Human Willing Research Articles

Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account by Han-Luen Kantzer Komline, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, pp. xv + 469, £90.00, hbk

Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account by Han-Luen Kantzer Komline, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, pp. xv + 469, £90.00, hbk

Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account by Han-luen Kantzer Komline

Reviewed by: Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account by Han-luen Kantzer Komline Christopher R. Mooney Han-luen Kantzer Komline Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 Pp. xv + 469. $150.00. What does Augustine mean by the notoriously elusive term “the will”? Hanluen Kantzer Komline’s Augustine on the Will argues that Augustine did not invent the will, nor did he simply recast a philosophical category, as others have claimed. Rather, Augustine develops an inescapably theological account of the will, meaning that any account of human willing must be differentiated by its location in the Christian narrative: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation (10–12). While there are common features, how Augustine describes created willing, fallen willing, justified willing, and heavenly willing are each unique and distinctively Christian. Before the fall, the will is like a hinge that turns the soul and is capable of sinning or not; for all humans after the fall, willing is now stuck due to their evil desires, imposing a certain necessity despite the existence of free choice; but in Christ, God’s grace through the Holy Spirit empowers the will—even drives it—to the good; finally, by a further grace the will of the saints in heaven is liberated even from the ability and desire for sin. The result is a well-researched, admirably balanced, and largely comprehensive illumination of human willing in Augustine’s thought. In certain places, especially on prayer and the will (Chapter Four), Christ’s exemplary human will and efficacious grace (Chapter Six), and the Holy Spirit’s role in illuminating the meaning of human and trinitarian willing (Chapter Seven), the book truly shines as a representation of Augustine’s thinking and aims. In addition to its judicious interventions for specialists, its individual chapters are well structured as introductions for advanced students, even if the book as a whole may be too long to serve as a student introduction. The book consists of eight chapters, which are grouped around the four stages of human willing. Chapter One concerns the created will in Augustine’s earliest works, Chapter Two deals with the fallen will up to Ad Simplicianum, Chapters Three to Four cover the fallen will and transition to redeemed willing, Chapters Five through Seven concern the redeemed will, and Chapter Eight concludes with the will eschatologically perfected in heaven. Kantzer Komline’s book also maps these four stages of human willing onto Augustine’s development over time, so that, as the bishop ages, his thinking grows [End Page 107] and his focus also shifts. She argues, for example, that his earliest accounts of the will (c. 387–95) are best seen not as a false, juvenile description but as largely right—insofar as they describe the created will. His later works do not so much reject the early account of created willing as adapt the account to other circumstances: how do we describe the will now that it is fallen, or when it is redeemed? Kantzer Komline highlights how Augustine’s four-dimensional approach to human willing uniquely grounds its goodness in the trinitarian God. This explains how Augustine really does elevate the will to a higher position in the human person than any thinker before him, though only because his account is so theological. Kantzer Komline’s theologically differentiated approach enhances our understanding of Augustine on the will, and the book is at its most persuasive in demonstrating the impossibility of distilling from Augustine a one-dimensional, atheological account of the will or simply reducing it to philosophical antecedents. In particular, Kantzer Komline shows that a theologically differentiated account of the will is necessary to account for Augustine’s anti-Pelagianism, his engagement with scripture, his theological development, his distinctly Christian, trinitarian approach to willing, and his reluctance to offer philosophically universal definitions of the will. Still, perhaps some expressions of theological differentiation go too far, such as where “four different accounts” are affirmed and contrasted with “‘an’ account of will” (418). But opposing “four accounts” to “an account” seems to risk losing any intelligibility regarding “the will.” “How the will functions varies” (10), yes, but we can still ask what...

