The devil is in this book. His place is not a prominent one – the closest he comes to a speaking role is when Ravven quotes a smattering of conservative political thinkers who view poverty as “karmic punishment for bad individual moral decisions” – but nonetheless, he occupies many of its shadows and allusions. In The Self Beyond Itself, Heidi Ravven considers the lessons of the now infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib as paired in Phillip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, and offers a careful excavation of Augustine’s exegetical work surrounding voluntariness and humankind’s place in its hierarchy of undetermined beings, but does not alight long on the Satanic preoccupations of either venue. It makes good sense that Ravven would leave Old Scratch for the footnotes: he is, in many ways, the poster boy for radically free will, or the “limit case” edging at the boundaries of Augustinian notions of will, as Charles Taylor put it. In other words, Satan is precisely the sort of figure whose existence Ravven seriously questions, and one whose presence (symbolic and otherwise) haunts our shared cultural imagination anyhow.
In a sense, the persistence of our investment in the mostly debunked notion of free will, or, as Ravven defines it, “this capacity to choose our actions” regardless of neurology, experience, culture, or situational context, is a good testament to her view that cultural beliefs powerfully influence the range of options available to us. Given the wealth of philosophical literature on free will and determinism, one would expect to find among the general population a corresponding diversity in views on free will. But as Ravven found in writing her book (and I subsequently found in writing this review), free will as an ideological foundation has a rather firm grip on modern conceptions of the self.
Thus, Ravven devotes the first part of her book to examining how we sculpt new selves, quite literally: she visits schools with particular character-building programs, and then considers their efficacy and history. Study by study, Ravven reveals that attempts at inculcating ‘character’ into school children via mandating adherence to certain virtues have failed tremendously. Many of the programs Ravven reviews in her historical visitation of schoolhouse moral education seem to be little more than thinly veiled endeavors to discipline the poor, and those too failed, though they linger on in the “no excuses” charter schools of today. From the strict Puritan classrooms of colonial New England to the ominously cheerful halls of Filmore Elementary School in some unnamed modern American suburb, Ravven finds the enforcement of obedience rather than the instilment of strong moral agency to be the real effect of moral education. (For those wondering how ominous a suburban elementary school can really be, Ravven recounts an unsettling exercise in which a teacher presents a group of kindergarteners with a pile of toys they must not even move to touch, like a Sesame Street reimagining of The Story of O.)
Of course, the conflation of obedience with genuine moral agency extends in impact far beyond the trivial, a point that Ravven illustrates with a brutal meditation on the Nazi Holocaust. Those who acted heroically to defend Jews during the Holocaust did so, Ravven argues, because they were predispositioned to by their social contexts before the necessity ever arose. Others were led by the strength of Nazi rhetoric and its institutional authority to perpetrate acts of inhumanity they otherwise showed absolutely no inclination toward. Ravven ends her consideration of the Holocaust on a solemn note: good and evil are better understood as characteristics of systems than people, though in defining systems they produce in people either good or bad behavior. Accountability for the devastation wrought by inhumane systems belongs most fully with those who construct them, Ravven explains, and it is here that her preference for building better systems over distributing appropriate culpability is most profoundly moving. It seems a far more beneficial project to imagine strategies for causing people to enact more ethical behavior en masse than to consider the most accurate methods for allocating blame, for the former envisions a future in which we collectively do better, and the latter one in which we continue to stagnate, fixed on a theory of ethics flowing to us from our ancient past.
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Because the idea of free will is so thoroughly entangled with how we, as heirs of the intellectual tradition of the Latin West, understand ourselves, it should come as no surprise that Ravven’s The Self echoes Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self in both title and trajectory. Likewise, because the self and the will are historically entwined with foundational questions of moral agency, Ravven and Taylor trace parallel lines between many of the same philosophers: Plato to Plotinus, Plotinus to Augustine, Augustine to Descartes, Descartes to Kant, with special attention to Maimonides and Spinoza in Ravven’s case.
Both Taylor and Ravven identify Augustine as a sort of conduit through which ancient Greek perspectives on humankind’s place in the universe passed and subsequently changed. In reading both accounts (and they are remarkably complementary) one gets the sense that Augustine was something of a historically impactful multi-tasker, introducing the ‘radical reflexivity’ of interior life while simultaneously carving out a space for unprecedented freedom of will. In both moves, Augustine consciously and decisively shed continuity with much of pre-Christian Greek philosophy, though he retained a certain respect and appropriative attitude toward it, especially Plato. For both authors the departure is distinct; for Ravven, it is fateful.
Ravven’s treatment of Augustine is extraordinarily careful. Over five million words penned by Augustine survive today; commentaries on his work are appropriately exponential in number. To be well versed in all that was said by and of Augustine is something of a monastic task in itself, and Ravven condenses what could be a truly disorienting blizzard of excerpts into a few expertly curated passages. Her reading focuses closely upon a few of Augustine’s many meditations upon his devil-haunted vision of Eden, and it is among these details that Ravven elegantly illustrates the formation of his doctrine of free will.
Yet what is most striking in Ravven’s examination of Augustine, especially in the greater scheme of her argument, is how she engages with the context of his developing doctrine of free will to demonstrate its service to an emergent belief system with political dimensions. The contrast she draws between a pair of Augustine’s works on Genesis – the first an earlier, metaphorically grounded argument against Manichaean cosmic dualism, the second a later, aggressively literal reading intended in part to correct “reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture” or inept Christian proselytizers – brings to the fore Augustine’s ongoing project of church unity. (Augustine’s long tracts were only the tip of the iceberg in terms of his campaign against heresy; he played both good cop and bad cop with ‘friendly’ letters of correction and the Roman legal system respectively.)
