Categories and Transcendentals Transcended

In this chapter attention is directed again at the relation between attention and intention. ‘Phenomenological’ intentionality may but does not necessarily implicate the will. Whether it does depends among other things on whether willing is understandable as wanting. This is how volo is understood in a Latin phrase cited by Hannah Arendt from a letter to her from Heidegger who attributes it to Augustine, namely ‘Amo: Volo ut sis’. I translate this as ‘I love: I want you to be’. Arendt too has ‘I want’, though it seems to me that the translation ‘I will’ would have been more consonant with the expectations raised in the context of her opinions on Scotus whom she describes as ‘the lonely defender of the primacy of the Will over Intellect’, notwithstanding his own argument for the equiprimordiality of these rather than for the priority of one over the other. However the validity of his argument may depend on what we think of his contention that what he names the natural will (wanting?) is ‘not really will at all, nor is natural volition true volition, for the term “natural” effectively cancels or negates the sense of both “will” and “volition”.’ He appears to take the duality in question here as that of a power in relation to its perfection and what he describes as a heightening of pitch, instress and therefore will. These distinctions are only a few of those that have to be made if we are to be clear about the differences between velle, willing, nolle, being unwilling, velle-nolle, willing not to will, and non-velle, not willing. For Scotus’ purposes and the purposes of this study the most important of these possibilities is that of rejecting both of the original simple alternatives, velle and nolle. For one of the keys to an understanding of this study is an understanding of what it is to will not to will.