Sin: A Thomistic Psychology by Steven J. Jensen

Reviewed by: Sin: A Thomistic Psychology by Steven J. Jensen Romanus Cessario O.P. Sin: A Thomistic Psychology. By Steven J. Jensen. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018. Pp. 336. $34.95 (soft). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3033-7. The Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston enjoys prominence among faculties devoted to the study of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Since 1975 a succession of recognized authorities in the field of Thomist studies has taught there. Steven Jensen, who currently serves as Director for the Center and also holds the Bishop Nold Chair in Graduate Philosophy, continues a work that began under the directorship of Professor Anton C. Pegis, formerly president of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto. The Center places Houston on the map of Thomist centers throughout the world, alongside Toulouse, Rome, and Fribourg—to name only a few. The present volume witnesses to the quality of the scholarship that one has come to associate with Texas Thomism. Distinguer pour unir recalls an important work of the Thomist author Jacques Maritain, who visited the Houston Center and is numbered among its honorary members. Distinguish to unite captures the overall achievement of Jensen’s presentation of what he calls a Thomistic psychology. In other words, the author demonstrates the remarkable ability of a good thinker to expose the arguments of those colleagues who purport to interpret the same texts that he does. In this case, the texts under analysis come from the pen of the Angelic Doctor, especially the Secunda pars of the Summa theologiae and the disputed questions De malo. Both works date from roughly the same period of Aquinas’s teaching career (the late 1260s and early 1270s). It is a fair generalization to state that the way Aquinas understands the specifically human workings of the rational animal differs from how many theorists of our period explain human behavior. To claim, as Aquinas does, that “a good understood [bonum intellectum] is the will’s object and moves it by being something to aim for” (STh I, q. 82, a. 4) separates Thomists from those who hold that human actions arise from anything but an understood good. To further claim “that in all of our choices we always act for some good” (1) introduces a number of questions that the author treats in chapter 1 under the heading of “The Enigma of an Evil Will.” Facile replies to questions about the relationship of the will to the highest good leads to assertions that would easily fit in the mouth of someone like Goethe’s Mephistopheles. The authentic Christian tradition, however, will not allow evil to determine anything. Had Adam not sinned, Jensen would not have had to write this book. However, original sin entered the world. Christian thinkers, then, face the challenge of explaining the existence of disorder in a world that God created good. I believe that the author chose the title that he did, Sin, in order to make this point. One, therefore, may be forgiven for thinking that a book about Aquinas’s discussion of human willing would most fittingly carry the title [End Page 318] “Blessedness,” whereas casuist authors might hawk their wares by promising cogent thought about sins. The present author, however, cleverly draws us to his subject by his implicit appeal to that which no Christian can escape. Once Christ dies on Calvary, those who follow him must seek to promote the good and to restrain what is evil. Aquinas in fact makes this point explicitly at the start of the Tertia pars. Some have even argued that the whole of the Summa exposes the path persons must follow to become what God made the human creature to be. Jensen outlines the mistakes that thinkers have made about how one should walk along this path. We need to know these errors, even though it remains the case that the only real remedy for the mistakes humans make provides work for theologians and not philosophers. Chapter 2 introduces the various ways in which contemporary philosophers interpret Aquinas’s teleology. The word “teleology” does not appear in the Index. Jensen discusses the ways...

Cultivating moral consciousness: The quintessential relation of practical reason and mind (Gemüt) as a bulwark against the propensity for radical evil

To perfect human beings with an innate propensity for radical evil is a formidable task. Kant explicitly says that the propensity for evil is not eradicable; it is rooted in human nature, specifically in the human power of choice-making. The task is to reorient the natural order of choice-making (which derives its maxim from an object of the inclinations), to the moral order that takes the moral law as its supreme principle. I explicate the role of a specific capacity of the human subjective side of judging in this process; namely, of ‘mind’ in its sense as Gemüt. While human willing and choice-making are subject to the influence of sensuousness (the inclinations and passions), Gemüt is a capacity of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) that allows the human subject to enjoy the feeling of being pleased in the fulfillment of duty. Its four specific aesthetic preliminary concepts of responsiveness to concepts of duty – moral feeling (as respect for the law), conscience, love of humanity, and respect for oneself (self-esteem) – must be cultivated in order to make objective practical reason also subjectively practical. Thereby one secures a bulwark against the ineliminable propensity for evil whose first effect is to destroy inner moral integrity.

Moral injury and original sin: The applicability of Augustinian moral psychology in light of combat trauma

Veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan often experience moral injury as an ambiguous sense of guilt or deep confusion or annihilation of a sense of what is good and right. Augustine argued that as personal agents, our willing follows that which we desire—the problem is that our desires are externally and internally distorted and our willing thus follows goods that are twisted and false. I argue that an Augustinian framework of human willing in pursuit of distorted goods holds a great deal of explanatory power in terms of the pathology of human violence and the phenomenon of moral injury in combat veterans. As several prominent psychological studies suggest, evolutionary, societal, and cultural forces condition our capacity to make critical moral decisions. Those studying moral injury in combatants have observed the profound guilt that eventually results from their participation in acts of violence and even in support of missions whose moral “good” they come to question. An Augustinian framework recognizes both the power of these external forces and the distortable nature of our own moral values and therefore allows us to locate moral injury in the realm of systemic, widespread societal and cultural problems. This definition allows the experience of differing levels of participation in wartime violence from “front-line combat” to support missions to be understood as valid experiences of moral injury while simultaneously recognizing that one’s active agency is required in order to experience moral injury. Further, this framework may resonate with veterans who experience hopelessness as a result of reflection on the malleability of human willing and its profound vulnerability to outside forces.

