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Topic for #120: Guest Eva Brann on Will (and Aquinas, Augustine, Heidegger, etc.)

July 24, 2015 by Mark Linsenmayer 10 Comments

On 6/26/15 Dylan Casey visited Annapolis, Maryland to talk with Eva Brann, bringing the rest of us in via Skype to talk with her about her 2014 book, Un-Willing: An Inquiry into the Rise of Will'’s Power and an Attempt to Undo It. We all read chapters I "Before Will" (about the ancient Greeks), II.C. on Augustine, III.A. on Aquinas, VI. "A Linguistic Interlude" about the word "will" (as in future tense), and her conclusion, "Un-Willing," where she sums up the whole book and elaborates on her view.

Citizens, listen to the full episode now, which will be released to the public in two parts on 7/27 and 8/3.

You should recall Eva from our Heraclitus discussion where we discussed her book The Logos of Heraclitus, in which she painstakingly constructed a narrative out of Heraclitus's fragments. Well, in this case she's working with the history of the treatment of the topic of "willing" in philosophy, and claims that the will is not something psychologically basic that we can all find via introspection, but that it's a historically built concept, and one that causes a lot of needless philosophical problems (the historical problems of "free will") and that moreover has had really awful implications for culture, bringing with it tendencies toward guilt, aggressiveness, control, and a fixation on action that she thinks undermines the good life.

Incidentally, we've again made a deal with Paul Dry Books, Eva's publisher, that allows PEL listeners to get you 30% off any order from them, with free shipping in the U.S. or a flat $25 for international shipping even if you buy several things. So you could use this to get any of Eva's books (including her brand new one, Feeling Our Feelings), or many other philosophy, fiction, poetry, or other titles. Go to pauldrybooks.com and enter PEL in the comments at checkout. The discount may not be reflected in the total but will be applied before your order is processed.

We're also going to have a drawing to give away five copies of Eva's book, or another of their titles of equal or lesser value (i.e. $35), if you prefer. These winners will be chosen at random on Monday, August 3rd from the list of dues-paying PEL Citizens, so go sign up to be eligible! This will also get you early access to the full episode, which will be released to the public in two parts on 7/27 and 8/3. (Note that there will be no aftershow for this episode.)

Eva's method is historical, and she first points out that the ancient Greeks lacked this notion of will. This sounds strange, of course: Weren't Greek two-year-olds willful? Weren't people grasping, didn't they make decisions, didn't they will one action rather than another? Though human nature likely hasn't changed, the concepts we use to talk about ourselves change, and Eva goes through all the ancient Greek words that might be translated as will to show that they really mean something different. On Socrates's conception, people always do what they think to be best. There is no void between the thinking (or seeing) and the doing, where will has to step in and make the determination to actually do the thing that is seen to be needful.

She locates invention of the will in St. Augustine, who posits the will as a rebellious force: Whether or not we see the right thing to do, it is another matter entirely to actually will oneself to do it, and people, as basically sinful, tend to perversely will wickedness, as in the example in The Confessions where Augustine discusses how at age 16 he and his friends stole some pears not out of need, but just for the joy of the sin itself. The will is posited as a power to be perverse, i.e., out of joint with our true interest, which for Augustine is the same as the will of God. This perversity is what makes the will free in a manner absent from Socrates's picture.

Thomas Aquinas also invented a conception of will, but one where will and its freedom are best described as a multi-stage process, and not one single point of decision. (The main text cited here is the "Treatise on Man," which is part of the Summa Theologica. This is the picture that Eva favors, but it's not the one that persisted in the tradition. Instead, all of our focus is on that one point: When I chose that, could I have done otherwise? How can that decision have been free if what I was going to do is a causal result of physical forces, and that it was predictable given sufficient knowledge of my character and of the circumstance I perceived myself to be in? These questions (explored in our episode 93) are all seen by Eva as misconceived, and likewise the psychological research showing that actually, we've already started to act before thinking we've actually made a decision, which is supposed to blow our minds re: the illusionary character of our alleged freedom, does not actually undermine freedom, because it's again based on this faulty picture of what freedom is: Freedom is not a matter of being able to exert our will contrary to all reason and the framework of our lives, but it is more a matter (as Sartre argued) of how well your life as a whole, your character as built over time, reflects what you really want, your true interests (insofar as you have any), your teleology. There are lots of interesting things to discuss about freedom, e.g., does some political situation offer true freedom or not, but the traditional picture just discussed does not address them.

So, what's the practical upshot? The picture of will from Augustine that focuses on will power evolved through the historical process of philosophers repeatedly misinterpreting each other to such monstrosities as Rousseau's "general will," which is the will of no one individual in particular, and further to will as a metaphysical principle as argued for by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. It's ironic that Nietzsche's project (as we discussed) is so anti-guilt, so anti-resentment, yet as a historical matter, his emphasis on the will of superior individuals has become part of the toxic mix that Eva describes as Augustine's legacy: The attempt to exert control over ourselves and over others, and the consequent bad vibes when we fail to control ourselves or lose whatever contest we've invested ourselves in.

This critique may sound familiar to those familiar with Heidegger's critique of technology. (Citizens can listen to this Not School discussion on it.) Technology represents a fundamentally aggressive stance toward nature, where we treat the natural world as resources and don't simply appreciate it. (A less weird expression of Heidegger's view was found in Thoreau.) We should instead adopt a more receptive, contemplative attitude wherein we, in Heidegger's words, create a "clearing" that "let's beings be."

In Eva's chapter on Heidegger, though, she eviscerates him, both for his Nazi period in which he advocates yielding to the stronger, national will, and even in his mature period described above where (according to her analysis of his view) becoming less willful toward Being ends up being itself something accomplished through an act of will. She also criticizes Heidegger of being too passive; the point of receptivity is not that you do nothing and wait for an epiphany, but that what you do is done in a relaxed, deliberate, graceful way, not "willful."

