Freedom vs. Freedom, Part 4: Implications

Interrogating Our Present

Over the last three posts, I’ve summarized the rise of voluntarism and nominalism, and explored how these late medieval ideas came to shape our modern world. (If you haven’t read those yet, I’d recommend doing so before proceeding!)

Freedom vs. Freedom, Part 3: Applications

Having ventured from the 14th century to the 21st, gentle reader, you might be asking yourself why I have spent over 5,000 words exploring this history. All kinds of forces, events, and ideas have shaped the present moment. Why do these two (old and largely unknown, outside of the academy) ideas merit so much attention?

Hegel famously said that philosophy is only able to fully explain its own age, its own foundations, when that age is coming to an end.¹ And indeed, we only begin to ask serious and troubling questions about our own way of thinking—critical examining the way we examine things—when we begin to think that perhaps our examinations are failing to offer good explanations.

And so it is precisely because I (like many before me) have long felt that our dominant ways of living and thinking are insufficient that I wanted to try and figure out where these ways of living and thinking came from, with the idea that such knowledge might help us repair what is not working. One of the myths of modernity is that modernity is basically sui generis: it arrived as a stroke of insight, quite literally an enlightenment, when free men realized their true nature and simply announced it to the world. The Enlightenment is framed precisely this way: a long age of darkness simply vanished as the light was turned on.

But of course this is indeed a myth, and it hides a truth that is difficult for those most enthusiastic about the Enlightenment and modernity to admit: that modernity was itself (of course!) caused by those eras that came before it. So: the Renaissance set the stage for the Enlightenment, but that means that the Renaissance was given birth by the late medieval period. In other words, the very Dark Ages that the Enlightenment saw itself as a repudiation of was the mother of that Enlightenment. Modernity was a slow progressing movement, in many ways a product of medieval Europe as much as some kind of transcending of it.

That conclusion—which seems as obvious and necessary as it is surely inconvenient—is at the heart of my curiosity about voluntarism and nominalism, because it seems to be these (very medieval!) ideas that were—and are—the engine of modernity, and of postmodernity as well (if we have indeed arrived at such a thing). This is not a conclusion I can take any credit for—the work of Gillespie and Harrison (as well as Hart) are the foundation I have built my own reflections on.² And indeed, this query at the heart of modernity, this effort to figure out how we got here is an old one; Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (which I am currently reading) and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (and many of his other books as well—none of which I have read yet) are two critical texts in this tradition, written many decades ago.

So this is my reason for studying voluntarism and nominalism: something is broken with modernity, and I’m desperate to fix it. But of course, some readers might question this claim. Is modernity broken? Does it need fixing? I said above that I have long felt that modernity is insufficient, that there is something wrong with our current ways of living and thinking, something that needs fixing. But is this so? Surely, many people seem to think that modernity is great, working well, and that all we need is more of it. And I certainly agree that the modern era has delivered lots of good changes that I very much want to keep (not only the conveniences of modern technology, but democracy, something closer to women’s equality, LGBTQ rights, etc.) So I think it’s critical that we get a handle on what is or isn’t working with modernity, before we conclude our (very short, summary, imperfect) investigation of voluntarism, nominalism, and how they’ve shaped us.

A Very Modern Problem

If most of us can quickly enumerate many great achievements of modern thought—the parenthetical list above just being the start of such a catalog—with a moment’s more reflection, many of us can also enumerate many problems with and indeed challenges to modernity. Interestingly, many of the great things are easily paired with major problems: we are surrounded by technological advancement that genuinely improves human life. At the same time, that technology not only threatens many people’s livelihoods, but producing it is also poisoning our environment. We live in a time of unprecedented information connectivity, and yet people have never been lonelier than they are today. Modern science has given us not only the basis for that aforementioned convenient technology, but also profound new degrees of understanding our cosmos. Yet, this view of reality is also “disenchanted” and mechanical, and for many makes not only genuine spirituality but even a sense of the meaningfulness of life impossible to hold on to. The modern market provides a seemingly endless array of products and services (as long as you have the cash!). Yet, the quality of many of those products and services is often lackluster at best, and even when we get what we want it never actually seems to make us happy.

