The Life of the Mind (54 page)

Besides being open to contraries, the Will can
suspend
itself, and while such suspension can only be the result of another volition—in contradistinction to the Nietzschean and Heideggerian Will-not-to-will, which we shall discuss later—this second volition, in which "indifference" is directly chosen, is an important testimony to human freedom, to the mind's ability to avoid all coercive determination from the outside. It is because of their freedom that men, though part and parcel of created Being, can praise God's creation, for if such praise derived from their reason it would be no more than a natural reaction caused by our given harmony with all the other parts of the universe. But by the same token they can also abstain from such praise and even "hate God and find satisfaction in such hatred" or at least refuse to love Him.

This refusal, which Scotus does not mention in his discussion of the possible hatred of God, is posited in analogy to his objection to the old "all men will to be happy." He admits that of course all men by nature wish to be happy (although no agreement about happiness exists), but the Will—and here is the crucial point—can transcend nature, in this case suspend it: there is a difference between man's natural inclination to happiness and happiness as the deliberately chosen goal of one's life; it is by no means impossible for man to discount happiness altogether in making his willed projects. As far as natural inclination is concerned, and the limitation nature sets on the power of the Will, all that can be affirmed is that no man can "will to be miserable."
⁵⁴
Scotus avoids giving a clear answer to the question of whether hatred of God is possible or not, because of the close relation of that question to the question of evil. In line with all his predecessors and successors, he, too, denies that man can will evil as evil, "but not without raising some doubts as to the possibility of the opposite view."
⁵⁵

The Will's autonomy—"nothing else but the will is the total cause of volition"
("nihil aliud a voluntate est causa totalis volitionis in voluntate")
⁵⁶
—decisively limits the power of reason, whose dictate is not absolute, but it does not limit the power of nature, be it the nature of the inner man, called "inclinations," or that of exterior circumstances. The will is by no means omnipotent in its actual effectiveness: its force consists solely in that it cannot be coerced to will. To illustrate this mental freedom, Scotus gives the example of a man "who hurls himself from a high place."
⁵⁷
Does not this act terminate his freedom since he now necessarily falls? According to Scotus, it does not. While the man is necessarily falling, compelled by the law of gravity, he remains free to continue "to will to fall," and can also of course change his mind, in which case he would be unable to undo what he started voluntarily and would find himself in the hands of necessity. We remember Spinoza's example of the rolling stone which, if endowed with consciousness, would necessarily be prey to the illusion that it had hurled itself and was now rolling of its own free will. Such comparisons are useful in order to realize to what an extent such propositions and their illustrations, disguised in the form of plausible arguments, depend on preliminary assumptions about necessity or freedom as self-evident facts. To stay with the present illustration—no law of gravity can have power over the freedom guaranteed in interior experience; no interior experience has any direct validity in the world as it really and necessarily is according to outer experience and the correct reasoning of the intellect.

Duns Scotus distinguishes between two kinds of will: "natural will"
(ut natura),
which follows the natural inclinations, and may be inspired by reason as well as by desire, and "free will"
(ut libera)
properly speaking.
⁵⁸
He agrees with nearly every other philosopher that it is in human nature to incline toward the good and explains the evil will as human weakness, the blemish of a creature that has come from nothingness
("creatio ex nihilo")
and has therefore a certain inclination to sink back into nothingness
("omnis creatura potest tendere in nihil et in non esse, eo quod de nihilo est
").
⁵⁹
Natural will works like "gravity in bodies," and he calls it "
affectio commodi,
" our being affected by what is proper and expedient. If man had only his natural will, he would at best be a
bonum animal,
a kind of enlightened brute, whose very rationality would help him to choose appropriate means to ends given by human nature. Free will—as distinguished from the
liberum arbitrium,
which is only free to select the means to a pre-designed end—freely designs ends that are pursued
for their own sake,
and of this pursuance only the Will is capable: "
[voluntas] enim est productiva actum
," "for the Will produces its own act."
⁶⁰
The trouble is that Scotus does not seem to say anywhere what this freely designed end actually is, although he seems to have understood the activity of free designing as the Will's actual perfection.
⁶¹

 

It is with great regret that I admit that this cannot be the place (and that I would not be qualified if it were the place) to do justice to Duns Scotus' originality of thought, especially to the "passion for constructive thinking that pervades all of [his] genuine work,"
⁶²
which he had neither the time—he died too young, too young for a philosopher—nor perhaps the inclination to present systematically. It is hard to think of any great philosopher, any one of the great thinkers—of whom there are not many—who still "needs [so much] to be discovered and helped by our attention and understanding."
⁶³

Such help will be all the more welcome and all the more difficult to provide, for the very good reason that finding a comfortable niche for him between predecessors and successors in the histoiy of ideas will not be possible. Avoiding the textbook cliché of the "systematic opponent of St. Thomas" will not be enough, and in his insistence on the Will as the nobler faculty compared with the Intellect he had many predecessors among the schoolmen—the most important was Petras Johannis Olivi.
⁶⁴
Nor will it be enough to clarify and bring out in detail his undoubtedly great influence on Leibniz and Descartes, even though it is still true, as Windelband said more than seventy years ago, that their links with "the greatest of the scholastics ... have unfortunately not found the consideration or treatment that they deserve."
⁶⁵
Certainly the intimate presence of the Augustinian inheritance in his work is too patent to escape notice—there is no one who read Augustine with greater sympathy and deeper understanding—and his indebtedness to Aristotle was perhaps even greater than that of Aquinas. Still the simple truth is that for his quintessential thought—contingency, the price gladly paid for freedom—he had neither predecessors nor successors. Nor for his method: a careful elaboration of Olivi's
experimentum suitatis
in thought-experiments, which were framed as the ultimate test of the mind's critical examination in the course of its transactions with and within itself (
experimur in nobis, experientia internatia
⁶⁶
).

