Reflections on Anselm's Ontological Argument
This is an excerpt from a somewhat off-the-cuff reflection paper I wrote recently for an independent study I am doing on Medieval Theology/Philosophy. In particular this for this assignment I was asked to choose texts from Anselm to read. I ended up reading Anselm's Monologium (which constitutes a variety of logically developed arguments for God's existence and nature) his Proslogium (the infamous ontological argument, written, he says, because he thought the Monologium was too varied in its arguments, and he wanted to find one single argument which could be developed) and also Anselms Apologium which are answers to the supposed refutations of Guanilon regarding the ontological argument. At any rate if more specific commentary is desired, I shall do it, but mainly my reflections for the assignment focused on the (admittedly, an object of my lengthy fascination) ontological argument. Enjoy!
It is the pernicious curse and prejudice of the contemporary
mind that new is better than old; hence new authors and thinkers are to be
preferred to the old ones, so it goes, lest one look unfashionable in their
reading habits. So too comes the common
but opposite lament of historians that, as Michel René Barnes puts it of
Augustine, and the famous Process theologian Charles Hartshorne of Anselm—it is
more popular to invoke the ancients than to actually read them (Hartshorne,
quite scathingly in his introduction to this collection of Anselm’s basic
works, says that though Anselm’s presentation, and then ultimately his defense
in the Apologium of the infamous
Ontological argument are only a few pages of his total corpus, “even these few
pages have been far too many to read for the Argument’s detractors.”) I myself am often guilty of such a habit as
I, ever since I was forced for my own intellectual survival in highschool to
begin (however naively) to sift through the “proofs” of God’s existence (and
become somewhat enamored with the ontological argument), far too often turned
to surveys rather than originals; though some (albeit entertaining) penance has
been done as I read three of Anselm’s treatises.
I should
say at the outset that I am still uncertain of my position regarding the
ontological argument. Though
Schopenhauer once said that the argument “is a charming joke,” I think this in
itself can be rhetorically turned one way or another. For there are many senses of a joke. Schopenhauer undoubtedly meant it
pejoratively—as in “that guy is a joke,” or “my singing skills are a joke,”
i.e. the objects of the sobriquet have no credibility. But turned slightly we could say that the
biting edge of the best jokes are that they are funny as they seem immediately
easy to dismiss—because they appear simple, or absurd, or crass etc… But once one thinks of the joke it begins to
turn reality around its axis and suddenly the joke is funny because it so
simply reveals reality in a startling and disconcerting way that, even if
ultimately untrue, lingers.
It is certain that the Ontological
argument can suffer no easy dismissal; in fact interestingly enough it has
received something of a massive renaissance in 20th century
philosophy, most recently by Alvin Plantinga in his very interesting version
which utilizes modal logic, and by Hartshorne himself in his The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in
NeoClassical Metaphysics. In fact
one of the most humorous tales of the comeback of the ontological argument was
by the famous mathematician Kurt Gödel, who wrote a very complex “proof” in
symbolic logic in 1941, though he told no one of it until his death bed around
1970 because “he was afraid that people would think he actually believed in
God, whereas he is engaged only in a logical investigation.”[1] Whatever his own beliefs, no less a
commentator than Bertrand Russell commented in his History of Western Philosophy (p.536) that "The argument does not, to a modern mind, seem very convincing,
but it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to
find out precisely where the fallacy lies." It seems we must therefore bastardize
Shopenhauer’s saying: the ontological argument is a joke because, perplexingly,
it seems simply untrue, yet clings, and cannot so easily be exorcized.
Anselm has the rare privilege in the history of thought where
usually there is “nothing new under the sun,” to have come up with that elusive
new thing, which in this case we now call the Ontological argument. One shouldn’t take the brief size of the Proslogium as a mark against it; if
anything its briefness should be considered a strength—it was by Anselm at any
rate. He considered it a small thing
that took up great space, and he wrote it because he considered his earlier
work, the Monologium, to be, even if
logically rigorous, too multivalent, too multi-tiered. Anselm disliked the fact that it was a book
that was “linked together by many arguments” (p.2) and he thus sought a single argument to demonstrate both God’s
existence and God’s essence.