Again, this is only a partial list of some of the problems of modern life. And of course, these problems are not unique to modernity. Loneliness, meaninglessness, the emptiness of consumption—these are problems as old as human society itself. Yet I think most people would agree intuitively—and there seems to be plenty of empirical verification for this intuition as well—that these problems have intensified in the last few centuries. At both a social and individual level, indeed, these crises threaten to swallow us whole.

These two realizations—both the advantages of modernity and its pitfalls—set the agenda for our work below. Somehow, we need to throw out the bathwater of loneliness, meaninglessness, and emptiness, while retaining the baby of indoor plumbing, women’s rights, and tolerance of difference. Whether such a maneuver is possible is, of course, yet to be known.

Chiseling Away at the Foundations

In any event, as I argued last week, it is my contention that the modern worldview is essentially the application and operationalization of nominalism and voluntarism—for better and for worse. Nominalism set the stage for modern science by insisting that individual things must be studied as individual things, and that the whole is always an agglomeration of its parts. This doubtlessly was crucial in the major scientific breakthroughs at the heart of modern technology. But as the world came to be seen as a giant mechanism (or a mere heap of mechanisms), not only religion but indeed any spirituality as such increasingly became impossible to sustain. This had not only psychological and social ramifications (not to mention spiritual ones), but ethical ones as well. After all, if everything is a mechanism, including humans, then what does it even mean to say that human life is sacred? Indeed, can any moral claims be sustained in a purely nominalistic, mechanistic framework?

Nietzsche clearly thought not, and though plenty of people have sought to develop a system of genuine ethical concern for others while simultaneously regarding those others as nothing but physical mechanisms, such proposals do not seem to have succeeded.³ Instead, what seems to often happen is that an unspoken metaphysical extra is assumed in ethical reasoning, but omitted in other modes of thought (biology, for example). Thus, the reality of someone else’s pain as a genuine phenomenal experience is taken seriously in ethics, but simply pulled off stage in biology.

This maneuver—so common that I think we barely notice it anymore—speaks to the contradictions at the heart of modern thought. I’ve written before about the way in which a materialist method in early 17th century science eventually metastasized into a materialist metaphysic. Someone like Francis Bacon could pursue knowledge of matter as matter without regard to “spiritual” or phenomenal concerns while openly admitting that this meant he was slicing off one aspect of reality in order to study it more closely. For Bacon, this materialist methodology in no way presumed a materialist metaphysic. But for someone like Francis Crick in the 20th century, they were really one and the same. Even so, Crick still understood himself as a humanist, and someone who was worried about human rights and human flourishing. But if the events at the base of the human animal—chemical and physical reactions—are not ontologically or metaphysically different from the events at the base of a piece of quartz or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, what is the factual basis for caring about human rights as such?

As I already alluded to above, this is one of the crucial dislocations of modern thought and its nominalist metaphysic. If pain is simply a physical event, an electrochemical event in the brain not meaningfully different from electricity moving through wires in my lamp or the chemical reactions that take place in the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, then why should we regard it as something uniquely worthy of our attention?

Now, I imagine many readers here want to interject that we care about suffering precisely because we do indeed experience it, and we know it to be, essentially, the definition of what is bad. No one has to tell us that pain is bad, the very experience of pain makes us want to stop the experience (phenomenologically, then, suffering is that phenomenon that signals the desire for its own negation). But notice the elision here: we have moved from a mechanistic, materialistic, objective description of beings as objects and are now discussing our own immediate, existential experience of being. As I have repeatedly argued on this substack,⁴ there is no philosophical framework that can unify a materialist metaphysic with any kind of realist attitude towards our own immediate (phenomenal) experience of existing. Consider that the latter is the only thing that I don’t think we can reasonably doubt,⁵ this is a big problem for a materialist metaphysic.

And if our society is built on just such a metaphysic, well—we would expect friction, confusion, anger, and despair, since we would be publicly affirming a view of the world that literally tells us we (as phenomenality) don’t actually exist. I submit, dear reader, that this is no small problem.

