The Battle of the Wills

People have been thinking about the will for a long time. Over the centuries, different philosophers and psychologists have come up with a wide variety of theories about what the will is and what drives this driving force. They wanted to understand what makes people do what they do, and why.

So, we start with Arthur Schopenhauer, who heavily emphasized human will and had a concept of the “will to live.” He believed that everything, even the universe itself, has and is driven by an innate will to live – to keep death at bay and to procreate.

A generation later, along came Friedrich Nietzsche. He believed that the main driving force of human life was what he called the “will to power.” Though what he meant by that isn’t entirely clear, the gist of it is the desire for power manifested in achievement, ambition and possibly “self-overcoming” to exert creative power. He described it as the instinct to expand one’s power, which is always at work unconsciously. (Hmmm, Nietzsche, project much?)

Alfred Adler integrated the idea of the will to power into his own psychology theories, but then along came Sigmund Freud with his “will to pleasure,” more commonly known as the pleasure principle. It’s the idea that humans are drawn toward pleasure and away from pain and that this force is what drives human action. Viktor Frankl espoused the “will to meaning,” in which the desire to find a meaning in one’s life is the most powerful motivating force for people.

Soren Kierkegaard took a very different view of things. He spoke of the “will to be oneself.”  In fact, he wrote an entire book about it called The Sickness unto Death. To Kierkegaard, the failure to embrace who you truly are results in spiritual death – his term for despair. This comes from not aligning yourself with God or his plan for you. He believed that to become your real self, you have to be both aware of your self and of the fact that you are grounded in love through the God who created your self.

Now of course, this last theory is the one that resonates with me most, since I have dedicated my life to helping people align with God to know their true selves and live their purpose. However, maybe one of the other theories resonated more strongly with you. Why is that?

Each of these theories advocates a very different essential driving force in human beings. Each of the men who proposed these theories was educated and thoughtful. Why, then, did they come up with such diverging ideas?

It all comes down to the lens through which each of them—and each of us—saw the world. I made the aside about Nietzche projecting because I believe that he was the sort of person who was always scanning the room for who had power and who might be trying to challenge his own. That’s how he operated, and that’s how he assumed everyone else did, too.

So, I suspect that each of these theories is born of personality. And I suspect that the reason I like the will to be oneself is that it reinforces my desire to be my true self, and that you like a particular theory because it mirrors your worldview.

This is all to say that none of the theories are essentially wrong. It’s just that they are incomplete. They are each based on the presupposition that all human beings are motivated by the same, single driving force. We know from studying the Enneagram and our Basic Desire that this is not the case.

So, if you know your personality type’s Basic Desire, think about how it influences how you perceive and show up in the world. If you don’t yet know, I recommend you take a look at “The Wisdom of the Enneagram” by Riso & Hudson. Knowledge is freedom to be who God purposed you to be all along.

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