The Life of the Mind

  With this experience of the Will as a mental potency whose power does not consist, as in Epictetus, in shielding the mind against reality but on the contrary, inspires it and endows it with self-confidence, it is as though we have reached the end of a history whose beginning was the Apostle Paul's discovery that velle and posse do not coincide—a coincidence taken for granted in pre-Christian antiquity. Scotus' last word about the Will as a mental faculty relates to the same phenomenon that was elucidated more fully many centuries later in Nietzsche's and Heidegger's equation of Will and Power—except that Scotus was still unaware of the annihilating (nihilistic) aspect of the phenomenon, that is, of the power generated by negation. He does not yet look upon the future as an anticipated negation of the present—or only perhaps in the general sense of perceiving the inherent futility of all merely worldly events (as Augustine said: "quod futurum est, transiturum expecta-tur," "what is in the future is expected as something that will have been"90 ).

  Man is capable of transcending the world of Being together with which he was created and which remains his habitat until death; yet even his mental activities are never unrelated to the world given to the senses. Thus the intellect is "bound up with the senses," and "its innate function is to understand sensory data"; in a similar way, the Will is "bound up with the sensory appetite" and its innate function is "to enjoy itself." "Voluntas conjuncta appetitui sensitivo nata est condelectari sibi, sicut intellectus conjunctus sensui natus est intelligere sensibilia."91 The decisive words here are the condelectari sibi, a delight inherent in the willing activity itself as distinct from the delight of desire in having the desired object, which is transient—possession extinguishes the desire and the delight. The condelectatio sibi borrows its delight from its closeness to desire, and Scotus said explicitly that no mental delight can compete with the delight arising from the fulfillment of sensual desire, except that this delight is almost as transient as the desire itself.92 Hence, he distinguishes sharply between will and desire because only the will is not transient. An inherent delight of the will in itself is as natural to the will as understanding and knowing are to the intellect, and can be detected even in hatred; but its innate perfection, the final peace between the two-in-one, can come about only when the will is transformed into love. If the will were mere desire to possess, it would cease to be once the object is possessed: I do not desire what I have.

  To the extent that Scotus speculates about an after-life—that is, an "ideal" existence for man qua man—this hoped-for transformation of the will into love with its inherent delectatio is decisive. The transformation of willing into loving does not signify that loving ceases to be an activity whose end is within itself; hence future blessedness, the beatitude enjoyed in an after-life, cannot possibly consist in rest and contemplation. Contemplation of the summum bonum, of the highest "thing," ergo, God, would be the ideal of the intellect, which is always grounded in intuition, the grasping of a thing in its "thisness," haecceitas, which in this life is imperfect not only because here the highest remains unknown but also because intuition of thisness is imperfect: "the intellect ... has recourse to universal concepts, precisely because it is incapable of grasping the haecceity."93 The notion of "eternal peace," or of Rest, arises out of the experience of restlessness, of the desires and appetites of a needy being that can transcend them in mental activities without ever being capable of escaping them altogether. What the will in a state of blessedness, that is, in an after-life, no longer needs or is no longer capable of, is rejection and hatred, but this does not mean that man in a state of blessedness has lost the faculty of saying "Yes."

  That unconditional acceptance is called "Love" by Scotus: "Amo: volo ut sis." "Beatitude is therefore the act by which the will comes in contact with the object presented to it by the intellect and loves it, thus fully satisfying its natural desire for it."94 Here again love is understood as an activity but no longer a mental one, as its object is no longer absent from the senses and no longer imperfectly known to the intellect. For "beatitude ... consists in the full and perfect attainment of the object as it is in itself, and not merely as it is in the mind."95 The mind, transcending the existential conditions of the "wayfarer," or pilgrim on earth, has an intimation of such future blessedness in its experience of sheer activity, that is, in a transformation of willing into loving. Falling back on the Augustinian distinction of uti and frui, using something for the sake of something else and enjoying it for its own sake, Scotus says that the essence of beatitude consists in "fruitio" the "perfect love of God for God's sake ... thus distinct from the love of God for one's own sake." Even if the latter is love for the sake of one's soul's salvation, it is still amor concupis-centiae, desirous love.96 Already in Augustine we find the transformation of willing into loving, and it is more than likely that the reflections of both thinkers were guided by Paul's words about the "love that never ends," not even when "that which is perfect comes" and all else has "passed away" (I Corinthians 13:8–13). In Augustine the transformation comes about because of the binding force of the will; there is no stronger binding force than the love with which the lovers love each other ("marvelously glued together").97 But for Scotus the experiential ground of love's everlastingness is that he conceives of a love that is not only, as it were, emptied, purified of desires and needs, but in which the very faculty of the Will is transformed into sheer activity.

