Volition occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, moving between theology, classical philosophy, neuroscience, and legal theory. The ancient Greek tradition, as Dihle exhaustively documents, lacked a discrete term for sheer volition independent of cognition or emotion — the faculty had to be inferred through compounds of boulēsis, prohairesis, and thelein, each carrying intellectualist freight. It was Augustine, Dihle argues, who finally forged a concept of will as autonomous and primary, capable of standing apart from rational deliberation and thus enabling doctrines of grace, predestination, and moral responsibility that Greek ontology could not have sustained. John of Damascus carries this Augustinian inheritance into systematic theology, treating volition as co-extensive with nature: where natures differ, wills differ; where natures are shared, wills are identical. Epicurean physics, as Long and Sedley demonstrate, attempted to ground volitional autonomy in atomic swerve, asserting that volitions lack external antecedent causes without thereby being causeless. Contemporary neuroscience, in the figure of Barrett, complicates all such architectures by distinguishing volition — the brain's actual causal role in behavior — from the phenomenal awareness of having chosen, warning that legal and psychological systems routinely confuse these. Together these voices reveal volition as a term whose apparent simplicity conceals the deepest tensions in any account of agency: between nature and freedom, between mechanism and responsibility, between cognition and desire.
In the library
17 passages
The word 'will' and its equivalents in modern languages as applied to the description and evaluation of human action denotes sheer volition, regardless of its origin in either cognition or emotion.
Dihle establishes the defining problem of the entire history of volition: the concept of sheer will, separated from both intellect and emotion, is a distinctly modern inheritance that ancient Greek thought could not express because it lacked the corresponding term.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982thesis
Some actions are performed in order to 'exemplify behavior patterns' such as gratitude, friendship, or disobedience, without being caused, in the primary act of volition leading to them, by a distinct object aimed at.
Dihle, via Kenny, identifies a class of volitional acts irreducible to intention or motive — acts whose description demands evaluative rather than causal language, thereby requiring a genuine concept of will.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982thesis
since man is by nature endowed with volition, the Lord also must be by nature endowed with volition, not only because He is God, but also because He became man.
John of Damascus argues that volition is a natural rather than hypostatic or accidental property, such that Christ's assumption of human nature entails a full assumption of human volition — a Christological grounding of the concept.
John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
The legal system, with its essentialized view of the mind and brain, mixes up volition — whether your brain actually played a role in controlling your behavior — and awareness of volition — whether you experience having a choice.
Barrett draws a sharp neuroscientific distinction between volition as actual neural causation and the phenomenal sense of choosing, arguing that contemporary legal and psychological institutions conflate these two distinct phenomena.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
the use of the words velle / voluntas in both philosophical and non-philosophical texts seems to indicate that the idea of pure volition as separate from both cognition and emotion was inherent, however indistinctly, in the Roman vocabulary.
Dihle identifies a latent voluntarism in Latin usage that preceded its philosophical systematization, suggesting that the conceptual conditions for a theory of pure volition were embedded in Roman linguistic practice before Augustine made them explicit.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982thesis
St. Augustine's doctrine of grace, very much like his Trinitarian theology, can only be properly understood on the basis of the fundamental belief that the direct relation between God and the human soul is prior to and independent of any objectively existing order of being.
Dihle shows that Augustine's innovation was to locate the will in a direct, pre-ontological relation between God and soul, making volition the irreducible ground of both grace and moral responsibility rather than a byproduct of cognition.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982thesis
Epicurus is speaking of self-determining animals. Volitional autonomy is not restricted to human beings... Their misbehaviour is quite explicitly said to be attributable not to their atoms but to their selves and their 'developments'.
Long and Sedley show that Epicurus grounded volitional autonomy in a stratum of psychological organization irreducible to atomic motion, attributing misbehavior to selves rather than to their material substrate.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
our volition has no external antecedent causes. Hence when we say that someone wants or does not want something without a cause we are taking advantage of a common linguistic convention.
The Epicurean position distinguishes absence of external antecedent causes from absolute causelessness, defending volitional freedom without resorting to uncaused events.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
Since, then, Christ has two natures, we hold that He has also two natural wills and two natural energies. But since His two natures have one subsistence, we hold that it is one and the same person who wills and energises naturally in both natures.
John of Damascus articulates the Dyothelite position: two wills corresponding to two natures, yet unified in a single personal subject — making volition both a mark of nature and an attribute of personhood.
John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
Virtue is upto us and without a master, if we will and choose. Plotinus has an extended discussion in the treatise which Porphyry calls On the Voluntary and the Will of the One.
Sorabji traces how Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa connect volition (thelēma, boulēsis) to concepts of self-determination (autexousion) and freedom (eleutheron), embedding will in a broader vocabulary of moral autonomy.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
volition from emotion, complicated and self-contradictory as it may be, and the final decision which results from reasoning are clearly distinguished.
Dihle demonstrates that classical Greek thought consistently distinguished emotional volition from rational decision, a bi-partite structure that resisted but ultimately could not generate a unified concept of will.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
neither volition as such nor the idea of free will, though frequently spoken of in both Biblical and post-Biblical literature, was described in a fixed terminology of which the elements can be understood regardless of the context.
Dihle observes that Jewish and early Christian literature addressed volition extensively but without a stable, context-independent technical vocabulary, requiring constant specification of whose will and under what circumstances.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
it is clear that the conception and evaluation of the aim of action (prolēpsis) comes first, and that this is an act of rational cognition (logikē gnōsis) and appropriate to a human being.
Dihle via Simplicius underscores the persistent intellectualist reading of prohairesis, showing how even late Neoplatonists subordinated the volitional element to cognitive appraisal of the aim of action.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
The same surprising juxtaposition of elements of cognition (doxa kai krisis: opinion and judgement) and volition (holou tou hēgemonikou hormē: inclination of the entire ruling part) can be found in a Stoic definition of anger and other passions.
Dihle identifies within Stoic psychology an unresolved tension between cognitive and volitional elements in the account of passion, pointing toward the structural difficulty of separating these faculties in ancient theory.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
there appears to be a tendency for middle perception verbs to be volitional. Exceptions are aisthánomai, osphrainomai and the special middle verb horáomai.
Allan's linguistic analysis shows that the morphological category of the Greek middle voice systematically correlates with volitional perception, encoding the volitional/non-volitional distinction at the grammatical level.
Allan, Rutger, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003aside
things that have the same essence have also the same will and energy, while things that are different in essence are different in will and energy.
John of Damascus proposes a formal ontological law correlating identity of essence with identity of will, deploying volition as a metaphysical criterion for distinguishing and unifying natures.
John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021aside
The leak in the logic is the assumption that choice is a deliberate, rational function we can apply at will. But choice is nearly always irrational — which is only to say that it is executed by the same brain that gives rise to hope, need, fear, and uncertainty.
Lewis critiques the disease/choice binary in addiction discourse by questioning the rationalist premise underlying both positions, arguing that volition is inseparable from affective and learned brain processes.
Lewis, Marc, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, 2015aside