The view that everything real must be preceded by a potentiality as one of its causes implicitly denies the future as an authentic tense: the future is nothing but a consequence of the past, and the difference between natural and man-made things is merely between those whose potentialities necessarily grow into actualities and those that may or may not be actualized. Under these circumstances, any notion of the Will as an organ for the future, as memory is an organ for the past, was entirely superfluous; Aristotle did not have to be aware of the Will's existence; the Greeks "do not even have a word for" what we consider to be "the mainspring of action." (Thelein means "to be ready, to be prepared for something," boulesthai is "to view something as [more] desirable," and Aristotle's own newly coined word, which comes closer than these to our notion of some mental state that must precede action, is pro-airesis, the "choice" between two possibilities, or, rather, the preference that makes me choose one action instead of another.)10
Authors well read in Greek literature have always been aware of this lacuna. Thus Gilson notices as a well-known fact "that Aristode speaks neither of liberty nor of free will ... the term itself is lacking,"11 and Hobbes is already quite explicit on the point.12 It is still somewhat difficult to spot, because the Greek language of course knows the distinction between intentional and unintentional acts, between the voluntary (hekōn) and the involuntary (akōn), that is, legally speaking, between murder and manslaughter, and Aristode is careful to point out that only voluntary acts are subject to blame and praise,13 ® but what he understands by voluntary means no more than that the act was not haphazard but was performed by the agent in full possession of his physical and mental strength—"the source of motion was in the agent"14 —and the distinction covers no more than injuries committed in ignorance or as mishaps. An act in which I am under the threat of violence but am not physically coerced—as when I give my money, pulling it out with my own hands, to the man who threatens me with a gun—would have qualified as voluntary.
It is of some importance to note that this curious lacuna in Greek philosophy—"the fact that Plato and Aristode never mentioned [volitions] in their frequent and elaborate discussions of the nature of the soul and the springs of conduct"15 and that therefore it cannot be "seriously maintained that the problem of freedom ever became the subject of debate in the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristode"16—is in perfect accord with the time concept of antiquity, which identified temporality with the circular movements of the heavenly bodies and with the no less cyclical nature of life on earth: the ever-repeated change of day and night, summer and winter, thé constant renewal of animal species through birth and death. When Aristotle holds that "coming-into-being necessarily implies the pre-existence of something which is potentially but is not actually,"17 he is applying the cyclical movement in which everything that is alive swings—where indeed every end is a beginning and every beginning an end, so that "coming-to-be continues though things are constantly being destroyed"18 —to the realm of human affairs, and this to the point that he can say that not only events but even opinions (doxai) "as they occur among men, revolve not only once or a few times but infinitely often."19 This strange view of human affairs was not peculiar to philosophic speculation. Thucydides' claim to leave to posterity a ktēma es aei—a sempiter-nally useful paradigm of how to inquire into the future by virtue of a clear knowledge of the greatest event yet known in history—rested implicitly on the same conviction of a recurrent movement of human affairs.
