Will

Aristotle does not isolate the will as a distinct power of the soul. The term most often rendered as "will" in his writings, boulesis, means rational wish or desire for the good. What concerns him is less an inner faculty that commands action than the structure of voluntary choice. In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, he distinguishes the voluntary from the involuntary: an action is voluntary when the agent knows the relevant circumstances and the origin of the action lies in the agent. Actions done under compulsion or through ignorance fall outside the scope of moral assessment. This framework does not require a metaphysics of free will. It requires only that one can distinguish agents who act from knowledge and from an internal principle from those who do not. The related questions of necessity, compulsion, and chance are taken up more fully under those ideas.

The central notion is prohairesis, deliberate choice. Choice is neither mere desire nor mere opinion; it is deliberate desire for things in our power. We deliberate about means, not ends. We wish for health, but we choose the regimen. Deliberation works backward from the end to the first step we can take, and choice is the verdict of that deliberative process. Aristotle thus binds willing tightly to reasoning: to choose is already to have thought through what to do, and the person of practical wisdom is the one whose desires are aligned with sound deliberation. In the treatise On the Soul, appetite is treated as the generic faculty of originating local movement, while wish is assigned to the calculative reason and desire and passion to the irrational part. What later writers call will appears here as a mode of appetite informed by thought rather than as a faculty standing apart from both.

For Aristotle, then, willing is always embedded in character. The temperate person wills temperately not by overriding desire with a separate power but because desires have been trained to accord with reason. The akratic person, who acts against better judgment, presents a difficulty precisely because the expected unity of reason and desire has broken down. Aristotle treats this as a failure of practical knowledge, not as a defect in some independent power of willing. The account is organic: reason and desire work together, and the moral virtues are habits that make that cooperation reliable. The distinction between voluntary motion and the non-voluntary motions of the bodily organs, later refined by physiologists from Harvey to William James, already appears in outline when Aristotle separates actions that proceed from knowledge and desire from those that do not.

Aristotle leaves to the tradition a power of choosing woven into practical reason and trained desire, not yet the separate faculty that Augustine and the later scholastics will treat under the name of will. The Augustinian analysis of a divided will, and the Thomistic account of will as rational appetite, both take their bearings from this earlier integration of desire and deliberation.

Augustine places the will at the center of the moral and religious life. In Book VIII of the Confessions, he recounts the struggle at Milan: he wished to turn to God and he wished not to turn, and these two wantings were simultaneous, real, and his own. "I willed and I willed not." Where Aristotle tends to treat such conflict as a failure of practical knowledge, Augustine treats it as a fissure in the will itself. The mind commands the body and is obeyed; it commands itself and is resisted. That internal resistance is, on his view, the mark of fallen humanity. The will is free in the sense that nothing external compels it, yet it is bound by its own disordered habits and loves. Sin is described as a weight that draws the will downward even as it reaches upward. The questions of sin, grace, and the fallen condition of man are treated more fully under those ideas; what belongs here is the claim that the will, as the seat of love and choice, is both free and damaged.

Augustine insists on freedom in order to vindicate God. If human beings are not free, then God is the author of evil, and the problem of theodicy becomes intractable. In the City of God, he argues that divine foreknowledge does not destroy human freedom: God knows what we will freely choose, and our choosing freely is part of what God foreknows. Against the Stoic determinists and the Manicheans, Augustine maintains that the will is genuinely ours. Against the Pelagians, who held that the will can achieve goodness on its own, he argues that the fall has so damaged willing that grace alone can restore it. We cannot will the good without God first willing in us to will. The relation of human freedom to divine foreknowledge and predestination belongs also to the chapters on God, Fate, and Necessity and Contingency.

This position holds together claims that later writers often separate. If the will is free, how can it also be incapable of the good without grace? If grace is necessary, in what sense is the will still free? Augustine answers through a distinction between the original freedom of Adam, who could choose either good or evil, and the wounded freedom of his descendants, who retain the capacity for choice but have lost the capacity for sustained goodness without divine aid. The will becomes the center of the human person not as an abstract faculty of choice alone, but as the power of love that is ordered or disordered according as it is turned toward God or toward lesser goods.

