Physical Laws: this is the set of laws which is partially responsible for limiting a persons capacity for action. I cannot neggate the effect gravity has on matter, and hence this is the intial limitation on a person.
Knowledge/Awareness/Learned Behaviour: Our attained awareness limits our actions by filtering out apparent impossibilities from the will . We develop this awareness through observing apparent cause and effect relationships. I am aware that i cannot fly unaided(gravity pulls me down i cannot overcome the force of gravity), i cannot breath underwater without assistance(i need air to live and i cannot extract enough air out of the water nor can i sustain life wiht water in my lungs), I cannot go to Harvard(bad grades) ect.
The will is limited by our attained knowledge . Knowledge is much like a chissle and the imagination is the clay. When we attain knowledge we develop an idea of what is possible in any given instance. So, the connection between knowledge and imagination in the mind is much like the connection between a chissle and clay in a sculpters hand. Our mind uses knowledge to carve out the concepts of our imagination deemed impossible in order to fashion our aspirations or our will, much like the sculpter uses the chissle to carve our unneeded clay to fashion an image or form.
Our concept of reality, or what is possible in reality, is held in line with our imagination in order to determin the plausability of any imagined state of affairs coming to fruition.
The end result of any such filtering of imagination becomes the will and if given the oppurtunity or means to act on such suppositions, the will can become action.
A sculpter does not make an incision until he has an idea of what it is he is fashioning an image of, and much like the sculpter, we do not act untill we have an idea of what it is we want to get done, if we consider ourselves rational people.
Is this an acceptable take on the source of will?
Could we then say that the morality is an attempt to form a universally acceptable will?
I’d say that the will is just the will, and that knowledge tells it what it can and cannot do. If a man wants to get from A to B asap, then his will might initially want to him fly, but his knowledge would tell him to run instead. Thus, the thing that’s been changed is not what’s willed but how it’s to be attained.
Morality does not neccessitate the will being universally acceptable. Kant’s morality would dictate that, but few maintain that belief now. Morality, in your terms, is made to restrict our will; to make some things unacceptable ie. that whole gray area analogy. In sparts where the gray gets darker and darker, the will is more and more condemnable under those moral standards.
I like your idea on will and knowledge though. It can be used to explain the capabilities of some people compared to others, ie. the warrior knows that he can easily kill another, so his will to do so is carried out in a fashion that is not too flashy or complicated. The scientist’s will is to reach the moon, but since he knows that he just can’t make a tall ladder, his will must goto make a vessel capable of overcoming gravity ie. a ship.
Excellent post!
I’d like to add to this that too much knowlegde can indeed cut so much off from the clay, or imagination, that the will is crippled. I like your metaphor in that it allows the sculptor to place more clay on the object which is to become the will after an erroneous cut has been made by too much knowlegde. This adding new clay would be done by tapping new sources of imagination. Is this in line with your idea?
When you say knowledge tells the will what it can and can’t do , you are saying pretty much the same thing i was thinking. But i would like to consider how the will, if limited in these various ways, can be said also to be free? Is the will to fly really a will at all? or is it just a fancy of the imagination? How do we distinguish the will from the imagination?or is there a distinction to be made?
Regarding morality, i would say that the untapped will, the will which is unconscious , the will of potentiality or our hierarchy of situational beliefs, this form of the will is our morality. There are many situations in which we can become involved which require little thought as to our actions which follow from such circumstances.
If for example i was to find money on the ground i would immediately pick it up and put it in my pocket, if though i saw a person drop it , i would offer it to them out of curtesy. On the other end of the spectrum, if i was to see a woman walking home from a bar alone and saw her cut through a park, i would certainly not attempt to rob or rape her but there are some people who would see such an"oppurtunity" in a different light.
These potential courses of action may reside in the subconscious, but take only the right circumstances to surface as consious thought, in most cases could be called our subconscious will, as they are a choice which could be made but the oppurtunity for such action is not presenting itself to the person currently. I would say that our morality is none other than this subconscious will.
I agree that morality doesen’t neccessitate the will being universal, in fact i would assume with the various courses of action available to the 6billion people or so, its impossible. Even the craftiest philosopher, or politician could not devise laws that everyone would accept. There is just to much to account for, but i think that we attempt it nonetheles.
Regarding the different skill sets people have, i would definately say the our own experiances , successes and failures play a large role in the formation or refining of our will, if you will:)
Thats right in line with what i was thinking; As we age and our experiance grows we develop a greator breadth of awareness , our will can draw from a greator source of information in fashioning a plan of action.
Just think of an artist who lived all over the world and was immersed into many different cultures, he will have a much more diverse range of experainces to draw inspiration from and fashion his works, than say a man who lived in the mountains his whole life.
Say a man has repeatedly failed in his attempts to join the military, he may find that he doesn’t have the capacity to do it and thus crippling that aspect of his will. Regarding whether a sequence of events could cripple all aspects of the will, i think the search for such a series of events would be vain , the will is do diverse to be completely crippled.
Any information held as knowledge,regardless of its truth, can have an effect on the will. If i believe that i could not win a fight against a certain person i will not want to fight them, this doesn’t mean i definately lose or win, but it does effect my will/
Those are feeling which can be benefitial(depending on whether we should fight or flight in the given situation) but all can hinder the exposition of the will
I was thinking along the lines of false knowledge. You know there are many things that are believed to be true, like cretin parameters of physical laws that are later found to be incorrect.
My point was that there is a lot of so-called knowledge that is false and this weighs heavy in every discipline of thought.
i certainly agree thay many things are held as common sense(Newton’s theory of gravity, electricity flowing from positive to negative, led zeppelin being the greatest band in the world) but over time theories get revised and improved. Although Zeppelin is omnipotent.
I also agree that the concept of truth or knowledge and what certaintuy we can have in debating such issues has plagued many a philosopher but in the end acts as a way of seperating the men from the boys.
The biggest vice and virtue of philosophy, depending on your take, is its attempt to be a science. Philosophy is only beginning to be a science which we can verify with experiments.
It seems to me that as soon a philosophy becomes verifiable in a lab we call it psychology.