The Life of the Mind (56 page)

Man is capable of transcending the world of Being together with which he was created and which remains his habitat until death; yet even his mental activities are never unrelated to the world given to the senses. Thus the intellect is "bound up with the senses," and "its innate function is to understand sensory data"; in a similar way, the Will is "bound up with the sensory appetite" and its innate function is "to enjoy itself." "
Voluntas conjuncta appetitui sensitivo nata est condelectari sibi, sicut intellectus conjunctus sensui natus est intelligere sensibilia."
⁹¹
The decisive words here are the
condelectari sibi,
a delight inherent in the willing activity itself as distinct from the delight of desire in having the desired object, which is transient—possession extinguishes the desire and the delight. The
condelectatio sibi
borrows its delight from its closeness to desire, and Scotus said explicitly that no mental delight can compete with the delight arising from the fulfillment of sensual desire, except that this delight is almost as transient as the desire itself.
⁹²
Hence, he distinguishes sharply between will and desire because only the will is not transient. An inherent delight of the will in itself is as natural to the will as understanding and knowing are to the intellect, and can be detected even in hatred; but its innate perfection, the final peace between the two-in-one, can come about only when the will is transformed into
love.
If the will were mere desire to possess, it would cease to be once the object is possessed: I do not desire what I have.

To the extent that Scotus speculates about an after-life—that is, an "ideal" existence for man qua man—this hoped-for transformation of the will into love with its inherent
delectatio
is decisive. The transformation of willing into loving does not signify that loving ceases to be an activity whose end is within itself; hence future blessedness, the beatitude enjoyed in an after-life, cannot possibly consist in rest and contemplation. Contemplation of the
summum bonum,
of the highest "thing," ergo, God, would be the ideal of the intellect, which is always grounded in intuition, the grasping of a thing in its "thisness,"
haecceitas,
which in this life is imperfect not only because here the highest remains unknown but also because intuition of thisness is imperfect: "the intellect ... has recourse to universal concepts, precisely because it is incapable of grasping the haecceity."
⁹³
The notion of "eternal peace," or of Rest, arises out of the experience of restlessness, of the desires and appetites of a needy being that can transcend them in mental activities without ever being capable of escaping them altogether. What the will in a state of blessedness, that is, in an after-life, no longer needs or is no longer capable of, is
rejection
and hatred, but this does not mean that man in a state of blessedness has lost the faculty of saying "Yes."

That unconditional acceptance is called "Love" by Scotus: "
Amo: volo ut sis.
" "Beatitude is therefore the act by which the will comes in contact with the object presented to it by the intellect and loves it, thus fully satisfying its natural desire for it."
⁹⁴
Here again love is understood as an activity but no longer a mental one, as its object is no longer absent from the senses and no longer imperfectly known to the intellect. For "beatitude ... consists in the full and perfect attainment of the object as it is in itself, and not merely as it is in the mind."
⁹⁵
The mind, transcending the existential conditions of the "wayfarer," or pilgrim on earth, has an intimation of such future blessedness in its experience of sheer activity, that is, in a transformation of willing into
loving.
Falling back on the Augustinian distinction of
uti
and
frui,
using something for the sake of something else and enjoying it for its own sake, Scotus says that the essence of beatitude consists in "
fruitio
" the "perfect love of God for God's sake ... thus distinct from the love of God for one's own sake." Even if the latter is love for the sake of one's soul's salvation, it is still
amor concupis-centiae,
desirous love.
⁹⁶
Already in Augustine we find the transformation of willing into loving, and it is more than likely that the reflections of both thinkers were guided by Paul's words about the "love that never ends," not even when "that which is perfect comes" and all else has "passed away" (I Corinthians 13:8–13). In Augustine the transformation comes about because of the binding force of the will; there is no stronger binding force than the love with which the lovers love each other ("marvelously glued together").
⁹⁷
But for Scotus the experiential ground of love's everlastingness is that he conceives of a love that is not only, as it were, emptied, purified of desires and needs, but in which the very
faculty
of the Will is transformed into sheer activity.

If in this life it is the miracle of the human mind that man at least mentally and provisionally can transcend his earthly conditions and enjoy the sheer actuality of an exercise that has its end in itself, then it is the hoped-for miracle of an after-life that man in his whole existence will be spiritualized. Scotus speaks of a "Glorified body,"
⁹⁸
no longer dependent on "faculties" whose activities are interrupted either by the
factivum,
the making and fashioning of objects, or by the desires of a needy creature—both of which render transient every activity in this life, the mental ones not excluded. Transformed into love, the restlessness of the will is stilled but not extinguished; love's abiding power is felt not as the arrest of motion—as the end of the fury of war is felt as the quiet of peace—but as the serenity of a self-contained, self-fulfilling, everlasting movement. Here are not the quiet and delight that follow upon a perfect operation, but the stillness of an act resting in its end. In this life we know of such acts in our
experientia interna,
and, according to Scotus, we should be able to understand them as intimations of an uncertain future when they would last forever. Then "the operating faculty will find itself calmed in its object through the perfect act [love] by which it attains it."
⁹⁹

The idea that there could be an activity that finds its rest within itself is as surprisingly original—without precedent or sequel in the history of Western thought—as Scotus' ontological preference of the contingent over the necessary and of the existent particular over the universal. I have tried to show that in Scotus we meet not simple conceptual reversals but genuine new insights, all of which could probably be explicated as the speculative conditions for a philosophy of freedom. As far as I can see, in the history of philosophy only Kant can equal Duns Scotus in his unconditional commitment to freedom. And yet certainly Kant had no knowledge of him. I shall therefore end with an odd passage from the
Critique of Pure Reason
that at least deals with the same problem though without any mention of Freedom or the Will:

