"Beneath, the body does what it does, in mechanical exertions of will and sinew, while the soul waits".
In Nagel's response to Williams, he argues that it is not just our actions that are vulnerable to moral luck but also our intentions, our dispositions, our exertions of will.
Yet you get the feeling that Lee's outlaw status is a conscious choice, just as Austin's reliability comes from a steady exertion of will.
Scientific truth, according to this view, is established less by the noble use of reason than by the stubborn exertion of will.
Trilling took "The Princess Casamassima" to be an example of what he called the story of the Young Man from the Provinces, in which a bright but naïve young man (or woman; there are, after all, some well-known female protagonists in the tradition) decides to conquer, by sheer exertion of will, sophisticated society, to enter into the gates of power and knowledge.
Unscrupulous landlords, family breakdown, a negligent employer, and, above all, a dearth of affordable housing are the true cause of Cathy's predicament and yet she is told again and again to "sort herself out", as though all that is lacking is an adequate exertion of will.
This exertion of will — if I'd seen more Godard films than any adult I knew, or read more books by Norman Mailer, then maybe I'd have proved something, even if I didn't understand them — was also an act of sensory deprivation, of self-abnegation.
Much has been made, for instance, of Mr. Bush's swearing off alcohol at age 40 while partying at the Broadmoor resort in Colorado; media hagiographers have inflated this exertion of will and spiritual forbearance into a profile in courage equivalent to wartime derring-do.
That's also why melodrama plays a special role in democratic culture: that sense of happiness arising from amazing coincidences veering toward blithe miracles is the magnanimous counterpart to assertions of triumph through the exertions of iron will.
As I discovered from my therapist and psychopharmacologist — both of whom argued that I belonged in a hospital now that my depression had taken on "a life of its own," beyond the exertions of my will — there was a clinical name for my state: "psychomotor retardation".
"The relaxed will," as he named it, using Forster's term, did not come naturally to Trilling; it required (to be Trillingesque) a strenuous exertion of the will.