  If in this life it is the miracle of the human mind that man at least mentally and provisionally can transcend his earthly conditions and enjoy the sheer actuality of an exercise that has its end in itself, then it is the hoped-for miracle of an after-life that man in his whole existence will be spiritualized. Scotus speaks of a "Glorified body,"98 no longer dependent on "faculties" whose activities are interrupted either by the factivum, the making and fashioning of objects, or by the desires of a needy creature—both of which render transient every activity in this life, the mental ones not excluded. Transformed into love, the restlessness of the will is stilled but not extinguished; love's abiding power is felt not as the arrest of motion—as the end of the fury of war is felt as the quiet of peace—but as the serenity of a self-contained, self-fulfilling, everlasting movement. Here are not the quiet and delight that follow upon a perfect operation, but the stillness of an act resting in its end. In this life we know of such acts in our experientia interna, and, according to Scotus, we should be able to understand them as intimations of an uncertain future when they would last forever. Then "the operating faculty will find itself calmed in its object through the perfect act [love] by which it attains it."99

  The idea that there could be an activity that finds its rest within itself is as surprisingly original—without precedent or sequel in the history of Western thought—as Scotus' ontological preference of the contingent over the necessary and of the existent particular over the universal. I have tried to show that in Scotus we meet not simple conceptual reversals but genuine new insights, all of which could probably be explicated as the speculative conditions for a philosophy of freedom. As far as I can see, in the history of philosophy only Kant can equal Duns Scotus in his unconditional commitment to freedom. And yet certainly Kant had no knowledge of him. I shall therefore end with an odd passage from the Critique of Pure Reason that at least deals with the same problem though without any mention of Freedom or the Will:

  There is something very strange in the fact, that once we assume something to exist we cannot avoid inferring that something exists necessarily.... On the other hand, if I take the concept of anything, no matter what, I find that the existence of this thing can never be represented by me as absolutely necessary, and that, whatever it may be that exists, nothing prevents me from thinking its non-existence. Thus while I may indeed be obliged to assume something necessary as a condition of the existent in general, I cannot think any particular thing as in itself necessary. In other words, I can never complete the regress to the conditions of existence save by assuming a necessary being, and yet a
m never in a position to begin with such a being. [And concluding this deliberation a few pages later]...there is nothing which absolutely binds reason to accept such an existence; on the contrary it can always annihilate it in thought, without contradiction; absolute necessity is a necessity that is to be found in thought alone.100

  To which, taught by Scotus, one may add that absolute nothingness cannot be found in thought. We shall have occasion later to come back to this idea when we discuss the uncertain destinies of the willing faculty at the close of the modern age.

  IV. Conclusions

  13. German Idealism and the "rainbow-bridge of concepts"

  Before we come to the final part of these considerations I shall try to justify the last and largest leap over the centuries in this sketchy and fragmentary presentation that I had the presumption to announce as a history of the Will. I have already mentioned my doubts as to whether there can legitimately be a "history of ideas," a Geistesgeschichte that rests on the assumption that ideas follow and generate one another in a temporal succession. The assumption makes sense only in the system of Hegel's dialectics. But, apart from any theories, a record does exist of the thoughts of great thinkers whose place in factual history is unchallengeable and whose testimony affirming or negating the Will we have touched on here only in passing—Descartes and Leibniz on one side of the argument, Hobbes and Spinoza on the other.

  The only great thinker in these centuries who would be truly irrelevant to our context is Kant. His Will is not a special mental capability distinct from thinking, but practical reason, a Vernunftwille not unlike Aristotle's nous praktikos; the statement that "pure reason can be practical is the chief thesis of the Kantian moral philosophy"1 is perfectly right. Kant's Will is neither freedom of choice (liberum arbitrium) nor its own cause; for Kant, sheer spontaneity, which he often called "absolute spontaneity," exists only in thinking. Kant's Will is delegated by reason to be its executive organ in all matters of conduct.

  Much more embarrassing, and thus in need of justification, is the omission from our considerations of the development of German idealism after Kant, the leap we have made over Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who in their speculative way summed up the centuries of die modern age. For the rise and decline of the modern age is not a figment of the "history of ideas" but a factual event that can be dated: the discovery of the whole earth and of part of the universe, the rise of modern science and its technology, followed by the decline of the Church's authority, by secularization and enlightenment.

  This momentous factual break occurring in our past has been characterized and interpreted from many different and legitimate viewpoints; in our context, the most decisive development that took place during these centuries was the subjec-tivization of cognitive as well as metaphysical thought. Only during these centuries did man become the center of concern to science as well as to philosophy. It had not happened in earlier times, even though, as we saw, the discovery of the Will coincided with the discovery of the "interior man" at a moment when man had become a "question for himself." Only when science had proved not merely that human senses were subject to error—which could be corrected in the light of new evidence in order to reveal "truth"—but that his sensory apparatus was forever incapable of self-evident certainties, did man's mind, now entirely thrown back upon itself, begin, with Descartes, to look for a "certainty" that would be a pure datum of consciousness. When Nietzsche called the modern age the "school of suspicion," he meant that, starting at least with Descartes, man was no longer sure of anything, not even of being real; he needed proof, not only of God's existence but also of his own. The certainty of the I-am is what Descartes found in his cogito me cogitare; that is, in a mental experience for which none of the senses, which give us the reality of ourselves and of an exterior world, is necessary.

