Per Caritatem

In reading a section devoted to Scotus in Hannah Arendt’s book, The Life of the Mind, I came across an interesting passage in which she contrasts Scotus and Spinoza with regard to freedom and necessity. 

The Will’s autonomy–”nothing else but the will is the total cause of volition” (”nihil aliud a voluntate est causa totalis volitionis in voluntate“)-decisively limits the power of reason, whose dictate is not absolute, but it does not limit the power of nature, be it the nature of the inner man, called “inclinations,” or that of exterior circumstances.  The will is by no means omnipotent in its actual effectiveness:  its force consists solely in that it cannot be coerced to will.  To illustrate this mental freedom, Scotus gives the example of a man “who hurls himself from a high place.”  Does not this act terminate his freedom since he now necessarily falls?  According to Scotus, it does not.  While the man is necessarily falling, compelled by the law of gravity, he remains free to continue “to will to fall,” and can also of course change his mind, in which case he would be unable to undo what he started voluntarily and would find himself in the hands of necessity.  We remember Spinoza’s example of the rolling stone which, if endowed with consciousness, would necessarily be prey to the illusion that it had hurled itself and was now rolling of its own free will (pp. 131-132). 

In other words, for Scotus our experience of our being aware that in the very act of doing x, I could be not doing x, is an indication that we are indeed free and not caught in a deterministic matrix.  Spinoza, in contrast, is skeptical of our experience and claims that our awareness of our desires and volitions only delude us into thinking that we are free, as we are ignorant of the causes that constantly impinge upon us and compel us to do this or that.  Arendt goes on to say with regard to the two thinkers,

Such comparisons are useful in order to realize to what an extent such propositions and their illustrations, disguised in the form of plausible arguments, depend on preliminary assumptions about necessity or freedom as self-evident facts.  To stay with the present illustration-no law of gravity can have power over the freedom guaranteed in interior experience; no interior experience has any direct validity in the world as it really and necessarily is according to outer experience and the correct reasoning of the intellect (Ibid., p. 132).

Here I am interested in what Arendt might have in mind with the first sentence in the passage above.  Might she be interpreted as suggesting a kind of Gadamerian insight, that is, that our pre-philosophical orientations to e.g. freedom or necessity shape the direction that our position will eventually take?  This seems to me a plausible read, as I cannot imagine an orthodox Christian thinker like Scotus ever embracing a deterministic position such as the one advocated by Spinoza.  I am not claiming that Scotus’ arguments for freedom depend on revelation, but I am suggesting that given his beliefs based on Scripture, the questions that he engages and the positions that he will or will not seriously embrace are in a sense set by his pre-philosophical convictions on e.g. freedom.  I tend to agree with Scotus’ position and find his arguments very convincing, so this is not a criticism of Scotus in any way.  I simply think that Gadamer’s view that our pre-judgments determine the questions that we ask and set the trajectory of our inquiries (not that these are unammendable) is highly plausible and sits well with my own experience, as well as the experience of others.  Thoughts?