Theories of Political

Obligation Module III-

Voluntarism
III Semester
 Voluntarism
• Any metaphysical or psychological system that assigns to the will
(Latin: voluntas) a more predominant role than that attributed to the
intellect. Christian philosophers have sometimes described as
voluntarist: the non-Aristotelian thought of St. Augustine because of
its emphasis on the will to love God; the post-Thomistic thought of
John Duns Scotus, a late medieval scholastic, who insisted on the
absolute freedom of the will and its supremacy over all other
faculties; and the position of the French writer Blaise Pascal, who in
religion substituted “reasons of the heart” for rational propositions.
•  Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative as an unconditional moral
 law for the will’s choice of action represented an ethical voluntarism.
A metaphysical voluntarism was propounded in the 19th century by
the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who took will to be
the single, irrational, unconscious force behind all of reality and all
ideas of reality. An existentialist voluntarism was present in 
Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of the overriding “will to power”
whereby man would eventually re-create himself as “superman.” And
a Pragmatic voluntarism is evident in William James’s reference of
knowledge and truth to purpose and to practical ends.
• 19th century voluntarism has its origin in Kant, particularly his
doctrine of the “primacy of the practical over the pure reason.”
Intellectually, humans are incapable of knowing ultimate reality, but
this need not and must not interfere with the duty of acting as though
the spiritual character of this reality were certain. Freedom cannot be
demonstrated speculatively, but whenever a person acts under a
motive supplied by reason, he is thereby exhibiting the practical
efficiency of reason, and thus showing its reality in a practical sense.
Following Kant, two distinct lines of voluntarism have proceeded
which may be called rational and irrational voluntarism respectively.
For Fichte, the originator of rational voluntarism, the ethical is
primary both in the sphere of conduct and in the sphere of
knowledge.
• The whole nature of consciousness can be understood only from the
point of view of ends which are set up by the self. The actual world,
with all the activity that it has, is only to be understood as material for
the activity of the practical reason, as the means through which the
will achieves complete freedom and complete moral realization.
Schopenhauer’s irrational voluntarism asserts a more radical
opposition between the will and intellect. For him, the will is by its
very nature irrational. It manifests itself in various stages in the world
of nature as physical, chemical, magnetic, and vital force, pre-
eminently, however, in the animal kingdom in the form of “the will to
live,” which means the tendency to assert itself in the struggle for
means of existence and for reproduction of the species. This activity is
all of it blind, so far as the individual agent is concerned, although the
power and existence of the will are thereby asserted continually
Irrationalism
• The idea that feeling, instinct and intuition are better guides for political action
than scientific reason. (it was popularized by Rousseau).
• Further promoted by metaphysical idealists like Friedrich Hegel- he laid
emphasis on unconscious reason, spirit and spiritual insight as the bases of
understanding.
• Schopenhauer formulated the doctrine that the underlying cause of all that
takes place in the universe and on this earth is will; not conscious, rational will,
but blind, groping, struggling will.
• Consciousness is but a superficial aspect or phase of the all-pervasive and ever-
driving energy that constitutes will. Will has no definite purpose or goal and
moves in no comprehensible course; it merely acts, and that is all. Therefore,
that the whole universe, including man, must be utterly irrational, and that all
attempts to subordinate will to what man calls reason are foolish.
• Nietzsche, a disciple of Schopenhauer, added an idea which gave the doctrine
of will high political potentiality.
• He said that will, as manifested in living things, does have a purpose, namely, to
prevail and achieve dominance over other things. This is Will to Power. All living
things are actuated by the Will to Power, they struggle unceasingly to overcome
whatever opposes them or stands in their way and thus gain ever more and
more power. And they seek power for power’s sake, not for good, not for evil,
not for any reason save to satisfy their insatiate craving for power.
• Nietzsche was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution and he blended it
with his theory of will. According to him social evolution is nothing more than a
never ending struggle for power, with natural selection favouring the strongest
and most ruthless. In long run this process would divide mankind into two great
classes-ordinary men and supermen, the latter being so superior, because of
the selective evolutionary process that had produced them, that they would
rule the world.
• The supermen would be race apart from ordinary men, physically,
mentally and morally. Ordinary men would not be able to match them
in any way, and would be unable to do otherwise than accept their
domination. Supermen would be few in number compared with the
ordinary men.
• Voluntarism is the theory that God or the ultimate nature of reality is to be
conceived as some form of will (or conation). This theory is contrasted
to intellectualism, which gives primacy to God’s reason. The
voluntarism/intellectualism distinction was intimately tied to medieval and
modern theories of natural law; if we grant that moral or physical laws issue
from God, it next needs to be answered whether they issue from God’s will
or God’s reason. In medieval philosophy, voluntarism was championed by
Avicebron, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. Intellectualism, on the
other hand, is found in Averroes, Aquinas, and Eckhart. The opposing
theories were applied to the human psychology, the nature of God, ethics,
and the heaven. According to intellectualism, choices of the will result from
that which the intellect recognizes as good; the will itself is determined. For
voluntarism, by contrast, it is the will which determines which objects are
good, and the will itself is indetermined.
• Concerning the nature of heaven, intellectualists followed Aristotle‘s
lead by seeing the final state of happiness as a state of contemplation.
Voluntarism, by contrast, maintains that final happiness is an activity,
specifically that of love. The conceptions of theology itself were
polarized between these two views. According to intellectualism,
theology should be an essential speculative science; according to
voluntarism, it is a practical science aimed at controlling life, but not
necessarily aimed at comprehending philosophic truth. In the modern
period Spinoza advocates intellectualism insofar as desire is an
indication of imperfection, and the passions are a source of human
bondage. 
• When all things are seen purely in rational relations, desire is stilled,
the mind is freed from the passions and we experience the
intellectual love of God, which is the ideal happiness. According to
Leibniz, Spinoza’s interpretation of the world as rational and logical
left no place for the individual, or for the conception of ends or
purposes as a determining factor in reality. Voluntarism is seen in 
Leibniz‘s view of the laws which govern monads (individual units of
which all reality is composed) in so far as they are the laws of the
conscious realization of ends.