We explain what the will is, its meaning in philosophy, in law and its relationship with duty. Also, willpower.
What is the will?
Will is an individual's ability to take decisions and organize your own conduct, that is, to dispose of himself with autonomy. Therefore, the things we do willingly are those we do with the full intention of doing them, as opposed to what we do involuntarily.
This word comes from Latin wills, derived from the verb I flew ("Want"), so it is closely linked with 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 of doing good or that they turn out well, or on the contrary, in doing evil or no matter 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 that he has passed away, especially with regard to his property and money. Or also of the "divine will", which would become the mandate of God, that is, what God wants to happen and that, therefore, must happen.
The will is always linked to conscience, lucidity and own decisions, so that what is done under duress, or under the effect of substances, is not considered to be carried out voluntarily. The will is necessarily an expression of the subjectivity of people.
Willpower
Willpower is the ability to sustain a desired behavior or to insist until something one wants materializes. In other words, it is the tenacity, the insistence, the determination. People with a lot of willpower are able to make and sustain decisions voluntarily and firmly, without too much hesitation and regrets, and above all without wavering and giving up before having achieved the task.
For example, it takes a lot of willpower to change one's own habits by others, since once one is used to doing something in a sustained way, it takes a lot to interrupt the tradition and found a new one. That is why smokers, for example, have such a hard time breaking the habit, even knowing that it is harmful to them and to 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 that you do not always have the same ability to exercise your own will. Poor diet, lack of sleep, and emotional restlessness are known to have a major impact on available willpower.
Will in philosophy
Rousseu in his "Social Contract" prioritized the will of the people over that of the monarch.The will has been since ancient times a central element in the philosophical reflections of the humanity. Plato himself (c. 427-347 BC) in Ancient Greece spoke of it as the seat of the responsibility individual. For his part, his disciple Aristotle (384-322 BC) related the will with the ethics, linking the virtue.
This would be the foundation of later Christian thought, whose doctrine proposed that God endowed human beings with 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 the will is closely linked with that of Liberty, since the will is only exercised when we are free to choose for ourselves.
Later thinkers such as René Descartes (1596-1650) add that conscious choices can only be made when complete information is available to judge, so that the more enlightened or educated the will, the more free it is. This is the ideal of Renaissance and of the Illustration 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 coming to postulate that it is "the reality last ”that underlies the world of the senses.
For his part, the French 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 the power resides in the modern democracy.
As we can see, it is a widely discussed concept in Western philosophy, and one that analytical philosophy and psychology are still dealing with today.
Will and duty
In the philosophical considerations of the German Immanuel Kant, the will was always measured by what he baptized as categorical imperatives, which are autonomous commandments of the individual, without any ideology or ideology mediating them. religion, and that governs human behavior in its most different manifestations.
In this way, Kant proposes to differentiate between the will that acts out of duty and the will that acts according to duty, that is, between those who follow the rules because they are fearful of punishment, or because they have been imposed externally, and those who choose to follow the rules, that is, they choose to act in accordance with the provisions of the rules.
Thus, Kant investigates the nature of ethics and what is good, starting from the notion of will. He concludes that the "holy" will, that is, that which acts without being affected by individual inclinations or tendencies, is not good because it acts out of duty, but rather "acts out of duty because it is good."
Will in law
In the legal world, the will is thought of as human intention, based on the idea that everything citizen he is able to freely assume what he does and discern the legal consequences that this would have.
In fact, one of the things that every criminal trial seeks to determine is what the will of the accused was, regardless of whether or not he actually committed the crime; a crime committed with the 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 in bilateral acts that of consent is used.