In The Medieval Theologians
G.R. Evans notes (p.96) that Anselm is unusual in “struggling philosophically
whether God exists.” And this is undoubtedly true; yet this statement hardly
covers the matter. In the Proslogium, despite its erudition and
sophistication, it is saturated in prayer, and with what can only be described
as laments. There is a palpable sense of
angst in his writing. “I have never seen
you, O’ Lord my God, I do not know your form.” (i.4)[2];
“Amid what thoughts am I sighing? I
sought blessings and lo! Confusion” (i.5); “How long, O’ Lord, will you forget
us, how long will you turn your face from us? (ibid); and he, after the argument has even been laid out, asks
himself “but, if you have found him, why is it that you do not feel him? Why, O Lord my God, does my soul not feel
you?” (xiv.21) Immediately, then, I
think we must dismiss that venerable canard that such arguments are akin to
indulging in esotericisms along the lines of “how many angels can dance upon
the head of a pin?” Anselm, it appears,
is in a crises whose magnitude can only be indexed by the spiritual. Indeed the argument only came upon him,
Anselm notes, when he was weary with its force (p.2). The argument, it seems from Anselm’s candor,
is not a “rationalism” devoid of the spiritual; it in fact pressed itself upon
Anselm’s very soul, and I could not help but be moved that Anselm’s argument in
the Proslogium both begins and ends
with prayer (indeed I couldn’t help but wonder if the whole thing was a prayer,
to be honest).
With our pension for categorizing, today there is a general
consensus, following G. Oppy’s thorough work The Ontological Arguments and the Belief in God (New York:
Cambridge Press, 1995) that there are, loosely, no less than 8 types of ontological argument. Oppy classifies Anselm’s as the
“definitional” ontological argument, namely the argument that, by definition or
concept, God has to exist. The argument begins in chapter two of
the Proslogium with the idea that
even the fool, who says in his heart “there is no God,” can understand the
concept of “a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived.” (ii.7). I was struck by the sense that this is an
“exteriorized” version of both Augustine’s and Descartes “interiorized”
argument for God: whereas they, in their own individual senses argue that since
they doubt, therefore God must exist (of course Descartes takes a more
roundabout approach) here Anselm (pace
his own heart-wrenching prayers) puts the doubt, not in himself, for the sake
of the argument, but in the “Fool’s” heart (following Psalm 14:1-3). I do not want to make too much of this, both
because the evidence is scarce and because I trust very little in my own
psychological insight, but here again we seem to see a man torn apart: his
heart lurches desperately toward God, but in order to find God he apparently
does not want to start the argument with his
own doubts (and how could one who has been asked, as Anselm records himself
as being asked, to state definitively upon God, start with his own fears?) Thus in the name of the rational, Anselm
starts with the fool.
Anselm then underscores a working assumption that “it is one thing
for an object to be within the understanding, and another for the object to
exist.” (Ibid). Hence “even the fool understands that
something exists in the understanding that than which nothing greater could be
conceived.” (ii.8). And so this “being”
exists in the understanding; but Anselm is not done. “For, assuredly, that than which nothing
greater can be conceived cannot exist in the understanding alone. For suppose it exists in the understanding
alone; then it could be conceived to exist in reality, which is greater.” (Ibid).
In other words if, truly, a
being “than which none greater can be thought” can be conceived, this being
must be conceived as existing per
necessity. For if it only existed in
the mind, a greater being, namely the same being in the mind, but now in
reality, could be thought. Thus, so the
argument goes, by definition, if
(paraphrasing with my own take on the argument) the concept of this “ultimate” can be conceived, it must be conceived as existing.
Now, there is a prevalent misunderstanding of the ontological
argument which Hartshorne in the introduction warns us to avoid. This misunderstanding reads the argument as:
perfection must have all desirable goods or qualities; existence is such a
quality, ergo perfection must have existence.
Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, p.483)
famously retorted that existence is not
a predicate, and hence “it is not a predicate that can be added to the concept
of a thing. Logically, it is merely the
copula of a judgment.” In other words,
“the real [concept] does not contain more than the possible [concept]…A hundred
real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars.” (One
of my professors at Portland State, when I was in the Philosophy program before
transferring to Multnomah, made an “anti-ontological argument” out of this
premise: it does not matter if God is real or not—the concept either way
contains the components necessary to live by its power). Of course a poor person would object that he
would much rather have 100 real dollars and Kant would agree; he is arguing
that “is” or existence is the admission
of an object, and not part of the definition.
