"Reflection on the right to will": Auden's "Canzone" and Arendt's notes on willing

Comparative Literature, Spring 2001 by Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah

The discovery of the Will did not secure its legitimacy, and one of the reasons for the persistence of questions concerning its rightness is the strange circumstance that those who bring it into question, namely philosophers, have, according to Arendt, something like a professional animus against the Will. For willing displaces the faculty of thinking from its contemplative state: the solitary quiet in which thought may proceed-otium-is forced into nec otium (negotiation).16 Viewed from the perspective of philosophers who resent its intrusion into the free functioning of the faculty of thinking, the Will presents three principal difficulties: first, it may not exist; second, the freedom without which there is no Will runs counter to the principle of reason; and lastly-and this includes the other two-the will, as she writes, suffers from the "curse" (2:27) of contingency. Oriented as they are toward the enduring present, thinking and its partisans privilege necessity-whether under the strictures of the principle of noncontradiction or those of the principle of causation. Thus, until the Will can rid itself of contingency, it cannot be legitimated in the eyes of a contemplation that finds satisfaction only in necessity. Of all of the philosophers whom Arendt discusses only Duns Scotus defends what she calls "the factor of contingency in everything that is" (2:31), and she notes that her study of Scotus could serve as "the speculative conditions for a philosophy of freedom" (2:146)-something she unfortunately did not live to work out.17

Arendt cites more than once Scotus's earthy proof for the existence of contingency: "Let all those who deny contingency be tormented until they admit that it would be possible not to be tortured" (2:134). The insight of Scotus that guides Arendt not only in her discussion of the subtle philosopher but in all her reflections on the right to will is that there must be contingency if there is to be freedom, or, to use a more exacting yet paradoxical formulation: contingency is the price to be paid for the priceless gift of freedom.18 Arendt closes her discussion of Scotus with a nod to another of his "surprisingly original" (2:145) insights: that the faculty of Will can be transformed into the sheer activity of love, not, however, by the binding of love with its object or by the transcending of desire through the activity of thinking, but by delighting in itself. Because of this delight, love can be emptied of the desire to possess the object of love, while still loving its object. Love is thus the foretaste of blessedness, of "perfect love of God for God's sake," in which the Will "no longer needs or is no longer capable of, rejection" (2:144) and hence of choice. But this does not mean, as Arendt points out, that those in a state of blessedness have lost the faculty of saying "yes." On the contrary, Scotus, for Arendt, is better able than even Augustine to make sense of the line that has haunted her work since her dissertation on the doctrine of love in Augustine: "Amo: volo ut sis [I love, I will that you be]" (2:144) .19