Augustine Good Will

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Augustine, through On Free Choice of the Will, gives the soul an excess amount of power to both control herself and give something that only it can. Many of Augustine’s philosophical views can arguably be rooting from Plato’s discussion of wisdom in Five Dialogues. Augustine argues good will as love for eternal, spiritual things in opposition to sins but does not mention God’s grace and his discussion of good will is mostly analogous to Plato’s view of wisdom and my personal beliefs. Augustine describes good will as the opposite of sinning but misses a key factor about the soul’s power to rule herself. Augustine describes people being “happy when they love their own good will” (Augustine 22) and embrace it. However, there is no mention of …show more content…

A person can will to be happy but it is short-lived if the person does not live rightly in order to guarantee happiness. Augustine’s two laws, …show more content…

Whereas Augustine describes “love [of] temporary things” (Augustine 24) as sin, Plato, similarly, discusses the body’s desire for such temporary illusions. Plato views anything arrived at through the senses as evil because it causes one to become further from the ultimate truth and become more immoral and corrupt. He states that the temporary senses of the body “prevent us from seeing the truth” (Plato 66d) and thus cause “confusion and fear.” (66d) This is similar to temporary desires causing a retraction from the good will as one becomes more adapted or comfortable to temporary senses or body’s senses. As we view Augustine’s temporary desires as arguably evil, he also states, “it follows that doing evil is nothing but turning away from learning.” (Augustine 2) This makes it more challenging to gain “pure knowledge” (Pluto 66d) as Pluto described it. Desire for temporary things, or sin, clearly make it more difficult to gain good will or in other words, true knowledge through the daemon. By shifting love towards “what is eternal” (Augustine 25) one is able to detach from the body and focus on the consciousness. Plato’s and Augustine’s meanings are nearly identical but they each use different concepts or forms of description to portray their underlying

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