Greetings community, I come to talk to you about a concept that apra my is the most important, the will. I hope you like it, I do not pretend to expand too much, but summarize the most important.
It is an activity of the human mind and is understood as the ability to determine. To manage to stop or calm our impulses and desires to mediate them by prudence and to compare them with reality. It is not easy to see a naked subject in the downtown streets of a city. People would be frightened, they would reject it and even warn the police. Hence, the will is something so important in individual and collective behavior.
This act of "willing" was defined by Aristotle directly from ethics as the voluntary act, or virtue with the will. This step was determined not to be linked to the moral intellectualism that his teacher, Plato, put in the mouth of Socrates. However, the concept was already perceived as an act of human freedom. It will not be until Augustine of Hippo and the scholastic that it will raise questions more related to the moral and theology. Free will is that act in which the human will is given where the appetite, desire and all those sinful actions can be stopped by means of this iron will connected with a relentless faith. Thus the will will not only be an action of understanding and reasoning, it will also be an act of moral commitment.
Spinoza will give it back its meaning with understanding. Thus, a volitional act are forms of people and not so much of notions of freedom or free will. Kant, on the other hand, will endow the will with a meaning that will have to do with the ethic of duty. In this way, a "good will" will be one that acts only by duty, directed by the categorical imperative.
To one of the problems that we face from the second half of the s. XX is this duality between body and soul, between reason and emotion that also contaminates the will. If we have the prejudice of the "machine" as a body, we will understand as Spinoza or Kant that the body pretends and wants some things, when it must be the volitional and rational act that must calm it and act correctly.
But will it not be that body and mind, will and desire are things that belong to the same range of action? If so, we should begin to pose the will as one more part of this complex mixture between what I am and what I want to be, between what I would like to be, what I can be and what I will really become.