“Could Have Chosen Otherwise Under Identical Conditions”: An Evolutionary Perspective on Free Will

Using an evolutionary perspective, this article examines the cogency of the libertarian formulation of free will—that is, that individuals have free will if they “could have acted or chosen otherwise under identical conditions.” The article argues that by representing the agent as a disembodied self acting and choosing in logical rather than in contextualized, lived-in space, the libertarian formulation misconstrues human willing in ways that invite a host of philosophical problems that persist to the present day. This article indicts the Platonic penchant for theoretical explanations consisting of necessary and sufficient conditions that capture the “essence” of terms, while discounting “naturalistic” ones that depict organisms navigating their environments in ways promoting their reproduction and survival. Securing naturalist-based correctives of neuroevolutionary phenomena like “free will” may represent a growth industry for scholars interested in remedying the kinds of problems generated by traditional forms of metaphysical speculation on the nature of intentionality.

Donne’s Annihilation

This essay explores the nuances of annihilation across John Donne’s oeuvre to bring into view his sophisticated representation and analysis of unexemplary martyrdom. Donne discovered that poetic making itself may prepare for but ultimately marks the lack of the self-annihilation required for martyrdom. A new reading of “Batter my heart” reveals that Donne, typically thought of as vigorously dismissive of martyrdom, developed a sophisticated theory of a passive martyrdom. This martyrdom is free from any human willing and cannot be imitated; it is, as Donne calls it, “passive action.” In Pseudo-Martyr, Biathanatos, and his sermons, this theory underwrites Donne’s analysis of Samson and violent actions undertaken against a state as well as Christ’s ultimate sacrifice.

Salvation and creation: on the role of forgiveness in the completion of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy

In the general introduction to the first part of his Philosophie de la Volonté, Le volontaire et l’involontaire ([1950] 1966) Paul Ricoeur writes that the phenomenological or ‘pure description […] of the Voluntary and the Involuntary’ is ‘constituted by bracketing’ two things: first the fault, which is essentially a perversion of the pure nature or the essence of human willing; and second ‘Transcendence which hides within it the ultimate origin of subjectivity’. Evil, the condition of brokenness or the reality of the fault, asks for an empirical description (and as Ricoeur will discover subsequently: a hermeneutics) of concrete myths and symbols. He will remove this first bracketing in the second part of his Philosophy of the Will and in the long ‘series of detours’ of his hermeneutical writings. The second bracketing, however, will turn out to be much more difficult to remove. It demands a ‘poetics’, which would threaten Ricoeur’s effort to separate his Christian faith from his ‘autonomous’ philosophizing. In this article I argue that Ricoeur eventually did present his poetics, though only in the epilogue to his penultimate book ([2000] 2004) on ‘Difficult Forgiveness’. The article indicates why this epilogue might fulfil the promise of a poetics, explains why this could only be done in an epilogue and gives at least one possible reason why Ricoeur could write at the end of his oeuvre, what he could not at its beginning.

What is a workshop?

Today, we might describe almost any activity of training, rehearsal, learning or play as a ‘workshop’ but, historically speaking a ‘workshop’ is a medieval building housing apprentices and their master, and producing craft objects. Perhaps our use of the word workshop is only metaphorical or perhaps the contemporary and the historical are, in certain respects, the same phenomenon. This article asks whether ‘workshop’ is a dead metaphor; that is a metaphor which has lost the meaning of its original imagery, or whether it is, as Max Black would have it, a separate vocabulary term whose meaning is not dependent upon foreknowledge of any metaphorical context. Put more simply, is there a more literal way to think about the experience of ‘workshop’? This article draws from experiences in workshop with the contact-dancer Kirstie Simson and the choreographer Adam Benjamin. Utilising Hannah Arendt's concept of ‘action’, it proposes an understanding of ‘workshop’ as a time and space for the undertaking of a particular kind of work, together. This species of work opens a space for what Arendt calls ‘natality’: an irreversible eruption of ‘newness’, without precedent and independent to human willing, and this natal space may be definitive of workshop practice. The line of questioning in the article proposes future research into other ‘metaphorical’ terms, such as, for example, ‘laboratory’, and discusses the political significance of the emergence of the term ‘workshop’ in theatrical practice in the mid-to-late twentieth century.

