What is voluntarism?

Wilhelm Wundt, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Wilhelm Wundt answers

Voluntarism, as I use the term, is not a metaphysical doctrine about the will as a cosmic force — it has nothing to do with Schopenhauer's transcendental original will, nor with the intellectualist systems of Spinoza or Herbart.¹ It is a strictly psychological position, and its meaning is precise. The core claim is this: psychical facts are occurrences, not objects.²

They take place in time and are never the same at one moment as they were the preceding moment. The intellectualist tradition treated ideas as things — as images of external objects that disappear from consciousness and return to it, remaining qualitatively unchanged in the interval.³ This is the error voluntarism corrects. Inner experience is not a collection of objects inspected by some inner sense; it is an interconnection of processes, actual only in their occurring.⁴

Volitions are the type of all psychical processes precisely because they exhibit this character of continuous change in quality and intensity most unmistakably.⁵ To call the psychology voluntaristic is not to assert that volition is the only real form of psychical life, but that the occurrence-character which volitional acts display belongs to every content of inner experience without exception.⁶

And this is no mere terminological preference. Every act of will presupposes a feeling with a definite tone, so bound up with it that apart from the feeling the act of will has no reality at all; and conversely, every feeling presupposes an act of will, its quality indicating the direction in which the will is stimulated.⁷ The distinctions we draw — will, desire, effort — are conceptual points of view upon a single flowing process; the flow of conscious life itself does not observe them.⁸

Apperception, that selective and unifying activity by which the mind takes up its contents into clear consciousness, is itself a volitional process — it is what we mean when we speak of the ego as our most private possession, most identical with our inner nature.⁹ A psychology built on passive ideas linked by association has, from the start, misidentified its subject. The subject is active process, and voluntarism names that recognition.

Sources

1. psychological voluntarism has absolutely no connection with any metaphysical doctrine of will. Indeed, it stands in opposition to Schopenhauer's one-sided metaphysical voluntarism, which derived all being from a transcendental original will, and to the metaphysical systems of a Spinoza or a Herbart, which arose from intellectualism.

   Outlines of Psychology

2. Psychical facts are occurrences, not objects; they take place, like all occurrences, in time and are never the same at a given point in time as they were the preceding moment.

   Outlines of Psychology

3. the former were regarded as the images of the latter; and so it came that the attributes which natural science ascribes to external objects, were transferred to the immediate objects of the 'inner sense', the ideas. The assumption was then made that ideas are themselves things, just as much as the external objects to which we refer them.

   Outlines of Psychology

4. the content of psychological experience does not consist of a sum of objects, but of all that which makes up the process of experience in general, that is, of all the experiences of the subject in their immediate character, unmodified by abstraction or reflection. It follows of necessity that the contents of psychological experience should be regarded as an interconnection of processes.

   Outlines of Psychology

5. Volitional acts are universally recognized as occurrences, made up of a series of continual changes in quality and intensity. They are typical in the sense that this characteristic of being occurrences is held to be true for all the contents of psychical experience.

   Outlines of Psychology

6. Voluntaristic psychology does not by any means assert that volition is the only real form of psychosis, but merely that, with its closely related

   Outlines of Psychology

7. Every act of will presupposes a feeling with a definite and peculiar tone: it is so closely bound up with this feeling that, apart from it, the act of will has no reality at all.

   Ethics Vol III The Principles of Morality

8. Hence these distinctions are purely conceptual: the flow of conscious life is not concerned with them. Not infrequently it is less the fact itself than the way in which we choose to look at the fact that decides what term we shall use.

   Ethics Vol III The Principles of Morality

9. apperception itself may be looked upon as a volitional process. It occurs as an essential factor in all inner and outer volitional acts, and as an ever-present one in the feelings of activity so characteristic of the will. Herein lies the chief motive for the fact that we look upon the will as our most private possession, the one that is most identical with our inner nature itself.

   An Introduction to Psychology