Will as Commitment and Resolve: An Existential Account of Creativity, Love, Virtue, and Happiness

2. The Heroic Will in Eastern and Western Perspectives

2 The Heroic Will in Eastern and Western Perspectives Overview. This chapter relates the concept of ‘‘heroic’’ or ‘‘striving’’ will introduced in chapter 1 to a positive attitude toward self-assertion prominent in certain Western thinkers and defends it against criticisms found in opposing Eastern traditions. By locating the volitional phenomena at stake within this long-running debate, this chapter distinguishes the existential conception from the extremes in both traditions and defends a moderate view of the will’s positive potential . Topics covered run from Hindu and Buddhist teachings through Augustine to Luther, Nietzsche, and contemporary Continental thought. The analysis is accessible to the general reader but also provides a historical frame that should be novel even to readers with advanced training. The first chapter began by introducing the concept of ‘‘heroic’’ willing as a self-motivated effort to set goals and strive to pursue them; it distinguished this concept from other, thinner notions of the will. This distinction will be developed in more detail in chapter 3. But first, it will be useful to address a fundamental objection to pursuing this concept of willing: namely, that the heroic striving will is biased toward dubious Western values , and so any existential conception developed from it risks valorizing precisely the kind of ambition and self-assertion that prevents peace, enlightenment , and salvation from suffering. The objection is not simply that the existential view is culturally parochial or fails to capture universal features of personhood; more deeply, it is that the existential model encourages one to see life as a conquest or quest for mastery over others or over the world. To examine this concern and to set the stage for the subsequent 28 The Heroic Will in Eastern and Western Perspectives 29 analyses, I start by acknowledging two opposing attitudes toward the striving will in the history of philosophy and indicating how my account hopes to move between them. 1. The Paradigmatically ‘‘Eastern’’ Attitude toward Will and Willfulness Underlying many disputes between different philosophical interpretations of the will in Western philosophy is a basic difference in attitude toward willing as such. Since this contrast concerns many thinkers over long periods involving significant cultural changes, I can do no more than paint it in broad strokes, omitting the detailed references that a full history of this subject would involve. The goal here is merely to present the contrast in basic outline, rather than to give a complete account or evaluation for any of the traditions in Eastern philosophy touched on here. 1.1. Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist Examples There is a long tradition of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who have, sometimes explicitly but more often implicitly, doubted the value of willing per se. This tradition, going back at least to the ancient Indian Upanishads, looked negatively on individual self-assertion as a source of conflict and held that true peace could be attained only by a kind of giving up of individuality in favor of group consciousness or even the loss of self in a primordial oneness with the whole of Being. Thus in the Taittireeya Upanishad, we are told to imagine a man with all his worldly desires satis- fied and to multiply this by a hundred million times; compared to this, we are told, ‘‘A man full of revelation, but without desire, has equal joy.’’1 The sages who originated this view thought that willing could only mean selfassertion in a violent or misappropriative sense: in their view, ‘‘will’’ stands for the arrogance that not only imposes form on nature but also desecrates the sacred, forces itself on others, and in general seeks to dominate everything its agent sees as alien. ‘‘The impure, self-willed, unsteady man misses the goal and is born again and again.’’2 In other words, his willfulness prevents his enlightenment and escape from the cycle of reincarnation. We are familiar with this view in its more recent guise as the suspicion that active pursuit of demanding worldly goals reflects a deeper desire for self-aggrandizement, an assertion of one’s own priorities over everything else, a determination to impose one’s will by force, mastering and controlling anything that resists. In fact, this idea is so deeply embedded in the sources of all human culture that the archetypal concept of the profane is 30 Will as Commitment and Resolve expressed partly in terms of that which is mastered, bound down...