We explain what will is, its meaning in philosophy, in law and its relationship with duty. Also, willpower.
What is the will?
The will is the ability of an individual to make decisions and organize his or her own behaviorthat is, to have oneself with autonomy. Therefore, the things we do voluntarily are those we do with full intention to do them, as opposed to what we do involuntarily.
This word comes from Latin willingderived from the verb flew (“want”), so it is closely linked to desire, that is, with what we would like to do or achieve, and, therefore, with what we propose. That is why we speak of “good will” or “bad will” when things are done, to say that they were done thinking about doing good or turning out well, or on the contrary, about doing evil or regardless of how they turn out.
It is also common to refer to the “last will” or testament: a document that specifies the wishes of a person who has diedespecially when it comes to your assets and money. Or also of the “divine will”, which would be God's command, that is, what God wants to happen and, therefore, must happen.
The will is always linked to consciousness, lucidity and one's decisions, so that what is done under a state of coercion, or under the effect of substances, is not considered carried out voluntarily. Will is necessarily an expression of people's subjectivity.
Willpower
Willpower It is the ability to sustain a desired behavior or to insist until something one desires materializes.. In other words, it is tenacity, insistence, determination. People with a lot of willpower are capable of making and sustaining decisions voluntarily and firmly, without too many hesitation and regrets, and above all without faltering and giving up before having achieved the goal.
For example, it requires a lot of willpower to change one's own habits for others, since once one is accustomed to doing something on a sustained basis, it is very difficult to interrupt the tradition and found a new one. That is why smokers, for example, have so much difficulty breaking the habit, even knowing that it is harmful to them and those close to them.
The greater the willpower, the easier it will be to break and/or sustain habits.. However, willpower is linked to psychic energy levels, so one does not always have the same ability to exercise one's will. Poor diet, lack of sleep, and emotional unrest are known to have a significant impact on available willpower.
Will in philosophy
The will has been a central element in the philosophical reflections of humanity since ancient times. Plato himself (c. 427-347 BC) in Ancient Greece spoke of it as the seat of individual responsibility. For his part, his disciple Aristotle (384-322 BC) He related the will to ethics, linking it to virtue.
This would be the foundation of later Christian thought, whose doctrine proposed that God gave human beings free will, that is, autonomy and free will to live their lives, and therefore would judge them at the end of it.
Hence, in this philosophical tradition, The idea of will is closely linked to that of freedomsince the will is only exercised when we are free to choose for ourselves.
Later thinkers such as René Descartes (1596-1650) add that you can only make conscious choices when you have complete information to judge, so that the will, the more enlightened or educated, the freer it is. This is the ideal of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment born in Europe.
Other philosophers such as Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) dedicated much of their work to the will, the latter going so far as to postulate that it is “the ultimate reality” that It underlies the world of the senses.
For his part, the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) proposed in The Social Contract the concept of the “general will”, which would become the will of the people, thus displacing in importance the will of the king, which was traditionally considered a divine mandate, by the voice of the masses, in which power resides in the modern democracy.
As we can see, it is a concept widely discussed in Western philosophy, and one that Analytical Philosophy and psychology continue to deal with today.
Will and duty
In the philosophical considerations of the German Immanuel Kant, the will was always measured with what he baptized as Categorical Imperatives, which are autonomous commandments of the individual, without any ideology or religion mediating them, and which govern human behavior in its most manifestations. different.
In that way, Kant proposes to differentiate between the will that acts out of duty and the will that acts according to duty, that is, among those who follow the rules because they are afraid of punishment, or because they have been imposed externally, and those who choose to follow the rulesthat is, they choose to act in accordance with what is established by the rules.
Thus, Kant investigates the nature of ethics and the good, starting from the notion of will. He concludes that the “holy” will, that is, the one that acts without being affected by individual inclinations or tendencies, is not good because it acts out of duty, but rather “it acts out of duty because it is good.”
Will in law
In the legal world, will is thought of as human intention, based on the idea that Every citizen is capable of freely assuming what he or she does and discerning the legal consequences that this would have..
In fact, one of the things that every criminal trial seeks to determine is what the defendant's will was, beyond whether or not he actually committed the crime; A crime committed with full will to commit it is always more serious than one committed accidentally or coerced. The concept of will, however, is used for unilateral legal acts, while the concept of consent is used in bilateral ones.
Continue with: Consistency
References
- “Will” in Wikipedia.
- “Will” in the Dictionary of the language of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “Will” in Filosofía.org.
- “Will” in Herder Encyclopedia.
- “Willpower: what it is and how to train it” in Vitónica.