  To be sure, this certainty is very questionable. Already Pascal, himself influenced by Descartes, objected that this consciousness would hardly be sufficient to distinguish between dream and reality: a poor artisan dreaming for twelve hours every night that he was king would have the same life (and enjoy the same amount of "happiness") as a king who dreamed every night that he was nothing but a poor artisan. Moreover, since "one frequently dreams that he is dreaming," nothing can guarantee that what we call our life is not wholly a dream from which we shall awaken in death. To doubt everything ("de omnibus dubitandum est") and find certainty in the very activity of doubting demanded by the "new Philosophy [that] calls all in doubt" (Donne) does not help, for is the doubter not obliged to doubt that he doubts? True, no one went that far, but that only means that "no one was ever a perfect skeptic [pyrrhonien, in Pascal]," though not because reason fortified him; he was restrained by "nature, [which] helped impotent reason"; and so Cartesianism was "something like the story of Don Quixote."2

  Centuries later, Nietzsche, still thinking in the same vein, suspected that it was our Cartesian "belief in the [thinking] 'ego'...as the sole reality [that made us]...ascribe reality to things in general."3 Indeed, nothing became more characteristic of the last stages of metaphysics than this kind of tuming-of-the-tables, of which Nietzsche, with his mercilessly honest thought-experiments, was the greatest master. But that game—still a thought-game rather than a language-game—did not become possible until, with the rise of German idealism, all bridges had been broken "except the rainbow-bridges of concepts,"4 or, to put it less poetically, until it dawned on the philosophers that "the novelty of our contemporary position in philosophy lies in the conviction, which no era had before vis, that we do not possess the truth. All previous generations 'possessed the truth,' even the skeptics."5

  Nietzsche and Heidegger are wrong, I think, in their dating of that modern conviction; actually it had accompanied the rise of modern science and then was attenuated by the Cartesian "certainty" as a substitute for truth; this in its turn was destroyed by Kant along with the remnants of Scholasticism, which in the form of logical exercises and the dogmatism of the "schools" had led a rather brittle existence of sheer erudition. But only at the end of the nineteenth century (here Heidegger is right) did the conviction of not possessing the truth become the common opinion of the educated classes and establish itself as something like the Spirit of the Age, of which Nietzsche was probably the most fearless representative.

  However, the mighty factor that delayed this reaction for centuries itself sprang up with the rise of die sciences as the natural response of every thinking man to the enormous and enormously rapid advance in human knowledge, an advance that was bound to make the previous centuries since antiquity appear as sheer stagnation by comparison. The concept of Progress as a vast co-operative drive in the interest of knowledge for its own sake, "in which all scientists of the past, the present and the future have a part ... appeared for the first time fully developed in the works of Francis Bacon."6 With it there came about, at first almost automatically, an important shift in the understanding of Time, the emergence of the Future to the rank formerly occupied by the Present or the Past. The notion that each subsequent generation would necessarily know more than its predecessor and that this progressing would never be completed—a conviction that only in our time has found challengers—was important enough; but for our context, even more important is the simple, matter-of-fact perception that "scientific knowledge" has been and can be attained only "step by step through contributions of generations of explorers building upon and gradually amending the findings of their predecessors."

  The rise of science had begun with the new discoveries of the astronomers, scientists who not only had "used most systematically" the findings of their predecessors, but who, without the records of past generations, and reliable records at that, would have been unable to make any "progress" at all, since the life-span of one man, or one generation of men, is evidently too short to verify findings and validate scientific hypotheses. But "the astronomers composed star catalogues to be used by future scientists," i.e., they had laid a basis for scientific advances. (As
tronomy, of course, was not wholly alone in initiating progress. Thomas Aquinas was conscious of an "increase in scientific knowledge"—'"augmentum factum est" —which he explained by "the defects of knowledge of those who first invented the sciences." Craftsmen, too, used to the method of trial and error, were keenly aware of certain improvements in their crafts. Yet the guilds themselves "stressed the continuity rather than the progress of craftsmanship," and "the only passage in the extant literature which clearly expresses the idea of the gradual progress of knowledge, or better, technological skill, occurs in a treatise on artillery."7 ) Still, the decisive breakthrough that gave modern science its impetus occurred in astronomy, and the idea of Progress, which from then on dominated every other science till it finally became the dominant notion of the equally modem concept of History, was originally based on the pooling of data, the exchange of knowledge, and the slow accumulation of records that were the requisites of astronomical advance. It was only after the world-shaking discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that what had been going on in that field came to the attention of those who were concerned with the general human condition.

  Thus, while the "new philosophy" proving the inadequacy of our senses had "called all in doubt" and given rise to suspicion and despair, the equally manifest forward movement of knowledge gave rise to an immense optimism as to what man can know and learn. Except that this optimism did not apply to men in the singular, not even to the relatively small community of scientists; it applied only to the succession of generations, that is, to Mankind as a whole. In the words of Pascal, who was the first to detect that the idea of Progress was a necessary complement to the idea of Mankind, it was the "particularly [human] prerogative [distinguishing man from animal] that not only each human being can daily advance in knowledge, but that all men together progress continually while the universe grows older ... so that the whole succession of men throughout the centuries should be considered as one and the same man who lives forever and continually learns" (italics added).8