Augustine turns the discussion of willing from Aristotle's account of rational desire toward an analysis of inner conflict, self-division, and the need for grace. Later theories of the will, whether scholastic, Reformation, or modern, return to his portrayal of a will that is free yet not whole, and to the question of what can heal that division.

Aquinas locates the will with precision in the architecture of the soul. The will is the rational appetite, the soul's inclination toward the good as apprehended by the intellect. It parallels the sensitive appetites of desire and anger, but operates at the level of reason. The intellect presents something as good; the will inclines toward it. On this view the will always wills under the aspect of the good. Even the person who chooses what is objectively evil does so because it appears good in some respect. There is no willing of evil as evil. The distinction between intellectual and sensitive appetite continues Aristotle's division of wish and desire, and it connects the idea of will to the treatment of desire, emotion, and the passions more generally.

The relation between intellect and will is reciprocal. The intellect moves the will by presenting objects of choice; the will moves the intellect by directing it to attend to this object rather than that. Neither faculty is simply sovereign. Within this structure Aquinas distinguishes the will's necessary act from its free act. The will necessarily wills happiness in general, the universal good, because it is constituted as an appetite for the good and cannot will against its own nature. No particular finite good exhausts the concept of the good, so the will is free to choose among particular goods. Free choice (liberum arbitrium) is the capacity to deliberate among means to the ultimate end and to select one rather than another. The root of liberty, Aquinas writes, is the will as subject, but the reason as cause, for the will can tend freely toward various objects precisely because the reason can have various perceptions of good.

From this structure certain consequences follow for morals and theology. Because the will necessarily wills happiness, the moral life consists in discerning which particular goods lead to the universal good, rather than in arbitrary self-assertion. Freedom is real but structured; it operates within the field of the good. With Augustine, Aquinas maintains that grace is necessary for the will to reach its highest end, the vision of God, yet he gives human freedom more scope in the natural order than Augustine typically does. The will is wounded by sin but not destroyed, and reason can still guide it toward natural goods even without grace. The theological problems of grace, merit, and the fall are reserved for other chapters; what belongs here is the claim that free choice need not be uncaused. God is the ultimate cause of what a man freely chooses, as of every natural event, and the will is always moved by the reason even in its free acts. Freedom, on this view, is a kind of self-determination within causality, not a suspension of causality.

Aquinas builds a framework that preserves both Aristotelian teleology and Augustinian freedom. Later writers, Descartes among them, will separate intellect and will more sharply, and will locate freedom in a power of assent that can outrun clear perception. The Thomistic unity of reason and appetite remains one of the principal alternatives against which those later accounts define themselves.

The debate over the freedom of the will had been one of the great themes of Christian theology from Augustine through the scholastics, and by Calvin's time it had settled into a roughly stable position in which the will was understood to be free, though wounded by the fall, and capable of cooperating with grace in the work of salvation. Luther had already disturbed this settlement by publishing, in his controversy with Erasmus, his treatise on the bondage of the will, and Calvin takes up the Lutheran position and gives it its most thorough statement in the Institutes. The will of man, Calvin says, is not free in the sense which the schoolmen had given to the word. It is free only in the sense that it is not compelled from without. Every act of the will proceeds from the nature of the agent, and in fallen man that nature is so corrupted that nothing but sin can proceed from it, however much the agent may be at liberty from external coercion.

The distinction Calvin insists upon is between compulsion and necessity. A compelled will would be a contradiction in terms. But a will which is necessitated by the nature from which it springs is not a compelled will, and it is not on that account free in the sense in which the scholastic doctors had used the word. Fallen man, left to himself, wills evil freely, that is, without compulsion, and yet necessarily, that is, as the only thing such a nature can produce. The freedom to will the good has been lost in the fall, and cannot be regained except by the gift of grace, which does not merely assist the will but replaces the corrupted nature from which the will proceeds. The scholastic picture of grace as the auxiliary of a will which is still fundamentally sound is for Calvin a concession to human pride and a denial of what Scripture has said about the condition of fallen man.

