The invention of the modern subject (continued) : will and action (3)

The lecture on January 27 (first hour), which could have been entitled "Je suis Verlaine" (I am Verlaine), opened, twenty days after the events we know about, with a reading of a long fragment from Sub Urbe, one of the Poèmes saturniens, devoted to the "poor dead". We then returned to Anselm of Canterbury and his distinction between direct causality, by oneself ('per se') and indirect causality,by another ('per aliud'). On this basis, we proposed an Anselmian analysis of "I did not want that". This return to Anselm continued with the development of a second Chisholm example: shooting a man, leading to the formulation of a general thesis on responsibility, ensuring that I am only responsible for an act it was in my power not to perform. Anselmian 'per aliud' causality opens up a theoretical possibility expressed in what has been called the "two-agent theory", illustrated in Chisholm by an argument, the "second man argument", involving a second shooter squeezing the finger of the first, to represent a situation where the agent to whom it is imputed cannot be held responsible for the act he appears to have performed. We then evoked an extrapolation of the "second man argument": the "belief argument", which, in the case of my beliefs, places the "second shooter" inside me - like an alien acting in my stead. We then evoked the Muslim theory of the acquisition of acts, recalling the main theses of al-Asha'rî (873/874-935/936), distinguishing between the Creator of acts (God) and the acquirer of acts (man). We compared this thesis to Thomas Aquinas's "first mover of our acts", mentioned in Human Freedom and the Self, and then recalled that, for Chisholm as for Locke, the real problem of freedom is not whether I am free to do what I want, but free to want what I want. We find the same question in Schopenhauer's Essay on Free Will, with the question: " Can I will what I will?", and his answer, negative and deterministic, carried by the example of the "freedom of the weathervane". The hour ended with Locke's three questions in hisEssay on Human Understanding: Is man free to will the things he actually wants to do? Free not to will any of the things he wills to do? Free to will such and such things as he does not wish to do? - to which we have added a fourth: When ? - i.e.: before committing the act, or at the moment when he performs it?