IS THE WILL INDEPENDENT AND SELF-MOVED?
Up to this point the present summary of Edwards' position in the Inquiry has been informed by my belief that it is misleading to suggest that the presupposition of its argument is that all events, including moral events, have their causes and occur by some sort of necessity.Faust and Johnson, p. xliv. No doubt this was Edwards' opinion, from which he never
-- 24 -- wavered. He writes that the causal principle "seems to be the first dictate of the common and natural sense God hath implanted in the minds of all mankind" (p. 181). But this was not and ought not to have been a primary postulate introduced at the beginning or in the course of the argument, since this is precisely what Edwards sets out to prove. He has to demonstrate that the principle of universal causation, or, if this be granted and a distinction made, universal necessary causation, applies to acts of the will. The pillars upon which his thought is erected in this treatise are his definition of liberty, his analysis of the nature of an act of volition, and (consistent with these) his interpretation of an agent's responsibility for an act when his will is in it. He correctly reasons that "if volition comes to pass by perfect contingence, and without any cause at all, then it is certain, no act of the will, no prior act of the soul was the cause, no determination or choice of the soul, had any hand in it" (p. 271). This may all be granted while still keeping in brackets questions about what causes the soul's own determinations.
Moreover, Edwards succeeds in refuting self-determinism if this means that in a preceding action the soul determines to determine or chooses to choose. The Arminian cannot escape by contending that self-determinism involves no preceding act, since the only way to determine to choose is by acting voluntarily. But what if the act of self-determination is no preceding act but rather one which takes place in the willing itself? This possibility Edwards mentions in framing certain possible replies to his own argument: "If it should be said, that although it be true, if the soul determines its own volitions, it must be active in so doing, and the determination itself must be an act; yet there is no need of supposing this act to be prior to the volition determined; but the will or soul determines the act of the will in willing; it determines its own volition, in the very act of volition; it directs and limits the act of the will, causing it to be so and not otherwise, in exerting the act, without any preceding act to excite that." Of three possible interpretations of the meaning of this objection, the second has some merit: "that the soul's determining the act of volition is the same thing with its exerting the act of volition" (p. 177). Obviously such a viewpoint approaches Edwards' own, so long as he sticks to analyzing the nature of free volition and moral responsibility; and it is therefore not surprising that his answer to this suggestion seems singularly weak (pp. 177–8; the possibility is significantly omitted from a later rapid summary of this same list of
-- 25 -- objections, p. 191). Edwards simply demands that the self-determinist not speak in this way. In describing the soul's being conversant about its own inner action, he must continue to make the same separation between volition and action as when speaking of the soul's being conversant about an external action. This will set him off on a path of preceding internal acts that will soon lead him out of this world; but if the self-determinist agrees to this, he will be doing at Edwards' insistence what elsewhere in abundance Edwards accuses him of doing, namely using of the soul's volitions language suitable only for discourse about external actions.
Thus we owe to Edwards himself the suggestion of a type of self-determinism which may be able to withstand the onslaught of his own attack; and which he was better able to formulate as an objection than his opponents were able to advance as a contention. In any case, so far as moral and volitional experience are concerned, and on Edwards' own penetration of these matters so long as he does not allow concepts not directly involved in them to intrude, there may be self-determination in the willing. Then one need not suppose action to be without the causation of the will or without the determination of the agent, or suppose that action results from the will being lit upon by swans and nightingales or crawled over by rattlesnakes. Nor need one suppose volition to be caused by involuntary changes in the succession of our ideas, which in turn have as much a cause (and our yielding to them as much a cause) as the changeable motes that float in the air, or the continual, infinitely various, successive changes of the unevennesses on the surface of the water.
