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The Indetermination of Reason and the Role of the Will in Aquinas's Account of Human Freedom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Thomas Aquinas argues that human choices are made by the will and reason working together. It is easy to misinterpret his argument and suppose that the reason alone works out what should be done while the will simply ratifies this. Instead Aquinas believes that in practical matters the reason is often undetermined since it arrives at many simultaneous conclusions. This is the often unacknowledged heart of Aquinas's account of freedom. All these simultaneous rational conclusions derive from the objective circumstances of the world; each one could give rise to a different rationally justified course of action; yet only one can be acted upon. The reason cannot decide between them. It is the will that accepts and affirms one of these conclusions and gives force to the reasonableness of one course of action. This is why a choice is always rational and personally willed – which is what makes it free. The indetermination of reason is what allows the future to be open-ended for the deliberating agent; it allows past and present to be interpreted in different ways, each of which has its own coherence and rationality. In this way Aquinas's account of human freedom avoids both an irrational voluntarism and a deterministic intellectualism
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- © The author 2008. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
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1 I will concentrate on some texts from the Summa Theologiae, De Veritate, and De Malo. I will not pay much attention to the differences between Aquinas's earlier and later writings on intellect and will. There is an ongoing debate about the development of Aquinas's thinking. I accept Daniel Westberg's conclusion that the differences are in emphasis rather than in matters of substance. Westberg argues that Aquinas did not, as Odon Lottin has proposed, move from a kind of intellectual determinism (in De Veritate) to a more voluntarist conception of human action (in De Malo 6). There is instead a consistent picture of the interdependence of intellect and will, a picture in which every action takes place for the sake of a good that is both understood and desired. Westberg writes: ‘Free choice is a matter of choosing, on the part of both reason and will, the bonum intellectum. This never changes in Thomas.’ Daniel Westberg, “Did Aquinas Change His Mind About the Will?”, Thomist 58 (1994): 56. There is, furthermore, an ongoing debate about the order in which the main texts concerning freedom were written, which complicates the discussion about Aquinas's intellectual development. Kevin Flannery argues that De Malo 6 is a much earlier work than usually thought, from no later than 1259, and that parts of De Veritate 24:1 are in fact based on De Malo 6. See Flannery, Kevin L., Acts Amid Precepts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 247–49Google Scholar.
2 The term goes back to classical literature and legal formulations where it indicates the ‘power to decide’ or ‘freedom of action’. See Westberg, Daniel, Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 81–82Google Scholar, and Kahn, Charles H., “Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine,” in The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, ed. Dillon, John M. and Long, A.A. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 250Google Scholar.
3 See Korolec, J. B., “Free Will and Free Choice,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Kretzmann, Norman, Kenny, Anthony, and Pinborg, Jan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 630–34Google Scholar.
4 See, for example, Westberg, Korolec, and also Timothy Suttor in Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Gilby, Thomas, 60 vols. (London: Blackfriars: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963ff), vol. 11, 237Google Scholar, footnote a.
5 See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.83:1ad3; hereafter referred to without title. The Latin text is from the Leonine edition of Aquinas's complete works, that is, Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia (Rome, 1882-), Volumes 4–11. The English translation in this article is based on that found in St.Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1948)Google Scholar, 5 volumes.
6 This does not rule out the fact that there are other senses of freedom for Aquinas which lie outside the range of meanings included in liberum arbitrium and libertas; such as the free will (libera voluntas) that inclines us to our final end, even though it excludes any choice and involves a kind of natural necessity. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, 24:1ad20, hereafter referred to as DV. The Latin text is from the Leonine edition of Aquinas's complete works, that is, Sancti Thomae de Aquino Opera Omnia (Rome, 1882-), Volume 22, Parts 1–3. The English translation in this article is based on that found in Aquinas, Thomas, The Disputed Questions on Truth, translated by Mulligan, Robert W., McGlynn, James V. and Schmidt, Robert W., (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952)Google Scholar, 3 volumes.
