Will

Aristotle never isolates the will as a distinct power of the soul. The word most often translated as "will" in his writings, boulesis, means rational wish or desire for the good. What interests him is not some inner faculty that commands action but the concrete structure of voluntary choice. In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, he draws the line between the voluntary and 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 we can distinguish agents who act from knowledge and internal principle from those who do not.

The key concept is prohairesis, deliberate choice. Choice is not mere desire, nor is it 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.

This means that for Aristotle the "will" is always embedded in character. The temperate person wills temperately not by overriding desire with a separate faculty but because their desires have been trained to accord with reason. The akratic person, who acts against their own better judgment, presents a puzzle precisely because the expected unity of reason and desire has broken down. Aristotle treats this as a failure of practical knowledge, not a defect in some independent power of willing. His account is organic, integrated; reason and desire are partners, not rivals.

Aristotle bequeaths to the tradition a will that is not yet a will: a power of choosing woven into the fabric of practical reason and trained desire, awaiting Augustine's dramatic separation of willing from knowing.

Augustine discovers the will in its full dramatic power. In Book VIII of the Confessions, he recounts the agony in the garden at Milan: he wanted to turn to God and he wanted not to turn, and these two wantings were simultaneous, real, and his own. "I willed and I willed not." The Aristotelian framework has no room for this experience. Where Aristotle sees a failure of practical knowledge, Augustine sees a fissure in the will itself. The soul commands the body and is obeyed; it commands itself and is resisted. This internal resistance is the signature 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 a weight that drags the will downward even as it reaches upward.

Augustine insists on freedom because he must vindicate God. If humans are not free, then God is the author of evil, and the problem of theodicy becomes insoluble. In the City of God, he argues that God's 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 alike, Augustine maintains that the will is genuinely ours. Yet against the Pelagians, who held that the will can achieve goodness on its own, Augustine argues that the fall has so damaged our willing that grace alone can restore it. We cannot will the good without God first willing in us to will.

This position introduces a tension that will haunt Western theology and philosophy for centuries. If the will is genuinely 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 holds both claims together through the 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. It is a psychological and theological revolution: the will has become the center of the human person.

Augustine transforms the conversation about willing from Aristotle's integrated account of rational desire into a drama of inner conflict, self-deception, and divine rescue. Every subsequent theory of the will is a response to his portrayal of the divided self.

Aquinas reconciles the Aristotelian and Augustinian accounts by giving the will a precise location 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 (desire, anger) but operates on the level of reason. The intellect presents something as good; the will inclines toward it. This means 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, no pure malice in the Thomistic universe.

The relationship between intellect and will is intricate and 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 between the will's necessary act and 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. But no particular finite good exhausts the concept of the good, so the will is free to choose among them. Free choice (liberum arbitrium) is the capacity to deliberate among means to the ultimate end and to select one rather than another.

This synthesis has profound consequences. Because the will necessarily wills happiness, the moral life is not a matter of arbitrary self-assertion but of discerning which particular goods genuinely lead to the universal good. Freedom is real but structured; it operates within the gravitational field of the good. Aquinas also maintains, with Augustine, that grace is necessary for the will to achieve its highest end (the vision of God), but he gives human freedom more scope in the natural order than Augustine typically did. The will is wounded by sin but not destroyed, and reason can still guide it toward natural goods even without grace.

Aquinas builds a framework capacious enough to preserve both Aristotelian teleology and Augustinian freedom. Descartes will dismantle the first half: once the intellect loses its role as the will's guide and the will becomes infinite in scope, the Thomistic unity of reason and appetite breaks apart, and the will is left as an untethered power capable of error precisely because it can race ahead of what the intellect clearly grasps.

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 strips the will of its scholastic dignity. In the mechanistic universe of the Leviathan, human beings are bodies in motion, and their internal life is nothing more than matter moving in response to stimuli. Deliberation is the alternation of appetites and aversions as we consider some object or action. The will is "the last appetite in deliberating," the final pull of desire or repulsion before we act. It is not a faculty, not a power of the soul standing above appetite, and certainly not the rational appetite of Aquinas. It is simply the terminus of a causal sequence. When a man says "I will," he means only that his deliberation has come to an end and one appetite has prevailed over the others.

This redefinition has a sharp consequence: "free will" is a meaningless 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. But the will itself is always determined, always the product of prior causes. "Every act of man's will, and every desire and inclination, proceedeth 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 whether virtue is blue: it applies a predicate to the wrong subject.

Hobbes is aware that this position offends religious and philosophical orthodoxy, and he does not care. The scholastic debates about free will, he argues, produced nothing but obscurity and faction. His own account is 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 their own appetite, uncompelled by external force. The will does not need to be free for punishment and praise to make sense.

Hobbes inaugurates the modern compatibilist tradition: freedom and determinism coexist because freedom was never about the will in the first place, only about the absence of external constraint on action.

Descartes gives the will an extraordinary promotion. In the Fourth Meditation, he confronts the problem of error: if God is perfect and created us, why do we make mistakes? His answer turns on a striking asymmetry between two faculties. The understanding is finite; it grasps only a limited range of clear and distinct ideas. The will, by contrast, is infinite in scope. We can affirm or deny anything, assent to or withhold judgment from any proposition whatsoever. Error arises when the will outruns the understanding, when we judge (affirm or deny) in matters where we do not perceive clearly. God gave us a perfect will and a limited intellect, and the fault lies in our misuse of the former, not in any deficiency of the latter.

