2. If some F-thing is superior to every not-F thing, say that God
brian leftow 2. If some F-thing is superior to every not-F thing, say that God is an F.
Obviously, whoever follows (2) and wants not to contradict him – or herself will also follow (1). We see below that all outputs of these rules are compatible: all descriptions they select can apply to the same being. Note that these rules compare all existing objects in the states they are actually in. They rest only on the idea that God is the best thing there actually is.
Monologion 15 seeks only intrinsic descriptions. But (2) does not yield only these. Consider being the creator of all good things other than itself. On its most obvious reading, this is not an intrinsic description, for something is so only if there are good things other than itself.5 But according to Anselm, whatever this description applies to is greater than whatever it does not apply to. For only
God has it, and God is greater than every other thing. So (2) selects it, though we cannot know this until we know that God in fact has it.6 The same will obviously apply to any relational description only
God satisfies. So (2) has intrinsic descriptions as output only if it gets only intrinsic descriptions as input. It is a rule for selecting among descriptions known to be intrinsic on other grounds.
On the face of it, (2) is not very helpful. Can we know that every G is superior to every non-G without knowing whether God is a G?
Perhaps not: perhaps every non-G but God is inferior to some G, and God is the one exception. There is nothing peculiar to God's case in this. The problem is that if all we consider is the position of individual Gs on a greatness scale, we can not know that every
G is superior to every not-G unless we have surveyed all of each, and if everything must be either G or not-G, this requires surveying everything whatsoever, including God. Anselm wants a decision procedure, something that will tell him whether God is intrinsically
G, for any G, starting from only the knowledge that God is the best actual thing – not assuming that we know whether God is G. Rule
(2) does not give him that. We can see, further, that there is really only one way around this problem. For there are just two ways to know whether every G is superior to every non-G. One is to survey Gs and non-Gs. The other is to learn something about what it is to be G and what it is not to be G that guarantees that Gs will
(or will not) be better than non-Gs. An effective decision procedure Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
Anselm's perfect-being theology
for perfect-being theology must focus on descriptions, not on the things satisfying them.
Further, (2) does not fit the opening example in Anselm's discussion, wisdom (Mon. 15). Anselm wants his rules to select "wise" to apply to God. His intuitions tell him that God ought to be a wise thing. (His reading of Scripture and his belief that it is Scripture's God he is reasoning about no doubt inform these.) But Anselm allows that a just wise person is better than a wise unjust person (Mon. 15). If this is so, then in the sense now under discussion, "wise" is not one of "those things to which whatever is not what they are is inferior" – some non-wise things are superior to some wise things.
Hence Anselm needs another rule to select further descriptions. better rules Anselm in fact suggests other rules before stating the two that I have so far treated. He has already pointed to a class of descriptions:
In some cases something is in every respect better than its negation – as for example wise than not-wise. For although someone who is just but not wise seems better than someone who is wise but not just . . . whatever is not wise is, insofar as it is not wise, unqualifiedly inferior to what is wise; for whatever is not wise would be better if it were wise . . . but in some cases the negation is in some respect the better; for example not-gold than gold.
For it is better for a man to be not-gold than to be gold . . . the more inferior in nature a man would become if he were gold, the better thing a man is than gold (Mon. 15).
Anselm's example is not entirely apt. A man cannot be golden. Someone who tried to turn a man to gold would instead replace the man with a golden statue. So it cannot be better for a man to be nongolden than to be golden, any more than it can be better for him to be non-golden than to be a round square. You can be better off being
F than being G only if you can be F and can be G. Still, what Anselm has in mind is clear enough. "Whatever is not wise would be better if it were wise" makes two comparisons. One is between actual things that are actually not wise and those very things as they would be if they were wise: between an actual thing in its actual state and the same thing in a state it is not actually in. An attribute – say, wisdom – is an improving attribute for a kind only if normal members of the Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006