Justin E. H. Smith
I.
To speak of a 'cheap whore' is, among other things, to utter a bisyllabic dysphemism. Orthophemized, the phrase lengthens to 'inexpensive prostitute', and from there it can be launched into the tortured register of euphemistic speech –where no one who means what he says ever goes– that gives us phrases like 'down-market sex worker'. But let us not allow the harshness of the first formulation to get in the way of profounder analysis, for it is very often the short, gruntlike dysphemisms that are the most deeply rooted in our linguistic heritage. 'Cheap whore' for example, whatever else it has wrong with it, turns out upon inspection to be not only offensive, but also, like 'wireless cable', a contradiction in terms. In learning why, we may learn a lot else besides.
II.
I would like to say a few words about intention, action, desire, and lack, and about the possible connections between these that are revealed by the vocabularies of a number of natural languages. I had initially intended to do this in my Etymology from Memory series, where the rule of the game is to see how many threads of a common lexical root I am able to follow without having recourse to any information other than what is stored in my own brain. I do this as a sort of act of resistance to the increasing reliance of our society on external memory-storage devices (if in the end it is our brains that are the detachable prostheses of Google, rather than vice versa, we still need to make sure that our brains are good for something when they are detached). I decided in the end to do this one hors-série, however, since I realized after I had begun the importance of getting it right this time. My prostheses, if this makes a difference, were all made out of paper.
Lack is a cousin, as well as an outlier, to what really interests me, so let's start there. Currently, the standard way of expressing desire in English, with the verb 'to want', is really a borrowing of a verb that until recently meant something quite distinct: 'This room wants a fireplace', 'May you never want for affection', and so on. There is also a nominal form of the same word, as in: 'Children are dying for want of access to clean water'. There doesn't seem to be any intentionality here at all: the room doesn't desire anything, or feel a lack that it hopes to fill. Rather, the room has a lack, as a matter of fact, even though the room itself does not care one way or another about this.
So wanting is in its primary sense simply lacking, and is only secondarily, or belatedly desiring, which is to say lacking plus longing for the lack to end. Now willing is in turn a longing for some condition to end, or a longing for some new condition to obtain, coupled with some sort of ability to change one's condition or the condition of one's immediate environment. Interestingly, the notion of willing –also sometimes concretized into a thing that produces acts of willing, i.e., 'the will' (German, der Wille)– furnishes another way of expressing what modern English speakers mean by the verb 'to want'. Thus, while the more polite and euphemistic way of saying what one wants in German forces one to say what one 'would like' (ich möchte, etc.), the more direct way is by means of the verb willen, plainly a cognate of the noun –'the will'– for the thing that Western metaphysics supposes to be the source of voluntary actions: ich will etwas essen. I want to eat something; I will to eat something.
Here moreover one would not be altogether naïve to discern a connection with the most common form of the future tense of the English verb 'to be'. I will to eat something; I will eat something. There is evidently a fine line between registering one's own intention, and predicting the future. This assumes of course that our wills are translatable into reality, that there will be no impediments that prevent us, notwithstanding what we might will, from, say, eating. There are many philosophers (Hobbes, I take it, and surely Spinoza) for whom this 'disconnect' (as they say these days) is just fine, since 'willing' is really just an agreeable sensation that accompanies certain determined events, but not others. In Russian, for questions concerning the immediate future, the future tense of the verb 'to be' may often be used interchangeably with the verb 'to want': thus ty budesh' chaï? (You will tea?, i.e., Tu seras du thé?) and ty khochesh' chaï? (You want tea?) are two equally fine ways of asking someone whether she would like tea. It is as if we are all little gods when it comes to the satisfaction of small desires, where we need but will something in order for it to become the case.
Read more »