Voluntelling and Voluntold

That’s not to say that the modern era has no anthropology or psychology, of course. And this is where voluntarism steps up to the plate. We saw back in part 1 that voluntarism began as a theological doctrine, a claim that God was a pure, sovereign, unconstrained will, and that any other “aspect” or “attribute” of God was subordinate to that will. So, for example, God was only good to the extent that God willed to be good, and since God’s will was sovereign over any idea of goodness, that meant, at least from one perspective, God could choose to not be “good”—or, to put it another way, whatever we meant by God’s being good was so different from what we meant when we say that a person or a thing was good, that God’s goodness was essentially unknown to us.⁶

This view of the will as the sovereign reality of God’s “personality” would come not only to shape much of modern theology (especially in Lutheran and Reformed thought), but would also jump across the theological-human fence, becoming the basis for modern anthropology. Thus, in the modern view, the human being is understood as an agent, as a chooser, as a willing that seeks to fulfill that for which it wills. More than anything, this is evident when we consider what we even mean by the idea of a free will. For while it’s true that many people today deny the idea of a free will (thereby privileging nominalist metaphysics over voluntarist anthropology—a fracture in modern thought we will return to below), whether one believes in free will or not, what the idea of free will actually is is largely taken for granted. This is known as the “libertarian” view of the freedom of the will (this should not be confused with political libertarianism, though they are not unrelated.)

On this view of the freedom of the will, in order to be truly free, a will must be capable of making any choice which is logically and physically possible. So, on this view, if someone offers me chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream, I must actually be able to choose either, arbitrarily. As we will see below, this has important metaphysical implications. But for the politics and anthropology of the Enlightenment, that I indeed could make such a choice was taken from granted. The restrictions on the exercise of the will were seen as social and political: for example, someone might want to choose to worship as a Lutheran, but if they lived in a Roman Catholic-majority country, the state might prohibit them from doing so. Likewise, someone else might want to wear fancy clothes, but in many feudal societies, commoners were prohibited from wearing clothing associated with the nobility.

From the perspective of the Enlightenment, such restrictions were a violation of the free exercise of the will of the individual, and a more just social and political order would allow them to make whatever choices on those matters they desired. If the king wanted to make chocolate ice cream illegal, for example, the Enlightenment political project would condemn such a move as tyrannical and a violation of the individual’s free will.

One of the principal ways that such freedom was understood and operationalized was in the realm of property. On the modern, Enlightenment view of property ownership, to own something is to exercise an absolute right to that thing, and to have, as much as possible, complete sovereignty over that thing. Government interference in ownership is either tolerated as a necessary evil or seen as the manifestation of evil itself (depending on how libertarian one’s liberalism is). Whereas in previous eras, property was always something networked into broader social structures—family, clan, monarchy, etc.—and was thereby seen as something that served the interests of those structures, an instrument to be employed to achieve other ends, now the exercise of sovereign property rights is itself the end, the purpose of ownership. To will, and to have one’s will sated.

It’s worth noting the connection here between the change in social and economic ideas and theological ones: just as theological voluntarism severed the divine will from any broader or deeper set of divine attributes, such that the divine will did not serve the goals established by divine love or divine mercy, likewise the modern conception of property severed the link between the will of the property owner and any broader or deeper conception of their identity, either as an individual or as a member of society: to own something was to have will over it, tout court. Any suggestion that the property owner has an obligation to exercise that ownership in a way restrained by broader social, economic, or spiritual goals is itself seen as a form of tyranny, a restriction of the sovereign will of the individual. And we see this very ideology at work today when we hear, for example, that corporations’ only responsibility is to their stockholders (who, after all, own the corporation).

And of course, voluntarism was not limited to philosophical speculation or economic justification. It came to be central to basic popular psychology, to the way we understood ourselves: as individual wills, whose happiness depends on being able to assert our wills as much as possible. From this viewpoint, our relationships with other people, for example, are simply opportunities to gain from them what we want. Indeed, under the voluntarist perspective, any interaction with another person is nothing but a contest of wills. When we speak to our spouse, when we direct our children, when we pass someone on the street—in all these moments, the only question voluntarism allows us to ask is “how can I get what I want here?” Such a view of human life reaches its apotheosis, of course, in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, who valorized the will to power as the only reality of human life.⁷

As we will see next time, such a view of life runs into serious metaphysical problems. But before we dive into that mess, it’s worth pausing here and noting that the voluntarist view of human life is fundamentally awful. For the voluntarist, there can be no genuine connection with others, nor can there really be any true beauty or revelation. Everything is reduced to an object of desire or revulsion, an instrument for my will to manipulate for its own ends. The human being described by voluntarism is estranged from itself, incapable of really living a life worth living.

