Voluntarism in Medieval Latin Philosophy: An Interview with Robert Pasnau
by Guido Alt
About Robert Pasnau
Robert Pasnau is Professor of Philosophy and College Professor of distinction at UC Boulder. He is interested in many areas of philosophy, but has particularly devoted himself to the history of philosophy, especially the end of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of the modern era. He is the editor of the Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy and the founding editor of Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy. His most recent book is After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions (OUP 2017).
The Interview
Joining us in this issue is no one other than Robert Pasnau (UC Boulder), who has kindly accepted to do an interview for the IPM to talk about his books and latest projects. In this pleasant and informal conversation, we took the opportunity to ask him about issues connected to his scholarship. Among these is the relevance of pursuing projects that cross over compartmentalized disciplinary boundaries in the history of philosophy, a task which he masterfully engages in like very few in the field. He has shared with us perspectives from his most recent book project on medieval voluntarism, from detailed historical analyses of what the voluntarist movement was, to reflections about how that movement has changed our conception of the self.
Guido Alt: I would like to start with a general question about the value of the history of philosophy – what is it all about, why is it interesting, what is valuable about pursuing it. You have a paper, a talk you gave called Philosophical Beauty, in which you argue that alongside truth, beauty is also an important value of philosophy. The things you had mind are for example the power of arguments, clarity of prose, and originality of ideas. I have a question to you on a more personal front, namely how does that answer you have on the more theoretical level connects to your projects, what drives you to study new themes and new periods in the history of philosophy?
Robert Pasnau: Yes, it is a question I think about a lot. I am in a typical American context where I am in a department with a bunch of folk who don’t work on history of philosophy, aren’t much interested in the history of philosophy, and I don’t have a lot of historians around me in Boulder. So, for me the question is kind of always arising: why do I do things in philosophy that I do, and what value does it have? At a certain point, that paper you mentioned grew out of a certain frustration of all this needing to find some edifying higher value in the pursuit of the history of philosophy. At some point I just thought, look, a big part of the reason for why I do what I do, is that I just find that stuff fascinating. I find it completely rewarding to think about it, to read it, and to write about it. I thought about what exactly is so rewarding about it, and I decided that it is not so different from the situation in the arts, where there’s just a kind of beauty to it! Will it advance the field of philosophy in the twentieth-first century? I don’t know. Will it lead to the discovery of some deep new truths? I don’t know. But the stuff I work on in the history of philosophy, and in medieval philosophy in particular, is just wonderful philosophy. It is worth doing it just because studying wonderful and brilliant philosophy is totally worth doing.
But I guess, to your specific question, about what gets me excited about projects, what leads me to a take up a new project and what sort of guides the sort to stuff I work on. It is really mainly a matter of my running into things that I don’t understand and wanting to understand them. I am not somebody who likes returning over and over again to the same topics. There are some philosophers – and I don’t mean only in the history of philosophy but in general – who have a fairly small focus on which they spend their whole career. I admire that, it’s a style of doing philosophy and it can produce some really good and careful work that is really progressing in a fine-grained way to some better understanding of some particular issue. But that is not at all the way I work. I will write something on a topic, sometimes it will be book, sometimes just an article, and it will be something that I just don’t understand, and that’s what gets excited about it, and then I will work on it, and work it, and work on it, until I feel like understand it well enough to write something up. Then at that point I am just ready to move on with my next topic. So, I suppose that is why the work I do covers a lot of ground, because that is what excites me about stuff. I get excited about working on things when I just do not understand what is going on.
GA: My next question is related to this. You have worked on a number of different topics and produced excellent books from the topics you did research on. Your very first book was on history of epistemology, and I think that seems like a thread that continued throughout your career. The first book I have in mind is Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages published by CUP in 1997. That interest in a sense has come full circle in After Certainty. It is also important to mention Metaphysical Themes in that trajectory, published by OUP. The latter is an invaluable contribution to the history of metaphysics. I think one common aspects of the most recent books – correct me if I am wrong on this – is that they pay more attention to the continuities and the ruptures between medieval and early modern philosophy. I think both in After Certainty that is on background of the story, and in the Metaphysical Themes, although in a different way, the relation between medieval times and modernity is also on the background of that book. While working on these books did you develop any views about the medieval/modernity divide in philosophy? What are your current views on these matters?