 

There is something very strange in the fact, that once we assume something to exist we cannot avoid inferring that something exists necessarily.... On the other hand, if I take the concept of anything, no matter what, I find that the existence of this thing can never be represented by me as absolutely necessary, and that, whatever it may be that exists, nothing prevents me from thinking its non-existence. Thus while I may indeed be obliged to assume something necessary as a condition of the existent in general, I cannot think any particular thing as in itself necessary. In other words, I can never
complete
the regress to the conditions of existence save by assuming a necessary being, and yet am never in a position to
begin
with such a being. [And concluding this deliberation a few pages later]...there is nothing which absolutely binds reason to accept such an existence; on the contrary it can always annihilate it in thought, without contradiction; absolute necessity is a necessity that is to be found in thought alone.
¹⁰⁰

 

To which, taught by Scotus, one may add that absolute nothingness cannot be found in thought. We shall have occasion later to come back to this idea when we discuss the uncertain destinies of the willing faculty at the close of the modern age.

Before we come to the final part of these considerations I shall try to justify the last and largest leap over the centuries in this sketchy and fragmentary presentation that I had the presumption to announce as a history of the Will. I have already mentioned my doubts as to whether there can legitimately be a "history of ideas," a
Geistesgeschichte
that rests on the assumption that ideas follow and generate one another in a temporal succession. The assumption makes sense only in the system of Hegel's dialectics. But, apart from any theories, a record does exist of the thoughts of great thinkers whose place in factual history is unchallengeable and whose testimony affirming or negating the Will we have touched on here only in passing—Descartes and Leibniz on one side of the argument, Hobbes and Spinoza on the other.

The only great thinker in these centuries who would be truly irrelevant to our context is Kant. His Will is not a
special
mental capability distinct from thinking, but practical reason, a
Vernunftwille
not unlike Aristotle's
nous praktikos;
the statement that "pure reason can be practical is the chief thesis of the Kantian moral philosophy"
¹
is perfectly right. Kant's Will is neither freedom of choice (
liberum arbitrium)
nor its own cause; for Kant, sheer spontaneity, which he often called "absolute spontaneity," exists only in thinking. Kant's Will is delegated by reason to be its executive organ in all matters of conduct.

Much more embarrassing, and thus in need of justification, is the omission from our considerations of the development of German idealism after Kant, the leap we have made over Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who in their speculative way summed up the centuries of die modern age. For the rise and decline of the modern age is not a figment of the "history of ideas" but a factual event that can be dated: the discovery of the whole earth and of part of the universe, the rise of modern science and its technology, followed by the decline of the Church's authority, by secularization and enlightenment.

This momentous factual break occurring in our past has been characterized and interpreted from many different and legitimate viewpoints; in our context, the most decisive development that took place during these centuries was the subjec-tivization of cognitive as well as metaphysical thought. Only during these centuries did man become the center of concern to science as well as to philosophy. It had not happened in earlier times, even though, as we saw, the discovery of the Will coincided with the discovery of the "interior man" at a moment when man had become a "question for himself." Only when science had proved not merely that human senses were subject to error—which could be corrected in the light of new evidence in order to reveal "truth"—but that his sensory apparatus was forever incapable of self-evident certainties, did man's mind, now entirely thrown back upon itself, begin, with Descartes, to look for a "certainty" that would be a pure datum of consciousness. When Nietzsche called the modern age the "school of suspicion," he meant that, starting at least with Descartes, man was no longer sure of anything, not even of being real; he needed proof, not only of God's existence but also of his own. The certainty of the I-am is what Descartes found in his
cogito me cogitare;
that is, in a mental experience for which none of the senses, which give us the reality of ourselves and of an exterior world, is necessary.

To be sure, this certainty is very questionable. Already Pascal, himself influenced by Descartes, objected that this consciousness would hardly be sufficient to distinguish between dream and reality: a poor artisan dreaming for twelve hours every night that he was king would have the same life (and enjoy the same amount of "happiness") as a king who dreamed every night that he was nothing but a poor artisan. Moreover, since "one frequently dreams that he is dreaming," nothing can guarantee that what we call our life is not wholly a dream from which we shall awaken in death. To doubt everything
("de omnibus dubitandum est")
and find certainty in the very activity of doubting demanded by the "new Philosophy [that] calls all in doubt" (Donne) does not help, for is the doubter not obliged to doubt that he doubts? True, no one went that far, but that only means that "no one was ever a perfect skeptic
[pyrrhonien,
in Pascal]," though not because reason fortified him; he was restrained by "nature, [which] helped impotent reason"; and so Cartesianism was "something like the story of Don Quixote."
²

Centuries later, Nietzsche, still thinking in the same vein, suspected that it was our Cartesian "belief in the [thinking] 'ego'...as the sole reality [that made us]...ascribe reality to things in general."
³
Indeed, nothing became more characteristic of the last stages of metaphysics than this kind of tuming-of-the-tables, of which Nietzsche, with his mercilessly honest thought-experiments, was the greatest master. But that game—still a thought-game rather than a language-game—did not become possible until, with the rise of German idealism, all bridges had been broken "except the rainbow-bridges of concepts,"
⁴
or, to put it less poetically, until it dawned on the philosophers that "the novelty of our contemporary position in philosophy lies in the conviction, which no era had before vis, that we do not possess the truth. All previous generations 'possessed the truth,' even the skeptics."
⁵