'Phenomenology of Will' - Out Now!
Preface to the new book by Tom Amarque
A new philosophical examination of one of the most human of all characteristics, the will, initially seems anachronistic. What more can be added to the concept and our understanding of this phenomenon? Hasn't the will been sufficiently explored for us to devote ourselves to other concerns? Moreover, are we not facing more pressing socio-cultural, political, economic, health-related, educational, climatic and other problems and challenges? Does it therefore seem reasonable to deal with such a lofty topic, which German philosophers, in particular, have already worked so fundamentally on in the past?
This view is supported by the fact that will and volition play little or no role in psychology anymore, mainly because the discourse has come to an end with the end of the modern-paradigmatic worldview or, as Foucault would say, épistémè, that is, the guiding unconscious subjectivity within a particular epoch and the knowledge that grounds truth. Even today, will is defined as the intensity and duration of investment in a final state or goal. This is, of course, a, if one may say so, classically modern or utilitarian conception, which merely leaves open questions about the strength (and strengthening) of will in the context of a psychology of self-optimization, a question that the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, for example, has devoted himself to intensively. It is, however, the task of philosophy to ask the obvious question of how such a modern, functionalist definition is connected to the overarching modern episteme and whether, should a change in worldview occur, this will sooner or later be reflected in a transformation of terminology and conceptions.
Such a classical modern definition of will as goal-oriented behavior is of course valid as long as we remain philosophically and in our Lebenswelt, our lived-in worlds, within the modern episteme, which is known to be characterized by a subject-object dualism, a certain mechanistic worldview and a concrete-operational mode of consciousness. Problems of fit arise immediately – and must arise – as soon as the episteme and our worldview change, but the definitions and terms remain at a different level. It is as if, to use a contemporary metaphor, one wanted to run old programs on a new operating system; compatibility problems are inevitable. The world and worldviews change, and our concepts and terms must do so as well.
In other words, our world has become increasingly complex and differentiated since will was a recurring theme in 19th-century continental philosophy. Philosophically relevant insights from constructivism, systems-theory and complexity theory (among many, many others), which influenced large parts of society at the end of the last century and to this day, have yet to be reflected and integrated in concepts such as will. Since the mid-1990s, these differentiations and increases in complexity of culture have been discussed in philosophy in the form of epistemic transitions from a modern to a postmodern to a post-postmodern worldview (or episteme) in order to capture the transformations in our culture (cf. for example Wilhelm Schmidt, 1996). Based on these considerations and the linguistic turn at the beginning of the 20th century, we know, for instance, that our language and the respective dominant worldviews of the culture in which we are embedded indeed define the framework in and through which we can observe given phenomena. So what does this mean for modelling of the will when we approach this phenomenon from a worldview after modernity? And what happens when we have long since entered into a postmodern – some might even say post-postmodern – episteme, but our conception of will has remained fundamentally modern and functional?
One consequence of this dysfunctional relationship between changing worldviews and concepts is that a homeostatic balance between cultural challenges and psychological capacities to solve them is under scrutiny. We are facing a multitude of crises that have not only been generated by our social institutions and psychological beliefs but seem, at the moment, impossible to solve. We lack healthy social and psychological immune systems – to borrow this idea from Peter Sloterdijk – to adequately address these crises; Sloterdijk, of course, had extended the biological concept of immunity to cultural life. The crises seem to be slowly and steadily intensifying without us currently having the social and cognitive abilities to address them directly and effectively.
If will is something that characterizes us in successfully navigating the world and its inherent present complexities, but we still cling to modern-functionalist concepts, it is not surprising that we see ourselves overwhelmed by the challenges of the world. It would not be surprising if such a mal-adapted conception of will were at least partly responsible for our inability to adequately address the manifold crises. How else can we interpret the current cultural tendency to see ourselves as victims and sufferers (of climate change, capitalism, patriarchy, matriarchy, toxic masculinity, toxic femininity, sexism, colonialism, mass migration, media manipulation, propaganda, artificial intelligence, the far right, the far left, – or of change in general) if not for the absence of an immunological – one could also say anticipatory: heroic – counter-pressure, which is always the result of an exercised will?
