The Life of the Mind (37 page)

Aristode laid the foundations for philosophy's attitude toward the Will, and throughout the centuries their resiliency has withstood the most momentous tests and challenges. According to Aristotle,
⁸
all matters that may be or may not be, that have happened but may not have happened, are by chance,
kata symbēbekos
—or, in the Latin translation, accidental or contingent—as distinguished from what necessarily is as it is, what
is
and cannot not be. This second, which he called the "
hypokeimenon,
" lies below what is added by chance, i.e., whatever does not belong to the very essence—as color is added to objects whose essence is independent of these "secondary qualities." Attributes that may or may not attach to what underlies them—their
substratum
or
substance
(the Latin translations of
hypokeimenon)
—are accidental.

There can hardly be anything more contingent than willed acts, which—on the assumption of free will—could all be defined as acts about which I know that I could as well have left them undone. A will that is not free is a contradiction in terms—unless one understands the faculty of volition as a mere auxiliary executive organ for whatever either desire or reason has proposed. In the framework of these categories, everything that happens in the realm of human affairs is accidental or contingent ("
prakton d'esti to endechomenon kaialiōs echein,
" "what is brought into being by action is that which could also be otherwise"
⁹
): Aristotle's very words already indicate the realm's low ontological status—a status never seriously challenged till Hegel's discovery of Meaning and Necessity in History.

Within the sphere of human activities, Aristotle admitted one important exception to this rule, namely, making or fabrication—
poiein,
as distinct from
prattein,
acting or praxis. To use Aristotle's example, the craftsman who makes a "brazen sphere" joins together matter and form, brass and sphere, both of which existed before he began his work, and produces a
new
object to be added to a world consisting of man-made things and of things that have come into being independent of human doings. The human product, this "compound of matter and form"—for instance, a house made of wood according to a form pre-existing in the craftsman's mind (rums)—clearly was not made out of nothing, and so was understood by Aristotle to pre-exist "potentially" before it was actualized by human hands. This notion was derived from the mode of being peculiar to the nature of living things, where everything that appears grows out of something that contains the finished product potentially, as the oak exists potentially in the acorn and the animal in the semen.

The view that everything real must be preceded by a potentiality as one of its causes implicitly denies the future as an authentic tense: the future is nothing but a consequence of the past, and the difference between natural and man-made things is merely between those whose potentialities necessarily grow into actualities and those that may or may not be actualized. Under these circumstances, any notion of the Will as an organ for the future, as memory is an organ for the past, was entirely superfluous; Aristotle did not have to be aware of the Will's existence; the Greeks "do not even have a word for" what we consider to be "the mainspring of action." (
Thelein
means "to be ready, to be prepared for something,"
boulesthai
is "to view something as [more] desirable," and Aristotle's own newly coined word, which comes closer than these to our notion of some mental state that must precede action, is
pro-airesis,
the "choice" between two possibilities, or, rather, the preference that makes me choose one action instead of another.)
¹⁰

Authors well read in Greek literature have always been aware of this lacuna. Thus Gilson notices as a well-known fact "that Aristode speaks neither of liberty nor of free will ... the term itself is lacking,"
¹¹
and Hobbes is already quite explicit on the point.
¹²
It is still somewhat difficult to spot, because the Greek language of course knows the distinction between intentional and unintentional acts, between the voluntary
(hekōn
) and the involuntary (
akōn
), that is, legally speaking, between murder and manslaughter, and Aristode is careful to point out that only voluntary acts are subject to blame and praise,
¹³
® but what he understands by voluntary means no more than that the act was not haphazard but was performed by the agent in full possession of his physical and mental strength—"the source of motion was in the agent"
¹⁴
—and the distinction covers no more than injuries committed in ignorance or as mishaps. An act in which I am under the threat of violence but am not physically coerced—as when I give my money, pulling it out with my own hands, to the man who threatens me with a gun—would have qualified as voluntary.

It is of some importance to note that this curious lacuna in Greek philosophy—"the fact that Plato and Aristode never mentioned [volitions] in their frequent and elaborate discussions of the nature of the soul and the springs of conduct"
¹⁵
and that therefore it cannot be "seriously maintained that the problem of freedom ever became the subject of debate in the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristode"
¹⁶
—is in perfect accord with the time concept of antiquity, which identified temporality with the circular movements of the heavenly bodies and with the no less cyclical nature of life on earth: the ever-repeated change of day and night, summer and winter, thé constant renewal of animal species through birth and death. When Aristotle holds that "coming-into-being necessarily implies the pre-existence of something which is potentially but is not actually,"
¹⁷
he is applying the cyclical movement in which everything that is alive swings—where indeed every end is a beginning and every beginning an end, so that "coming-to-be continues though things are constantly being destroyed"
¹⁸
—to the realm of human affairs, and this to the point that he can say that not only events but even opinions
(doxai
) "as they occur among men, revolve not only once or a few times but infinitely often."
¹⁹
This strange view of human affairs was not peculiar to philosophic speculation. Thucydides' claim to leave to posterity a
ktēma es aei—a
sempiter-nally useful paradigm of how to inquire into the future by virtue of a clear knowledge of the greatest event yet known in history—rested implicitly on the same conviction of a recurrent movement of human affairs.