In any case there is nothing in Edwards' account of an act of free, responsible volition which precludes it from being independent and self-moved. This may be inferred from what Edwards says elsewhere about God's volition. "If there be any such thing at all, as what we mean by acts of will in God; then he is not indifferent whether his will be fulfilled or not. And if he is not indifferent, then he is truly gratified and pleased," or has pleasure in it. The End for Which God Created the World, Ch. 1, sec. 4, ans. 2 to obj. 1; Worcester ed., 6:47; WJE 8:449. If there be an end for which God created the world, in that voluntary action God took real delight. In like manner with men's acts of will, "we must suppose that God before he created the world, had some good in view, as a consequence of the world's existence that was originally agreeable to him in itself considered, that inclined him to create the world, or -- 26 -- bring the universe, with various intelligent creatures into existence in such a manner as he created it." End for Which God Created the World, Intro., Worcester ed., 6:16; WJE 8:412. We may justly infer what God intended, or was inclined to, by what he actually does. End for Which God Created the World, ch. 1, sec. 1, no. 6, Worcester ed., 6:28; WJE 426-27. In other words, in speaking of God's will Edwards employs the principle of analogy which has its point of departure in what we know of human volition. This principle he plainly states in The Nature of True Virtue. "This is the only way," he says, "that we come to be capable of having ideas of any perception or act even of the Godhead. We never could have any notion what understanding or volition, love or hatred are, either in created spirits or in God, if we had never experienced what understanding and volition, love and hatred, are in our own minds. Knowing what they are by consciousness, we can add degrees, and deny limits, and remove changeableness and other imperfections, and ascribe them to God. Which is the only way we come to be capable of conceiving of any thing in the Deity." The Nature of True Virtue, ch. 5; Worcester, ed., 2:440;WJE 8:591. Yet in the Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World he writes:
There is something in that disposition in God to communicate goodness, which shows him to be independent and self-moved in it, in a manner that is peculiar, and above what is in the beneficence of creatures. Creatures, even the most gracious of them, are not so independent and self-moved in their goodness, but that in all the exercises of it, they are excited by some object that they find; something appearing good, or in some respect worthy of regard, presents itself, and moves their kindness. But God, being all and alone, is absolutely self-moved. The exercises of his communicative disposition are absolutely from within himself, not finding any thing, or any object to excite them or draw them forth; but all that is good and worthy in the object, and the very being of the object, proceeding from the overflowing of his fullness. End for Which God Created the World, ch. 1, sec. 4, obj. 4, no. 2 (final italics JE's), Worcester ed., 6:59–60; WJE 8:462. See below, pt. 5, no. 18, of this Introduction, for JE's notion of God's "arbitrary" action.
It is obvious that Edwards (in saying that God in his volitional action is independent and self-moved yet motivated and inclined by what pleases him, while man chooses what pleases him yet is not self- -- 27 -- moved) simply adds degrees and denies limits, and removes changeableness and other imperfections. Otherwise, what might be said of the divine will would be univocal with the account of human volition. On the other hand, statements about divine and human volition would be equivocal, and we would be able to say nothing at all about acts of will in God, if Edwards went so far as to deny that these acts, no less than human volitions, are a matter of preponderant inclination or pleasedness. So much we know from the analysis of an act of choice, and may ascribe to God from the experience of choice in our own minds. Edwards' belief that self-determinists are wrong in ascribing self-motion to man arises, then, not from any description of willing in itself or as it is within the agent himself, but from a justifiable fear that "they who thus plead for man's liberty, advance principles which destroy the freedom of God himself." "Miscellaneous Observations Concerning the Divine Decrees in General, and Election in Particular," No. 21; Worcester ed., 5:369; "Controversies," MS p. 279 [219]. "Miscellaneous Observations Concerning the Divine Decrees" was created by JE's early editors from entries in the "Miscellanies" and "Controversies notebook; the wording differs in the original. For Edwards there is only one "causal progenitor" in the history of the world; all other beings and events have "causal ancestors." Cf. C. D. Broad's inaugural lecture Determinism, Indeterminism, and Libertarianism (Cambridge, 1934), 35.
, Ed. Paul Ramsey [
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