The Evolution of Volition from a Scholastic Philosophy Perspective

What does it mean to truly want something? Not just to feel a passing urge, but to will it – deliberately, consciously, in pursuit of something genuinely good? This question sits at the heart of volition, one of the most carefully examined concepts in the history of philosophy. Long before modern psychology began mapping decision-making and desire, the medieval thinkers of the Scholastic tradition had already built a remarkably sophisticated framework for understanding why and how human beings choose. Their answers, rooted in theology and classical philosophy alike, remain philosophically relevant and surprisingly precise.

What is scholastic philosophy? 🔗

Scholasticism was not simply a body of doctrine – it was a rigorous intellectual method. Emerging in European universities roughly between 1100 and 1500 CE, it sought to reconcile the philosophy of ancient Greece, particularly Aristotle, with Christian theological teaching. As the New World Encyclopedia explains, it was primarily a tool for learning that emphasized dialectical reasoning – posing a question, examining opposing arguments, and working toward a carefully defended conclusion. The greatest minds of this tradition, figures like Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, applied this method to nearly every domain of human inquiry: metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, and crucially, the philosophy of mind.

Among the questions that absorbed these thinkers most deeply was the nature of human willing. What is the will? How does it relate to reason? And what, ultimately, does it seek?

The will and the intellect: a structured partnership 🔗

The Scholastic account of volition begins with a fundamental distinction between two faculties of the human mind: the intellect and the will. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes in its treatment of Aquinas, the immaterial human mind is best understood as an ensemble of powers – the intellect working in conjunction with the will. These were not seen as competing forces but as structurally interdependent ones.

The intellect’s role is to perceive, reason, and judge. It identifies what is true and what is good. The will’s role is to desire and to act on that perception. In Aquinas’s framework, this means the intellect always has a kind of structural priority: the will cannot desire what it has not first, in some sense, come to know through the intellect. As one formulation of this view puts it, it is through the intellect that a person comes to know what is good, and it is that knowledge which informs what the will then chooses to pursue.

This is sometimes called intellectualism – the position that the intellect, not the will, is the primary power in human action. For Aquinas and those in his tradition, the will is a kind of rational appetite: it reaches toward goods that reason has identified as worth pursuing. Without the intellect’s guidance, the will would have no direction. It would be blind desire rather than purposive choice.

The will as rational appetite 🔗

This point deserves emphasis because it marks a clear departure from how we might casually think about wanting something. In ordinary usage, we often picture desire as something that simply happens to us – an impulse, a craving, a feeling. The Scholastic tradition insists on something more structured. Aquinas’s account of volitionalism, as examined in the scholarly journal Aporia, holds that the will is inclined toward the general good and that its acts of choosing are always responsive to the intellect’s presentation of what is worthwhile. This does not make the will passive – it remains the power through which rational judgment becomes action – but it does mean that genuine volition is never arbitrary.

A key phrase here is rational appetite. The will is an appetite in the sense that it reaches toward something beyond itself. But it is rational because what it reaches toward is always mediated by understanding. This is precisely why Thomas Hobbes, writing in the seventeenth century and heavily critical of Scholasticism, targeted this exact formulation – he rejected the definition of will as “a rational appetite” on the grounds that it made voluntary action against reason conceptually impossible. Whether or not Hobbes was right, his objection confirms just how central the intellect-will partnership was to the entire Scholastic account of human action.

The will’s orientation toward goodness 🔗

At the core of the Scholastic view of volition is a deceptively simple claim: the will always aims at some good. This is not a moral prescription but a structural claim about how the will operates. According to Aquinas, the will simply cannot, by its very nature, desire something it perceives as entirely without value. As the Stanford Encyclopedia’s treatment of Aquinas summarizes: by its very nature, the will can desire only what is presented to it as a good.

This has a significant implication: even when people make choices that are destructive, harmful, or morally wrong, they are not choosing evil as evil. They are choosing what their intellect – perhaps wrongly, perhaps under the influence of passion or bias – has presented as some kind of good. The person who lies to protect their reputation sees some good in self-preservation; the person who acts cruelly may perceive some good in domination or revenge. The will, in this framework, is not morally infallible. It can be misdirected. But it always operates under the form of seeking what appears good.

This is why the relationship between the intellect and the will carries such ethical weight in Scholastic thought. If the intellect misjudges what is truly good, the will follows that misjudgment into bad choices. Moral education, on this view, is as much an education of the intellect’s capacity to perceive genuine goods as it is a training of the will’s ability to pursue them.

Freedom in the face of limited goods 🔗

If the will always seeks good, and the intellect always points toward good, one might wonder where freedom enters the picture. This is where the Scholastic account becomes especially sophisticated. The key is the difference between perfect good and limited goods.

For Aquinas, perfect goodness – goodness without qualification or limit – would compel the will necessarily. A being that clearly perceived and possessed the fullness of all good would have no alternative but to will it. But human beings in this life never encounter perfect goodness directly. Every good we actually face – knowledge, friendship, health, pleasure, virtue – is a partial, finite, imperfect realization of goodness. And because each of these goods is limited, none of them is capable of compelling the will absolutely.

