Q 63: Near the beginning of Book Two of On Free Choice of the Will Augustine tells Evodius that “no one becomes ready to find God unless he first believes what he will afterwards know.” In what specific ways does the dialectic of Book Two of On Free Choice of the Will seek to facilitate the transition from belief to knowledge?

68. Near the beginning of Book Two of On Free Choice of the Will Augustine tells Evodius that “no one becomes ready to find God unless he first believes what he will afterwards know.” In what specific ways does the dialectic of Book Two of On Free Choice of the Will seek to facilitate the transition from belief to knowledge?

[AT note: Mostly from Tweedt 2010, but I included some info from Parker 2009 and reworked the arguments for the answers to Q2 and Q3.  And there’s a superfluous secondary source thing at the end.]

1.       Belief and knowledge

a.     Belief and knowledge are mutually exclusive.

b.     Basis:

                                               i.     Belief: based on testimony

                                             ii.     Knowledge: based on seeing or intellectual illumination

c.     Examples

                                               i.     I believe Memphis, Egypt, exists since I’ve never seen it but have only heard about it.  (In contrast, I know that Memphis, TN exists since I’ve been there and seen it.)

                                             ii.     I know 2+2=4, but I merely believe the solution to a complex equation if a mathematician tells it to me.

2.      Augustine’s Pedagogy:

a.     First believe, then understand

                                               i.     Isa. 7:9—“Unless you believe, you will not understand.”

                                             ii.     If I do not believe moral truths, I will not be in a position to understand why they’re true. [See Williams’ excerpt below.]

b.     Goal of teaching

                                               i.     Belief is incomplete and unstable until it becomes knowledge.

                                             ii.     Goal of teaching is to turn belief into knowledge

3.      How it plays out in Bk II:

a.     In the beginning of book II, Evodius asks “why God gave human beings free choice of the will, since if we had not received it, we would not have been able to sin.”

b.     Augustine responds that the question can be answered if 1) God exists, 2) God gives all good things, and 3) free will is one of the good things that He gives. [c.f. II.2 pp. 30-31]

c.     Evodius believes (1)-(3), but he doesn’t know them.

d.     Augustine acknowledges this and affirms it’s good for Evodius to want to know what he believes.

e.     Facilitating the transition (Augustine’s proofs, leading Evodius from belief to knowledge)

                                               i.     Q. 1: Does God exist? (ch. 3-14)

                                             ii.     Yes. Here’s the proof:

1.   If there exists something X higher than reason, then that thing is God or there is something more excellent than X.

2.   Truth itself is higher than reason.

a.     If X is common to Y and Y conforms to X, then X is better than Y. 

b.     Numbers and wisdom are common to reasoners, and reason conforms to them.

c.     Truth is common to numbers and wisdom, and numbers and wisdom conform to truth.

d.     So, truth is higher than reason.

3.   So, God is truth, or there is something more excellent than truth.

4.   There’s nothing more excellent than truth.

5.   Truth is required for making us happy. (p. 59)

6.   So, God is truth.

7.   Truth exists. (assumed, probably from the commonality sub-argument above)

8.   So, God exists.

                                            iii.     Q. 2. Do all things, insofar as they are good, come from God? (ch. 15-17)

1.   Everything that exists has some form.

a.     Having form is necessary for existing.

2.   Things are good insofar as they have form.

3.   Things have form insofar as they got the form from God.

a.     If something has a form, it gets it from something else.  It can’t give it to itself, because a thing can’t give what it doesn’t have.  God is an unchangeable, complete, perfect form.

4.   Therefore, all things, insofar as they are good, come from God.

                                            iv.     Q. 3. Is FW one of those good things? (ch. 18-20)

1.   We don’t have to think that FW is bad just because people use it wrongly.  Argument by analogy: just as there are good things in the body that can be used wrongly (hands and feet: undoubtedly good, but they can be used wrongly), there can be good things in the soul that can be used wrongly.  Just as we praise the giver of the one who gave us hands (i.e. God) and disregard those who use them wrongly, we praise can praise God for the good things in the soul, even if they can be used wrongly.  FW is a good thing in the soul; without it, no one can live rightly.

2.   Since FW is good, it comes from God.

[AT note: Here is an excerpt from Williams’ intro to On Free Choice of the Will.  I found it helpful, but the above outline should suffice.]

