‘Wishing, Willing, or What? Exploring Stoic Boulēsis’ by Judith Stove

 

This essay will examine boulēsis, named in our sources as one of the three good emotional states (eupatheiai) in Stoicism. It will explore a range of attempts to render this term in English. Finally, it will suggest some new options for understanding this important concept in such a way as to be useful for today’s Stoic practice.

The first key passage here is the summary in Diogenes Laertius (passage A):

Also they [the Stoics] say that there are three emotional states (eupatheias) which are good, namely joy (charan), caution (eulabeian), and wishing (boulēsin)…and they make wishing the counterpart of desire (or craving), inasmuch as it is rational appetency (Diogenes Laertius 7.116, Loeb translation by R.D. Hicks, 1925 and later editions).[1]

Of these three good emotional states, only one seems unequivocally positive, that is, joy. ‘Caution’ is perhaps a lukewarm translation of eulabeia, which has also been rendered as ‘discretion.’

The really odd one out, however, is ‘wishing.’ A recent informal survey about passage A in a Stoic Facebook group revealed that members were unsure what ‘appetency’ meant, and were also uncertain as to how ‘wishing’ fitted with the Stoic worldview: surely ‘wishing’ is a strange state to be characterised as good, in a broader system which recommends conforming our wishes to the actual course of events?

As so often, it is important to start with Plato. In the Cratylus, Socrates is invited to explain words relating to opinion and belief. While at times in this dialogue he seems tongue-in-cheek, even whimsical, in offering etymologies, they remain indispensable evidence.

Hermogenes
What is your view about doxa (opinion) and the like?

Socrates:

Doxa is derived either from the pursuit (diōxis) which the soul carries on as it pursues the knowledge of the nature of things, or from the shooting of the bow (toxon); the latter is more likely; at any rate oiēsis (belief) supports this view, for it appears to mean the motion (oisis) of the soul towards the essential nature of every individual thing, just as boulē (intention) denotes shooting (bolē) and boulesthai (wish), as well as bouleuesthai (plan), denotes aiming at something. All these words seem to follow doxa and to express the idea of shooting, just as aboulia (ill-advisedness), on the other hand, appears to be a failure to hit, as if a person did not shoot or hit that which he shot at or wished or planned or desired (420b-c, Loeb translation by H. Fowler, 1926).[2]

As often throughout the Cratylus, Socrates seeks to identify or illustrate a concept with a physical activity, here purposive aiming and shooting with a bow (or, as Thomas Taylor rendered it in his 1793 version, ‘hurling forth’ a missile: 90). This approach may well have influenced the early Stoa, as in Zeno’s vivid illustration of impression and katalēpsis with hand gestures (Cicero, Academica 1.41); for the Stoics, mental assent in itself is a physical event, so a bodily illustration is appropriate.

In any case, Cratylus 420b-c must lie in the background of the Stoic understanding of boulēsis. For his part, Aristotle may, or may not, have treated boulēsis as ‘rational desire’ (Lockwood). Our Greek lexicon, Liddell and Scott, in its entry for boulēsis, offers the definition ‘willing,’ but also ‘purpose.’ It is worth noting that the cognate boulē – in modern as it was in ancient Greek – remains the term for a deliberative council.

Cicero seems to have made a conscious choice, when bringing Stoic philosophy to Roman readers, to render boulēsis in Latin as voluntas (let us call this passage B):

By a law of nature all men pursue apparent good and shun its opposite; for which reason, as soon as the semblance of any apparent good presents itself, nature of itself prompts them to secure it. Where this takes place in an equable and wise way the Stoics employ the term boulēsis for this sort of longing [sic], we should employ the term wish (voluntatem). (Tusculan Disputations 4.12, Loeb translation by J.E. King, 1927).

This instance in Cicero is the very first usage of voluntas cited in the Lewis and Short dictionary, although evidently the term was in use earlier (the Tusculans are usually dated to 45 BCE), with a range of connotations including ‘will,’ ‘wish,’ ‘choice,’ ‘intention,’ ‘decision,’ and ‘consent.’ Voluntas, the noun, is derived from the base verb volo, I wish, and both are cognate with the Greek boulomai, Cicero doubtless attending to Socrates’s etymology in the Cratylus.

