Just over 500 years ago, in 1525 (perhaps I should have written this last year!) Martin Luther published his classic work, ‘The Bondage of the Will’, in response to the humanist Erasmus. This is a title I find difficult. I both strongly agree and disagree with it at the same time.
Why? The title suggests a double fallacy. It seems guilty of both reification (treating the will as a thing rather than a concept) and of ‘faculty psychology’ (which I prefer to call the anatomical fallacy). This is the error of thinking that the mind is composed of different parts (or faculties) in the same way as the body has different organs.
So the body has kidneys, lungs, a heart, and so on. And the anatomical fallacy assumes the mind has distinct components – the will and memory and an emotional area and so on. I’ve heard people speak as if you could locate a part of the mind which is the will and as if Luther’s idea is that this mental component is, as it were, tied up and disabled.
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