Augustine is convinced that “Unless you believe, you will not understand.”  Unless you have already come to have certain moral beliefs on the basis of what you have heard from your parents or teachers, you will never be in a position to see for yourself that these beliefs are true, and thus to attain moral knowledge.  This may sound like arguing in a circle or at least like a kind of prooftexting (“Here’s what I believe; now I’ll try to prove that I’m right”), but in fact it is a very plausible position.

[Physicist example: If you’re brought up thinking that physicists are deceitful tools of a conspiracy, you will be unlikely to ever bother studying physics and see that physics tells us a lot of true and interesting things.  If a physicist ever tries to defend a point to you, you will say, “You only say that because you’re a physicist.”]

Moral truths are no different.  Belief is required for understanding.  If you are brought up among people who think that morality is just a matter of opinion, it is highly improbably that you will ever be able to see that moralists teach us a lot of true and interesting things about the intelligible world.  If someone ever tries to demonstrate to you that some moral belief is true, you will respond by saying “You only say that because you are a moralist.”  And yet the moralist will still be right, and your disbelief is utterly irrelevant to that.  The law against murder is not abrogated simply because you are a relativist; even if every human being repudiated belief in objective moral standards, murder would not cease to be wrong.  So belief is necessary for the attainment of knowledge, but belief is incomplete and unstable until it is replaced by knowledge.  All of Augustine’s philosophical writing may be seen as an attempt first to awaken belief and then raise it to the level of knowledge.

(Williams, xvi-xvii)

Q 63: Is the presentation of the divided will in the Confessions consistent with Augustine’s account in On the Free Choice of the Will?

63. Is the presentation of the divided will in the Confessions consistent with Augustine’s account in On the Free Choice of the Will?

1.     Intro

a.     Set-up:

                                               i.     Context

b.     Thesis:

                                               i.     The presentations in the texts are consistent but have different emphases.  Confessions is personal account of the difficulty in reorienting the will, and FCW is a theoretical discussion of the relation between free will, sin, and evil.

c.     Map:

                                               i.     Confessions

                                             ii.     FCW

2.     Confessions

a.     Augustine is doing two things here:

                                               i.     refuting the Manichean view that there can be multiple wills in a person, and multiple wills = multiple minds or natures.

                                             ii.     forcing us to acknowledge a non-rational component of human volition.

b.     The struggle between the old (carnal) and new (spiritual) will:

                                               i.     The old will has Augustine tied up in chains.  The chain: [distorted will-->lust-->habit-->necessity]

1.  Distorted will: a will burdened by original sin (e.g. infant’s jealousy & ‘screams of revenge’)

2.  Lust: distorted will grows into lust (or some vice, e.g. Augustine as teenager)

3.  Habit: Becomes a habit (Augustine as a young man)

a.     We are responsible for developing our habits [cf. Aristotle]

4.  Necessity: despite intellectual certainty, he is now in the grip of necessity, cannot do otherwise

a.     Knows and sincerely wants to change, but cannot.

b.     Unable to act on one’s own, requires the grace of God

                                             ii.     The old will doesn’t will wholly because of its distortion, and without willing wholly the will does not command.

                                            iii.     The new will is given by God converting Augustine (the “take and read” scene); can overcome the old will.

                                            iv.     BUT there is still only one will.  “Two wills” talk just depicts a struggle within his own will.  The division is just interior conflict. “When I was deliberating about serving the Lord my God, […] it was I who willed to do it, I who was unwilling.  It was I.  I did not wholly will, I was not wholly unwilling.  Therefore I strove with myself and was distracted by myself […] [which] showed me not the presence of some second mind, but the punishment of my own mind.” (8.10.22)

3.     FCW

a.     Book I: free will is what makes someone responsible for an action

b.     Book II: it’s good that humans have free will

c.     Book III: there are difficulties in willing (and thus acting) freely

d.     Book I-II: The will (agent causation) is basic. 

                                               i.     If we look for the cause of the will we then face a regress of looking for the cause of the cause of the will.

                                             ii.     This is part of the imago dei (like God, we have freedom of will).  Free will exists so that we can do the good.

                                            iii.     Free will is a great gift, and we owe God a great debt for it.

                                            iv.     Nothing can control the will but itself.

