Voluntarism and PSR

Aquinas holds that “will follows upon intellect” (Summa Theologiae I.19.1).  He means in part that anything with an intellect has a will as well, but also that intellect is metaphysically prior to will.  Will is the power to be drawn toward what the intellect apprehends to be good, or away from what it apprehends to be bad.  Intellect is “in the driver’s seat,” then.  This is a view known as intellectualism, and it is to be contrasted with voluntarism, which makes will prior to intellect, and is associated with Scotus and Ockham.  To oversimplify, you might say that for the intellectualist, we are essentially intellects which have wills, whereas the voluntarist tendency is to regard us as essentially wills which have intellects.

That is an oversimplification, though.  Voluntarism can come in milder forms which do not subordinate intellect to will but merely tend to put them on a par, and perhaps some writers who can sound like voluntarists really mean only to emphasize the importance of the will without intending thereby to assert anything about its metaphysical relationship to the intellect.  Augustine might be regarded as a voluntarist in a mild sense, and Ockham in a strong sense.  On the other side, even in Aquinas the claim that intellect is prior to will has to be qualified in light of the doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which God’s intellect and will are identical.  All the same, the tendency of the intellectualist is to understand the will always by reference to the intellect, whereas the tendency of the voluntarist is to conceive of the will independently of its relation to the intellect.

The implications of the dispute between intellectualism and voluntarism are many and profound, and I have discussed some of them in various places (e.g. here and here).  One of these implications is theological.  The intellectualist tends to think of God as essentially a Supreme Intellect, as (you might say) Subsistent Rationality Itself.  We might not always understand what he wills and does, given the limitations of our own finite intellects; all the same, in itself what God wills and does is always rational or intelligible through and through, and would be seen to be by a sufficiently powerful intellect.  By contrast, an extreme voluntarist conception of God would regard him primarily as a Supreme Will, indeed as (you might say) Subsistent Willfulness Itself.  On this sort of view, what God wills and does is not ultimately intelligible even in itself, for he is in no sense bound by rationality.  He simply wills what he wills, arbitrarily or whimsically, and there is ultimately no sense to be made of it.  If we borrow some analogies from Plato’s analysis in the Republic of the five types of regime, God as the intellectualist understands him is essentially the Philosopher-King write large, whereas God as the most extreme voluntarist understands him is like the tyrant writ large.

Some of the general theological consequences of these two conceptions of God as they were developed within the context of Christianity have been sketched by Michael Allen Gillespie in his book The Theological Origins of Modernity (which I reviewed here) and by Margaret Osler in Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy.  They are also relevant to what Pope Benedict XVI had to say about the difference between Christianity and Islam in his famous Regensburg lecture.  The Cartesian view that even mathematics and the laws of logic are the product of divine fiat, and could have been other than they are had God so willed, is a specific consequence of extreme theological voluntarism (though Osler thinks there is still a sense in which Descartes was an intellectualist -- again, the relationship between the two tendencies in the work of a particular thinker is not always as simple as it might at first seem).

Another specific theological implication has to do with the relationship between God and morality.  For Aquinas, what is good for us is necessarily good for us because it follows from our nature.  As such, even God couldn’t change it, any more than he could make two and two equal to five.  For the divine intellect knows the natures of things, and the divine will creates in accordance with this knowledge.  To be sure, the natures in question exist at first only as ideas in the divine mind itself; in this sense they are, like everything else, dependent on God.  Still, in creating the things that are to have these natures, the divine will only ever creates in light of the divine ideas and never in a way that conflicts with what is possible given the content of those ideas.  Aquinas’s position is thus at odds with the sort of “divine command ethics” according to which what is good is good merely because God wills it, so that absolutely anything (including torturing babies for fun, say) could have been good for us had he willed us to do it.  This sort of view was famously taken by Ockham, for whom God could even have willed for us to hate him, in which case that is what would have been good for us. 

In the Catholic context, at least a very strong whiff of voluntarism is to be found among those who think the pope could decide to teach -- contrary to scripture, tradition, and the constant teaching of previous popes -- that capital punishment is always and intrinsically immoral, or that it is not after all a mortal sin for a Catholic to divorce and “remarry.”  In fact, according to Catholic teaching the pope is not a dictator and cannot either reverse scripture and tradition or make up new teachings from scratch.  That would be contrary to the very point of the papacy, which is to preserve the “Deposit of Faith” without adding to or taking away from it.  In that sense the pope’s will is, like any other Catholic’s, subject to the Catholic Faith and does not create it.  The Catholic understanding of papal authority is, you might say, intellectualist rather than voluntarist.  Critics of Catholic claims about papal authority often read a voluntarist conception into it, but this is a caricature; Catholics (whether liberal or conservative) who suppose that a pope can teach whatever he wants essentially buy into this caricature. 

In philosophical anthropology, the dispute between voluntarism and intellectualism cashes out in the difference between what Servais Pinckaers calls the “freedom of indifference” and the “freedom for excellence.”  On the former conception of free will, developed by Ockham, the will is of its nature indifferent toward the various ends it might pursue, and the will is thus freer to the extent that it is at any moment equally capable of choosing anything.  The implication is that a will that is strongly inclined to choose what is good rather than what is evil is less free than a will that is not inclined in either direction.  By contrast, on the conception of free will as “freedom for excellence,” which is endorsed by Aquinas, the will is inherently directed toward the good in the sense that pursuit of the good is its final cause.  The implication is that the will is more free to the extent that it finds it easy to choose what is good and less free to the extent that it does not. 