This account separates Descartes sharply from the Thomistic tradition. For Aquinas, the will follows the intellect's presentation of the good; it cannot outstrip what reason offers. For Descartes, the will is the more expansive power, and its reach exceeds reason's grasp. Freedom is located here: in the capacity to assent or to withhold assent. But Descartes adds a complication. He 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 this is not a limitation of freedom but its perfection. True freedom is not indeterminacy but luminous assent to the evident.

The tension in this position is real. If the highest freedom is compelled by evidence, and the lowest freedom is mere ignorance, where is the genuine power of self-determination? Descartes seems to want both a voluntarism (the will is the active, responsible power) and an intellectualism (clear perception determines the will infallibly). This instability will drive Spinoza toward eliminating the will as a separate faculty and Locke toward relocating freedom in the person rather than in any single power.

Descartes bequeaths to modernity a will that is godlike in scope, the one faculty in which the creature resembles the creator, and yet also the source of every error and every sin.

Spinoza dissolves the will. Where Descartes elevated it to an infinite faculty distinct from the understanding, Spinoza argues that no such faculty exists. "In the mind there is no volition, or affirmation and negation, save that which an idea, inasmuch 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 thing. Separate them, and you create a phantom: a power that somehow stands outside thought and decides what to do with it. Spinoza sees this as incoherent.

The consequences are total. If there is no separate will, there is no "freedom of the will" in any 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 that stone.

Yet Spinoza does not leave us 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 they do what they do, 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, and Spinoza regards it as the highest good.

Spinoza completes the destruction that Hobbes began: the will is neither a separate faculty nor a free one, and the only freedom worth having is the lucid recognition of necessity.

Locke approaches the will with the patience of a conceptual therapist. Chapter XXI of Book II of the Essay is his longest single chapter, revised repeatedly across editions, because he recognized that the question of free will was tangled in bad grammar. The will, he argues, is simply a power: 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 "Is the will free?" is therefore to ask whether one power possesses another power, which is "as insignificant a question as to ask whether sleep be swift or virtue square." Freedom is an attribute of the person, not of the will.

Having cleared the grammatical underbrush, Locke asks the substantive question: what determines the will? His answer evolved across editions. In the first edition, he said the greater good determines the will. By the second edition, he had changed his mind. What moves us to action is not the perception of distant good but the present experience of uneasiness, a discomfort or dissatisfaction with our current state. We act to relieve felt disquiet, not to pursue abstract goods. A person may know perfectly well that eternal happiness outweighs a glass of wine, yet the present uneasiness of thirst moves the will while the distant good does not. This insight has a proto-empiricist honesty about it: we are moved by what we feel, not by what we calculate.

Locke does preserve a space for genuine freedom, however. The mind has the power to suspend the execution of any desire and to examine it before acting. This capacity for suspension is "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 is not located in the will's supposed indeterminacy but in the agent's ability to halt, reflect, and then act from considered judgment. This is a pragmatic, anti-metaphysical account of freedom, and it sets the agenda for the British tradition.

Locke redirects the conversation from the metaphysics of the will to the psychology of the agent, and in doing so makes freedom a matter of reflective self-governance rather than faculty ontology.

Hume approaches the will with the same deflationary spirit he brings to 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 power, not a metaphysical engine; it is an impression, a felt experience that accompanies our initiating action. This is consistent with Hume's broader empiricism: anything that cannot be traced to an impression or an idea derived from an impression is a fiction. The scholastic "will" with its rational appetite and its liberum arbitrium fails this test.

With the will deflated, Hume takes up the ancient quarrel between liberty and necessity. His argument is elegant. 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 some mysterious compulsion in things, but as the mind's inference from observed regularity. Liberty, meanwhile, is simply "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.

Hume presses the point further. The real threat to moral responsibility is not necessity but chance. 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, Hume argues, has persisted only because both sides failed to define their terms clearly. Once we do, the dispute evaporates.

Hume brings the compatibilist tradition to its sharpest formulation: necessity grounds responsibility, liberty is the absence of constraint, and the metaphysical problem of free will is a verbal dispute waiting to be dissolved.

Kant rescues the will from the empiricists by relocating it outside the causal order altogether. In the phenomenal world, the world as we experience it, every event is determined by prior causes. Hume and Hobbes are right about this. But the will belongs to the noumenal world, the world of things as they are in themselves, where the categories of cause and effect do not apply. We cannot prove this theoretically; we must postulate it practically. Morality demands that we be able to act from duty, and acting from duty requires that the will be free from natural determination. The moral law and freedom stand or fall together: each is the ratio cognoscendi (ground of knowing) of the other.

The centerpiece of Kant's moral philosophy is the concept of autonomy. 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. This is the categorical imperative, and it is the will's own legislation, not imposed from outside by God, nature, or society. Heteronomy, by contrast, is the condition of a will determined by anything other than its own rational principle: inclination, self-interest, fear of punishment, hope of reward. Kant insists that only the autonomous will is genuinely free. Freedom is not doing what you want; freedom is rational self-legislation. The person who acts from duty, even against strong inclination, exemplifies the highest expression of the will.

The Groundwork opens with one of philosophy's most famous sentences: "There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world, or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will." Intelligence, courage, wealth, even happiness can be perverted; only the will that acts from duty, from respect for the moral law, is unconditionally good. This is a remarkable inversion. For Aristotle, the will was 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.

Kant completes the arc from Aristotle's integrated rational desire to the will as the supreme moral fact: self-legislating, unconditioned by nature, and the sole bearer of unconditional value.

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.