In De Casu Diablo, or, On the Fall of the Devil, one of his three theological dialogues in
which discussion of free will plays an important role, St. Anselm, himself an
Augustinian, embraces a seemingly un-Augustinian
account of freedom. His goal, it seems, is to reconcile the apparently
conflicting claims that (a) creatures receive all they have (including their
will) from God and (b) creatures will freely such that, through the actions
they freely will, they are morally culpable for their failure to receive perseverance or persevering
grace from God. His solution is to offer a two-willed theory of freedom that
links the rational creature to moral responsibility through their capacity to
will, on the one hand, either justice or injustice and, on the other hand,
either lesser happiness or greater happiness. The following (two possibly three part) series of posts seeks to fill
out the details of that theory with respect to Anselm's success in responding
to the (implicit) claim that (a) and (b) are irreconcilable. Along the way to this conclusion, I offer my own interpretation of
how best to understand Anselm's two wills, and I provide an objection to a
recent and interesting rival interpretation.
In the present post, I just offer the details of Anselm's two wills and give my interpretation for the best way of understanding them. In the following post, I object to Katherine Rogers's recent hierarchical interpretation of Anselm's two wills as, respectively, a set of competing first-order desires that are divided amongst different goods, to use Frankfurt's well-known distinction, and a second-order desire for justice as the will for rectitude. Following this (in either the same or a different post), I'll offer some critical evaluation of Anselm's account and provide a serious objection against it; I then see whether Anselm's theory can succeed in answering this objection.
Prologue
Anselm's
dialogue begins with a dispute between the characters the Teacher and the
Student over a proper reading of 1 Corinthians 4:7, the relevant portion of
which is the rhetorical question from St. Paul: "what do you have that you
did not receive?" Following an initial disagreement, the Student comes to
accept the Teacher's reading of the passage, which is that:
[God] alone has of himself all that he has, while other things have nothing of themselves. And other things, having nothing of themselves, have their only reality from him.[1]
God, in having all that
he has of himself, in other words, is the sole source of all being or existence
in the cosmos, and there is no 'thing' that did not receive its being from him,
nor is there any 'thing' that does not possess something, i.e., goods, or
qualities, or powers, that it did not receive from God. As this discussion
directly concerns grace and free will, the dispute proper begins with a
question connected with Paul's passage that the Student poses.
An angel who perseveres in truth, i.e., perseveres in
justice, does so, the Student and Teacher agree, because he has perseverance.
Moreover, given the just agreed to assumption that everything the angel it has
it has received from God, it follows that the angel has perseverance because it
received perseverance from God. But this is not all. As the Student argues:
It also follows that he 'who does not persevere in
the truth' [John 8:44] does not persevere because he does not have
perseverance, and he does not have it because he did not receive it, and he did
not receive it because God gave it to him.[2]
But this implies, the
Student continues, that the angel who falls from 'the truth' is not culpable
for his offense. The Teacher disarms the Student's objection, however, by pointing out that it does not necessarily
follow from the fact that a thing was not received that it was not received because it was not given. For example,
if someone offers another person a gift, the receiver receives the gift,
assuming he accepts it, because the
giver gave him the gift. But if the receiver refuses to give the gift, it
clearly does not follow that the receiver did not receive the gift because the
giver refused to give it.[3] So,
assuming God gives the gift of perseverance, the angel and not God is to blame
for the angel's failure to receive it.
The Will for Rectitude and the Will
for Happiness
But this does not say anything about what the features of
the angel's will are such that, by willing, it wills freely, and is thus made
worthy of blame (or praise) for its actions. In DCD, Anselm's understanding of
the will appears to be based on his idea that the creaturely will has two distinct
wills, a will for justice and a will for happiness. The first explicit mention
of the two wills takes place in chapter twelve. There, Anselm attempts to
clarify the sense in which an angel can will to receive the gift of
perseverance.[4]
There is an obvious sense, he argues, in which one might say a thing can do something when one means to
indicate that it is not the thing itself that, in the proper sense, acts, but
something else. So, for example:
If I should say, 'A book can be written by me,' the
book certainly can do nothing and it is I who can write the book. And when we
say, 'That one cannot be conquered by the other,' we intend to say that the
latter cannot conquer the former.[5]
In the sense of willing
an act freely, this is clearly not this sense of can that one is interested in. Something, like a broom, that is
used in such a way to perform a certain task is said to act in virtue of its
being moved to act.