                                             v.     Nothing is so much within our power as the will itself.  I will by the will. (the will is reflexive)

e.     Human free will is the source of the world’s evil.  (So God is not.)

[From 2009.  I have no idea what’s going on.]

I       Will in On Free Choice of the Will

Ø  Will is free: can achieve anything just by willing it

§  Nothing can control the will, but itself.

§  Nothing is so much w/in our power as the will itself.  I will by the will.

Ø  Division

§  “if we will and the will remains absent, then we are not really willing at all” (BK III.3)

Ø  Explains why conflict (distortion due to fall)

§  Cannot achieve what it desires if ignorant or not powerful enough

-    Fallen will is either (or both) ignorant or corrupted by its own habituation toward lower goods

Reason for why we need grace (not free in the PAP sense; we are necessitated –yet no causal necessity)

Q58: How does Augustine’s Neo-Platonic conversion in Book VII help him overcome his intellectual attraction to Manichean dualism? What are the existential, intellectual, and spiritual limitations of this neo-platonic conversion according to Augustine himself? To what extent does the Christian conversion in Book VIII solve these problems?

58. How does Augustine’s Neo-Platonic conversion in Book VII help him overcome his intellectual attraction to Manichean dualism?  What are the existential, intellectual, and spiritual limitations of this neo-platonic conversion according to Augustine himself?  To what extent does the Christian conversion in Book VIII solve these problems?

[AT note: I based my outline on Aho 2011, but restructured it, added information from the 2010 outline, and made a suggested thesis and map.  Also, I followed Karl’s link and took the metaphysical/epistemological/ethical outline from there.]

1.     Intro

a.     Thesis

                                               i.     Though Augustine’s Neo-Platonic conversion from the Manichean dualism of good and evil, spirit and matter, enabled him to understand God as immaterial and evil as a privation of good, the conversion had limited results for how he lived, for his spiritual peace, and for his intellectual satisfaction. Augustine was thankful that he converted through Platonism (7.20.26), but he recognized its insufficiency.  His Christian conversion built on and surpassed his Neo-Platonic conversion.

b.     Map

                                               i.     Manichean dualism

                                             ii.     Neo-Platonism

1.     Why it was attractive

2.     What its limitations were

                                            iii.     Christianity

1.     In what way it solves the problems of the Neo-Platonic conversion

2.     Manichean Dualism

a.     Good (light)/Evil (darkness)

                                               i.     opposing metaphysical forces

                                             ii.     the Kingdom of Light is associated with spirit, the Kingdom of Darkness with matter.

b.     Spirit/Matter

                                               i.     The body is evil because it is matter fighting soul (soul is a piece of God that broke off and is now trapped in the material world)

                                             ii.     Materialism: confusingly, even spirit was treated materially.  c.f. 3.10.18 where a Manichean saint eats a fig and “breathes out certain particles of the Godhead”.  The good/bad division of spirit/matter is just a division between good and bad types of matter, the good being light and diffuse.

c.     Affects on Augustine:

                                               i.     Augustine had a hard time not thinking of God as material, even after rejecting Manicheanism.  (“I was intent upon things that are contained in space, and in them I found on place to rest.” (7.7.11)

1.     Example: Sponge (7.5.7): God is like an infinite sea, and in it is a huge but finite sponge, completely filled with the immeasurable sea.

                                             ii.     Augustine was dissatisfied with the Manichean account of evil as a positive force or substance.

3.     Neo-Platonism

a.     Why it was attractive:

                                               i.     Got Augustine out of materialism by giving him an intelligible realm of immutable, incorruptible forms.

1.     When he tried to think of as immaterial only saw nothingness –not even a void.  Platonism provided an alternative way to thinking about entities than just in a materialistic way.

                                             ii.     Lets him answer the problem of evil by understanding goodness as participation in God and evil as privation of good.

1.     God is not the author of evil.  He made all things good.  Even corruptible things are good, just not perfectly good.  (Argument: The thing must have some form (good) in order to be corruptible since if it didn’t have form it wouldn’t exist at all.  Therefore, as long as it is, it is good.)

