Will (Boúlesis / Voluntas / Wille) — The faculty of deliberation, willing, and choice by which an agent determines itself to act. The Latin voluntas, tied to the verb velle (to will), renders the Greek boúlesis, the rational desire already analyzed by Aristotle. Although antiquity discussed choice (proaíresis) and desire, it was Augustine who placed the will at the center of moral and spiritual life: sin springs not from ignorance but from a will that turns away from God toward created goods—a will that can be divided against itself, as he describes in the Confessions. In modern thought, Kant distinguishes Wille (the legislative will, identical with pure practical reason, which gives itself the moral law) from Willkür (the power of choice, the capacity to adopt maxims and to choose between duty and inclination); this distinction underpins his doctrine of autonomy. Schopenhauer breaks with intellectualism: in The World as Will and Representation, the Will (Wille zum Leben, “will to live”) is the blind, single, irrational essence of all reality, prior to representation, from which the subject can free itself only through aesthetic contemplation or asceticism. Nietzsche reinterprets this drive as the Will to Power (Wille zur Macht): a creative, self-affirming force that exceeds mere self-preservation. The notion connects directly to the problem of free will and to the distinction between will and desire (undeliberated sensory appetite).
← Glossary