In the following I shall try to summarize those strikingly original and highly relevant thought-trains—or thought-experiments—which clearly go against the grain of our philosophical and theological traditions but are easily overlooked because they are presented in the manner of the schoolmen and easily lost in the intricacies of Scotian argumentations. I have already mentioned some of the striking insights: first, his objection to the old cliché that "all men will to be happy" (of which nothing more was left than "no man can will to be miserable"); second, his no less surprising proof of the existence
of
contingency ("let all those who deny contingency be tortured until they admit that it would be possible
not
to be tortured"
⁶⁷
). Stumbling on such down-to-earth remarks in their erudite surroundings, one is tempted to read them as mere witticisms. Their validity, according to Scotus, depends on the
experientia interna,
an experience of the mind whose evidence can be denied only by those who lack the experience, as a blind man would deny the experience of color. The dry, tindery quality of such remarks could suggest flashes of insight rather than thought-trains, but these abrupt flashes usually occur only in the thought-thing, a single pithy sentence that is the result of long previous critical examinations. It is characteristic of Scotus that, despite his "passion for constructive thinking," he was no system builder; his most surprising insights often appear casually and, as it were, out of context; he must have known of the disadvantages of this, for he warns us explicitly against entering into disputes with "contentious" opponents who, lacking "internal experience," are likely to win an argument and lose the issue at stake.
⁶⁸

Let us start with Contingency as the price to be paid for freedom. Scotus is the only thinker for whom the word "contingent" has no derogatory association: "I say that contingency is not merely a privation or defect of Being like the deformity ... which is sin. Rather, contingency is a positive mode of Being, just as necessity is another mode."
⁶⁹
This position seems to him unavoidable, a matter of intellectual integrity, if one wishes to save freedom. The primacy of the Intellect over the Will must be rejected "because it cannot save freedom in any way "
—"quia hoc nullo modo salvat libertatem."
⁷⁰
For him the main distinction between Christians and pagans lies in the Biblical notion of the origin of the universe: the universe of Genesis did not come into being through the emanation of predetermined necessary forces, so that its existence would also be necessary, but was created
ex nihilo
by the decision of a Creator-God Who, we must suppose, was entirely free to create a different world in which neither our mathematical truths nor our moral precepts would be valid. From this it follows that everything that is might possibly not have been—save God Himself. His existence is necessary from the perspective of a non-necessary world which He freely "designed," but not necessary in the sense that there had ever been a necessity that coerced or inspired Him in His creation; such a necessity working through Him would be in clear contradiction to God's omnipotence as well as to His supremacy.

Men are part and parcel of this Creation, and all their natural capabilities, including their intellect, naturally follow the laws laid down by divine Fiat. Yet Man, in contradistinction to all other parts of Creation, was not freely designed; he was created in God's own image—as though God needed not only angels in some supranatural world, but some creatures after His likeness in the midst of worldly nature to keep Him company. The hallmark of this creature, obviously closer to God than any other, is by no means creativity; in that case the creature would indeed have been something like a "mortal god" (and to my mind this is very likely the reason that Scotus did not follow up his notion of a "freely designed goal of the Will" even though he seems to have thought of such a "content-less ability to design freely" as "true perfection"
⁷¹
). Rather, God's creature is distinguished by the mental capacity to affirm or negate freely, uncoerced by either desire or reasoning. It is as though Being, having come into existence, needed God's final judgment for its fulfillment—"And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good"—and this judgment was elicited also from the mortal that had been created in His likeness.

At any rate the price of the Will's freedom is to be free vis-à-vis every object; man can "hate God and find satisfaction in such hatred," because some pleasure (delectatio) attends every volition.
⁷²
The Will's freedom does not consist in the selection of means for a predetermined end—
eudaimonia
or
beatitudo
or
blessedness
—precisely because this end is already
given
by human nature; it consists in freely affirming or negating or hating whatever confronts it. It is this freedom of the will mentally to
take a position
that sets man apart from the rest of creation; without it he would be an enlightened animal (
bonum animal
) at best, or, as Olivi had said earlier, a
bestia intellectualis,
an intellectual beast.
⁷³
The miracle of the human mind is that by virtue of the Will it can transcend everything ("
voluntas transcendit omne creatum,
" as Olivi said
⁷⁴
), and this is the sign of man's being created in God's image. The Biblical notion that God showed him His preference by giving him dominion over all the works of His hands (Psalm 8) would only make him the highest of all created things; it would not set him absolutely apart from them. The willing ego, when it says in its highest manifestation, "
Amo: Volo ut sis,
" "I love you; I want you to be"—and not 'I want to have you" or "I want to rule you"—shows itself capable of the same love with which supposedly God loves men, whom He created only because He willed them to exist and whom He
loves without desiring them.

That is how the matter presented itself to the Christian; it is why "Christians ... say that God acts contingently ... freely and contingently."
⁷⁵
But it is also possible, according to Scotus, to arrive at the same evaluation of contingency by way of philosophy. After all, it was the Philosopher who had defined the contingent and the accidental
(to symbēbekos)
as that which "could as well not be"
(endechomenon mē einai)
,
⁷⁶
and what was the willing ego more aware of in every volition than that it could also not will
(experitur enim qui vult se posse non velle
⁷⁷
)? How would man ever have been capable of distinguishing a free act of will from an overwhelming desire without that infallible internal test?