This is the source of human freedom. As the Stanford Encyclopedia notes in its discussion of Aquinas’s ethics, with regard to any specific course of action there are always multiple perspectives from which a situation can be judged, and the will can even direct how we think about things – whether we focus on how rewarding or how burdensome an action would be. Even in pursuit of happiness itself, the will is not necessitated. Aquinas considered any claim that the will is determined by necessity to be contrary to both faith and the principles of moral philosophy.

Freedom, in this picture, is not the absence of orientation toward good – it is the space that opens up precisely because no finite good exhausts the will’s capacity to seek goodness. The will can always step back from any particular good and ask: is this truly the best I can choose here? That reflective distance is what makes genuine deliberation possible.

Voluntarism: the challenge from Duns Scotus 🔗

Not all Scholastic thinkers were satisfied with Aquinas’s intellectualist account. The Franciscan philosopher John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) mounted a systematic challenge that gave rise to the rival position known as voluntarism. Where Aquinas held that the intellect’s judgment about what should be pursued informs and in some sense shapes the will’s choice, Scotus denied that any such judgment ever determines what the will actually does. For Scotus, the will is the only truly free power precisely because it is not constrained by the intellect’s conclusions.

As the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains in its entry on Scotus, he held that the will, as a capacity for opposites, is the only truly rational power – rational in a different sense than the intellect’s natural determinism. The will can act against even a completely correct judgment of the intellect. Scotus also introduced an important distinction within the will itself: an affection for the advantageous (a natural inclination toward one’s own benefit) and an affection for justice (an innate orientation toward goodness in itself, independent of personal advantage). This second affection is what makes genuine moral freedom possible – the capacity to will something because it is right, not merely because it benefits the agent.

The intellectualist-voluntarist debate was not merely technical. It touched on questions about moral responsibility, the nature of divine action, and the foundations of natural law. As noted in New World Encyclopedia’s overview of Scholasticism, the fourteenth century saw this tension harden into a sustained dispute between the Dominican followers of Aquinas and the Franciscan tradition shaped by Scotus – a debate that left deep marks on both philosophy and theology.

Happiness as the possession of good 🔗

Both the intellectualist and voluntarist strands of Scholastic thought converge on one crucial point: the will’s ultimate orientation is toward happiness. In Scholastic Latin, this is beatitudo – a term that refers not to a passing mood or subjective contentment but to a complete and stable state of fulfillment. As the Philosophy Teaching Library’s analysis of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae explains, happiness for Aquinas must be comprehensive – it cannot lack any essential good and must include all genuine human goods. A bodily good alone, for instance, fails this standard because it leaves out the goods of the soul.

What makes this account distinctive is how Aquinas frames happiness in terms of possession. The will seeks not merely to identify the good but to attain and possess it. Happiness consists in the actual attainment of the end, not merely in knowing about it or striving toward it. As long as the will continues to seek something it has not yet obtained, it remains, in a formal sense, unfulfilled.

This creates a striking consequence. Since the only good that would completely satisfy the will – one that is infinite, perfect, and without limitation – is God, the will’s deepest orientation is ultimately theological. Worldly goods, however valuable, cannot bring the will to final rest because they remain partial. As the Pursuit of Happiness project’s account of Aquinas summarizes: perfect happiness (beatitudo) is not possible on earth, but an imperfect happiness (felicitas) is attainable through the exercise of reason and virtue in this life.

The distinction between will and intellect revisited 🔗

This vision of happiness clarifies the final and perhaps most important distinction in the Scholastic account of volition: the difference between what the intellect contributes and what the will contributes to the pursuit of the good. The intellect identifies, understands, and judges. The will desires, chooses, and acts. Neither faculty is sufficient alone.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s treatment of Aquinas’s moral philosophy notes that while the highest human happiness involves the intellect – specifically, the contemplation of God’s nature – the will’s movement toward that end through love and desire is equally essential. Aquinas himself acknowledged that love is an indispensable complement to happiness: it pulls human beings toward their end and rejoices in the grasp of it. The goal of life, properly understood, integrates both: an intellectual vision of the highest good and a volitional embrace of it.

In this sense, the Scholastic account of volition is not simply a historical curiosity. It proposes something genuinely challenging: that human freedom is neither arbitrary nor unlimited, that the will is always in pursuit of something that genuinely matters, and that the deepest form of happiness is not mere pleasure or preference-satisfaction but the actual possession of a good that fully answers what we most fundamentally seek.

What do you think? If the will always seeks what appears good to the intellect, does that mean that people who make destructive choices are simply mistaken about what is truly good – or is there something else at work that this account doesn’t fully capture? And if happiness requires actually possessing the good rather than merely striving toward it, what does that imply about how much genuine happiness is possible within a human lifetime?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Scholasticism
2. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Scholasticism
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/
4. https://aporia.byu.edu/pdfs/west-aquinas_on_intellect_will_and_faith.pdf
5. https://iep.utm.edu/john-duns-scotus/
6. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/duns-scotus-john-c-1266-1308/v-1/sections/universals-and-individuation
7. https://philolibrary.crc.nd.edu/article/key-to-happiness/
8. https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/thomas-aquinas/
9. https://iep.utm.edu/thomasaquinas-moral-philosophy/