Being and Will, Will to Be

Being and Will, Will to Be

Samuel Bird

It is in here somewhere, I am sure. If I just look around deep enough within the recesses and confines of my psyche, I will find the resolution to the inquiry the rest of me happens to be. How could I have the misfortune to be the problem with no solution? As I search my soul, I come up with things to grasp, but it is just want. I want this, I want that, and I want to know the factors at play. My wantings mount and build until palaces and powers of any sort could be beaten by a new want for a greater version. This want from within me, builds to insatiability. In my curiosity of its nature, I follow the wanting. Each thought has a thread that leads back to its cause or assumption that sponsored it. Why do I want power? To not feel powerless. Why do I not want to feel powerless? To not feel a sense of insecurity. Why do I want to not feel insecure? I want to be safe. Why do I want to be safe? I do not want to risk death. Why do I not want to risk death? I don’t want the possible to be affirmed into the actual via my demise. Sartre and Heidegger explored being in the world. Somewhere between the mind and the world is what comprises being. This perception is either the making real of what is or the only noteworthy way something could be effectively real. We only have this majestic world via our senses, and in what sense is it anything more than just that? This perception is what makes there being in causal facthood or at least effectively so, as there is at least someone to talk about it now. Here I am, thrust into the world and perceiving it. Time and nothingness envelop me as I find myself between their sheerness. However, we are not just thrust into the world. While the world has no queries, our meeting it builds a series of imperatives within us. The world as that dead half of being, has no wants as I do. However, myself as the other effective half of being certainly does. I will. This is the will to life as to participate in the dance of the ages. It is to power, as in to build the ability to leverage the world toward its aims. In effect, we are not just cast into this world naked and unknowing. We Don’t just sit there wondering about the “why” that made this all happen. We start the fight of fights to stay alive. We rarely have the luxury to question the rules of the game and instead are reminded that at least no questioning can be done if we exit. This world has no will, but I meet it as sheer will. This disparity is drenched with dissonance as I am at odds with the world around me. When starving in a cave in the woods, I remarked how the world neither did this in spite nor cared for it not to be so. It did not have that will. It simply was a fact. Those facts, such as edible vegetation or a rabbit to skin and eat, aligned with my will. However, reality took occasion to boldly be what it was, no matter how its will was against mine. For each bit of comfort or curiosity, we find them to be subsidiary and periphery. In all moments I want. My back hurts, my hands are cold, my stomach grumbles. In the back of my mind is the next imperative that is needed to feed my will. But what do I will? We find that we aren’t just being, but willing. Then what do we will? We will to be. You may ask why I ask why, but I am met with no necessary answers from my asking of such. The soul's persistence via subsistence is the core of the aims at hand, to the degree we can’t look away. We can look at thoughts in our mind because we are not that thought and we share a plane. You can’t look at your own singularity of consciousness, because that is what you are. The core of your will is so central to you, that is how could you turn from it as separate to behold it. You want. You want this and that and a series of things, but at the core is that will to be. Violent defenses or non-properly basic heavens are means to that goal before all. Your being, however, is something that you can approach with nuance. As your death comes inevitably, you are able to find those ways you can still be. In your art, you leave how being seemed to you. In your labor, you show the mythos of what you fought against, why, and who that made you. In your blood flowing through times unknown, a sort of you continues on. You will. You will. You will. 

