The second hour of the lecture on January 6 was devoted to a series of historical and conceptual variations on a phrase engraved on the fireguard of the fireplace in the château des fêtes at Haut-Koenigsbourg: " Ich habe es nicht gewollt ", "I didn 't want that". As this phrase is attributed to Wilhelm II, we briefly touched on its use in Karl Kraus's play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), published between 1915 and 1922, once in the mouth of "Little William", once in that of God himself, the true final word. Against this backdrop, we have touched on several problematizations of the non-will: that of Roderick Chisholm (1916-1999), in Human Freedom and the Self, with the casus of the civil servant and the bribe; that of Anselm of Canterbury in the pages De potestate et impotentia, possibilitate et impossibilitate, necessitate et libertate from ms. 59 of London's Lambeth Palace Library, published in 1936 by Dom François de Sales Schmitt under the title Lambeth fragments. Continuing with the quadrangle of Jean de Damas's agency, we presented in detail what has been called the "Anselmian square", made up of: " facere esse" (FE), " non facere esse " (NFE), " facere non esse " (FNE), " non facere non esse " (NFNE). A recent reconstruction of this "square of doing" is Sarah Uckelman'sAgentive square of opposition , which articulates agency and causality in four equivalences:
- FE: 'to cause to be' ;
- FNE: 'to cause not to be' ;
- NFNE: 'not to cause not to be ' ;
- NFE: 'not to cause to be'.
Introducing the difference between agency "by oneself" (per se) and agency "by another" (per aliud), we then summarized Anselm's six modes of action, based on Douglas N. Walton's model, its operators and notation. After a few formal considerations, we focused on the "square of will", distinguishing between :
- V, to want ;
- NV, not to want ;
- VN, want not to ;
- NVN, not to will not.
Then to the "square of want to do", distinguishing :
- VF, want to do ;
- NVF, don't want to do;
- VNF, want not to do ;
- NVNF, don't want not to do.
We concluded with the difference between 'non velle' (not to will) and 'nolle' (to will that not to), precisely formulated in the Lexicon philosophicum terminorum philosophis usitatorum, published in Jena in 1653 by Johannes Lütkeschwager (1597-1658), alias Micraelius.