2.     Because created things are corruptible, they have a potential for evil.  Evil is just their corruption, being deprived of good.

b.     What its limitations were:

                                               i.     Existential: acknowledges the good, but is not fulfilled; the will is divided (8.10.22); cannot get over old habits (8.11.25)

                                             ii.     Intellectual: unable to know God Himself.  In his intellectual ascent at 7.17.23, it’s the immutability of God (not his person) that is emphasized, and God is depicted as very distant (e.g. “I knew that I was far from Thee in the region of unlikeness”, “thou didst cry to me from afar” (7.10.16)).  Augustine found God, but not that the Word became flesh. (7.9.13-14).

1.     Metaphysical: Neo-Platonists think that creation emanates necessarily.  (Augustine will deny this.)  Also, Neo-Platonists deny that the perfect intelligible reality can never be adequately realized in the imperfect sensible world.  (The Incarnation is a rejection of this.)

2.     Epistemological: Neo-Platonists focus on how the sensible things blind you to the intelligible realm.  (Augustine will focus on how they remind you of the intelligible realm.)

3.     Ethical:  All body is bad for getting in the way of the understanding the intelligible.  The metaphysically further away from the One something is, the morally worse it is. (For Augustine, moral depravity is preferring lesser things to God, not metaphysical distance.)

                                            iii.     Spiritual:

1.     Augustine needs grace to overcome his bad habits, to wholly will to change.

2.     He needs scripture to show him how to live what he knows: to “be able to discern the difference that there is between presumption and confession, between those who see what the goal is but do not see the way, and [those who see] the Way which leads to that country of blessedness, which we are meant not only to know but to dwell in.” (7.20.26)

4.     Christianity

a.     Existential: his will becomes whole (he can overcome his habits); his hunger is satisfied (the pre-conversion ascent at 7.17.23 left him hungry, desiring something of which “I had caught the fragrance but which I had not yet the strength to eat”; the post-conversion ascent at 9.10.24 feeds him with truth: “[we came] at last to that region of richness unending, where You feed Israel forever with the food of truth”)

b.     Intellectual:

                                               i.     Metaphysical: The Christian believes that God’s creation was not necessary (like Plotinus’s emanation) and that creation itself is not a departure from God’s perfection.  Also, the Christian believes that the Good, the One, etc. actually comes to the sensible, imperfect world.  That’s the incarnation. (see 7.9.13-14)

                                             ii.     Epistemological: Sensible things can remind us of God instead of blinding us to him.

                                            iii.     Ethical: we don’t need to think of the body as evil in itself; we just need to discipline it.

c.     Spiritual: Has a personal relationship with God (through the Word) rather than a purely intellectual one.

Q53: Based on the readings available to you from The Essential Plotinus, discuss the relationship between One, Nous, soul, and matter.

53. Based on the readings available to you from The Essential Plotinus, discuss the relationship between One, Nous, soul, and matter.

[AT note: Outline from Chris Tweedt 2011, but I added numbers.  Below, I give an alternative outline based on Kenny on Plotinus.]

Preface: From highest to lowest ontologically is One, Nous, Soul, then matter. Each one necessarily emanates the next lowest (iff there is one). I will address each one, discussing its relationship to the others. In the end, it should be clear what their relationships are.

Analogy

            Intelligence/Being : Artist

            Soul : Artist’s idea

            Matter : Raw material

            Ensouled thing : product

1.     One/Good

a.     Highest: causes of unity are higher than the things they cause to be unified.

b.     One ≠ Being

                                               i.     Being are composite. One is unified

                                             ii.     Being includes all (diverse) beings. One does not. (75,76)

                                            iii.     Being/Intelligence thinks itself, so there’s a duality. Not for One. (76, 82)

c.     One ≠ all things

                                               i.     If it were, it would be all things together or individually. If together, it’d be posterior. If individually, it wouldn’t be their source. So, it’s prior. If prior, not identical. (173)

                                             ii.     If identical with all things, there would be no diversity. But there is. (173)

           

2.     Nous/Being

a.     Second-highest

                                               i.     Necessarily emanates from the One. (98, 99)

1.     “What is perfect becomes productive.”