The concept of God is what Kant calls its “analytic concept” (i.e. what
defines the object) but the existence of any object, even God (according to
Kant) is confirmed only “synthetically” (i.e. a posteriori). In other
words the ontological argument commits a category mistake to prove its case—it
tries to do a priori what can be done
only in some synthetic combination of a priori and a posteriori. Of course in
the case of God even Kant had to make the exception, and God then for Kant is
neither a priori or a posteriori strictly speaking, but transcendental for the sake of the
practical reason.
This is not, despite its cogency
in its own realm, relevant to Anselm’s argument (so argues Hartshorne, and I
agree). Because what is not being argued
is a generalized thesis that existence is a predicate of perfection. Rather the argument is, in fact, (and Anselm
would fully admit this) dealing with a unique
case. Existence is not a predicate—yes:
of normal, finite, created things. Nor
perhaps in abstraction is it a predicate of God; however what is at stake is
not a predicate “existence.” Rather God
is defined as “necessary existence”
or that which “cannot be conceived not to exist.” (Proslogium III.8). Thus if
we are to use Kant’s terms the analytic concept of the “object” God demands the synthetic concept of
existence because it, by its very essence, must
exist if the concept is to be coherent.
In other words what we have is Aquinas’ ipsum esse: God is He whose essence and existence are identical,
unlike contingent created beings whose essence does not demand their
existence. And thus the gray area raises
its head: logically definition and reality in this instance seem to have to
co-occur. Because by definition that
which cannot be conceived not to exist is greater than that which can be
conceived to not exist (i.e. what is contingent). Hence Kant’s critique is generally incisive,
but specifically wrong.
If I might generalize, this is the first sticking point of the
ontological argument, namely whether or not we can make the leap from
definition to existence, from thought to reality. This is perhaps the greatest sticking point
for myself. If we are honest with
ourselves, at this point, despite whatever logical rigor accompanies it, when
it comes down to brass tax it is simply difficult to admit that the concept
must somehow make demands upon reality.
However, whatever my reservations about the validity of this step I need
to say that even if it is invalid it
has very interesting and fertile consequences.
Michael Buckley has written a book (which I am chomping at the bit to
proceed beyond the introduction) called At
The Origins of Modern Atheism. The
main content of the book is to chart the rise of atheism as a cogent and
generally accepted position from the Reformation through the 19th
century. But one of the book’s working
hypotheses is that atheism is essentially parasitic upon the theism it
rejects. In other words it is not that
atheists believe in “nothing” (as the popular fundamentalist mantra would have
us believe) but rather that they disbelieve in very specific things—namely the
specific theistic context they are rebelling from. E.g. Evolution only contradicts a theism set
up in Victorian England as enumerated by a design-theory like William Paley; or more relevant to the ontological
argument, atheism rejects a God that is defined (whatever the original intentions)
as something less than “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. One of the transitions to modern atheism,
argues Buckley, is that God more and more became envisioned, not as the grand
creator of being and creation ex nihilo,
giving being to beings, but as having this or that specific function in the
universe (i.e. Paley’s design, or Newton’s “force at a distance”; even economic
theories that were precursors to Adam Smith had God doing very specific menial
tasks). God, they thought, must be doing something very specific,
and very akin to the tasks other things were doing. But in this sense God “became that much
easier to identify, and so that much easier, once theory progressed, to kill.”
What Anselm’s argument does at this point (again, even if invalid as
a proof per se) is point out the fact
of some of the “grammar” of what it means to speak of God. Indeed if I can skip back for just a moment
to Anselm’s prior work, the Monologium,
he writes “…the supreme Being is so above and beyond every other nature
that, whenever any statement is made concerning it in words which are also
applicable to other natures, the sense of these words in this case is by no
means that in which they are applied to other natures.” (ch. LXV.129) In other words the negation of this God is
nonsensical; this doesn’t ultimately, I think, demand that God exists. Rather what it does it to demonstrate that
the atheist reaction to God is meaningless—in a strict logical sense (without
commenting on whatever sympathies I have with their existential rebellion). One can react and live as if there is no God; but ultimately the intellectual
orientation of atheism has no discernable (non contradictory) content since per definition one cannot (logically,
per definition, etc…) “deny” this existence.
One has to merely reject the definition and accept the abyss; one cannot
“refute” it per se (Proslogium III). According to Anselm, then, it seems that
wherever atheists reject a god, we should thank them because they have only
torn down an idol.
The second sticking point of the
ontological argument is whether or not one can actually conceive “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Descartes’ opponents were quick to point out
that it did not seem, in fact, that we could have a “clear and distinct” view
of the infinite. One therefore likewise wonders
at the exact stability of Anselm’s construct.