Abraham and the Reformation: Romans 4 and the Theological Interpretation of Aquinas and Calvin

Abstract The diversity that exists within the history of the church's engagement with Rom 4 demonstrates the difficulty in understanding Paul's question "What shall we say about our father Abraham?" and the answer he provides. Paul's teaching on "imputing" Abraham's faith as justice and his opposition to "works of the flesh," however, were key points for the Reformers' disputes against the Catholic Church's teaching on justification as transformation and the inclusion of works in justification. In this essay, I explore the theological interpretations of John Calvin, a clear proponent of the imputational model of justification, and Thomas Aquinas, a clear articulator of the transformational model, and analyze how they address Paul's teaching on works of the flesh and justification by faith. I illustrate how philosophical and theological judgments pertaining to the relation of justification to the law, the dynamics of justification itself, and the causal relationship between divine and human willing interact with the text of Rom 4 to produce two distinct articulations of what Paul says about our father Abraham. I conclude by noting that Calvin's concerns are largely met by Aquinas's interpretation but without the strong dichotomy between justification by faith and justification by works.

Abraham and the Reformation: Romans 4 and the Theological Interpretation of Aquinas and Calvin

Abstract The diversity that exists within the history of the church's engagement with Rom 4 demonstrates the difficulty in understanding Paul's question "What shall we say about our father Abraham?" and the answer he provides. Paul's teaching on "imputing" Abraham's faith as justice and his opposition to "works of the flesh," however, were key points for the Reformers' disputes against the Catholic Church's teaching on justification as transformation and the inclusion of works in justification. In this essay, I explore the theological interpretations of John Calvin, a clear proponent of the imputational model of justification, and Thomas Aquinas, a clear articulator of the transformational model, and analyze how they address Paul's teaching on works of the flesh and justification by faith. I illustrate how philosophical and theological judgments pertaining to the relation of justification to the law, the dynamics of justification itself, and the causal relationship between divine and human willing interact with the text of Rom 4 to produce two distinct articulations of what Paul says about our father Abraham. I conclude by noting that Calvin's concerns are largely met by Aquinas's interpretation but without the strong dichotomy between justification by faith and justification by works.

Uncovering the Constitution's moral design

The U.S. Constitution provides a framework for our laws, but what does it have to say about morality? Paul DeHart ferrets out that document's implicit moral assumptions as he revisits the notion that constitutions are more than merely practical institutional arrangements. In Uncovering the Constitution's Moral Design, he seeks to reveal, elaborate, and then evaluate the Constitution's normative framework to determine whether it is philosophically sound - and whether it makes moral assumptions that correspond to reality. Rejecting the standard approach of the intellectual historian, DeHart for the first time in constitutional theory applies the method of inference to ascertaining our Constitution's moral meaning. He distinguishes the Constitution's intention from the subjective intentions of the framers, teasing out presuppositions that the document makes about the nature of sovereignty, the common good, natural law, and natural rights. He then argues that the Constitution constrains popular sovereignty in a way that entails a real common good, transcendent of human willing and promotive of human well-being, but he points out that while the Constitution presupposes a real common good, it also implies a natural law that prescribes the common good. In critiquing previous attempts at describing and evaluating the Constitution's normative framework, DeHart demonstrates that the Constitution's moral framework corresponds largely to classical moral theory. He challenges the logical coherency of modern moral philosophy, normative positivism, and other theories that the Constitution has been argued to embody and offers a groundbreaking methodology that can be applied to uncovering the normative framework of other constitutions as well. This cogently argued study shows that the Constitution presupposes a natural law to which human law must conform, and it takes a major step in resolving current debates over the Constitution's normative framework while remaining detached from the social issues that divide today's political arena. Uncovering the Constitution's Moral Design is an original approach to the Constitution that marks a significant contribution to understanding the moral underpinnings of our form of government.

