What is “will”?- Part one

My most recent Substack article, “The Art of Willing,” proved interesting largely because of the feedback it generated. In retrospect, it became obvious that I had failed to answer the most fundamental question of all—namely: What is will? I realized that much of the criticism stemmed from this omission. I had committed one of philosophy’s cardinal sins: assuming that everyone uses a given term in the same way I do. So let’s rectify this.

In everyday routines and ordinary conversation, we tend to use the term will very broadly, often to denote an extraordinary degree of effort or intensity. Think, for instance, of Novak Djokovic defeating Carlos Alcaraz in the tennis final of the Paris Olympics 2024. It was a pure exercise in determination, effort, concentration, focus, endurance—and, yes, sheer will. By most accounts, he should not have prevailed against the younger, more agile genius of Alcaraz. Yet he did. The match was decided by an incredible forehand winner down the line—a moment in which every fiber of Djokovic’s being was set into motion, as if every minute of his life as a tennis player had been compressed into a single instant: A shot unreachable for Alcaraz. This very shot appeared as a moment of pure will, immediately tangible to everyone watching: From the position Djokovic was in, the safer option would have been to play the final return of Alcaraz a cross-court backhand, forcing Alcaraz wide. Instead, Djokovic put in extra effort, ran around the ball to place himself in position for a forehand kill shot—a spontaneous conscious decision that brought victory. It was precisely this spontaneity, this deliberate embrace of risk, that rendered his will so strikingly visible.

This common understanding of the “power of will” is largely what Roberto Assagioli was concerned with in his work on the training of willpower. To some extent, that focus is fair, as it provides a tangible entry point into the discussion. But I also think it has unintentionally narrowed—and perhaps even stifled—the broader debate about will and about why this human capacity deserves deeper philosophical attention in the first place.

Especially for a German, notions such as “power of will” or “will to power” carry a bitter aftertaste. Whether justified or not, there is a now well-worn line of association running from Fichte to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and onward—via Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s ideological distortions—to National Socialism. For that reason alone, we must tread very carefully here.

I would argue—for reasons that will soon become clear—that the example of willing we see in Djokovic’s victory is not the essence of will, but rather one particular manifestation of it: a special case among others.

It was certainly an exceptional outburst of will, but this framing obscures the deeper reality: Djokovic trained and sacrificed for years with an intensity few would tolerate, let alone choose. His Olympic match was therefore not the will itself, but merely the visible tip of an iceberg formed by years of training, dedication, and sustained sacrifice.

Indeed, I would argue that his will differs from ours only in degree of concentration, not in kind — we will explore later what “concentration” might mean and entail. It is the same will we exercise when we commit for example five years of our lives to university in the hope of a better future—less dramatic, perhaps, but structurally identical: We have to give up certain things, leave the safety of our homes, shed childlike parts of ourselves, and gradually assume responsibility. We learn to subordinate—more or less—our spontaneous and childlike tendencies to the disciplined act of learning. Of course, some people bring more focus and intensity to this process than others, but in all cases it is will at work. Only when a lack of will becomes pathological do we encourage someone to seek therapy or choose a different occupation altogether.

The same holds true for most other human endeavors. From this, we can arrive at a preliminary definition of will as goal-oriented behavior: we posit a goal in the future and organize our present behavior in such a way that, according to our internal heuristics, achieving that goal appears possible.

From this vantage point, will immediately becomes an intriguing phenomenon:

1. What exactly is this cognitive capacity that allows us to envision and extrapolate a future field of possible behaviors—and then modulate our present actions so as to shift and transform our actual behavior accordingly? It is clearly not identical with attention itself, even though attention plays an important role in its execution. What is attention, anyhow?

2. It becomes apparent that the language of “goals” already carries a very distinctly modern, individualistic, success-driven bias. Describing will in terms of goal-setting risks importing a narrow, instrumental understanding that may obscure older, broader, or more relational or resonance conceptions of willing. Might it be more appropriate to speak of an array of behaviors through which we elicit a particular future from an otherwise virtually infinite range of possible futures?

3. What, then, does this imply for our notions of self, world, and being-in-the-world? If, by organizing our behaviors, we are in fact able to elicit certain kinds of futures—of both self and world—does this not rupture the strict boundary between the individual and “the world” presupposed by modernist thought? Would it not be more plausible to assume an intimate field of resonance between self and world, one that crystallizes in response to will as it is enacted?

4. If this is true, what the are the inherent limitations in eliciting certain futures? And: Can the strength of will measured in the realization of increasingly unlikely futures?

These questions grow increasingly difficult the more closely we examine them. So lets go through them point by point.