To us, who think in terms of a rectilinear time concept, with its emphasis on the uniqueness of the "historical moment," the Greek pre-philosophical praise of greatness and stress on the extraordinary, which, "whether for evil or for good" (Thucydides), beyond all moral considerations, deserves to be saved from oblivion, first by the bards and then by the historians, seems to be incompatible with their cyclical time concept. But until the philosophers discovered Being as everlasting, birthless as well as deathless, time and change in time constituted no problem. Homer's "circling years" provided no more than the background against which the noteworthy story had appeared and was being told. Traces of this earlier non-speculative view can be found throughout Greek literature; thus Aristotle himself, in his discussion of eudaimonia (in the Nicomachean Ethics), is thinking in Homeric terms when he points to the ups and downs, the accidental circumstances (tychai) that "revolve many times in one person's lifetime," whereas his eudaimonia is more durable because it resides in certain activities (energeiai kat' aretēn) worth remembering because of their excellence and about which therefore "oblivion does not grow" (genesthai).20
No matter what historical origins and influences—Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian—we may be able to trace for the cyclical time concept, its emergence was logically almost inevitable once the philosophers had discovered an everlasting Being, birthless and deathless, within whose framework they then had to explain movement, change, the constant coming and going of living beings. Aristotle was quite explicit about the primacy of the assumption "that the whole heaven was not generated and cannot be destroyed, as some allege, but is single and forever, having no beginning and no end of its whole existence, containing and embracing in itself infinite time."21 "That everything returns" is indeed, as Nietzsche observed, "the closest [possible] approximation of a world of Becoming to a world of Being."22 Hence it is not surprising that the Greeks had no notion of the faculty of the Will, our mental organ for a future that in principle is indeterminable and therefore a possible harbinger of novelty. What is so very surprising is to find such a strong inclination to denounce the Will as an illusion or an entirely superfluous hypothesis after the Hebrew-Christian credo of a divine beginning—"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"—had become a dogmatic assumption of philosophy. Especially as this new creed also stated that man was the only creature made in God's own image, hence endowed with a like faculty of beginning. Yet of all the Christian thinkers, only Augustine, it seems, drew the consequence: "[Initium] ut esset, creatus est homo" ("That a beginning be made man was created").23
The reluctance to recognize the Will as a separate, autonomous mental faculty finally ceded during the long centuries of Christian philosophy, which we shall be examining later in greater detail. Whatever its indebtedness to Greek philosophy and especially to Aristotle, it was bound to break with the cyclical time concept of antiquity and its notion of everlasting recurrence. The story that begins with Adam's expulsion from Paradise and ends with Christ's death and resurrection is a story of unique, unrepeatable events: "Once Christ died for our sins; and rising from the dead, He dieth no more."24 The story's sequence presupposes a rectilinear time concept; it has a definite beginning, a turning-point—the year One of our calendar25 —and a definite end. And it was a story of supreme importance to the Christian, although it hardly touched the course of ordinary secular events: empires could be expected to rise and fall as in the past. Moreover, since the Christian's after-life was decided while he was still a "pilgrim on earth," he himself had a future beyond the determined, necessary end of his life, and it was in close connection with the preparation for a future life that the Will and its necessary Freedom in all their complexity were first discovered by Paul.
Hence one of the difficulties of our topic is that the problems we are dealing with have their "historical origin" in theology rather than in an unbroken tradition of philosophical thought.26 For whatever may be the merits of post-antique assumptions about the location of human freedom in the I-will, it is certain that in the frame of pre-Christian thought freedom was localized in the I-can; freedom was an objective state of the body, not a datum of consciousness or of the mind. Freedom meant that one could do as one pleased, forced neither by the bidding of a master nor by some physical necessity that demanded laboring for wages in order to sustain the body nor by some somatic handicap such as ill health or the paralysis of one's members. According to Greek etymology, that is, according to Greek self-interpretation, the root of the w
ord for freedom, eleutheria, is eleuthein hopōs erō, to go as I wish,27 and there is no doubt that the basic freedom was understood as freedom of movement. A person was free who could move as he wished; the I-can, not the I-will, was the criterion.
2. The Will and the modern age
In the context of these preliminary considerations, we may be permitted to skip the complexities of the medieval era and try to have a brief look at the next important turning-point in our intellectual history, the rise of the modern age. Here we are entided to expect an even stronger interest in a mental organ for the future than in the medieval period, because the modern age's main and entirely new concept, the notion of Progress as the ruling force in human history, placed an unprecedented emphasis on the future. Yet medieval speculations on the subject still exerted a strong influence at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And, so strong was the suspicion of the willing faculty, so sharp the reluctance to grant human beings, unprotected by any divine Providence or guidance, absolute power over their own destinies and thus burden them with a formidable responsibility for things whose very existence would depend exclusively on themselves, so great, in Kant's words, was the embarrassment of "speculative reason in dealing with the question of the freedom of the will...[namely with] a power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states"28 —as distinguished from the faculty of choice between two or more given objects (the liberum arbitrium, strictly speaking)-that it was not till the last stage of the modern age that the Will began to be substituted for Reason as man's highest mental faculty. This coincided with the last era of authentic metaphysical thought; at the turn of the nineteenth century, still in the vein of the metaphysics that had started with Parmenides' equation of Being and Thinking (to gar auto esti noein te kai einai), suddenly, right after Kant, it became fashionable to equate Willing and Being.