The questions raised here belong to several neighboring ideas. The condition of the nature from which the will proceeds is taken up in the chapter on Sin; the divine sovereignty which works upon the human will in the work of salvation belongs to the chapter on God; the relation of necessity to freedom in general is a theme of the chapters on Necessity and Contingency and on Fate. What is peculiar to the idea of Will is the insistence that the older philosophical distinction between what is voluntary and what is compelled is not sufficient to settle the theological question, and that a will may be voluntary, in the sense of proceeding from the agent's own inclinations, and yet wholly in bondage, in the sense of being incapable of any inclination toward the good.

Shakespeare's Macbeth, written in a Protestant England within living memory of Calvin, dramatizes a will that is neither compelled from without nor able to turn back from the course it has chosen, and it has been read as a secular reflection of the Calvinist picture of bondage. Hobbes will take up the necessitarian side of Calvin's doctrine and use it, against the schoolmen, to deny free will altogether, though without the theological framework. Descartes, on the other hand, will insist on the immense and almost godlike freedom of the will, and his position is partly a reaction against what Calvin had made respectable. The modern debates over free will are still, though in a disguised form, continuations of the controversy Calvin revived.

Shakespeare's dramatizations of the will are not philosophical treatises, but they belong to the tradition of the Great Books because they raise, in a form the philosophers cannot ignore, the question of how a man may fail to act upon what he sincerely knows to be his duty. Hamlet brings the question to the audience with open self-reproach. The prince is commanded by his father's ghost to avenge a murder; he believes the command to be binding; he is not prevented by any outward obstacle from executing it; yet through four acts he does not execute it. The reasons he gives himself for the delay are various and partly inconsistent: at one point he doubts the ghost, at another he waits for a better occasion, at another he reproaches himself for his slowness. What the play presents, and what the earlier philosophical accounts of the will had not quite confronted, is the possibility that a single faculty called the will may fall apart in practice into a knowing that is not a doing, and a doing that, when it comes, comes rather by accident than by resolve.

If Hamlet is the case of the will that cannot bring itself to act, Macbeth is the opposite case of the will that knows what it ought not to do and acts on the contrary. Macbeth hears the prophecy, is tempted, is urged on by his wife, and commits the murder. He knows before the deed what the deed will cost him; he knows after it that the cost is what he had foreseen; and yet at each later step he is carried forward, not by ignorance or by a new temptation, but by the inertia of the original act. The two plays, taken together, exhibit the disorders of the will at its two extremes: the resolve that will not discharge itself in action, and the action that carries the agent beyond what his resolve can govern.

Questions raised in these plays are taken up under several heads. The relation between knowing and doing belongs to the treatments of Knowledge and of Good and Evil; the working of external necessity upon the hesitant will, to Fate; the bearing of conscience on the act already committed, to Sin and to Punishment. What belongs properly to the idea of Will is the dramatization of its internal division, and the refusal to treat the self-commanding agent as if the command of the self were a simple matter.

The later philosophical tradition does not let the Shakespearean cases alone. Hobbes will deny that there is anything in the hesitation of a Hamlet beyond a succession of appetites and aversions, each of which in its turn is the will for the moment at which it prevails. Spinoza will treat the appearance of free decision as a confused idea of the natural causes that produce each act. Freud, reading Hamlet in a yet different spirit, will find in the delay a sign of repressions too deep for the prince's conscious mind to acknowledge. Between them they do not quite explain what the plays display, and it is part of Shakespeare's importance to the tradition that the plays display it with a vividness which cannot easily be rewritten in the terms of any single theory.

Hobbes places the will within a mechanistic account of animal motion. In the Leviathan, human beings are bodies in motion, and their internal life is matter moving in response to stimuli. He distinguishes vital motions, such as the course of the blood and breathing, which need no help of imagination, from animal or voluntary motions, such as going and speaking, which always depend upon a precedent thought of whither, which way, and what. Deliberation is the alternation of appetites and aversions as one considers some object or action. The will is the last appetite in deliberating, the final pull of desire or repulsion immediately adhering to the action or its omission. It is not a faculty standing above appetite, and not the rational appetite of the Schools. If will were a rational appetite, Hobbes argues, there could be no voluntary act against reason, yet men clearly act against reason. Will is simply the terminus of a causal sequence. When a man says "I will," he means that his deliberation has ended and one appetite has prevailed.

