II. Replies to the preliminary arguments
IS INTENTION AN ACT OF THE WILL ALONE?
encompassing both (a) what has its tending toward something else from another and (b) what has its tending toward something else from itself, as moving itself toward that thing. Also, something can tend toward something else either as toward a present object or as toward a distant or absent terminus.
9 Taken in the first way (a), intention characterizes every power with respect to its object.
10 Taken in the second way (b), more properly, intention is understood as applying to what tends toward another and is not led to that other, but instead leads itself.
So understood, intention cannot belong to any natural power, but only to a free power, because as Damascene says,5 "a non-free appetite is led and does not lead," and that is true of every natural power.
11 Therefore, 'intend' understood properly in this way, as meaning "to tend toward another in virtue of one's own power (ex se)," will belong paradigmatically to a free power. But because willing freely belongs to free choice as a whole, which includes both intellect and will (in keeping with the third view in distinction 25 of this book6), intention will belong to free choice as a whole (and that if it is understood in its most proper sense), and it will not belong to any power with respect to its object, but only with respect to an end. And since, according to Anselm,7 in every volition there is both a what and a why, intention has to do not with the what but with the why, in that it indicates tending toward something as distant, through something as an intermediate.
12 Therefore, intention will be an act of free choice by reason of the will, and it will be an act of the will with respect to what it wills. Now if there is one and the same act of willing what is willed and that for the sake of which it is willed, use and intention will be one and the same act; but if they are distinct acts, 'intention' will indicate formally the act by which it tends toward the end and materially the act of use by which it refers something else to that end.
II. Replies to the preliminary arguments 13 In reply to the first argument [n. 2], it is evident that it depends on taking 'intention' as a tendency on the part of anything that is determined and terminated by something else.
5 Damascene, De fide orthodoxa c. 36, c. 41.
6 Scotus did not revise d. 25 for the Ordinatio. See Lectura II d. 25 n. 69, and for the development of Scotus's view of liberum arbitrium and the contributions of intellect and will, see Dumont, "Did Scotus
Change His Mind on the Will?"
7 On Truth 12.
ORDINATIO II, D. , Q. UN.
To the second argument [n. 3] I say that the intention of the joining will does not cause the first vision; rather, intention has the power to join the whole8—in one and the same temporal instant—and thus strengthen that vision. But once that first intellection has been achieved, the will can turn to or away from other activities and thus join [the soul's attention to objects] in a variety of ways.9 Therefore, we should deny the major premise, that no distinct vision can be had without intention joining, unless this joining is understood not to be actually concomitant. And accordingly the claim that discrete vision is temporally prior to all intellection should be denied, although it is prior in nature. Alternatively, if that vision, which is without intellection and intention as concomitants, can exist without the intention of the will joining, then the proposition "discrete vision cannot exist without intention joining" should be denied absolutely. And denying it is not contrary to Augustine: for he holds that the will can turn the gaze [of the mind] toward an object and tend toward the object, but he does not hold that no vision can take place unless the will thus tends and turns.10
To the last argument11 [n. 5] I say that comparing in the mode of judgment, like understanding, belongs to the intellect alone. But relating by using—that is, by ordering one object of love to another—belongs to the will. For just as the will is reflexive because it is immaterial, so too it is, in its own way, comparative or capable of relating [one thing to another].
8 "the whole" = vision and the thing seen.
9 Cf. Augustine, On the Trinity XI.4.7.
10 Augustine, On the Trinity XI.3.6.
11 No response is given to the third argument [n. 4].