Voluntarism

Voluntarism is a term associated with theories that emphasize the primacy of the force of will in contrast to rationalistic or intellectual explanations of God, reality, human nature, or morality. Theological and metaphysical theories of voluntarism have influenced evolving moral, psychological, and political thought.

Theological voluntarism is often traced to the medieval writing of John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and those who stressed the importance of the divine will of God. Scotus claimed that God's will determines what is reasonable or right and that God is free to act on this will. Ockham believed that divine will, rather than any form of pure or human reasoning, mandates whether human activities are sinful or good. He claimed that God's freedom is absolutely unlimited and that nature itself is subject to divine will and has no causal or logical inevitability. Divine command theory is associated with the views of Ockham and others who grounded theology and morality in God's will and commands. God was seen as radically free and could have willed other than any reasonable moral order. Theological voluntarists challenged the influential views of Aristotle and Aquinas, who stressed that reason or rationality is critical in trying to understand an ordered, logical universe in which human beings are part of this whole. Heaven, or a final state of fulfillment, was associated with contemplation in the Aristotelian tradition, while voluntarists believed that fulfillment or happiness comes through acts of love and fidelity to God's will. The priorities that earlier Greek and scholastic Christian thinkers had placed on form or matter, rationality, order, and hierarchies were replaced in theological voluntarism with contrasting concerns.

A focus on the will of God, as expressed by theological voluntarists, shifted with the Enlightenment and later philosophical conceptions of the will. These metaphysical conceptions of nature or reality held implications for politics, psychology, and morality. For example, Thomas Hobbes had a bleak view of the consequences of unconstrained human will or desire, and he proposed political remedies such as the power of a strong sovereign state and its regulations and controls to harness human willfulness and excesses. David Hume thought that moral sentiment directed human behavior, and he dismissed reason as influencing human behavior or having a role even in opposing or controlling a powerful will. Metaphysical voluntarism had some of its origin in Immanuel Kant's denial of a capacity for pure reasoning by human beings, but those later advocating forms of metaphysical voluntarism had very different perspectives from those of Kant, or often from one another. Three prominent examples of metaphysical voluntarism can be found in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, J. G. Fichte, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Schopenhauer viewed universal will as the ultimate reality, and he insisted that all things are the expression of or are determined by this overarching and powerful will. He found the objectification of this essential will in forces of nature and inanimate matter as well as within all living things. For Schopenhauer, this essential will, as expressed in the human will to live, desire, procreate, and consume, could not be controlled by any final goal or purpose. Such human will and desires could never be fully satisfied and, thus, only led to human frustration and suffering. Even knowledge concerning this dominating will, according to Schopenhauer, only leads to greater pain associated with increasing awareness of vast human egoism and deficiency. For this desperate human condition, Schopenhauer suggested asceticism and available forms of negation of desire, as extreme as starvation and death.

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