THE RAZOR'S EDGE:

A Better Concept of Freedom (GEORGE WEIGEL, March 2002, First Things)

According to one of his most eminent contemporary interpreters, the Belgian Dominican Servais Pinckaers, [Thomas] Aquinas' subtle and complex thinking about freedom is best captured in the phrase, freedom for excellence. Freedom, for St. Thomas, is a means to human excellence, to human happiness, to the fulfillment of human destiny. Freedom is the capacity to choose wisely and to act well as a matter of habit — or, to use the old-fashioned term, as an outgrowth of virtue. Freedom is the means by which, exercising both our reason and our will, we act on the natural longing for truth, for goodness, and for happiness that is built into us as human beings. Freedom is something that grows in us, and the habit of living freedom wisely must be developed through education, which among many other things involves the experience of emulating others who live wisely and well. On St. Thomas' view, freedom is in fact the great organizing principle of the moral life — and since the very possibility of a moral life (the capacity to think and choose) is what distinguishes the human person from the rest of the natural world, freedom is the great organizing principle of a life lived in a truly human way. That is, freedom is the human capacity that unifies all our other capacities into an orderly whole, and directs our actions toward the pursuit of happiness and goodness understood in the noblest sense: the union of the human person with the absolute good, who is God.

Thus, as Pinckaers notes, virtue and the virtues are crucial elements of freedom rightly understood, and the journey of a life lived in freedom is a journey of growth in virtue — growth in the ability to choose wisely and well the things that truly make for our happiness and for the common good. It's a bit, Pinckaers says, like learning to play a musical instrument. Anyone can bang away on a piano; but that is to make noise, not music, and it's a barbaric, not humanistic, expression of freedom. At first, learning to play the piano is a matter of some drudgery as we master exercises that seem like a constraint, a burden. But as our mastery grows, we discover a new, richer dimension of freedom: we can play the music we like, we can even create new music on our own. Freedom, in other words, is a matter of gradually acquiring the capacity to choose the good and to do what we choose with perfection.

Law is thus intertwined with freedom. Law can educate us in freedom. Law is not a work of heteronomous (external) imposition but a work of wisdom, and good law facilitates our achievement of the human goods that we instinctively seek because of who we are and what we are meant to be as human beings.

Aquinas was fully aware that human beings can fail, and in fact do evil — often great evil. No exponent of Aristotelian realism like St. Thomas, indeed no one formed by biblical religion as well as ancient philosophical wisdom, could deny this undeniable truth. Yet, even in the face of manifest evil, Thomas insisted that we have within us, and we can develop, a freedom through which we can do things well, rightly, excellently. Evil is not the last word about the human condition, and an awareness of the pervasiveness of evil is not the place to start thinking about freedom, or indeed about political life in general. We are made for excellence. Developed through the four cardinal virtues — prudence (practical wisdom), justice, courage, and temperance (perhaps better styled today, "self-command") — freedom is the method by which we become the kind of people our noblest instincts incline us to be: the kind of people who can, among other possibilities, build free and virtuous societies in which the rights of all are acknowledged, respected, and protected in law. It was not for nothing that John Courtney Murray, the great American Catholic public philosopher of freedom, called Thomas Aquinas "the first Whig."

Our second monk, William of Ockham, was born in England about a dozen years after Aquinas' death, joined the Franciscans, was educated and later taught at Oxford, and died in 1347 in Munich after a life of considerable turbulence, both intellectual and ecclesiastical. Even those who have never studied philosophy will recognize his name as the author of "Ockham's Razor" — the principle (still used in the sciences as well as in philosophy) that, as a general rule, the simpler of two explanations should be preferred. Professional philosophers consider him the chief exponent of "nominalism," a powerful late-medieval philosophical movement, which denied that universal concepts and principles exist in reality — they exist only in our minds. To take an obvious and critical example, there is for nominalists no such thing per se as "human nature." "Human nature" is simply a description, a name (hence "nominalism") we give to our experience of common features among human beings. The only things that exist are particulars.

Often presented as a crucial moment in the history of epistemology, nominalism also had a tremendous influence on moral theology. And because politics, as Aristotle taught, is an extension of ethics, nominalism's impact on moral theology eventually had a profound influence on political theory. If, to return to that obvious and critical example, there is no "human nature," then there are no universal moral principles that can be "read" from human nature. Morality, on a nominalist view, is simply law and obligation, and that law is always external to the human person. Law, in other words, is always coercion — divine law and human law, God's coercion of us and our coercion of each other.

The implications of Ockham's nominalism for the moral life and for politics are not hard to tease out of this brief sketch of his basic philosophical position. In his history of medieval philosophy, Josef Pieper writes that, with Ockham, "extremely dangerous processes were being set in motion, and many a future trouble was preparing." Pinckaers goes so far as to describe Ockham's work as "the first atomic explosion of the modern era." "The atom he split," though, "was . . . not physical but psychic," for Ockham shattered our concept of the human soul and thereby created a new, atomized vision of the human person and, ultimately, of society.