2.     “It begets necessarily because it is perfect…”

                                             ii.     The One only produces the greatest things that are less than it. (98)

b.     Nous = Being

                                               i.     The act of Being/Intelligence is pure act, so undistinguishable acts. (53)

                                             ii.     Interdependence: Intelligence gives existence to Being by thinking it. Being, by being an object of thought, gives Intelligence its thinking and so existence. (95)

c.     Nous = All intelligences

                                               i.     As a genus is to a species (51)

                                             ii.     It knows them and it only knows itself (it is pure act). (50)

d.     Function

                                               i.     To itself: intellection (65)

3.     Soul

a.     Third-highest

                                               i.     Intelligence produces Soul just as One produces Intelligence. (98)

b.     Soul ≠ Being/Nous

                                               i.     Soul is potentially combined with matter. Being/Nous is pure act.

c.     Soul ≠ One

                                               i.     Soul gives things qualities it is itself not. One does not. (74)

                                             ii.     Soul is not unified because it has many diverse faculties. (74)

d.     Soul = All souls

                                               i.     As a genus to a species (65)

                                             ii.     They all have the same essence (65)

                                            iii.     Analogy: Soul : sunlight :: individual souls : rays (131)

e.     Soul ≠ a particular soul

                                               i.     An individual soul is like the sunlight marked off (131) by either:

1.     Being embodied (134, 143) or

2.     Having mental operations carried over from previous embodiments. (134, 143)

f.      Functions (65)

                                               i.     To Intelligence: intellection

                                             ii.     To itself: preservation

                                            iii.     To matter: administration

4.     Matter

a.     Souls unite with matter.

b.     Why would soul unite with this?

                                               i.     Soul contains all possible grades of souls. Matter is necessary to make some souls less noble. (65,68)

                                             ii.     Souls want independence from Soul. (66)

                                            iii.     Souls want to govern. (67)

c.     Nature of the uniting

                                               i.     A soul isn’t put into a body. A body is put into Soul. (150)

                                             ii.     The soul isn’t contained in a body. The soul does the containing. (148)

                                            iii.     Sensation and memory are in the soul. The soul uses body for sensing. (154, 155)

[AT note: I thought that Anthony Kenny had quick and helpful guide to Plotinus (in An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy, pp. 106-7).  His explanation follows the upward path (as opposed to, e.g. Copleston and the outline above), i.e. from matter to One, and is helpful for understanding why each higher level is necessary for the one below it.  It also relates Plotinus to Aristotle, Plato, and Parmenides.  So here is an outline of Kenny’s outline.]

1.     Matter

a.     “Plotinus takes as his starting point Platonic and Aristotelian arguments […].  The ultimate substratum of change, Aristotle had argued, must be something which, of itself, possesses none of the properties of the changeable bodies we see and handle.

b.     But a matter which possess no material properties, Plotinus argued, is inconceivable, like the Unbeing of Parmenides.

c.     We must dispense, therefore, with Aristotelian matter; we are left with Aristotelian forms.  The most important of these was the soul […]”

2.     Soul

a.     “It is natural for us to think that there are as many souls as there are individual people.  But here Plotinus appeals to another Aristotelian thesis: the principle that forms are individuated by matter. […]

b.     So we conclude that there is only one single soul.”

c.     Soul (transcendent, incorporeal) is not bodies (individual, corruptible, composite).  Rather: body is in soul (“by depending on it for its organization and continued existence”).

d.     So soul governs and orders the world of bodies.

e.     “But the wisdom which it exercises in the governance of the world is not native to it: it must come from outside.  It cannot come from the material world, since that is what it shapes; it must come from something which is by nature lnked to the Ideas which are the models or patterns for intelligent activity.  This can only be the World-Mind […]

3.     World-Mind (Nous)

a.     Nous “both constitutes and is constituted by the Ideas, which are the objects of its thought.

b.     In all thinking, Plotinus continues, there must be a distinction between the thinker and what he is thinking of […].  Moreover, the Ideas which are the objects of Mind are many in number.  In more than one way, then, Mind contains multiplicity and is therefore composite.  Like many other ancient philosophers, Plotinus accepted as a principle that whatever was composite must depend on something more simple.  And thus we reach, at the end of our journey upward from formless matter, the one and only One.”

4.     One

a.     “We cannot, strictly, utter any true sentences about the One, because the use of a subject distinct from a predicate would imply division and plurality.  In a way which remains mysterious, The One is identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good.  As The One, it is the basis of all reality; as The Good, it is the standard of all value; but it is itself beyond being and beyond goodness.”