decision, love, & wisdom
the more perfect the understanding...the more will practical reason tend to converge on a single decision.
Someone may encounter difficulty in motivating himself come to a decision. It is repays the effort to reflect on what a decision is. The root of the work gives a hint, since it is related to “cutting” or “striking”. Scissors, excision, and incision are siblings of decision. I picture it as a sort of “pruning” in the garden of the forking paths, whereby we cut away all the roads we might have travelled for the sake of selecting a single way forward. If we are to make a decision that is not capricious or arbitrary, we will have allowed reason to inform our pruning. But sometimes we don’t have enough information or sometimes we don’t sufficiently understand—by way of theoretical reason—the information we have. The result of either of these deficiencies in respect to theoretical reason is that our practical reason is incapacitated in turn. Inversely, it also follows that the more clearly we understand the issue in question, the easier the decision will be in respect to the right path to tread. A fortiori, the more perfect the understanding of theoretical reason, the more will practical reason tend to converge on a single decision. This is the interesting way in which perfection of knowledge rather limits than compounds our choices because it increasingly reveals all of the possible paths except the right one to be mistakes. And the only way someone would “choose” what he knows to be a mistake is by fiddling with the definition of those words. Practical reason is axiomatic, in this respect: to wit, it will always choose what seems good. It is incoherent to state otherwise. Of course, for a thing to seem good does not necessarily indicate anything beyond this prima facie appearance. Hence, it is the purpose of philosophy and the refinement of theoretical reason to index our perception of the good, as it seems, to the Good in itself, as it is. I will return to this point presently. Emphasizing the paradoxical culling of choices that is brought about through advancement in understanding: Spinoza thought of freedom as the same thing as necessity. This is liable to strike anyone who has not thought through the line of reasoning above as a very strange idea. But doubtless, this is what he meant: if I am certain of the correct decision, I am bound to make it.
If we are bound to make a decision of which we are certain it is a good one, the interesting question remains as to how we motivate ourselves to care about striving to achieve this certainty. Why not just make decisions on a whim? The only answer is a paradoxical one. It is something like “love of wisdom.” But of course, to quote Schiller “he must already be wise in order to love wisdom.”1 To possess wisdom is already to love it, and vice verse. “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”2 This is why philosophy is always indistinguishable from mysticism at its upper limit. By the eye of wisdom we discern the Good and on the wings of love we ascend to it. Wisdom lights the way and love inspires our limbs to carry us along it. Insight into this connection completes our concept of philosophy with its complement. In other words, “love of wisdom” is at the same time “wisdom of love.” Philosophy is amator sapientae and sapientia amoris alike. The Greek philosophia is ambivalent, like the notorious duck-rabbit.
“Sie müßten schon weise sein, um die Weisheit zu lieben: eine Wahrheit, die Derjenige schon fühlte, der der Philosophie ihren Namen gab.”
—Friedrich Schiller (1795)
Matthew 13:12