First, though, we should examine Cicero’s ‘that kind of longing (eius modi appetitionem)’ with which he identifies boulēsis.

Appetitio is defined in Lewis and Short as: (1) ‘a grasping at something, a reaching after’; (2) ‘a passionate longing or striving for something, strong desire or inclination’; both with reference to usages by Cicero. It is formed through prefixing ad-, signifying ‘towards’ something, to the base verb petere, ‘to direct one’s course to, to make for’ – first, literally as travelling to a spatial destination (e.g. towards Rome), and secondarily, to exert effort towards another kind of object. Over time, the prefix ad- was elided into the initial p, so that more usually (although not always) such words appear as starting with app- rather than adp- (standardised to app- in this essay).

Appetitio was Cicero’s chosen Latin rendering of the technical Stoic term hormē. In the Academica Cicero explains that sense data, e.g. visual input, must be accepted by us as reliable, in order to motivate us to action:

As otherwise appetition (appetitio), our chosen equivalent for the term hormē, by which we are impelled to action and seek to get an object presented to our vision, cannot be set in motion (Academica 2.8.24, Loeb translation by H. Rackham, 1927).

There is something essential, then, about appetitio which impels us towards an object or an outcome. Hormē (plural hormai) is often translated today as ‘drive’ or ‘instinct,’ denoting the basic impulses shared by animals, and even plants, to preserve their own life, and to reproduce (Diogenes Laertius 7.85-6). In On Duties, too, Cicero uses appetitus to refer to the universal drive to reproduce (1.4.11). Appetitio or appetitus, then, is both strong and natural, in the sense of innate. It would seem to be involuntary, certainly for plants and non-human animals.

Yet boulēsis – which, we have seen, Cicero has identified as one kind of appetitio/hormē – would not seem to be involuntary. In fact, it denotes the contrary: deliberation, or choice. Further, appetitio can represent a bad (e.g. violent) or indifferent kind of longing, as Cicero later explains:

Temperance allays the cravings (appetitiones) and causes them to obey right reason, and maintains the well-considered judgments of the mind (conservatque considerate iudicia mentis (Tusculan Disputations 4.22, Loeb translation by J. King).

Cicero quotes Zeno (though without giving Zeno’s Greek) as saying that ‘disorder is a longing (appetitus) of undue violence’ (4.47). On the other hand, appetitus could even be a longing for virtue – and even so, should be eradicated: ‘even if the unduly violent longing be for virtue itself (etiam si virtutis ipsius vehementior appetitus sit), the same mode of speaking must be employed by all by way of a deterrent’ (4.62).

For the wise person, of course, all cravings and wishes are well-reasoned and positive, so much of this tension disappears, but that might well be seen as a cop-out. Cicero, for his part, tackled this matter head-on. Our passage B continues:

[Boulēsis/voluntas], they think, is found in the wise man alone and they define it in this way: wish is a rational longing for anything (quae quid cum ratione desiderat, 4.12).

Yet as Cicero goes on to use ‘we’ – ‘where we are satisfied that we are in possession of some good’; ‘since we naturally desire good’ – the reader must infer that we ordinary humans, too, are implicated. The ‘figure of the sage,’ in Hadot’s phrase, may motivate us to emulation; and the ‘human sage’ in Cicero and Seneca is a model at which we can appropriately aim (Hadot 2020, 196-7; Gill 2022, 218).

The key modern treatment of the eupatheiai is by Margaret Graver. At various points in the magisterial Stoicism and Emotion (2007), Graver gives quite different definitions for boulēsis. One of these, ‘volition,’ is fundamentally related to the Stoic principle of what is ‘up to us’ (63). Graver uses the term in rendering our key Cicero passage (B):

When this [pursuing an apparent good] is done prudently and in accordance with consistency, it is the sort of reaching which the Stoics call a boulēsis and which I shall term a ‘volition’ (203).

John Sellars, in his popular guide Stoicism (2014), on the good emotional states, quotes Diogenes Laertius passage A, retaining (without explanation) the Loeb’s term ‘appetency’ (derived from Latin appetitus); the most recent usage of ‘appetency’ in the Oxford English Dictionary Online is from 1881.[3] R.D. Hicks, the Loeb translator of Diogenes Laertius, was born in 1850, so the term may have been current in his day; but it is less than informative now.

