Wearing a Dunce Cap

I have been wandering of late in the company of a distinct minority within the Age of Christendom. By and large it is the company I’ve kept throughout my life even if, quite often, sometimes for years on end, I’ve been socializing with the same minorities in other cultures—Persian (Mazdaism), Arab (Sufism), but also touching the Chinese (in Taoism). This walk, of late, began with Duns Scotus whom I met, in my childhood, by way of the dunce cap and, growing up, I never questioned the prevalent but mildly expressed view among my teachers in Catholic schools from lowest to highest that Scotus was a rather dim light, if not a small shadow-thrower, in the vast brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dunce cap? Worn by those who do not get it. You can make one out of some sheets of newspaper, making them into a cone. For the origin of that shape I show a fifteenth century painting of Scotus (who himself lived mostly in the blessed thirteenth century, 1266-1308); the Flemish painter was Justus van Gent (link).

Scotus belongs to the Platonic line traceable backwards by way of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine himself was part of this minority, close to Manichaeism in youth, a gnostic view which itself has links back to Mazdaism. He lived in a time when the New Dark Age of the Roman Realm was up and running in a serious way. The Visigoths sacked Rome when he was 56 in 410 AD. Therefore his view was darker and more pessimistic than that of Aquinas (1225-1274) who lived as the light of the Renaissance began to signal its own coming with a faint rosy color beneath the horizon. And Aquinas’ great influence was Aristotle who lived just as the Old Modernism, Hellenism, was about to be launched by his pupil, Alexander the Great.  

Let me capture these distinctions in cartoon-like fashion, as it were. Plato stood in relation to Aristotle as Scotus stood to Aquinas. In Plato we see the mature philosophy of a passing religious age, in Aristotle the foreshadowing of a modern time. The same may be said of Scotus and Aquinas, with the small but not very important difference that Aquinas was 41 years older than Scotus whereas Plato was 43 years older than Aristotle. In inwardly-directed religious ages, awareness of the fallen nature of humanity is to the fore. In outwardly-directed secular ages, self-assertion rises. The feeling tone derives from the focus of attention.

So I was reading Berdyaev. He proclaims himself a Platonist, Christian existentialist, and he viewed Duns Scotus as the greatest of the Scholastics. It was the kind of statement that caught my eye, surprised me. I underlined it heavily, adding exclamation marks in the margin—the last time I had read the Russian sage some decades ago with great approval.

So here we have a minority strain of pessimism and a majority dominance of optimism—both within an almost invisibly small cluster of communities that even think about permanent transcendence. I’m still of the pessimistic camp but getting there, in age, I mean. And the odd thing is that, well past the three-score-and-ten, I am feeling optimistic now. If one goes deep enough in any direction with a kind of junk-yard-dog persistence, amazingly the light begins to dawn. I wonder. Does the light eventually dim for the really persistent optimists? If so, my intuition guided me correctly in my gloomy youth.

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.