What Is the Will?

“She rose to stardom via the force of her will.”

“He lacked the willpower to stay off the booze.”

“Nietzsche emphasized the will to power.”

“I believe in free will as opposed to determinism.”

As these examples suggest, will is a fairly commonly used term. As such, you might presume that psychologists have engaged in a detailed study of the concept. However, this is not really the case. Psychologists in the middle of the 20th century focused on notions such as drives (e.g., Freud) and needs (e.g., Maslow). Currently, concepts like goals and motives are prevalent in the way psychologists frame human behavior. There have been some lines of research into the concept of willpower: Roy Baumeister developed an interesting line of research that framed willpower as a muscle that could be exercised and strengthened (or expended and depleted). However, this is the exception, and I have never seen an introductory psychology text that mentions the will. Virtually all of the discussion regarding the will in academia is framed in terms of the debate between free will and determinism. However, that is not the focus of this post. (See here for my take on the free will vs. determinism debate).

My question is whether the will is a useful concept that deserves more attention. Psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli thought so. Indeed, he committed his life to studying the concept and developed The Will Project, which continues as an endeavor today. I have been reading his book, The Act of Will (1973), and have been thinking about the concept from the vantage point of the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK). Here I share the basic outline of it from a UTOK frame.

The core of the will can be framed as the intensity and duration of investment toward some end goal or state. We can apply this definition in the examples above. In the first, the woman was able to overcome whatever odds against her and rise to stardom, whereas in the second the man lacks the necessary drive/desire to invest in sobriety, relative to his situation and circumstance. Nietzsche thought the core human drive/desire was the acquisition of power. And the final comment refers to the capacity to choose what one invests in, as opposed to it being caused by outside forces.

With this basic formulation in hand, we can look at the will from the metatheories that UTOK gives us. First, I want to highlight that I characterized the will above as “drive/desire.” I did this based on some of the work by philosopher Alexander Bard. He characterizes “drive” as the more foundational motive and “desire” as a more self-conscious force toward some outcome. We can readily frame the difference between drive and desire via the lens offered by UTOK. First, we can frame the “drive” via UTOK’s Behavioral Investment Theory. It frames animal behavior patterns via the P – M => E formulation, which represents the idea that perceptual inputs are referenced against motives which in turn trigger an emotional response. The “M” in this formulation can be framed as your drive to approach something (or avoid it). The “E” can be interpreted in part as the degree to which you like or dislike something.

This analysis allows us to place “wants” and “likes” in proper relation to each other. Many people assume these are basically the same thing, but they are not. Wants drive us toward things, whereas likes give the current state its emotional tone (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant). This is important because when we contrast “wants” to “likes,” we can find a useful way to see the will from a bottom-up perspective. The more you stick with something despite how much you do not like it is an indicator of how strong the drive is. Consider that researchers have developed contraptions in which they clamp a weight to a rat’s tail, and proceed to measure the force the rat exerts against the weight. As the weight increases, it becomes an increasingly negative force, both in pull and discomfort; thus, it becomes a way to measure the rat’s drive toward something.

In UTOK, Justification Systems Theory frames human persons as self-conscious justifying agents on the sociocultural stage. It provides the lens to understand desire, or the will from the top down. Think about a long-term goal you have for yourself. Maybe you want to be a doctor or a star athlete. Maybe you want to get into shape or climb Mount Everest or learn a new language. This is the realm of self-conscious desire. UTOK frames this aspect of our mind as the Culture-Person justifying mind. The human justifying mind organizes, plans, and governs aspects of the primate mind.

This allows us to see will from a “top-down” perspective. Whereas drive pits the basic animal motivation toward a state relative to pain or discomfort, self-conscious desire refers to carving out a self-determined path across time, relative to obstacles, injuries, and other difficulties. For example, when we see a football player come back after rehabilitating from a devastating injury, this is an example of will as self-conscious desire across time. Likewise, when we see someone who, as a teenager, wanted to become a neurosurgeon, and then, finally, achieves that goal after 20 years, we can say they demonstrated much will, in the self-conscious desire sense.

There is, of course, much more to be said about the will. Nevertheless, we are off to a good start. Via UTOK, we can see the will as the intensity and duration of investment toward some end state across time relative to difficulties or pain. Furthermore, we can frame the will from the bottom as the core animal valuing process that drives the individual forward toward particular outcomes, and we can think about the will from the top as the self-conscious desire for a long-term outcome.

I will finish Assagioli’s The Act of Will and explore The Will Project some more. If I find it valuable, I will return to this topic and share. For those who are curious about the book, I share the opening paragraphs below. Although these words were written 50 years ago, they seem quite timely:

From Assagioli’s The Act of Will, 1973:

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"If a man from a previous civilization—an ancient Greek, let us say, or a Roman—suddenly appeared among present­ day humanity, his first impressions would probably lead him to regard it as a race of magicians and demigods. But were he a Plato or a Marcus Aurelius and refused to be dazzled by the material wonders created by advanced technology, and were he to examine the human condition more carefully, his first impressions would give place to great dismay. He would soon notice that, though man has acquired an impressive degree of power over nature, his knowledge of and control over his inner being is very limited. He would perceive that this modern 'magician,' capable of descending to the bottom of the ocean and projecting himself to the moon, is largely ignorant of what is going on in the depths of his unconscious and is unable to reach up to the luminous superconscious levels, and to become aware of his true Self.

"This supposed demigod, controlling great electrical forces with a movement of the finger and flooding the air with sound and pictures for the entertainment of millions, would be seen to be incapable of dealing with his own emotions, impulses, and desires. As several writers, Toynbee among them, have pointed out, this wide gulf between man's external and inner powers is one of the most important and profound causes of the individual and collective evils which afflict our civilization and gravely menace its future. Man has had to pay dearly for his material achievements. His life has become richer, broader, and more stimulating, but at the same time more complicated and exhausting. Its rapidly increasing tempo, the opportunities it offers for gratifying his desires, and the intricate economic and social machinery in which it has enmeshed him make ever more insistent demands on his energy, his mental functions, his emotions, and his will.…The ensuing disturbance leads to increasing discouragement and frustration—even to desperation. The remedy for these evils—the narrowing and eventual closing of the fatal gap between man's external and his inner powers—has been and should be sought in two directions: the simplification of his outer life and the development of his inner powers."