From this definition it follows that "free will," as a property of the will itself, is a misapplied phrase. Liberty belongs to the person, not to the will. A free man is one whose bodily motion is not externally impeded; he can walk where he wills because no chains restrain him. The will itself is always determined, always the product of prior causes. Every act of man's will, and every desire and inclination, proceeds from some cause, and that from another cause, in a continual chain. To ask whether the will is free is like asking whether speech is rapid or virtue blue: it applies a predicate to the wrong subject. Freedom and necessity are consistent. As water has both liberty and necessity of descending by the channel, so men voluntarily do actions that are also necessitated by prior causes. The chapters on Liberty, Cause, and Necessity and Contingency take up the general form of this distinction; what is peculiar to Will is the identification of willing with the last appetite rather than with a rational faculty.

Hobbes is aware that this position departs from religious and philosophical orthodoxy. The scholastic debates about free will, he argues, produced obscurity and faction. His own account is meant to be clear, consistent with natural philosophy, and compatible with a functioning commonwealth. Subjects need to be held responsible for their voluntary actions; they do not need metaphysical freedom of the will. What matters is that a person acted on his own appetite, uncompelled by external force. The will need not be free for punishment and praise to make sense. Beasts that deliberate must, on this view, also have will, so the traditional reservation of will to rational animals alone is rejected.

Hobbes holds that freedom and determinism are compatible because freedom was never a property of the will, only the absence of external constraint on action. Locke and Hume will refine this position; Spinoza will push further and deny that a separate faculty of will exists at all.

Descartes assigns the will a central place in the account of error and of human freedom. In the Fourth Meditation he confronts a difficulty: if God is perfect and created us, why do we make mistakes? His answer turns on an asymmetry between two faculties. The understanding is finite; it grasps only a limited range of clear and distinct ideas. The will, by contrast, is of such extent that the idea of any greater faculty is beyond our grasp. We can affirm or deny, pursue or shun, whatever the understanding places before us. Error arises when the will outruns the understanding, when we judge in matters where we do not perceive clearly. God gave us a will of great range and an intellect of limited scope; the fault lies in our misuse of the former, not in any defect of the latter as such. The activity of the will, for Descartes as for Spinoza in a different way, consists in assent or dissent to ideas rather than in the formation of new ideas.

This account differs sharply from the Thomistic tradition. For Aquinas, the will follows the intellect's presentation of the good and cannot outstrip what reason offers. For Descartes, the will is the more expansive power, and its reach exceeds reason's grasp. Freedom is located in the capacity to assent or to withhold assent. Yet Descartes also distinguishes grades of freedom. The lowest is freedom of indifference, the ability to go either way when we have no clear perception. The highest is the freedom we experience when a clear and distinct perception inclines us irresistibly toward truth. When we see clearly that two and three make five, we cannot withhold assent, yet Descartes regards this as the perfection of freedom rather than its limitation. Freedom in its highest form is luminous assent to the evident, not the mere power to go either way in ignorance. In order to be free, he writes, it is not necessary that we should be indifferent as between contraries; the more we lean to the one side because we see the reasons of the good and the true in it, the more freely we choose and embrace it.

The position holds together elements that later writers will separate. If the highest freedom is determined by evidence, and the lowest is mere indifference born of ignorance, where is the genuine power of self-determination? Descartes seems to affirm both a voluntarism, in which the will is the active and responsible power, and an intellectualism, in which clear perception determines the will. He insists that the knowledge of the understanding should always precede the determination of the will, and that the will impels us neither to follow nor to flee except as the understanding represents something as good or evil. Yet he also holds that the will retains the power of directing itself toward one side or the other apart from any determination by the understanding. The theological side of this dispute, concerning God's will and the indifference of divine choice, is taken up under God and under Necessity and Contingency; what belongs here is the claim that human liberty, though it involves an experience of freedom that Descartes treats as a matter of universal experience, is not the absolute indifference he ascribes to the divine will.

Descartes presents a will of nearly unlimited scope, the faculty in which the creature most nearly resembles the creator, and at the same time the source of error whenever it races ahead of clear perception. Spinoza will deny that will and intellect are distinct; Locke and others will relocate freedom in the agent rather than in any single power of the soul.

