The Dynamics of Will: Understanding Human Volition

Every day, you make hundreds of choices – what to eat, what to say, whether to act on a feeling or hold back. But have you ever paused to ask: what exactly is the force driving those choices? Behind every decision lies something philosophers have long called volition – the will to act. And when we examine how this will operates in the context of human freedom and the pursuit of good, we arrive at one of the most compelling ideas in the philosophy of the human person: volitional dynamism. Far from being a simple on/off switch, the human will is a dynamic, ever-moving force – one that is both guided by reason and entangled with freedom in deeply complex ways.

What is volition, exactly? 🔗

Volition, also known as will or conation, is the cognitive process by which a person decides on and commits to a particular course of action. It is defined as purposive striving – one of the primary human psychological functions, alongside emotion, motivation, and cognition. Unlike a reflex or impulse, a volitional act is conscious and deliberate. When you override the urge to scroll your phone and return to work instead, that is volition in action.

But volition is not just decision-making in the narrow sense. Volitional dynamism refers to the inner drive or force behind a person’s will – the energy that moves a person toward goals, values, or ideals. It describes not merely the capacity to choose, but the dynamic power that sustains commitment, helps overcome obstacles, and orients the person toward something meaningful. In short, it is what makes human agency more than mechanical selection between options.

The will and its natural orientation toward the good 🔗

A foundational insight in the philosophy of volitional dynamism is that the human will is not neutral. It has a natural orientation – a built-in inclination toward the good. This is not a modern invention; it is a claim with deep roots in classical philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas described the will as a native desire for what the intellect understands to be good – an appetite that responds to the intellect’s assessments of what is choiceworthy. For Aquinas, the will is not arbitrary. It tends necessarily toward universal goodness as its ultimate end, just as the intellect naturally adheres to first principles. As he states in the Summa Theologiae, the will must of necessity pursue happiness as its final end, in the same way that the intellect cannot reject self-evident truths. This orientation is not a constraint on freedom – it is the very nature of the will as a rational appetite.

This idea is echoed in how Aquinas understood freedom itself: freedom for rational beings is the manner in which they seek universal goodness. It is not the power to want anything at all, but the power to choose among goods in pursuit of the highest good. This distinction is crucial to understanding volitional dynamism.

Intellectual dynamism: the will’s indispensable partner 🔗

The will does not operate alone. It works in close partnership with the intellect, and this is where the concept of intellectual dynamism enters the picture. Before the will can move toward a good, the intellect must first present that good. According to Aquinas, the intellect has a certain causal priority over the will – it moves the will by presenting it with its object. The will, in turn, moves the intellect by directing it toward particular questions or ends.

This mutual influence is what gives human action its richness. You do not simply want things blindly. You evaluate, compare, and reflect. When you are deciding between two career paths, your intellect weighs consequences, values, and outcomes – and the will acts on the basis of that evaluation. The dynamism here is genuinely interactive: a back-and-forth between knowing and willing that shapes every meaningful choice.

The philosophical tradition rooted in Joseph Maréchal’s analysis of intellectual dynamism argues that this intellectual striving is essentially an instinct – innate in all human beings and the fundamental driving power in all human activity. In a dynamic worldview, nothing is a finished product. Every reality, including the human person, is striving to become fully what it is meant to be.

Freedom and the problem of limited goods 🔗

Here is where things get genuinely complex – and philosophically fascinating. If humans naturally incline toward the universal good, what role does freedom play? Why don’t we simply and automatically choose the good every time?

The answer lies in the nature of the goods we encounter. In actual life, we do not face a simple choice between good and evil – we face a range of limited goods, none of which is identical to or sufficient for the universal good we ultimately seek. Every particular good we can choose (a career, a relationship, a moral action) captures something of the good, but not all of it. As Aquinas explains, the will is only necessitated by those goods that have a necessary connection with happiness. For individual goods that lack this necessary connection, the will retains freedom – it may choose them or not, without contradiction.

This is the philosophical ground of genuine free will. Because no finite good fully satisfies the will’s orientation toward universal goodness, the will is never compelled by any particular good. It can always withhold assent, weigh alternatives, or choose differently. Freedom, in this sense, is not arbitrary – it emerges from the very excess of the will’s desire over any limited object placed before it.

Volitional dynamism in the context of moral responsibility 🔗

The concept of volitional dynamism is not merely abstract metaphysics – it has direct implications for how we understand moral life. If the will is naturally oriented toward the good but remains free in relation to limited goods, then humans are genuinely responsible for their choices. They are not deterministic machines, nor are they random choosers. They are rational agents who can recognize the good, deliberate about it, and act – or fail to act – accordingly.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy captures this well: to say an agent acted freely is to say the agent successfully carried out a free volition or choice arising from their own rational capacities. This is why moral praise and blame make sense. We hold people responsible because we recognize – implicitly or explicitly – that their choices were genuinely theirs, not forced by external causes or biological necessity alone.