1. Behaviors always give rise to further behavior—unless, trivially, one is dead. What is especially interesting here is that we are capable of steering behavior – its not apparent that other animals can do this to extent we humans are able to. To illustrate this, let me briefly turn to complexity theory. Within this framework, systems—whether physical, biological, social, or psychological—are understood to exhibit different regimes of behavior:

a) Static behavior, as in the realm of psychology or neurology a comatose state, or a deep-sleep state.
b) Dynamic/repetitive behavior, characterized by stable cycles—such as getting up in the morning, brushing one’s teeth, making and drinking coffee, and going to work.
c) Complex behavior, occurring at the much-discussed edge of chaos. In this regime, systems are capable of generating genuinely new information and novel patterns of action. Subjectively, this state is often experienced as play, creativity, ecstasy, or flow.
d) Chaotic behavior, which appears to follow no stable rule set—such as certain erratic states found in severe mental illness or under the influence of intoxicating substances.

Now, we possess both learned and genetically imprinted capacities to distinguish between these regimes of behavior, and we have developed internal heuristics that allow us to anticipate which kinds of behavior tend to lead to which hypothetical outcomes. These heuristics are, of course, fallible—and more often than we like to admit, they fail. At times, they even fail deliberately.

We appear to be the only species capable of generating behavior that is explicitly designed to steer and organize other behavior. This is far less trivial than it might initially seem. What is it, psychologically speaking, that enables us to clench a hand into a fist simply because we direct our attention to it and decide to do so? The translation from decision to action unfolds over milliseconds or seconds, yet we are still able to fine-tune our movements with extraordinary precision. In tennis, for instance, the coordinated movements of eye, hand, and entire body reliably lead to highly specific outcomes. This capacity for behavioral self-regulation is itself a central expression of will. (We will come back to the nature of attention and concentration in Part Two)

2. To elicit a future, therefore, means nothing more—and nothing less—than eliciting a particular configuration of future behaviors. One could even argue that the future itself is nothing other than a set of behaviors, both cognitive and physical, through which we construct a coherent worldview (which itself is a cognitive action) and a coherent sense of self, rather than experiencing reality as a mere stream of disparate events and phenomena – which would thereotically possible; it is rather strange that we always experience world as whole. The psychological question, then, is how we generate this coherence and how we use it as a reference point for what psychologists often call the matrix of possibilities—that is, the future.

(In light of (1), this implies that we must be able to shift our behavior depending on the situation—especially between repetitive dynamic regimes and complex ones—in order to generate new behaviors and new futures. At times, it is even helpful to create a safe space in which chaotic behavior is temporarily permitted, allowing rigid interdependencies within the system to loosen and reorganize.)

3. This matrix of possibilities condenses and crystallizes into a coherent worldview as soon as we are able to approach it behaviorally. As philosopher Alexander Bard has suggested, the “Now” is itself a phase state that lasts a few seconds and in this sense becomes permeable for potential at its edges. Reality is therefore nothing cone of actuality in a sea of positive and exhausted possibility - future and past. If this is true, it implies a deeply intrinsic connection between cognition, world-building, and the world itself—one that remains largely invisible from a strictly modernist mindset.

4. There is a philosophical tradition that claims there are, in principle, no limiting restrictions on what one can become or what future might be elicited, that these limiting restrinction are only in ones mind. Does that mean I could still become Chancellor of Germany? Technically, yes—after all, it is a position occupied by human beings. In reality, however, I lack the will to do it. The limitation is not external but internal, not structural but volitional. But it is unlikely, given my history, interests, character (as a set of behaviours) and future-inclinations.

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Seen in this light, Djokovic’s forehand down the line was not merely an outburst of effort, nor a heroic act of brute willpower of an individual acting withing the boundaries of a physcial world. It was the visible crystallization of a long-term orientation toward the future—a future patiently elicited through years of disciplined behavior, sacrifice, and self-regulation. In that decisive moment, Djokovic did not simply choose a risky shot; he momentarily positioned himself at the edge of chaos, where repetition gives way to novelty and where a system becomes capable of generating something genuinely new. The spontaneity of the decision was not opposed to structure but emerged from it. His will revealed itself not as domination over the world, but as a finely tuned resonance between perception, body, and situation—an alignment in which a particular future became, quite literally, playable. What we witnessed, then, was not exceptional will in kind, but ordinary human willing brought into rare clarity: the capacity to organize behavior in such a way that one future, among many possible ones, is allowed to come into being.

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Tom Amarque is writer, philosopher, podcast host, editor & publisher. His recent book is ‘Phenomenology of will’. He founded the German publishing house Phänomen-Verlag in 2009 and Parallax-Media in 2019. Tom currently lives in Palma, Spain. Contact him a tomamarque@yahoo.de