Will
The idea of each of us having a ‘will’ might seem archaic. When we think about the process of choosing between various desires and deciding on one, we think of it as a psychological process occurring in the brain. Philosophers before and during the Early Modern period, however, thought that there was a specific part of our minds — a mental faculty — where this process took place. They called this ‘the will’. In the Early Modern period, the will crops up in issues relating to morality, freedom, and politics and is discussed by Hobbes, Hume, Descartes, Leibniz, and Rosseau — to name but a few.
So, what is it? This is a good question and different philosophers have different answers to it. Broadly, willing is the process we go through when we select one desire from the various other desires we might have. For example, I might want to buy a coffee, but I might also want to save my money. Whichever desire I deliberately pick and commit myself to will be the action that I will. We can also describe this act of will as a volition. Philosophers throughout the history of philosophy thought this process happened within a specific section of our minds which they called the will. There were some early modern thinkers who started to disagree with this position, however, and claimed no such faculty existed, that willing was just a cognitive process that happened naturally in our minds.
René Descartes. ‘The Nervous System. Diagram of the Brain’ from De homine figuris, et Latinitate donatus a Florentio Schuyl (1662). Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).
René Descartes (1596-1650) followed the Scholastic tradition (whose approach to definition is discussed elsewhere in this series) and understood the will as a mental faculty. He believed the will was a faculty of affirming or denying and that amounted to our ability to either say yes to a certain desire and commit to pursuing it, or to say no to a desire and decide to avoid it. Descartes thought that our wills are naturally directed towards what seems good to us. The fact that we are able to deviate from this, and choose to go against this God-given tendency toward the good, is because of our free-will. Gottfreid Leibniz (1646-1716) also incorporated this idea of the will being a mental faculty that is directed toward what we think is good. Leibniz thought that willing is the effort of moving towards what we find good. Importantly, for Leibniz, it is our awareness of the good thing that makes us want to pursue it. What we end up willing is a ‘direction’ that results from us weighing up various perceptions and inclinations.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) rejected the idea of a will as a metaphysical faculty determined by an abstract notion like ‘goodness’, insisting instead that the will be understood as an act. The act of willing is, for Hobbes, the final stage in a process of ‘deliberation’, leading up to an action which the philosopher calls the ‘last appetite or aversion’. Or, to put it another way, the noun ‘will’ is reducible to the verb ‘to will’. Since Hobbes staunchly rejected the view that the ultimate ground of everything was reason, a view held by some Early Modern philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and Leibniz, Hobbes also thought it a mistake to think of the will as a ‘rational appetite’ that is driven by what is rational or good. Hobbes’ use of the term ‘appetite’ indicates that he thinks the process of willing is actually a ‘passion’. What Hobbes means by ‘a passion’ is a natural (as in, bodily) feeling or desire that is directed by self-interest towards pleasure. The passions are the primary motivators for our behaviour, including our moral behaviour. This means the will, as an appetite and subsequently a passion, is driven by self-interest and happiness rather than reason.
Allan Ramsay. David Hume, 1711 - 1776. Historian and philosopher. National Galleries of Scotland.
David Hume (1711-1776) is in the same camp as Hobbes on the will — he doesn’t think it is a faculty directed by reason toward the good and also thinks the will is a passion. Hume didn’t think the will can be directed by reason in the same way that Descartes or Leibniz do because he thought that reason, on its own, could never motivate us — reason is ‘inert’. We need a passion to accompany a reason for action in order to be sufficiently motivated. For example, I know that when I am hungry, I should eat. But Hume thinks this reasoning isn’t enough to get me to eat — I have to want to eat. Wanting to eat is a desire and desire is a passion, as are feelings of fear or joy. It is the passions, never simply reasons, that motivate the will. Hume thinks the passions boil down to feelings (or anticipation of feelings) of pleasure and pain. My desire to eat is based on the unpleasant feeling of hunger. Ultimately, then, the will is affected by pleasure and pain.
I have mainly focused on a singular will, belonging to a particular person. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788), on the other hand, was interested in a collective will, which he called the general will. Rousseau believes that individuals have their individual wills, which are motivated by self-interest. Yet, by identifying as members of a society or community, they contribute to a general will which is the set of democratically decided priorities or common interests that lead to the ideal coexistence of individuals within that society. In an ideal society, an individual’s will and the collective will of their society would align, but Rousseau is aware that in reality, this is rarely the case. The laws resulting from what the universal will decides upon are universally binding and apply to every member equally. A good citizen will be able to will the general will, even if it conflicts with their immediate self-interests.
This is a brief summary of a how a few early modern philosophers conceive of the will. How these philosophers conceived of the will shapes what they think motivates us and how it is we act in moral situations. As we’ve seen with Rousseau, the will also comes into play in political contexts. The debate over whether our wills are free is also a prevalent debate in the early modern era but would be its own discussion.
Colette Olive is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at King’s College London.
25 May 2021.