La naissance de la volonté by Miklos Vetō (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 329 La naisstlnce de la volonte. By MIKLOS VETO. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002. Pp. 332. 26,50 €(paper). ISBN 2-7475-3776-5. Miklos Veto, a Christian philosopher from Hungary who teaches in France, brings together a number of his areas of interest in his most recent book. While he is no doubt best known for his studies in German Idealism-Schelling, in particular-he has also written on the problem of evil in Christian thought, and provided philosophical interpretations offigures outside the mainstream (Simone Weil and Jonathan Edwards). As the title of the latest book suggests, it recounts the genesis of the notion of will in intellectual history. Veto's aim in this account is above all philosophical: rather than trace the complex web of historical influences in the ideas of a particular thinker or school of thought, he intends to unfold the concept of will "through thinkers that do not necessarily have historical connections to each other" (7). In this regard, one might compare his approach to Hannah Arendt's work on the Life ofthe Mind, which Veto himself cites as an early inspiration. Such an approach, of course, always begins with a precise destination in mind. For Veto, "at the end of its more than two-thousand year history, the notion of Will finds its fulfillment in Kant" (304). To understand why requires an understanding of what Veto means by the "birth" of the will. As he explains in the introduction, the story of the birth of the will is a story of its gradual "purification," by which he means its dissociation from a number of related orders and its emergence into a sphere proper to itself alone, a sphere that Veto insists possesses a sui generis intelligibility. On the one hand, this entails a separation of the will's activity from its effects in the world, and on the other hand it requires the more difficult, but for Veto the more essential, dissociation of the will from both the natural desire for the good and the order of the (theoretical) intellect. The confusion ofthese orders accounts, according to Veto, for both the impoverishment ofsome notions of will-for example, the varieties of classical naturalism and intellectualism--and the monstrous exaggerations of the will in more modern thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The story of the will's "birth," then, is the story of the increasingly decisive articulation of its autonomy, a story that thus reaches its climax in eighteenth-century Konigsberg. The story unfolds in stages. The book's first chapter, "Commencements," covers the broad stretch from Greek thought to the Reformation. While it is Stoicism that first "discovers" the will, Aristotle prepares the way by making a distinction in the practical realm between immanent action (praxis) and production (poesis); the former designates an action whose end lies in itself and thus already marks a certain independence from external effects. Seneca carries this movement a step further by dissociating the will's immanent intention from action. The reduction of will to intention, in fact, is what inaugurates the will's autarchy, that is, its sovereign independence from the vicissitudes ofthe outside world (28). Nevertheless, the Stoics' internal world is still the world of cosmic (and therefore natural) reason. It is Augustine, according to Veto, who 330 BOOK REVIEWS introduces a division within that internal world itself (39), which leads him to draw the crucial distinction "between what is natural in the will and what is spiritual" (40), that is, between what Augustine eventually calls potestas or facultas, and what he calls voluntas proper (45). Later Christian thinkers specify this distinction and its implications further: Anselm realizes that the will's proper object is not the (appetible) good, but justice (51); Duns Scotus extracts the "non-naturality" of the properly free will, which transcends all creatures and is inferior only to God (53); Calvin, finally, succeeds in formalizing the will by subordinating the multiple material instances of its acts to its general orientation or permanent intention (68). Aquinas, according to Veto, represents a regression in this development insofar as he "resolutely subordinates [the will] to the intellect" (50). As the book progresses, the historical...