Governing the Will in a Neurochemical Age

Abstract

The idea of the will has led a strange existence. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its first use in the sense of ‘desire, wish, longing; liking, inclination, disposition (to do something)’ to Beowulf in the seventh century and suggests that in modern usage this sense is merged with another — that of ‘the action of willing or choosing to do something; the movement or attitude of the mind which is directed with conscious intention to (and, normally, issues immediately in) some action, physical or mental; volition’ which it first identifies in the Old English of the tenth century. In the nineteenth century, matters of the will were central to philosophy, to the emerging discipline of psychology, and to those concerned with the practical arts for the management of conduct, from pedagogy to passion. Yet today, while the notion of ‘free will’ remains a topic of debate in philosophy and in jurisprudence, the notion of the will itself has largely disappeared from the language of the disciplines of the subjective.

This paper was presented at ‘On Willing and Doing: An international symposium in the framework of the interdisciplinary project on “Voluntary Action — On the Nature and Culture of Volition”’, held at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Munich in February 2004. A more developed version of the arguments can be found in Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press, 2006, and some passages in this chapter come directly from that book.