Of other recent guides, Christopher Gill, in Learning to Live Naturally (2022), and most recently in Stoic Ethics: The Basics (2025), with Brittany Polat, has stuck with ‘wishing,’ amplified as goodwill towards others. The sub-species of such goodwill have traditionally included eunoia, wishing good things for another; eumeneia, persistent good intent; and so on (Diogenes Laertius 7.116; Gill 2022, 215; tabulated at Graver 58).

The following table allows us to compare some different accounts and renderings of boulēsis, in chronological order.

Translator/Author	Date/text	Rendering	Comments
Plato (as Socrates)	Cratylus ‘Middle Period’ 388-367 BCE	Intention, plan	Derived from aiming a weapon – purposive
Cicero	45 BCE; Tusc. Disp. 4.12	voluntas	‘Will,’ ‘choice’ – by definition voluntary
	Transl. King, 1927	Longing	Can be negative; seems overstated
	Acad. 2.8.24	One form of appetitus/appetitio (Latin rendering of Greek hormē)	Innate, seems involuntary; can be negative
Diogenes Laertius	3rd century CE 7.116 Transl. Hicks, 1925	Wishing	Can be negative
	Transl. A.A. Long and D. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1 (1987/2012), p. 610	‘They say that wishing is the opposite of appetite, consisting in well-reasoned stretching [desire]’	Seems directly to contradict Cicero’s identification as a form of appetitus (a problem we cannot address here)
Graver	Stoicism and Emotion (2007)	‘Powerful types of longing or wishing’ (4), Well-reasoned reaching (52), ‘Wish for prospective goods’ (53), Reflection (105), Wish (188), Volition (203), Rational orexis (218)	Widely differing versions; orexis (desire) more associated with Aristotle (another issue we lack space to explore)
Sellars	Stoicism (2014)	Wishing; ‘rational appetency’ (quoting DL 7.116, 153) ‘Wishing would be a rational desire for a genuine good, again virtue’ (154)	‘Appetency’ outdated. Also, cf. Cicero TD 4.62 – excessive desire even for virtue should be extirpated (yet another problem we lack space to address)
Gill	Learning to Live Naturally (2022)	Will (34) ‘Wishing (boulēsis) is a (correct) belief that a future thing is good, such that we (rationally) reach out for it’ (215; repeated at Gill and Polat 90)	Have different connotations; require careful and repeated qualifications of ‘correct’ and ‘rational’
Gill and Polat	Stoic Ethics: The Basics (2025)	Wish (35), Wishing (90), ‘In place of “desire,” we have “wish”’ (94), ‘Generic emotion of wish includes various forms of good will and ‘cherishing’ (107)	Requires amplification and other-direction in order to seem good and/or effective

 

Notwithstanding Graver’s suggestion of ‘volition,’ ‘wishing’ remains the favoured current version over ‘willing’ (which retains unwelcome connotations from Christian and post-Christian contexts). Yet ‘wishing’ seems to demand considerable fleshing-out – amplification, emphasis on other-direction – in order to pose as a plausible candidate for a good emotional state.

To be clear, ‘wishing,’ so far as it goes, is a correct rendering of boulēsis. It seems, however, not only dated – its prominence in earlier versions may represent a trace of Victorian understatement (we have already noted the antiquity of Hicks; J.E. King, of the Tusculans, was of similar vintage, born in 1858) – but seriously underpowered.[4] To borrow terms from another area of philosophy, boulēsis seems to possess a modicum of success-grammar entirely absent from ‘wishing.’ Gilbert Ryle, the philosopher most associated with this concept of ‘success words,’ wrote:

We are inclined to require some intention or purpose of a runner or player before we will use the heavily-loaded terminus-verbs ‘win’ and ‘checkmate’ (89; emphasis mine).

Most importantly, portraying ‘wishing’ as a good state may look confusing to learners who have absorbed the principle, expressed forcefully in Epictetus, that our wishes should be adjusted and subordinated to the actual course of events:

Don’t seek that all that comes about should come about as you wish, but wish that everything that comes about should come about just as it does, and then you’ll have a calm and happy life (Epictetus, Handbook 8, Robin Hard translation, 2014).

