Augustine: Learning

In his work, On the Free Choice of the Will, St. Augustine attempts to solve the problem of evil, as presented by Anselm, using the free will defense.  Augustine claims that God gave mankind freedom of will and the ability to use his will for good or for evil; however, he also claims that evil is not learned :  "Learning is good, therefore we do not learn evil." (page 1?)  I find this line of the argument problematic for a few reasons.  (Actually I find this sentence to be rather false).  First of all, St. Augustine believes that knowledge should and can very well support faith in God; and that all knowledge must be good, as it reflects the genius of an unsurpassable great and highest being.  But since evil is present in the world, as man uses God's gift of free will defectively, it would seem that some knowledge - that is - some things known to man are also defective; unreflective of the goodness of God.  For example, I would imagine it is quite apparent that hatred and prejudice are learned characteristics.  While prejudice is also truly a consequence of ignorance, I think it can be said that such blind hatred does not arise without particular ascertained conceptions of a group or of an individual.  These conceptions are often passed from person to person; from parent to child.  Granted that there can be such knowledge that is false and knowledge that is true, does it not follow that knowledge could either be reflecting God or not reflecting God?  Second, given what I’ve just made claim to, such knowledge that does not reflect the goodness of God might be used to create evil.  If man has access to knowledge, which can incite hatred or promote cruelty, then he is learning it or has learned it at some time.  Furthermore, man’s learning of something is (for Augustine) his interpretation of the eternal unchanging law of the universe.  Man uses reason to examine the content of his perceptions and to judge his own thoughts and actions throughout life.  But much of what man seeks to know about the universe is dependent upon his motivation for wanting specific knowledge.  If his motivation is to seek ways in which he can be more pious and more like God, then he will seek to learn knowledge that is good – knowledge that is reflective of God’s truth.  However, if man seeks to make evil upon the earth, then he will seek to learn knowledge that will fuel evil – knowledge that is Godless.  I suppose the problem with the falsification of the claim “Learning is good, therefore we do not learn evil” is founded in the possible implications this might have on his argument about free will.  If knowledge can be true or false, then I suppose we could say that learning can be bad and that we can learn evil.  Would these ideas I’ve examined lend themselves to criticizing Augustine’s claim that evil does not come from God?  More particularly, is mankind wholly responsible for his evil doings if evil is something learned? 

Augustine: Truth

               A dialogue on the relation of wisdom and numbers between Evodius and Augustine in XI segues into a dialogue about truth in XII – XIV.  The topic of truth is very compelling, and Augustine has some very wise ideas to present about it.  Augustine establishes that immutable truth exists and is superior to the senses and minds.  “You will not deny, therefore, that immutable truth, comprising everything that is immutably true, exists; and you cannot say that immutable truth is yours, or mine, or anyone else’s” (65).  Truth is public and yet belongs to no specific persons in particular.  As Augstine says, the mind is subject to truth because we make judgments according to truth rather than about it.  The mind perceives more or less, so if the mind determined truth then truth would change, but “Truth, remaining in itself, does not gain anything when we see it, or lose anything when we do not see it.  It is whole and uncorrupted” (67).  Minds can be closer or further to truth, and the mind that is closer to truth knows more.

                In XIII, Augustine declares that we ought to embrace and enjoy truth, as it is by truth that we attain the highest good and are happy.  At the end of page 68, Augustine uses an excellent metaphor describing how the mind wields reason to discover truth:  “when the rapier edge of the mind cuts through the many true and immutable things with its sure reason, it steers toward the very truth, by which all things are revealed…”  Truth is absolute and eternal and through it we can become greater.  “It changes for the better all who behold it, and is not changed for the worse by anyone.  No man passes judgment on truth, and no man judges well without it” (70).  Augustine is a fascinating theologian because he reveres truth and reason.

Belief without understanding

.

I would like to examine not necessarily a passage, but more of an overarching state of mind of the people of Augustine's time.  The people of this era had unshaken faith in the existence of god , even though they did not understand certain aspects of their own faith.  The work as whole demonstrates this .  Augustine and Evodius both do not fully understand free will, how it should be used, or if it was given by god, yet they both believe without fully understanding.  The second section of the work has several quotations that demonstrate this perfectly.  The stretch from the bottom of the second paragraph that begins with " yet if it is certain that god gave free will, however it was given, we must acknowledge that.............." and ends at the top of the next page with " A. At least you are certain that god exists- E . I accept even this by faith and not by reason" is this view in a nutshell.  This is in striking contrast to the types of thinkers in the age of reason who worked tirelessly to find " proof" for the existence of god.  The Enlightenment sought out a base or reasoning behind things in nature, and many saw god as no different.  Even if God was a higher being than other things in nature, it still must have some logic behind it.  The church ruled these times with an iron fist.  To speak out against the church or to question it's dogmas was punishable by death.  Many great thinkers like Galileo were seen as enemies of the church, and forced to recant or be put to death. I am not surprised that the masses, almost all of whom were poorly educated, believed with blind faith, but I am surprised that even intelligent philosophers were in this frame of mind as well.

What I find most interesting about this concept is the special place it is given by the human mind.  People almost always want sound reasons why they are expected to believe something.  " I'll believe it when I see it" or " Prove it" are common phrases .  However, religion is given the free pass.  People see past all of the evidence, and just have faith that a supreme being exists.  It has always interested me .  Many have searched for the reason why, perhaps we are all just afraid of death, perhaps we do not like to take the blame for things that happen.  Overall I chose this because it demonstrates just how powerful the church of this time was.  There was zero doubt in the minds of even the most educated ( or maybe they were just too afraid to say it )

Augustine: Happiness

I was interested in Augustine’s discussion of happiness in On Free Choice of the Will. I will examine two statements in particular that Augustine made in relation to happiness.