Free will, then, provided not only a satisfactory intellectual answer to a number of theological problems, but through its intense focus on praise and blame, potentially strengthened the force of Augustine’s quest against heresy. When individual culpability is on the line, there is little room for the wishy-washy. Christendom evidently agreed: Ravven documents the subsequent purification and formalization of Augustine’s doctrine of free will by Church authorities, and notes the resultant suppression of alternative approaches (including much Aristotelian thought) that spared mainly Eastern quarters.
Ravven reports that it was within the work of Arabic-writing philosophers of the Islamic falsafa movement that alternative conceptions of the will based in Aristotelian thought survived, giving rise to the great Jewish thinker Maimonides, and later, his secularizing inheritor Spinoza. As Richard Dawkins recently proved with an ill-conceived tweet, the intellectual accomplishments of Medieval Muslim intellectuals often serve as minor footnotes to the seemingly greater progress of their self-congratulatory Western peers. Ravven tolerates no such blithe dismissal: her account of the falsafa movement is nuanced and deft, though it is with Spinoza that her most impressive expository effort shines.
Spinoza is one of those rare figures about whom even the most restrained philosopher feels comfortable waxing effusive. To Bertrand Russell, Spinoza was both “lovable” and “supreme”; Hegel attributed the foundation of modern philosophy to him, Nietzsche found a friend in him, and nearly three centuries after his death, Gilles Deleuze declared him the “prince of philosophers.” It seems there’s always something more to mine him for, and Ravven’s contribution is to credit him with what she calls “the education of desire”, or his theory of developed moral agency sans the concept of free will. Where others – Augustine, Descartes, Kant and more – viewed the human person as a sundry of constituent parts (free will chief among them in the arena of ethics), Spinoza viewed the person as contiguous with herself and nature, shaped utterly by endless sculpting forces. For Spinoza, Ravven writes,
Moral development is the task of reason when reason is educated and put to use according to a specific philosophic understanding and praxis. Moral motivation is transformed by the knowledge of the union…of oneself with the universe – an identification accomplished when one traces the causes of one’s own individuality, of one’s own emotional and motivational makeup, back to their causes in the natural and social universe.
Spinoza and Ravven, in other words, are in cahoots.
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It should come as no wonder that Spinoza was accused in his day of consorting with the devil. Steven Nadler notes that “one disturbed critic went so far as to call [Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus] ‘a book forged in hell’, written by the devil himself.” Ravven points out that his place in the philosophical canon has been a deeply embattled one, marred by disputes over his potential impact on the very possibility of ethics. Critics and would-be supporters alike can be forgiven for wondering: how can we criticize a person’s choice if she literally had no choice?
The remainder of The Self responds to that question with a thorough review of neuroscience literature on the issues of choice and decision-making. Based on a number of psychological studies, Ravven explains that we tend to assign moral responsibility for actions to individuals before we have determined them to be the (freely-willing) cause of a culpable action. The supposed presence of free will doesn’t really appear to have so much of an impact on our moral judgments as we assume, she argues, and worse, it relieves groups, systems, and institutions of responsibility for their hand in individual behaviors. In other words, there is no need to ‘get’ to a place where free will isn’t much of a factor in the assignment of responsibility or ownership: according to what we know of brain science, we’re already waiting for ourselves there.
Ravven follows Spinoza in suggesting that how we learn, believe, and act can evidently prime us for more adopting more ethical behavior. Mirror neurons, cognitive framing, and neuroplasticity can be as complicit in urging unethical behavior as ethical, Ravven argues, and so it is imperative that one of our main focuses, along with developing “a more independent moral sense and sensitivity”, should be “the embrace of broader belonging and wider critical perspectives.” That is to say, we should be as interested in developing selves that are independent enough to resist evil forces from the systems we’re parts of as we are in developing systems that bring good forces to bear on all of us.
This is perhaps the most inspiring claim Ravven proposes, especially in light of her critique of blame-based theories of moral agency. Ultimately free will is about blame: suggest to anyone you meet that free will is a farce, and the ensuing discussion will have to do with how we allocate blame. The disbanding of this narrow, punitive focus in favor of a more “ecological and universal perspective” is a necessary step on the path to a more compassionate, progressive future. Ravven believes that, as a function of our neurology, we are capable of immense change, total shifts in framework. If this is true, then many of the systems we participate in and through our participation perpetuate – such as the causal attribution of poverty to the impoverished based on our notions of free will – are as open to demolishing as the idea of free will itself.
Ravven’s book is performative in this sense. Understanding ourselves as we really are – coherent and dynamic, social and unique, dependent upon and influential in the conscious and unconscious systems that shape us – is an act toward assuming greater responsibility for our place in the world. Reading on the self beyond itself is an enactment of the “fundamental intellectual virtue” Spinoza advocated for, and it offers a view toward the sort of future he imagined: one marked by pluralism, openness, and an interest in universal humanness.
Thus, if Spinoza is in league with the devil, then Ravven is there with him. But their devilry isn’t the brand imagined by Augustine and his successors, wherein radically free will is the reality that invites extraordinary individual culpability, with nary a glance cast around for another mode of self-understanding. It’s rather a ‘gnostic’ sort of devilry, the kind that snakes its way out of obedience and into a better, clearer understanding of the self. Ravven’s account is more complicated than the theory of free will, but it resolves to a more elegant explanation of lived moral agency and corresponds more accurately to the realities of our neurology. Despite its finally optimistic, humane approach to the future, Ravven’s fundamental rethinking of ethics may not be one that’s readily adopted, but we’d be damned for not wanting it to be.