INTRODUCTION

According to Anselm's official definition, freedom of choice is “the power to preserve rectitude of will for the sake of that rectitude itself.” From the point of view of contemporary metaphysics, this is one of the most unhelpful definitions imaginable. Does such freedom require alternative possibilities, for example? Is it compatible with causal determination? Is the exercise of such freedom a necessary and sufficient condition for moral responsibility? The definition sheds no light on these questions.

So we need to move on from Anselm’s definition to Anselm’s account of freedom. Here, though, we encounter the opposite problem. Where Anselm’s definition seems not to answer these questions at all, Anselm’s account seems to answer all these questions, sometimes with a yes and sometimes with a no. Consider the question about alternative possibilities. In De Libertate Arbitrii, Anselm seems clearly to deny that freedom involves alternative possibilities. God, the good angels, and the blessed dead cannot do otherwise than preserve rectitude, but they are still free – freer, in fact, than those who are capable of abandoning rectitude. On the other hand, in De Casu Diaboli Anselm seems to require alternative possibilities for freedom. For if an angel is to be just, Anselm says, he must have both the power to will rectitude and the power to will happiness. If only one power were given him, he would be able to will nothing but rectitude or nothing but happiness, as the case might be; being unable to will otherwise, his will would be neither just nor unjust. Now justice, according to De Veritate 12, is rectitude of will preserved for its own sake. So an angel without alternative possibilities cannot have rectitude of will, and a fortiori cannot preserve rectitude of will; hence, an angel without alternative possibilities is not free.

Preliminary remarks on terminology in Saussure and in his commentators

Throughout the Cours de linguistique générale (inter alia 24, 25, 56, 119, 121, 129) the reader finds the terms opposition and dualité. Opposition is used in its general sense in the passages cited above but occurs elsewhere (167ff.) in a specific sense which brings it within the compass of one of the paired terms (différence/opposition) which shape the entire Cours de linguistique générale (henceforth Cours, CLG, or CGL in English), a sign's constituents, its form and its concept, being different from those of other signs for Saussure, but the sign as a whole being in opposition to other signs. In many commentaries on the Cours, the paired terms are themselves referred to as oppositions or dualities. While opposition is an apposite description of the relationship in which the terms in each pair stand to each other, i.e. a characterisation of the distinctiveness of the linguistic sign with respect to other linguistic signs, as defined in the text of the Cours (167), it is potentially misleading in its more general meaning, which can overshadow the Saussurean sense of distinctiveness by a suggestion of contrast or even of incompatibility. As for duality, though it does not entail the same problem, neither does it correspond to the sense in which Saussure uses dualité to denote a division inherent within the subject matter of linguistics itself (Hjelmslev's objet étudé), rather than in the analytical apparatus of the discipline. (See Gordon, 1996.)

INTRODUCTION

A good place to start in assessing a theory of truth is to ask whether the theory under discussion is consistent with Aristotle's commonsensical definition of truth from Metaphysics 4: “What is false says of that which is that it is not, or of that which is not that it is; and what is true says of that which is that it is, or of that which is not that it is not.” Philosophers of a realist bent will be delighted to see that Anselm unambiguously adopts the Aristotelian commonplace. A statement is true, he says, “when it signifies that what-is is.” But the theory of truth that Anselm builds on this observation is one that would surely have confounded Aristotle. For no matter what the topic, Anselm's thinking always eagerly returns to God; and the unchallenged centrality of God in Anselm's philosophical explorations is nowhere more in evidence than in his account of truth. Indeed, we see in the student's opening question in De Veritate that the entire discussion has God as its origin and its aim: “Since we believe that God is truth, and we say that truth is in many other things, I would like to know whether, wherever truth is said to be, we must acknowledge that God is that truth.” The student then reminds Anselm that in the Monologion he had argued from the truth of statements to an eternal supreme Truth.

My aim is to discuss Anselm of Canterbury's use of basic modal terms (necessity, possibility, impossibility) and his interpretation of the meaning of these and some related notions. I will first sketch modal conceptions in philosophical and theological traditions with which Anselm was familiar, and then take a look at some eleventh-century modal controversies entered in Peter Damian's On Divine Omnipotence and also discussed by Anselm. The third section deals with Anselm's views against the general historical background, and the last section is about his attempt to sketch the semantics of modal terms.

MODALITIES IN ANSELM’S SOURCES

The main line of the history of modal theories in ancient and medieval times can be described as follows. There are four originally Aristotelian ways of understanding the meaning of modal terms in ancient philosophy: the “statistical” or “temporal frequency interpretation” of modality, the conception of possibility as a potency, the conception of diachronic modalities (antecedent necessities and possibilities), and the idea of possibility as noncontradictoriness. I will explain below how these modal paradigms occur in Boethius (c. 480–523), whose works made them known to early medieval thinkers. Ancient conceptions did not include the view that the meaning of modal terms should be spelled out by considering simultaneous alternative states of affairs. This new idea was introduced into Western thought in early medieval discussions influenced by Augustine’s (354–430) theological conception of God as acting by choice between possible alternatives. Ancient habits of thinking continued to play an important role in scholasticism, However, and the systematic significance of the new conception was not fully realized before the extensive discussions by John Duns Scotus, William Ockham, John Buridan, and some other fourteenth-century thinkers. Many scholars have paid attention to the similarities between these late-medieval theories and the contemporary possible-worlds semantics for modal logic.

