2.4 Medieval Transitions
2.4.2 Scotus on the Intellect and the Will
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Plato could account for evil without reference to wills or necessity. Evil could be understood as a product of ignorance or disharmony, which, in turn, was largely a function of distance from the eternal perfection of the Forms. How does Augustine account for evil if evil is prohibited to God? We know his answer. His origin story of evil centers on human free will. As a compatibilist, there is still a question of why God’s grace was insufficient to keep the human will from straying. That issue is beyond the scope of the current project.
Most importantly, what we find in Augustine is the injection of human free will in a way that makes up for God’s separation from the anthropo-cosmic synthesis that yet remains at the heart of the way Western thought imagines reality to fit together. God remains involved through the doctrine of providence, but the formal and organic connection with God is sundered. In its absence, human liberty arises to fill the vacuum. Augustine had introduced the notion of ordered love or ordered desire. The will, being associated with desire, gained a foothold relative to the intellect. That foothold would become a full-scale revolution during the Middle Ages.
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with the emerging priority of the individual came Scotus’s reversal of the Greek and Thomistic priority of the intellect over the will, based largely on Scotus’s category of ‘nature.’
Whereas Augustine’s doctrine of free will had little direct impact on the synthesis of the human and the natural due to his doctrine of providence, Scotus’s theological voluntarism would have a strong impact. In the Thomistic tradition, the will had followed the intellect, meaning that the intellect discerned the true good from malleable goods. The intellect then led the will to choose the true good. The intellect presented the truth to the will. Acting as a final cause, the truth motivates the will to choose the good.51 This position is very conservative relative to the classical Hellenistic tradition. In contrast, Scotus, working within anthropological aspects of the Augustinian tradition, argued against Thomas that the will directs the intellect. The will has priority over the intellect. In this section I will explain how Scotus supports this claim and what its implication might be for how Western society models reality.
The ascendancy of the will in Scotus begins with the will’s capacity for contingency, which separates the will from nature, placing the will outside of nature. For Scotus, there are three dimensions of human freedom, each associated with the will:
1. The will can choose contrary acts.
2. The will can choose contrary objects.
3. The will can choose opposite effects.52
What is important about each of these dimensions is the contingency of the will.53 I could have chosen otherwise than I did in each case.
51 Shannon, Ethical Theory, 41.
52 Ibid., 47.
53 “Given that this contingency cannot arise in the functioning of the intellect, Scotus reasons that it must instead arise in the functioning of the will. Following a suggestion made by Aristotle, Scotus posits a basic contrast between free powers and natural powers. Free powers have three features not shared with natural powers. The first of these features is being indetermined, being a power for opposites . . . The will’s indeterminism entails its remaining two
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In contrast to the contingent will, Scotus posits a determined and deterministic nature. He uses the example of heat, which he categorizes as a nature. Heat heats because it is its nature to heat. A nature cannot do otherwise because nature is determined. The human will is not part of the determined and deterministic cosmos because the will may make contingent, rather than determined, choices.54 Nature becomes, in Scotus, a category, which he then associates with the intellect.
The contingency of the will is a central premise to Scotus’s argument that the will has priority over the intellect. The intellect does not have contingency because it is a nature.55 Just as heat heats because it is heat, so the intellect knows or understands because that is the nature of the intellect. When presented with something that is capable of being known, the intellect will know it. In contrast, Scotus categorizes the will as a rational potency, a term deriving from Aristotle. For Scotus, the intellect, as a nature, can and will recognize the good, but it cannot choose the good. It has no potency. The intellect is a “precondition for the act of a rational potency,”56 or an “incomplete rational potency.”57 In one sense, the intellect shares similarities with Anselm’s notion of the affectio commodi, the affection for advantages, which points to a eudaimonistic ethics. We gain advantage in doing the things that lead to our eudaimonia.
features: that a free power is a self-mover, a sufficient cause of its own actions; and that a free power can refrain from acting even when all the conditions necessary for its acting obtain” (Cross, Scotus, 85).
54 Shannon, Ethical Theory, 47.
55 “And the intellect, so considered, counts as nature. For it is of itself determined to understanding, and it is not in the intellect’s power to understand and not understand [simples] or, with regard to propositions, where it can have contrary acts—assent and dissent—those contrary acts are not in the intellect’s power.” John Duns Scotus, John Duns Scotus: Selected Writings on Ethics, Thomas Williams, trans., ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017):
6.
56 Scotus, quoted in Shannon, Ethical Theory, 62.
57 Ibid., 63.
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However, this is true for all of nature. Only in the affectio justitiae do human beings begin to transcend nature, for Anselm.58 For our purposes, we do not have to delve into the concepts and implications of the affectio commodi and affectio justitae. This transcendence of nature is an important development for us to note. Additionally, the contingency or indeterminacy of the will leading to the concept of freedom as choice is important.
Within the genealogy that I am crafting, the important point is that by elevating the will over the intellect in this way, Scotus completes the dissolution of the ontotheological synthesis – the dissolution of a metaphysical model based on transcendence. The Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo had removed the theological dimension of that synthesis when it separated God from the cosmos. Scotus completed the separation of the anthropic from the cosmic when he elevated the will over nature. For Scotus, the capacity for contingency is the source of the possibility of human creativity. On what grounds was God placed outside of the cosmos? God was removed from the synthesis on the basis that God was the Creator of the cosmos. Now we are seeing the human capacity for creativity, located in our contingent wills, also removing humanity from the cosmos and placing us outside of the natural and cosmic moral order.59
One final point worth noting is how Scotus justifies his claims about the contingency of the will in the above three cases. He does so by appeal to experience: We experience ourselves to be free. We experience these contingencies in our choices. Consequently, our freedom is self-
58 Ibid., 56.
59 “…for Scotus the will is ‘transcendental,’ understood to mean transcending the divide between divine and created being. Thus there is a simple notion of will, indifferent to its realizations in God and in human beings—i.e., in infinite or in finite being—and denoting the essential characteristic common to every will, whether human or divine.
This essential characteristic is freedom…” Guido Alliney, “Landolfo Caracciolo, Peter Auriol, and John Duns Scotus on Freedom and Contingency,” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 82, no. 2 (2015): 273.
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evident to us. It is incontrovertible.60 When we come to René Descartes, the human will has completed its ascension, attaining demigod status:
Similarly, if I examine the faculties of memory or imagination, or any others, I discover that in my case each one of these faculties is weak and limited, while in the case of God it is immeasurable. It is only the will, or freedom of choice, which I experience within me to be so great that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond my grasp; so much so that it is above all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God. For although God’s will is incomparably greater than mine . . .
nevertheless it does not seem any greater than mine when considered as will in the essential and strict sense.61
And while Descartes was in many respects a rationalist, we find in his position that, experience, albeit not sense experience, has established itself as epistemically basic. It is my experience of myself thinking, it is my experience of the infinity of my will that serves as the properly basic foundation of what follows. Certainly, the epistemic status of sense experience will be canonized in John Locke, but we find experience, more broadly conceived, already at work in Descartes.