Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 261 - To Will or Not to Will - Scotus on Freedom.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, To Will or Not to Will, SCOTUS on Freedom. Hamlet, Act III, Scene 3. We find the Prince of Denmark doing what he does best, hesitating. He has an apparently perfect opportunity to revenge his father's murder at the hands of his uncle Claudius, having found him alone, praying. Hamlet has Claudius at his mercy, but then realizes that killing him now might be too merciful. If he slays Claudius while he prays for forgiveness, then Claudius will go to heaven. Am I then revenged, asked Hamlet, to take him in the purging of his soul when he is fit and seasoned for his passage? He decides to wait for a better opportunity. And thus, as Hamlet puts it elsewhere, the native hue of resolution is sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. I could hardly have put it better myself. And we've all been there, well, perhaps not quite in this situation, but we've all been uncertain how to act, or certain how to act, but uncertain whether the time for action has come. At such moments, we feel vividly that we have a genuine power to choose whether or not to act. Hamlet is not like a Greek tragic hero, carried inevitably forward by his own character, the tide of events, and the will of the gods. He is a quintessentially modern tragic hero, blessed, or perhaps cursed, with the power and responsibility to shape the present and the future. He must choose whether it is right to kill or not to kill, and, famously, whether to be or not to be. As philosophers nowadays would put it, these choices seem to be characterized by the presence of alternative possibilities. Hamlet can kill Claudius as he prays, or refrain from doing so. Both paths are open to him, and he must choose which one to follow. For some philosophers, we can count ourselves as free only when such alternative possibilities are available. Freedom is not just, for example, doing what you want. If you cannot avoid performing a given action, you are unfree with respect to that action, whether you want to perform the action or not. Of course, the idea that freedom involves open alternatives was not invented by Shakespeare. It has a long history, and can perhaps be traced back ultimately to Aristotle. In his logical work On Interpretation, Aristotle points out that if everything were necessary, it would make no sense for us to engage in deliberation. Yet Aristotle also gave philosophers a powerful reason to be suspicious about the idea of genuinely open possibilities. In the same passage, he suggests that whatever is happening right now in the present moment is necessary. If this is right, then at the very moment Hamlet passes up the chance to kill Claudius, his not killing Claudius is necessary. And this makes a certain amount of sense. How could it still be possible for Hamlet to strike, even as he is in the act of withdrawing, saying, upsord, and know thou a more horrid bent? To get to the modern-day notion of simultaneous, genuinely open possibilities, we are going to have to make a few subtle distinctions. In particular, we are going to have to turn to a man who specialized in such distinctions, John Duns Scotus. We've already met him engaging in debates over the Trinity, and arguing for the univocity of being, but now I'd like to introduce him properly. I'm treating him as the last of the great thinkers of the 13th century, even though his life spanned the 13th and 14th centuries, as did his thought, responding as it did to Henry of Ghent and others, while also setting the agenda for numerous thinkers in the age to come. He was born in Scotland in the 1260s, hence the Scotus part of his name. He wrote many of his works right around the turn of the century, lecturing on Peter Lombard's sentences in Oxford in the year 1300 itself. As you might remember, theologians standardly taught the sentences and used this as an excuse to put forth their own views, something especially true in Scotus's case. He then had two stints at Paris, where he became a master of theology, before dying in Cologne in 1308. His works are full of newly-coined terminology, brilliant argumentation, novel philosophical notions and torturously complex reasoning, making them a thrilling, yet challenging read for interpreters to say nothing of podcasters. His earliest important work consists in those lectures on the sentences given in Oxford. We have a revision of the lectures from his time in Paris, as well as student notes on his Parisian lectures, along with other philosophical and theological works, including a commentary on Aristotle's metaphysics and a treatise on God. More information can be gleaned from other sources, like additional notes produced by Scotus's secretary, William of Alnwick. The upshot is that Scotus has left a wealth of material for us to study, yet this material is often confusing, because of layers of revision and the fact that it's sometimes other people who are reporting what he said. We also find a significant evolution in thought, with Scotus changing his mind in characteristically subtle ways as his career goes along. His views on freedom and the will offer a good example. Scotus seems to have changed his mind about the nature of possibility and also the role of our intellect in forming our choices. When he thinks about the relation between intellect and will, Scotus is reacting especially to Henry of Ghent. Henry is regarded as a pioneer of voluntarism. We saw him saying that the intellect has only an advisory capacity with the will serving as the supreme power within the human soul. On this reckoning, it is Hamlet's will alone that determines the choice not to kill Claudius, even if it is taking the advice of Hamlet's intellect that slaying Claudius just when he is at prayer isn't the best way of exacting revenge. The early Scotus is reluctant to give the will sole responsibility, and makes intellect