Introduction

This chapter offers a historical and theoretical perspective. A comprehensive understanding of Saussure's ideas requires some idea of how other linguists at the time dealt with the same topics. Only in this way can the novelty of his theory become clear, a novelty of which contemporary linguists were not fully aware. The key notions that are addressed in this chapter - system, arbitrariness and value - are at the very heart of Saussure's objectives, and are abstract and theoretical, even more so than other concepts in the CLG.

Saussure’s teachings were collected and reorganised, as is well known, from several sources, with the addition of unfinished personal papers and drafts. They are to be seen as the result of his previous efforts over many years concerning descriptive linguistics, and thus arise in fact from his own practice. The purpose of this new teaching (i.e. general linguistics) was not to put forward new data or discoveries about such and such a language, as Saussure did for instance when teaching Sanskrit or Gothic, but to confront the difficulties involved in making something worthwhile out of this mass of ‘facts’ from many languages, already fully described by linguists during the previous century. This, briefly speaking, was the goal of general linguistics among scholars at that time, although in Saussure’s opinion it was far from being achieved, or indeed fully initiated.

A book like this has to give a picture not only of the modern philosophical and theological interest of its subject's writings, but of the context in which he wrote. For a writer whose works have been the subject of debate for nearly a millennium, there is the additional task of seeking to convey the changing nuances of expectation with which he was read century by century. All this is of more than historical importance. To discuss in translation the thought of someone who chose his words very carefully in Latin is not necessarily to discuss exactly what he wrote. And to analyze ideas out of context is to discuss matters which, while they may be of high philosophical interest in themselves, may also not be exactly the topics or the solutions Anselm had in mind.

Anselm of Bec and Canterbury is read as a thinker in his own right and not merely as a prominent exponent of a mode of thought belonging to a particular period period of medieval thought. Nevertheless, he was in a number of respects a man of his time and the thought itself was conditioned by personal and historical circumstances which need to be understood if his ideas are to be interpreted with sensitivity to what preoccupied him and what he meant to say. This chapter is biographical and historical; it seeks to provide a brief but necessary context and to encourage the reader to consider in this light the “Anselmian” complexion of the topics covered in other chapters.

Underlying this chapter is the assumption that, in charting the history of ideas, it is important to situate them broadly in their contemporary intellectual context. In contrast to many commentators who sought the origin of some of the ideas contained in the Cours in the work of early German linguists, the intellectual historian Hans Aarsleff has insisted on the role of the 'Paris milieu' in shaping Saussure's ideas. This is not to deny the influence of the German comparative tradition, particularly on his dissertation or mémoire. While history and comparative linguistics remained an abiding interest for Saussure, it is nonetheless the theory of a systematic, synchronic linguistics as it appears in the Cours de linguistique générale which marks the beginning of European linguistics and which helped to launch structuralism in a wider arena. It is possible to argue that the young Saussure was already going beyond his German masters, with the ideas of language as a system, and of the phoneme as a concept if not a term, being embryonically present in the mémoire. Nevertheless, the ideas that would be published in the Cours were already shaped and articulated in his Paris lectures, according to Meillet. In order to understand developments in the study of language at the end of the nineteenth century, and the evolution of Saussure's own ideas and their subsequent impact, we shall look first at the discipline of linguistics as he found it on his arrival in Paris in the Autumn of 1880, and then at other disciplines, in line with Aarsleff's claim that 'The innovation begun by Bréal during the 1860s formed part of a broad movement in French intellectual life during the latter half of the nineteenth century' (1982: 310).

Philosophy and theology both ask what sort of being God is. One way toward an answer begins from the idea that God is in all respects perfect, and fills out the concept of God by reasoning about what a perfect being would be like. Anselm's is perhaps the name most associated with this program. The perfect-being project had a long history before Anselm. Plato, Aristotle, and such Stoics as Zeno and Cicero all offered perfect-being arguments. But Anselm probably had no access to these. It is likely that passages in Augustine and Boethius suggested the perfect-being project to him.

Anselm took up the perfect-being project in Monologion 15. Prior to this, the Monologion has argued that there is something “through which all good things are good” (Mon. 1) – something that plays the role of a property of goodness all good things share. But, Anselm suggests, whatever it is that makes all good things good must be a great good itself. (This suggestion is not backed up. Perhaps Anselm had some such thought as this in mind: delete this thing from reality, and all goodness goes with it. Perhaps an item’s goodness is in some proportion to how much less good things would be without it.) If this thing is good, it must be good through itself, as it is that through which all good things are good. So there is, Anselm thinks, a good thing whose goodness is entirely due to its own intrinsic character – not a function of its relations to anything else. Anselm asserts that this is the best of all goods, just because it is not good through anything other than itself (Mon. 1). The highest good turns out to be the efficient cause of all things other than itself (Mon. 7). So while it plays the role of a property of goodness, it is not after all a property. Properties are not causes.

