Topics Philosophers

Question I understand that Anselm says that things which exist in the mind and reality are better then things that exist in the mind alone, but how can this apply to things such as murder and rape? If I think of the genocide of a race, how is it any better that this genocide actually exist?

Accepted:
June 19, 2008

Comments

You seem (reasonably enough) to be understanding the notion of 'better' in the moral sense of the term. But that isn't the sense that Anselm had in mind, and it's not actually the word he used either. What he was concerned with (in chapter two of his Proslogium) was 'that, than which nothing greater can be conceived' (in the Latin, 'id quo maius cogitari nequit'). And it's true that the notion of greatness does sometimes carry moral connotations, such as when we describe a particular paragon of virtue as being a great man or woman. But it works the other way too. In cases like murder and rape, although we might sometimes regard wicked intentions as already constituting crimes -- we certainly do so when these intentions are shared and discussed by a cabal of conspirators -- most of us would nevertheless regard it as a greater crime if those intentions actually get translated into action. And then there are plenty of other senses of 'great' that carry no moral connotations whatsoever, one way or the other. We talk of 'a great distance', or 'a great weight', or 'a great sum of money', for instance. The term 'greater' is an intensifier, and it is always understood in relation to some quality, moral or otherwise, that different things can possess to variable degrees, be it virtue, iniquity, length, weight or monetary value. As for Anselm, he is here understanding 'greater' purely in relation to the different forms of existence that things can possess, and his argument turns on the claim that something which exists in reality thereby possesses a higher form of existence than something which exists in the understanding alone. This needn't mean that it's either better or worse: it just means that it's more real and substantial. And God, he would say, is by definition the ens realissimum, the most real being of all.