Intellect and the will.

Human beings make decisions in the everyday life. This decision warrants humans to act in one way or the other. We have always wondered if humans have the capacity of free will, which is the ability to choose between possible actions unhindered. Ultimately, humans decide what they want and do not want to do, which is very reliant on the eventual choice of the will. Hence the will plays a very important role in helping humans decide what actions to take. However, before the will can even suggest what ought to be the right action to take it has to rely on some understanding and analyses of the situation at hand which the will is not privy to and this is where the cognitive ability of the human being comes into play, the intellect. The intellect analyses the situation and focuses on understanding the dilemma at hand to make a judgement.

So how do the intellect and will work? The intellect is the understanding part of the body where all the analyses take place, and as said earlier, it is the human capacity to cognize the situation. The intellect abstracts and takes in information which is then analysed by combining concepts to make a judgement. Intellect helps make moral judgement which is where conscience comes into play thus making it an intellectual activity. In moral judgement, the intellect seeks to present the action as good or bad, which leads us to what guides that process in deciding what is good and what is bad. Could it be religion, the Legal system or our values? Well, all these to some extent help shape and inform the good or bad in an action but the intellect is kind of independent of their influence as it tends to analyse situations based on the nature of the human. Hence, intellect could be wrong in its analyses of what is good.

Will on the other hand which is the decision-making part of the soul seeks what is good, and then the will motivation capacity sets in to move us to do what we do. The will depends on the intellect to identify what alternative actions are possible and desirable. Even though the will is attracted to various good options, the human still must decide on what to do. Hence, to further ensure that our willpower is at its optimal best we should always seek to strengthen it. For example, addiction weakens willpower, so after addiction to a certain process is kicked in, it makes it hard for the will to seek the good concerning that addictive process.

Human feelings and emotions should be guided by intellect and will, as this helps in controlling how we react to situations and feelings. Even though we might not be able to control how we feel in most cases, we should at least be able to control our reaction and how we respond to the feeling. For example, losing a loved one will bring about the feeling of grief which in most cases you cannot avoid, however, the way you react or respond to such grief can be fully controlled by humans. Understanding all these interconnectedness helps in guiding our actions and the process that leads to those actions.