A determined proponent of ‘wishing’ might grasp that nettle, claiming that what Epictetus urges just is, in fact, identical with boulēsis, ‘Stoic wishing’: acceptance of events. But this, in the first place, seems a long way from the dictionary definitions, and from cognates such as boulē which imply deliberative action: a boulē may have a ‘wish-list’ of desired outcomes, but it also has to determine practical ways to achieve them, through considering proposals, seeking expert opinion, and arriving at decisions.

In the second place, we have direct evidence from Marcus Aurelius that deliberate action, and willing acceptance of outcomes, are not the same, but are two separate projects (Marcus does not here use boulēsis, but he uses words, e.g. praxis, which denote practical achievement). In Book 9, Marcus clearly indicates three different requisite conditions, the first two relating to sound preparation of an action towards the common good; the third being acceptance of the outcome:

It’s enough if one’s current belief is true, if one’s current action has the common good as its objective, and if one’s current state of mind is willing acceptance of every externally caused thing that happens (Meditations 9.6, Robin Waterfield translation, 2021).

In Book 10, Marcus specifies that the productive action, and the subsequent acceptance, represent two separate commitments:

A man who looks at things objectively…[is] content, first, if he always does what is right and, second, if he embraces his lot in its entirety (10.11, Waterfield).

Hadot reminds us that ‘translated into Latin, the technical terms of Greek philosophy would lose a part of their meaning’ (1998, 52). Evidently, through transmission, the concept of boulēsis has lost touch with action, central to the Cratylus foundation account. ‘Wishing’ as an English rendering also seems to have lost contact with the broader Socratic understanding of virtue as a kind of knowledge. The problems were perhaps less conspicuous throughout a twentieth century in which the Anglosphere dismissed Stoicism as an irrelevant museum piece. But today, for students keen to make sense of key texts with a view to developing their own practice, ‘wishing’ may stand out as unhelpfully nebulous.

Simply wishing to achieve success – as a novice might announce ‘I wish I could hit the bullseye!’ – is fruitless, even counter-productive. It does not seem to represent a good emotional state: rather, it seems to reveal a condition of culpable ignorance. (Making it other-directed: ‘I cherish you, so I wish you would hit the bullseye!’ would, in the absence of the shooter’s preparation, remain equally futile.) The goddess Artemis, whether she’d practised or not, would hit the bullseye every time; but humans need to plan, learn from a skilled practitioner, and train regularly. As Socrates, in the work of Plato most concerned with education, insists:

No…tool will ever make one a craftsman or athlete by just picking it up, and it will be useless for one who has not acquired its science and has not given it enough practice (Republic 2.374d).

Graver rightly says, ‘Linguistic equivalents are rarely exact’ and ‘definitions can be frustrating’ (2); while, for his part, Hadot warns ‘in the final analysis, philosophy, like poetry, is untranslatable’ (1998, 53). Perhaps, nonetheless, we may be in a position usefully to refine versions of critical terms (noting that these, also, will in time seem inadequate).

One option might be to understand hormē/appetitio as ‘motivation,’ ‘pursuit,’ or ‘effort,’ and boulēsis/voluntas as ‘deliberative or constructive or intentional or productive focus,’ or simply ‘focus,’ ‘attention,’ or ‘concentration.’ These renderings bring positive connotations around functional preparation for a task, while restoring, for boulēsis, the indispensable element of purpose: we cannot achieve anything without it.

As Seneca writes, brilliantly exploiting the twin senses of petere (as we have seen, the base for Cicero’s chosen verb appetere), pursuing a goal – as in the Cratylus, shooting at a target – and heading for a destination:

The archer must know what he is seeking (petat) to hit; then he must aim and control the weapon by his skill. Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for (petat), no wind is the right wind (Letters 71.3).

Stoic readers are already familiar with the importance of paying strict attention to the present moment, a practice usually denoted by the term prosochē (e.g. in Epictetus, Discourses 4.12.1). While prosochē may be understood as an habitual attitude, the kind of purposive focus I am suggesting would relate to a particular task or objective in the near or farther future. Both prosochē and boulēsis would be demanded in working towards complex pro-social goals, such as the judicial, diplomatic, and strategic ends which Marcus Aurelius must always have had in view.