Now, properly speaking, the action belongs to the one who
moves the broom; the broom can be said to act, if it can be said to act at all,
only insofar as it is moved to act by someone. From all cases of something x
moving something y to an act, Anselm seems to generalize to the conclusion that
all cases of something x's moving something y to an act are such that x, in
moving y, initiates the act of movement in which y moves. He seems to assume,
in addition, that if something never
initiates any of its actions, it can never be said to act on its own. Conjoin
this last assumption with the further one that something that never acts on its
own never acts freely, and one has the conclusion that if x always moves y to
act, y never acts freely. Something, in other words, that is moved to will an
act does not will to act on its own, because it does not of itself move to will, i.e., it does not initiate its moving, viz., through a will to move. To illustrate
his point, Anselm has the Teacher introduce the example of a hypothetical angel
who is created "capable of willing," but who does not yet will
anything.
As Visser and Williams indicate in the chapter on free
will in their helpful monograph-length study of Anselm, Anselm has more than
one sense of will in mind throughout
his discussions on free will. So, here, before proceeding, it would be a good
idea to have a good grasp of what sense he intends in this context. Visser and
Williams helpfully disambiguate Anselm's use of the term 'will' by breaking it
into three distinct senses: a "faculty," a "disposition,"
and a "volition."[6]
Visser and Williams argue that Anselm means, in this context, 'will' in the
sense of a disposition, and this seems right. "An angel who has the faculty of willing but who is incapable of willing" can be safely
ruled out, because faculty typically indicates a power, capacity, or an
ability, so it is unclear, given the context, what other work this distinction
would do. To turn to the sense of will as a "volition," it is
possible that Anselm has this sense in mind, but anything with a faculty or
power would also seem to be capable of willing in this sense. This leaves
"disposition" for willing as the remaining choice.
One thing that might help indicate
"disposition" as the right answer in this context is to ask whether a
person could will something if the person's will was not, first, inclined to
will anything. It seems no: if the will wills something x, it seems the will
must, in some sense, be already inclined to will x.[7] Anselm's
Student reinforces this point: if, on the other hand, one says that the person
moves without willing:
it will follow that he moves because of another, not
of himself, except perhaps in the manner of one who instantly closes his eyes
to parry a blow or is forced to will what he did not before in order to avoid
some harm.[8]
But it would be clearly
incorrect to say the person wills to move his eyes as the blow closes in; an
involuntary movement does not count as a willed act (or arguably even an act at
all).[9] Moreover,
the sense of will as a disposition or an inclination seems to capture Anselm's
insistence (as I have interpreted it) that if something x moves something y to
an act, it is x that acts and not y.
But, to turn back to the case of the hypothetical angel,
the picture, now, is this: a person cannot will anything without an inclination
for willing something, so an angel must, first, have a will inclined to willing
something if it is to will at all. The conclusion Anselm draws from this last
point is that an angel who is capable of willing yet who wills nothing
"cannot have its first willing of itself."[10] The capacity for willing is useless, in other
words, in the absence of its being oriented or inclined to one thing or another,
and, without such an orientation, it does not make sense to say it exercises
volitions, because a volition, it seems, is always a volition for a particular object x. It seems incoherent to say I will, though I will no particular thing,
i.e., that my act of willing is not concerned with any particular thing, thought, event, etc. My
body might, in the absence of a willed object, spontaneously "jump into
action," leading me to perform a cartwheel. But this does not count as a
voluntary action any more than my sneezing is a voluntary action. So, Anselm
concludes, the will must be oriented to willing something or another.
The first class of objects to which the will might be
oriented that Anselm discusses is those associated with what he calls the will
for happiness. He describes this will as follows:
Not everyone wants justice nor do all flee
injustice. On the other hand not only every rational nature, but every subject
capable of sensation, tends to the useful and avoids the harmful. For no one
wills but what he takes to be useful to him. In this sense all want things to
be well with them and do not want things to go badly for them. It is of this
happiness that I now speak.[11]
Thus, the sense of
happiness Anselm has in mind seems to be something like advantage or
usefulness. As Anselm states, happiness in this sense is, in itself,
indifferent to justice, because every nature capable of sensation, which, of course,
includes non-rational animals, has a will or an inclination towards it. Moreover, since
the will for happiness is itself only a general inclination for happiness, the
inclination will be an impetus for a creature's actions only to the extent it
leads them to choose particular goods that are conducive to its happiness.
The second possible orientation of the will, according to
Anselm, is the inclination towards justice, i.e., the inclination a creature
has towards choosing such that its choices are morally praiseworthy or
blameworthy. This second orientation differs somewhat from the first insofar as
it is not directed to just objects in
opposition to the fact that the will for happiness is directed to good objects. The reason for this
difference is not hard to discern. As Anselm's reference to 1 Corinthians 4:7
at the beginning of the dialogue makes clear, all things receive all that they
have from God, and both they and all that they receive are good. So because all
things are from God, all things are good. Hence, it would not make sense to
claim that some things are, in themselves, just and others unjust, since, for
Anselm, the will is not directed to some just
objects or other unjust objects. It
is always directed to the good in the sense that it is always directed to some
particular thing and that thing, in virtue of having God as its maker, is good.