BP: When I went to graduate school, I went to Cornell University to get my PhD with the express purpose of studying medieval philosophy with Norman Kretzman, and that’s what I did. I had a lot of interest in philosophy, I was back then as I continue to be interested in a lot of non-historical topics. But I mainly wanted to study medieval philosophy, and of course that’s what I did. So, my first book Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages grew out of my dissertation. That’s a strictly medieval book, and then I sort of thought, well, that’s just what I am going to do for my career. My second book, on Thomas Aquinas (Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature), was also of course a strictly medieval book. But I got more and more interested in later medieval material, and I started to think about Aquinas not as sort of the end of the road in the Middle Ages. You know, there’s this sort of a traditional conception of Aquinas as the culminating point of medieval philosophy after which it all goes into decline, this notorious earlier conception of the field that I think we now left behind. I started to sort of take that seriously myself and got interested in later material, and I had a very hard time in seeing a stopping point in the later Middle Ages, at which it stops being interesting. If you go well ahead to Suárez in the sixteenth century, boy, that’s pretty interesting stuff! And it is very recognizably in the scholastic tradition going to back Aquinas and other thirteenth century figures in Aristotelianism and all of that. It is obvious to anybody who looks at this stuff that there is a lot of continuity from Suarez stretching back into the high Middle Ages.
So then, if you are thinking of all of that as a sort of block of extremely interesting material, it is natural to then ask the question, well, what happened? Why did that tradition start to wind down? It didn’t of course stop overnight; scholasticism is alive and well in the seventeenth century and beyond. But obviously this new important dominant thing comes into the scene in the seventeenth century, so dominant and transformative that people just call it ‘modern philosophy.’ I started to take seriously the question of what happened. Why did scholasticism die? Why did the so-called modern philosophy rise up? How different are they really? I never doubted they were different, and I still don’t doubt that they are extremely different in important ways. But exactly in which ways are they are different, do they have commonalities that are perhaps not so obvious?
So, I started to really worry about those questions. And at the same time at a more personal level, I was frustrated with the way medieval philosophy can feel like this very self-contained separate field. You know, some people work in ancient, some people work in modern, and then there are some people doing medieval. I just thought this is absurd, that there ought to be room for research projects that cross over from one field to the other. In Metaphysics Themes and in After Certainty, the project would be very much to try and tell a story about those parts of the history of philosophy that just ignored those kinds of disciplinary boundaries, and just try to tell a continuous story that ignored the fact that the first half of it is medieval, and the second half is early modern. I found it extraordinarily difficult to do. I think anybody who tries it will find it extraordinarily difficult to do. But I think it is super important to try to do those things, because we sort of have a need to compartmentalize this field, but in historical context nobody was doing that. One thing led to another, and led to another, and then let to another. If you put them in these compartments, you are going to get history wrong in all kinds of ways.
GA: And your current book project is on voluntarism, is that right?
RP: Yes, that’s right.
GA: That is a very interesting topic and a classic, a in one way a classical medieval topic. But I guess I can already see by your answers and by your scholarship that the topic can be approached in various different ways and in different facets. I would like to ask you what is voluntarism, what is this movement, and when did it take place?
RP: One thing to say right from the start is that despite what I just said in my previous answer, this new book project is not a project that attempts to cross over from medieval into the seventeenth century. This book goes back to my earlier roots and is a solely medieval project. It’s imaginable that I might have attempted to push on into the seventeenth century, I have a hard time resisting the temptation to do that. But in this case, I never felt the temptation, because the medieval material on this stuff is so wonderfully sophisticated, that it just cries out for attention all by itself. Whereas as I understood the debates, and as I looked from time to time to the seventeenth century material like Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Descartes, I just thought that these folk in the seventeenth century are not doing anything new. They know a little bit about the scholastic debates, they are responding in intelligent ways to those debates, they are brilliant men these famous names from the 17th century. But I just can’t see that they are doing anything fundamentally new. Now, that’s a crazily wide sweeping generalization, and I am ready to be corrected on this point or that point. But I think it’s just manifestly clear that by and large, when it comes to the debate over free will, it’s really the later Middle Ages, the 13th and 14th century, where the action is. Where you get this series of really important innovations that just transform our understanding of those issues. And since that time, really everything else is just a series of footnotes to what when on back in those centuries.
