From time to time I return to Schopenhauer. Not because I
find him compelling as did Wagner, Nietzsche, and others, but because I still
have no idea what he is talking about. He makes Marx look lucid. Now the key
element in Schopenhauer is the Will. After some almost sixty years of reading
and re-reading him I have no idea what he means. Yet he did indirectly
influence Hitler which is no claim to fame.
Will. A term that philosophers throw about at random. We all
know it, right? Wrong.
As Aristotle notes in his Nicomachean Ethics[1]:
Virtue and vice are in our power.
The end, then, being what we wish for, the means what we
deliberate about and choose, actions concerning means must be according to
choice and voluntary.
Now the exercise of the virtues is concerned with means.
Therefore virtue also is in our own power, and so too vice. For where it is in
our power to act it is also in our power not to act, and vice versa; so that,
if to act, where this is noble, is in our power, not to act, which will be
base, will also be in our power, and if not to act, where this is noble, is in
our power, to act, which will be base, will also be in our power. Now if it is
in our power to do noble or base acts, and likewise in our power not to do
them, and this was what being good or bad meant, then it is in our power to be
virtuous or vicious. The saying that ‘no one is voluntarily wicked nor
involuntarily happy’ seems to be partly false and partly true; for no one
is involuntarily happy, but wickedness is voluntary.
Or else we shall have to dispute what has just been said,
at any rate, and deny that man is a moving principle or begetter of his
actions, as of children. But if these facts are evident and we cannot refer
actions to moving principles other than those in ourselves, the acts whose
moving principles are in us must themselves also be in our power and voluntary.
Witness seems to be borne to this both by individuals in their private capacity
and by legislators themselves; for these punish and take vengeance on those who
do wicked acts (unless they have acted under compulsion or as a result of
ignorance for which they are not themselves responsible), while they honour those
who do noble acts, as though they meant to encourage the latter and deter the
former.
But no one is encouraged to do the things that are
neither in our power nor voluntary; it is assumed that there is no gain
in being persuaded not to be hot or in pain or hungry or the like, since we
shall experience these feelings none the less. Indeed, we punish a man for his
very ignorance, if he is thought responsible for the ignorance, as when penalties
are doubled in the case of drunkenness; for the moving principle is in the man
himself, since he had the power of not getting drunk and his getting drunk was
the cause of his ignorance. And we punish those who are ignorant of anything in
the laws that they ought to know and that is not difficult, and so a too in the
case of anything else that they are thought to be ignorant of through
carelessness; we assume that it is in their power not to be ignorant, since
they have the power of taking care.
Now Aristotle used the term voluntary, meaning voluntas and
in English will. I would argue that this is the beginning of will. Aristotle
does not define this idea of voluntary, but somehow one must know it.
In the case of Augustine we have[2]:
There are three distinct features that explain why the
will comes to have such prominence in Augustine's thinking. In Book I of De
Libero Arbitrio, Augustine endeavors to construct an anti-Manichean theodicy
[De Libero Arbitrio I.2], one that accounts for the presence of moral evil in
the world without either substantializing it or finding its source in divine
activity.
In this regard, the will is what makes an action one's
own, placing the burden of responsibility on the one performing the action [De
Libero Arbitrio I.11]. By the time he composed Book III of De Libero Arbitrio,
however, Augustine had come to conceive of the human condition in terms of the
ignorance and difficulty that attend it [De Libero Arbitrio III.18], and these
features tend to complicate the libertarian optimism of Book I by raising
questions about whether it is even possible for us to overcome the ignorance
and difficulty. But even here, the will is intended to serve as the fulcrum
of moral responsibility [e.g. De Libero Arbitrio III.22].
As Augustine himself states in Confessions[3]:
The one necessary condition, which meant not only going
but at once arriving there, was to have the will to go— provided only that the
will was strong and unqualified, not the turning and twisting first this way,
then that, of a will half-wounded, struggling with one part rising up and the
other part falling down.
Finally in the agony of hesitation I made many physical
gestures of the kind men make when they want to achieve something and lack the
strength, either because they lack the actual limbs or because their limbs are fettered
with chains or weak with sickness or in some way hindered. If I tore my hair,
if I struck my forehead, if I intertwined my fingers and clasped my knee, I did
that because to do so was my will.
But I could have willed this and then not done it if my
limbs had not possessed the power to obey. So I did many actions in which the
will to act was not equalled by the power. Yet I was not doing what with an
incomparably greater longing I yearned to do, and could have done the moment I
so resolved. For as soon as I had the will, I would have had a wholehearted
will. At this point the power to act is identical with the will. The willing
itself was performative of the action. Nevertheless, it did not happen. The
body obeyed the slightest inclination of the soul to move the limbs at its
pleasure more easily than the soul obeyed itself, when its supreme desire could
be achieved exclusively by the will alone.
Yet no where does Augustine definitively define this will.
He become famous (infamous) for his free will discussions, but somehow we all
must know what he means.
Now moving to Aquinas we have[4]:
First off, let us treat the will. Generically, the will
is an appetite, that is, a power of the soul by which we are inclined toward
something. By means of appetitive powers, we seek and desire things; we strive
to unite ourselves (in various ways) with them. They are consequent upon
knowledge. "Some inclination follows every form."( ST, Ia, 80, 1 )
Because knowledge the attainment of a new form in a non-material way, an
inclination of the appetite follows upon this knowledge. So, since there are
two kinds of knowledge, sense and intellectual, there are consequently two
kinds of appetites.
From sense knowledge, ie. the apprehension of the forms
of things in their particularity, sensual appetition follows. In a like manner,
from intellectual knowledge, the apprehension of universal forms, intellectual
appetition follows. In humans, the intellect is discursive, going from premises
to conclusions logically, and so is called rational. Likewise the consequent
appetite is rational; it is called the will. The will then is that power
by which we desire the universal, not bound in itself to any manifestation of
that universal in particular, real, material things.
Thus no matter how one searches, will is either understood
as the act of choosing or left undefined. Will is an ability to select. We can
choose to drink the water or not. Unless of course we are dying of thirst and
we perforce of our physiology drink the water. So much for will.
Yet Schopenhauer builds a whole theory on will, never ever
defining it. How do we know what it is, how can we see if it works. Free will
is out ability to choose. Yet in many cases our choices are set out for us,
they are pre-ordained by others, by events, by circumstances. We should ask;
what is the will and then; what is the basis upon which you make the
identification. How also can we once having identified it then assure others
that wat we have can be readily understood?
Perhaps just reading Schopenhauer on a rainy December day is
a means to pass the time, it beats the news stations….and yes what are those
French really up to?
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