Thus Schiller declared that "there is no other power in man but his Will," and Will as "the ground of reality has power over both, Reason and Sensuality," whose opposition—the opposition of two necessities, Truth and Passion—provides for the origin of freedom.29 Thus Schopenhauer decided that the Kantian thing-in-itself, the Being behind the appearances, the world's "inmost nature," its "core," of which "the objective world...[is] merely the outward side," is Will,30 while Schelling on a much higher level of speculation apodictically stated: "In the final and highest instance there is no other Being than Will."31 This development, however, reached its culmination in Hegel's philosophy of history (which for that reason I prefer to treat separately) and came to a surprisingly rapid end at the close of the same century.
Nietzsche's philosophy, centered on the Will to Power, seems at first glance to constitute the climax of the Will's ascendancy in theoretical reflection. I think that this interpretation of Nietzsche is a misunderstanding caused partly by the rather unfortunate circumstances surrounding the first uncritical editions of his posthumously published writings. We owe to Nietzsche a number of decisive insights into the nature of the willing facility and the willing ego, to which we shall return later, but most of the passages about the Will in his work testify to an outspoken hostility toward the "theory of 'freedom of the Will,' a hundred times refuted, [which] owes its permanence" precisely to its being "refutable": "Somebody always comes along who feels strong enough to refute it once more."32
Nietzsche's own final refutation is contained in his "thought of Eternal Return," the "basic concept of the Zarathustra," which expresses "the highest possible formula of affirmation."33 As such, it stands historically in the series of "theodicies," those strange justifications of God or of Being which, ever since the seventeenth century, philosophers felt were needed to reconcile man's mind to the world in which he was to spend his life. The "thought of Eternal Return" implies an unconditional denial of the modem rectilinear time concept and its progressing course; it is nothing less than an explicit reversion to the cyclical time concept of antiquity. What makes it modem is the pathetic tone in which it is expressed, indicating the amount of willful intensity needed by modem man to regain the simple admiring and affirming wonder, thaumazein, which once, for Plato, was the beginning of philosophy. Modem philosophy, on the contrary, had originated in the Cartesian and Leibnizian doubt that Being—"Why is there something and not, rather, nothing?"—could be justified at all. Nietzsche speaks of Eternal Recurrence in the tone of a religious convert, and it was a conversion that brought him to it, though not a religious one. With this thought he tried to convert himself to the ancient concept of Being and deny the entire philosophical creed of the modem age, which he was the first to diagnose as the "Age of Suspicion." Ascribing his thought to an "inspiration," he does not doubt that "one must go back thousands of years to find somebody who would have the right to tell [him], 'this is also my experience.' "34
Although in the early decades of our century Nietzsche was read and misread by almost everybody in the European intellectual community, his influence on philosophy properly speaking was minimal; to this day, there are no Nietzscheans in the sense that there are still Kantians and Hegelians. His first recognition as a philosopher came with the very influential rebellion of thinkers against academic philosophy that, unhappily, goes under the name of "existentialism." No serious study of Nietzsche's thought existed before Jaspers' and Heidegger's books about him;35 yet that does not mean that either Jaspers or Heidegger can be understood as a belated founder of a Nietzsche school. More important in the present context, neither Jaspers nor Heidegger in his own philosophy put the Will at the center of the human faculties.