The Rover. Or, The Banish't Cavaliers is the most frequently performed and read of Aphra Behn's plays, yet, when it was first staged by the Duke's Company at the Dorset Garden Theatre in London in March 1677, Behn went to some lengths to conceal her authorship of this play. The 'Person of Quality' who wrote the prologue (most likely Behn herself) used masculine pronouns to refer to the author, and this 'Person' further diverted attention away from the playwright by suggesting that this author was 'unknown' (v: Prologue, 5). As the acknowledged author of six plays, Behn was hardly an unknown in London's theatre-going circles at this time. In 1675, indeed, she had been listed in a theatrical compendium as 'Astrea Behn, a Dramatic writer, so much the more considerable as being a Woman, to the present English stage'.

Why, then, did this ‘considerable’ woman dramatist employ these strategies of concealment? The reason most frequently advanced is that Behn was trying to avoid a plagiarism charge relating to her use of material from Thomaso, Or The Wanderer, a play written by Thomas Killigrew, the recently retired Master of the Revels and manager of the rival King’s Players at Drury Lane. The playwright’s own words in the third issue of her play are also often invoked to support this reading. In this issue, Behn finally acknowledged her authorship of The Rover and, in a postscript, she revealed that initially she had trouble getting her play printed because of the rumour that it was Thomaso ‘alter’d’.

The pastoral tradition

Pastoral lyrics express the town persons' view of an alternative life that has never existed. From the lyrics of Theocritus (c. 310-250 bce), Moschus (fl. c. 150 bce) and Bion (fl. c. 100 bce) to the Restoration, the pastoral lyric offered an urbane and often wittily erotic representation of country life. The shepherd's life was depicted as an idyllic existence, barely at all laborious, and much occupied with love and composing verse. Virgil (70- 19 bce) set an indelible mark on the form with his ten eclogues (composed probably around 37 bce) which extended the range of the pastoral lyric to include politics, prophecy, and patronage. Since classical antiquity, the Eclogues have been understood in terms of the civil wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar's assumption of power. Virgil's shepherds, despite their pastoral location amidst fields and herds, and their concerns with love, do not exist in an entirely serene environment. The famous opening lines of Eclogue 1 set the contentment of Tityrus, who has his farm, against the anguish of Meliboeus, who has lost his – perhaps due to the redistribution of land following the civil wars:

By the late 1670s, England's political culture had witnessed the defeat of consensus and the triumph of contention. The battle over the country's political and religious future pitted the old republicans, the first Whigs, and Protestant nonconformists against Tories, High Anglicans, and Catholics. No public figure, work, or spectacle was immune from the rage of party. Those who made their living by the pen felt this disputatious atmosphere keenly. Many a poet, ideologue, scribbler, and hack drew his pen 'for one Party', or both, or first for one and then for the other. Jonathan Scott may have exaggerated the fluidity of political loyalties in the era of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis with his remark, that '1678's “Whigs” were 1681's “Tories”', but he made an important point so often missed in recent scholarship. Politics was divided into camps in the late Stuart era, but those camps were hardly fortresses. Combatants often slipped back and forth. Writers, in particular, were attuned to the twists and turns of political fortune. Both the poet, Elkanah Settle, and the propagandist, Henry Care, after years of producing very effective Whig polemic, transferred their loyalties (Settle in 1681, Care in 1683) and put their talents to work for the court.

But this was not true for Aphra Behn, one of the most prolific writers of the Restoration. Her politics throughout the 1670s and 1680s remained consistent. True, Behn had positioned herself on the winning side of the debate in the early 1680s when Whig debacle followed Whig debacle. But there she remained even as James II’s policies after 1687 made his Tory and Anglican supporters ever more queasy. Behn was not ‘disillusioned with James’s sagacity’ or any more ‘tolerant’ of the opposition in 1688 than she had been in 1681. Her Toryism was never ‘less than wholehearted’. She died in April 1689, an unreformed and unreformable Tory.

In the final stanza of Aphra Behn's pastoral poem, 'The Golden Age', the authenticity, integrity, and moral credit of the poem's nostalgic idealism is radically undermined by revealing the interest of its speaker:

The ideal of the economy of the ‘gift’, the language of pastoral ‘liberty’, is a ploy to get something for nothing. And the name Sylvia encourages us to connect this beloved with the beleaguered heroine Behn was writing about at the same time (‘The Golden Age’ was published in her Poems Upon Several Occasions of 1684), the recipient of the urgent love letters from her sister’s husband, who uses the precedent of the ‘golden age’ to seduce her into giving him the final favour as a gift to cement their love.