and you can do that… and you can even talk of ‘having’ a will in ordinary language. it’s only when we get philosophical that the conceptual confusions arise surrounding the meaning of the word ‘will’. when we think of ‘will’ as some immaterial substance, we commit a category mistake (see gilbert ryle) if we then proceed to talk about it in the traditional philosophical sense (plato > descartes), and our predications become nonsensical.
‘he has a strong will’
so we have two entities, the person, and the will which they possess? or rather do we say the person’s disposition, in this case the resolve, was persistent? if the latter then we are describing a capacity of behavior and not a thing, not an entity, not a subject ‘will’. if the former was have to ask; where is this will kept. then the metaphors appear; ‘by his heart’, or ‘in his soul’, etc. now we’re talking poetry, not philosophy.
you find this kind of subtle category mistake present everywhere in philosophy from the ancient greeks all the way up to freud and his theory of psychic apparatus. but again, there is no need to point this subtle mistake out if we aren’t speaking in a philosophically technical language… since that’s only where the confusion appears.
yeah but i dunno why you’d call such things ‘metaphysical’.
be that as it may, i’m simply saying there is no freewill first because there is no ‘will’ in the sense that philosophers think there is, and second, even if there were, it sure as shit wouldn’t be ‘free’ in the sense that philosophers think of it as being. then at the same time i deny the doctrine of determinism because that is a gross anthropomorphothromorphicization of nature.