Spinoza denies that there is a separate faculty of will distinct from the intellect. Where Descartes elevates the will to an extended faculty of choice, Spinoza holds that in the mind there is no volition, or affirmation and negation, save that which an idea, insofar as it is an idea, involves. Every idea carries its own affirmation. To perceive a triangle is already to affirm that its angles equal two right angles; there is no separate act of will that steps in to ratify or reject what the intellect presents. The will and the intellect are one and the same, or more precisely, individual volitions and individual ideas are one and the same. To separate them is, on this view, to invent a power that stands outside thought and decides what to do with it. Against the Cartesian claim that the will extends more widely than the intellect, Spinoza finds no such extension; against the supposition of free power to construct mere fancies, he holds that the mind forms no ideas by a free act of will.

The consequences for freedom follow at once. If there is no separate will, there is no freedom of the will in the traditional sense. Human beings are finite modes of the one substance, God or Nature, and every state of a finite mode follows necessarily from prior states and from the laws of nature. Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined to wish and desire. The experience of freedom is an illusion produced by ignorance of causes. A stone thrown through the air, if it were conscious, would believe it flew of its own volition. We are in that condition with respect to our own acts. God alone is a free cause, for God alone exists and acts from the necessity of his own nature. Freedom does not reside in the will, nor in the absence of necessity, but in self-determination: not in choice, but in the absence of compulsion by causes that lie outside one's own nature. The chapters on God, Cause, and Necessity and Contingency develop these points more fully.

Yet Spinoza does not leave the moral life without a form of freedom. The bondage described in Part IV of the Ethics is the condition of being determined by external causes we do not understand. Freedom, redefined, is adequate knowledge of the causes that determine us. The free person is the one who acts from adequate ideas, who understands why he does what he does, and who therefore acts from internal necessity rather than external compulsion. This is not the freedom to have done otherwise; it is the freedom of self-comprehension, which Spinoza regards as the highest good. The passions and the way in which they bind or liberate the mind are treated under Desire and Emotion as well as under Will; what is distinctive here is the identification of willing with thinking, and of freedom with understanding necessity rather than with escaping it.

Spinoza carries further the line of thought that Hobbes began: the will is neither a separate faculty nor a free one in the sense of undetermined choice, and the only freedom worth seeking is the lucid recognition of necessity. Later writers who wish to restore a free will will have to answer this identification of volition with idea, and this redefinition of freedom as self-caused determination.

Locke treats the will as a power of the mind rather than as a metaphysical faculty of the scholastic kind. Chapter XXI of Book II of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, revised across editions, is his most sustained discussion of the subject. The will, he argues, is the power to direct our operative faculties toward or away from some action. Liberty is likewise a power: the power to act or not act according to the direction of the will. These are two distinct powers belonging to the same agent. To ask whether the will is free is therefore to ask whether one power possesses another power, which is as insignificant a question as to ask whether sleep is swift or virtue square. Freedom is an attribute of the person, not of the will. Understanding or perceptivity is a power to receive ideas; will or motivity is a power to direct the operative faculties to motion or rest. Volition is the actual exercise of that power by directing a particular action or its forbearance.

Having distinguished will from liberty, Locke asks what determines the will. His answer changed across editions. In the first edition he said the greater good determines the will. By the second edition he had altered the account. What moves us to action is the present experience of uneasiness, a discomfort or dissatisfaction with our current state, rather than the perception of a distant good. Desire is an uneasiness of the mind for want of some absent good; and it is that uneasiness which determines the will to successive voluntary actions. A person may know that eternal happiness outweighs a glass of wine, yet the present uneasiness of thirst moves the will while the distant good does not. Locke also distinguishes will from desire more carefully than Hobbes: desire may tend contrary to what the will sets us upon, so willing is not simply an act of desire, though uneasiness of desire is what moves us to will.