“Complete Nihilism” in Nietzsche

Whatever I create and however much I love it- soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it. And you too, lover of knowledge, are only a path and footprint of my will; verily my will to power walks also on heels of your will to truth.1 Nietzsche's assessment of modernity is ambivalent. On one hand, he describes it as age of last man, age of stifling mediocrity where values of herd have become universally triumphant; on other, he describes it as a promising dawn, a re-awakening of humanity's full potentialities. He characterizes new beginning as liberation of creative human will, which suggests that power of creation had hitherto rested outside human sphere, or at least that we had believed to be case, which for Nietzsche amounts to same thing. Thus Nietzsche's narrative of history of morality can be read as slow but progressive unfolding of self-consciousness of human will. However, since history of morality is for Nietzsche history of nihilism, story of creation must also be told against latter, more fundamental backdrop. That at any rate is approach taken in essay. My argument is that although Nietzsche himself speaks of nihilism as a merely pathological transitional stage in human history, to see phenomenon of nihilism in manner is to misconstrue its significance for Nietzsche's own thinking on concept of creation and its function in human willing. I will show that truly authentic creation, as Nietzsche himself at his most challenging understands it, is solely product of valuative will to power of complete nihilist; so that in dispensing fully with nihilism, taken in its most robust sense, one would also be eliminating possibility for creative human will to reach full maturity. To begin, we need to get clear on concept of nihilism in Nietzsche's thinking. A Typology of Nihilism The problem of nihilism occupied Nietzsche throughout his career and might arguably be called his central philosophical concern. In posthumously patched-together work The Will to Power, we find Nietzsche's most concentrated collection of reflections on concept of There he defines (one kind of) nihilism as the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability.3 He adds that nihilism, thus understood, is rooted in Christian moral interpretation of world. Thus he approaches phenomenon as an evolutionary process, an historically determined continuum of types. For Nietzsche, recounting history of morality is equivalent to showing how one kind of nihilism is replaced by another. The first, pre-modern type is what I will call nihilism. All efforts to posit a beyond, a suprasensory realm opposed to this world, result in transcendental nihilism, nihilism of values or absolute spheres.4 Platonism, Christianity-- that platonism for people'-and Kantianism are most significant forms of type of In his succinct summary of Western morality in The Twilight of Idols, Nietzsche argues that move to transcendent is first step in the history of an error. Platonism, positing existence of a realm of pure Ideas, allows access to rarefied world, but only for assiduously schooled knowers Christianity also posits existence of an otherworldly realm and holds it to be unattainable in life, although repentant sinner may attain it in next. Kantianism for its part locates beyond in Ding an Sich and a priori structure of consciousness. The true world here becomes epistemologically unreachable, though thought of it is held to be an imperative of morality. 6 As these examples illustrate, transcendental nihilism operates by moving life's center of gravity out of life itself. This is its most general characteristic, which is why Nietzsche can conflate its metaphysical and religious manifestations. …

THE DIALECTIC BETWEEN EXPLANATION AND UNDERSTANDING

If i were to try to label the main thrust of Paul Ricoeur's work, I would suggest 'a philosophical anthropology'. This is a term he uses himself to describe his work. Just as importantly, it does justice to his lifelong interest in explaining and understanding human action. In his earliest original work, Freedom and Nature,1 he conceives of a kind of architectonic, composed of an 'eidetics' of the will, an 'empirics' of the will, and a 'poetics' of the will. The first would be a pure eidetic description, in the style of Husserl, of the fundamental concept of willing. The second would be a Kantian transcen dental argument for the logically necessary conditions for human evil to be possible. The second part of the 'empirics' of the will includes a hermeneutic account of the linguistic symbols of evil and the myths of the origin of evil which serve as the first-order explanations of evil. The third projected step in the trilogy was to be a phenomenology of hope and reconciliation and a solution to the paradox of transcendence and human freedom. I recently asked Paul Ricoeur if we would ever see the promised Poetics of the Will? He told me that either there would be no Poetics or that his work on metaphor and narrative constituted it. Then he asked me, 'Do you hold me to completing a plan I made when I was a very young man, some thirty-five years ago?' So what began as a carefully laid plan to answer some specific questions about human willing and freedom, about the nature and origin of evil, and about the reconciliation of transcen dence, gave way, little by little, to the demands of new questions and of new methodological resources. At the end of each of his major works, he lists the unanswered questions—or better, the new questions revealed by the investigation he has just completed. Thus, looking backwards, Ricoeur's work more resembles the unity of a journey than the completion of an architectonic drafted many years ago. Yet there is a constant theme of understanding human action— and he has added recently, human suffering—through the interpretation of texts. The main thrust of his effort has been to overcome Cartesian dualism and all of its vestiges. As his philosophical analyses progress, Ricoeur proposes alternative solutions to the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and