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Being and Evil: Philosophy in the Shadow of Augustine

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Being and Evil: Philosophy in the Shadow of Augustine Being and Evil: Philosophy in the Shadow of Augustine by Vincent Le B.A. (Hons) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts (Research) Deakin University August, 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Portions of the second and third chapters were shortlisted for the Australasian Association of Philosophy’s 2017 Postgraduate Essay Prize. Sections of the fifth chapter were published as “Schelling and the Sixth Extinction,” in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 13, no. 3 (2017), 107-129. I would like to thank my supervisor Matthew Sharpe for his invaluable feedback. I would also like to thank Patrick Stokes for his suggestions and comments. Professional editor, Floriana Badalotti, provided basic proofreading services, according to the guidelines laid out in the university-endorsed national “guidelines for editing research theses.” ABSTRACT This thesis demonstrates how Augustine’s concepts of good and evil opened up certain conceptual possibilities that Descartes, Kant and Schelling later developed through their own metaphysical systems: more precisely, its contention is that Descartes, Kant and Schelling adhere, directly or indirectly, to Augustine’s model for ontology by rendering being absolutely Good, so as to repress evil as a mere privation, fault, or absence. After the introduction, the first chapter examines how Augustine’s rationalist demonstration for the benevolent God’s existence as being’s highest totalization permits him to develop a theodicy according to which evil is the epiphenomenal privation of the Good rooted in the misuse of our free will. At the same time, we shall see that Augustine’s late doctrine of predestination inadvertently threatens his ontologization of the Good, insofar as it re-envisions God as bringing evil into being as a co-eternal principle alongside the Good by gratuitously condemning some to eternal damnation. The second chapter corrects the typical portrayal of Descartes as having broken with medieval, Christian philosophy by showing how Descartes only really breaks with scholastic Thomism so as to return to Augustine’s even more ancient rationalism. Descartes thus translates Augustine’s ontological argument against the sceptics into his innate ideas of the cogito and the perfect God, as well as Augustine’s theodicy into his epistemological account of error’s privation of what truly is. Ultimately, we shall see that Descartes is even, as it were, “too Augustinian for his own good” when he reconstructs the problematic predestinarian doctrine through his late occasionalism. In the third chapter, I show that, while Kant’s first Kritik is deeply sceptical about ontological arguments, his second Kritik recapitulates Augustine’s ontologization of the Good by demonstrating through other, critical means that our moral behaviour operates in such a way as if we have a free and immortal soul created by a benevolent Creator. As per Augustine, Kant thus holds that evil can only result from our freedom to deviate from the law of the highest, divine Good, even as he also recognizes an even more radical evil as the will’s anterior condition. The final chapter shows how the young Schelling attempts to resolve Augustinian theodicy’s shortcomings by ontologizing being as always already free, and hence evil. In the final analysis, however, even Schelling eventually reaffirms an absolute spirit of pure Positivity beyond evil’s negative dialectic to account for the inverse problem of how the Good can emerge out of the dark ground of being. By tracing how three canonical philosophers extrapolate Augustine’s chief thought- structure, which conflates being with the Good to the detriment of evil as privation, this thesis hopes to show that Augustine’s legacy on the history of Western metaphysics has perhaps been insufficiently registered in much scholarship. This is a hypothesis that could be tested further by putting Augustine in dialogue with other thinkers, although this task is evidently beyond this thesis’ scope. CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................. 1 1.1. THE ONTOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF AUGUSTINE’S CONCEPTS OF GOOD AND EVIL…. .............................................................................................................. 1 1.2. GENERAL LITERATURE REVIEW APROPOS THE HISTORY OF CONCEPTS OF GOOD AND EVIL...................................................................................... 4 1.3. METHODOLOGY OF TEXTUAL ANALYSIS ..................................................... 9 1.4. CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER OUTLINE .................................................................. 12 CHAPTER 2. FACING AUGUSTINE’S DEMONS .............................................. 16 2.1. AUGUSTINE’S PROBLEM OF EVIL ................................................................... 20 2.1.1. The biographical backdrop of Augustine’s problematic ............................. 20 2.1.2. Augustine’s first Manichean solution .......................................................... 21 2.1.3. Augustine’s “road to Damascus” ................................................................ 22 2.1.4. Augustine’s rational approach to the problem of evil ................................. 22 2.2. AUGUSTINE’S RATIONALIST ONTOLOGIZATION OF THE GOOD ........ 24 2.2.1. The sceptical context and Platonic inspiration for Augustine’s proto- ontological argument ............................................................................................... 24 2.2.2. The proto-ontological argument itself ......................................................... 27 2.2.3. From God’s existence to his benevolence ................................................... 29 2.3. AUGUSTINE’S THEODICY .................................................................................. 30 2.3.1. Augustine’s privation theory of evil ............................................................ 30 2.3.2. Natural evil .................................................................................................. 31 2.3.3. Moral evil .................................................................................................... 32 2.4. AUGUSTINE’S ETHICS ......................................................................................... 33 2.4.1. The three eras of human history .................................................................. 33 2.4.2. The theoretical and practical virtues ........................................................... 34 2.4.3. The Pelagians and the Donatists’ temptations ............................................. 36 2.4.4. The role of the Church and the State ........................................................... 40 2.4.5. The fourth stage of history .......................................................................... 41 2.5. AUGUSTINE’S DOCTRINE OF PREDESTINATION ....................................... 41 2.5.1. Whereof Augustine cannot speak ................................................................ 41 2.5.2. Augustine’s late predestinarian turn ............................................................ 42 i 2.6. CONCLUDING REMARKS ................................................................................... 46 CHAPTER 3. AFTER AQUINAS, DESCARTES’ EPISTEMIC AUGUSTINIANISM ................................................................................................. 49 3.1. AQUINAS’ WORDLY REFORTIFICATION OF AUGUSTINIANISM ........... 50 3.1.1. Aquinas against the mystics ........................................................................ 50 3.1.2. Aquinas’ Aristotelian revival ...................................................................... 52 3.2. DESCARTES’ MODERN BREAK AS A RETURN TO AUGUSTINE ............. 58 3.2.1. The sceptical backdrop to Descartes’ critique of Aquinas .......................... 58 3.2.2. Was Descartes really a Christian? ............................................................... 59 3.3. DESCARTES’ MÉDITATIONS MÉTAPHYSIQUES ............................................ 65 3.3.1. The first three meditations’ recapitulation of Augustine’s ontological argument .................................................................................................................. 65 3.3.2. The fifth meditation’s proof of God’s perfection ........................................ 69 3.3.3. The fourth meditation’s epistemic translation of Augustine’s theodicy ..... 70 3.4. DESCARTES’ LATE OCCASIONALISM ............................................................ 74 3.4.1. The fifth and sixth meditations’ mind-body dualism .................................. 74 3.4.2. Descartes’ late occasionalist turn ................................................................ 75 3.5. CONCLUDING REMARKS ................................................................................... 77 CHAPTER 4. THE AUGUSTINIAN “ANTINOMY” OF KANT’S CRITICAL TURN .......................................................................................................................... 79 4.1. KRITIK DER REINEN VERNUNFT ....................................................................... 80 4.1.1. The question of metaphysics ....................................................................... 80 4.1.2. The transcendental aesthetic ........................................................................ 82 4.1.3. The transcendental logic .............................................................................. 83 4.1.4. The analytic of principles
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