Locke preserves a space for a kind of freedom that is neither indifference nor mere absence of chains. The mind has the power to suspend the execution of any desire and to examine it before acting. That capacity for suspension is, he says, the source of all liberty. We are not mere conduits of uneasiness; we can pause, compare goods, and let reason reshape our desires before the will engages. Freedom, on this account, lies in the agent's ability to halt, reflect, and then act from considered judgment, not in any supposed indeterminacy of the will. How the mind moves the body remains, for Locke as for Hume, obscure: the passing of motion from mind to body is as inconceivable as how one body moves another. The chapters on Mind, Desire, and Liberty take up neighboring aspects of this analysis; what belongs to Will is the clarification that freedom is a power of the man, and that the determination of willing by uneasiness does not abolish that freedom so long as suspension and examination remain possible.

Locke redirects the discussion from the metaphysics of a free faculty to the psychology of the agent. Freedom becomes a matter of reflective self-governance rather than of an undetermined power within the soul, and this formulation sets much of the agenda for the later British treatment of liberty and necessity.

Hume treats the will in the same spirit in which he treats causation and the self. The will, he writes, is nothing but the internal impression we feel, and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body or new perception of our mind. It is not a faculty, not a metaphysical engine; it is an impression, a felt experience that accompanies our initiating action. This is consistent with his empiricism: anything that cannot be traced to an impression or to an idea derived from an impression is a fiction. The scholastic will, with its rational appetite and its liberum arbitrium, fails this test. How the motion of the body follows upon the command of the will is, for Hume as for Locke, forever beyond our diligent inquiry; that it does so is a matter of common experience, but the power by which it is effected is unknown and inconceivable.

With the will so described, Hume takes up the quarrel between liberty and necessity. We observe constant conjunction between motives and actions in human conduct just as we observe it between physical causes and effects. Given the same character and circumstances, people act predictably. This is necessity, understood in Hume's way: not as a mysterious compulsion in things, but as the mind's inference from observed regularity. Liberty, meanwhile, is a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will. So understood, liberty and necessity are not only compatible; they require each other. Without regularity we could not reason about human conduct. Without the ability to act on our determinations we would not be agents. Remote and uncertain speculations concerning the causation of character or the structure of the universe do not, in his view, affect the sentiments of approbation and blame that arise from the natural and immediate view of human actions. The chapters on Cause, Liberty, and Duty develop these connections; what belongs to Will is the reduction of willing to an impression and the claim that moral responsibility does not depend on an undetermined will.

Hume presses the point further. The real threat to moral responsibility, on his view, is chance rather than necessity. If actions are genuinely undetermined, arising from nothing, they cannot be attributed to the agent's character and therefore cannot ground praise or blame. It is precisely because actions flow from stable dispositions, because they are in that sense necessitated, that we hold people accountable. The free will debate, he argues, has persisted only because both sides failed to define their terms clearly. Once we do, the dispute evaporates. The experience of liberty or indifference may be a false sensation; we may feel free when we are in fact determined by causes of which we are ignorant. Yet even if every voluntary action is part of a continued chain of necessary causes, the mind of man is so formed that upon the appearance of certain characters and actions it immediately feels the sentiment of approbation or blame.

Hume's formulation of the compatibilist position is this: necessity grounds responsibility, liberty is the absence of constraint, and the metaphysical problem of free will is in large part a verbal dispute. Kant will reject this settlement by relocating the free will outside the causal order of phenomena altogether.

Kant relocates the free will outside the causal order of phenomena. In the world as we experience it, every event is determined by prior causes. On that score the analyses of Hume and Hobbes are not denied. But the will, as free, belongs to the noumenal world, the world of things as they are in themselves, where the categories of cause and effect in time do not apply. Freedom is not for Kant a mere matter of faith or a pragmatic postulate. It is, he says, the only one of all the ideas of pure reason whose object is a matter of fact, in the sense that its objective reality can be proved from the moral law. We know that we are free from knowing that the moral law exists; we know that the moral law exists because reason judges that we ought to have done what we did not do. Freedom is the ground of being of the moral law, while the moral law is the ground of knowing of freedom. The moral law and freedom stand or fall together.