1. “The happy life…is man’s proper and primary good” (81-82). Frankly, I was surprised to see an early Christian theologian place a great emphasis on happiness. Christianity is founded on martyrdom, and holds the next life to be much more important than this one. Shortly before Augustine’s time, Christians were regularly persecuted and sometimes thrown to lions; their lives were anything buy happy. A sign of a good Christian was praising Jesus/God as one was about to be murdered for believing in them, having faith that although this life was terrible, the faithful would be rewarded in the next. Augustine, however, states that a happy life is man’s primary good, a notion that may have seemed alien to those whom had been martyred. Now of course (according to Augustine) one cannot live a happy life if one is concerned only with this world, wisdom and happiness come from being in touch with something greater (like numbers!), however happiness is now no longer confined only to the afterlife. I imagine that this shift in outlook was made possible by Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.

2. “we all wish to be happy, so it is agreed that we all wish to be wise, since on one without wisdom is happy” (58). I think this statement is flat-out incorrect. People may wish to be happy, but I don’t believe that wisdom is seen as being a necessary part of that, or that the unwise are necessarily unhappy (see Voltaire’s short story “The Good Brahmin”). Though I don’t like this phrase at all, there is a significant amount of truth to ‘Ignorance is Bliss’. I think that Augustine’s assumption that everyone seeks to be wise is a case of him believing that people want to be what they should be (or rather, what he thinks they should be). Augustine’s knowledge of the Forms has brought him happiness, but it is a leap to claim that people are looking for something they haven’t discovered. I realize that Augustine’s work is dogmatic in nature (‘I believe so that I may understand’), but to claim that everyone seeks to be wise is a very hard statement to justify empirically; and, in the spirit of Plato, Augustine does not attempt to.

Augustine: On The Free Choice of The Will

I was unaware that the problem of evil dated back as far as Augustine. Through studying moral problems in philosophy I became familiar with arguments for and against the existence of God, the problem of evil being a major element in disproving the existence of an O3 God. What makes the problem of evil so damaging to those who claim God exists is its logical validity. The problem of evil is a logically sound argument that is valid when looked at carefully. However, the problem of evil does end up producing a notion that is extremely prominent in medieval philosophy-Free will. Free will offers a solution to the problem of evil to some extent, by shifting the blame from God to humans. Now instead of there being this necessity to understand why God allows us to suffer from evil, we have a slightly more reasonable task to solve. We shift from the question-why is there evil in the world we exist in? To questions such as- How do we justify punishment and reward? The questions now on the table seem a little less daunting to answer because they now deal with moral issues in humanity. It may not seem like an outstanding triumph, but to me this moment in medieval philosophy is where we bridged the gap between hypothetical’s that are entirely based on the O3 God and its existence-To hypothetical questions involving moral choices. There now needed to be more of a focus on our individual responsibility we have due to our freedom of will. We are held accountable for our own decisions we make and can no longer shift the blame to God every time we are stricken by misfortune. The idea of Justice is also a significant notion that is brought about by this era. From this philosophical time period we see development in our morals and reasoning. It is now clearer to me why there seems to be a vast number of similarities that correlate between ancient philosophy and medieval philosophy. Before this class there was a major gap in my understanding of philosophical history and its timeline.

Perception and a Chain of Existence

In his “On the Free Choice of Will,” St. Augustine speaks of three “senses”: sense, inner sense and reason. He speaks of how sense can be perceived only by inner sense, and of how both sense and inner sense, as well as reason itself, can be perceived only by reason. We are not able to recognize the fact that we have seen the color red by using our eyes; we must use our inner sense. By the same token, we cannot perceive that we have perceived this outer sense, sight, through our inner sense using our inner sense; we must use reason. Sense, inner sense and reason must be perceived because we are aware of their existence, and it is for this reason that inner sense and reason are necessarily within us. Also, any being that possesses reason must necessarily possess both sense and inner sense as well, but a being that possesses both sense and inner sense does not necessarily possess reason. This is made obvious when we compare ourselves with the other animals, or “beasts,” who possess only two of these qualities: sense and inner sense. Augustine illustrates this point perfectly on page 42: “We must not believe that beasts know that light is not perceived by the ears nor a voice by the eyes, for we perceive this only by rational thought and reflection within the soul.” This relates to Augustine’s idea of reason assisting faith in that it is through reason that we are able to understand the higher forms and, possibly, God.

Like Plotinus, Augustine sets up a chain of existence in his discussion. “What is eternal and immutable,” as Augustine puts it, rests at the top. Next are human beings, who through their capacity to reason are able to comprehend and to contemplate the ideals that are at the top of the chain. Finally, we have all other animals and creatures of the earth, who are able to see, taste, touch, hear and smell, and are able to control these senses using their inner sense, but who are not able to understand that they have perceived and controlled these senses using their inner sense. They are also certainly unable to understand abstract concepts like numbers. This is true because no animal besides human beings has within it the capacity to reason. It is because of reason that we, as human beings, are closest to God. Animals have no concept of God, but we do, and Augustine believes that it is entirely within our capacity to understand God. Your “god” may not be the same as the one Augustine is referring to, but this concept should have resonance for even the non-religious because it shows that what is greatest within us is our ability to learn, to understand and to contemplate. Admittedly, animals also have the ability to learn and to understand, but we do not refer to these qualities within animals and human beings in the same way at all.

Link

Here's an interesting site on life in Medieval Europe:

http://www.medieval-life.net/index.htm