7 I.83:1c.
8 I.83:1c.
9 I.83:1c.
10 I.83:1obj3. Citing Aristotle's Metaphysics 1:2, 982b25.
11 I.83:1ad3.
12 I-II.1:2c. He is citing Peter Lombard, II Sent., 24, 3. Cf. I.83:2obj2.
13 I.83:3c.
14 I.83:3c.
15 I.83:3ad2. Citing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 3:3, 1113a12.
16 I-II.13:1c.
17 Finnis, John, “Object and Intention in Moral Judgments According to Aquinas,”The Thomist 55 (1991): 5–6Google Scholar.
18 I-II.13:2c.
19 I-II.13:2c.
20 Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts, 163.
21 I.83:1c.
22 I-II.13:6c.
23 I-II.13:6c.
24 Gallagher, David M., “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,”Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 76 (1994): 248CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Ibid.: 249.
26 I-II.13:6ad1.
27 I-II.13:6ad2.
28 This is one reason why Yves Simon insists that the key to Thomistic freedom is superdetermination and not indetermination. Simon, Yves R., Freedom of Choice (New York: Fordham University Press, 1969), 152–53Google Scholar.
29 I-II.15:3ad3.
30 See Boyle, Joseph M., Grisez, Germain, and Tollefsen, Olaf, Free Choice: A Self-Referential Argument (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 13Google Scholar.
31 See Finnis, John, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 66–70Google Scholar.
32 See Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts, 162–66. The examples that follow are based on Flannery's.
33 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3:5, 1113b6.
34 De Malo 6c [287–296], Thomas Aquinas, “Quaestiones Disputatae De Malo,” in Sancti Thomae De Aquino Opera Omnia (Rome: 1882-); hereafter referred to as DM. The English translation is from St. Thomas Aquinas, On Evil, translated by Jean Oesterle (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). The body of DM 6 (a single article) is very long, and for this reason, instead of just referring in the customary manner to DM 6c [corpus], I also provide line numbers for each quotation in square brackets. These refer to the line numbering in the above Latin edition.
35 DV 23:1c.
36 Donagan, Alan, “Thomas Aquinas on Human Action,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Kretzmann, Norman, Kenny, Anthony, and Pinborg, Jan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 652–53Google Scholar.
37 I.83:1c.
38 I.82:4c.
39 I-II.9:1c.
40 I-II.10:2c.
41 I-II.10:2c.
42 I.83:3c.
43 I.83:3ad2.
44 I-II.13:2c and I-II.15:3ad3.
45 The object of the intellect is ‘universal being and truth’ (ens et verum universale), as Aquinas writes in I-II.9:1c.
46 DV 22:15c.
47 He is commenting on I.83:3.
48 Brock, Stephen, Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 170Google Scholar, footnote 75; italics in original.
49 Ibid., 170, see 61–72; italics in original.
50 See, for example, Hause, Jeffrey, “Thomas Aquinas and the Voluntarists,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 6 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eardley, P. S., “Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Will,” The Review of Metaphysics 56 (2003)Google Scholar; and Pasnau, Robert, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. section 7.4, 221–233Google Scholar.
51 See Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,” for a particularly fine account of all these issues.
52 Finnis, John, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 93Google Scholar, see ch. IV, 81–97.
53 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 510Google Scholar.
54 This idea of autonomy in Aquinas is brought out in Rhonheimer, Martin, Natural Law and Practical Reason: A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy (Fordham University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, see esp. viii and 143.
55 I.83:3c.
56 DV 22:6c.
57 I-II.1:2c, citing Peter Lombard, II Sent., 24, 3.
58 DM 6ad10.
59 I.83:1ad3. But this doesn't exclude God being the first cause of our freedom, as we shall see.
60 See DM 6c [360–415].
61 But it is important to remember that the will's control over the exercise of an act also has some bearing on the act's specification, since any specification depends on a particular act of the intellect which itself needs activating.
62 DM 6c [361–363].
63 DM 6c [364–365].
64 DM 6c [378–381].
65 Cf. I-II.10:4 and I-II.109:2ad1.
66 DM 6c [390–391].
67 Aquinas refers to the conclusions in the chapter De bona fortuna of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, 8:2, 1248a16–29. Aquinas's whole theory rests on this Aristotelian assumption that there is an ‘external’ or ‘transcendent’ source of the will's dynamism.
68 DM 6c [412–415].
69 Gallagher, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in Thomas Aquinas,” 256.
70 Ibid.: 276.
71 Brock, Action and Conduct, 40, footnote 79.