Independent “Free” Will in the Stoa

This introduction to the Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine of knowledge and the position accorded to feeling in their psychological theory already shows see that striving and the will presuppose a complex interaction between different psychic acts. According to this view, desire or volition is neither an absolute nor an original principle in itself that could be contrasted with cognition and would be in competition with the latter in some manner. The contrasting view holds that one can only explain why action at times only arises when the will dominates over thought, and at times only when thought dominates over the will, and now and again through the harmonious interaction of both, through postulating competition between them qua independent agents.

Contrary to the view that this opposition is a fundamental problem of modern philosophy, it was, in fact, already formulated within the philosophical systems of Hellenism and of the Stoa. It can be understood both in the ancient Stoa and in early modernity only in the context of a doctrine which sets out from the premise that consciousness or the evident representation [Repräsentation] of given representations [Vorstellungen] is the primary act in the cognitive process that grounds a unity. In the ancient Stoa, this fundamental doctrine is discussed under the concept of “oikeiôsis” (“self-appropriation”) and is intended to justify how it is possible to explain the unity and the harmony of the “drives” and aspirations of the prerational behavior of the subject with the conscious, rational actions of this same subject.