The Seba library treats Will in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including Richard Sorabji, Easwaran, Eknath, Yalom, Irvin D.).
Augustine connects the will (voluntas) with responsibility… the will is present in all these movements. Rather, they are all nothing other than acts of will (voluntates).
Sorabji establishes Augustine’s threefold linkage of will with freedom, responsibility, and the moral quality of the passions, arguing that all emotions are ultimately acts of will whose rectitude or perversion determines their moral status.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
Desire and Will are close relations. They even have the same surname, Prana… every desire draws vitality away from the will. If that desire can be resisted, the power caught up in it begins to flow into our hands.
Easwaran advances an Upanishadic economy of psychic energy in which will and desire are homologous forces competing for the same vital substrate, so that resisting desire is the primary mechanism for strengthening volitional power.
, Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spiritualitythesis
There is will in every desire. If the desire is self-centered or conditioned, our will is turned against us; we do what it commands. As Spinoza observed, in such a life there are no decisions, only desires.
Parallel to the previous passage, this text specifies the paradox that conditioned desire does not negate will but rather co-opts it, reducing apparent choice to mere compulsion — a point anchored by reference to Spinoza.
, The Upanishadssupporting
The will is an impulse, positively, actively placed in the service of the ego, and not a blocked impulse, as is the emotion… Rank viewed the will as a separate executive entity equal in power to the impulse system.
Yalom reconstructs Rank’s revisionist psychoanalytic theory in which will is distinguished from both blocked impulse (emotion) and raw drive, constituting instead a freely choosing ego-agency — though the formulation remains entangled in Freudian metapsychology.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
Will is rational, free and natural desire, and in the case of man, endowed with reason as he is, the natural appetite is ruled rather than rules. For his actions are free, and depend upon reason.
John of Damascus offers a systematic scholastic definition distinguishing will as rational, free, and natural appetite from the merely instinctual appetition of non-rational animals, grounding human freedom in the subordination of appetite to reason.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
Since there is but one nature, there is also but one natural will… In the case of men, however, seeing that their nature is one, their natural will is also one, but since their subsistences are separated and divided from each other… their acts of will and their opinions are different.
John of Damascus extends his will-doctrine to Christological and anthropological differentiation, arguing that a single nature yields a single natural will, while the plurality of human persons produces divergent individual acts of will.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting
It groups the sinners in Hell first according to the degree of their evil will, and within those categories according to the gravity of their misdeeds.
Auerbach’s reading of Dante’s moral cosmology treats the degree of evil will as the primary taxonomic principle organizing damnation, implicitly affirming the Augustinian view that will is the root of moral accountability.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside