The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity

The Will Is Not a Greek Idea: How a Philological Discovery Rewrites the Foundations of Depth Psychology

Albrecht Dihle’s The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity executes a single devastating argument across the span of a millennium: the Greeks had no concept of will. Not because they lacked sophistication about human motivation, conflict, or moral failure, but because their entire framework of action was built on an intellectualist architecture in which cognition determined conduct. For Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the person who truly knows the good acts accordingly; moral failure is always, at bottom, a failure of perception. Dihle tracks how this intellectualist consensus held firm—through Stoicism, through the Hellenistic period, through every apparent counter-example—until it was shattered not by philosophical argument but by a theological crisis. Paul’s anguished confession in Romans 7 (“the good that I would, I do not”) introduced into Western thought something genuinely unprecedented: a model of the self in which knowing and doing are structurally divorced, in which a faculty called “will” must be posited to explain why a soul acts against its own understanding. Augustine then systematized this Pauline rupture into a full doctrine of the will, and Western philosophy has never recovered from it. This genealogy matters enormously for depth psychology, because every modern account of psychic conflict—Freud’s drives warring with the ego, Jung’s shadow undermining conscious intention, Hillman’s daimonic powers disrupting the heroic project—presupposes the Augustinian architecture. The unconscious, as a concept, requires a prior split between knowing and willing that the Greeks never made. Dihle does not draw these implications himself, but they are inescapable.

Greek Intellectualism Was a Complete Psychology, Not a Deficient One

The most common misreading of classical moral psychology—shared by philosophers, theologians, and psychologists alike—is that the Greeks simply failed to notice the will, as though it were always there waiting to be discovered. Dihle dismantles this assumption with philological precision. He shows that Aristotle’s proairesis (deliberate choice) and the Stoic hormê (impulse) are not primitive or partial versions of “will” but belong to an entirely different conceptual economy. In Aristotle’s framework, choice is the outcome of deliberation, which is itself a cognitive act; the desiring part of the soul (orexis) moves toward what reason presents as good. There is no separate executive faculty needed because the system is already complete. The Stoics radicalized this further: since all mental events are judgments, even passion is a species of assent to a false proposition. Weakness of will (akrasia) was the great test case, and Dihle traces how Greek thinkers from Socrates through the Stoics addressed it without ever conceding the existence of an autonomous willing faculty. This is not intellectual failure; it is a different ontology of the soul. The implications for Hillman’s archetypal psychology are striking. When Hillman insists that “the gods have become diseases” and that the soul’s afflictions are the gods reaching us through symptoms, he is working within a framework far closer to Greek intellectualism than to Augustinian voluntarism. For Hillman, as for the Greeks, pathology is a mode of perception, not a failure of will. The soul sees through its complexes; it does not resist them with some inner executive. Hillman’s polemic against ego psychology—his attack on the “ego-self axis” as “the usual Judeo-Protestant monotheism in psychological language”—is, read through Dihle, a polemic against the Augustinian will dressed in Jungian clothes.

Paul and Augustine Invented the Inner Abyss That Depth Psychology Would Later Colonize

Dihle’s central chapter traces the rupture with extraordinary care. Paul’s experience on the Damascus road, and his subsequent theological wrestling with the Law, produced a phenomenology of the divided self that had no Greek precedent. The Law tells me the good; I assent to it intellectually; yet I do the opposite. For a Stoic, this is simply impossible—or rather, it means I have not truly assented. For Paul, it means something has gone catastrophically wrong within the soul, at a level deeper than cognition. Augustine took this Pauline crisis and built from it the most influential psychology of the ancient world: the will as a faculty that can be turned toward or away from God, that can be divided against itself, that constitutes the deepest locus of personal identity. Dihle shows how this Augustinian will absorbed and transformed the entire Greek vocabulary of action—how proairesis, boulêsis, hormê were all retroactively reinterpreted as imperfect grasps toward a concept that only became available through Christian experience. Edinger’s account of the post-Kantian trajectory—Schopenhauer’s cosmic Will, Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, Nietzsche’s will to power—now appears as a direct continuation of the Augustinian line, not the Greek one. Schopenhauer did not rediscover a Greek insight; he secularized an Augustinian one. And Jung, inheriting this tradition, built his psychology of the unconscious on the Augustinian premise that the deepest dimension of the self operates beneath and against conscious intention—a premise no Greek would have recognized.

The Middle Voice Vanishes Precisely Where the Will Appears

Peterson’s recent work on the grammatical “Middle Voice”—the Greek verbal form in which the subject is neither purely agent nor purely patient—illuminates Dihle’s thesis from an unexpected angle. The Middle Voice is the grammatical correlate of the intellectualist psychology: the hero who deliberates with his thūmos is neither commanding an inner faculty nor being overwhelmed by it, but is engaged in a reflexive operation that the active/passive binary cannot capture. Peterson argues that this middle ground was abolished by ecclesiastical decree (Canon 11 of Constantinople, 869 CE), which reduced the soul to a binary of body and spirit. Dihle’s philological analysis provides the philosophical prehistory of that abolition: the will, as Augustine conceived it, is inherently an active-voice concept—“I will” or “I will not”—that structurally eliminates the middle. Once the will becomes the soul’s defining faculty, the reflexive, deliberative, thūmos-consulting mode of Greek moral psychology becomes unintelligible. The Middle Voice does not merely fade from grammar; it fades from anthropology. The therapeutic implications are direct. If the will is a Christian invention rather than a human universal, then the entire clinical framework built on “willpower,” “resistance,” and “motivation” is culturally specific rather than scientifically necessary. Hillman’s insistence that soul-making is “imaging” rather than willing—that therapy is a mode of seeing, not a strengthening of resolve—recovers, whether he knew it or not, the Greek intellectualist position that Dihle documents.

This book matters for anyone in the depth psychological tradition because it provides the missing genealogy. Without Dihle, one can read Hillman’s polemic against the will, Jung’s account of the autonomous complex, and Freud’s theory of resistance as though they were all engaging the same timeless problem. Dihle shows they are not. They are each struggling with—or against—a specific historical invention: Augustine’s voluntas. To understand what depth psychology is actually doing when it speaks of unconscious motivation, compulsion, or surrender, one must first understand that the entire problem space was created by a Cilician tentmaker’s letter to Rome, and consolidated by a North African bishop’s confessions. Dihle’s philological archaeology is the only work that makes this visible with full scholarly rigor.