The invention of the modern subject (continued) : will and action (12)

At the request of the audience, part of the second hour was devoted to a lexicographical break. A brief history of the terms "vouloir", "nouloir", "volonté", "nolonté" and their corresponding concepts was offered. For "nolonté", we evoked the figures of Charles Renouvier (1815-1903) and his disciple and friend Louis Prat (1861-1942) - the true introducer of the word and the notion into philosophy, for whom nolonté designates freedom understood as the power to say "No!". However, the term had a history before Renouvier and Prat's La Nouvelle monadologie (1899) and Prat's Le caractère empirique et la personne , subtitled: du rôle de la nolonté en psychologie et en morale (1905). We traced it back to Mirabeau, where nolonté designates the absence of willpower. We then evoked the case of the verbs "nouloir" and "noloir". To this end, we examined a principle of Old Regime customary law: "Married women have neither will nor noloir" (Coutume d'Arras, art. 10), which gave rise to a lengthy legal excursus on the need for marital authorization to contract, bind oneself or sue, and its supposed philosophical justification. Turning to Latin, we proposed an investigation centered on " noluntas" in Scholastic theology, which led to the theme of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and Christology, raised several times in the lecture. To set the framework for future research, we analyzed a text by Cajetan (Thomas de Vio, 1469-1534) on the Passion, focusing on the exegesis of Mt 26:38: ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου, "My soul is sorrowful unto death". We thus touched on the question of the causes of sadness, the theory of the four reasons for nouloir, and that of nolléité (" nolleitas") or "conditioned will" in Duns Scotus, evoked by Cajetan. As nolleitas is to volition what nouloir is to will, we began to study the question of whether Christ had had " nolleitatem mortis ", "nolleitas of death", when he entered the Passion. This led to a reflection on what I call "the Gethsemane problem", based on the statement in Mt 26:39: " transeat a me calix !" - the New Testament episode known as the "refusal of the cup". This rich theological material has made it possible to logically pose the problem of freedom in terms of the articulation of the will and the knot, in a series of questions inscribed in "complexes made up of questions and answers" (in the Collingwoodian sense), whose conceptual status and doctrinal investment will be clarified in the following lessons: Can we, at an instant t, will that p and knot that p? Can we, at an instant t, want that p and want that no ? Are we still free to will what we knot at the moment we knot it? Are we still free to want what we want the moment we want it? We concluded by announcing the themes to be taken up again on April 7: the principle of alternative possibilities and the moment of decision.