With Ockham, we meet what Pinckaers has called the freedom of indifference. Here, freedom is simply a neutral faculty of choice and choice is everything, for choice is a matter of self-assertion, of power. Will is the defining human attribute. Indeed, will is the defining attribute of all of reality. For God, too, is supremely willful, and the moral life as read through Ockhamite lenses is a contest of wills between my will and God's imposition of His will through the moral law.

Ockham's radical emphasis on the will is an idea with very serious "real world" consequences. It not only severs the moral life from human nature (which, for a nominalist, doesn't exist). At the same time, and because of that, it severs human beings from one another in a most dramatic way. For there can be no "common good" if there are only the particular goods of particular men and women who are each acting out their own particular willfulness.

Here, in the mid-fourteenth century, is the beginning of what we call today the "autonomy project": the claim that human beings are radically autonomous, self-creating "selves," whose primary relations to others are relations of power. From its Ockhamite beginning, as Pinckaers writes, "freedom of indifference was . . . impregnated with a secret passion for self-affirmation." Thus, over time, freedom was eventually led into the trap of self-interest from which Immanuel Kant tried, unsuccessfully, to rescue it by appeals to a "categorical imperative" that could be known by reason and that would, it was hoped, restore a measure of objectivity to morality. On a long view of the history of ideas, and freely conceding the twists and turns of intellectual fortune along the way, William of Ockham is the beginning of the line that eventually leads to Nietzsche's "will to power" and its profound effect on the civilization of our times.

Freedom, for Ockham, has little or no spiritual character. The reality is autonomous man, not virtuous man, for freedom has nothing to do with goodness, happiness, or truth. Freedom is simply willfulness. Freedom can attach itself to any object, so long as it does not run into a superior will, human or divine. Later in the history of ideas, when God drops out of the equation, freedom comes to be understood in purely instrumental or utilitarian terms. And if the road on which Ockham set out eventually leads to Nietzsche, it also leads, through even more twists and turns, to, for example, Princeton's Peter Singer and his claim that parents ought to be able to wait for a few weeks before deciding whether their newborn child should be allowed to live. Ideas do indeed have consequences.

This touches on many of the discussions here over the last couple weeks, most obviously once you look at where Peter Singer leads, Peter Singer: Architect of the Culture of Death (DONALD DEMARCO, September/October 2003, Social Justice Review):

For Peter Singer a human being is not a subject who suffers, but a sufferer. Singer's error here is to identify the subject with consciousness. This is an error that dates back to 17th Century Cartesianism — "I think therefore I am" (which is to identify being with thinking). Descartes defined man solely in terms of his consciousness as a thinking thing (res cogitans) rather than as a subject who possesses consciousness.

At the heart of Pope John Paul II's personalism (his philosophy of the person) is the recognition that it is the concrete individual person who is the subject of consciousness. The subject comes before consciousness. That subject may exist prior to consciousness (as in the case of the human embryo) or during lapses of consciousness (as in sleep or in a coma). But the existing subject is not to be identified with consciousness itself, which is an operation or activity of the subject. The Holy Father rejects what he calls the "hypostatization of the cogito" (the reification of consciousness) precisely because it ignores the fundamental reality of the subject of consciousness — the person — who is also the object of love. "Consciousness itself' is to be regarded "neither as an individual subject nor as an independent faculty."

John Paul refers to the elevation of consciousness to the equivalent of the person's being as "the great anthropocentric shift in philosophy." What he means by this "shift" is a movement away from existence to a kind of absolutization of consciousness. Referring to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Holy Father reiterates that "it is not thought which determines existence, but existence, "esse," which determines thought!"

Singer, by trying to be more broadminded than is reasonable, has created a philosophy that actually dehumanizes people, reducing them to points of consciousness that are indistinguishable from those of many non-human animals. Therefore, what is of primary importance for the Princeton bioethicists is not the existence of the being in question, but its quality of life. But this process of dehumanization leads directly to discrimination against those whose quality of life is not sufficiently developed. Singer has little choice but to divide humanity into those who have a preferred state of life from those who do not. In this way, his broad egalitarianism decays into a narrow preferentialism.

The problem of preferentialism arises because, even though Ockham and his progeny have disavowed the possibility of our judging what is good, they can not wish away the clash of wills. Human conflict has not been eliminated, only the moral basis for the resolution of such conflict. And so there must be some other measure, presumably material and ultimately nothing but naked power, of who will prevail when individuals are in conflict. This gives us things like the "greatest good for the greatest number", which might be referred to more honestly as "strength in numbers." It also renders an ethic where the least powerful and most burdensome members of society are in imminent danger of destruction--infants, unborn, the elderly, the disabled, etc.. Subtract also the idea that every human is imbued with dignity and deny that there's such a thing as human nature--a that nature is badly flawed--and you've the perfect recipe for the eminently rational reign of the culture of death.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 9, 2003 8:40 PM