Happy Easter to all of our readers! As previously announced, our monthly theme for April is the philosophy of Saint Augustine. Now, it is hard to say anything about this expansive topic that has not been said many times before by more reputable and/or eloquent voices than our own, but we hope this month to at least rehash some deeply influential points which may not have made it to the ears of our audience. One of Augustine’s principal philosophical achievements is his characterization of the will, specifically how that characterization marked a departure from the Platonic and Aristotelean models that had dominated Western thought for over 700 years. For more background and analysis of this departure, Alasdair MacIntyre provides an insightful summary in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (specifically in chapter 9, “The Augustinian Alternative”). Today I want to examine Augustine’s characterization of the will, specifically in its precise relationship to the intellect.
Let us start with the Aristotelean/Platonic model from which Augustine deviated. I will focus on Aristotle’s since his more systematic approach makes his account easier to relate, but his is quite similar to that of Plato. We see in their accounts that the sphere of potential alternatives from which we choose is limited to those alternatives that are apprehended by reason; and more restrictively, it is limited to those which are judged by reason as good. Some accounts of Aristotle’s position would go even further to say that the only option presented to the will is that which the reason has, through its deliberation, found to be the best. In such an account, the will hardly seems free in any meaningful way; the intellect decides what is best, and the will is merely the slave of the intellect which inclines the soul toward the specific action that reason has determined best.
By contrast, in The Confessions, Augustine is very clear that at several key points in his wayward youth he chose to do an action that he knew to be wrong, and even chose that action because of the iniquity in it (most famously, II.6.12-14). How can this be squared with the Aristotelean model just recounted? The first avenue one might take is to say that Augustine’s reason was not at that time formed in such a way to deliberate properly, but this attempt fails. For in the cited example in book II chapter 6 regarding the theft of fruit, Augustine is clear that he did not even have a material reason for desiring the fruit, and that there was no sense inclination that could have clouded his judgment. This further rules out the slightly more sophisticated approach to square this circle which would be to say that his disordered passions caused the lapse in judgement.
Now let us see, as is so often the Catholic approach, how Saint Thomas Aquinas handles this issue. In the Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo (specifically his response in question 6), Saint Thomas tries to hold on to the Aristotelean model of human nature while contending with this very real phenomenon that Augustine narrates his experience of. The solution that Saint Thomas arrives at, and its relative success is borne out by its dominance of subsequent Aristotelean thought, is that the will is what terminates the act of deliberation, which is the realm of the intellect. According to Saint Thomas, the mistake of Aristotle on this matter is in thinking that the intellect is capable of coming to a conclusory decision at the end of its deliberation. Saint Thomas argues that such a conclusion is the realm of the will’s free act of choice. When it comes to practical decisions of how to apply moral principles most prudentially to given circumstances, he argues, due to the particular nature of the question and the nature of the intellect as ordered toward the universal, that the intellect is not able to come to a decision. The intellect can only continually weigh alternatives (and even the alternatives considered are those chosen by the will) until the will steps in to terminate that deliberation, resulting in an action.
This is the genius of Saint Thomas, but does it fully resolve the issue presented by Saint Augustine? Even allowing for the influence of the will and/or passions upon the deliberations of the intellect, it seems that Augustine still poses a problem by insisting that while his intellect produced a judgement that the action at hand was wrong, he still chose it anyway. Now Saint Thomas has one trick to escape this issue, and that is his principle that the will, under his new characterization, is not as limited in its options as it may have been in the Aristotelean model, and it can incline toward any course of action which the intellect perceives as “good” under the “aspect” (ratio) of that goodness. This is where the trick comes in, since “good” is used in a very expansive sense. Insofar as any action has in itself or in its direct effects any aspect of goodness, it is possible for the will to choose that action, and by habituation of the will and its influence on the intellect, that potentially wrong or evil action may even become perceived by the intellect as best.
To provide my own opinion, I still feel unsatisfied with such an explanation. The real phenomenon that Augustine observes in himself in The Confessions still seems inexplicable within Thomas’ Aristotelian framework. Augustine observes a true dissonance between the intellect and will. He even describes himself as having two wills (e.g. VIII.9.21). One should not make the mistake of interpreting him to mean by this that he has a human will and disordered animal passions. He really seems to mean that he is divided against himself within his will, which, having been habituated by years of sinful behavior, pushes him toward evil out of a kind of inertia, despite the simultaneous inclination toward good. This observation is not unique to Augustine; in fact, many of us have probably felt this way at one time or another, though Saint Thomas may not have personally felt that same inertia of bad habits. But this observation nevertheless presents an anomaly, for not only is the badly habituated will choosing to deliberate about evil actions only to have the reformed intellect shun such actions, but the will seems to be able to bully the reason into rationalization rather than deliberation. At least to my understanding, such oppression by the will does not fit neatly into the Thomistic model, so perhaps there is still room for improvement there; and maybe that starts with taking Augustine’s observation as an axiom, an undeniable starting point as the phenomenologists would, rather than an anomaly to be shoehorned into conformity with an already established model.