To us, who think in terms of a rectilinear time concept, with its emphasis on the uniqueness of the "historical moment," the Greek pre-philosophical praise of greatness and stress on the extraordinary, which, "whether for evil or for good" (Thucydides), beyond all moral considerations, deserves to be saved from oblivion, first by the bards and then by the historians, seems to be incompatible with their cyclical time concept. But until the philosophers discovered Being as everlasting, birthless as well as deathless, time and change in time constituted no problem. Homer's "circling years" provided no more than the background against which the noteworthy story had appeared and was being told. Traces of this earlier non-speculative view can be found throughout Greek literature; thus Aristotle himself, in his discussion of
eudaimonia
(in the
Nicomachean Ethics),
is thinking in Homeric terms when he points to the ups and downs, the accidental circumstances
(tychai)
that "revolve many times in one person's lifetime," whereas his
eudaimonia
is more durable because it resides in certain activities
(energeiai kat' aretēn)
worth remembering because of their excellence and about which therefore "oblivion does not grow"
(genesthai).
²⁰

No matter what historical origins and influences—Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian—we may be able to trace for the cyclical time concept, its emergence was logically almost inevitable once the philosophers had discovered an everlasting Being, birthless and deathless, within whose framework they then had to explain movement, change, the constant coming and going of living beings. Aristotle was quite explicit about the primacy of the assumption "that the whole heaven was not generated and cannot be destroyed, as some allege, but is single and forever, having no beginning and no end of its whole existence, containing and embracing in itself infinite time."
²¹
"That everything returns" is indeed, as Nietzsche observed, "the closest [possible] approximation of a world of Becoming to a world of Being."
²²
Hence it is not surprising that the Greeks had no notion of the faculty of the Will, our mental organ for a future that in principle is indeterminable and therefore a possible harbinger of novelty. What is so very surprising is to find such a strong inclination to denounce the Will as an illusion or an entirely superfluous hypothesis after the Hebrew-Christian credo of a divine beginning—"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"—had become a dogmatic assumption of philosophy. Especially as this new creed also stated that man was the only creature made in God's own image, hence endowed with a like faculty of beginning. Yet of all the Christian thinkers, only Augustine, it seems, drew the consequence: "[Initium]
ut esset, creatus est homo
" ("That a beginning be made man was created").
²³

 

The reluctance to recognize the Will as a separate, autonomous mental faculty finally ceded during the long centuries of Christian philosophy, which we shall be examining later in greater detail. Whatever its indebtedness to Greek philosophy and especially to Aristotle, it was bound to break with the cyclical time concept of antiquity and its notion of everlasting recurrence. The story that begins with Adam's expulsion from Paradise and ends with Christ's death and resurrection is a story of unique, unrepeatable events: "Once Christ died for our sins; and rising from the dead, He dieth no more."
²⁴
The story's sequence presupposes a rectilinear time concept; it has a definite beginning, a turning-point—the year One of our calendar
²⁵
—and a definite end. And it was a story of supreme importance to the Christian, although it hardly touched the course of ordinary secular events: empires could be expected to rise and fall as in the past. Moreover, since the Christian's after-life was decided while he was still a "pilgrim on earth," he himself had a future beyond the determined, necessary end of his life, and it was in close connection with the preparation for a future life that the Will and its necessary Freedom in all their complexity were first discovered by Paul.

Hence one of the difficulties of our topic is that the problems we are dealing with have their "historical origin" in theology rather than in an unbroken tradition of philosophical thought.
²⁶
For whatever may be the merits of post-antique assumptions about the location of human freedom in the I-will, it is certain that in the frame of pre-Christian thought freedom was localized in the I-can; freedom was an objective state of the body, not a datum of consciousness or of the mind. Freedom meant that one could do as one pleased, forced neither by the bidding of a master nor by some physical necessity that demanded laboring for wages in order to sustain the body nor by some somatic handicap such as ill health or the paralysis of one's members. According to Greek etymology, that is, according to Greek self-interpretation, the root of the word for freedom,
eleutheria,
is
eleuthein hopōs erō,
to go as I wish,
²⁷
and there is no doubt that the basic freedom was understood as freedom of movement. A person was free who could move as he wished; the I-can, not the I-will, was the criterion.

In the context of these preliminary considerations, we may be permitted to skip the complexities of the medieval era and try to have a brief look at the next important turning-point in our intellectual history, the rise of the modern age. Here we are entided to expect an even stronger interest in a mental organ for the future than in the medieval period, because the modern age's main and entirely new concept, the notion of
Progress
as the ruling force in human history, placed an unprecedented emphasis on the future. Yet medieval speculations on the subject still exerted a strong influence at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And, so strong was the suspicion of the willing faculty, so sharp the reluctance to grant human beings, unprotected by any divine Providence or guidance, absolute power over their own destinies and thus burden them with a formidable responsibility for things whose very existence would depend exclusively on themselves, so great, in Kant's words, was the embarrassment of "speculative reason in dealing with the question of the freedom of the will...[namely with] a power of
spontaneously
beginning a series of successive things or states"
²⁸
—as distinguished from the faculty of choice between two or more given objects (the
liberum arbitrium,
strictly speaking)-that it was not till the last stage of the modern age that the Will began to be substituted for Reason as man's highest mental faculty. This coincided with the last era of authentic metaphysical thought; at the turn of the nineteenth century, still in the vein of the metaphysics that had started with Parmenides' equation of Being and Thinking
(to gar auto esti noein te kai einai),
suddenly, right after Kant, it became fashionable to equate Willing and Being.

Thus Schiller declared that "there is no other power in man but his Will," and Will as "the ground of reality has power over both, Reason and Sensuality," whose opposition—the opposition of two necessities, Truth and Passion—provides for the origin of freedom.
²⁹
Thus Schopenhauer decided that the Kantian thing-in-itself, the Being behind the appearances, the world's "inmost nature," its "core," of which "the objective world...[is] merely the outward side," is Will,
³⁰
while Schelling on a much higher level of speculation apodictically stated: "In the final and highest instance there is no other Being than Will."
³¹
This development, however, reached its culmination in Hegel's philosophy of history (which for that reason I prefer to treat separately) and came to a surprisingly rapid end at the close of the same century.