Even Concerning Free Will—We Have a Choice

The world is hopelessly divided, come to think of it. There are General Motors people and Ford people, Honda people and Toyota, Platonists and Aristotelians, Scotists and Thomists—and, which it is my object to examine today, Voluntarists and Intellectualists. The last are two ways of looking at free will. Neither denies that free will exists—or to put it another way, both affirm that the will is free, but voluntarists put will at the summit, intellectuals put the intellect at the peak. So how exactly does this work?

The problem arises because, as souls, we are a unity but have different powers. We also clearly experience these powers as distinctly real. A commonplace example is when someone says, “I am of two minds about that.” The statement is ambiguous enough to illustrate the problem. Does it mean that the person experiences two intellectual conceptions of some situation too close to one another to signal, clearly, which is right? Or does it mean that the pictures are clear enough, but the person has not yet decided which one to choose as relevant?

The intellectualist view of free will holds that the ultimate decider is the Intellect—and free will is the power that executes the intellect’s lead in choosing some perceived good. Free will is therefore a function of an intellectual appetite or desire. Here acting wrongly is assigned to the intellect. It values a lesser good rather than the higher. But whatever the person chooses he or she desires, therefore the emphasis is on something perceived. Appetite comes form the Latin for “desire toward.” This is the view held by Thomas Aquinas (link).

The voluntarist view is that free will is, in a manner of speaking, sovereign. Nothing compels it. It is quite capable of acting contrary to the intellect’s leaning. This is the view of John Duns Scotus (link). He argues that the will cannot be said to have genuine freedom unless it is capable of acting contrary to the intellect’s desire. Furthermore, the will stands above the intellect because it directs the attention to whatever subject it selects to understand. In the source I cite for Scotus is this interesting observation:

Scotus means to show not just that the will is a higher power than the intellect, however. He argues for the remarkable claim that the will is unique among all created powers because it alone acts freely.

                                                              [Jeffrey Hause, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308)]

This would mean that the will is the essential characteristic of the soul, making it what it is. The human being may be coerced into actions it does not will, but its decisions cannot be changed by external force.

Now, of course, when we look at the unity of the soul—even if it may be of two minds at any one point—we are looking at a something that has multiple powers. The Medievalists like to single out intellect and will, but feeling, imagination, and intuition are also present. We can distinguish them by observation. But, as Duns Scotus observes, these distinctions are “formal,” meaning that they point to “realities” that are present in a unity but inseparable from it. How can we possibly select one to be the primus inter pares? The answer, of course, is that we can choose one. Quite a potent power that, free will.

As for me, I feel quite comfortable with General Motors, Honda, Plato, and Scotus. The addition of the last name to this list I owe to a hint I found on Siris the other day (link). It came in handy in enlarging on the concept of free will I had planned to undertake after writing the last post.