What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [132]
CHAPTER 1 What Changes? What Doesn’t Change?
1. M. Seligman and J. Hager, eds., The Biological Boundaries of Learning (New York: Apple-ton-Century-Crofts, 1972).
2. M. Seligman, Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975); M. Seligman, Learned Optimism (New York: Knopf, 1991).
3. Copyright by Lisa Friedman Miller. I thank her for her generosity in letting me use it here.
CHAPTER 2 Booters and Bootstrappers
1. This version is taken from the Passover Haggadah, distributed by Maxwell House Coffee, 1981.
2. Even the more psychological books of the Bible—Job and Psalms, for example—are peculiar, seen from a modern perspective, in what mental states are present and what mental states are absent. There is some emotion—anger, grief, and joy; but less cognition—expectation, belief, inference, problem solving; and almost nothing of human will—decision, intention, choice, and preference. What Aristotle called conation is almost absent from the Scriptures (see Deuteronomy 30:19 and Isaiah 65:12 for two rare exceptions).
I used a concordance to bear out this impression. Since I am a far cry from a biblical scholar, I am not sure my observation would bear closer scrutiny. If it is true, however, I take the question of why this might be so to be a great historical question.
3. The skeptical reader should spend some time with the stark account of Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis 22: 1–13. Abraham’s absence of mentation is striking.
4. Pico’s Oration (1486), translated by D. Brooks-Davies and S. Davies, quoted in S. Davies, Renaissance Views of Man (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 62–82.
I have been unable to find a history of free will. I hope that a scholar will someday be moved to undertake such a history. A history of free will, unlike, say, the history of empiricism, would be more than an airy exercise in the history of a philosophical notion. If I am right, what a given historical period believes about free will reflects, and may even affect, how active or passive that culture is, how helpless and how despairing that culture is.
This section of my book, along with this note and the note below on human participation in grace, is my bare sketch of such a history.
Pico was far from the first to articulate the concept of free will. Dante wrote, “A light is given you to know good and evil, and free will (“e libero voler”), which if it endure fatigue in its first battles with the heavens, afterwards, if it is well nurtured, it conquers completely” (canto 16, Purgatory). Before Dante, Aquinas endorsed it, more than halfheartedly.
It was clearly put forth one thousand years before Pico by Pelagius in his lost work De Libero Arbitrio. Unfortunately for Pelagius, he had the most towering of opponents, the luminescent Saint Augustine. Augustine, for most of his life, held that humans could indeed will evil, but that when they will good, it is merely by the irresistible action of divine grace.
Augustine’s conception traces back to the Stoic Seneca’s view that fate and human freedom are compatible. And Seneca’s view, in turn, traces back another century to Cicero. The Golden Age Greeks had a lively interest in free will versus fate, and this contrasts instructively with the debate’s absence from the Bible. The issue of free will is Greco-Roman in origin, not Judeo-Christian.
At any rate, Augustine’s opposition to Pelagius may have set back the idea of free will for a millennium or so, since save for Aquinas and Dante, it did not seem to reemerge with any force until Pico. See Marianne Djuth’s “Stoicism and Augustine’s Doctrine of Human Freedom After 396,” in J. Schnaubelt and F. Van Fleteren, eds., Collectanea Augustiniana (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), for an illuminating account of this hoary dispute at the close of the fourth century.
5. From the point of view of advocates of human choice, Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will (1525)