What is “will”? - Part three
Apollonian thoughts for 2026
For German sociologist and system-theorist Niklas Luhman moral is a communicative difference that can be introduced in a communication or not. In one of his interviews, he says:
When morality is introduced into a communication context, we not only distinguish between good and bad, but we also draw a distinction, i.e. we make a decision: “this is good”, “that is bad”. However, this always raises the question of when it is appropriate to make and introduce such a distinction in the first place. My point is that in modern society, it is becoming increasingly rare to develop, promote and process situations in such a way that they can be dealt with without moralising. In this sense, moralising becomes an aid—a feverish immune response to situations that seem impossible to resolve in any other way.
What Niklas Luhmann addresses here is a thought already well known to the disciples of Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, morality arises where there is a lack of capacity for action, creative power, and sovereignty. Moralizing appears where the Apollonian principle—form, measure, self-mastery—is absent, and thus becomes something primarily engaged in by the weak rather than the strong.
Camille Paglia arrives at a closely related insight when she argues that once a culture can no longer integrate its dark energies, it begins to moralize. In this sense, moral discourse functions less as ethical guidance than as a compensatory reaction to lost cultural and psychological competence.
Seen in this light, most contemporary attempts to “overcome” postmodernity lack phallic, Apollonian energy. The generative force that once animated thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari has dissipated. Postmodernity is mostly nowadeays wrongly accused of being about ‘deconstruction’, which is plainly wrong, because the positive generative driving impetus was always ‘justice’, not the deconstrcution of what came before. For whatever it´s worth, these philosphers and their generative ideas shaped our culture—in this sense, it was a highly phallic project.
In its place we find now—50 years later—an obsession with crisis and “meta-crisis”—a culture suspended in a “time between worlds”, unable to act: To moralize about COVID, climate change, social injustices, the Ukraine war, or Gaza is, from an Apollonian perspective, profoundly weak. Moralization here functions as a substitute for creation. It is the language of those who have forfeited their capacity to shape the future, to generate ideas, to take responsibility for form.
Society has no valid project for the future, which is the very reason it engages in repressive moralizing.
It is the discourse of people without generative will.
Appendix A: The central problem of integral and metamodern “philosophy” is that, from its inception, it rode the wave of political correctness and moralization: do this, don’t do that; listen; respect all quadrants; do your shadow work. In its worst forms, Integral thinking enabled a kind of crayon-level cognition—be Yellow; you’re bad because you’re Green. This was no accident. It emerged from a deeply ingrained apathy and a lack of genuine vision for the future apart from a kind of rose petal protestant idea of paradise. Instead of continuing the phallic impetus of postmodern philosophy, Integral jumped onto the Train to Anti-Thesis, rejected the project, and embraced wokeness 2.0. And you see it cleary in it´s theory-design: Integral (and its daughter Metamodernism with it´s idea of oscillation between modern and postmodern) is directed downwards, towards of the integration of what came before—which makes no sense from a developmental point of view: Every emergence is a phallic outburst of something entirely new, an event that is not reducable to what came before, either culturally or psychologically.
Those who possess real vision rarely concern themselves with moral signaling. Vision moves forward; morality regulates sideways. Steve Jobs was not a jerk because he was famous; he was famous because he was also a jerk—because he pushed, violated norms, and imposed form where others sought consensus. You may not like this truth, and still you buy his products. If you want good products of art and science, you need testosterone, hierachy, agressiveness, dominance. And here you see the fundamental flaw in Integral Theory that tried to exchange dominance hierarchies for soft growth hierachies. Because in order to create a heathly society that is not engrossed in wokeness, political correctness, gender- and culture wars, and endless ‘crisis-thinking’ you need dominance hierachies and agressiveness and testosterone and inequalities, plain and simple. As culture critic Anna Khachiyan has repeatedly argued, a society can be bureaucratized and moral-managed to death in the name of sensitivity—dismantling what was once built by strong, creative, appolonian men.
Appendix B: Moralizing—driven by lower testosterone levels and higher degrees of neuroticism—is something women are statistically more prone to than men. Every man who has been in a long-term relationship with a woman knows this dynamic firsthand. Weak man adopt this behaviour. Paul Dano, for example, is a fine actor—he was in the Sopranos! Yet he lacks the viral, complex, explosive masculinity of Marlon Brando or the brooding masculinity of Robert DeNiro that changed the course of cinema. Dano is, from that point of view, indeed ‘weak sauce’, as Tarantino suggested. He is not adding to the evolution of cinema. Of course you can make the case that it´s not the job of actors to change the course of cinema. And yet, they are rewarded every year when theys do so.
That why the whole manosphere-scene is—like the body buidling scene—utterly feminine. As if Hemingway or Picasso or Beethoven or Redford needed a seminar! Like most of therapeutic apporaches, they enhance what they set out to solve. If you attend a manosphere seminar, you are just at the polar opposite of what you could generate as future.
Tom Amarque is writer, philosopher, podcast host, editor & publisher. His recent book is ‘Phenomenology of will’. He founded the German publishing house Phänomen-Verlag in 2009 and Parallax-Media in 2019. Tom currently lives in Palma, Spain. Contact him a tomamarque@yahoo.de