So, clearly, Anselm will need a more complicated account for explaining how the
will's orientation works in regard to justice and injustice, as it cannot
choose injustice by choosing unjust things.
In a recent post, I discussed the first portion of an intriguing thought experiment that Anselm offers for proving the necessity of the two dispositions for angelic freedom, (http://ffsdffsd.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/anselms-on-fall-of-devil-and-will-for.html), in which God creates an angel with only the will for happiness. In that post, I identified what seemed like some difficulties with Anselm's use of that thought experiment for showing that an angel could not will anything but happiness if God only gave the angel the will for happiness. But, for the sake of continuing my investigation, I'll waive those objections for the time being.
Now, following my having
conceded (T1), Anselm moves on to affirm that if an angel cannot will happiness
to the highest degree it can, it will aim at what it sees as the next best
opportunity for achieving happiness. So the angel, he continues, wills
happiness in proportion to its knowledge of the available goods it can will. But
the highest thing it knows of is God; therefore, Anselm, concludes, the angel
wills to be like God. The moral Anselm draws from this last point is this: the
angel, in willing to be like God, does not will justly because it does not
befit him, given his creaturely nature, to be God. But it cannot be unjust,
either, he thinks, because it is what he does (i.e., wills) necessarily; it would
be incorrect to say that the angel does this because of its nature (a point
that will become relevant in a moment), as this seems to suggest that its
nature is to will what is contrary to what befits its nature, since what befits
it is, at least in part, determined by its nature. And this would clearly be
absurd. But it would also be obviously wrong to consider the angel blameworthy
for its actions. Anselm also affirms, however, perhaps surprisingly, that the
angel is not made (truly) happy unless he also deserves to be happy,[12]
and, as a corollary, he thinks that the angel is not made happy unless the
angel deserves to be happy, i.e., unless its will is just.[13]
So, ironically, not only is the will for happiness by itself not a sufficient
condition for happiness, but the will for justice would also be insufficient,
by itself, for a creature's happiness.
And, indeed, the same situation regarding the first
scenario would also hold, with respect to an angel's inability to will justice,
Anselm believes, if the angel were given only the will for rectitude. Anselm
does not, in this case, spell out in much detail what the angels actions would
look like, but, presumably, it would will always in accordance with its
disposition or inclination for
rectitude, i.e. it would always will the goods appropriate to its nature. But the angel's willing always rightly does not, Anselm believes, make its will just any more than its always willing happiness would make its will unjust. For, in this case, though the angel always wills as it should will, none of its acts of willing are such that they are initiated by the angel himself. The angel has no power other than to will in accordance with the single inclination that God gave it. There is no time in its existence in which it can initiate its own acts of willing, i.e., move itself to will. Hence, one must distinguish between rightness or rectitude, for Anselm, and justice. The angel wills rightly insofar as its will is fixed to the objects that are appropriate for a thing of its kind to will. It only wills justly insofar as its willingly rightly is a consequence of its moving itself to will rightly; that is, it wills justly if and only its will for willing what is right comes from the angel himself.
[1] St. Anselm, "On the Fall of
the Devil," translated by Ralph McInerney, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, edited by Brian Davies and
Gillian Evans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pg.194, ch.1.
[2] Anselm, pg.196, ch.2.
[3] This is a simple case of denying
the consequent. From the conditional if P then Q, it clearly follows that if Q
fails to obtain then the conditional P > Q as a whole fails to obtain. But the reason why P > Q fails to obtain is
because Q fails to obtain; likewise, the reason the gift is not received is
because the receiver does not accept it; not because the giver does not give
it.
[4] The actual object of willing in
this context is not perseverance per se, but, mutatis mutandis, it seems
plausible to think that anything Anselm has to say about the will simpliciter
will apply to what he would say on perseverance.
[5] St. Anselm, pg.212, ch.12.
[6] Sandra Visser and Thomas
Williams, Anselm. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 182.
[7] An obvious reply might be that
the person wills x because of some other good, say, y. But this is no good,
since then the person, then, will have had an inclination to will y.
[8] Anselm, pg.212, ch.12.
[9] One might further note that even involuntary movements imply an
inclination of the will; in this case, to avoid pain.
[10] Anselm, pg. 213, ch.12.
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