This recognition is embedded even in social institutions. Legal systems, for instance, rest on the assumption that individuals were psychologically free at the time of an action. The entire penal framework is an implicit acknowledgment that human freedom is real and that volitional agency matters.

How different philosophers have understood this dynamic 🔗

The tension within volitional dynamism – between inclination toward the good and freedom to choose among limited goods – has been interpreted in various ways across the history of philosophy.

Kant’s moral autonomy 🔗

Immanuel Kant saw the will as essential to moral agency. In his Critique of Practical Reason, he argued that volition is the means through which humans enact moral law. Kant’s theory of autonomy stresses that genuine moral action comes from acting according to principles the will itself adopts – not from external pressures or mere inclination. Volitional dynamism, for Kant, is the capacity to act in accordance with self-given rational principles despite competing desires or circumstances.

Sartre and the weight of radical freedom 🔗

Jean-Paul Sartre took a more unsettling view. For Sartre, human beings are condemned to be free – there is no predetermined nature or essence to fall back on. Every choice is an act of self-creation, and evading this responsibility through what he called bad faith is a form of self-deception. Volitional dynamism in the existentialist frame becomes almost vertiginous: the will is entirely open, and the burden of that openness is inescapable.

Schopenhauer’s pessimistic will 🔗

Arthur Schopenhauer offered a strikingly different interpretation. For him, the will is a blind, irrational striving that drives human beings toward perpetually unsatisfied desires. Where Aquinas saw the will’s orientation toward the good as purposive and dignified, Schopenhauer saw it as a source of suffering. The only resolution, on his view, was the renunciation of desire – a quieting of the volitional drive itself.

These contrasting views reveal that while the fact of volitional dynamism is widely recognized – that humans are driven by inner force toward ends – the interpretation of that drive and its relation to the good remains philosophically contested.

Volition, neuroscience, and the question of agency 🔗

Modern neuroscience has added a new layer to this ancient debate. Research on the neuroscience of free will, beginning with Benjamin Libet’s pioneering studies in 1983, has shown that the brain appears to commit to certain decisions before a person becomes consciously aware of having made them – with a measurable delay of about half a second or more. This has prompted some, like philosopher Sam Harris, to argue that conscious volition may be an after-the-fact experience rather than a genuine cause of action.

However, other researchers push back on this conclusion. Philosopher Alfred Mele argues that even if a movement is initiated before conscious awareness, consciousness may still play a role in approving, modifying, or even vetoing the action. The question remains open – and it is a question that makes volitional dynamism not only a philosophical matter but a genuinely interdisciplinary one, connecting ethics, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind.

What seems clear is that volition – the experience of deliberating and committing to action – is a real and psychologically significant feature of human life. Whether or not it maps neatly onto metaphysical free will, it shapes how we navigate relationships, build habits, take responsibility, and construct meaning.

The practical significance: living as a volitional being 🔗

Understanding volitional dynamism is not just an academic exercise. It changes how you relate to your own choices. Recognizing that you are naturally oriented toward the good – that the will is not a random generator but a purposive faculty – reframes moral failure not as arbitrary bad luck but as a deflection of something fundamentally human. And recognizing that you are genuinely free in relation to limited goods means that every significant choice carries real weight.

The natural law tradition developed from this insight argues that reason and will together are the basis of moral development: growing in the intellectual virtues (like prudence) and the volitional virtues (like justice and temperance) is how a human being becomes more fully what they are meant to be. Volitional dynamism, in this view, is not just a descriptive fact about human psychology – it is a call to ongoing self-realization.

What do you think? If the human will is naturally inclined toward the good, why do people so consistently choose what they later recognize as harmful or wrong – and what does that tell us about the relationship between knowledge, desire, and freedom? And is genuine moral responsibility possible if our choices are shaped – even partly – by factors outside our conscious control?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volition_(psychology)
2. https://ignoucorner.com/explain-volitional-dynamism/
3. https://iep.utm.edu/thomasaquinas-moral-philosophy/
4. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1082.htm
5. https://aquinasonline.com/freedom-of-the-will/
6. https://taylormarshall.com/2007/10/michael-sherwin-on-thomas-aquinas/
7. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/35209/1/Unit-4.pdf
8. https://aquinasonline.com/rational-appetite-will/
9. https://iep.utm.edu/freewill/
10. https://www.myexamsolution.com/2025/02/explain-volitional-dynamism.html
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
12. https://aquinasonline.com/natural-law/