “subject” or “genus”. For Avicenna, Scotus, and others in the scholastic tradition, second intentions generally have a second-class status and valuation in comparison to first intentions.

Whether there really are such things as natural signs is a question that will have to be considered. Of course insofar as there are natural things, or phenomena that we agree to call natural things, there “are” such natural things as smoke and fire. We can probably agree too that smoke is in some sense “caused” by fire. But that that inference from smoke to fire is truly naturally given, and not in any way due to us, is quite debatable.

Scotus’s talk about the will of the institutors of a language is also problematic. It can be fairly said that the state of a natural language at a given time is not the product of anyone’s will, individual or collective. Even more generally, real history is not based on a foundational moment. It is the cumulative compound of many accidents.

“Duns Scotus nonetheless does not relate signification to knowledge, but to will. Speech is an ordered communication, which makes manifest certain signs of a mutual will…. Language does not express a knowledge, but rather indicates a will…. What we understand, what is said, manifests what the speaker wants to say. It is inscribed in the space of reciprocity (mutuae voluntatis), and not that of monologue or meditation. Finally, it has communication in this space of interlocution as its aim. Language agrees with the human as a being who is not limited to reason, but who is given a will” (p. 31).

The invocation of mutuality and reciprocity and a “space of interlocution” here is an important surprise that makes this more interesting. This overlaps with the concerns of Hegel, Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom.

I use the locution “I want to say that x” from time to time myself. Right now “I want to say” that while to speak of a definite will in the sense of intending this and not that is a perfectly good distinction, claims that there even is a power of pure arbitrary choice — let alone that it is superior to intellect — ought to be rejected. What the speaker according to herself wants to say is indeed a part of the story of meaning, but it is only a part.

“Signs suppose an institution on our part. They follow from a voluntary decision, and in no way from a nature of signs. The order of signs is not in the nature of things. Established, stopped, they found a status, a state, or an order among the participants in discourse. But the instituted sign can efficaciously represent an invisible reality: a will. It thus represents an intellection, but under its highest form, as will, and allows the willed effect to be produced. The sign thus instituted has a double function: it guarantees the certitude of recognition, it allows the efficacy of its operation. The model is thus that of a pact (pactio), whether it is a matter of a firm engagement (sponsio), a guarantee (fideiussio), or an oath (juramentum). The efficacy of signs comes from a pact between the liberties they represent” (pp. 31-32).

We can see that there is a high-level analogy between this notion of the “institution” of a regime of signs and the common early modern foundation myth of a social contract. Like the social contract, which is supposed to ground strong claims of political sovereignty — and unlike Hegelian mutual recognition, which is always in process and open to another chapter — the institution of signs for Scotus putatively has an “always already founded” status.

As is common in the scholastic tradition, efficacy here is also unequivocally associated with efficient causation, which is treated as the most primary kind of cause, whereas in a purely Aristotelian context efficient causes are subordinate, which implies that efficacy cannot be simply identified with efficient causality. Moreover, for Aristotle himself, something like the art of building is more truly an efficient cause than the architect or the carpenter or the hammer or the hammer’s blow.

“2) The signified can be permanent or intermittent. The sign that always has its signified is a ‘true sign’ in the sense of saint Anselm. It is also called ‘efficacious’ because it implies an efficient causality between the event and its sign. Reciprocally, for the one who depends on it, it always leads to a knowledge. It has no need of an interpreter, and always does what is expected of it: it always realizes its proper operation. The necessary sign can only appear accompanied by its signified: the eclipse is the true sign and efficacity of the interposition of the earth, since it is always the effect. This signification, which rests on a necessary inference, is necessary and always true. Thus all the natural signs are efficacious signs” (p. 32).

From an Aristotelian point of view, I have already expressed some skepticism about the claim that there are natural signs, but in the Catholic tradition it is commonly held that the sacraments, unlike linguistic signs, are efficacious in themselves, and Scotus is giving voice to this.

“But among the conventional signs, certain are efficacious (the sacraments), while others are not. The latter do not always imply their signifieds, but are sometimes true, sometimes false, that is to say neutral. This kind of sign is falsifiable, it is enunciated in variable propositions, and its signification is contingent. It is not efficacious, not having the power to realize its signified: in a proposition, it is not in the power of the speaker to make it so that the sign is accompanied by the thing it signifies. The sign is thus not true by itself, but is an exterior adequation to its signified. The ambivalence between the truth of the sign and truth of adequation mark the division between the conventional sign in general and the efficacious sign” (ibid).

The notion of efficacy here also seems be an all-or-nothing proposition — either total or inapplicable. I think there is a kind of efficacy of signs, but it is never total.

“3) Again we can distinguish signs according to their relation to a temporal signified. Some refer to the past (commemorative signs), others to the future (predictive signs: prognosticum), and others finally to the present (deictic signs: demonstrativum). For Scotus language is a commemorative sign, while the sacrament is a demonstrative sign” (pp. 32-33).

The “commemorative” status of linguistic signs is presumably supposed to be a kind of reference back to a founding event or will. Again I think of social contract theories.

Husserl also speaks of “deictic” expressions, but gives the term the nearly opposite meaning of indexical or occasional, as contrasted with ideal. Something like Husserlian deictic expressions are called “floating” signifiers in the Saussurean tradition, because they have no fixed reference.

“According to Thomas Aquinas, every sacrament has an omnitemporal signification. It is the sign of the past, of the present, and of what is to come (it recalls respectively the Passion of Christ, source of all grace, the present which is the gift of grace, and the glory to which every grace destines the human). Its signification contains an essential presence, present to all the dimensions of time. For Scotus, on the contrary, the sacrament is a demonstrative sign. Like every sign, it has an intentionality pro praesenti. It refers to the present and to it alone. It is in this sense that it is a representative sign: the representational function of the sacrament as sign implies the realization of the signified at the instant of its utterance, and indeed the temporal presence of the object represented. It has a deictic dimension that is demonstrative, in contrast to memory and the promise. Representation is first of all a form of presence.”

Aquinas and Scotus are both doing things with presence, but it seems as though presence in Scotus is contracted to a punctual status that is connected with a punctual or all-at-once view of representation. The strong association of representation with presence is also important.

“Duns Scotus cannot accept the thesis according to which the verb in present tense signifies the instant at which the utterance of every enunciation is completed, or all the conclusions that depend on it. ‘When it is uttered, the verb cosignifies time in the same way that it signifies [the signified]’: as a consequence, when it cosignifies the present, it only refers to the instant of its utterance. When no indication comes to specify a proposition, the time of the enunciated in the present is that of its enunciation. The intention of the speaker comes to coincide with the rhythm of the phrase. Expressed temporality follows lived temporality. In the same way, by the force of discourse, the demonstrative pronoun hoc [this] signifies what it shows the instant it is proffered” (pp. 32-34).

For Brandom, pronouns like “this”, far from being indissociable from immediacy, are anaphoric back-references to something said before.

“Three metaphysical principles are interlaced in the Scotist semantics: the primacy of the will for justifying the institution of signs, that of univocity for establishing their ideal state, and that of presence for explicating their temporal reference” (p. 34).

Next in this series: A Triangular Relation

Signs, Concepts, Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Signification, Representation

Being and Representation Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Signs, Concepts, Things

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).