Ok, so you ask what voluntarism is. Well, when I began this project, I thought that I was going to write a book about the very many senses of voluntarism that people use, offering a kind of unifying account of what it is to be a voluntarist in the context of the will, what it is to be a voluntarist in the context of God’s ability to frame the moral law, sometimes called theological voluntarism, there is voluntarism in various other theological contexts having to do with grace and foreknowledge and providence, there is voluntarism in a more political context; the term gets used extraordinarily widely, and it’s very confusing. And like I said in the start of the interview, what often motivates me is my own sense of perplexity, and I felt very perplexed about this. I thought, there is nobody that has written any book that sorts through all of this and explains it, and I thought I was going to do that. It is now looking like I am not going to do that at all, because I started with voluntarism in the context of the will, and I am more than halfway through the book now, and I haven’t gotten past that, and I don’t think I am going to get past that. Because that all by itself has turned out to be sufficient for a good-sized book, and it’s just looking more and more like it wouldn’t be helpful to sort of pull in these other senses of voluntarism.
So, my focus is strictly on what is it to be a voluntarist in the context of the narrow debate over free will. Even in that narrow context, people worry about this terminology of voluntarism a lot, and they contrast voluntarism with intellectualism, and pretty much everybody complains about this terminology, and complains about how poorly defined it is, even in this narrow context. I’ve come to think that in fact I am prepared to offer a kind of a strict definition of what voluntarism is. In fact, what I want to do is to distinguish between two stages of the voluntarist movement, and I want to claim that they are both fairly well defined, and they are both extraordinarily important to the history of philosophy.
The first stage I call semi-voluntarism. These aren’t medieval labels by the way, these are 19th century labels we impose back on these debates, so you can use these labels however you want, the labels don’t matter so much. But I am calling this first stage semi-voluntarism. Semi-voluntarism arises when you get a doctrine of the will as a faculty, and then critically importantly, the will as a faculty becomes that within us which is in control of our agency. It becomes the thing in control, the thing in charge. I call this the doctrine of agential will, that the will becomes an agent within us, the controlling agent within us.
That’s such a familiar idea, that I think it’s essentially gone unnoticed by historians of philosophy, and people just take it for granted that this is what a will is. Well, that is not what a will was until the thirteenth century. Only in the thirteenth century that this conception of the will as a faculty of the soul, and as the faculty of the soul within us that is in control, only in the thirteenth century that that conception emerges. It emerges in people like Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and I give Grosseteste a lot of credit for to my mind being the first person to clearly formulate that kind of view. Of course, Aquinas and Bonaventure are the massively influential figures, that I think completely embrace this picture. And with them, it just becomes such a dominant conception of what the will is that nobody even thinks to question it. It is almost an invisible doctrine, because it is becomes so taken for granted that nobody argues against it. But I think in a lot of ways you can make the case that it is the most important idea in all of medieval philosophy. That is a pretty crazy thing to say, but the reason I put it so strongly, is that I think: what other idea in medieval philosophy has so transformed our conception of the self, than this idea that we have within us a will that controls our agency, by which we sort of go by through our daily life and make our way through the world? When that idea happens, that’s what I call the first stage of voluntarism. That’s not what people ordinarily mean by voluntarism. But I think the reason why people will read Aquinas and Bonaventure and they will see a kind of voluntarism there is because the will is extraordinarily important for both of those figures, and I think I’ve just described a way in which it is important, in this conception of agential will.