But before we jump to the conclusion that he was in fact a
proto-Cartesian, whose arguments circled around the ability to equate “I am
able to conceive” with “I have a clear and distinct notion of…” Anselm’s
argument of being able to conceive of “that than which nothing greater can be
conceived” leads into ch. XV (p.22) of the Proslogium
where he writes “Therefore, O Lord, you are not only that than which a greater
cannot be conceived; but you are a being greater than can be conceived.” And in
XVI Anselm repeatedly speaks of God’s “unapproachable light.” And in the Monologium LXIV (p.128) he writes “For it is my opinion that one
who is investigating an incomprehensible object ought to be satisfied if his
reasoning shall have brought him far enough to recognize that this object most
certainly exists; nor ought assured belief to be the less readily given to
these truths which are declared to be such by cogent proofs, and without
contradiction of any other reason, if, because of the incomprehensibility of
their own natural sublimity, they do not admit of explanation.”
In this sense Anselm’s proof is
more profound, more existential than Descartes’. Because it is a grasping at a hint; not the
revolution around a (supposedly indisputable) beacon. Thus Anselm’s proof in no way relies on
“clear and distinct” ideas. Only on a
very basic logical component that a “maximally great” being (to use Plantinga’s
language) is possible to approach mentally.
I have focused greatly on a minor
part. In our discussions in class I
would like to touch upon how the doctrine of simplicity systematically imposes
itself upon Anselm’s thought (especially in the Monologium) but I have ran out of room here. I want to conclude with a brief reference to
the idea of “reason alone” or “apart from faith.” Anselm is often credited with the instigation
of this idea, however nascent and neophytic it is in his thought. My comment is nothing profound but is this: I
believe there is a difference, at least abstractly viable, between what a
thinker thinks they are doing, and what they actually do; and then again
between what a thinker’s epigones think he did, and what was actual in his (or
her’s) thought. For Anselm suffers another
dichotomy: in the Monologium which he
was dissatisfied with, with its multiple arguments, he also is very specific in
the fact that his arguments runs from reason, and apart from Christian creed
and faith. Yet the later Proslogium, which, as Anselm himself
says, was written in order to cure his own dissatisfaction with the Monologium’s bricolage of arguments, is
not now done “reason alone” but in fact begins with a prayer for God to reveal
himself, and speaks in no uncertain terms of the necessity of revelation. So Anselm, it seems, is difficult to fit into
a narrative of a world “coming of age,” in which reason begins to overtake
revelation. If anything Anselm is a
microcosm of this in reverse: he thought at first to prove God with reason
apart from revelation (though arguably the whole path of the Monologium is implicitly directed along
its very specific course by Anselm’s faith, so I wonder if even here “reason
alone” could be true) but then
instead of purifying this method of reason even further, Anselm disrupts the
narrative of progress by finding a more
satisfactory solution in the explicit “faith seeking understanding”
introduction which frames the Proslogium. Different contexts, of course, can partially account
for the differences; nevertheless I wonder if in the end, if I could
extrapolate Anselm as a microcosm, that he stands as a sort of metaphor for the
whole modern to postmodern turn: at first we were intoxicated by the myth of a
pure reason. But now, wholly dissatisfied
with the manifold paths this spawned, we return to the idea that, in fact, we
must accept a tradition, we must believe first, in order to understand anything
at all.
[1] As
a happy coincidence I stumbled onto A.
W. Moore’s history of the development of the concept of the infinite, aptly
named The Infinite (London:
Routledge, 1990) p. 172ff at Powell’s Books a few weeks ago which had this
chapter on Gödel. Moore also notes that
apart from this “explicit” ontological argument many have (rightly or wrongly)
considered another of Gödel’s theorums, his “incompleteness” theorem, to in its
own way be an ontological argument for the necessity of a true infinite. In essence his theorem disrupts the
assumption of Euclidean geometry that a finite stock of axioms can be
ascertained from which we can deduce an infinite number of other mathematical
truths. What Gödel demonstrated was
that, for example in set-theory, there will always be a mathematical axiom that
is true but not provable, because it will always imply a greater set that
includes the current set, ad infinitum. There then must therefore (to give the short,
blissfully un-mathematical version of the story) be a true infinite reconciling
the set of all sets.
[2]
Citations will be format x.y where x indicates the chapter and y the pagination
in the collection of works I am drawing from.
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