For Jaspers, human freedom is guaranteed by our not having the truth; truth compels, and man can be free only because he does not know the answer to the ultimate questions: "I must will because I do not know. The Being which is inaccessible to knowledge can be revealed only to my volition. Not-knowing is the root of having to will."36
Heidegger in his early work had shared the modern age's emphasis on the future as the decisive temporal entity—"the future is the primary phenomenon of an original and authentic temporality"—and had introduced Sorge (a German word that appeared for the first time as a philosophical term in Being and Time and that means "a caring for," as well as "worry about the future") as the key existential fact of human existence. Ten years later he broke with the whole modern age's philosophy (in the second volume of his book about Nietzsche), precisely because he had discovered to what an extent the age itself, and not just its theoretical products, was based on the domination of the Will. He concluded his later philosophy with the seemingly paradoxical proposition of "willing not-to-will."37
To be sure, in his early philosophy Heidegger did not share the modem age's belief in Progress, and his proposition "to will not-to-will" has nothing in common with Nietzsche's overcoming of the Will by restricting it to willing that whatever happens shall happen again and again. But Heidegger's famous Kehre, the turning-about of his late philosophy, nevertheless somewhat resembles Nietzsche's conversion; in the first place, it was a kind of conversion, and secondly, it had the identical consequence of leading him back to the earliest Greek thinkers. It is as though at the very end, the thinkers of the modem age escaped into a "land of thought" (Kant)38 where their own specifically modem preoccupations—with the future, with the Will as the mental organ for it, and with freedom as a problem—had been non-existent, where, in other words, there was no notion of a mental faculty that might correspond to freedom as the faculty of thinking corresponded to truth.
3. The main objections to the Will in post-medieval philosophy
The purpose of these preliminary remarks is to facilitate our approach to the complexities of the willing ego, and in our methodological concern we can hardly afford to overlook the simple fact that every philosophy of the Will is the product of the thinking rather than the willing ego. Though of course it is always the same mind that thinks and wills, we have seen that it cannot be taken for granted that the thinking ego's evaluation of the other mental a
ctivities will remain unbiased; and to find thinkers with widely different general philosophies raising identical arguments against the Will is bound to arouse our mistrust. I shall briefly outline the main objections as we find them in post-medieval philosophy before I enter into a discussion of Hegel's position.
There is, first, the ever-recurring disbelief in the very existence of the faculty. The Will is suspected of being a mere illusion, a phantasm of consciousness, a kind of delusion inherent in consciousness' very structure. "A wooden top," in Hobbes's words, "...lashed by the boys ... sometimes spinning, sometimes hitting men on the shin, if it were sensible of its own motion, would think it proceeded from its own will, unless it felt what lashed it."39 And Spinoza thought along the same lines: a stone set in motion by some external force "would believe itself to be completely free and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish," provided that it was "conscious of its own endeavor" and "capable of thinking."40 In other words, "men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined." Thus men are subjectively free, objectively necessitated. Spinoza's correspondents raise the obvious objection: "If this were granted, all wickedness would be excusable," which disturbs Spinoza not in the least. He answers: "Wicked men are not less to be feared, and not less harmful, when they are wicked from necessity."41
Hobbes and Spinoza admit the existence of the Will as a subjectively felt faculty and deny only its freedom: "I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech." For "Liberty or Freedom, signifieth properly the absence of ... external impediments of motion.... But when the impediment of motion is in the constitution of the thing itself, we use not to say: it wants the liberty, but the power to move; as when a stone lieth still or a man is fastened to his bed by sickness." These reflections are entirely in accordance with the Greek position on the matter. What is no longer in line with classical philosophy is Hobbes's conclusion that "Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water, that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel; so likewise in the actions which men voluntarily do: which because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty; and yet, because every act of man's will ... proceedeth from some cause and that from another cause, in a continual chain ... proceed from necessity. So that to him that could see the connection of those causes, the necessity of all men's voluntary actions would appear manifest."42