Now, the second stage of voluntarism as I understand it arises around 1277 with the condemnation. The condemnation is putting in writing a kind of groundswell of opinion. And what this opinion involves, what happens in 1277, is the idea that this agential will within us should be conceived of as a first cause, undetermined by any sort of past causally necessitating history. To understand this transformative moment, it is critical to see how Aristotelianism, as it was brought into the University in the 13th century came through this Arabic filter, and the Arabic filter was heavily deterministic. I am talking about Ibn Sina, I am talking about Ibn Rush, but also even somebody like Al-Ghazali, as Al-Ghazali’s ideas were transmitted through his work The Aims of the Philosophers, people thought that is Al-Ghazali’s own work; all of these Arabic sources presented a version of Aristotelianism that was deterministic. I think the first generations of Latin philosophers in the University, philosophers and theologians, just felt as if this is the best philosophy we have available for us, a deterministic philosophy. I think this first generation – and I include both Aquinas and Bonaventure in this camp –, I think all of this folk thought that we need to tell a story about the will that is going to be compatible with that background Aristotelian story about causal determinism.
But what happens in 1277, as I understand the story, is that a kind of groundswell of opinion against that view arose, and people said that if our choice is between making the will determined and following this Arabic Aristotelianism, then we should reject the Aristotelianism. It is not worth holding on to Aristotelianism, if that forces us to say that the will is determined by its causal antecedents. So, they reject that part of Aristotelianism, they insist on the will as a first cause, and that’s what you get in Henry of Ghent, in Peter John Olivi, and then after those two it just snowballs, and it just becomes the common opinion. And you get still more sort of radical proponents of voluntarism like John Duns Scotus and William Ockham, and it is everywhere at this point. And the condemnations of 1277 are very important, because although the condemnations are notoriously all over the place and scattered in what they condemn, over and over again these condemnations come back to the problem of free will. And one thing that they are clear about is condemning this doctrine that the will is determined by its causal antecedents. That was widely understood to be something that after 1277 condemnations you just couldn’t say it anymore. That for me is when you get full blown, real voluntarism, after 1277; in Peter John Olivi, Henry of Ghent, Scotus and Ockham, and a whole lot of other figures too. That is the rise, for me, of the fully voluntarist movement.
GA: Thank you for this glimpse over the story of the book. I am very looking forward to reading it. I wanted to go back for my next question to something you mentioned, that the conception of the will as controlling faculty, as a central faculty in agency is one of the most important, if not the most important contribution to philosophy, or to at least to the history of ideas. Because that seems an important point, right? During this project you have explored voluntarism from different angles from what I could see in the talks and the papers during this time, from analysis of modalities, which are issues you talk about in the context of determinism and so on, and even conceptions of the self in English literature. I get the impression that alongside this narrow, specifically defined notion of voluntarism in which the medieval contribution can be understood, these ideas seem to have an important impact in our understanding of the self as you mentioned. Do you have an idea of the ways in which voluntarism impacted our culture, both in philosophy and perhaps outside of it?
RP: Yes, absolutely. The story I was just telling you, is really the story of the first half of the book. That part of the book is written, and that was the part of the book on which I based a series of lectures I gave in Paris the past spring, and those are actually going to be published in French before they appear in English with Vrin, hopefully next year. So that tells the more theoretical story of how I see the debate going, more what you would expect from the history of philosophy. But for me a lot of the interest in the project is to think about just the kind of thing you were asking about, to think about, well, what difference does this make to the self, to think of the will in this way? To think about ourselves as being controlled by this will within us? So, the second half of the book which I am working on now, tries to develop those sorts of questions by way of asking the master question of the narrative, is what is the value of this sort of approach to human nature, to think of ourselves as having a will in this way? Does this somehow give us better control over our lives? Does this give us a picture of human nature that somehow is more appealing? You find a lot of rhetoric among the voluntarists to the effect that there is nothing more important within us than the will, that the will is this thing that marks us off from the rest of nature, and puts us on a level on which we are almost in a sense comparable to the Angels and even to God, because we are united with them in this shared faculty that is undetermined by the rest of nature. So, the question I ask in the second part of the book is, in what way exactly is that valuable? And that is in effect to ask a question about how it changes the conception of ourselves.