We are not impartial beings. In the ends that have, we approach the world not just to see how it is, but to access what we require to be. This has been my anger of philosophy in my age. It wonderfully accesses the world via a priori reasoning and breaking the world into non-arbitrary categories to better answer the questions. However, in my reading of writers and thinkers much better than I, I ask why. What prompted them to write the book? Prestige and pretention are possible, but more charitably I think of curiosity and being a part of what immortalized them. Still, I feel there is something missing and from this something that could be readily expanded on. They seem to have forgotten their ends and wills. This is not an uncommon phenomenon. We start with one end in mind, like survival, and then we build complex systems to allow such, like a society to keep us safe. However, these ideas played out can lead to a reductio ad absurdum and defeat the initial objective. To save the society we made to keep us alive, we will die. This could make sense if there were fewer net deaths and we valued the many survivors more than our own lives. However, it illustrates the action of thinking in a complete circle until you give up the aim at hand. What was the aim I started writing these books for? I wanted to make room for the soul. I wanted to engage people with their existence. I wanted to prepare them for death. These are not dead ideas but imperatives as they meet my heart. They go from information to obligation worth weary hands and missed opportunity. I try not to lose track of what I will, I try not to lose track of you. I want something for you. I have reason to believe you go without, and it pains me. This pain is sort of the contrary to my will, and I refuse it. I only work and accept these ends I have made for you. You want and will. What do you want and will, or rather, what series of things? We want pleasure and meaning. Love and freedom. Hope and peace. However, these things end up at odds frequently, and in the mighty judgment of this evaluating mind, our wanting prizes the core over the peripheral. This is the making of the half of the soul we do: What things are given up for other sorts of things. This tells me more about you than the hours spent or ideas shared. Our world of desperation and need is a blessing as we make ourselves one sort of magnificent thing and make it meaningful. You don’t have time to do x and y. So, what will you choose and why? The giving up of one will make the other of more worth to you, and as we found in will, there is only worth in terms of a subject. I am painfully aware of the limits of my thought system, but came to those dead ends knowing what other options I had. One sort of this, is my pointing out that we can manage our wills, and that our wills are what manage us. Which one is properly basic Samuel? How can we control that which controls us? I will be honest, I don’t know and I think a meditation on the matter would find you next to me. However, what we can say is that we have wills at odds. We can’t do as we want, but we can’t want something different to will. How we manifest it could be more complex, but we still have that core of will. What then are we to do when we have wants at odds, either logically at odds in the sense of a contradiction, or empirically at odds, as it is not likely to have both given our world? We let the greater want utterly destroy the lesser. In their wanting, they come precharged with their degree of imperative that gives them a weighting ready for our evaluation. I want to be loved and belong. I feel ill to be away from kin and kind. Yet, the want for me to engage with my Esse Maxim is before all of that. This is the early motivation for Esse Maxim. Not just in terms of epistemic assumptions, but what matters most to me. I have so many things that I value, but what is before all? Esse Maxim holds up to powerful scrutiny, but it is not just for the elite and scholastic. The average person would carry in their mind that beautiful thought that mattered most and gave them all the truth, good, beauty, and meaning they needed. Willing is the soul after values, and Esse Maxim is the honest acquisition of those values. This will is in the subject, and as we have different aspects, we find ourselves at odds. The body, mind, and soul sacrifice each other to their ends. It would be all the more expected that when we come to an internal consensus of what we will, another subject will vary. The world of minds is wills at odds, this is the plight of wars and relations. Our wills don’t then just have to navigate ourselves, but this complex social world whose game theory pushes us to more and more complex responses until we find ourselves our own worst enemy. What is the solution? Well, I think we can honestly see why we are at odds. Perhaps the other party is both evil and foolish or perhaps our wills and circumstances put us at odds. This doesn’t mean we should lose any fervor in being at odds, but lying about what makes us so could never help. We have explored how this wanting morphs in the application, but let us sit with it in simplicity. I will. I will that I be. I am being, and from that will. I exist and then have my evaluation of such and its parts. We are in no way an impartial being as our affinity toward our will is at play in all moments. Philosophy as the dead impartiality fails to know us, and from such to certainly fail to respond to our being. Come to yourself for a moment. What do you will in this moment? What core will drive that wanting? Can you will otherwise? If not, how do you respond to a world you are free in all ways, except the direction you wish to go? This is then my plight. To attempt to know your wanting. Rocks and dirt can’t read my books, so I don’t care for them. I care for you, write for you, and want for you. While I will never find that satiation to stop all wanting, in my partiality and affinity, I find you. In these books that are the plane for our friendship, I ask myself what I mean to do. My will to express these ideas is met with the social opportunities via similarities available to me. What book and person is like this one and myself? It is not true religion, official philosophy, or effective self-help. However, my will as what I wish to create is uninhibited by what similar roles and literature are available. You will ever struggle to explain who I am when asked, but in this is manifest the authenticity of that will. Our will is that great affirming to the multitude of antecedents the world presents to us. Even Esse Maxim is that great conditional. It is dead without one’s will. However, it is designed to be that first and primary thing one wills that brings the structure for all will to fall into place and lose its animosity to itself. All we have is being and will. And what is this will? The will to be.