The invention of the modern subject (continued) : will and action (11)

march 31, first hour. There is no will or intellect without appetite. This was the meaning of the formula put forward on March 24. For Buridan, the will is not only (if at all) constrained by the judgment of the intellect, it is also and primarily solicited by desire - the sensible appetite - and short-circuited by it, when practical reasoning gives way to the enthymeme. An enthymeme is an incomplete syllogism, in which one of the two premises, the minor or the major, is implied or, at any rate, remains unexpressed. What distinguishes humans from animals? At first glance, very little. Both are "necessitated", one in his will, the other in his appetite. This is suggested by the "intellectualist" necessitarian proposition 159 (164) of Tempier's syllabus, arguing that "man's will is necessitated by his cognition as the beast is by its appetite" (" Quod voluntas hominis necessitatur per suam cognitionem, sicut appetitus bruti "). Aristotle's answer is that what distinguishes man from beast is the difference between desire (human) and appetite (animal), in other words, the relationship to time(De an. III, 10, 433b4-10). "The intellect urges us to resist in consideration of the future; the appetite draws us into the sole view of the immediate". When man becomes a beast, it's because he manages his desires enthymematically. In the mental syllogism that separates expectation from fulfillment, desire takes the place of the minor; it shortens response time. The intellect, when it resists, seeks on the contrary to gain time. The ability to remain "in suspense" is what distinguishes man from animals. To think philosophically about this distinction, Buridan takes up the distinction between wanting, velle, wanting that not, nolle, and not wanting, non velle: V, VN, NV, which we saw emerge on January 6 (second hour) in the Anselmian "square of wanting". Four questions arise: What can I want? What can I will? What can I defer? Can I want and knot at the same time? To address the latter, we have proposed a case study: the logical analysis of adultery in Buridan and Abélard, two heroes of the Ballade des dames du temps jadis. Buridan argues that a rational being cannot reasonably will what is not "voulable". In other words, he can't want and not want at the same time. Abelard distinguishes two kinds of adultery: voluntary and involuntary. In involuntary adultery, there is a combination of V + VN, velle + nolle, in two modes, one categorical: "I want a relationship with such and such a woman" (V), the other optative: "I wish she were not married" (VN); in the voluntary, on the other hand, that of "gloriole" adultery, where a woman's company is sought because she is "the wife of a powerful man", there's a combination of V and NVN, namely: "I want a relationship with her" (V) and "I especially wouldn 't want her not to be married" (NVN). In both cases, however, there is no real conflict of wills, no coexistence of incompatible desires or incompossible wills ormutually exclusive acts. At instant t, there is no such thing as wanting that p and not wanting that p, or wanting that p and wanting that not. Such situations do exist. They are the ones we need to study.