My earliest pre-philosophical application of the idea was ‘willpower’. As a younger person, caught up in the lust for admiration that is characteristic of some younger people, I was very motivated to be physically fit, strong, and attractive. To this end, I understood the need for diet and exercise. But these are difficult things to do, requiring a degree of discipline and a willingness to subject yourself to suffering. What I found, naturally, and what anyone would find if they care to look, was that if you focus your attention on your goal and on what is necessary to achieve it, you will come to want the discipline and want the suffering required to achieve your goal. They are a part of the picture that you are looking to emulate. Discipline and suffering, in this form, became desirable. And with this picture in mind it was no effort at all: you simply did what you wanted to do, which was diet and exercise.
When my ‘willpower’ failed, inevitably occasionally, I recognised afterwards, invariably, that I had lost sight of my goal. I had lost sight of what mattered to me. I hadn’t held the picture in mind. I had been distracted. It was a failure of attention.
We call it ‘willpower’, but it’s the understanding and the attention that’s doing all the work here, not the will. I suspect this applies to all examples of ‘willpower’. If you clearly understand the dangers of smoking – or what it costs you; the toll it takes on your life – you won’t want to smoke. If you clearly understand the consequences of eating or drinking too much, and you don’t desire those consequences, then you won’t desire the cause. Whilst we often seem to want what isn’t good for us, this is only a false appearance: as Socrates says, nobody (really) wants what (really) harms them. If we think it through, clearly, we find we have no choice to make.
If you apply your understanding properly you will have no weakness-of-will and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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