and will cooperative causes in forming choice. But he comes to adopt a more purely voluntaristic view like Henry's, and this is the understanding of human action that we usually associate with Scotus. Like Henry, and unlike Aquinas, the mature Scotus insists that the will is not moved to make its choices by intellect, rather it simply moves itself. With this, he is rejecting a basic tenet of Aristotle, who had argued that self-motion is impossible, so that he could trace all motion back to the single ultimate mover that is God. Scotus scornfully dismisses this idea, stating that the impossibility of self-motion is not a first, no not even a tenth principle. But Scotus still seeks to base his theory on Aristotle, this is scholastic philosophy after all, and is especially persuaded by Aristotle's idea that rational powers are distinguished from natural powers by their capacity to select either of two contraries. The idea here is that a merely natural cause gives rise to only one effect. Fire always heats things up and never cools them down. By contrast, a so-called rational power can do either of two opposed things, as when a jazz fan decides whether to listen to Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five or the Miles Davis album Birth of the Cool. Scotus argues on this basis that only the will is truly rational, because only will can choose from either of two alternatives. The intellect is instead a natural cause, more like fire. It can only form beliefs based on the available evidence. Thus, Hamlet judges that killing Claudius while he prays will allow him to go to heaven. He's wrong about this, by the way. Shakespeare allows us to enjoy the irony of Claudius saying, just after Hamlet departs, that his prayers are ineffective. "...my words fly up, my thoughts remain below, words without thoughts never to heaven go." Wrong or right, Hamlet's intellect must reach the judgment that seems most compelling. Yet, he is still free to choose however he wills on the basis of this judgment. As Scotus puts it, if the will had no power over the opposite in that very instant, and at the time when it is actually determined to something, then no effect that is being actualized would be contingent. Freedom is not about judging or not judging. To will or not to will, that is the question, as Will Shakespeare didn't quite say. If we are to be capable of this sort of freedom, then we are going to need genuinely open alternatives to choose between. To show how this could be so, Scotus is going to have to produce a definition of possibility that was not dreamt of in Aristotle's philosophy. Before Scotus, it was common to assume that merely possible or contingent things are simply the things that happen sometimes but not always. And fair enough, you might say. It seems right that necessities are always true while impossibilities are never true. It is eternally the case that 1 plus 1 equals 2, eternally false that 1 plus 1 equals 3. Contingent things, by contrast, might be the case, but don't need to be. It's possible for me to sit and for me to stand. This is how it can be that you'll occasionally find me standing, though usually you'll find me sitting, since that's the posture I adopt for reading about philosophy. Notice that on this reckoning, genuinely possible things do need to happen at least at some point. If something is never the case, then, according to the traditional Aristotelian view, it must be impossible. Also, as we already said, in this way of thinking, the past and present are no longer contingent. They are necessary, since it is too late to do anything to change them. Scotus explicitly rejects this whole way of thinking. He says, I do not call contingent everything that is not necessary, or not eternal. Instead, I refer to something the opposite of which is possible even at the very moment it actually exists or occurs. That's actually a pretty straightforward explanation by Scotus's standards, but let's unpack it a bit. Of the traditional conception of contingency, only the future was open. As Hamlet stalks the hallways of Elsinore looking for Claudius, it is still open for him to kill or not. But once he finds Claudius and chooses to spare his life, the die is cast. It's not possible for him to kill Claudius while not killing Claudius. Scotus's breakthrough is to insist that it does remain possible for Hamlet to kill Claudius even as he refrains from doing so. This is because possibility, or contingency, is not defined in terms of what happens or doesn't happen. It's defined in terms of what could happen, whether or not it does in fact happen. That sounds a bit circular. But it isn't, because Scotus has a brilliant way of explaining precisely what we mean when we say that something could be the case even when it isn't. The contingent is just that which implies no contradiction. Scotus puts the point in terms of repugnance. The reason a round square is impossible is that the terms round and square are incompatible with or repugnant to one another. Scotus actually prefers the example of the chimera, a mythical beast made up of parts of a lion, snake, and goat. Since these animal natures in fact exclude one another, the chimera cannot exist. Possible things are possible because they involve no such repugnance or incompatibility. As Avicenna pointed out, neither do such things need to exist. There's nothing about the essence of a lion, a snake, or a goat that guarantees the existence of lions, snakes, or goats. And the same goes in the case of actions like Hamlet's. There is no logical or metaphysical impossibility entailed by killing Claudius at prayer, so it remains possible for Hamlet to do so, even as he is deciding it would be better to catch Claudius later on when he is in a state of sin. This conception of possibility is often held as Scotus's greatest contribution to the history of philosophy, and not without reason, even if, as usual, we have to admit that groundwork was laid by previous