Will

Wanting treated as a faculty - the part of a person that decides, as distinct from the part that reasons or the part that feels.

Theme: Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition: Western
Term fixed: c. 397

In plain terms

Knowing what is best and doing it are not the same, and the gap between them is what the will was invented to name.

Greek philosophy tended to treat wrongdoing as ignorance: nobody knowingly chooses the worse. Augustine, examining his own hesitations, found that unconvincing. He could see the better course, want it, and not move - and what failed was not his understanding.

So the will became a third thing alongside reason and appetite: the deciding part, capable of going against what one knows and even against what one wants. Whether that is a real faculty or a way of naming a failure we cannot otherwise describe has been argued ever since, and modern psychology has largely stopped using the term while continuing to study everything it covered.

As a philosopher would put it

Aquinas makes the will a rational appetite, oriented to the good as reason presents it, and locates freedom in the fact that no finite good compels it. Duns Scotus goes further toward voluntarism: the will is self-determining and can refrain even from what reason recommends, which makes it prior to intellect rather than following it.

Kant relocates it entirely. A good will is good without qualification, and autonomy is the will giving itself the law - so morality is not obedience to an outside standard but the will's own legislation, and freedom is the capacity to act from principle rather than from inclination.

Schopenhauer inverts the tradition. Will is not a faculty of a person but the thing-in-itself, blind, purposeless striving of which the intellect is a late and superficial servant, and the individual will is one expression of it. Nietzsche transforms this into will to power, and denies that willing is a simple act at all - it is a compound of commanding and obeying inside one person, and the feeling of freedom is the feeling of being the commanding part.

Where you meet it

In 1995 Austria had an organ donor consent rate close to one hundred per cent. Germany, next door and culturally similar, had about twelve per cent. Neither country had a campaign the other lacked.

The difference was a form. Austria presumes consent unless you object; Germany required you to opt in. Johnson and Goldstein reported the comparison in Science in 2003 across eleven European countries and found the same pattern everywhere: presumed-consent countries clustered above eighty-five per cent, opt-in countries below thirty, with no overlap.

Asked, people in both kinds of country say much the same things about donation. What differs is which answer requires an act. Whatever the will is, its outputs turn out to depend heavily on which option is the default - and that is uncomfortable for any account on which willing is a self-originating act, and unsurprising for any account on which it is a system responding to how a choice is presented.

What is actually disputed

Whether there is a faculty here at all.

The deflationary case is that the will was posited to explain weakness of will and explains nothing: saying that someone knew the better and their will failed redescribes the fact without adding to it. Ryle treats volitions as a mythical inner act, and psychology has largely replaced the term with mechanisms of self-control and executive function.

The defence is that something has to account for cases where knowledge, desire and action come apart, and that the modern replacements are the same posit under new names. Beyond that lies the deeper split: Kant makes the will the seat of rational self-legislation and therefore of dignity, while Schopenhauer makes it a blind striving that reason serves. Almost every subsequent account of motivation sits somewhere between those two, and they cannot both be right about what a person fundamentally is.

Commonly confused with

Free will c. 397 Free will is a question about whether choices could have been otherwise. The will is the alleged faculty that does the choosing, and one can affirm it and deny the other.
Desire c. 380 BC Desires pull; the will was posited precisely because a person can act against what they most want. If willing were just strongest desire, there would be no weakness of will to explain.
a last will and testament A legal instrument. Shares the word through the sense of a settled intention and nothing more.

Defined against

Wu wei The Chinese tradition builds an account of effective action with no faculty of will in it at all, which is the sharpest available contrast

Philosophers

Augustine of Hippo The divided will, and the discovery of the gap
Thomas Aquinas The will as rational appetite, free because no finite good compels it
Duns Scotus The will as self-determining and prior to intellect
Immanuel Kant The good will, and autonomy as self-legislation
Arthur Schopenhauer Will as the thing-in-itself, with intellect as its servant
Friedrich Nietzsche Willing as commanding and obeying within one person

Works

Confessions Where the divided will is described
Summa Theologiae The will as rational appetite
Ordinatio The voluntarist alternative
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals The good will, and autonomy
The World as Will and Representation The inversion of the whole tradition
On the Genealogy of Morals Willing analysed into command and obedience

Schools

Augustinianism Where the concept enters European thought
Thomism Where it is systematised
Scotism Where it is made prior to reason
German Idealism Where it becomes self-legislation
Lebensphilosophie Where it becomes the fundamental reality
Nietzscheanism Where it is decomposed

Related concepts

Agency c. 340 BC · Free will c. 397 · Desire c. 380 BC · Autonomy 1785 · Responsibility c. 340 BC

Classical Greek has no single word for it; Augustine's account of a will divided against itself is where it becomes a distinct faculty in European thought, and Schopenhauer makes it the fundamental reality.