Ockham Makes “Freedom” A Synonym Of “Will”

Last updated on: October 23, 2016 at 1:35 pm by Scott Beauchamp

Ockham Makes “Freedom” A Synonym Of “Will” 2016-10-23T13:35:51-04:00 Scott Beauchamp

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William_of_Ockham

William of Ockham in stained glass – Moscarlop – CC AA 3.0

OK, not the sexiest headline, but an accurate one – at least as (if) I understand Ockham. Building off of my project to understand acedia as it was articulated by the early Christians until Aquinas, I’ve sort of set myself on the long road to studying Saint Thomas more generally. A tall order, perhaps, but a fulfilling one if my experiences so far are any indication. And so part of this project is studying the thinkers that bookend Aquinas: the Greeks on one end and Duns Scots and Ockham on the other.

I’ve mentioned this before, very briefly, but I’m interested in Ockham’s conception of freedom compared to Aquinas’s. As Nault writes in The Noonday Devil: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil of our Times, “It is necessary to realize that Ockham’s [conception of freedom] is so ingrained in us today that it is difficult for us to picture freedom as anything other than the possibility to choose between two contradictory things.” Pressed, it’s probably difficult for most modern people to come up with a definition of freedom that strays very far from Ockham’s. But that seems (if I’m reading Nault correctly) to only be the case because we no longer have, not just an agreed upon conception of the good, but no longer agree if such a thing as “the good” even exists. Most classical and early Christian thinkers would have considered “freedom” the ability to pursue virtue in action. The metaphor I used in a previous post was a musician being able to play well. Is a truly free player a player that imposes a will on the strings, whatever that will may be, or a player who is able to play well should they choose to? One seems like a sort of cultivation. The other seems like a chaotic solipsism.

Ockham’s revolutionary articulation of freedom presented it as a moment prior to action – a moment before one has committed to anything. It’s a liberty of indifference, or libertas indifferentiae. I’ll write more about the problems this poses in another post, but one of the major ones that springs to mind is a sort of moral legalism that you see come into full fruition with Kant.

Sorry about all the stuffy philosophy posts if it isn’t your thing. Posts with a more personal touch are forthcoming. Sorry about all the amateur philosophy if it IS your thing. But like my friend Professor Duarte says, philosophy can be just like punk music: anyone can do it and it doesn’t have to sound pretty or complicated.

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