thinkers. For Scotus, the most important inspiration here was, yet again, Henry of Ghent. Henry already had the idea that some things that are genuinely possible are never realized. What makes them possible is that they are conceived as possibilities in the mind of God. I don't have a sister, but I could have had one. For Henry, what this means is that God understands that he could have created her. Now it might seem that there is a big difference between Scotus and his predecessor on this score. Henry argued that things become possible because God thinks about them as things he could create, whereas Scotus says that things are possible in themselves, just by virtue of not involving any repugnance or intrinsic impossibility. But actually, we can find Scotus too talking the way that Henry did. His approach is especially close to Henry's in his early works, but he always seems to retain the idea that possibility is somehow grounded in God's creative power. So is Scotus's position on possibility, like a chimera, stuck together out of incompatible parts? No. And to see why, we need to, of course, draw a distinction. Repugnance or incompatibility belongs to things by their very nature. Chimeras are intrinsically impossible and lions intrinsically possible. But before lions can be possible in this way, God has first to think of them as something he can create. Thus we should distinguish between a first moment and second moment in the order of nature. In the first moment, God thinks, here's something I could make, a lion, something Henry and Scotus describe as the creation of lions in intelligible being. In the second moment, lions are in themselves possible. This possibility is not something God needs to bestow on lions, nor does God need to do any extra work to prevent lions from combining with snakes and goats to form chimeras, since chimeras are in themselves impossible. Finally, in a third moment, God actually creates some, but not all, of the things that could possibly be created. The reason there are no round squares or chimeras is that they can't exist. The reason I do exist and my sister doesn't is down to God's choice as a creator. And make no mistake, God does have a choice about what he creates. Scotus's idea of simultaneously open possibilities is meant to apply to God's freedom as much as to ours, if not more so. This is despite the fact that God is a necessary being. Scotus, being Scotus, in fact has a clever and complicated proof of God's necessary existence. I'll avoid the complicated bits and cut straight to the most brilliant part. After a lot of work, Scotus is able to demonstrate to his own satisfaction that there could possibly be a cause for all other things, which is first and therefore uncaused. In other words, he shows that God might exist. From this, Scotus thinks he can immediately infer that God does exist. For just consider, obviously a first cause does not come to exist by being caused to exist by something else. So the only way for such a cause to exist is by being necessarily actual. But we know that there is a way for the cause to exist since we established that it might exist. Therefore, the cause is necessarily actual, so God does, in fact, exist. As Scotus notes himself, his proof is reminiscent of earlier attempts to demonstrate the existence of God. The move from God's possible existence to his actual existence may remind us of the equally clever, and most people would say equally dubious, move at the center of Anselm's ontological argument. Scotus's proof also recalls Avicenna and his idea of God as a necessarily existing first cause. Unlike Avicenna, though, Scotus thinks that God's actions as a creator are contingent, even if God exists necessarily. It may seem that, with Henry of Ghent's help, Scotus has already shown us how this could be so. God chooses only some possible creatures for actual existence. But as Hamlet might say, not so fast. Even granted that there are a variety of ways for God to make the world, isn't he required to choose the best of those ways? After all, he is perfectly good and benevolent. So when God considered whether to create lions, he had to consider whether a world with lions is better than a world without lions. Apparently he decided the answer was yes, though giraffes might beg to differ with this decision. But this is not quite how the medievals typically saw things. Aquinas and Bonaventure denied that it even makes sense to talk about a best of all possible worlds. Any created world is infinitely inferior to God himself, so that no matter what world God creates, there will be an infinite amount of room for improvement. We can say that our actual world is in a sense perfect because it is internally well ordered, but there is no point comparing this world to other worlds that might have entirely different sorts of creatures in it. Scodas likewise focuses on the question of whether things could be better arranged, given the natures that actually exist, rather than the question whether a whole different set of natures might be preferable. He says that our world is perfect as it is, but for a different reason. Namely, that whatever God does is perfect just by definition. God's goodness does not consist in his choosing the best out of available options. Rather, it consists in conferring goodness on whichever option he does choose. To put it another way, if God had decided to arrange things differently, then that different arrangement would be best. This is a rather surprising conclusion. To understand it more fully, we're going to have to turn away from the metaphysical issues that have been concerning us over the past couple of episodes, and towards the question of just what Scodas understands by the good. Would he agree with Hamlet that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so? Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt that you should join me for Scodas's ethics, next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.