I am very interested, for instance, in looking at medieval literature, especially medieval English literature, and thinking about how this concept appears there. In Chaucer for instance, you do find explicit mention of philosophy and of these debates. Chaucer translated all of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, he was very interested in philosophy. But what I am most interested in is not the explicit discussions of philosophy, I am interested in the way in which this voluntaristic picture changes the way they think about humans beings being in the world. And you see it over and over again in medieval literature, that the principal way of engaging with human beings and their place in the world, is a picture of human beings in this kind of moral quest, where we have to somehow find a way through our lives in a way that will allow us to secure the kind of moral aims that we have – to act morally, to act in the way God want us to act, to follow God’s laws, to pursue our happiness in right way, amidst all the challenges of life. If you read something like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this is the story of man, Gawain, who voluntarily chooses to go on this quest to satisfy this promise that he is forced to make in the start of the story. And the whole journey is this precarious attempt on his part, to make it through his destination in such a way that he preserves his moral goodness. I think it is this picture on which human beings are put in an extraordinarily precarious situation, where there’s temptation surrounding them on all side, where they don’t know what the right thing to do is, and they are left to goodness of the will to do the right aim if they can. If they can’t of course, well, the penalty for wrongdoing in the Middle Ages is eternal damnation, and so stakes couldn’t be any higher. I think the element of medieval literature that I am most interested in, and I find just fascinating, is these high stakes and the difficulty for human beings of trying to kind of win this game so difficult and so desperate. You see this dramatized over and over again in all these great works of English literature.
GA: Thank you! For my last question – and again that was very interesting and leaves me wanting to read more the book -, also picking up on something you said a few moments ago is that perhaps this impact of voluntarism has been widespread that we take many things for granted about the picture of ourselves that comes from this movement, but were perhaps not previously there. These ideas have a certain history and so on. When you were working through this material, would you like to highlight something you found surprising about how this movement, about how this idea of a free will was developed in the first place?
RP: Yes, I think, in a way the most surprising conclusion I’ve reached is something I alluded to already, but it bears repeating and stressing. As I understand the story, there was a kind of general consensus in the 13th century up until 1277 that a theory of the will was going to have to be compatible with this Arabic style Aristotelianism and determinism, there is a general consensus there. And I just cannot find anybody before 1277, saying in any text that survived, that they think these deterministic principles should be rejected. Everybody knows about these deterministic principles. You can say exactly where they are, you can find them in the Arabic texts, in the Latin texts, you can find authors quoting them and citing them and over and over again. I can’t find anybody rejecting them. I can’t find anybody putting forward a theory of the will that isn’t compatible with this deterministic teaching. And then, on my story, 1277 happens and things completely switched. And within not very long after 1277 everybody has swung to the other side, and everybody agrees that we should reject determinism of that reading of Aristotle, that we should embrace the will as an indeterminate first cause, a prime mover. That just becomes the universally accepted view.
Even somebody like John Buridan – who I think you can see is not really thrilled by this way of going -, just feels obligated to embrace it as I read him. And I don’t think he is just saying that because of Church authority. I think he really thinks that if we are really going save human freedom, and if we are really going to make humans morally responsible for their actions, then, Buridan thinks we really do have to find some sort of kernel of indeterminacy within the will. That sort of voluntaristic view goes from being something that nobody believed, thorough the first three quarters of the 13th century, to something that everybody believed. And as I understand the debate, that consensus endures within scholasticism for centuries. It sort of hardens into Church teaching, and later Thomists embrace the view and think they can find it back in Aquinas himself which I think is a mistake. But at any rate everybody holds the view, and that doesn’t change until the reformation. Then you get people like Luther and Calvin, who don’t believe in free will at all, and then you get philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, living in protestant countries in which they have more leeway to reject that sort of voluntaristic approach. But there is this chunk of time in the late scholastic era in which voluntarism just becomes the view that everybody takes. I think that is a surprising conclusion, but I think it’s peculiarly surprising that it changes so quickly right after 1277.
GA: Let me thank you then Bob for this wonderful interview and for your time. We are looking forward to seeing that wonderful project flourish into the book.
RP: Thank you! It was my pleasure, enjoyed talking to you.
IPM Monthly 