Will

Will is the psychological process of adjusting one’s own activities consciously and purposefully. It is the spiritual pursuit and driving force based on rational knowledge. Unconscious instinctive activities, blind impulses or some habitual actions do not contain or have little will. There is an essential difference between human’s will and animal’s reflex action. Animals have no will. The will of a person shows the unique conscious purpose and active selectivity in the person’s activities, the value orientation and pursuit of a person, and the consciousness based on his understanding of objective necessity. Human will, like human consciousness, is the product of society.

Idealism regards will as a priori and inherent characteristic of human beings and exaggerates the dynamic function of human will. Schopenhauer regarded will as an essential thing and a factor that forms the whole world. He argued that human will is unitary, metaphysical, beyond time and space, immutable and has no reason or purpose. He regarded will as an independent thing and pushed it towards voluntarism.

Dialectical materialism holds that will is formed in practice and transforms and dominates nature through purposeful activities. Marx pointed out that “the animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity.” Controlled by one’s will, man can produce things according to the scale of any species and create a world of objects and work upon inorganic nature by personal activity to prove himself a conscious species-being. Any planned action by any animal cannot mark their will on the earth. Only human beings can do this. Animals only use the external nature, while human beings change the nature through deliberate, planned and willful conscious activities to serve themselves and dominate nature.

Human will activities are based on and restricted by objective necessity and laws. At the same time, objective laws provide realistic possibilities for human choice out of free will. People’s will is not only determined and restricted by objective laws, but also restricted by their own level of development. The characteristic of human will is that people can make subjective and dynamic choices according to objective necessity and laws, and adjust actions according to predetermined plans, so that actions are not only subject to objective laws, but also to moral and ethical standards, restrain various incentives that conflict with these plans, and overcome various obstacles to achieve their goals. Human will is formed historically, which reflects the dependence of human actions on social existence and the restriction of social production mode and ideology on human actions. Lenin pointed out that determinism confirms the inevitability of human behavior and abandons the absurd myth of so-called free will, but it does not destroy human rationality, conscience and evaluation of human actions. On the contrary, only according to determinism can we make a strict and correct evaluation without attributing everything to free will. Similarly, the idea of historical inevitability does not in any way damage the role of individuals in history. Human’s ability of free will is formed and developed in practice. It is a product of social history and promotes the progress of social history.

The materialist conception of history holds that the will of the masses of the people can turn “ideal tendencies” into “ideal powers” and turn ideal into reality through social practice. Materialist conception of history understands the world (subjective world and objective world) as a process of historical development, a process in which human beings give full play to their subjective initiative to understand and transform the world. Engels said that: “The influences of the external world upon man express themselves in his brain, are reflected in it as feelings, thoughts, impulses, volitions, in short, as ‘ideal tendencies’, and in this form become ‘ideal powers’.” Only when motives of human actions are transformed to impulses, volitions and “ideal tendencies” by human brain can man acts.

The will of individuals, groups and classes gain universal legal effect through the will of the state. However, in the history of mankind, the will of the state is ultimately determined by the development of productive forces and exchange relations and the dominant position of a certain class. The class representing the advanced social productive forces will transform the will to change the mode of production into concrete actions, so as to make the society undergo sudden or gradual changes, get rid of the shackles in the development of productive forces, construct a new mode of production and way of life, and gradually move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.