The Life of the Mind (48 page)

What is it then that causes the will to will? What sets the will in motion? The question is inevitable, but the answer turns out to lead into an infinite regress. For if the question were to be answered, "will you not inquire again for the cause of that cause if you find it?" Will you not wish to know "the cause of the will prior to the will"? Could it not be inherent in the Will to have no cause in this sense? "For either the will is its own cause or it is not a will."
⁸³
The Will is a fact which in its sheer contingent factuality cannot be explained in terms of causality. Or—to anticipate a late suggestion of Heidegger's—since the will experiences itself as
causing
things to happen which otherwise would not have happened, could it not be that it is neither the intellect nor our thirst for knowledge (which could be stilled by straightforward information), but precisely the will that lurks behind our quest for causes—as though behind every Why there existed a latent wish not just to learn and to know but to learn the know-how?

 

Finally, still tracing the difficulties that are described but not explained in the Letter to the Romans, Augustine comes to interpret the scandalous side of Paul's doctrine of grace: "Law came in to increase the trespass; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more." From that it is indeed difficult not to conclude: "Let us do evil that good may come." Or, to put it more mildly, that it is worthwhile to have been incapable of doing good because of the overwhelming joy of grace-as Augustine himself once said.
⁸⁴
His answer in the
Confessions
points to the strange ways of the soul even in default of any specifically religious experiences. The soul is "more delighted at finding or recovering the things it loves, than if it had always had them.... The victorious commander triumphs ... and the greater the peril in battle, the greater joy in triumph....A friend is sick ... he is restored, and though he walks not with his former strength, there is such joy, as there had not been when he was able to walk strongly and soundly." And so it is with all things; human life is "full of witnesses" to it. "The greatest joy is ushered in by the greatest painfulness"—this is the "allotted mode of being" of all living things, from "the angel to the worm." Even God, since He is a living god, "doth joy more over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine persons that need no repentance."
⁸⁵
This mode of being
(modus)
is equally valid for base and for noble things, for mortal things and things divine.

This is certainly the quintessence of what Paul had to say, but expressed in a non-descriptive, conceptual way: without appealing to any purely theological interpretation, it effaces the edge of Paul's lamentations and latent accusations, from which only the
argumentum ad hominem,
the Job-like question "Who are
you
to ask such questions and to raise such objections?" could save him.

In Augustine's refutation of Stoicism, we can see a similar transformation and solidification brought about by means of conceptual thought. What was actually scandalous in that doctrine was not that man could will to say "No" to reality but that this No was not enough; in order to find tranquillity, man was told, he had to train his will to say "Yes" and to "let your will be that events should happen as they do." Augustine understands that this willed submissiveness presupposes a severe limitation of the willing capacity itself. Although in his view every
velle
is accompanied by a
nolle,
the freedom of the faculty is limited because no created being can will against creation, for this would be—even in the case of suicide—a will directed not only against a counter-will but against the very existence of the willing or nilling subject. The will, the faculty of a living being, cannot say "I'd rather not
be,
" or "I would prefer nothingness as such." Anybody who says "I'd rather not exist than be unhappy" cannot be trusted, since while he is saying it he is still alive.

Yet this may be so only because being alive always implies a wish to go on being; therefore most people prefer "to be unhappy than to be nothing at all." But what about those who say "If I had been consulted before I existed, I'd have preferred not to exist rather than be unhappy"? They have not considered that even this proposition is stated on the firm ground of Being; if they would consider the matter properly, they would find that their very unhappiness makes them, as it were, exist less than they wish; it takes some existence from them. "The degree of their unhappiness is commensurate with the distance from that which
is
in the highest degree
[quod summe est\
" and therefore outside the temporal order, which is shot through with non-existence—"for temporal things have no existence before they exist; while they exist, they are passing away; once they have passed away, they will never exist again." All men fear death, and this feeling is "truer" than any opinion that may lead you "to think that you ought to will not to exist," for the fact is that "beginning to exist is the same as proceeding toward non-existence." In short, "all things by the very fact that they
are
are good," evil and sin included; and this not only because of their divine origin and because of a belief in a Creator-God, but also because your own existence prevents you from either thinking or willing absolute non-existence. In this context it should be noted that Augustine (although most of what I have been quoting is drawn from the last part of his
De libero arbitrio voluntatis)
nowhere demands, as Eckhart later does, that "A good man ought to conform his will to the divine will, so that he will what God wills: hence, if God has willed me to sin, I should not will not to have committed my sin; this is my true repentance."
⁸⁶