Against this background, let me offer new versions of our key passages: A, from Diogenes Laertius:

The Stoics say that there are three emotional states which are good, namely joy, discretion, and constructive focus…they consider productive focus the reverse of craving, consisting as it does of rational pursuit (7.116).

B, from Cicero:

Where this takes place in an equable and wise way the Stoics employ the term boulēsis for this sort of effort: we should employ the term intentional focus (voluntatem). That, they think, is found in the wise man alone and they define it in this way: focus is a rational pursuit of anything (Tusculan Disputations 4.12).

Focus is particularly, in addition to expertise, sought for such in-demand and lucrative pursuits as musical and athletic performance. We recall Graver’s characterisation of the eupatheiai:

We should think of them as being like the easy movements of a powerful athlete, forceful but without strain (52).

To borrow an analogy from music, practitioners of historically informed performance undertake research and careful assessment of earlier traditions as essential preparation for ‘new,’ at times startling, interpretations. Similarly, it cannot be inappropriate, and may be fruitful, to consider alternative understandings of our technical Stoic terms. I will leave the last word to Hadot:

The modern reader tends too often to imagine that there is only one possible translation of a Greek text, and he or she may be surprised to find considerable differences’ (1998, viii).

 

 

Acknowledgements

This essay has benefited from discussions both in Facebook groups (Living Stoicism; Let’s Read: Philosophy, Psychology and Literature), and the Discord group of the College of Stoic Philosophers. Thanks to Ryan Broadfoot, James Daltrey, Tony Grimwood, Ralph Kurz, Courtney Shipley, Khyel Walker, and the Stoicism Today editorial team, for productive input. All errors and inevitable omissions are of course mine; I welcome all critiques, suggestions and comments.

 

Works Cited

Loeb versions of Plato, Cicero and Diogenes Laertius cited in-text

Gill, Christopher. Learning to Live Naturally: Stoic Ethics and Its Modern Significance. Oxford University Press, 2022.

Gill, Christopher, and Brittany Polat. Stoic Ethics: The Basics. Routledge, 2025.

Graver, Margaret R. Stoicism and Emotion. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Hadot, Pierre. The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (translated by Michael Chase). Harvard University Press, 1998.

Hadot, Pierre. ‘The Figure of the Sage in Greek and Roman Antiquity,’ The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot (translated by Matthew Sharpe and Federico Testa). Bloomsbury, 2020, 185-206.

Hard, Robin. Epictetus: Discourses, Fragments, Handbook. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Lockwood, Thornton C., ‘Aristotle on Desire’ (review of Giles Pearson, Aristotle On Desire, Cambridge UP, 2012), Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2013, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2013/2013.09.24

Long, A.A. and D.N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 1987, 18^th printing 2012.

Ryle, Gilbert. Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures 1953. Cambridge University Press, 1954, 2015 edition.

Sellars, John. Stoicism. Routledge, 2014.

Taylor, Thomas. The Cratylus, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Timaeus of Plato. London, 1793.

Waterfield, Robin. Meditations: The Annotated Edition: Marcus Aurelius. Basic Books, 2021.

 

About the Author

A writer from Sydney, Australia, Judith Stove (Judith.stove@gmail.com) aims to make key Latin and classical Greek texts more accessible in today’s Stoic communities. A student of the College of Stoic Philosophers, she is a co-coordinator of Stoicon-X Melbourne, Living Stoicism (Facebook), and Southern Star Stoics (online). Her latest book  is Marcus Aurelius and His Legacy: Seeking Rome’s Kingdom of Gold (Pen & Sword 2025).

 

Notes

[1] Nouns are quoted as they appear in the Greek, in the accusative case.

[2] Particular thanks to Khyel Walker for pointing me to this passage.

[3] OED Online consulted 10 August 2025.

[4] It occurred to me that in older English, ‘wish’ might have possessed some more of this notion of deliberation – it may be related to the archaic ‘wist’ or ‘wit,’ ‘know’ (surviving in words and phrases such as ‘wise’ and ‘to wit’) – and is linked with ‘ween,’ ‘think, surmise’; yet the OED Online entry suggests that even as far back as Old English, ‘wish’ was used much as today – to express any kind of desire, trivial or weighty, fanciful or serious. OED Online consulted 13 August 2025.

 

Image credit: Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

 

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