The intellectualist is also naturally going to endorse the Aristotelian conception of man as a rational animal.  Contrast that with a view I recently found expressed by Philip K. Dick in an interview in What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick.  Dick says:

[The] android figure… is my metaphor for the dehumanized person, as you know, who is someone who is less than human -- that essential quality that distinguishes a human being is essentially compassion or kindness, that -- it’s not intelligence.  An android -- or in the film Blade Runner it’s called “replicant” -- can be very intelligent, but it’s not really human.  Because it’s not intelligence that makes a human being; in my opinion it’s the quality of kindness or compassion or whatever -- you know, the Christians call “agape.” (pp. 63-64)

I imagine many people today would find this appealing and regard the traditional Aristotelian conception as too bloodless and insufficiently touchy-feely.  But from an intellectualist point of view Dick’s claim is just muddleheaded.  Love that is truly human is an act of will, which is why it can abide when sentiment wanes.  But will, and thus love, presupposes an intellect which can grasp the object of love qua good or lovable.  Hence man is a compassionate or loving animal precisely because he is, more fundamentally, a rational animal.  But neither, contra Dick’s portrayal of the replicants, could there be such a thing as an intelligent creature incapable of love in the sense of willing the good of another.  For will follows upon intellect, and it is of its nature directed toward what the intellect perceives as good or lovable.  Hence an intellectual creature always loves something (even if the object of its love is sometimes not what it should be). 

To make sense of Dick’s proposal you would, it seems to me, have to be committed to a kind of voluntarism, on which love -- the willing of someone’s good -- could float free of intellect.  (There is at least a family resemblance between Dick’s view and that of Scotus, whose position is summed up by the Catholic Encyclopedia as follows: “Because the will holds sway over all other faculties and again because to it pertains the charity which is the greatest of the virtues, will is a more noble attribute of man than is intelligence.”)

In ethics and politics, a kind of voluntarism is evident in the Hobbesian theses that the good is just whatever one happens to will, and that law is not something the intellect discovers in the nature of things, but rather something the sovereign creates in an act of will.  Hume’s claim that reason is but the “slave of the passions” is in the same ballpark, though of course the will and the passions are distinct.  Such ideas are known to have their echoes in modern social and political life.

Lately (here and here) we’ve been discussing the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), according to which everything is intelligible.  How could that be the case if it is will rather than intellect that is fundamental?  To be sure, mild or localized versions of voluntarism could in theory be consistent with PSR.  Suppose you thought God’s intellect was prior to his will but that the laws that govern human societies were ultimately grounded in the sheer fiat of legislators.  Then everything might still have a sufficient reason.  The sufficient reason for the existence of some particular law was that it struck the fancy of some legislator to impose it, that it struck his fancy might be given an explanation in terms of his mood that day together with some end he hoped the law would realize, that he was in that mood might be explained by his circumstances together with his physiology at that moment, and the whole chain of causes could trace back to God who willed to set things up this way in light of what his intellect grasped to be good.  But suppose God as First Cause is himself conceived of in voluntarist terms.  Could this be consistent with PSR?

I think not, at least not if the voluntarism is extreme.  Suppose mathematics, the laws of logic, and everything else are the product of divine fiat, where God’s willing things the way he did is in turn in no way intelligible -- that it is unintelligible in itself, not merely unintelligible to us.  Since God’s willing the way he did is the ultimate cause of everything else, it would follow that everything is thus ultimately unintelligible.  At the bottom level of reality would be the “brute fact” that this is what God has willed, utterly arbitrarily, and that’s that.  PSR, which admits of no brute facts, would therefore be false.

Now if PSR is false, then the principle of causality is threatened as well, since if things are ultimately unintelligible, there is no reason to think that a potency might not be actualized even though there is nothing actual to actualize it and thus that something might come into being without any cause at all.  But then it would not be possible to argue from the world to God as cause of the world.  Hence it is no surprise that Ockham’s voluntarism went hand in hand with skepticism about the possibility of any robust natural theology and a retreat into fideism.  I’ve also suggested that theism itself, or at least classical theism, cannot be made consistent with a denial of PSR.  For rejecting PSR tends, for reasons given in that earlier post, to lead away from classical theism to a more crude and creaturely conception of God.  Hence it is no surprise that Ockham’s voluntarism was followed historically by such a conception.

Hence extreme theological voluntarism -- motivated though it seems to be by a desire to do honor to God and uphold divine power -- in fact undermines theism.  (Which is not surprising when you think about it, since voluntarist views have this self-undermining tendency elsewhere: Authoritarianism undermines authority by reducing it to lawless tyranny and thus destroying all respect for it; the view that the pope can teach just any old thing he wishes undermines the very point of the papacy and undermines the credibility of papal decrees in general; the Hobbesian idea that the good is just whatever we happen to will is not really an alternative theory of ethics but destroys the very possibility of ethics and replaces it with the notion of a non-aggression pact between self-interested preference maximizers; and so forth.)

Whether milder forms of theological voluntarism would have similar results depends on how they are formulated, but it is hard to see how any view which makes the divine will prior to the divine intellect (as opposed to being merely on a par with it) could avoid a similar result.

No post on voluntarism and PSR should fail to discuss Schopenhauer.  But as the supreme arbitrary dictator of this blog I hereby arbitrarily decree that this post will.  But that is not to rule out a future post on the subject.