Abstract
In Chapter 5 I said that the truthful answer to the question ‘who am I?’ is not arrived at by means of self-reflection. Someone might therefore believe that I agree with Heidegger when he writes: ‘Self-observation and analysis, however initiated and no matter how penetrating, never bring us to light, our self and how it is with it. But in willing we bring ourselves to light […] In willing we encounter ourselves as who we are authentically.’1 The line of thought might go like this: who you are is not determined, so you cannot come to an answer to that question by means of observation, but instead you answer it by determining who you are by an act of will.
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Notes
K. E. Løgstrup, Etiske begreber og problemer (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1996), 67 (my translation).
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 6.
In fact, birth is for her in the end the only example of something radically new, not political action (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 203, 272).
A. W. Price, ‘Aristotle, the Stoics and the Will’, in The Will and Human Action: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Thomas Pink and M. W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2004), 29.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), 13.
See, e.g., D. Z. Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 100
D. Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 325.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987), 107.
Thomas Pink and M. W. F. Stone, ‘Introduction’, in The Will and Human Action: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Thomas Pink and M. W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2004), 1.
Carlos Steel, ‘The Effect of the Will on Judgement: Thomas Aquinas on Faith and Prudence’, in The Will and Human Action: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Thomas Pink and M. W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2004), 79.
Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, 4th ed. (London: T. Sowle, 1701), 343–4. See also pp. 367–8.
Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 105.
See e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in vol. 3 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 540 (§ 301)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, in vol. 5 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 18, 34–5, 53–4, 119–20 (§§ 4, 20, 34, 199)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist: Fluch auf das Christenthum, in vol. 6 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 177 (§ 11).
See e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, vol. 4 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 146–9.
Martin Heidegger, Feldweg-Gespräche, Gesamtausgabe 77, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 56 (my translation).
Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14.6.
Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 14th ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007), 175 (my translation).
For this problem, see Martin Heidegger, Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit: Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das Denken, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Gesamtausgabe 13, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 38ff.; Heidegger, Feldweg-Gespräche, 51ff.
Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (London: Routledge, 2001), 65–6.
Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 126–7.
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© 2015 Hugo Strandberg
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Strandberg, H. (2015). The Will. In: Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137538222_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137538222_11
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