So far I have focused on SAFi, the technical implementation of SAF in this blog, so today I want to talk about the traditional lineage of the framework. Because ideas like SAF are not born in a vacuum, but build up from a lineage of thinkers before us.
SAF goes back more than two thousand years to ancient Greece to Aristotle and Plato. They were the ones who first started asking the big questions in a systematic way. They looked at the human mind and saw a kind of internal struggle, a battle between our rational side (what we know is right) and our appetites or desires (what feels good).
They gave us the concepts of an Intellect (or Reason) and the goal of building a virtuous character. They essentially drew the first rough sketch of our family tree.
For a long time, that sketch was the whole picture. But then, a few centuries later, a philosopher named St. Augustine came along and made a huge contribution. He looked at the model and realized a piece was missing.
How can a person know what is right but still choose to do what is wrong?
He argued there must be a third, independent faculty at play: the Will. The Will was the ultimate decider, the power to choose which path to follow.
With Augustine, the family got a crucial new member, and the picture became much clearer.
For the next 1,500 years, this was the core family: Intellect, Will, and Conscience (our inner sense of right and wrong). Thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant debated and refined their roles, but the basic structure was set.
SAF builds on this model.
Before SAF these known faculties were not synthesized in this specific order: Intellect > Will > Conscience, But were discussed independently, with conscience being more of a function of the Intellect.
I struggled with this order, because indeed in humans, conscience is proactive and reactive, meaning that it warns us before we take an action, and it nags us when an action is taken that violates our values. The conscience is the feedback system, manifested through our emotions.
Eventually I decided to place the conscience after the Will to be the judge of the actions already taken. This degraded the function of the conscience, but made the process systematic.
After arranging the faculties this way, the flow felt clear, the intellect proposes, the will decides, and the conscience reflects or judges, but there was something missing, the ability to capture the long term performance of the system, and thats how the spirit faculty was born.
In Virtue Ethics, character is built by habit, by repeating things over and over again, this is what the spirit faculty does. It tracks the long-term performance and coherence of the system, and monitors how aligned the system stays true over time, this is what gives the system its identity.
I debated for quite a bit how to name this last faculty, because the word Spirit is very abstract, and is loaded with metaphysical meanings, but I don’t think there is any other word that describes the concept better than spirit.
Spirit is the manifestation or lack thereof of alignment, so if a person is aligned with their values it will experience a sense of meaning or harmony, and reading the Bible I found passages that alluded to this, for example, the blessed mother’s praise in Luke 1:47:
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”
For me, that passage describes a spirit that is in perfect alignment.
As you can see, the faculties have a long traditional history, and what I have done is just to stand on the shoulders of giants and rearranged some things, and introduced a new member of the family, the Spirit.
