8.1 Aquinas on Will
Aquinas regularly connects knowledge with will. People, he says, can cognize, but they can also be moved by what they cognize in that they can be attracted or drawn to it. For Aquinas, therefore, will (voluntas) involves being drawn to what one somehow perceives or knows. He thinks that we will insofar as we find something we cognize to be desirable. He thinks of will as, so to speak, appetite in action. As I noted in chapter 6, Aquinas agrees with Aristotle’s claim that the good is what everything desires, and his understanding of willing in people is connected with this claim.
Aquinas takes will to be a faculty or power in people, one that he strongly connects with their ability to know. It is commonly said that knowing and willing are to be sharply distinguished, but Aquinas does not rigidly distinguish between them. He thinks that distinctions can be drawn. He does not deny, for example, that one can know that such and such is the case yet be indifferent to the fact or not act on it in any way. And he thinks that will depends on knowledge in that we will to act on the basis of how we take things to be. In other words, he thinks that willing has a cognitive grounding. On the other hand, he also holds that judging something to be good amounts to being drawn to it somehow or in being attracted to it in some way. And he thinks that our knowledge can arise under the influence of desire.
As Herbert McCabe nicely puts it, Aquinas’s position is that “there is no operation of the reason which is not also an operation of the will, and vice versa.” According to Aquinas: “There is an interweaving of understanding and being attracted that cannot be unraveled in practice. We think of what we are attracted to thinking of, and we are attracted to what we think of.”1 Aquinas does not mean that we just believe what we want to. His point is that we pay attention to what we want to attend to.
You may think that there is a rigid distinction to be made between knowing or understanding on the one hand and willing on the other, and you may think so because of the effort that can sometimes be involved in doing what we know to be good. Doing what we know to be good can sometimes be difficult. Most people have to “force” themselves to pay regular visits to a dentist even though they know very well that it is good for them to do so. Yet, assuming that people go to a dentist voluntarily, they have to desire to visit a dentist, even though the thought of sitting in a dentist’s chair comes with what we might call “mixed feelings.” Thinking of some course of action as good, and therefore desiring it, does not necessarily mean liking it as one might, say, unequivocally and without reserve like to eat ice cream. Aquinas is conscious of this fact, and something that helps him to be so is his view of things not being good except under some description. As I have shown, Aquinas takes “good” to be a logically attributive adjective whose sense is noun-dependent. So he can perfectly well distinguish between dental visits being good as a means to oral well-being and bad as a source of physical discomfort. And if we drag ourselves to the dentist, thinks Aquinas, that will be because we value oral well-being more than we value never experiencing physical discomfort.
The role of desire in willing comes out strongly in some accounts that Aquinas frequently provides of voluntary or willed action. Aquinas never wrote a full-scale treatise on the topic of freedom and determinism, but he says plenty to indicate that his view is that a genuine human action, as opposed to a process through which our bodies might go that has nothing to do with our desires, is always something with respect to which one can raise the question “With a view to what?”
If I fall because someone pushes me, it would be idiotic for you to ask me “With a view to what are you doing that?” since I am not really doing anything. I am not willing anything. I am merely going through a process of change caused by something other than me.
Yet what if I decide to feed my cat? When doing that I walk into my kitchen, pick up a tin of cat food, transfer its contents to a bowl, and place the bowl in front of my hungry cat. At any stage in this process you can sensibly ask me “With a view to what are you doing that?” And I can give you an intelligible answer, which will refer to some good end that I am striving to bring about, something that I want or take to be desirable.
Now, according to Aquinas genuine human action, as opposed to a knee-jerk reaction or something like that, is always aimed at what the actor, rightly or wrongly, regards as good.2 He therefore thinks that genuine human actions are always voluntary since they express or reflect the desires of the agents whose actions they are. That is why he takes will to be present when goodness is desired. He knows that we can desire things without trying to get them, but he thinks that there is will insofar as there is a being drawn to what is good, or to what is believed to be good, even if this does not always result in action.3 I may be attracted to a particular human being while concealing my feelings. Yet Aquinas would say that I might still love or desire that person, or maybe just the good of that person; and loving or desiring, regardless of degree, is at the heart of Aquinas’s notion of human willing.