 

What Augustine infers from this theory of Being is not Will but Praise: "Give thanks that you are"; "praise all things for the very fact that they are." Avoid saying not only " 'It would be better if [sinners] had not existed,' but also "They ought to have been made differently.'" And the same is true for everything, since "all things have been created in their proper order," and if you "dare to find fault with a desert," do so only because you can compare it "with what is better." It is "as if a man who grasped by his reason perfect roundness became disgusted" because he could not find it in nature. He should be grateful for having the idea of roundness.
⁸⁷

In the previous volume, I spoke of the ancient Greek notion that all appearances, inasmuch as they
appear,
not only imply the presence of sentient creatures capable of perceiving them but also demand recognition and
praise.
This notion was a kind of philosophical justification of poetry and the arts; world-alienation, which preceded the rise of Stoic and Christian thought, succeeded in obliterating it from our tradition of philosophy—though never entirely from the reflections of poets. (You can still find it, very emphatically expressed, in W. H. Auden—who speaks of "That singular command /I do not understand,/
Bless what there is for being,
/Which has to be obeyed, for/What else am I made for,/Agreeing or disagreeing?"
⁸⁸
—in the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and, of course, in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.) Where we find it in a strictly Christian context, it already has an uncomfortably argumentative flavor, as though it were simply a necessary inference from the unquestioned faith in a Creator-God, as though Christians were duty-bound to repeat God's words after the Creation—"And God saw everything ... and ... it was very good." In any event, Augustine's observations on the impossibility of nilling absolutely because you cannot nill your own existence while you are nilling—hence cannot nill absolutely even by committing suicide—are an effective refutation of the mental tricks Stoic philosophers had recommended to enable men to withdraw from the world while still living in it.

***

We return to the question of the Will in the
Confessions,
which are almost entirely non-argumentative and rich in what we today would call "phenomenological" descriptions. For although Augustine starts by conceptualizing Paul's position, he goes far beyond that, also far beyond his own first conceptual conclusions—that "to will and to be able to perform are not the same," that "the law would not command if there were no will, nor would grace help if will were enough," that it is our mind's allotted mode of being to perceive only through the succession of opposites, of day becoming night and night becoming day, and we learn about justice only by experiencing injustice, about courage only through cowardice, and so on. Reflecting on what had actually happened during the "hot contention wherein he had engaged with himself' before his conversion, he discovered that Paul's interpretation of a struggle between flesh and spirit was wrong. For "more easily did my body obey the weakest willing of my soul, in moving its limbs at its nod, than my soul had obeyed itself in carrying out this great will that could be done in the will alone."
⁸⁹
Hence the trouble was not the dual nature of man, half carnal and half spiritual; it was to be found in the faculty of the Will itself.

"Whence is this monstrosity? and why is it?...The mind-commands the body, and is obeyed instantly; the mind commands itself and is resisted?"
("Uncle hoc monstrum, et quare istud? Imperat animus corpori, et paretur statim; imperat animus sibi et resistitur?")
The body has no will of its own and is obedient to the mind although that is different from the body. But the moment "the mind commands the mind to will, and the mind is not something different, yet it does not [will]. Whence is this monstrosity and why? I say it commands that itself would will a thing, and would not give that command unless it willed, and it does not that which is commanded." Perhaps, he continues, this can be explained by a weakness in the will, a lack of commitment: The mind perhaps "willeth not entirely, and therefore does not command entirely ... and therefore what it commands
is
not." But who does the commanding here, the mind or the will? Does the mind
(animus)
command the will, and does it hesitate, so that the will does not receive an unequivocal command? The answer is no, for it is "the will [that] commandeth that there be a will, not another will [as would be the case if the
mind
were divided between conflicting wills], but the same will itself."
⁹⁰

