The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity

Name: The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity
Author: Albrecht Dihle

The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity is a work by Albrecht Dihle (1982).

Core claims

Dihle demonstrates that the concept of “will” as a unified faculty directing action is not a Greek philosophical invention but a Christian theological one, born from Paul’s account of the divided self—a genealogy that exposes the entire modern voluntarist tradition, from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to depth psychology, as standing on Augustinian rather than Aristotelian ground.
The book reveals that Greek intellectualism—the Socratic doctrine that to know the good is to do the good—was not a naive oversight about human weakness but a coherent psychological framework in which action follows perception, making the very question “why don’t I do what I know is right?” structurally unintelligible within classical thought.
Dihle’s analysis implies that the entire problematic of the “unconscious will”—the territory Freud, Jung, and Hillman each claimed to map—only becomes possible after Augustine splits intention from knowledge, creating the inner abyss that depth psychology would later colonize as “the unconscious.”

How does Dihle’s demonstration that Greek moral psychology had no concept of will complicate Hillman’s claim in The Myth of Analysis that Greek mythology provides the archetypal substructure for depth psychology’s understanding of psychic conflict?
If Schopenhauer’s “Will” is, as Dihle implies, an Augustinian rather than Greek inheritance, how should we reassess Edinger’s placement of Schopenhauer in the genealogy leading to Jung’s concept of the unconscious in The New God-Image?
Peterson’s argument in The Iron Thūmos that the Middle Voice was abolished by Canon 11 of 869 CE addresses the grammatical dimension—how does Dihle’s earlier philological analysis of the displacement of proairesis by voluntas provide the philosophical mechanism for that abolition?