Autonomy is the central notion of this account. The will is autonomous when it gives itself the moral law, when it acts according to a principle it can rationally endorse as a universal law. That is the categorical imperative, and it is the will's own legislation, not imposed from outside by God, nature, or society. Heteronomy is the condition of a will determined by anything other than its own rational principle: inclination, self-interest, fear of punishment, hope of reward. Only the autonomous will is free in the full sense Kant intends. Freedom, on this view, consists in rational self-legislation rather than in the satisfaction of inclination. The faculty of desire, insofar as its inner principle of determination lies in the reason of the subject, constitutes the will; and the will, so far as it may determine voluntary choice by pure reason, is the practical reason itself. A free will and a will subject to moral laws are, for Kant, one and the same. The negative conception of free will is independence from determination by sensuous impulses; the positive conception is the capability of pure reason to be practical of itself.

The Groundwork opens with the claim that nothing in the world, or even out of it, can be held good without qualification except a good will. Intelligence, courage, wealth, even happiness can be put to bad use; only the will that acts from duty, from respect for the moral law, is unconditionally good. A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, nor by its aptness for attaining some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition. This reverses the Aristotelian priority in which willing is embedded in the pursuit of happiness. For Kant the good will is prior to and independent of happiness; the moral worth of an action lies entirely in the principle on which it is willed, never in its consequences. The apparent conflict between freedom and natural necessity is resolved by assigning each to a different aspect of the same subject: as phenomenon the agent is determined in time, as noumenon the agent is a cause that is not subject to time-conditions. The chapters on Duty, Liberty, and Cause treat these issues in their wider setting; what belongs to Will is the identification of the pure will with practical reason and the claim that moral goodness resides in the will alone among the things of the world.

In Kant the free will is self-legislating, unconditioned by nature as phenomenon, and the bearer of unconditional moral value among the things of the world. Later writers who accept or reject this autonomy still work within the alternatives he and the empiricists between them have defined.

Dostoyevsky's most direct treatment of the will is in the first part of Notes from Underground, where the nameless narrator sets himself against the utilitarian theorists who have claimed that man, once he understands his true interest, will pursue it of his own motion and that the ordering of society is a matter of giving him the information required. The underground man answers that the claim misunderstands what a man is. A man, he argues, would rather act against his advantage than be told what his advantage is and reduced to a creature whose behavior is predictable by a table of desires. His freedom is not the freedom to do what he ought or what he finds pleasant; it is the freedom to do what no calculation of advantage could have predicted, and this freedom is for him more important than the advantages calculation would supply. The argument is violent and partial and is offered by a narrator the novel does not require the reader to admire, but its force has been felt by every later treatment of the question.

The tradition against which the argument is pitched is not primarily the theological tradition from Augustine and Aquinas but the eighteenth-century tradition, in Bentham and the later utilitarians, which had treated the will as the servant of rational self-interest. The underground man's objection is that such a will is not a will at all, but a calculation; and that if the calculation turns out to be reliable, the man has ceased to be the sort of being whose conduct is interesting. The example he gives is the famous one of "twice two makes four": if men are given a world in which even the simplest propositions cannot be disputed, they will look for a way to dispute them, not because they are unreasonable, but because their humanity requires that some capacity for refusal be preserved. The position is stated in language the Augustinian tradition would not have used, but it is not wholly incompatible with that tradition's insistence that the will is free in a sense that reason alone cannot account for. Where the older treatments had set the free will against the determinations of nature or of grace, Dostoyevsky sets it against the determinations of an advantage which has been calculated in advance.

The philosophical questions raised belong also to the treatments of Liberty, of Man, of Good and Evil, and of Reasoning, and are discussed under those heads. What Dostoyevsky contributes to the idea of Will is the recognition, on the part of a novelist who is not writing as a philosopher, that the will cannot be accommodated within any account of action which derives it from the calculation of advantage, and that the capacity to refuse what such a calculation would prescribe is one of the things a full account of man must preserve.

The later treatments of the will in the existentialist tradition take up much of what Notes from Underground had first put into the discussion, and the lineage is acknowledged in the usual histories. Within the Great Books tradition itself, what follows Dostoyevsky on the will is less a continuation than a slowly widening recognition that the modern psychological and economic theories of motivation leave something out, and that what they leave out is what Dostoyevsky had described. Whether the description is to be taken as the last word on the matter, or whether some reconciliation with the earlier theological treatments is possible, are questions the tradition continues to debate.