Choosing a Different Choosing

Again, it’s worth remembering that this view of human life is relatively recent, and that people had different views of the human being—and indeed of human freedom—before. Now, of course, there are many views of human freedom and meaning we could contrast with the western voluntarist view, but even if we just limit ourselves to western medieval European thought (which is to limit ourselves quite a bit!), we have a rich alternative view of human freedom. This perspective it often call (confusingly!) “intellectualism”, and it is opposed to “libertarianism”. We have seen that the latter applies the voluntarist lens to the human being. Just as an appreciation of theological voluntarism helped us to see what voluntarism had to say about humans, the same can be said for the intellectualist view of freedom.

On the pre-voluntarist, intellectualist view of the divine will, as discussed back in part 1, God’s will was just one “part” or “aspect” of the reality of God, as viewed from the human perspective.⁸ Thus, the will operated along with other attributes of God, such as God’s love or compassion. The will took the objectives of God, as determined by the fullness of who God is, and then worked to achieve those ends. So, for example, if God loves humanity (and indeed the whole creation) infinitely, and yet humanity comes to endanger itself by turning from God, God might choose to Incarnate Godself in order to restore and save humanity.⁹

On this view, God’s will does not operate in some totally separate and sovereign way apart from the fullness of who God is. Instead, God as willing is only one “aspect” of God, which can only be understood as one part of the fuller whole. God’s will serves to realize God’s love, and so God is truly faithful, etc. The intellectualist view of God’s freedom is not concerned to defend the idea that God could choose to be wicked or violent or ridiculous, because it takes it as an article of faith that God definitely isn’t any of those things, anyway. Voluntarism was so obsessed to protect God’s freedom that it insisted God must be able to do things that God would not want to do. Intellectualism saw such a defense as pointless and myopic.

Now, the anthropology of pre-voluntarist western Europe tracks this intellectualism in theology: what human freedom meant was the freedom to do those things that one truly wanted to do. For the voluntarist/libertarian, when I am presented with two kinds of ice cream, it needs to be the case that I can choose vanilla, even if I prefer chocolate, otherwise I am not truly free. But for the intellectualist, this is a red herring. Why would we be concerned about the ability to make a choice that we don’t actually want to make? If I know I prefer chocolate to vanilla, why would I be concerned to defend my right to make a choice I won’t want to make? From the intellectualist point of view, what is important about freedom is whether we are free to do what we actually want—or, actually, if we are free to do what is really best for us, what is actually true of us. (So in this scenario, perhaps the truly free choice is to not take any ice cream at all!)

We can see the divide between these two positions if we consider an important and difficult question: is an addict who can sate their addiction free? Consider someone addicted to cocaine. Let’s say they have lots of money and enough connections to avoid interruption by law enforcement. So they can buy as much cocaine as they want and use it whenever they want, without any social or political interference. Is this person free?

From a voluntarist viewpoint, at least at first glance, it seems so: assuming the person wills to use cocaine, the fact that they can sate that desire seems to be the only question in play. They desire to feel the high of cocaine, and they can achieve that. Since the only question of freedom is the freedom of the will, that could be the end of the matter.¹⁰ Indeed, even if they decided not to use cocaine, this action would only be significant as an act of willing—it could not be regarded as better than the opposite choice, since, in order to be free, the will cannot be constrained by any values beyond itself.

For the intellectualist, though, things are definitely more complicated. This person, addicted to cocaine, might realize, at least at certain moments of clarity, not only that cocaine is bad and dangerous for them, but also that using it is preventing them from pursuing other goods: relationships might have been lost, hobbies abandoned, and feelings of calm or comfort long rendered impossible. Thus, the intellectualist could argue that an addict who can sate their addiction is actually unfree precisely because they are able to do what they would truly want to do, if this one overriding desire were not dominating them. In other words, because the intellectualist realizes that the will is only one part of the human person, and that genuine freedom is freedom not just of the will but of the whole person, the arbitrary exercise of the will is not genuine freedom at all. Just as a divine will willing for the sake of willing was an emaciated theology, a human willing for the sake of willing is an emaciated anthropology.

Instead, human thriving—human freedom—had to mean that the human being was properly oriented to their true end and goal, what was actually good (and true and beautiful). But this kind of broader teleological view of the human person was precisely what voluntarism—and nominalism—had foreclosed upon.

