Abstract
In this article, we explored one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century Hannah Arendt's views on the power of the will, and the close relationship she established between will and freedom, and freedom and action. The issue of will inevitably has an important place in the history of thought. In these discussions, who or what determines/directs the will basically constitute the essence of the issue, and the issue is considered together with the concepts of freedom, responsibility, determinism, choice, and action. The examination of the problem is closely related to almost all fields of philosophy: A series of problems are always closely related to the state of the will, from the theological discussions about God's will and human freedom, to the knowledge of man about himself and the world, and to considering human being as a moral agent. Arendt claims that while traditional Western thought generally ignores the will, on the other hand, freedom is approached with suspicion and, ultimately, a picture is drawn in which human being is limited by the causality of the external world in response to his/her apparent freedom, and she openly denies this picture.
Arendt defines will as an autonomous faculty with thought and judgment/reasoning. The autonomy of the will has not been expressed historically, moreover, the will and the freedom contained in it have been ignored, and viewed with suspicion at best. Arendt justifies the inferences made by philosophers in favor of thinking ability, but she does not spare her criticisms. She positions will and thought as opposing, autonomous abilities. After all, both the temporal extensions of thought and will – the will extends to the unknown future – and their objects are different. While thought pursues the unchanging principles and the universal, on the contrary, the will is concerned with the particular/contingent. In this state, the will is located right in life. The field of action is also the field where the freedom of the will is understood phenomenologically because the feature of initiating the unimaginable makes human actions an indicator of freedom. Thanks to his free will and designs for the future, human being establishes a world with his/her fellows, this is the field of politics. Each person participates and contributes to this place with their own uniqueness. This world is a place established by people who can design and act their own stories with free will. Thus, Arendt establishes an ontological link between will, freedom, and action – politics – that requires each other.
Arendt is a political philosopher and in this sense, studies about Arendt are mostly directed to this field. In her works, she sought ways to human alienation from the world and for liberation that would overcome this alienation. The emphasis on the experience of living together, human's relationship with the singular, that is, his daily life, and the effort to base all these on an ontological ground, make her important to understand and study. Her ruthless criticisms of modernism, her thoughts that human nature can only realize itself in public and the field of politics, and the tight bond she has established between action and freedom are issues that must be emphasized.
Studies on the nature of will in Hannah Arendt are not many as we can see. Studies on freedom as the closest issue to this subject take place in the literature. In Turkish, on the other hand, despite a few articles on freedom, we did not find any study on the will. We hope that we will have the function of speaking and opening the door in this field. Basically, we benefited from Arendt's last work, The Life of the Mind, Between Past and Future, and The Human Condition.
Our study will start with an introduction in which the general lines of the problem are presented and then continue with a section in which the relationship of will with other mental abilities and subsequently freedom, and the relationship of freedom with action are investigated. When action is mentioned, it is already understood that social and political life will be the subject of the study. Freedom, for Arendt, emerges in action and makes politics possible.