Emotional will

The emotional will is the acquisitive one, and solely is doing the work in the definition. It has one motive, gain or loss of anima, and no other considerations enter into what it chooses. Its counterpart is the conscious will, controlled by the conscious and disposed to disperse a person's energy rather than hoard it. The pair runs in opposite directions on every axis Marsh names. The emotional will seeks to conserve energy in an animus, which sounds prudent and is not, because euphoria is attained through the expenditure of energy, so conserving it produces depression. It also craves energy, which is the other half of the same disposition. It is attached to gravity and to ordered objects and fights to preserve endosocial structures, which is why it operates as the endosocial drive where the conscious will operates as the exosocial one. There is a further inversion worth holding onto, since it runs against the way the definitions first read. The emotional will creates order and the conscious will disperses it, which is the opposite of the impression given by calling one a force of chaos, and it is consistent once the scale is fixed: hoarding produces local order, and dispersal produces order in the world at the cost of the person's own store. A malignant emotional will can drive someone into harmful behaviour, producing a long struggle with ill health and accidents and an internal war between the two wills.

Splitting motivation into a grasping part and a governing part is one of the oldest moves in the literature, from Plato's appetitive soul through Augustine and Aquinas to Freud's id and ego, and dual process psychology after Daniel Kahneman gives it a contemporary form as fast automatic responses against slow deliberate ones. Behavioural economics builds on the same division to explain choices that look irrational. What distinguishes Marsh's account is that the emotional will is not irrational or impulsive but consistently optimizing for one thing. It is rational in its own terms and mistaken about what produces euphoria, which is a different diagnosis from weakness of will and points at a different remedy.