At my AA meeting this morning the topic was willingness, which in the context of AA mostly implies willingness to accept: that one is an alcoholic, that one controls very little, that one needs help, etc. In essence, willingness signifies surrender, acquiescence, really, a lack of will.
By contrast think of the Nietzschean concept of the Will to Power, ultimately apotheosized in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will about the 1934 Nuremburg Rally. It's not like this concept is ever far from the surface in the English concept of will. We often speak of willpower or willfulness.
Indeed, the opposite of willingness, unwillingness, signifies really less an absence than a surfeit of will. So we find ourselves squarely in the presence of another instance of what Freud identified in his essay on the uncanny as the identity of primordial opposites, the space where the heimlich (homely) and unheimlich (uncanny) merge.
Part of me is slightly tempted to ask an AI do a historical-etymological analysis of how this happened, but what I'd really be interested in is finding an article by some nerd who actually did the work the AI would be stealing. But I don't really care enough to do that.
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