The split occurs in the will itself; the conflict arises neither out of a split between mind and will nor out of a split between flesh and mind. This is attested by the very fact that the Will always speaks in imperatives: "Thou shalt will," says the Will to itself. Only the Will itself has the power to issue such commands, and "if the will were 'entire,' it would not command itself to be." It is in the Will's nature to double itself, and in this sense, wherever there is a will, there are always "two wills neither of which is entire [foia], and what is present to one of them is absent from the other." For this reason you always need two antagonistic wills to will at all; it is "not monstrous therefore partly to will and partly to nill"
("Et ideo sunt duae voluntates, quia una earum tota non est.... Non igitur monstrum partim velle, partim nolle").
The trouble is that it is the same willing ego that simultaneously wills and nills: "It was I who willed, I who nilled, I, I myself; I neither willed totally nor nilled entirely"—and this does not mean that I was of "two minds, one good, the other evil," but that the uproar of two wills in one and the same mind "rent me asunder."
⁹¹

The Manicheans explained the conflict by the assumption of two contrary natures, one good and the other evil. But "if there were as many contrary natures as there are wills that resist themselves, there would not be two natures only but many." For we find the same conflict of wills where no choice between good and evil is at stake, where both wills must be called evil or both good. Whenever a man tries to come to a decision in such matters, "you find one soul fluctuating between various wills." Suppose somebody tries to make up his mind between "going to the circus or the theatre, if both be open the same day; or, thirdly, to rob another's house ... or, fourthly, to commit adultery ... all these meeting together in the same junction of time, and all being equally desired, which cannot at one time be acted." Here we have four wills, all bad and all conflicting with each other and "rending' the willing ego. And the same is true for "wills that are good."
⁹²

Augustine does not say here how these conflicts are resolved except that he admits that at a certain moment a goal is chosen "whither the one entire wdl may be borne which before was divided into many." But the healing of the will, and this is decisive, does not come about through divine grace. At the end of the
Confessions
he returns once more to the problem and relying on certain very different considerations that are explicitly argued in the treatise
On the Trinity
(which he was to spend fifteen years writing, from 400 to 416), he diagnoses the ultimate unifying will that eventually decides a man's conduct as
Love.

Love is the "weight of the soul," its law of gravitation, that which brings the soul's movement to its rest. Somewhat influenced by Aristotelian physics, he holds that the end of all movement is rest, and now he understands the emotions—the motions of the soul—in analogy to the movements of the physical world. For "nothing else do bodies desire by their weight than what souls desire by their love." Hence, in the
Confessions:
"My weight is my love; by it I am borne whithersoever I am borne."
⁹³
The soul's gravity, the essence of who somebody is, and which as such is inscrutable to human eyes, becomes manifest in this love.

 

Let us retain the following. First: The split within the Will is a conflict, and not a dialogue, and it is independent of the content that is willed. A bad will is no less split than a good one and vice versa. Second: The will as the commander of the body is no more than an executive organ of the mind and as such quite unproblematic. The body obeys the mind because it is possessed of no organ that would make disobedience possible. The will, addressing itself to itself, arouses the counter-will because the exchange is entirely mental; a contest is possible only between equals. A will that would be "entire," without a counter-will, could no longer be a will properly speaking. Third: Since it is in the nature of the will to command and demand obedience, it is also in the nature of the will to be resisted. Finally: Within the framework of the
Confessions,
no solution to the riddle of this "monstrous" faculty is given; how the will, divided against itself, finally reaches the moment when it becomes "entire" remains a mystery. If this is the way the will functions, how does it ever arrive at moving me to act—to prefer, for instance, robbery to adultery? For Augustine's "fluctuations of the soul" between many equally desirable ends are quite unlike Aristotle's deliberations, which concern not ends but means to an end that is given by human nature. No such ultimate arbiter appears in Augustine's main analyses except at the very end of the
Confessions,
when he suddenly begins to speak of the Will as a kind of Love, "the weight of our soul," but without giving any account of this strange equation.