„Towards the rehabilitation of the will in contemporary philosophy“ (Blok, V.), Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 44(3)(2013), pp. 286-301. (original) (raw)
Related papers
One of the controversial issues in the development of Heidegger’s thought is the problem of the will. Th e communis opinio is that Heidegger embraced the concept of the will in a non-critical manner at the beginning of the thirties and , in particular, he employed it in his political speeches of 1933–1934. Jacques Derrida for instance speaks about a “massive voluntarism” in relation to Heidegger’s thought in this period. Also Brett Davis discerns a period of “existential voluntarism” in 1930–1934, in which Heidegger takes over a notion of the will in a non-critical manner. In this article, this interpretation is challenged and a stronger interpretation of Heidegger’s concern with the will is developed. Our hypothesis is that Heidegger’s concern with the will at the onset of the thirties is brought about by his confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the concept of the will. Based on his lecture courses from 1930 and 1936/37 and his Rectoral Address from 1933, enables us to discern three main characteristics of Heidegger’s destructed concept of the will in the early thirties. Keywords: Free will, will, confrontation, Heidegger, Derrida""
The starting point of this article is the undeniable experience of conscious willing despite its rejection by scientific research. The article starts a phenomenology of willing at the level of the (epi)phenomenon of willing itself, without assuming its embeddedness in a faculty of the soul, consciousness and so forth. After the introduction, a brief history of the philosophy of willing is provided, from which the paradoxical conclusion is drawn that, according to phenomenologists like Heidegger and his followers, the dominance of the will is the main characteristic of the current age, whereas scientists deny the existence of a conscious will at all. Then, four structural moments of the phenomenon of willing are explored in contrast to traditional characterizations in order to rehabilitate and appreciate the phenomenon of willing in contemporary philosophy: the interconnectedness of the one who wills and that which is willed, the transcendence and demand character of that which is willed, the self-involvement of the one who wills and the ampliative nature of the act of willing. To this end, not only sources from the phenomenological tradition but also the affordance theory of the ecological psychologist James Gibson are critically discussed.
9. Ch4 - The Understated importance of the Will
Gramsci's Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Theory of Democracy, 1992
Please note: this is Chapter 4 in Gramsci's Democratic Theory. I could only upload one section at a time - this is section 9 of 13 in total. FROM THE BOOK: The prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci serve as the foundation for Sue Golding's in-depth study of Gramsci's contribution to radical dem- ocratic theory. Her analysis encompasses English, Italian, and French debates on the subject, as well as political and philosophical discus- sions on the limitations of liberal and socialist democratic theory. Golding explains how Gramsci arrives at the conclusion that a funda- mentally pluralistic 'post-liberal' democracy - that is to say, one that is 'open/ fluid, and based on an immanent and heterogeneous will of the people - is not only possible and preferable, but actually obtainable. The consequences of his analysis are dramatic: on the one hand, Gramsci is able to provide a conception of the structure which is no longer static or reducible to a formal economic moment; it is, instead, profoundly political, since it becomes both the repository and expression of change as well as the terrain upon which a better society can emerge. On the other hand, he is able to incorporate as fundamental to a post-liberal democratic theory a number of concepts often overlooked in the theoretical discussions of socialist democracy. Gramsci demonstrates that if one is to take seriously historical materialism and the kind of democratic society to which it points, one will necessarily be faced with a clear choice. One can either accept a flawed but strategically powerful methodology based on the dialectics of a philosophy of praxis or, more to the point, take as a given the profundity of the political and the radical diversity this implies, and search for a new logic. In the concluding chapter, Golding takes a look at the possible resolutions offered by way of a discursive (or what has come to be known as postmodern) philosophy outlined in part by the surrealists and further developed in the work of Laclau, Mouffe, Foucault, and Derrida.
Symphilosophie. International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism, 2020
This volume, which is the result of a conference in Munich in 2017, contains thirteen articles, all expounding the broad topic of the notion of "will" in classical German philosophy from Kant to Schelling and Schopenhauer. Most of the perspectives developed in this book are primarily concerned with questions of ethics and practical philosophy in general. However, this naturally implies discussions about the very foundations of theoretical thought and of metaphysical conceptions as well. In this regard, the close interrelation between the different disciplines of philosophy that is characteristic for classical German thought is adequately highlighted by this volume as a whole. The book is divided into two main parts: the first one (7-85) deals exclusively with Kant's practical philosophy. The second, more extensive part (89-262) offers a broad collection of studies on various post-Kantian thinkers, not only on the most famous representatives of German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), but also on some less popular, yet important authors (Reinhold, Maimon, Jacobi, Bouterwek). In the following review, some-not all-of the articles in the volume will be presented in a short, concise way. Markus Kohl (29-48) argues that two different types of selfdetermination by rational beings can be identified in Kant's ethics. Since no such thing as completely lawless freedom of action is possible in Kant's moral philosophy, at least some kind of determination generally has to be included. While there is a model of "absolute unconditional necessity" that "excludes any form of contingency" (29), a second model "involves a form of contingency which entails alternative possibilities for determining oneself" (ibid.). In this case, "absolutely spontaneous intelligence is affected by sensible conditions whose influence inveighs against reason, which makes it contingent whether or not the agent acts in accordance with right reason" (41). Kohl identifies this type of self-determination as "executive freedom," whereas the first type can be called "legislative freedom" (ibid.
The Self-Overcoming of the Will (edited 2024)
This is a story of one human being’s entanglement with and acting out the Faustian will or the will-to-power—the destroyer of our world—from the time of his birth onward. Many questions are being asked today about how to address this will-to-power, or how to “go beyond” our technological civilisation which manifests the will-to-power in actuality. In this pages lies some hints… a soul phenomenological approach.
An Introduction to Hegel's theory of the Will
What I will develop in this paper are two main points deployed from Hegel´s conception of the will: (1) in his treatment of the problem of the will Hegel will ascribe an inherent relation between will and a fundamental property; namely, freedom. (2) In Hegel´s theory of the will there is an analytic separation between freedom of the will and freedom of action as two faculties of the agent. I will divide the following discussion in three main sections: I. I will show, generally, the main idea of the determinist and indeterminist theses and some of the compatibilist and incompatibilist arguments, focusing on the “consequence argument” from Peter van Inwagen. The purpose of this first sketch is not just to review the different attempt of reconciling the idea of free will and determinism, but to show how in the current discussion on free will we find homologated –almost interchangeably- the notions of free will and action. II. After this first exposition, I will treat the idea of free will that Harry Frankfurt proposes since it contains –I believe- similarities with the Hegelian idea of will, which will help introduce the Hegelian structure –both Frankfurt and Hegel have a definition that would separate them from the determinist problem between will and action-. III. To conclude, I will analyze the problem of free will as it is explained in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right and will relate it to Frankfurt´s exposition.