Becoming part of something bigger
An invitation to the Parallax Academy
In my ironically—but really not so ironically—so-called “future classic,” the seminal Phenomenology of Will, I tried to instigate or rekindle a conversation that basically ended in 1945, or even a couple of years earlier when that event pictured above occurred. Much has happened since, but I believe that this very event had a more devastating effect on philosophy than most people realize—not only because it signaled an unholy alliance between politics and philosophy, an alliance that persists—even and especially outside the discipline of political philosophy itself— thanks to Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School to this day, but also because it shifted cultural discourse in a direction so pervasive that nobody seems to notice its effects. One adjacent consequence is that identity politics, the “politicization of the private,” and (for example) Covid policies structured around Foucault’s—Nietzsche’s successor’s—idea of biopolitics were, as it was said in the German parliament, “without alternatives.”
Yet there are always alternatives, mind you. Only when we become too attached to underlying narratives—too bound to a specific zeitgeist—do some actions appear consecutive (according to the dominant perspectives), while other possible actions are simply deleted and erased.
Another outcome of THAT handshake was that the topic of will became ugly. The “will to power”—which really is just the will to agency and self-efficacy in modern psychological terms—was frowned upon, dismissed as something to be overcome because of the Nazis, obviously. As if will were inherently right-wing and love inherently left-wing. That is an idiotic kind of thinking, but it led to a over-feminization of culture in the seventies. We still frown upon people with strong will; we don’t like them in politics, we hate them in business (patriarchy, bad white males), and we certainly don’t like them in our private lives. And yet, will is simply a human capacity.
We pride ourselves today on our cognitive sophistication and (post-)postmodern—systems thinking, interbeing, intersubjectivity, dividualism, all very feminine concepts. Yet when it comes to action, we remain rooted in a modernist subject-object dualism. These two orientations don’t mesh: you cannot claim interconnectedness in thought and feeling while still opposing the world in action.
What I tried to do in that book was to rethink will and bring it up to speed with our times. Is there a way to think of will that transcends subject-object dualism, enabling us to truly contend with the challenges of our lives and times? A way that includes our ability to listen to the greater scheme of things, to the winds of change, and let our actions be informed andd guided by them?
By now everybody knows that I am not a big fan with the notion of the “meta-crisis.” It’s an utterly stupid concept. Nobody denies that there are challenges: from climate change to smartphone addiction, from media manipulation to incompetent politics, from the soft invasion of the West by radical Islam to turbo-capitalism, failing education reforms, bad diets, cultural decline in the arts, and AI with which we are already building a symbiosis. But here’s the thing: we have always had crises, and we always get what we can handle. We need crises to grow; they are nothing inherently bad. By framing them as the looming “meta-crisis,” as the “time between worlds,” we disconnect ourselves from the underlying possibilities in much the same way our modernist notion of will disconnects us from belonging, acting, and becoming. The fact that we face a multitude of crises simply means that we have grown—that we can handle them, that we have a chance, and that we can take a swing at them.
It’s really not that difficult. If people develop, so do their problems. So yeah—let’s get those things fixed! But we need a new concept of will to do that, because the old way of thinking about will won’t cut it. All in all, we don’t know what will happen. We can wrestle with the world, fail, win, fail again, and win again. In theory, this should be fun. In reality, we are frail human beings who shudder at the challenge.
When Andrew and I began working together on Parallax a couple of years ago, and before Cordula Frei joined us, I didn’t yet realize that the world wanted Parallax. The signs were there, but I couldn’t see them. Parallax now feels like an entity of its own: we put in some effort, and things happen that seem to foster the endeavor. Nora Bateson calls this Aphanipoiesis—the incremental improvement toward the good and the complex. The more I take myself out of the equation, the better it works. My will doesn’t separate me from the world; it’s not a subject-object thing in the sense of “my will be done.” Slowly, but steadily, Parallax is growing.
And yes, it will die at some point. But not now. Right now, you have the opportunity to become part of something bigger—our attempt to contribute to the larger scheme of things. We have now fully unfolded the Parallax Academy, with a rich library of courses, great people who want to work with us, a membership system, and other exciting projects.
But if you are still allergic to will—if you don’t want to engage in world- and future-building, if you would rather intellectualize or emotionalize than doing—then Parallax is definitely not for you. Otherwise: you should check it out!
Tom Amarque is writer, philosopher, podcast host, editor & publisher. His recent book is ‘Phenomenology of will’. He founded the German publishing house Phaenomen-Verlag in 2009 and Parallax-Media in 2019. Tom currently lives in Palma, Spain. Contact him a tomamarque@yahoo.de