We are therefore stuck with the dilemma that our psychological immune systems have remained stuck somewhere in the subject-object discourse. At the same time, the problems and complexities of the world have long since taken on an inherently global and, in a sense, post-postmodern form. So, figuratively speaking, we now find ourselves in a historical situation comparable to that of the Native Americans when the Spanish conquistadors with their highly developed biological immune systems arrived on their shores – and who were subsequently virtually wiped out by plagues and pandemics. If the last pandemic has shown us anything from a macro-perspective, it is that the population as a whole was no longer able to process the multiple contingencies of cause attribution, media reporting, social pressure, state intervention and the real dangers of a novel virus in a psychologically meaningful way. As Sloterdijk again has noted, there is an inherent connection between the social and psychological issues of immunization. It is then possible to formulate the hypothesis that these problems of immunization intensify, and might even be caused by the fact that we are not equipped conceptually and misunderstand one of the most fundamental characteristics of being human. There is, for example, no other way to interpret the cultural symptom of the ever-redundant question of the freedom of will: the question only makes any sense in the context of a modern episteme with its subject-object dualism. Our fundamental attitudes, worldviews and metaphysics, especially when unconscious, determine our attitudes and experiences in everyday life. If the worldview changes, it must gradually affect all levels, including the conceptual level, so we can act appropriately.
However, a coherent philosophical examination of the will from this new perspective has not yet been undertaken. It is not only Vernunft [reason] and rationality that distinguish us from our closest genetic relatives, but also our purposeful action – our ability to shape the future – in which our reason and awareness are embedded – our will. In this sense, the discourse on the will has got stuck somewhere between Aristotelian epistemology and current challenges. An answer to the question of what form an iterative recursion of the will on itself would take (or to what extent a self-referential will permeates our experience of life, psyche and the world), indeed how will itself might appear after (post-)modernity, is yet to be provided. This means that the question of the relationship(s) between the acting subject, the will and the world must be posed anew.
From this point of view, a phenomenology of the will seems necessary to update our conceptual and experiential understanding of this human ability. In order to approach the phenomenon of the will in a meaningful way, a whole series of preconditions must be clarified because, however we understand the will, it does not exist as a detached phenomenon – it exists not only in the field of tension between man and the world and between the present and the future. In this fourfold sense, we must ask: What is consciousness? What is psyche? What is the ‘world’, and what are the relations between the psyche, consciousness, and world, as well as the present and future?
Part 1 is about the conditions of consciousness and why we can know what we know, i.e. the epistemological foundations for a modeling of the will. Part 2 then deals with the actual phenomenology of the will and proposes a different way to understand this ability to act with agency that makes us human. The reader can decide whether to begin with Part 1 or Part 2, or jumps back and forth between the sections. The reader might, as Joseph Campbell once said concerning King Arthur's hero's journey, enter the forest alone at the point that seems darkest to him.
About ‘Phenomenology of Will’
In this book, Tom Amarque disentangles the concept of will from its historical context and transforms it in a contemporary way with the aim of arriving at a conception that does justice to today's crises and demands.
Phenomenology of Will is a book twenty years in the making, summarizing the works of numerous German book-titles of Amarque into a coherent and accessible whole: Die Evolution der Psyche (2006), Der Wille (2009), Entwicklung als Passion (2011), Narratives Bewusstsein (2015), Der Wille zur Transzendenz (2019).
Phenomenology of Will is his first english-only book-release.
ISBN 9788412948417, 255 Pages, 13 x 20 cm, Paperback
Get the book here
Congratulations Tom and Parallax Publishing! Just ordered my copy and looking forward to giving this a read. A great accomplishment!