So, even though we saw a lot of connections between the life of creative contemplation that Eva advocates and the positions we've explored in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger, these all end up being on-balance negative figures in her genealogy of the notion of will, and it's really Aquinas and the ancient Greeks that we should look for in "unmaking the will," both as a conceptual/philosophical and social corrective.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Filed Under: General Announcements Tagged With: Eva Brann, free will, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, will

Comments

  1. s. wallerstein says

    July 24, 2015 at 11:44 am

    I haven’t read the book, but wasn’t Nietzsche’s will to power more of an unconscious drive (such as Freud’s libido) than “something” we control? In Nietzsche’s psychology we don’t control the will to power: rather it controls us. The will to power, according to Nietzsche, constructs the self and is prior to the self rather than a tool used by the self.

    Reply
  2. Alan Cook says

    July 24, 2015 at 3:31 pm

    A lot of these same themes are covered in Hannah Arendt’s Willing, Part II of her Life of the MInd:

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Life-Mind-Volume-Willing/dp/0151518963

    Reply
    • Marc says

      August 11, 2015 at 3:04 pm

      Alan,
      Thank you for the reference. I ordered both Arendt’s book and Brann’s book to up my knowledge on will. You are completely correct that Arendt captures the geneology of will well before Brann, and it is odd that Brann should not mention Arendt given the similarity of theme. I am 1/2 way through Arendt’s book and find it engrossing, crisp, and lucid. With respect to the concept of will in the Greeks, Arendt highlights the Aristotelian concept of ‘prohairesis’ https://felicianethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/what-is-aristotelian-prohairesis.pdf , which she describes as a mediator between Desire and Reason, but it does not take on the role of an independent mental faculty. Like Brann, Arendt says that the modern concept of the will as a mental faculty, a faculty on par with Desire and Reason, began with St. Augustine. After Augustine, we can now say I Will this, I Desire that, and I Reason thus. In this respect the will was a new discovery or invention.
      Thank you for the reference,
      Marc

      Reply
  3. Erik Weissengruber says

    July 27, 2015 at 7:25 pm

    Does Brann talk about thymos or “striving”? Plato places mind (nous) as the chariot driver, keeping thumos and appetite (epithumia) in check, but unable to move without them. These are human faculties. There is no universal “appetite” and it is not the “appetite” of animals.

    Reply
  4. Wayne Schroeder says

    August 1, 2015 at 12:27 pm

    Good Will Hunting:
    Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power was first developed from his concept of drives: “Every drive is a kind of lust to rule, each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm” (WP, 481). It is through our drives that we interpret the world, and are thus perspectival, not through our consciousness or perceptions.

    What we call thinking, willing and feeling are “merely relation[s] of these drives to each other.” (BG&E 237) When we speak of “I” (ego) we are merely speaking of the current predominant drive, beneath which are more distant drives, not me, but it (the Id). To will is to use the predominant drive to command, while the other drives obey (largely unconsciously).

    Perhaps the greatest fiction is that we are subjects endowed with free will–-the fiction of a force separated from what it can do. We assume that behind every deed there is a conscious doer (Nietzsche) when in fact we are at the mercy of our unconscious drives. When we do not express our impulses outwardly, we turn them inward and generate “bad conscience,” and false guilt (a function of the Freudian superego)—the reification of transcendent moral values above and beyond the value of life itself.

    Good willing thus enable an entity’s power to actualize (not rationalize) its creative potential as a physical body with affects (which yield the ability to influence actively or be influenced), whether organic or inorganic. There is no appeal to the transcendental, universal “God” or “Subject.”

    Bad willing, or morality (top down, transcendent, universalizing) thus becomes truly unrealistic, inauthentic, destructive and fundamentally anti-ethical (ethics being bottom up, immanent, singular).

    Reply
  5. Thalo says

    August 2, 2015 at 1:06 pm

    Good idea! I ordered the book yesterday.

    Reply
  6. Thalo says

    August 4, 2015 at 5:02 am

    Ahh, Ms. Brann’s book has arrived. As one who considers the concept of free-will an intellectual (philosophical) static pattern of value, I look forward to all Ms. Brann’s explorations addressing this ever-changing pattern.

    Reply
  7. Clark says

    August 11, 2015 at 9:37 pm

    Just listened to the podcast. Loved it. I just went to order the book.

    Small problem.. The book wasn’t available on iBooks, which I prefer to the Kindle due to a lot of limits with the Kindle app. (Like having only one book open at a time not to mention better typography) Oddly her Logos of Heraclitus was available. Then I went to get the Kindle version and that wasn’t available either!

    I’ve long ago decided only to purchase ebooks from now on unless there’s absolutely no other way. My library was just taking up too much space. (And my wife kept asking why I was keeping books I’d not read in years – it was hard to explain why Heidegger’s Nietzsche volumes were staying on the shelf)

    Hopefully the book will be available on iBooks soon.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Episode 120: A History of “Will” with Guest Eva Brann (Part One) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    July 27, 2015 at 7:00 am

    […] Eva (whom you may recall from our Heraclitus episode) thinks that the notion is a historical artificat that causes needless philosophical confusion, and worse, has had a damaging effect on our culture. Read more about the topic and get the book. […]

    Reply
  2. The Problem of Will in Free Will | Mormon Metaphysics says:
    August 11, 2015 at 9:45 pm

    […] was a great two part episode of Partially Examined Life interviewing Eva Brann about her book Un-Willing: An Inquiry into the Rise of Will’s Power and an Attempt to Undo It. […]

    Reply

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