Here, then, we can return to the original question I began this piece with: what’s wrong with modernity? Well, modernity is built on a nominalist, reductive, materialist metaphysics that renders any real appreciation of our own phenomenal experience impossible and which gives us a view of reality that is both hopeless and meaningless. Likewise, even if we ignore this and shift our attention to the psychological and phenomenological frame, voluntarism meets us there and gives us a view of the human person completely hollowed out of everything but a pure, arbitrarily willing. Not only our relationships, but even on our values, ethical or aesthetic, are essentially sacrificed on the altar of pure choice: for the voluntarist libertarian, what I choose does not matter, only that I can choose matters.

It is as evident as anything can be, to me at least, that such a view of our world and ourselves is not only metaphysically untenable, but also morally and aesthetically wrong—indeed, grotesque. And so this is why I am casting about in our distant past, following the thread of modern thought backwards to try and figure out how we got here, because I’m not at all pleased by where we have ended up. Even so, as I said above, that does not mean I would advocate for some kind of reactionary swerve to embrace a totally premodern (that is to say, pre-nominalist and pre-voluntarist) philosophy or social system. And I say this not only because I think such a move is flatly impossible, but also, as already indicated, that such a move would in so many ways be very bad: again, I want to get rid of the bathwater, but very much keep the baby.

Next week, in the fifth (and I hope, final—but I’m not promising!) installment of this series, I want to (as briefly as possible) point out the metaphysical problems with the nominalist-voluntarist modern position (thereby pointing out that there are reasons to reject it as an all-encompassing framework besides finding it unpleasant) and then discuss what we might actually do about all of this: what path could we take forward? How can we—can we—throw the bathwater out but keep the baby?…

Freedom vs. Freedom, Part 5: Beyond Freedom

1. Hegel’s “Owl of Minerva”.

2. Peter Harrison, Some New World and Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity. You can find links to both books’ publishers’ pages in part 1. Hart’s ideas on this topic were absolutely formative for me; you can find a great talk he gave here on youtube.

3. Utilitarianism, at least in certain incarnations, might be regarded as such an ethical approach. But its utility, so to speak, relies precisely on assuming the very thing that mechanistic materialism denies: that suffering as suffering truly happens, even if utilitarianism wants to simultaneously regard this qualitative measure as a quantitative one.

4. Is a Substack also a “blog”, a new and particular form of that genre of internet publishing? Or is it just a “substack”? We often refer to videos on Youtube as “youtubes” but we can certainly also refer to them as “videos” or even “Youtube video” (though that expression definitely has boomer energy). But I’m never quite sure what to call this thing I write on each week. Substack? Blog? Publication? World-Wide-Web-a-zine? This is the kind of question, dear reader, I need your guidance on.

5. This is related to but not necessarily identical to Descartes famous cogito ergo sum. But I don’t want to dive down that rabbit hole here and now.

6. It’s worth pointing out that this completely equivocal usage of “goodness” renders the term meaningless.

7. That such a view is untenable at a psychological or spiritual level is perhaps best evidenced by the way Nietzsche’s life ended: he had a kind of psychotic break when he saw a farmer mercilessly beat a horse who was too old and tired to move. Nietzsche burst into tears and wrapped his arms around the animal’s neck, seemingly in a fit of profound compassion. It would seem that after decades of insisting that only selfishness was real, Nietzsche realized that he had cut himself off from important truths about life. In any event, he did not write or speak much, if at all, after that event until his death. I’m not sure he was able to trek back down that terrible mountain he had ascended earlier.

8. The terms in quotations should be taken analogically. Like all classical western theists, I am committed to the doctrine of divine simplicity: God has no parts. We speak here in human terms because we are humans.

9. Warning: this account of the Incarnation is highly simplistic and non-technical! I am speaking in broad strokes here, because this piece is already way too long and so I can’t dig deeply into the metaphysics of the Incarnation here and now.

10. I imagine that those defending a libertarian view of freedom might want to object that they think that other desires that competed with the desire to get high could instead be the basis for action. But of course, to accept this kind of complex internal geography to human desire and willing is to already be moving towards the intellectualist position. For voluntarism to “work”, the ability to make an arbitrary choice must always be preserved. Of course, this means that the addict should be (theoretically) free to not choose the cocaine, but this option, as a metaphysical possibility, could be preserved even when the reality of addiction requires that it will not be exercised (here we see voluntaristic anthropology running headlong into nominalistic determinism—but more on that later)