3.5⭐️

Taaie kost met goede inhoud. Gelukkig heb ik uit betrouwbare bron gehoord dat het normaal is om dit soort boeken niet volledig te begrijpen als je ze voor de eerste keer leest.
Genoeg stof tot nadenken/aansporing om ermee aan de slag te gaan.
Daarom hierbij even een prachtige ChatGPT samenvatting voor het geval ik het nog eens wil lezen:

Samenvattend is "Over de vrije wilskeuze" een diepgaande verkenning van de complexe interactie tussen vrije wil, zonde, straf, en goddelijke voorzienigheid. Augustinus verdedigt de vrije wil van de mens als een fundamenteel goed, maar benadrukt ook de verantwoordelijkheid die ermee gepaard gaat. Het kwaad in de wereld is een gevolg van de verkeerde uitoefening van deze vrije wil, en hoewel God het kwaad toelaat, blijft zijn voorzienigheid en rechtvaardigheid onaangetast

Augustine and I just differ.

I can't rate this book, because its third book is completely beyond my understanding. I am also not sure whether I really know what the saint is talking about in the first two books. His entire philosophical system is established on his belief in God, which makes his philosophy quite different from others thinkers'. Maybe I shall ask to which extent can we can this philosophy. What I learned from this book is that St. Augustine's thought and his effort to reconcile faith and reason do not make sense to me. Reading the book is time-consuming, because once I failed to understand a certain point, I began to feel sleepy, and this made some arcane passages even more difficult.A vicious cycle

It's amazing how many of Augustine's major themes appear in this little book. And, correspondingly, how dense the reading is! I found the translation very readable, however. I don't think this book says all that faithful theology must say about the problem of evil; but (as always, perhaps?) the theologian ignores Augustine to their own peril.

Not an easy slog, but when you dig in some interesting thoughts on an age-old question. Not for the faint of heart or those with short attention spans.

I loved this work, Augustine is very clear and asks interesting questions. A breath of fresh air after reading Lactantius and similar figures, who were largely responding to paganism.

Its my #2 favorite Augustine book.

Solid arguments, but tautological. The transcendent hierarchy is appealing, but I find no tenable claims for a source of evil.
Also I’m sick of these ancients writing off animals. There’s a bit distinguishing inner sense from our privileged rational faculty and it’s bogus. If anything the cognitive difference amongst living beings is more a gradient, less rigidly categorized. It’s not that animals obey our will bc they recognize it as stronger; Homo sapiens possess language and we provide. of course they will pursue that pleasure at the cost of will; they didn’t have the language to deny the enslavement to begin.

It’s not so black and white as good and evil, the fools and the wise. Hate to borrow the banal term ‘binary thinking’ but the rigid categories really inspire a personal disillusion with the sanctimoniousness voice in the text. We seek so desperately to understand the world, yet in doing so we cast it in such stark shades that we ignore the richness of truth.

So according to Augustine:
I can be wise if I pursue the eternal law (fucking math or virtues I’m cool with the virtues), ignore all cravings of the flesh (as if a good god would truly cage me in a shell built to ‘test’ me), and will myself to be rational enough not be tempted. Then I’ll be wise and therefore happy. Everyone else who doesn’t know that’s what makes them happy will try to be happy pursuing/bent by the temporal law and all things temporary will fleetingly slip through their grasp. Ignorance is misery.

This elitist rebuke of worldly pursuits is much like Plato and I dig the disciplined standards placed on the self, but I think there’s truly something to be said for the Empiricist’s sense-derived truth. The pleasure of life experience and insight derived thereby is the truest path, much more conducive than a logically coherent a priori framework.
Logical validity doesn’t necessitate soundness, believing I can impose a rational set of parameters on an inherently chaotic (and non-anthropocentric) reality is folly - and betrays the original Christian concession that God’s intentions/mind/w/e is beyond our capacity to reason.

It might not be the most best philosophy which can stand any argument, but most definitely it is a piece of really hard and good work ( sometimes a bit amusing) which gives you a glimpse into the basics of christian theology and what it is based on.

Although it's an interesting read, it's not a good resource on philosophy of the free will. It's a good reference to figure out why Christians used to blame poor people for being poor based on their virtue. There's also a lot of blaming clinically depressed people for being depressed. I want to laugh about it, but Augustine was probably serious about his idea that sin and everything comes from free will and if it doesn't you should grin and bear it.
I does have interesting arguments on why sin exists at all. Usually people don't even try to answer that question.

This book was not terrible, but it did drag on quite a bit. A book this short took me an absurdly long time to complete simply because of how dense it is. A lot of the writing did not resonate with me and I found many of the passages completely incomprehensible. This is a text I will likely revisit in the future, but as of now I gained very little from reading it. The nice thing about this book is that I now have a slightly better understanding of Christian philosophies around evil, good, and the nature of man. I also really enjoyed how this text was mostly a conversation between two people, that is a format I haven’t really experienced before. Otherwise, I found Augustine to ramble quite a bit, but parts of it were still enjoyable and logical.

In this book Augustine discusses Freewill and good acts.
What makes us have free will? What makes something good?
These are some of what I consider the most valuable questions in our lives and Augustine takes them on to try to answer. Philisophical and deep.