I congratulate you on the fine selection of lively and illuminating materials, founding your discussion.

He means book 3. Aristotle grounds justice in the proposition that it is the will to pay back good with good and evil with evil. The most clear formulation of the most common sense view.

What they have in mind in the simple sense, in the contrast with reason, is what we call interest (passion), as in business interest or family interest. A passion is something acting on us. Think of the stark mendacity of the tobacco companies 'distrust' of reason with respect to tobacco's cancer causing quality. If one observes such persons, one sees they don't generally lie in any simple sense, the Greeks didn't speak explicitly or naturally of "lying", but of having one thing in the chest and saying another, or of saying the thing that is not (a formulation ambivalent about intention to deceive). Of course, in one sense, they knew perfectly well what a lie was, but it makes a difference not having the word. They spoke of pseudos. The body of an executive or corporate flunky can twist itself into not knowing.

These ideas still play a role when you hear these people speaking in Marxist terms of someone's class background, e.g. the whole of the Karl Popper's absurd slander on Plato. One's own vs the public good is another way to lean into the notion. A mother loves her gigantically despicable child because that child is her own. Reason is cold, and so almost impossible in a good mother, or anyone with live interests.

Reason is unity according to the Christian way of thinking, the body is the principle of difference. One can not eat for another. One can be in concord with the reason or logos of another.
The Christians bring in freedom as a criterion of persons, over and against absolute blind nature which is ruled by god's rationality or positive law. One knows lying in order to make money is bad, but one is tempted. That's what they mean by the Greeks didn't have the concept of will. Since knowing with the Greeks is a kind of habit, knowing how to tie one's shoes, will in the sense of temptation not to follow the law of one's nature, god's logos placed in the core of man, has no place there.

This is all a long topic, because one has to see the three levels of god and his positive law, reflected in the mirror of nature, where it shows up as natural law, and the tertiary reflection, the third copy of the perfect painting, in man's dim understanding. The way the conception of will is sussed out of Christian doctrine into the sharp contrast of the positivist teaching is full of neighing subtitles and whispering sophistries. Logos becomes mathematical logic, laws of a projected world of geometric solids. Then, one forgets all that, and speaks of free will as what is common sense. E.g., in Searle.

But my question is simpler. Apparently will is in tension with reason; i.e., not reason. I take free will for granted and can adduce my own arguments in favor of its existence. (Along the lines of, do I wear white socks or black socks today.) But the Greeks, not so much. And Luther, not on your nelly! — tim wood

'A tension with reason' ?

'will' and 'reason' do not appear 'tensioned' but they are it seams points at which some thing undergoes a transition from: cosmic to natural to human. No more than the child has a tension with his/her adolescent or mature form. The 'will' is temporally antecedent to or perhaps contemporaneous with the 'thought', and subsequent reasoning or the 'thinking', which precedes the doing, and appears to come after the 'arrival' of the will. The relationship between 'will' and 'reason' appears entirely temporal and natural, it seems to have a temporal flow, that is applied by consciousness.

Nietzsche writes : "A thought comes when it will, not when I will"

If we consider this assertion carefully I think it points to the historicity of thought itself. In more modern parlance one might assert that instinctual imperative precedes thought and determines the general form of thought, a functional 'reasoning' is subsequently applied to this deeper imperative, and thought seems to be the consequence. The quality of the thought is dependent upon that of the reasoning, but neither 'need' to get the interpretation of the initiating instinct or 'will' correct in toto. Nature seems to revel in misinterpretation in order to produce variance. The correct interpretation of 'will' by the individual may well be the purest form of intelligence as it more correctly correlates with the source of subsequent thought?

The functional reasoning is purely subjective-logic towards the end of satisfying the initial instinctual imperative. In this sense a more modern interpretation of 'will' might be 'instinctual imperative'. These are and may well be continually misunderstood by reason. (Human intelligence or reason may well be in its infancy in this regard)

This definition of 'will' might then be confined to a 'natural function' in the sense that instinctual imperatives are derivations out of of the natural order, and they simply direct the animal towards the satisfaction of Natural as opposed to personal objectives (there is no 'point' to sex for example).

What is important then is to as what is the 'objective(s)' that nature is compelling us towards vis the experience of will? An ultimate form of the evolving Universe?

Anaxagoras may have come close to a notion of 'will' in his concept of 'nous'

Schopenhauer has effectively excluded the notion that you 'might choose your socks' from the concept of a 'freedom' of the will. One cannot effectively assume a freedom of will simply because one thinks about the choice of socks prior to the deed of putting one on, or leaving it in the drawer.

M

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