In Leibniz, ideas are not private mental images but intelligible structures grounded in possibility, reason and divine order. His Discourse on Metaphysics distinguishes confused, clear, adequate and intuitive knowledge, while insisting that will is not arbitrary decision but rational inclination towards perfection. Even God does not choose by caprice; divine freedom consists in selecting the best possible order according to wisdom, so that genuine will is inseparable from reason. Hegel radicalises this relation by arguing that neither ideas nor will are complete in immediacy. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness discovers that every claim to immediate certainty collapses into mediation: the idea becomes true only by passing through contradiction, negation and historical experience. Truth is not a static possession but the whole process of becoming, and the will must therefore be understood as part of spirit’s labour of self-recognition. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel gives this problem its political form: the will is free not when it withdraws into abstract indeterminacy, but when it objectifies itself in rational institutions such as property, contract, morality, family, civil society and the state. Freedom is thus not mere choice, but concrete freedom, the reconciliation of subjective intention with objective ethical life.
This philosophical lineage becomes especially powerful when placed beside literary and aesthetic theories of modernity. Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” displaces the sovereign will of the author by arguing that writing is a field of quotations, codes and cultural voices; meaning does not originate in authorial intention but emerges through the reader’s encounter with textual plurality. The author’s will is therefore dethroned, while the idea of the text becomes a mobile structure rather than a personal confession. LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” translates this displacement into artistic practice: the idea becomes the machine that makes the work, and the artist’s subjective will becomes secondary to the process once initiated. His insistence that banal ideas cannot be redeemed by beautiful execution turns conceptual art into a discipline of intellectual necessity rather than expressive spontaneity. Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde adds an institutional dimension: the avant-garde does not merely produce new forms, but attacks the autonomy of art itself, attempting to reintegrate artistic ideas into life-praxis. The will of the avant-garde is therefore not only aesthetic but historical: it seeks to transform the social function of art, even as institutions later absorb its negations as cultural value.
Modern literature, however, reveals the darker and more ambiguous forms of will. Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” presents urban modernity as a field of signs that the observer tries to classify, only to encounter an anonymous figure who resists interpretation. Here the idea of knowledge meets its limit: the will to read the crowd collapses before opacity, anonymity and endless circulation. Melville’s Bartleby offers an even more radical case. His phrase “I would prefer not to” is not a doctrine, programme or revolutionary manifesto; it is a negative will that suspends command without directly opposing it. Bartleby disables the legal office by refusing the grammar of labour, duty and explanation, revealing that institutional power depends on habitual compliance more than explicit coercion. Adorno and Horkheimer, in “The Culture Industry”, show how modern capitalism captures both ideas and will by standardising cultural production and manufacturing desire. Under mass culture, choice appears free while being pre-structured by repetition, advertising and commodified pleasure; the individual will survives only as an administered illusion. Kaufmann’s decolonial analysis extends this critique to knowledge economies and artistic research, showing that ideas are never neutral: they are embedded in colonial histories, racialised labour, gendered exclusions and geopolitical hierarchies. A decolonial account of will must therefore ask not only who thinks, but whose worlds are made thinkable, whose knowledge is legitimised, and whose forms of life are excluded from the archive of reason.
Taken together, these sources suggest that ideas are never inert representations and will is never simple volition. Leibniz makes will rational; Hegel makes it historical and institutional; Barthes disperses it across language; LeWitt converts it into process; Bürger politicises it as institutional critique; Poe makes interpretation fail before modern anonymity; Melville turns refusal into a devastating form of passive agency; Adorno and Horkheimer expose the industrial manufacture of desire; and Kaufmann insists that knowledge and agency must be rethought through decolonial struggle. The resulting thesis is clear: the modern subject does not merely have ideas and exercise will; rather, it is produced, constrained and transformed by the systems of intelligibility, labour, language, culture and power through which ideas become active in the world.
Harvard bibliography
Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1944) ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Available in the uploaded edition.
Barthes, R. (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, trans. R. Howard, in Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana.
Bürger, P. (1987) Teoría de la vanguardia. Translated by J. García. Barcelona: Ediciones Península.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1807/2013) The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by T. Pinkard. Unpublished translation.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1820/1952) Philosophy of Right. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kaufmann, T. (2011) ‘Art and Knowledge: Rudiments for a Decolonial Perspective’, transversal texts, 03/2011. Available at: https://transversal.at/transversal/0311/kaufmann/en.
Leibniz, G.W. (1686/2017) Discourse on Metaphysics. Edited and translated by J. Bennett. Available in the uploaded edition.
LeWitt, S. (1969) ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, Art-Language, 1(1). Reprinted in the uploaded edition as Sentences on Conceptual Art (1968).
Melville, H. (1856) ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street’, in The Piazza Tales. Available in the uploaded edition.
Poe, E.A. (1984) ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. New York: The Library of America, pp. 388–396.
