The invention of the modern subject (continued) : will and action (16)

Second hour. The only medieval alternative to Aristotle's model is that of Augustine. Its theological "locus" is the Epistle to the Galatians (Gal 5:17): "There is a conflict of desires in man: the flesh desires against the spirit; the spirit desires against the flesh: they oppose each other, so that the things we would, we cannot do. In both his work and his life, Augustine echoes both Paul and the "problem of Gethsemane". Augustine's starting point is the self-resistance of the willing mind insofar as it is willing. The explanation for this phenomenon, which Augustine describes in paradoxical detail, is that the will is not entirely in wanting what it wants, that it is not entirely in its wanting. This illness of the mind (aegritudo animi) is the normal state of the will. The will only half obeys, because it only half commands. In Scotian terms: it cannot will in a, without willing in a. There are not two complete wills in man, two opposing wills - one good, the other evil - carried by two distinct natures or substances, flesh and spirit, soul and body - the Manichean thesis; there is one will split by the knot dug in each will by its own incompleteness, as a consequence of Adam's sin. There are not two souls in me, but a single soul, at war with itself, divided into a velle and a nolle by sin, which "dwells in it", as Romans 8:14 puts it. To sum up Augustine's model in a nutshell: we can only will in a if we can only knot in a; we can only knot in a if we can only will in a. Hanna Arendt gave a precise description of this model: "It always takes two rival wills to will." It's a fact of structure. The conflict of wills is the expression of what Arendt calls the " Two-in-One" that characterizes all mental or psychic processes: thought, will and judgment. The will, shared and automatically producing its counter-will, becomes one only by taking action. The flaw within the will is independent of the content that is willed: good or bad, right or wrong. A bad will is no less shared than a good one, and vice versa. According to Arendt, what resolves the conflict between velle and nolle constitutive of the will as a practical figure of the Two-in-One is, in a word, the act itself. The only way out of torment is by acting, by absorbing the counter-will in the act. Duns Scotus, for whom "the will is always at the same time the act of wanting and not wanting", is Augustine's successor. The final word went to John Adams: Spectemur Agendo! "Let us be judged by our actions", as the year drew to a close with eighteen concluding questions, punctuated by the announcement of the theme for 2016: "The subject of passion".